The Ellington Century (19 page)

After 1950 John Cage went even further, replacing any traditional notion of rhythm with determinedly “meaningless” clock time, mere temporal data. Cage's antipsychological strategies showed a futuristic understanding of the new recording and broadcasting technologies that were transforming the way music was produced and perceived. In works, like Cage's
Williams Mix
, of
musique concrète
, composed through tape manipulation, rhythm was a function of tape length and playback speed: “The score resembles a dressmaker's pattern, from which the tapes were cut to size and shape.”
⁵⁸

Throughout his career, though, Cage either ignored jazz or described it as a naïve folk style.
⁵⁹
Equating the experimental with the conceptual, Cage denied jazz, however free, any conceptual content or experimental capacity; not surprisingly, when the free jazz of Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy, Don Cherry, Cecil Taylor, and John Coltrane first appeared, some critics assumed, as they had with Ellington's jazz innovations, that it was trying to catch up with the advances of classical modernism, especially with Cage. A typical bracketing of Cage and Coleman appears in Frank Tirro's
Jazz:
A
History.
Tirro juxtaposes Cage (“I try to arrange my composing means so that I won't have any knowledge of what might happen.…My purpose is to eliminate purpose”) with Coleman (“I don't tell the members of my group what to do. I want them to play what they hear in the piece for themselves. I let everyone express himself just as he wants to. The musicians have complete freedom, and so, of course, our final results depend entirely on the musicianship, emotional make-up, and taste of the individual member”).
⁶⁰
If Coleman was reacting to Cage, he was reacting selectively. Musicianship, emotional makeup, and taste, all forms of purpose, were three factors that Cage systematically excluded from his music.

Despite Cage's virtual silence on the subject of jazz, however, the rhythmic research of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, Art Blakey, Thelonious Monk, and Bud Powell also reverberated with advanced styles in painting, poetry, and even concert music. Painters like Jackson Pollock played bebop recordings in their studios; poets like
Frank O'Hara emulated its spontaneous-sounding phrase shapes; and composers as different as Leonard Bernstein, Elliott Carter, and Stefan Wolpe emulated its high-voltage rhythmic energy.

We might designate all jazz, from Buddy Bolden onward, as rhythmic research, but what were the particular rhythmic innovations of bebop and post-bebop styles? Many of the musicians shared a desire to break the ties with American popular song. Though the two genres were intimately entwined from the time of Louis Armstrong's 1929 rendition of “I Can't Give You Anything But Love” to his chart-topping recording of “Hello Dolly” in 1964, by the late 1940s the marriage was already on the rocks.

Bebop musicians often transformed Broadway material radically, as Charlie Parker did with “Embraceable You,” Miles Davis did with “Surrey with the Fringe on Top,” and Coltrane did, on an epic scale, with “My Favorite Things.” By calling attention to the gap between Broadway and Birdland renditions of the same tunes, jazz musicians declared an ironic musical independence. Less ironically, they also developed an alternative jazz songbook to replace the Broadway-born standards, a strategy of Ellington's career from the beginning. Instead of playing Gershwin or Rodgers tunes they performed a copious new jazz songbook composed by Tadd Dameron, Thelonious Monk, Errol Garner, John Lewis, Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, or Sonny Rollins. Or they abandoned the thirty-two-bar structure of the pop tune altogether, along with the harmonic role of the rhythm section. The 1959 Ornette Coleman quartet (Coleman on white plastic alto sax, Don Cherry on pocket trumpet, Charlie Haden on bass, and Billy Higgins on drums) was eccentric in a lot of ways, but especially in the absence of a harmony instrument, piano or guitar. The loosened-up texture of their music, though, had precedents in the opening bars of the Parker/Gillespie “Ko-Ko,” and, as we have already heard, in the first phrase of “Cotton Tail.”

Moving away from the pop tune, jazz musicians reconnected with other genres of African American music, like the gospel music heard in many compositions of Charles Mingus or the funk rhythms in Miles Davis's
On the Corner.
They put their music to school with other traditions of improvisation: Indian music (John Coltrane and Alice Coltrane) or African music (Randy Weston and, in his extended composition for jazz orchestra and Ghanaian musicians,
Congo Square
, Wynton Marsalis). Or they just went “out.”

