Mood Indigo

Mood Indigo is a jazz standard, which was composed by Duke Ellington and Barney Bigard. Mitchell Parish wrote the text.

History of the song

The song takes the form of ABA, where B is a variation of A. The main theme was delivered by Bigard, who had it in his clarinet teacher Lorenzo Tio, the Mexican Blues called it dubbed for a radio broadcast in October 1930 met.

Ellington's distinctive arrangement was first recorded by his Cotton Club Orchestra for Brunswick Records (Catalog # 01068 ) on 17 October 1930. On the recordings are Arthur Whetsol (trumpet ), Joe Nanton (trombone), Barney Bigard ( clarinet), Duke Ellington ( piano ), Fred Guy ( banjo), Wellman Braud (bass) and Sonny Greer (drums) to hear. Unusual aspect of this recording was that Ellington the muted trumpet, trombone and clarinet a muted began to gain a unified sound.

The piece was recorded in October 1930 as part of a radio production of Ellington's orchestra and titled as Dreamy Blues. " It was the first song I had written for a microphone transmission ," said Ellington recalled. " In the next few days were mountains of mail, it was a rousing success weft for this new piece, and Irving Mills wrote a text to ". It was renamed in Mood Indigo and ultimately a jazz standard. Only in 1940 took Ellington with Ivie Anderson vocal version on.

What makes the song interesting is the fact that Ellington traditional timbres of the blower turned on its head: The normal order of the pitch would be the clarinet in the high position, trumpet in the middle, and the trumpet in the low register. In Mood Indigo, the order was reversed. At the time this instrumentation was uncommon. The harmonics of the clarinet and trombone produced in the studio, an additional mic timbre ( tone mike ). Through acoustic deception of the impression of another voice, a fourth instrument is created. This acoustic effect was of Ellington at Solitude (1932 ), Dusk ( 1940) and other pieces of used repeatedly. Mood Indigo has been over the years one of the masterpieces of the Ellington orchestra.

The Ellington biographer James Lincoln Collier describes it as an atypical Ellington composition, since this tended to be "a rather moving Composer "; " He used a lot of polyphonic, serious and often dissonant harmonies and a lot of contrast. Mood Indigo is almost itself the immobility It contains no polyphony; the harmonies are mostly simple, and there is only a minimal contrast between the parts. It moves slowly, with the stealth of a sunset, and suddenly disappeared. "

The play has been widely taken up by other artists, including Paul Robeson, Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, the Boswell Sisters, Charles Mingus, Red Nichols, Kid Ory, Johnny Hodges, the clarinet quartet Cl -4 and Albert Mangelsdorff.

Chart success

Ellington recording and his Cotton Club Orchestra in 1931 for 10 weeks in the charts and made it to number 3 in the next year Jimmie Lunceford reached with his Orchestra No. 19 Norman Petty brought the song in 1954 in the pop charts (# 14); The Four Freshmen reached 24th place in the same year

Copyright litigation

It was only in 1987 claimed the lyricist Mitchell Parish, now 87 years old, that he had written the text to Mood Indigo alone. Until that time were regarded as composers Albany Leon Bigard (aka Barney Bigard ), Duke Ellington and Irving Mills. Parish has been asked since 1929 by professional writers to write some unfinished compositions to an end and is therefore regarded as the most famous phantom copywriter that time. From Mills itself is narrated that only got him a small vocabulary available, so that he at Mood Indigo has probably can help out. Anyway Parish received until his death in 1993 this no royalties; he merely stood on the payroll of the music publisher Mills Music.

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