Jelani Eddington Celebrates the Fourth of July at Balboa Park's Organ Pavilion

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s concert at the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park featured Jelani Eddington, star of the theatre organ world (and the only male soloist besides San Diego civic organist Raúl Prieto Ramírez, to be featured on this year’s Summer Organ Festival series; the others are all female to celebrate this year’s theme of “Women in Music”), playing one of those programs in which the printed listing included most of what he actually played, but not in the same order. His program also didn’t list the names of the composers (except for a medley he did of George Gershwin songs) or their birth and death dates. (Only one of his pieces – a symphonic suite from John Williams’ score for the movie once known merely as Star Wars but now rather ponderously called Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope – was from a still-living composer.)

Eddington opened his concert with the “National Emblem March,” composed in 1902 and published in 1905 by Edwin Eugene Bagley. After he played it Eddington explained that this was one of the few marches by composers other than John Philip Sousa that has survived – and Bagley was an almost exact contemporary of Sousa (Sousa’s dates were 1854-1932, Bagley’s were 1857-1922). I can think of at least one other, “American Patrol March” by Frank White Meacham, composed in 1885, but that’s more likely due to Glenn Miller’s swing version from 1942 than the march original. A marching-band version of the “National Emblem” is on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U40OIESDwlU, and it’s an appealing piece of music very much in Sousa’s style even though he didn’t write it. The second and third works on Eddington’s program were two atmospheric pieces by Leroy Anderson (1908-1975). Eddington actually recorded two CD’s worth of Anderson’s pieces, which I bought at a previous Organ Pavilion concert of his, and they were the only Anderson compilations readily available until Naxos Records did a five-CD set that at least purported to be his complete works. The pieces Eddington played last night were “The Phantom Regiment” and “A Trumpeter’s Lullaby” – Eddington joked that until he heard that piece he’d never associated trumpets and lullabies, but Anderson also wrote a lullaby for drums – and they were both quite beautiful and well played.

Next on the program was “Fanfare” by 20th century organist and composer Richard Purvis (1913-1994), and after that Eddington explained that he wanted to fit into the year’s theme of “Women in Music” by honoring one of the greatest female jazz singers in history, Ella Fitzgerald. The tunes he chose were her star-making hit, “A-Tisket, A-Tasket,” which she did with Chick Webb’s band in 1938 (the tune was credited to Webb’s arranger Van Alexander with lyrics by Ella Fitzgerald tweaked from the original nursery rhyme. The colors of the basket changed from green and yellow to brown and yellow, and for the release Ella added a new verse referencing two dance crazes of 1938: “She was truckin’ on down the avenue/Without a single thing to do/She went peck-peck-peckin’ all around/When she spied it on the ground”), plus one song from the George Gershwin Songbook album, “Slap That Bass,” and two from the Duke Ellington Songbook, “I Got It Bad (And That Ain’t Good)” and “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing).” I found it odd that a tribute to Ella Fitzgerald should include two Ellington songs originally written for his incredible singer Ivie Anderson, a contemporary of Fitzgerald’s and Billie Holiday’s who was kept from having the huge solo career they did by her chronic asthma, which forced her to retire from Ellington’s band in 1942 and led to her death in 1949. As good as Ella was in these songs, Ivie was utterly incomparable – in a review of an Ellington compilation critic Ralph J. Gleason wrote that while Duke had worked with many marvelous singers, “only Ivie sounded like she was born to sing this music.”

Eddington closed out his first set with an arrangement of the traditionial folk song “Shenandoah” (quite well phrased, though Harry Belafonte’s 1950’s recording remains unique) and Williams’ Star Wars medley, mostly the opening theme with bits of the other music from the score spliced in. When he returned from the break – he said the intermission would last 19 minutes but it was more like 20 – he did his first genuine Sousa march, “Semper Fidelis,” and then went into the Gershwin medley, which consisted of five songs: the relatively obscure “Love Is Sweeping the Country” from his 1831 political musical Of Thee I Sing before it went into more familiar fare: “Nice Work if You Can Get It,” “Embraceable You,” the andante therme from the “Rhapsody in Blue” and “I Got Rhythm” for a rousing finish.

The next song was “Not While I’m Around” from Stephen Sondheim’s 1979 musical Sweeney Todd, which Eddington introduced as “a very beautiful piece of music I like to play on an instrument like this, because as you’ve heard, there are a lot of wonderful colors in the instrument, a lot of beautiful strings, beautiful flutes, lovely reeds, both small and large, and it’s fun to find a piece to really explore these colors and to really dive into the beautiful tonal palette that this instrument has.” I found myself annoyed by Eddington’s introduction because, while the song he was playing is indeed beautiful, it is from a musical about serial murder and cannibalism, and in the show it’s sung by a child and its function is to provide a brief respite from all the gore.

After the Sondheim ballad it was time for the inevitable medley of the Armed Forces military themes, and Eddlington called out to the members of each service in the audience to stand when their branch’s theme was played. This being San Diego, more people stood for the Navy hymn “Anchors Aweigh” (played second, after the Army; the Marines came third, the Coast Guard fourth and the Air Force fifth) than any other. When he played “Wild Blue Yonder” I was startled to see a woman stand, if only because the Air Force is notoriously the most sexist of the services and the one in which women have the fewest chances for advancement. He segued at the end of the military medley into Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America,” did the equally obligatory Sousa “Stars and Stripes Forever” (in which he took an unexpected ritard in the final chorus), and then played a surprising encore: the famous “Toccata” final movement from Charles-Marie Widor’s Organ Symphony No. 5. It’s been called the second most popular organ piece ever written (after Johann Sebastian Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor), and Eddington seemed to be using it to say, “Hey, I’m not just a theatre organist! I can play the classics, too!”