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JOHN EDWARD BASSE 9/"AMWR»rOR[IVinO" DyK[ [iiinoTDn m mm : n the long and storied career of Duke Ellington, who was born in 1899 and I died in 1974, no nation save his own played as significant role as did France. I Ellington enjoyed a long and rich association with France, especially its City a of Light, spanning forty years. He performed in Paris and twenty-six other * French cities, playing nearly one hundred concerts, as well as making radio, television, and film appearances. During his band's three-year residency at Harlem's Cotton Club, from late 1927 to early 1931, Ellington honed his compositional abilities and showmanship and achieved international attention through recordings and radio broadcasts. In February 1931, he embarked upon nearly ceaseless touring for the rest of his life. Despite the hectic pace, he nearly always found time to compose every day, even if just a few measures on the back of an envelope. (A testament to his productivity is the trove of 100,000 pages of unpublished music that he composed for his orchestra, now preserved at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History.) By the early 1930s, he had developed a singular compositional style, by creating his own harmonic rules and eliciting unusual tone colors from the distinctive voices of his gifted instrumentalists such as trumpeter Cootie Williams, alto saxophonist Johnny Hodges, and trombonist Joe "Tricky Sam" Nanton. As a result of his originality and his players' individuality, his band sounded unlike any other. France had proved hospitable to jazz beginning in early 1918, when U.S. Army lieutenant James Reese Europe's band took the country by storm.' In 1918 or 1919, the American drummer Louis Mitchell took his band to Paris and remained there for a decade; in 1922 his became the first black jazz band to record in Europe. Jazz was, as John Szwed put it," 'the shock to the system the French had been waiting for': modern, energetic, exotic."^ The clarinetist/saxophonist Sidney Bechet had performed in Europe in 1919, and lived and performed in France during the latter 1920s. But visits from top-tier American jazz musicians to Europe were rare. Ellington's first appearance in France was in 1933, during the lowest point in the Great Depression. Ellington's manager, Irving Mills, always seeking new op portunities for his artists—Ellington, Cab Calloway, Mills's Blue Rhythm Band, the Mills Brothers—traveled to Europe in November 1932.' The result was a European tour by the Ellington orchestra in the summer of 1933, sponsored by the British bandleader Jack Hylton. The dancer Bessie Dudley, best known for the .