As jazz enthusiasts around the world prepare to mark 100 years of the peerless Duke Ellington, some particularly special arrangements are under way in Dublin. On Monday night, Whelans of Wexford Street will be home to The Improvised Music Company and its unique Duke at 100 celebration, a musical tribute to the man widely regarded as America's greatest composer.
The prime mover in this Ellington centenary concert is Rock Fox, a leading authority on Duke and someone who, these days, describes himself as an ageing retired solicitor, horticulturist, ornithologist and steam railway enthusiast. But that's just a man called Chas Meredith talking. Rock Fox is someone else altogether, one of the enduring presences on the Irish jazz scene for almost 50 years. "As a solicitor's apprentice in 1950, unlike other students, you weren't allowed go off and work in canning factories in Norwich in summer vacations because you had signed a sort of contract with your master that you would keep your nose to the grindstone. So I, of course, didn't go off and can peas - I got into the music business. But whenever I got involved in a concert that was going to be highly promoted, I realised instantly that it would undoubtedly come to the knowledge of the authorities. So in the space of 15 seconds on a phoneline I became Rock Fox. I lived in Foxrock - very corny but there it is - and I've been stuck with Rock Fox for the rest of my musical life."
In the days before Chas Meredith was Rock Fox, he was just another self-taught musician listening to his father's record collection and reading anything he could find about jazz. At 19 years old however, concerned that he couldn't actually read the dots, he shut himself off for about three months with a Boosey and Hawkes tutor and taught himself to read music. After that he felt he could go anywhere "without too much discomfort" and, as a qualified solicitor and an out-in-the-open musician, he soon began to develop his own special interests in jazz - Duke Ellington in particular.
"I had spent a long time heavily involved in New Orleans jazz but I realised that there was no point in trying to recreate New Orleans jazz any more than there was in trying to recreate Shakespeare. Once you've heard anything later than New Orleans jazz then you can no longer have an unsullied approach to it. Of course, it goes without saying that what I'm doing now in playing Duke Ellington is no longer an unsullied approach to his music, either. I've heard and am still hearing everything that has gone on up to now, and so I'm no longer writing pure Ellington. Therefore quite a considerable element of the arrangements I'm doing is my 1999 feelings about Ellington."
The initial idea for the centenary concert came from Ronan Guilfoyle of Newpark Music School and Gerry Godley of The Improvised Music Company. They approached Fox as "the local Ellington nut" and so, on Monday night, Rock Fox will perform his own arrangements of Ellington music with the Improvised Music Ensemble. Basically it's the Timeband minus Justin O'Carroll and plus Noel Kelehan. This, as it happens, also means a quite special reunion in that Fox, Kelehan and Jim Farrelly were all members of Dublin's first be-bop group, the Jazz Heralds. But while reliable personnel is one thing, arranging the music of Ellington is quite another.
"It's a fearsome task. Ellington has written the best part of 2,000 compositions that would range from long to short. That's an awful lot of writing. He's made thousands and thousands of recordings with all sorts of combinations of musicians - big-band and smaller groups and strings and all sorts of things. And so the field that one has to draw on is absolutely mind-boggling. So what I've done is basically go for, let's say, the simple end of the Ellington repertoire. This is partly because I'm limited by the number of musicians and by my own talent. So I've selected 12 or 15 numbers that I personally like and that I felt I could handle. Some of them are small group things that I'm arranging in the Ellington original format, and some of them are big band things which I'm scaling down to suit the band that we have on the show - a nine piece band with six horns and three rhythm. So I'm trying to achieve Ellington colours my own way."
Rock Fox has many stories to tell, among them tales of his long friendship with saxophone legend Gerry Mulligan, who actually arranged music for him and even turned up to jam in Slattery's of Capel Street. He also formed enduring friendships with some of the stellar names who played with the great Ellington orchestras during the 1950s and 1960s.
"I actually made it my business to get over to England to hear Duke as often as I could. I spent a lot of time with the band and always renewed the acquaintance whenever I went to see them. During the late 1950s and 1960s you had most of the classic 1940 band members - Johnny Hodges, Cootie Williams, Jimmy Hamilton and so on. Road musicians are very prone to be friendly and they like to see friendly faces in the countries they go to.
"When the Ellington band came over here to play, in 1973 I think it was, I was sitting in my office at Hume Street and the phone rang and it was a Mr Ellington. I hasten to say that it wasn't Duke - it was his son Mercer who said that they were in the Gresham Hotel and invited me to drop over and see them. Which is very nice!"
But there had also been several audiences with Duke himself. For Rock Fox it was a particular thrill to meet the man he had first heard on his father's record-player at a time when hardly anybody in Ireland had even heard the name of Ellington. These were records bought simply because his father liked them - foot-tapping music played by an extraordinary band.
"It was absolutely wonderful. My first actual contact with Duke was entirely due to Gay Byrne who was scheduled to go over and interview him in the Free Trade Hall in Manchester in the Spring of 1962. Gay got flu and couldn't go and then RTE, in its wisdom, phoned me and asked would I stand in for Gay. Although you couldn't really interview Duke - he was so suave and eloquent that he talked on and on and said absolutely nothing. He was brilliant and did it with such charm and aplomb that you'd think you were having the most wonderful conversation with him but when you thought about it afterwards, he had said absolutely nothing."
And so on Monday night Dublin pays tribute to Duke Ellington, the founding father of orchestral jazz and someone whose influence, even on the popular mainstream, is incalculable. He ran his extraordinary orchestras and smaller groups across five decades, and moved from popular hits to orchestral and sacred works right through to music for stage and film. For Rock Fox a.k.a Chas Meredith, there are no doubts about that Ellington legacy. "I hesitate to give a personal opinion because I don't think that the opinions of people like me are particularly relevant. All I can say is that I am part of a world opinion that Ellington is unquestionably one of the great 20th century composers."
Duke at 100, the Ellington Centenary Concert with the Improvised Music Ensemble and special guests Rock Fox and Noel Kelehan is at Whelans, Wexford Street, Dublin, on Monday, 8.30 p.m.