Duke Ellington - Caravan

ORIGINATION Classic Jazz Archive: Diminuendo In Blue CD
LAST LISTENED TO a few days ago
CHANCE OF WAKING TO IT yes, there was some
RATING ★★★★★

Caravan is one of those pieces of music that most of us know, even if we don't know we know it. Co-composed by Duke Ellington and his trombonist Juan Tizol (or possibly just by Tizol himself), it has been recorded countless times since and is has come to be considered a jazz standard. The first recorded version in 1936 was by a band that seem very much to have been Ellington and co., however this, the first credited Ellington version was not released until the following year.

With its smooth, flowing melody, it has a strong middle-eastern flavour which combined with a jazzy primitive percussion sound, prefigures the exotica movement of the fifties. It begins with an opening statement of that melody, before giving way to a string of short solos. The longest of these goes to the trumpet, which rasps throughout the piece before busting in for a brief solo around the half-way point on a muted wave. The real star of the piece, though, is that haunting, exotic melody, which winds smokily in and out of almost the whole tune. It was that melody that has captured countless ears and been the impetuous behind the avalanche of versions over the past seventy-five years.