The title refers to the main street or central artery in town, which in New York, means Broadway.

Ellington paints the picture of hustle and bustle at a terrific pace. Alternate titles for this piece were Altitude and On Becoming A Square. Main Stem, along with two Strayhorn charts (My Little Brown Book and Johnny Come Lately) was recorded on June 26, 1942 in Ellington’s penultimate recording session before the recording ban took effect.

The band’s personnel has remained constant since Ray Nance replaced Cootie Williams a year and a half before, except for the loss of Jimmy Blanton, who left the band due to fatal tuberculosis. Junior Raglin filled in for nearly four years but was never the major soloist or driving force that Blanton had been for the band. The succession of fine bassists over the next 30 years, including Oscar Petiford, Jimmy Woode, Wendell Marshall, Aaron Bell, Ernie Shepard, Joe Benjamin, and John Lamb all paled in comparison to Blanton.

Ellington’s love of the blues was well documented by his own words on the subject as well as the extraordinary number of blues pieces he composed and arranged, and the creative variety of each. Of the 14 titles chosen for this volume, which spans the three most prolific and inspired years of his career, seven are 12-bar blues and one is an 8-bar blues with a bridge.

Fletcher Henderson’s band had a reputation for playing in difficult keys, but here is Ellington in the key of D. Jazz bands prefer the flat keys and will go as far as one sharp (G major or E minor), but two sharps is usually reserved for strings, to accommodate their tuning. The fundamental pitch for trumpets and trombones is Bb and saxes are also more naturally in flat keys. Flat keys sound darker. D major is quite bright. The interlude modulates up a 4 th to G major, but then we return to D for the recapitulation and coda. Like C Jam Blues (composed by Barney Bigard and arranged by Strayhorn in January of 1942), Main Stem parades a series of star soloists. Where C Jam Blues leaves the accompaniment mainly to the rhythm section, Main Stem develops the opening motif throughout all the blues choruses. C Jam Blues is the epitome of simplicity in jazz. Main Stem is propelled by the succession of riffs that subtly develop the opening motif a little bit at a time.

Jazz musicians coming up at the time name Cottontail and Main Stem as the two Ellington records that influenced them the most. There is a raw energy in both these recordings that pushed the Swing Era to its boundaries. Bebop was beckoning. But this is 1942, and Ellington won’t have any beboppers in his band until the following year when Dizzy Gillespie joined for a short time at the Hurricane Club in New York during the recording ban. Finally, Jimmy Hamilton, Paul Gonsalves, Clark Terry, and Willie Cook will add that modern approach, but that won’t be for a while yet. When Michael James asked his uncle what he thought of bebop, Duke answered, “The bop was a bitch.”