Boston's best day in years, from the extremely specialized view of the jazz fan, must certainly have been last Sunday. The Jazz Club had Bobby Hackett, Brad Gowans, and Charlie Vinal at the Copley Square Hotel in the best session, of its series, and in the evening Duke Ellington appeared at Symphony Hall. In addition to topping anything the town has heard in many months, both events were sold out.

The Ellington concert was a tough one to evaluate. The band is as polished as ever, but Duke is definitely undergoing a major change.

Just what he's trying to do, I don't know. His compositions and orchestrations become more and more complex, and he is turning to the so called modern school of composition, retaining, at the same time, much of the flavor and even some of the form of jazz. The result is a unique hybrid, which nonetheless comes too close to Gershwin, Grofo, and Morton Could to suit me. I want my Ellington and I want it straight.

This matter of orchestration is almost as important as composition; the medley of Ellington favorites was served up in a hectic, pretentious hash in which only "Mood Indigo" appeared in the form we love so well, and the separate original versions of the tunes in the medley remained invariably far superior. In the matter of composition, the contrast was sharp, but I hesitate to pass judgement so readily.

I've often brushed off a new Duke record only to have it grow on me, and the same may happen to "New World a Comin," but I think that as a whole the piece is out of line as a jazz composition and not at all satisfactory from any other standard. In particular, I could not take the piano interludes and clarinet cadenza--which had nothing to do with jazz and appeared to have nothing to do with the rest of the composition.

Ellington's music has always been an intensely personal matter, not only as far as he was concerned, but his musicians as well. For years the band played without written music (quipped Duke, "What would we do if the lights went out?"), partly because the compositions and arrangements were worked out by Duke with the individual men, and partly because a few of the earlier members were slow at reading (but fast on the draw).

Most of the material was developed by virtually the entire band, and only a few compositions could truly be considered the sole work of any one man. The Ellington band had an exceptionally stable personnel between 1927 and 1941, but the past two years have brought about three or four times as many changes as the Ellington band has ever had. As a result, the music is less distinctive, less personal, and somewhat streamlined.

This is painfully true when Ray Nance, an ordinary trumpet player, a poor violinist, and an unnecessarily heavy-handed showman, is out in front as soloist. It is definitely not required that a violinist assume an agonized, orgiastic expression in order to produce a simple passage; Nance was such a phony mugger that when he trotted out for his last violin solo the crowd laughed before he even began to play. Nance would never have been tolerated in the old Ellington band, and there would have been no room for such ordinary musicians as Skippy Williams and Jimmy Hamilton.

The highlight of the evening for me was Joe "Tricky Sam" Nanton's coda on "Black and Tan Fantasy." Nanton's plunger trombone, although sometimes exploited for comic effect, is my favorite voice in the Ellington band--especially so since Johnny Hodges has taken to playing only sentimentally, with every appearance as soloist winding up in an ever-softening fadeout. "Rockin' In Rhythm," as always, was a good, solid performance, and even Nance's fiddle couldn't mar the beauty of "Moon Mist."

"Bakiff" is a fascinating study which perhaps belongs rightfully in the same general category as Stravinsky's, Shostakovich's and even Ravel's "modern" compositions--superimposed, or course, on a steady dance rhythm. Going further afield, the excerpts from the "Brown" section of the much-discussed "Black, Brown, and Beige" were most promising, and I'd like more than ever to hear the entire work.