"Every man prays in his own language." This phrase alone summarizes the Sacred Music concerts that Duke Ellington conceived, wrote, and performed between 1965 and 1973, driven by a need to communicate with God through a language that was not just jazz, nor just blues, nor gospel as usual, but was the sum of all that with the imprint of that genius who, at 70 years old, already a living legend, continued to write some of the most vibrant pages of 20th-century music.
In 1969, within the framework of the IV International Jazz Festival of Barcelona, he brought the tour of his Second Sacred Concert to the Cathedral of Santa María del Mar. That November 24, accompanied by his band with the addition of the Coral de Sant Jordi, Ellington left an indelible mark on several hundred Barcelonians who were lucky enough to attend that recital.
Maria dels Àngels Bonaventura Pons, then a resident of the Ribera neighborhood, remembers it this way: "Imagine, I was a 17-year-old girl. That was, in fact, my first concert, because my parents wouldn't let me go out at night. Her mother took me and a friend. And it was a real shock, a feeling of delving into a different music, which I didn't know. I was into the Beatles and Rolling Stones and Bee Gees, and that sounded absolutely new to me. And it moved a lot of things!"
For the artist, that was the best concert of the tour. "The Swingle Sisters participated in the sacred concerts we gave in Paris and Barcelona. The concert in the latter city ---where Alice Babs was present--- was completely unsurpassed. Alice had to give ten encores, and when it was time to dance with hands, the audience made a gesture to get up and go dance in the aisle with Tony Watkins. The Barcelona choir was the best of all, and our sacred concert shone with a new and unforgettable height." He explains it this way in the pages of his imposing autobiography, Music Is My Mistress, which Libros del Kultrum has just reissued in a beautiful, profusely illustrated edition translated by an expert on the subject, the writer Antonio Padilla Esteban.
An unrepeatable evening
If the previous night Ellington and his band had offered a recital at the Palau de la Música, where the musicians' fatigue was evident due to the tight schedule of that tour, what happened at Santa Maria del Mar was, never better said, a different story. "Half a century of musical practice has culminated in this mosaic of respect, faith, and joy that, conditioning a vivid spirituality, dragged the audience into active participation en masse: marking the rhythm, raising their arms, chanting Alabemos a Dios, the last song of the evening," Daniel Carbonell wrote in his concert review for La Vanguardia.
But the cry that attendees remember most vividly is another, when the orchestra, led by the voice of soprano Alice Babs, intoned the song Freedom, repeating the word in several languages, including Spanish. Libertad, liberté, etcetera. "That was amazing, because, moreover, that show was taking place in a church, the last place where, at that time, no one could imagine experiencing something like that. In the midst of Francoism, with Ellington and his band shouting freedom, libertad! My friend and I left there revolutionized," Maria dels Àngels recalls with a laugh.
All of this was recorded in the form of a broadcast for Televisión Española, and the album Second Sacred Concert, which captures the performance in the Barcelona basilica and in whose liner notes Ellington recalls: "The music and the message of the concert seemed to transcend language barriers without difficulty." Something logical, considering a cast that included saxophonists Johnny Hodges, Russell Procope, and Paul Gonsalves; trumpeters Cootie Williams and Cat Anderson; trombonist Benny Green, and drummer Sam Woodyard, among many others. Pure sacred dynamite.
Freedom to exist
The idea of Duke Ellington's Sacred Concerts began to take shape during the outbreak of the Civil Rights Movement in the early 1960s, when one half of the United States not only did not dialogue with the other half, but practically hated it.
In the program notes for the first concert, which took place at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco in September 1965, the artist explained it this way: "How can anyone expect to be understood, unless he presents his thoughts with complete honesty? This situation is unfair because it demands too much of the world. In effect, we say to ourselves: 'I dare not show you what I am because I don't trust you, but please love me anyway because I need it.' And, of course, if you don't love me unconditionally, you are a dirty dog, just as I suspected, so I was right all along.' However, every time the children of God have cast aside fear in pursuit of honesty ---trying to communicate themselves, understood or not---, that is when miracles have happened."
This freedom to exist with complete honesty, dialoguing with the elevated and, through it, with the rest of humanity, was one of the bases on which Duke Ellington conceived his successful liturgical concerts. The man who had revolutionized jazz, who had defined and redefined the concept of the big band, who had written more than a thousand pieces, among them countless standards, thus prayed to God, to people, to life. He explains it in detail, along with the bulk of his career, in that Music Is My Mistress which saw the light in 1973, a year before his death.
Be that as it may, on that night of November 24, 1969, embraced by "the slender and sublime architecture of Santa María del Mar" ---according to Daniel Carbonell---, that brilliant man brought a good number of Barcelonans to apotheosis with that gospel of his, personal, non-transferable... and definitively liberating.