Jazz historians trace the birth of the “out” to the atonal sections of Ellington's “Clothed Woman” of 1947, but the impulse was also
present around the same time in the music of Lennie Tristano and the futuristic pieces, like “City of Glass,” that Robert Graettinger wrote for Stan Kenton and which Ellington parodied wickedly in his
Controversial Suite
of 1951, which also took a parting shot at the “Dixieland” revivalists.
⁶¹
Ornette Coleman's 1959 performances at the Five Spot turned these marginal efforts into a new movement that came to be called, after Coleman's 1960 album, free jazz.
⁶²

Eric Dolphy's
Out to Lunch
, recorded in 1964, is an early but classic example of the idiom. Its personnel are: Eric Dolphy, bass clarinet, flute, and alto sax; Freddie Hubbard, trumpet; Bobby Hutcherson, vibraphone; Richard Davis, bass; and Tony Williams, drums. (Astonishingly, Williams was just eighteen years old when the recording was made.) Of all the free jazz musicians, Dolphy had the strongest connections with advanced classical composition. He performed Varèse's flute solo
Density 21.5
, and he dedicated the third work on this album to Severino Gazzelloni, the Italian avant-garde flautist. Though all five tracks of
Out to Lunch
repay close study, let's look at the opening number, “Hat and Beard,” an homage (or “tone parallel”) to Thelonious Monk.

“Hat and Beard” is a study in odd-numbered asymmetry. It is in five sections and begins with a nine-beat, nine-pitch ostinato divided into 5 + 4 ( C-B
-A
-G
-F; E-B-G-D
). The two melodic units imply the oscillating harmonies of Monk's theme song “Epistrophy.” The opening section states the ostinato in various transformations twenty-two times, lasting about ninety seconds. The closing section also restates the ostinato but reverses the order of variants from the opening and compresses them to sixty seconds (a Bartókian structure and, roughly speaking, proportional relationship). The rhythm of the ostinato is square but goofy, like Monk's “Misterioso.”

The three central sections are solos for Dolphy (bass clarinet), Hubbard, and Hutcherson, with Davis and Williams maintaining the 5 + 4 beat pattern throughout, aided by Hutcherson, when he's not soloing. What might have been a rhythmic straitjacket in lesser hands becomes a marvel of unpredictable cross-accentuation, especially in the “knots and gnarls” of Williams' ceaselessly creative drumming.
⁶³
The rhythm section plays “supermelodically” without losing the pulse. Dolphy's solo, a darting series of swirls, wails, and shrieks, defies any simple relation to the pulse; though many of its sounds come from the repertory of “extended technique” cultivated by European avant-garde wind players like Gazzelloni and Heinz Holliger, every sound Dolphy makes stems
from the blues. Hubbard develops Dolphy's fragments into longer, sustained lyrical lines that sound in turn like bebop and Arabian music. Hutcherson begins his section sparely, delineating the scalar structures of the ostinato. Instead of building on this, Hutcherson forgoes a star turn and instead weaves a trio with the bass and drums, quietly evoking bells and birdcalls—a little “night music.”

There is not a single moment in “Hat and Beard” where the rhythmic patterns suggest the expected patterns of bebop, let alone swing. Yet it swings. The rhythmic layering and the vocabulary of rhythmic gestures in play all stem from the jazz tradition, and the exquisite timing and phrasing of the five performers sum up generations of rhythmic experiment by musicians predating even Bechet and Armstrong. The loss of pop tune harmonic progressions seems no loss at all; on the contrary, they feel like an unnecessary encumbrance, mere scaffolding. The rhythmic and harmonic implications of the ostinato theme seem more rigorous and apt in their demands on the players. There's life after rhythm changes.

