TDWAW - The Duke Ellington Itinerary

[EKE BBB]

Coordinated and hosted by David Palmquist.

This message was posted in the duke-lym list:

"Those who were at Ellington 2014 in Amsterdam or who've read the most recent Blue Light will recall me announcing that

The Duke Where and When

A Chronicle of Duke Ellington's

Working Life and Travels

web page is now online at http://tdwaw.ca The webpage is meant to be a reference tool for Ellington researchers and biographers, but it will interest anyone who shared my fascination with the amazing amount of travel done by Duke Ellington and his orchestra throughout his adult life, or who simply wants to check certain facts - there's a lot of misinformation in biographies and on the internet.

Caution - you likely should not open the itinerary if you have a slow internet connection or have to pay for each minute of download time. It is a huge file (see technical info below) and may take a long time to open.

Putting the itinerary online so researchers can share their knowledge and avoid duplicating their efforts was Carl Hällström's idea. Carl persuaded Klaus Götting to let me use his August 2011 print-layout itinerary The Duke: Where and When as a starting point, and Carl nominated various researchers to participate, including Ken Steiner, who has been our most active team member.

Klaus agreed to let me use his title for the webpage, and the URL (webpage address) is simply an acronym for The Duke - Where And When. The domain .ca was chosen because I'm Canadian, eh?

This "evergreen" project began in 2011 and has been my primary hobby since Ellington 2012. It will never be complete and despite best efforts, will have mistakes and omissions. New information, additional references, corrections and simple reporting of glitches are welcome.

While I did the html coding and lots of my own research, this is a team effort. Our chronicle expands upon *Klaus' itinerary which in turn was built on and expanded the earlier itineraries created and/or published by the late Joe Igo, the late Gordon Ewing the late Art Pilkington (see DEMS 08/2-6), the late Frank Dutton, the late Dr. Klaus Stratemann, the late Ken Vail, *Steven Lasker, and *Ken Steiner. Klaus gathered material from a great many other sources, as well as direct and indirect contributions from *Roger Boyes (UK), Jan Bruér (Sweden), the late Jack Chambers (USA), G. Collombé, George Debroe (Belgium), *Agustín Pérez Gasco (Spain), Michael Graff (USA), the late Sjef Hoefsmit (Belgium), Ted Hudson (USA), *Carl A. Hällström (Sweden), *Steven Lasker (USA), Michel MacAire (France), Luciano Massagli (Italy), Joe Mosbrook (USA), Jordi Navis-Ferrer (Spain), Wolfram Knauer (Germany), Arne Neegaard (Norway), Jean Portier (France), Ben Pubols (USA), Ulf Renberg, R Schneider, *Rick Steiger (USA), William E. Timner (Canada), *Lance Travis (South Africa), the late Jerry Valburn (USA), and Giovanni M. Volonté (Italy), and of course, all the contributors to the DEMS Bulletins. A great deal of credit is due to the late Sjef Hoefsmit and his predecessor, the late Benny H. Aasland of The International Duke Ellington Music Society for their dedication to collecting and sharing the tremendous body of Ellington knowledge they published three times a year in the DEMS bulletin for thirty-three years.

I haven't finished adding the many hundreds of dates discovered by Steven Lasker and Ken Steiner, but I am very grateful to them for their outstanding support, clarifications, and encouragement. In addition to those whose names are marked with asterisks in the preceding paragraph, as of May 2014 the team included Bjorn Andresen (Israel), Ian Bradley England), Nicholas Fernandez (USA), Marcus Girvan (Scotland), Michael Graff (USA), and Andrew Homzy (Canada), and of course Donna (aka Monika) Stratemann of Germany, who kindly gave me her late husband's research files, and both Patricia Willard (USA) and Roger Boyes (UK) who have provided so much encouragement and help through clarifying many facts and their proper context.

I am super grateful to Klaus Götting and to Marcus Girvan, because I have blatantly copied from their documents, saving so much typing time. There are many others who have provided a great deal of help. If I've failed to acknowledge you, it may be because your messages are sitting on my defunct old computer or just because I forgot. If you contributed information used by Mr. Götting or by me and your name has not been mentioned, please accept my apology and let me know so I can credit you on the acknowledgements page.

Technical stuff:

The hyperlink http://tdwaw.ca takes you to an index page where you will pause for 30 seconds to allow time to consider opening one of the hyperlinks shown on the index page. After 30 seconds, your browser will be redirected to the itinerary. If you don't want to wait 30 seconds, there's a link to jump right away.

The itinerary is an html document that uses css. I created it on a PC desktop computer with a flat-screen monitor and it works on my PC and my Windows 7 laptop. I know it works with the Windows-compatible browsers Opera, Internet Explorer 11, Firefox, and Safari, although the appearance changes a little from one to the other and older versions of Firefox might not properly display the background image. Browsers differ so the line thickness and font size/resolution may change a little as you try different browsers. I have not tested the page with Google Chrome, nor have I tested it on Mac computers, but those who have did not report problems. It believe it opens on tablets, but it will be slow and it's probably too big to open on a smartphone.

We have 14,000 or so events listed and an additional 3,600 dates marked as undocumented, so the file is over 8 megabytes in size. If you have a slow internet connection or you pay by the minute for data usage, this webpage may not be for you.

The itinerary uses 10-column tables: start date, for multi-day events, end dates, city, venue, event description and related information, primary information resources with hyperlinks where possible, New Desor reference numbers for recordings, DEMS references, often hyperlinked, other information (mostly things I haven't checked out) and finally, the date the entry was added or modified. I am still adding weekdays to the first column, the names of states or countries to the third, and expanding the multiday events to show on each day. It's taken a lot longer than I expected because filling in these details sometimes requires additional research, which often opens up new garden paths I love to explore.

Navigation is basically by using {up} and {down} arrows and {page up}/{page down} buttons. It's faster to just to go to the Year menu at the top (with your {Home} key), click one to arrive at the beginning of a particular year, and then scroll up or down from the beginning of the target year. A touchpad on a laptop may not be very useful for a file this size, and I don't know how it will work with touchscreens.

I usually use the browser's "Find" tool ({Control-F} with Windows browsers) to find particular search strings - the name of a venue, a city, a song title, etc. Searching for a date requires you to use the yyyy mm dd format with spaces. For instance, May 13, 1951 should be keyed as 1951 05 13 (that is, 1951[space]05[space]13)

I've mentioned the file is huge, but you needn't reload it every time you want to look something up if your browser caches it. If it does, you might prefer to use the cached copy unless the index page shows a "last update" date after your last visit.

I encourage you to participate in our project. Whether you do or not, though, please enjoy the webpage and let me know if you spot mistakes or glitches.

David Palmquist"

Edited July 26, 2014 by EKE BBB

[kh1958]

That's very interesting. I was astounded to see that the on April 30, 1973, there was a performance of the second sacred concert at Lovers Lane Methodist Church here in Dallas.

And June 2-4, 1972, appearing at the Loser's Club in Dallas.

[EKE BBB]

TDWAW is alive and kicking! 

Tons of new dates and information have been added during the last ten years.