“So Far, So Good” – Duke Ellington and his Famous Orchestra (1940)

This week I’ll be highlighting some really lovely jazz vocal records – starting with a tune that was on the CD set that first turned me on to jazz back in the late 1980s: The Blanton–Webster Band by Duke Ellington, which collected together Duke’s singles from 1940-42.

I was working at photo-video checkout as a student at the Kansas City Art Institute and my boss, jazz musician Reverend Dwight Frizzell, would constantly play jazz at work – and narrate the history of the bands or comment on the arrangements of each tune. This set was one of the first that perked my ears up and I ended up buying a copy.

Reading the excellent liner notes of that set – which gave a historical background of the Blanton-Webster band, along with detailed notes on each of the sixty six songs – was like a master class in learning to listen to and understand jazz.

Decades later when I got into collecting 78s I have tried to find as many of the outstanding tunes on this release as I could on 78 rpm.

Here we have the lovely Ivie Anderson singing “So Far, So Good”. It was a song I often skipped in my younger years – wanting to focus on the instrumental numbers. This could have been influenced by the liner notes, which introduced this as “a pop song that had been previously recorded by several white artists” and went on to call the arrangement “workaday” and said the band “sounds ready to go home.”

But this perhaps misses the larger point: The star of this number is the delightful vocal performance by Ivie Anderson. I’ve grown to love it – and hope you do too.

Recorded in Chicago, Illinois on March 6, 1940.
Released as Victor 26537.

Credits:
Duke Ellington – piano, arranger, director
Wallace Jones, Cootie Williams – trumpet
Rex Stewart – cornet
Joe Nanton, Lawrence Brown – trombone
Juan Tizol – valve trombone
Barney Bigard – clarinet
Johnny Hodges – clarinet, soprano sax, alto sax
Harry Carney – clarinet, alto sax, baritone sax
Otto Hardwick – alto sax, bass sax
Ben Webster – tenor sax
Fred Guy – guitar
Jimmy Blanton – string bass
Sonny Greer – drums
Ivie Anderson – vocals