“Out” in “Hat and Beard” is a happy, utopian state. It does not take the listener outside of time, nor, despite the album title, is it in any way crazy. But it does lead us “out” of constraining categories like classical, jazz, and even avant-garde (and it reminds us that all of those categories are constraining). As Ellington put it, the art is not in the categories, but “in the cooking.”
⁶⁴

In the advanced industrial countries pop music is defined by standardization; its prototype is the song hit. A popular American textbook on writing and selling such hits confessed that with disarming missionary zeal some thirty years ago. The main difference between a pop song and a serious or—in the beautifully paradoxical language of that manual—“standard” song is said to be that pop melodies and lyrics must stick to an unmercifully rigid pattern while the composer of serious songs is permitted free, autonomous creation. The textbook writers do not hesitate to call popular music “custom-built,” a predicate usually reserved for automobiles.

—T. W. Adorno

Play a simple melody.

—Irving Berlin

 

 

 

INTRO: THE MELODY BIZ

Melody was a touchy subject for the grandees of modern music. In his 1939 Norton Lectures Stravinsky conceded, grandly, that the public was right about melody and he was wrong: “I am beginning to think, in full agreement with the general public, that melody must keep its place at the summit of the hierarchy of elements that make up music.”
¹
Once he had bowed to the wisdom of his Harvard audience, however, Stravinsky sternly corrected it: “but that is no reason to be beclouded by melody to the point of losing balance and of forgetting that the art of
music speaks to us in many voices at once. Let me once again call your attention to Beethoven, whose greatness derives from a stubborn battle with rebellious melody.”

Schoenberg similarly presented himself as a misunderstood melodist: “It is perhaps necessary to show also some melodies of my later period, especially of the composition with twelve tones, which has earned me the title of constructionist, engineer, mathematician, etc., meaning that these compositions are produced exclusively by the brain without the slightest participation of the heart.”
²
Attempting to appear warm and fuzzy, Schoenberg cited as a melodic illustration of “heart” a twelve-tone theme from his Third String Quartet that most listeners would file under “brain.” The rhythm of this theme (from the opening of the Intermezzo movement) has a certain Viennese lilt, but its pitches have all the charm of an atonal ear-training exercise.

Melody, a fighting word, can set the cultured elite against the general public, the brain against the heart, the human against the unhumanly mechanical. In wrestling with the subject, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Adorno, each in his own way, tried to put out a persistent antimodern brush fire. For their opponents the absence of melody, more than any other factor, explained the ever-widening distance between modern music and the concert audience. The decline and fall of melody epitomized the “agony of modern music,” to quote the title of Henry Pleasants's 1955 antimodern, projazz polemic.

But what made melody such a hot potato? My trusty 1969
Harvard Dictionary of Music
locates the tensions within the term itself. Its definition begins with bland objectivity: “In the broadest sense, a succession of musical tones, as opposed to harmony, i.e., musical tones sounded simultaneously.” Down a few paragraphs, though, we find a surprisingly reception-oriented definition: “Melody is the only element in common to music of all times and all peoples, and…the cornerstone and touchstone of artistic quality.” As a yardstick of quality, not simply an acoustical fact, melody empowers the listener. No wonder the term pushed composers' buttons! If melodic quality is measured by royalties, only a bare handful of classical melodies written since, say, 1920 have come anywhere near the earning power of popular songs. Perhaps the modernists should have just admitted flat out that they were handing melody over to Tin Pan Alley while they pursued loftier goals.

Tin Pan Alley was the name Monroe Rosenfield gave to a block on West 28th Street where M. Witmark, publisher of the 1891 hit “The Picture That's Turned to the Wall,” had its headquarters.
³
Tin Pan Alley
devoted itself exclusively to publishing and promoting popular songs. Its business took off rapidly through ties to emerging media: cheap sheet music, cabarets, variety shows, vaudeville, and the player piano.

