It's all about history--adherence to and respect for the past, about clinging to the vestiges of time even as the seconds race by. Jazz fanatics love their rigid 78s and their erstwhile heroes, their memories of notes so thick they pour out of the speakers like soup. Jazz is a music that demands an understanding of the past even as it expects you to hurtle toward a future; it wants you to remember forgotten names and still create something never before heard. Shelley Carrol is a student of that past, as respectful as any young man reared on sounds created by men who recorded and retired long before he even picked up his tenor saxophone. That such a young man would have the chance to perform all these years later with members of The Duke Ellington Orchestra--a name that conjures up a library's worth of history books and Important Albums, each shouting their big-band blues and compound classical louder than the next--is the stuff of which a young jazzer's dreams are made. It's the chance to play history--Ellington compositions like "Thanks For the Beautiful Land on the Delta," "Heaven," "Self Portrait (of the Bean)," and Billy Strayhorn's "A Flower is a Lovesome Thing," rank among the Orchestra's lesser-known works of wonder--and a chance to make history, an opportunity to soak in lessons between takes. After all, on trumpet is none other than Barrie Lee Hall, Jr., a link to the great Edward Kennedy Ellington himself. Hall was a protégé of the great Cootie Williams, and he is one of the few remaining members of the orchestra who shared a stage with Ellington before his death in May 1974. The other members of the Orchestra on this album all came in during the years when Mercer Ellington, Duke's son, led the band: Pianist Tommy James has worked with everyone from Stanley Turrentine to James Taylor, bassist Hassan Abdul Ashak-Kar's father is the great big-band pianist Gerald Wiggins, and drummer Sebastian Whittaker is an old childhood friend of Carrol's and a band leader who recorded four albums for the Houston-based Justice label. "I know everybody on the album," Carrol says. "They're like family. We're all close, and I was used to working with them. I picked the cats I most enjoyed playing with and got along with and had worked with." Carrol, who was born in Houston 32 years ago and moved to Dallas in the 1980s to attend the University of North Texas in Denton and play in the prestigious One O'Clock Lab Band, joined the Orchestra about a decade ago, after Hall kept inviting and insisting the young tenor player take his place on the bandstand. "Barrie heard me when I was 16 or 17 and remembered me," Carrol recalls, "and one day he called me while I was going to school at North Texas and offered me the gig. To me, playing with this band is overwhelming. Being in New York and abroad, I could hear musicians I never would have gotten the chance to hear otherwise. And Mercer took to me very well." Born to a family of gospel singers and musicians, Carrol was the youngest of four children, all of whom sang in the church choir; Shelley was even a member of the Boys Choir of Houston for a while. His brother had a band, and every once in a while he'd let Shelley play tambourine: "And that's when the entertainment bug hit me," Shelley laughs now. "It seemed natural for me to be in music." In the seventh grade, he wanted to play the saxophone, but when he went to ask the band instructor for the instrument, he was told they were all out. Instead, Carrol would have to play oboe--which he did all through junior high and much of high school. His first opportunity to play the saxophone was at Houston's Performing and Visual Arts High School, in a band led by Dr. Bob Morgan. But his initial training on the instrument was not limited to school. Rather, Carrol was lucky enough to learn with two of the real masters, legendary practitioners of the wide-open Texas Tenor sound. The great Arnett Cobb lived just three blocks away from the young Carrol, and he was something of a legend in their Houston neighborhood. "I didn't know it then, but he was idolized all over the world," Carrol says now. But Cobb didn't have enough time to give to the burgeoning jazzman--he was either on the road all the time or, later in life, suffering from ill health--so instead Shelley turned to former Ray Charles sideman Don Wilkerson for inspiration and education. Carrol was introduced to Wilkerson through a Houston singer with whom Carrol had been performing, and the two became good friends. "Don treated me like I was his son after we decided he was gonna show me something," Carrol says--and as a tribute to Wilkerson, Carrol has included two of his compositions on his debut, the aptly named "Scrappy" and the brash, sassy "Lone Star Shuffle." Marchel Ivery, arguably the greatest living Texas tenorist, stopped by the studio during the recording and offered up "Blues by Five" a composition that was a favorite of Red Garland, another Texas native who was also a dear friend. The result is a new twist on the classic two tenor dual. Instead of staging a clash between seasoned pros, a distinct soundscape is produced by the venerable meeting the emerging. The inclusion of the Wilkerson tunes and the brand-new Tommy James-penned "Basic Black" make it clear that this is the kind of rare jazz album that manages to capture vita without encasing it in glass: It captures the soul and swing of the 1920s and '30s Duke--the one who recorded with ensembles small and large for OKeh, the one who was performing dance music for Cotton Club crowds and creating "Black and Tan Fantasy" while still a young man redefining the still-very young music--and the complex elegance of his sacred music. It honks and hollers and howls and growls, punches (and connects!) where most records merely swing, jump and jive and then get on bended knee when it's all over. Like Leaning House Records' other releases, Carrol's album with the Ellingtons proves there's still some magic to be squeezed from songs that date back decades. It was actually Leaning House founder Mark Elliott--a young man in his 20s with the old soul of a real jazz aesthete--who picked the four Ellington cuts. Elliott wanted to round out the record with songs rarely performed and recorded over the decades, with the most well-known being "Self Portrait (of the Bean)" from the 1962 Impulse! Duke Ellington Meets Coleman Hawkins--and even that's obscure when held up to some of Ellington's classics. Only "A Flower is a Lovesome Thing" (which dates from the 1940s) and "Heaven" (from the 1968 Second Sacred Concert) are in the Ellington orchestra repertoire (as is the non-Ellington-written "Poor Butterfly"), while "Thanks for the Beautiful Land on the Delta" went unreleased even on an Ellington record until years after his death. "Mark and I collaborated on the song list, and sometimes he'd let me hear something, and I would say, 'I didn't even know we had that in the book,'" Carrol says. "Some of that stuff isn't even written down. I tried to see what it sounded like, especially something like 'Thanks for the Beautiful Land.' That's kind of special to me after I started playing it. There's something about the energy of that one. " One of the amazing things about this album is the way Carrol and Elliott reduced a big band into a miniature ensemble without sacrificing the enormity of sound. In Hall's hand, the trumpet mute, the plunger, becomes almost a bullhorn; the sound's enormous, and behind him the rhythm section fills in the gaps. It's almost like listening to an old Arnett Cobb or Illinois Jacquet record: The silences are overwhelming, the blanks colored by a thousand different shades. You hear something that's not there. "You know," Carrol says, "I thought since I had all these guys this seemed like a nice way to start, a nice way to do a first album. I've done something honest to the way I play, and you can't ask much more than that." Robert Wilonsky Music Editor New Times Los Angeles
	Shelley Carrol, tenor saxophone Barrie Lee Hall, Jr., trumpet Tommy James, piano Hassan Abdul Ashak-Kar, bass Sebastian Whittaker, drums
		Producer: Mark Elliott Executive Producer: Keith Foerster Engineered by Mark Elliott and Bill Foshee Recorded at Sumet Studios Studio A, Dallas Mixed by Mark Elliott at Crystal Clear Sound, Dallas Art direction & layout: F. Goodenough Off-Center Graphics, Dallas Photographs: John Maxwell Recorded live to 24 track analog with Dolby SR. In an attempt to deliver a more natural sound, the Acoustic Sheetrock™ miking technique was employed. Shelley Carrol would like to dedicate this album to his big brother, Forest Paul Carrol, Charlotte Cummings and Mercer Ellington.