The Ellington Century (10 page)

Debussy's musical symbolism rests on two strategies that suggest parallels with Ellington. The first is intertextuality, usually between the music and some other artwork. The second is the sound metaphor, the evocation of one timbre through another. Debussy's symbolic techniques inform the musical languages of such later and different works as Stravinsky's Sererade in A, Bartók's
Out of Doors
, Messiaen's
Vingt Regards
, or any of the preludes in Shostakovich's op. 87. But, even though the Cotton Club may have existed in a different universe from Mallarmé's exclusive symbolist gatherings, Debussy's aesthetic ideas perhaps found their richest application in the music of the Ellington Orchestra. From his earliest compositions to his last recordings, the blues provided Ellington with an intertextual discourse; his band was the source of sound symbols. Let's see if we can come up with a list of Ellington “preludes.” If we exclude the genres of songs, concertos, and extended compositions (and give Strayhorn and Tizol their own lists), and limit ourselves to pieces with a distinctive timbre, we might easily arrive at two volumes of twenty-four preludes, a Bachian “48” to set beside Debussy's three dozen:

  1. Black and Tan Fantasy

  2. Black Beauty

  3. Immigration Blues

  4. East St. Louis Toodle-Oo

  5. The Mooche

  6. Creole Love Call

  7. Awful Sad

  8. Jubilee Stomp

  9. The Mystery Song

10. Echoes of the Jungle

11. Mood Indigo

12. Old Man Blues

13. Eerie Moan

14. In a Sentimental Mood

15. Delta Serenade

16. Daybreak Express

17. Menilek

18. Blue Light

19. Subtle Lament

20. Jack the Bear

21. Ko-Ko

22. Across the Track Blues

23. Harlem Airshaft

24. Bojangles

25. A Portrait of Bert Williams

26. Sepia Panorama

27. Dusk

28. Warm Valley

29. Blue Serge (Mercer Ellington)

30. Clothed Woman

31. Moon Mist (Mercer Ellington)

32. Dancers in Love

33. Happy-Go-Lucky Local

34. Transblucency

35. On a Turquoise Cloud

36. Such Sweet Thunder

37. Madness in Great Ones

38. Where's the Music

39. Single Petal of a Rose

40. Zweet Zurzday

41. Afro Bossa

42. Bonga

43. La Plus Belle Africaine

44. Depk

45. Amad

46. The Sleeping Lady and the Giant Who Watches over Her

47. Portrait of Wellman Braud

48. Second Line

While we're at it, here are a dozen Strayhorn preludes:

  1. Chelsea Bridge

  2. Take the “A” Train

  3. Balcony Serenade

  4. Johnny Come Lately

  5. Hear Say

  6. Star-Crossed Lovers

  7. Bluebird of Delhi

  8. Agra

  9. Isfahan

10. Lotus Blossom

11. Blood Count

12. U.M.M.G.

OUTRO: SOUNDS RECAPTURED

The “Ellington effect” is a particular instance of a much wider twentieth-century soundscape, a constructed environment of sound that always has both physical and semiotic dimensions. As Emily Thompson points out, the idea of acoustical engineering itself arose in response to the idea of “noise pollution.” Noise was a ubiquitous by-product of ever-encroaching industrialism, but it also symbolized “the many perils of the modern American city, including overcrowded tenements, epidemic
disease, and industrial pollution.”
⁷¹
Similarly, a “good” acoustic environment was not a simple question of physics and reverberation time but a matter of taste, and therefore a matter of class and race as well. The acoustics of Symphony Hall in Boston, for instance, were designed for an orchestra manager, Henry Higginson, who preferred “older music” to “very noisy music” (in other words, Beethoven over Strauss), part of a broader notion of the solemn, serious qualities—ethical qualities—that Higginson and others of his time associated with good music. Concertgoing, according to Theodore Thomas, was “an elevating mental recreation which is not an amusement.”
⁷²
Good acoustics could symbolize an entire value system.

Just a few years after the opening of Symphony Hall in 1900 its carefully controlled environment would be an anachronism. The argument about good and bad music and good and bad sound quality shifted from the concert hall to the living room and later to the kitchen, the den, and, most worryingly, the automobile. And to the movie theater as well. For most of the people most of the time, musical sound in the twentieth century meant recorded and/or broadcast sound, the revolutionary consequence of Edison's 1877 invention (and Marconi's 1895 discovery), when, as Ira Gershwin would put it, “they all laughed”—but not for long.

