The Ellington Century (20 page)

As a reproof to Wilder's dismissive assessment of Ellington's song-writing, Gary Giddins pointed out that though Ellington only composed one-twelfth the number of songs written by Jerome Kern, they produced an equal number of “standards.” Here is his list of Ellington “standards”:
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All Too Soon

Azure

Caravan (by Juan Tizol)

Come Sunday

Do Nothing Till You Hear from Me

Don't Get around Much Anymore

I Didn't Know About You

I Got It Bad and That Ain't Good

I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart

I'm Beginning to See the Light

I'm Just a Lucky So-and-so

In a Mellotone

In a Sentimental Mood

Jump for Joy

Lost in Meditation

Prelude to a Kiss

Rocks in My Bed

Satin Doll

Solitude

Sophisticated Lady

But wait, there are more (if we add some Strayhorn and Tizol tunes). Here are additional songs on Ella's recording:

Bli-Blip

Chelsea Bridge (Strayhorn)

Day Dream (Strayhorn)

Drop Me Off in Harlem

Everything But You

I Ain't Got Nothin' But the Blues

I Didn't Know About You

It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)

Just A-Sittin' and A-Rockin' (Lee Gaines, Strayhorn)

Just Squeeze Me (But Please Don't Tease Me)

Love You Madly

Lush Life (Strayhorn)

Mood Indigo

Perdido (Tizol)

Rocks in My Bed

Squatty Roo (Hodges)

Take the “A” Train (Strayhorn)

This list still does not include “Black Butterfly” or “It Shouldn't Happen to a Dream” or such later standards as “Heaven,” nor does it list many great instrumental melodies, such as “Black Beauty” and “Warm Valley,” which were never given lyrics. By any measure Ellington (& Co.) was a prodigious melodist.

Because many of his early works either quoted existing melodies (“Black and Tan Fantasy,” “Creole Love Call”) or shared credits with Bubber Miley, it is hard to pinpoint the first Ellingtonian melody. “The
Mooche,” recorded in October 1928 and for many years the band's theme song, presented Ellington's trademark combination of jungle beat and chromaticism. In the spring of 1928, Ellington recorded, as a piano solo, an equally individual yet completely different melody, “Black Beauty.” Although the authorship is also shared with Miley, its style is more in the character of other lyrical pieces written for, with, or by Ellington's “sweet” trumpeter Arthur Whetsol such as “Awful Sad,” “Take it Easy,” “Zonky Blues,” and “Misty Mornin‘.” All these melodies build a plaintive mood on gliding chromatic harmonies.

With its first melodic interval, a downward leap of a minor seventh, “Black Beauty” announced Ellington's uninhibited approach to melody. The tune unfolds without repetition, leaping back up a major ninth to end its first phrase. Its melodic notes enrich the harmony and insinuate the blues. Although the main phrase of melody doesn't seem to allude to the blues, its two accidentals, the flatted third and flatted seventh, come from the blues scale. Ellington, though, avoided the stereotypical blues markers that Gershwin depended on; the blues feeling saturates “Black Beauty” without calling attention to itself.
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Ellington must have been particularly proud of “Black Beauty.” It is featured in the central art deco dance sequence in the short film “Black and Tan,” and it remained in the band's book for years. “Awful Sad” (also from 1928), by contrast, is a nearly forgotten gem. Its even more modernistic harmonies have led some critics to suspect the influence of Bix Beiderbecke's impressionistic “In a Mist,”
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but as the title of James P. Johnson's tune “You've Got to Be Modernistic” implies, modernistic chords were very much a la mode. What was not in the air, at least not for another forty years, is the melodic line that, in its easy grace, sounds more like Brian Wilson's “God Only Knows” than like anything from the 1920s.

“
PRELUDE TO A KISS
”

With two of his earliest hit songs, “Mood Indigo” (1931, coauthored with Barney Bigard) and “Sophisticated Lady” (1933), Ellington already demonstrated a style of melodic writing that set his songs apart from those of contemporaries, even those as adventurous as Gershwin and Arlen. “Mood Indigo” begins with a typical device of indicating a “blue note” by wavering between the major and minor third of the key (A
in the sheet music version). In the second phrase, though, to the words

You ain't been blue,

Till you've had that mood indigo

the tune seems to fly off the tonal rails as the harmony shifts to E major. This harmonic move is not as weird as it first looks, but its sinuous chromaticism sounds more like Bartók than Chopin.

True to its title, “Sophisticated Lady” is even more up-to-date. The sheet music version, also in A
, begins with an altered F
dominant seventh chord with the fifth lowered so that all the notes are part of a whole-tone scale. The ultrasophisticated chord is an emblematic modernistic touch, the first of more to come. The tune begins by climbing up in thirds, F-A
-C-E
-G
, to outline the dissonant interval of a minor ninth, from F to G
; it then proceeds chromatically downward, with the harmony moving in parallel with the melody, in nonfunctional dominant seventh chords. Like the whole-tone scale, this device is conspicuously Debussyan. Ellington sustains the harmonic tension in the “bridge” of the song, later given the words

Smoking, drinking,

Never thinking

Of tomorrow, nonchalant.

The harmonic progression ( I-vi-ii-V) is an Alley cliché and might sound harmonically uninteresting if Ellington had not placed it in the key of G major, far distant in tonal terms from the A
tonality of the other phrases. Even though the Broadway tunesmiths prided themselves on the harmonic deviousness of the “bridge” (Rodgers's “Have You Met Miss Jones?” is the classic example), few can match Ellington's nonchalant chromatic elegance here.

Alec Wilder termed “Prelude to a Kiss” (1938) “another chromatic idea supported by very gratifying, satisfying harmony” and granted that “except for a totally instrumental release, it comes close to being a song. Even the lyrics by Irving Gordon (in lock step with Irving Mills) have a few moments, though the image of a ‘flower crying for the dew' somehow fails.”
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The tune appeared almost simultaneously as both an instrumental and a vocal recording (August 8, 1938, for the instrumental, August 24 for the vocal by Mary McHugh, accompanied by Johnny Hodges and His Orchestra).
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