I was weirdly obsessed with this jazz tune when I was twelve

I mainly grew up in a classical radio type of household, but my folks had a couple of jazz albums too, including Duke’s Memories by Abdullah Ibrahim. It included an obscure Ellington tune called “Way Way Back.”

The melody is elegantly simple, and reveals greater depth with each listen. When I was in sixth grade, I was obsessed with this track. I listened to it over and over and over. I liked to sit and draw abstract geometric shapes and cartoon beings while I listened. I had no idea where to take this interest until years later. Evidently I had good taste as a kid! The tune is a great one, and the recording is deep in the pocket. I don’t love that 80s rubber-band-like upright bass pickup sound, but the groove is impeccable.

Here’s my transcription:

And here’s how the MIDI looks in Ableton Live:

Duke Ellington was great at turning blues cliches into fresh and distinctive melodies. The first four bars of the tune are a slowed-down version of a ubiquitous intro/ending riff that doesn’t have an official name. I call it the descending sixths blues cliche. For a “bluesier” harmonization, you might play:

| F/C | F°7/B E°7/Bb | F/A ...

The rest of the tune just moves this descending sixth motif through some standard ragtime-y chord changes, only breaking the pattern at the very end for the minor third up to the tonic.

By the way, Abdullah Ibrahim’s piano solo is pretty excellent. The melody he starts the solo off with could be the basis of an Ellington-esque standard unto itself.

Ellington is great at evoking nostalgia, even when you aren’t sure what you’re nostalgic for. When I was twelve, I hadn’t had too many experiences to be nostalgic about. I also hadn’t heard very much jazz, blues or ragtime. And yet listening to “Way Way Back” made me feel like I was connecting to some vast and ancient heritage. I had the same experience the first time I heard “Mood Indigo,” it was the cafe in my college campus center, played by a band a few of my friends were in. They couldn’t have even been playing it all that well, but it froze me in my tracks. I felt like I was hearing something I had heard hundreds of times many years ago.

Unless I had some formative Duke Ellington experience in early childhood that I don’t remember, the nostalgia I felt listening to these tunes must have mainly come from the tunes themselves in the moment. Hearing the second phrase in the tune made me nostalgic for the first phrase, and hearing the third phrase made me nostalgic for the second one. Ellington and Bach don’t have much in common, but their music does have the shared quality of being very good at teaching itself to you through careful deployment of repetition and variation. If the music is “about” anything, it’s about the experience of listening to music itself.