The surprisingly rapid acceptance of recorded music as the equivalent of live performance may appear less surprising when we realize that, at least in middle-class households, the piano already played the same cultural role in the nineteenth century that the phonograph would play in the twentieth. Through transcriptions and reductions, the piano, like the phonograph, brought into the home the orchestra and the opera house, as well as genres such as ragtime, which otherwise might only be encountered in questionable surroundings. Prefiguring the direction that recording would follow, the piano evolved in order to translate instrumental sounds with the ever-greater illusion of fidelity. Piano builders, composers, and performers took an interest in the “production” of piano sound, not just its renderings of pitches and rhythms but also its atmospherics. Debussy's use of the piano to suggest distant sounds, cultures, and sensations makes him a precursor for recording engineers. Recording allowed the esoteric researches of symbolism to shape the sound of everyday life, including the “sound” of music.

While the sound of recorded jazz reflected changes in technology as well as ongoing trade-offs between sound, convenience, and price, it was also a subliminal, symbolic “correspondence” to the way people
conceptualized jazz. When Ellington's music was associated with inaccessible and exotic venues like the Cotton Club, recordings were made in a “you are there” mode (often with Irving Mills simulating the role of emcee). When jazz listeners sought to capture the nonrepeatable essence of jazz, improvisation, they would tolerate bad microphone placement and erratic balances as long as the results sounded “live.” For listeners, like John Hammond, predisposed to view jazz as a kind of folk music, a rough acoustic was a badge of honor. And when jazz became a classical music, the recording ambience had to suggest the calm, well-balanced resonance of the concert hall.

There are Ellington recordings to match all of these approaches; the Blanton-Webster recordings made for Victor in 1940 and 1941 and the live recording made at the Crystal Ballroom in Fargo, North Dakota, on November 7, 1940, demonstrate how contrasting styles of recording can cast completely different lights on the same repertory and players. Dick Burris and Jack Towers made the Fargo recordings on a portable disk-cutting recorder. The sound is distant, balances are erratic, and some recordings break off in the middle of a performance. It says volumes about the notion of jazz “authenticity” that many listeners accept the judgment of Alexander Coleman, cited in the Book-of-the-Month Club rerelease, that this “recording is the jazz equivalent of the Holy Grail.” For its admirers, the Fargo set represents the way the Ellington band “really” sounded, in the moment. By contrast, not only is the sound of the Victor recordings (made in Chicago, Hollywood, and New York) clearer and more evenly balanced, but the performances are more classical as well, that is, slower, even though they were mainly single takes. For a different kind of listener, these studio recordings of the Blanton/Webster band are the firmest evidence of the “masterpiece” status of most of the pieces (interestingly, the same listeners rarely give the vocals the same respect as the instrumental pieces).

We can hear a similar divide in recording styles in canonic albums made in 1959 by two of Ellington's most important successors: Charles Mingus's
Blues and Roots
, produced by Nesuhi Ertegun for Atlantic, and the Miles Davis / Gil Evans
Sketches of Spain
, produced for Columbia by Teo Macero and Irving Townsend. It's not an accident that Atlantic is best known for their recordings of Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin, while Columbia was associated with the sounds of the Philadelphia Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic. The ambience (or lack of it) of the Mingus recording screams authenticity. You feel like you are in the front row at the Five Spot. There seems to be no reverb,
no room sound, no microphones, nothing between you and the music. The sound perfectly suits the gospel style of the music; it tells us that we are in a jazz church, as far from the commercial realm of Mammon as it is possible to be.