Unlike most modernists, Tin Pan Alley understood the commercial value of its product and the makeup of its market. Adorno did not need to invent the idea that there was a mechanical formula for song production; the industry issued its own recipes for success. Charles K. Harris, both composer and publisher of the 1892 hit “After the Ball,” advised composers to “take note of public demand” and “avoid slang and vulgarisms” as well as “many-syllabled words.” He summed up his whole aesthetic creed in one sentence: “Simplicity in melody is one of the great secrets of success.”
⁴

At the outset, Tin Pan Alley's idea of simplicity caused its composers to turn out products that seemed merely crude, with simple hymnbook harmonies and cloying lyrics. Comparing these songs with the European art music of the time, Charles Hamm relates the rise of Tin Pan Alley in the 1890s to a wider split in musical culture: “The first Tin Pan Alley composers were contemporaries of Claude Debussy, Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler, and Arnold Schoenberg; there was almost no common ground now between popular and classical music, no possibility that a piece of contemporary art music could be fashioned into a popular song.”
⁵

We could replay this “melody gap” throughout the twentieth century: the 1950s, for instance, were the decade of both Boulez and Buddy Holly. But a contrast of the crude if catchy “After the Ball” and the utterly refined
Das Lied von der Erde
omits important parts of the story. By the late 1890s Tin Pan Alley was also selling cakewalks and ragtimes, many by African American composers, often under the racist rubric of “coonsongs.” However offensively packaged, ragtime enlivened the marketing mix of sentimental ballads and Bowery waltzes with raffish, rhythmic songs like Ben Harney's “You've Been a Good Old Wagon But You Done Broke Down” (1895) and Joseph Howard's “Hello! Ma Baby” (1899). As Hamm points out, the melodic market also had room for the operatic sounds of Reginald De Koven, Victor Herbert, and Ethelbert Nevin, whose songs spoke a language not all that distant from Strauss or Mahler.

At the beginning of the twentieth century popular music was a mélange of cakewalks, sentimental ballads, novelty tunes, Gilbert and Sullivan, and Viennese operettas, and the broad eclecticism of popular music has continued ever since. The Alley's megamart approach also
embraced contemporary classical works. Debussy's “Rêverie” became “My Reverie” Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto was reborn as “Full Moon and Empty Arms” Puccini's
Tosca
provided melodic inspiration for “Avalon” (1920, credited to Al Jolson) and “Smile” (1936, by Charlie Chaplin); and Stan Kenton lifted his theme song, “Artistry in Rhythm,” right out of Ravel. By 1914 popular tunesmiths like Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern were writing songs that were not one-season ephemera. For some early critics of popular culture, like Gilbert Seldes in
The Seven Lively Arts
(1924), “Alexander's Ragtime Band” and “They Didn't Believe Me” marked the arrival of a new art form. For much of the classical world, however, they were just more “Moon/June” rubbish.

With the appearance of Ella Fitzgerald's “song book” albums in the late 1950s and the publication of Alec Wilder's
American Popular Song
in 1972, the much-maligned output of Tin Pan Alley became the much-acclaimed Great American Songbook. Wilder's book, written by a practitioner, demonstrated on every page that the creators of popular song were craftsmen, not hacks. They pursued aesthetic ideals, not just monetary gain. Today opera stars like Renée Fleming and Jessye Norman perform these songs as certified classics, but the rise of the Great American Songbook from the flotsam of Tin Pan Alley owed much to interpretations by jazz singers and instrumentalists. Louis Armstrong initiated this cross-genre, cross-race collaboration in his 1933 recording of “I Got a Right to Sing the Blues,” by Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler. The African American Armstrong strutted his right to sing a popular song by two Jewish Americans who proclaimed their right to compose in an African American genre.

The collusion of jazz and popular song produced new ways of composing melodies, new ways of performing them, and a new form of melodic elaboration, beyond embellishment, which I call “supermelody.” The Ellington repertory richly illustrates the full range of these melodic innovations. Songs from “Solitude” to “Satin Doll,” and soloists as gifted as Johnny Hodges, Cootie Williams, and Lawrence Brown, exalted melody far beyond the habitual dualisms of high and low or brain and heart.
⁶

THE DUKE ELLINGTON (& CO.) SONGBOOK

Although the
Duke Ellington Songbook
came third in Ella Fitzgerald's recordings (after Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hart, but before Irving Berlin, the Gershwins, Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern, and Johnny Mercer),
his place of honor in the Great American Songbook was far from obvious at the time. Alec Wilder devoted just a few pages to Ellington toward the back of his book; he prefaced his praises (for the music) by claiming that “the only problem with discussing his songs is that very few of them are essentially songs, nor were they meant to be.”
⁷
The statement is both true and false. As a band leader and an African American, Ellington lived a very different life from the rest of the song-writing fraternity. Unlike the Mighty Six, he did regularly write songs for Broadway shows and Hollywood movies. Many of his songs, like “Mood Indigo,” first became popular as instrumental compositions. Once they were launched, Irving Mills or a staff lyricist, like Mitchell Parish at Mills Music, would add lyrics.

