Talk:Take the A Train

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[edit] Chronological order of events

I removed the following paragraph from this article:

Strayhorn composed the piece while a young man in Pittsburgh. He introduced the song to Ellington after he succeeded in making his way to Ellington's dressing room when Ellington was appearing in Pittsburgh, then showing Ellington how he would have arranged Ellington's own song "Sophisticated Lady", then performing "Take the A Train" for him. Ellington was so impressed that he called the rest of the band in one at a time to hear Strayhorn, then hired him on the spot, to begin work in several weeks when Ellington returned to New York.

My replacement paragraph is this:

Ellington hired Strayhorn in 1939, who set about studying Ellington's scores to learn his style. As Strayhorn became able to emulate Ellington's style more closely, he was allowed to take on more arranging. "Take the A Train" was composed by Strayhorn in 1941.

My source for this paragraph is History and Tradition of Jazz by Thomas E. Larson, which was the textbook for a "History of Jazz" course I took this past semester. Obviously the main difference between these two paragraphs is when "Take the A Train" was written. The first paragraph claims Strayhorn wrote it before he joined Ellington, and was able to show it to Ellington as a sort of "resume". Larson's book says that the song was written after Strayhorn had learned what he called the "Ellington effect", which was Ellington's arranging style, and that Strayhorn learned this style while working for Ellington.

Clearly there's a contradiction here. I took the liberty of commenting out the version I think is incorrect, since I have cited the source for mine. If someone has a source for the first version, perhaps we can work something out. —Bkell (talk) 04:16, 10 June 2006 (UTC)