The Ellington Century (21 page)

“Prelude to a Kiss” is a thirty-two-bar AABA song. Although this format is typical, by Alley standards the melody of “Prelude to a Kiss” is indecently chromatic. Its sensuous chromatic descent recalls erotic
arias like the “Habanera” from
Carmen
or
“Mon Coeur s'ouvre à ta voix”
from
Samson et Dalila.
While the two French examples begin on the tonic and outline the tonic triad clearly, Ellington's melody starts on the dissonant seventh degree of the tonic C major scale and does not settle down tonally for eight bars, where it comes to rest not on the tonic C but on an A, the “added six” floating above the dominant. Ellington goes even further at the bridge, belying the lyrics (“Though it's just a simple melody”) with a jump into a distant key (E major) and approaching every note in that key with a half-step chromatic “neighbor tone.” The interval of the half step, the building block of the chromatic scale, becomes a subliminal melodic motive, or what Schoenberg might term a
Grundgestalt
, a basic shape. The downward curve of D#-C#-B-A-C
(which then resolves up to C#) is so devious that even Ella Fitzgerald (or whoever copied the music for her) felt the need to “correct” it, making that low C
a C#. Ellington here turned the pitch C, which should be the most consonant note, into the strongest dissonance, a diminished ninth that resolves upward to a slightly milder dissonance (major ninth) rather than downward to an octave.

Harmonies heat up the melody's seductive moves. Ellington set the initial pitch, B, atop a D dominant-ninth chord to form the interval of a thirteenth above the bass, the highest possible upper addition to a triad. The thirteenth is a double dissonance, one seventh (upward from C to B) stacked on another (from D to C). Music theory terms these combinations of tones dissonances, but they sound sensuous, not harsh. Every note of this melody is either a dissonance, or part of a dissonant chord. In the seven notes of the opening phrase the dissonances are as follows:

B over a D ninth: a thirteenth

B
: a passing tone forming a diminished thirteenth

A over a G ninth (with a raised fifth): a ninth

A
: a passing tone forming a diminished ninth

G: a fifth over a C dominant ninth

A: an “escape tone” forming a thirteenth

E: the major seventh of an F major seventh chord

For the next phrase Ellington transposed the notes and chords just heard down a minor third, seemingly even further from any vestige of C major, but landing on a d minor triad, the first three-note harmony of the song, which, as any jazz pianist can tell you, will easily lead to
C major through the progression ii-V-I. Ellington, however, stretched that familiar move out with an upward melodic leap of a ninth on “se-
re-na-ding
you.”

All these dissonances may look like early Schoenberg, but they sound more like those of Schoenberg's tennis partner, George Gershwin, just as the lyrics tell us. (Gershwin died in July 1937; perhaps this song was Ellington's musical eulogy.) Indeed the rich chord progression resembles that of “Nice Work If You Can Get It,” written a year earlier for Fred Astaire in
A Damsel in Distress.
Ellington's melody is more deviously sensual than Gershwin's bromidic glide.

The eccentricities of “Prelude to a Kiss”—its chromaticism, high dissonance level, and systematic exploitation of the interval of a half step as a thematic idea— mask what we might term its skeletal structure. These good bones become visible once we pare the song down to its two outer lines and remove the many pitches outside the C major scale. Such a reduction reveals how the melody and the bass move steadily (yet evasively) toward the tonic. The melody descends sequentially: B-A-G-E; G-F-E-D. Ellington delays the arrival of the tonic note C so that the melody had to keep moving. When the melody finally completes the move downward to C, it leaps up a ninth so that the descent has to begin all over again. The bass line likewise moves in the time-honored pattern of the circle of fifths, but where another composer might have traced that circle from C to C, Ellington began the circle on D, one note above the tonic (D-G-C-F-B-E-A-D), keeping the harmony in suspense.

Though Ellington's style was distinctive, his songs employed the same idiom as that used by his Broadway-based colleagues, not a distant jazz world dialect. To better discern the similarities and differences, let's compare “Prelude to a Kiss” to a song that would seem to be its opposite, “My Romance,” by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. It appeared in their 1935 show
Jumbo
and was revived as a jazz standard by Bill Evans. “My Romance” appears as plain as “Prelude to a Kiss” seems extravagantly fancy, but perhaps the differences are just skin-deep.

Celebrating a lack of ornament (“My romance doesn't have to have a moon in the sky”), Rodgers's tune is conspicuously “white.” The entire melody for the chorus uses only the notes of the C major scale. As in “Prelude to a Kiss,” the “chorus” of “My Romance” is thirty-two bars long, but in a different configuration, ABAC, more typical of theater-based songs. ABAC songs save their biggest punch for the ending rather than the bridge. They present two similar statements with different
endings, the first tentative, the second assured. Where the overall arc of Ellington's tune moves downward to resolution on the low C, Rodgers's tune is a series of upward scales that reach a climax in the final phrase when the opening three notes, the hook that states the title, blaze forth, transposed up a sixth to state and reiterate the melody's highest note.

