‘Promenade with Duke’: Michel Petrucciani’s Tribute To Duke Ellington
The album is full of stunning performances, as Petrucciani put his own stamp on some of the best-known tunes in jazz.
A few months after the release of his Blue Note album Promenade with Duke in April 1993, French pianist Michel Petrucciani told an audience in London why he had recorded a tribute album to the master composer and bandleader Duke Ellington. “I’ve been preparing this album for 25 years,” the French-born pianist said. “Duke Ellington was the one who made me learn the piano.”
The famous tale goes that Petrucciani’s ambition to become a pianist was first sparked by watching a televised Ellington concert, when he was aged just four. His father bought him a toy piano but Petrucciani was so frustrated by its limitations that he destroyed it with a hammer. “It was not the sound I had heard on TV,” he later recalled. “When I saw Duke Ellington on the piano with the big band, I said ‘I want to do that one day.’ He really touched my heart.”
Listen to Michel Petrucciani’s Promenade with Duke now.
Promenade with Duke, a neat title Petrucciani came up with himself, contained versions of “Caravan,” “Lush Life,” “African Flower,” “In a Sentimental Mood,” “One Night in the Hotel,” “Satin Doll” and “‘C’ Jam Blues.” There is also his own gorgeous ‘Ellingtonian’ composition “Hidden Joy,” which he wrote for his son Alexandre. The album is full of stunning performances, as Petrucciani put his own stamp on some of the best-known tunes in jazz, reinventing them into a mixture of homage and improvisation. “It’s very difficult to play Duke Ellington’s music and not come out sounding like Duke Ellington,” he explained.
Among the highlights are the seven-minute version of “Caravan,” which explores every nuance of the 1936 hit Ellington wrote with trombonist Juan Tizol, a performance that encapsulates the Frenchman’s masterful ability to create a mood. Another triumph is his version of “‘C’ Jam Blues,” a tune Ellington composed in 1942. One of Petrucciani’s hands delivers the rolling blues rhythm while the other delivers a delightfully wistful melodic line – it is a masterpiece of solo invention. The interpretation of “Lush Life,” composed by Ellington collaborator Billy Strayhorn, is full of romanticism and sparkle.
Sparkle and joy, ultimately, are the words that most come to mind when listening to Promenade with Duke. Petrucciani was born with osteogenesis imperfecta, known as “glass bone disease.” But, as jazz drummer and Promenade co-producer Gilles Avinzac once put it, Michel “had the fierce desire to overcome his handicap, to live at a hundred miles an hour. He combined intelligence, charisma, kindness and humor.”
Perhaps Petrucciani saw similar personality traits in Ellington. At the very least, Petrucciani believed Ellington’s music was, above all, joyous – a counterpoint to the troubled genius stereotype that sticks to so many other jazz musicians. “I’m at peace with myself when I play,” Petrucciani once revealed. “I don’t believe in suffering artists… I’m very, very, happy.” That happiness shines through in this wonderful album.
