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Autograph music manuscript for Juan Tizol’s Perdido, together with Duke Ellington’s first sketch arrangement for the song, 1941
Juan Martínez Tizol and Edward Kennedy ‘Duke’ Ellington
TIZOL, Juan Martínez (1900-1984) and Edward Kennedy ‘Duke’ ELLINGTON (1899-1974).
Autograph music manuscript for Juan Tizol’s Perdido, together with Duke Ellington’s first sketch arrangement for the song, 1941.
Speaking to Patricia Willard in November 1978 for the Smithsonian’s Jazz Oral History project, Tizol recounted the song’s origin: ‘Perdido was written on the train, a coach train... I gave it to Duke. And he took it right there and made some kind of arrangement... I extracted it, so we wrote it, he arranged it, and we played it that same night, because there was nothing to that first arrangement of Perdido. The song became a standard for the Ellington orchestra, first recorded in December 1941 for Standard Radio Transcription Services, and subsequently laid down in what is regarded as their definitive version on 21 January 1942 for the Victor Label. After lyrics were written for the song by Ervin Drake, it was recorded by Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Dinah Washington, and many others. In his 1987 biography of Ellington, James Lincoln Collier somewhat dismissively remarks that, along with another Ellington classic C-Jam Blues, Perdido cannot ‘really be classified as a “song”’, conceding that ‘the lesson to be learned is that, in jazz, less is often more. These two recordings have outlasted a great many much more venturesome and complex pieces of that time… It is an inviolable rule of jazz: first you must swing. And these two minimal compositions swing.’ Collier, 235. Tizol cited in Nicholson, 239.
Tizol’s draft manuscript in pencil on seven pages, 306 x 242 mm, six on dual ten stave paper printed on rectos only, the seventh on a half-sheet of dual twelve stave paper manually separated at the fold, the manuscript titled 'Perdido' and inscribed 'Juan Tizol, Copyt’., Tempo Music Inc. 261-Broadway N.Y.C.', the score complete with the song’s introduction, A and B sections and the head, with parts for saxophone, trumpet and trombone; Ellington’s sketch on five pages, 317 x 238 mm, comprising two half-sheets of dual twelve stave paper manually separated at the fold, scored on both sides, and one sheet of dual twelve stave paper scored on one recto only, the arrangement with parts for brass, saxophone, clarinet, baritone sax, and noting a solo passage for trumpeter Ray Nance; accompanied by a handwritten note of provenance from trombonist Lewis McCreary, stating '…Juan Tizol gave me these with the explanation that the one portion was his original draft of the tune Perdido, while the other was Duke Ellington’s first sketch and probably the only “arrangement” Duke ever wrote on the tune'; housed in a modern custom quarter morocco cloth slip case.
[With:] a typewritten publishing agreement for the composition Perdido between Tempo Music, Inc. and the three co-composers Juan Tizol, Harry Lenk and Ervin Drake, dated 1 July 1942, noting Tizol’s share as three quarters, signed in ink by Tizol, Lenk and Drake, and by Ruth Ellington on behalf of Tempo Music. 4pp., 356 x 216 mm. Provenance: Guernsey’s, New York, 18 May 2016, lot 27.