On Broadway most lyricists and composers worked closely together, usually writing the music first and words second. As Philip Furia points out, this method allowed the lyrics to bounce off the syncopated rhythms and echo the “ragged” quality of contemporary American speech. Even after he broke with Mills, however, Ellington never sustained a hand-and-glove collaboration with a lyricist, although in 1939 he hired Billy Strayhorn for that purpose. Ellington soon discovered that writing great lyrics, like those Strayhorn had already penned for his song “Lush Life,” was just one of Strayhorn's many talents.
⁸

Although Wilder assumed that all of Ellington's songs were by products of his band's instrumental repertory, the young, unknown Ellington had worked as a songwriter when he first came to New York.
⁹
In 1925, a year before the recording of “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo” put his band on the map, he composed three songs for the all-black review
Chocolate Kiddies.
African American songwriters, following in the footsteps of Shelton Brooks (“Some of These Days” and “The Darktown Strutters' Ball”) and Chris Smith (“Ballin' the Jack”) scored notable successes in the early 1920s. Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle wrote “I'm Just Wild about Harry” for their popular review
Shuffle Along.
Turner Layton Jr. and Henry Creamer wrote “Way Down Yonder in New Orleans,” and James P. Johnson and Cecil Mack launched the most important dance craze of the decade with “Charleston” from the 1923 show
Runnin' Wild.
Ellington's song “Jig Walk” quoted “Charleston” explicitly (as did Gershwin's Piano Concerto in F, written in the same year), but it already revealed a personal voice hinting at the “jungle” style that would soon appear.
¹⁰

Ellington, however, pursued a different path from other black songwriters. Although all-black reviews, beginning with Sissle and Blake's
Shuffle Along
, were popular and influential, they were marginalized. The music industry was segregated, either as a matter of law, or marketing strategy, or custom. Broadway happily assimilated the musical advances of the all-black reviews (Gershwin, for instance, turned the catchy rhythm of “I'm Just Wild about Harry” into “Love Is Sweeping the Country”), but African American musicians like W. C. Handy, Eubie Blake, Will Vodery, and William Grant Still were kept at a remove from the commercial machinery that turned Broadway melodies into money-making hits. Even at the Cotton Club, where performers were black but the audience was white, except for a few seats in the back reserved for black celebrities, white composers and lyricists like Jimmy McHugh, Harold Arlen, and Dorothy Fields wrote “black” songs. As the film
Black and Tan Fantasy
shows, the Ellington Orchestra provided music for dance numbers, but not songs.

Ellington and Mills sized up this situation early and gave popular song a specific economic function in relation to a broader marketing strategy designed to set Ellington apart from the competition and to appeal to white listeners as well as black. In his 1933 advertising manual
¹¹
Mills instructed his agents not to “treat Duke Ellington as just another jazz bandleader…. Ellington's genius as a composer, arranger and musician has won him the respect and admiration of such authorities as Percy Grainger…Leopold Stokowski…Paul Whiteman…and many others.” As a “great artist” and “musical genius” Ellington recorded for the prestigious mass-market Victor label, not for labels aimed only at the “race” market. The songs, published as sheet music, aimed for the wide—that is, white—audience. The lyrics of “Sophisticated Lady,” “Solitude,” and “In a Sentimental Mood” were dreamy, romantic, and racially nonspecific. The sophisticated lady portrayed on the cover of the original sheet music could be white. Ellington and Mills tailored the songs for general use. Their unmarked racial character allowed them to cross over to romantically erotic territory not usually open to black male vocalists until the arrival of Billy Eckstine and Nat “King” Cole. Not surprisingly, “Solitude” became a big national hit for Benny Goodman, not Ellington. American dance halls, like its churches, would remain segregated either by law or custom for most of Ellington's life.