Sketches of Spain
is renowned for its first track, Evans's sixteen-minute reworking of the slow movement of Rodrigo's
Concierto de Aranjuez
, originally for guitar and orchestra, as a concerto for trumpet and a twenty-six-player jazz orchestra (including flutes, oboe, and harp). The arrangement united Davis, Evans, and Rodrigo and invited Debussy, Ravel, Falla, and Juan Tizol to the party, and Nelson Riddle and Henry Mancini as well. Given the crossover nature of the music, the sound ambience here aptly bespeaks hybridity. From the first sounds of a distant harp and castanets, the music seems to float in a highly engineered imaginary space at once resonant and intimate, where instrumental sounds drift in and out, in sharp or soft focus. The sound suits the mood of romantic exoticism, but, even more, it supports Davis's vocal approach to the music, “the jazzman as confessional poet,” as Gary Giddins put it.
⁷³
As soon as jazz singing embraced the microphone, the recording of jazz required some attention to the balance of amplified and unamplified elements, the synthetic intimacy of the voice and the acoustic space of the instruments. Nelson Riddle turned this problem into an art form in the albums he made with Frank Sinatra in the mid-1950s,
In the Wee Small Hours
and
Only the Lonely.
Evans's three concerto albums for Davis,
Miles Ahead, Porgy and Bess
, and
Sketches of Spain
, can be heard as a fusion of Ellington/Strayhorn tone parallel and concerto genres and Riddle's way of wrapping the voice in instrumental opulence.

Blues and Roots
and
Sketches of Spain
present contrasting pictures of jazz as a music of roots and a music of branches. Mingus's music here explores the black side of the Ellington spectrum, while Davis and Evans pursue the blue side beyond “Transblucency.” Though Ellington rarely engaged in the kind of evolved production heard on
Sketches of Spain
, even in albums marketed as “hi-fi,” his innovative approach to timbre as sound and symbol could inspire musicians working in styles that might seem distant from jazz. We might even detect the influence in the music of Brian Wilson. Rock historians usually place the highly composed ambient sound of “Good Vibrations” within the framework of Phil Spector's “wall of sound” first heard in the 1963 recording of “Be My Baby” by The Ronettes, and the Beatles' recording of “Strawberry Fields.” Spector created an “overall sound tapestry” by “combining
layers of electronically processed sound—miked, amplified, recorded, filtered, compressed, synthesized, and so on.”
⁷⁴
In “Strawberry Fields,” the producer George Martin mixed a simple guitar/bass/drums accompaniment with music for trumpets and cellos “and the strange sucking timbres produced by recording various percussion instruments with the tape reversed.”
⁷⁵
For the album
Pet Sounds
and the single “Good Vibrations,” Wilson similarly created a background track of staccato chords using recorded sounds of organ, harpsichord, piano, sleigh bells, and pizzicato strings
⁷⁶
and the electronic sound of the theremin. If we compare the sound of “Good Vibrations” with classic earlier Beach Boys recordings like “Little Deuce Coupe,” the difference reproduces (by other technical means) the contrasting modes of “authenticity” and “hybridity” we heard in the Mingus and Davis/Evans albums, similarly recasting Wilson from “real” beach boy to surreal rock poet. “Good Vibrations” might just be Californian for
klangfarbenmelodie.

The presence of rhythm and lack of symmetry are paradoxical, but there they are. Both are present to a marked degree. There is always rhythm, but it is the rhythm of segments. Each unit has a rhythm of its own, but when the whole is assembled it is lacking in symmetry. But easily workable to a Negro who is accustomed to the break in going from one part to another, so that he adjusts himself to the new tempo.

—Zora Neale Hurston

The incantation must be so percussion oriented that it disposes the listeners to bump and bounce, to slow grind and steady shuffle, to grind, hop, jump, kick, rock, roll, shout, stomp and otherwise wing the blues away.

—Albert Murray

What good is melody?

—Irving Mills, lyrics to “Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)”—also attributed to Bubber Miley

 

 

 

In the early years of the twentieth century the tempo of life sped up sharply, as if someone had suddenly stepped on a global gas pedal. Urban life seemed faster, noisier, less predictable. The hopped-up pace felt exhilarating and dizzying: “Everything around man jumps, dances, gallops in a movement out of phase with his own.”
¹
Even before the century turned its musical soundtrack crackled with a new rhythm.
Scott Joplin's “Maple Leaf Rag,” published in 1899, the year of Duke Ellington's birth, quickly became a worldwide sensation. Ragtime was not just another form of exoticism in an era that cultivated the exotic; Europeans (wowed by the performances of the touring Sousa band) and Americans alike embraced ragtime as the emblem of their accelerating everyday lives: “We make love to ragtime and we die to it.”
²
Like the first Wright Brothers' plane, however, ragtime was just the lift-off phase of ever-faster existence; in a few decades people would move at the speed of sound and communicate at the speed of light. And they would dance: every increment of speed set bodies in new kinds of motion, from rag to rap. The eighteenth century danced the minuet, the nineteenth waltzed, but in the twentieth each decade branded itself with a dance rhythm: the one-step, the fox-trot, the Charleston, the Lindy, the mambo, the twist, disco, salsa—all of them African American in origin.

