Ben Webster Biographies

[BeBop]

I've been eyeing the Buchmann-Moller bio (having already read the de Valk). Anyone read both and care to comment? Comments on either?

[EKE BBB]

Anyone?

[erhodes]

I've been eyeing the Buchmann-Moller bio (having already read the de Valk). Anyone read both and care to comment? Comments on either?

The following post appeared this morning on the Ellington listserv.

Dear LYM'ers

During a JATP-visit in Denmark Coleman Hawkins, Teddy Wilson and Ben Webster agreed with the TV-producer Sten Bramsen to play "Honeysuckle Rose". When they came to the program Bramsen "spontaneously" suggested the title, but surprisingly Hawkins grunted, "Don't know it", Webster added, "Could you whistle the tune?" and Wilson said, "I'm not familiar with the changes."

How Bramsen managed the practical joke we are not told, but it is one of the anecdotes in Frank Büchmann-Møller's new biography on Ben Webster, which is strongly concentrated on the chronology of Webster's life, the gallery of characters surrounding Webster and Webster’s recordings, and strictly chronologically structured.

As the publisher writes, Frank includes numerous translated excerpts from European newspapers and journals and studies of every known Webster recording. The book has no discography but the preface announces that the Ben Webster Foundation will publish a sessionography compiled by Heinz Baumeister. It will be a great support during the reading of the text.

The many notes connected to the text reveal a thing or two about the sources to the text, but the reader himself will have to compile it into a bibliography, because the book has none, which is regrettable.

There are no transcriptions and thus no analysis of such in the text, instead Frank draws on his extensive experience as a reviewer, which results in many impressions on the part of the writer. A biography does not only portray its main character but also its author, and we now have a great opportunity to compare our own impressions of Webster's playing with Frank Büchmann-Møller's.

One of the main chapters is concerned with Webster's engagement with Ellington's orchestra. It is called "Golden Years With Ellington", but there were also a couple of things that were not golden. "In A Mellotone" is composed by Ben Webster, we can read on page 70. This is new in the Ellingtonian literature because it always credits Ellington for this. [That includes both articles on Ellington as a composer, by Erik Wiedemann. Webster was probably pretty disappointed on this and suggested his musical property right with the contrafact "Did You Call Her Today", which has so many musical features similar to "In A Mellow tone" that is it one of the more easy ones to detect.] This happened even though Webster earlier the same year had experienced Ellington's expropriation of "Cotton Tail" on which the band leader put his name after having changed the original title from "Shuckin' and Stiffin'" to "Cotton Tail". The author speculates that Webster was so disappointed by this that he stopped writing for the orchestra completely, but lacks a source to prove it. The complaints about the power relations of the jazz world in the jazz literature are many, but there are fewer discussions about the replication of this relation within the swing orchestras. In this case the author quotes Milt Hinton, who knew Webster very well, for the remark: "Well, the thing that I think bothered most of the guys that worked with the Duke was that, like all the band leaders of his generation, he took credit for everything the band did [...]."

Jørgen Mathiasen,

Berlin

[ghost of miles]

I checked both of these out of the IU School of Music library recently while I was working on an Afterglow feature for the Webster/Joe Zawinul album Soulmates. I read only the chapters concerning summer & late 1963, when Webster was Zawinul's roommate, but boy, a coin toss on which book was "better"--both sections seemed pretty good & were certainly helpful in giving me some background. Been listening to Ben a lot lately, so I think I'm going to order one or both of these bios.