Highbrow Blues

The crowd of 3,000 jive addicts was one of the largest ever to jam Manhattan's Carnegie Hall. Hepsters overflowed into a chamber music hall upstairs to get their rhythms by remote control, piped from the auditorium below. There was no doubt that Duke Ellington, twice winner of Esquire's All-American jazz poll, could still make more dollars dance at the box-office than such latter-day swing merchants as Eddie Condon, Lionel Hampton and Hazel Scott.

But for fans of the Duke's Mood Indigo, Sophisticated Lady and It Don't Mean a Thing days, the concert had the taste of a stale highball. They had come for ginmill stuff and had been served something more like a bad-year champagne. The Duke once more dragged out such pretentious symphonic items as Black, Brown and Beige (listed as "a musical parallel to the history of the American Negro"); Perfume Suite ("each section . . . tries to convey the essence of a particular fragrance"). Until late in the evening, when the band got back to being itself on easy-riding bounce tunes, the whole thing sounded more like Andre Kostelanetz than a night in Harlem. Four sessions in Carnegie Hall had had an unmistakably mopey, not to say arty, effect on the Duke.

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