Between the two world wars jazz musicians imbued the new dance rhythms with an equally new quality called swing. Where ragtime had mirrored the nervous jolts and jostle of the city streets, swing, disseminated at lightning speed through radio, celebrated the freedoms that accelerated motion brought to daily life, freedoms made visible in the sleekly urbane dancing of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and the gravity-defying acrobatics of the Nicholas Brothers. Today the term
swing
sounds geriatric (swing dance classes for senior citizens); we have to remind ourselves that swing was as radical a concept for music as relativity was for physics.

Swing remains oddly ineffable. Even in the twenty-first century it still eludes the grasp of most classically trained musicians. And of the dictionary as well. Even a well-honed definition seems to beg a few questions: “A sensation of pull and momentum found in jazz. It appears to result partly from the push and pull between layers of syncopated rhythms and the constant underlying beat.”
³
More than the sum of technical devices (such as syncopation and “swung” eighths), more than a particular stylistic phase of jazz, swing, ultimately, is an
ethical
ideal, a temporal image of liberation, or, as Albert Murray says, “purification and celebration/affirmation.”
⁴

Swing first appeared as an extraordinary quality of solo playing, heard mainly in short “breaks.” Instrumentalists, arrangers, and composers quickly learned ways to insinuate swing into performances by big bands as well as soloists. A handful of much-anthologized moments usually serves to chart its development: Jelly Roll Morton's swung performance of “Maple Leaf Rag,” Louis Armstrong's 1924 solos (in “Go
'Long Mule” or “Copenhagen”) in the relatively unswinging Fletcher Henderson band, the 1932 recording of “Moten Swing,” in which every member of the Bennie Moten Orchestra captures the quality.

While in the view of many jazz historians, the Ellington band, for all its formal and expressive distinction, was rarely in the forefront of rhythmic propulsion, jazz critics single out “Cotton Tail” as an acme of swing, a groundbreaking rhythmic achievement that “changed the face of jazz.”
⁵
In “Cotton Tail” rhythm plays a formal role comparable to its function in Beethoven's symphonies.

“
COTTON TAIL
”

Did you ever hear that story about that rabbit in the briar patch? And they caught him and some shit what he was doing wrong. They said, “We'll fix you—we're going to throw you in the briar patch.” And the rabbit, “Oh, mister, please, please, don't throw me in there.” Yes! They threw him in there and he said, “You can all kiss my ass. That's where I wanted to be all the time!” Then he cut out, ya know. Well, that's the way it is.

—Louis Armstrong

The Ellington Orchestra first recorded “Cotton Tail” in Hollywood on May 4, 1940. The recording features the tenor saxophonist Ben Webster, who had joined the band just five months earlier. Webster's unusually spacious two-chorus solo started out as an improvisation but became a fixed feature; in Ellington's music improvisation was often the road to composition. The solo became Webster's signature tune, but it would remain largely intact in later performances of “Cotton Tail,” when Paul Gonsalves occupied the solo tenor chair.
⁶

Throughout his career Duke Ellington worked synergistically with the members of his band. The taut structural logic of “Cotton Tail” is characteristically Ellingtonian, clearly related, as we shall see, to older Ellington charts based on “Tiger Rag,” but its effortless drive (and many of its notes) depend on two musicians who had recently joined the band: Webster and bassist Jimmy Blanton. Some listeners might also detect the influence of composer/arranger/pianist Billy Strayhorn (who joined the band a year earlier and was already Ellington's alter ego) in the fierce dissonances of some of the brass chords.

