Don't Get Around Much Anymore

Bob Russell wrote lyrics to Ellington's earlier instrumental "Never No Lament," and the result was a masterpiece of emotional deflection: the narrator avoids the old haunts, the old crowd, because returning would mean confronting loss. The text deals in understatement — missed the Saturday dance, could have gone but didn't, tried to forget. There is a sharp humor in this obliqueness that the swing arrangement embodies perfectly: the rhythm is buoyant, almost cheerful, while the lyric performs its wry melancholy with straight-faced precision. Ellington's band plays it with the easy mastery of musicians who have lived inside this groove, brass sections answering vocalist calls, the rhythm section swinging with gorgeous nonchalance. The song is a miniature of emotional indirection — a form that jazz, with its tradition of playing around the melody, suits perfectly. In listening it operates as party music with a wink, surface brightness over a private understanding. It makes you want to move and makes you think simultaneously, which is precisely the American songbook at its most intelligent and most human.