Beneath their surfaces, though, “My Romance” and “Prelude to a Kiss” are nearly identical. Both melodies state an idea then restate it a third lower. Both melodies create tension by moves from the tonic, C, to the submediant, E. Ignoring for a moment the differences between their AABA and ABAC designs, we might even say that Rodgers's diatonic chords and melody represent the harmonic analysis of Ellington's tune. It would be hard to reduce the tune or chords of “My Romance” the way we did for “Prelude to a Kiss” like a shellfish, its skeleton is on the surface.

If we flip that observation around we can see why the tunes encourage different jazz treatment. To a jazz player, “My Romance” is a blank slate, just waiting for its harmonies to be enriched, its rhythms enlivened. As printed there is not a single jazz rhythm in the entire song apart from its fox-trot feeling, and yet if a player just moves the notes forward half a beat, as Bill Evans does, it becomes effortless jazz. “Prelude to a Kiss,” by contrast, doesn't have to be turned into jazz. Its melody comes already richly ornamented. Its rhythms subtly alternate bars of fox-trot and bars of Charleston so that it swings even played as written. Johnny Hodges doesn't turn it into jazz; he just turns it into Hodges.

UNDRESSED MELODIES: SEX AND RACE

The pop tune flourished within a particular time frame, let's say 1911–70, in a particular place, melting pot, mongrel Manhattan, and it served particular social functions, including the definition of national and generational identities. Eighty-five percent of the time (according to Furia) its overt subject, though, was romance (“I love you in thirty-two bars”): not medieval romance, but the American kind where boy meets girl and, if things work out, they check into a small hotel, but, as “There's a Small Hotel” says, only in the “bridal suite.” Romance included sex, love, and marriage; the friction and frustration generated by these categories kept the subject and the songs interesting.

Popular songs represented romance with four scales: major, minor, blues, and chromatic. The major scale conveyed an ideal of untroubled,
“normal” innocence: “Do-re-mi.” Like Mozart, Schubert, and Brahms, however, the tunesmiths knew how to give a song a bittersweet quality by making the major scale sound minor. Here are four mixed-mode examples (of many, many others) you can play through in your head: “My Heart Stood Still” (Rodgers and Hart), “Embraceable You” (the Gershwins), “What'll I Do?” (Berlin), and “Yesterday” (Lennon and McCartney). The first two songs emphasize minor-sounding segments of the major scale. “What'll I Do?” draws its poignancy from just one pitch borrowed from the minor mode, the flat sixth. “Yesterday” hovers between major and relative minor. None of these songs uses blues devices, but the minor mode makes them sound blue. Love, after all, isn't easy, but at least in pop tunes the minor usually gives way to the major.

Until rhythm and blues crossed over to become rock and roll, the blues scale functioned as a racial marker in pop tunes. The blues scale indicated that a song, like “Stormy Weather,” was intended for black performers because it portrayed emotions that “they” had but “we” could not express, or it portrayed a “mongrel” condition, like that portrayed by mixed-race Julie in
Show Boat
when she sings “Can't Help Lovin' That Man of Mine.” The blues scale in particular became a fixture of torch songs, from “The Man I Love” to “The Man That Got Away,” sung by women who had “gone south” and paid the price. The presence of the blues, even in just a passing chord, as in “Somebody Loves Me,” denotes an unsettling, subversive feeling summed up in the phrase “low down.” Although Harold Arlen specialized in songs with a blues tinge, there's not a trace of the blues in his most “American” score, for
The Wizard of Oz.
In the Emerald City, Dorothy may not be in Kansas anymore, but she is also far from the un-American terrain of Harlem.

In classical music and popular music alike the chromatic scale often denotes sexuality. Tin Pan Alley's chromatic inhibition therefore may have been more than a question of singability. In a marketplace where songs appeared in the censored media of the movies and radio, full frontal sexuality was both unsingable and unspeakable. Without sex, though, love songs become, in the words of Dorothy Fields, “as cold as yesterday's mashed potatoes.” The solution appeared in songs like “How Long Has This Been Going On,” which floated a diatonic melody atop a chromatic accompaniment, an upstairs/downstairs scalar divide. This device appears in “The Girl Friend” (Rodgers and Hart, 1926), a paean of “terrible honesty”: “Homely wrecks appeal/When their checks appeal,/But she has sex appeal.” The girlfriend in question is
both good and bad: “She's knockout, she's regal,/her beauty's illegal.” Rodgers divides her licit and illicit aspects between the melody and the bass, keeping the erotic element subconsciously below the waist.