Webster had worked with Ellington occasionally in 1935 and ′36 (he can be heard on recordings of “Truckin'” and “In a Jam”), but until his arrival in January 1940 the band had never had a regular tenor soloist to fill the gap between Johnny Hodges on alto and Harry Carney on
baritone. Now there were five reed players: Barney Bigard played clarinet and, when needed, second, nonsoloing tenor, and Otto Hardwick was a nonsoloing alto. Since the Ellington book was conceived for a four-man reed section, Webster at first had to create his own parts; it would have made sense, therefore, for him to compose (or propose) an entire chorus in which the five saxophones would play an improvisatory-sounding group solo, at once harmony and melody.
⁷
The reed section solo device descends from the clarinet trios in Don Redman's arrangements for Fletcher Henderson in the 1920s such as “The Stampede” of 1926 (and on Ellington's “The Mooche” of 1930) and in many Benny Carter charts in the 1930s (Webster had played with Carter).
⁸

“Cotton Tail” exists both as a thirty-two-bar head to be followed by improvised choruses and as a six-chorus composition in which the head serves as a frame. You can find the head in most fake books, though often in the key of A
rather than the B
heard on Ellington's recordings.
⁹
“Cotton Tail” as a composition, not just the head, consists of six choruses of “rhythm changes” in B
a format that many bands of the time could have filled out without a written arrangement (as a head arrangement). However spontaneous it may sound it is not a head arrangement but a tightly compressed composition in which every note counts. Its phrase structure and scoring develop a dialogue of reeds and brass toward an escalating rhythmic and dynamic tension that reaches a high point in the “tutti” shout of the final chorus.

In jazz parlance “rhythm changes” denotes a thirty-two-bar harmonic pattern derived from Gershwin's “I Got Rhythm.” Throughout the 1930s jazz players appropriated the harmonic patterns of popular songs, transforming them into variants of the blues (the Moten band turned “Sweet Sue, That's You” into “Toby,” and the Lunceford Band transformed Gershwin's early tune “Do It Again” into “Swinging Uptown”). Ethel Merman put “I Got Rhythm” on the map in the 1930 Gershwin musical
Girl Crazy;
within a few years rhythm changes were second only to the twelve-bar blues pattern as the basis of jazz improvisation. Five years before “Cotton Tail” Ben Webster had recorded a very swinging rhythm changes chart, “Hotter than ‘ell,” by Horace Henderson with the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra. Virtually contemporary with “Cotton Tail” are such famous rhythm changes charts as the Basie band's “Lester Leaps In” and “Lunceford Special.” Pieces based on rhythm changes are, like the blues, a series of isomorphic stanzas, but where a blues stanza (or chorus) contains three four-bar lines, AAB, a “rhythm” stanza has four eight-bar lines: AABA. (The template
of rhythm changes does not use the final extended “Who could ask for anything more?” phrase of the Gershwin song.) In a blues the B serves to complete the thought:

I've got the choo-choo blues, had 'em all night and day.

I've got the choo-choo blues, had 'em all night and day.

'Cause the Panama Limited carried my man away.
¹⁰

In rhythm changes the B,

Old man trouble,

I don't mind him.

You won't find him

Round my door

also called the “bridge” or “release,” sets up melodic contrast and harmonic tension resolved by the final A.

A masterwork of compression, “Cotton Tail” consists of twenty-four (6 × 4) phrases, only three of which state the “head”. No two phrases are exactly the same. Following is a phrase-by-phrase outline. The personnel for the May 1940 recording were:

Reeds: Otto Hardwick and Johnny Hodges, alto sax; Barney

Bigard, tenor sax and clarinet; Ben Webster, tenor sax; Harry Carney, baritone sax

Brass: Cootie Williams, Wallace Jones, Rex Stewart, trumpets; Joe Nanton, Lawrence Brown, Juan Tizol, trombones

Rhythm: Duke Ellington, piano; Fred Guy, guitar; Jimmy Blanton, bass; Sonny Greer, drums

Chorus I: “Head” AA'BX

A: “Head” played in unison by one alto sax, baritone sax, plunger-muted trumpet (Williams), and trombone (Nanton)

A': “Head” with brass chords added

B: Reversed call-and-response between the five-sax choir and Williams's growled trumpet solo

X: A four-bar contrapuntal riff for reeds and brass taking the place of the expected eight-bar A

Chorus II: “Webster solo part I” AA'BA”

A: Webster and the rhythm section

A': Webster continues

B: Reverse call-and-response between clarinet + brass and Webster

A”: Webster continues solo, two bars of emphatic brass punctuation at the end