Year: Day to Day Men: March 17

Morning’s Red Splendor

The seventeenth of March in 1916 marks the birth date of Ray Ellington, an English singer, drummer and bandleader. He specialized in jazz but experimented with many other genres. Ellington’s musical style was heavily influenced by songwriter and saxophonist Louis Jordan’s up-tempo hybrid of jazz, blues, and boogie-woogie. 

Born Henry Pitts Brown in Kennington, London, Ray Ellington was the youngest of four children to Eva Stenkell Rosenthal and Harry Pitts Brown, an African-American music hall comedian. After his fathe’s death in 1920, he was raised as an Orthodox Jew and, beginning in 1924, attended the South London Jewish School until 1930. Ellington entered show business at the age of twelve with his first acting appearance on a London stage. 

In 1937, Ellington joined Harry Roy and His Orchestra as the band’s drummer. At his first session with the band, he did vocals along with his drumming for the 1937 song “Swing for Sale”. In May of 1940, Ellington was called for military service. He joined the Royal Air Force and became a physical training instructor for the course of the war. Ellington also played in service bands including the RAF’s Blue Eagles in 1945. 

After demobilization, Ray Ellington resumed his music career with a group of his own musicians that played at London’s The Bag O’Nails club. After rejoining Harry Roy’s orchestra for a couple of months, he formed the Ray Ellington Quartet in 1947. Ellington’s band was one of the first in the United Kingdom to feature the simple guitar, bass, drums and piano format that became the basis of rock and roll. The band was also one of the first jazz bands in the United Kingdom to feature an amplified guitar. 

The guitarist in the Ray Ellington Quartet was Trinidadian Lauderic Rex Caton, an autodidact on guitar who played professionally from the age of seventeen. He was also proficient on saxophone, double bass and banjo. Jazz pianist Dick Katz studied at the Peabody Institute, the Manhattan School of Music and the Juilliard School. He became the favorite pianist of Benny Carter, Coleman Hawkins and vocalists Carmen McRae and Helen Merrill. Jamaican-born George Coleridge Goode was the bassist  and had recorded with Django Reinhardt the year before the quartet was formed. He had a long collaboration with alto saxophonist Joe Harriott and became involved with Harriott’s pioneering blend of jazz and Indian music, the Indo-Jazz Fusions. 

From 1951 to 1960, the Ray Ellington Quartet had a regular music segment on “The Goon Show”, a radio comedy program broadcast by the BBC Home Service and occasionally the BBC Light Program. Musical performances alternated with scripted comedy segments. Occasionally Ellington would have small speaking roles in many of the episodes; no attempt was made to change his normal accent regardless the role.

Ray Ellington was married to British actress Anita West, who also co-hosted the BBC children’s program “Blue Peter”. They had two children, Nina and Lance. Lance Ellington became a singer who recorded several jazz-oriented albums. After a prolific forty-year recording career, Ray Ellington died of cancer on the twenty-seventh of February in 1985.

Notes: The online “The Seagoon Memoirs” has a short May 2022 article on Ray Ellington by Nick Reeves. The article includes photos, newspaper reviews and several videos including the Ray Ellington Quartet performing “Pink Champagne”. The article is located at: https://www.theseagoonmemoirs.com/post/ray-ellington

Jasmine Records issued a thirty-song collection in 2019 entitled “Ray Ellington: That Rock’n’Rollin’ Man” which contains several songs from his early to mid 1950s Columbia 78 rpm records.