Duke Ellington
Three Suites

Inside the museums, Infinity goes up on trial
Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while
But Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues
You can tell by the way she smiles
See the primitive wallflower freeze
When the jelly-faced women all sneeze
Hear the one with the mustache say, "Jeeze
I can't find my knees"

-- Bob Dylan, "Visions of Johanna" --

I don't know about you, but I hate museums. It seems like a pretentious attempt to catalog, label. Putting under formaldehyde corpses that should naturally decay, fertilize the soil, and give birth to little flowers. Naturally, it's not that I want to go there with an indelible red marker and draw mustaches on the Mona Lisa. I might do that on postcards or the catalog at most.

I rarely listen to classical music. It seems too orderly and precise to me. It has the same effect on me as a museum. Gosh, Bach's scores have been there for four or five hundred unchanged years; all the performers play them the same way for centuries on end. Maybe somewhere a fly left a little spot on the score, and there's an extra note that the master didn't want to put, but, darn fly, it is condemned to the heavy burden of eternity against its will.

Not that I despise classical music, I was saying, it's simply far from my nature. In my philosophy, every performance must be different; it must continually reinvent itself. This is why I love jazz, where each time, the musician invents a different solo, which should, in the best of all possible worlds, capture their own sensations without trapping them in a definitive score.

Many jazz musicians have tried from time to time to musically draw mustaches on the Mona Lisa, with more or less debatable results. Anyway, I think Duke Ellington really succeeded quite well, as proven by this collection of three suites. The first is a version of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker, the second excerpts from Grieg's Peer Gynt. Two classical music compositions that indeed have enough highway blues and lend themselves well to jazzy distortions. The third is a composition by Ellington and Strayhorn, the Suite Thursday, almost classical in flavor as well.

Why Mona Lisa had the Highway blues, you can see it by the way she smiles.