The Ellington Century (28 page)

“C” describes the flight of Frenchmen southward, out of the path of Nazi occupation, through a series of images of an imagined past (the castle of a mad duke) and the newsreel present (overturned cars and defused weapons), held together by the French sound “C”
(say).
Like the Weill, it exploits a contrast between minor and major and the power of a refrain. The most memorably café-style phrase, drifting from D
major to C
major, appears twice, first with the idealized imagery of an eternal fiancée dancing in a meadow, and then with a picture of impotent weaponry and tears that cannot be rubbed away. Poulenc sets the eight-syllable lines with great finesse so that the final syllables, all of them pronounced “C,” toll like bells heard in the distance.

Both the Weill and Poulenc songs subtly camouflage their artistry and their seriousness. They could easily be programmed along with other hits of the war years such as Frank Loesser's “Spring Will Be a
Little Late This Year” or Ellington's “I'm Beginning to See the Light.” Or they could share the stage with heavier music of the time, like the “Lamentation” from Bernstein's
Jeremiah Symphony
or Britten's settings of the Holy Sonnets by John Donne. If you played Poulenc's song very, very slowly it would begin to sound like a contemporaneous simple melody that responded to the same events in a less vernacular manner, the final movement from Olivier Messiaen's
Quartet for the End of Time
, “Louange à l'Immortalité de Jésus.” Both composers employed a chordal vocabulary not far from what you can find in Ellington or Cole Porter. But the tempo makes all the difference. In performance Messiaen's thirty-three four-beat bars last just over seven minutes. At that pace (each beat lasting five seconds), the conventional sequential and symmetrical structure of the melody melts into the sublime and an added E major sixth chord, usually associated with elevator music, sounds like the voice of God.

I had a kind of harmony inside me, which is part of my race, but I needed harmony that has no race at all but is universal.

—Duke Ellington

The kaleidoscope blending and interchanging of twelve semitones within the three-mirror tube of Taste, Emotion and Intention—the essential feature of the harmony of to-day.

    The harmony of to-day, and not for long, for all signs presage a revolution, and a next step toward that “eternal harmony.” Let us again call to mind, that in this latter the gradation of the octave is infinite, and let us strive to draw nearer to infinitude.

—Ferruccio Busoni

We thus no longer find ourselves in the framework of classic tonality in the scholastic sense of the word. It is not we who have created this state of affairs, and it is not our fault if we find ourselves confronted with a new logic of music that would have appeared unthinkable to the masters of the past. And this new logic has opened our eyes to riches whose existence we never suspected.

—Igor Stravinsky

 

 

 

INTRO: HOW JAZZ TAUGHT ME HARMONY (AND EVEN MADE ME LOVE IT): A SHORT CONFESSIONAL

Harmony is the most academically discussed and least generally understood element in twentieth-century music and, so far, twenty-first-century music as well. Despite the persistent myth of harmonic progress,
the infinite expansion of harmonic resources forecast by Busoni and others somewhere along the line turned into a contracting black hole. Today most composers, from neotonalists to microtonalists, work in the harmonic dark, and music theorists, still hooked on Brahms, offer little in the way of ideas to elucidate most of the music from Debussy to Radiohead. The dark, I have found, is sometimes the best place to be, but I only began to see the light through a belated discovery of jazz harmony.

In 1965 the Pulitzer Prize board, headed by the president of Columbia University, overturned the recommendation of the music jury and refused to honor Ellington with the prize. In 1967, however, Columbia honored me with a Kellett Fellowship for two years of study at Cambridge, and in 1973 Columbia belatedly granted Ellington an honorary doctorate. At Clare College, as at Columbia, I studied English literature while surrounding myself with musically stimulating friends, in particular the composers Roger Smalley and Tim Souster, who introduced me to the music of Messiaen and Stockhausen. England had suddenly become the hot spot of new music; Boulez was conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the Beatles even put Stockhausen's face on the cover of
Sgt. Pepper.
In London I heard Boulez conduct
Pelléas
and
Wozzeck
and Stockhausen's
Gruppen
and also attended the London premiere of Elliott Carter's Piano Concerto. I spent any spare money on buying contemporary scores, which were much cheaper in England than back home. Though I didn't pay much attention to the rising star on the British rock scene, Jimi Hendrix, I did go to see Cecil Taylor play a kind of jazz that emptied the hall in about ten minutes. I loved that power to offend; I was in my hard-core avant-garde phase. In the spring of 1970 Tim, Roger, Peter Britton, and I even gave the Cambridge premiere of Terry Riley's
Keyboard Studies.

Halfway through my first year I decided to switch to the study of music, even though the department was far more traditional than the one at Columbia. The Cambridge music curriculum was amorphous by American standards. There were no required courses or activities, no classes in musicianship or solfège. You were expected to spend the year preparing, with the help of a faculty supervisor, for six three-hour exams, called the Tripos. In music these exams consisted entirely of a single kind of exercise. They gave you the beginnings of pieces ranging from the fourteenth century (Machaut) to the twentieth (Poulenc), and you were asked to complete them—at your examination desk. (The composer Nicolas Flagello later told me that when students at the more humane setting of Rome's Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia took a
similar examination they would be locked in a studio with a piano and provided with as much spaghetti as needed to get through.) Previous exams were made available so I knew what to expect, but no one could explain how I might prepare myself for this daunting task. As good English empiricists the music dons at Cambridge viewed music theory as a suspiciously Germanic form of speculation. They seemed to believe that you could pass the exam on the basis of listening and intuition alone.

Before I could get too panicky, though, fate intervened in the form of the Vietnam War. In the spring of 1968 the draft laws changed; graduate study no longer deferred me from service. I soon learned, though, that New York City was setting up a crash program to train teachers, who were still qualified for deferral. I sailed home to learn, in eight weeks, how to teach at a junior high school.

My year at J.H.S. 118 in the south Bronx, which was also the year of a protracted New York teachers' strike, Woodstock, and the moon landing, was, needless to say, interesting, but once I drew a high number in the draft lottery my thoughts anxiously returned to the Tripos. My brother Andy recommended that I call his jazz piano teacher, Irwin Stahl, for advice. I brought Irwin a copy of an old exam. He asked if anyone at Cambridge had taught a way of analyzing the music in order to complete the incipits —but, of course, they had not. In that case Irwin suggested that I study harmony and counterpoint with him. In just a few months he taught me everything I have ever needed to know about both subjects. His understanding of harmony was stunningly lucid. “There are just three chords,” he told me. “Everything else is a just a substitution.” Irwin, who wrote the liner notes for the great
Art Tatum Solo Masterpieces
collection, showed me how to think about harmony from a jazz perspective, even though we were not studying jazz.

I later learned that his approach to harmony was nearly identical to that of Schoenberg's textbooks. Irwin had me compose progressions, not pastiche imitations of Bach chorales or Mozart minuets, just different combinations of those three chords: the subdominant, the dominant, and the tonic, or, in jazz terms, ii, V, and I. Once I understood the relationship between these chords I could expand their potential. Changing the note in the bass by “inverting” a chord allowed the music to flow more smoothly. Replacing a chord with its relative minor or major made the harmony sound richer. Preceding any chord with its dominant increased the sense of urgency. Adding a fourth pitch to triads, making them into seventh chords, turned a Bach-like progression into jazz. Preceding the dominant with the subdominant (ii) made any
chord progression sound like bebop. Using only four-pitch chords that did not contain the fifth turned cocktail piano into Bill Evans. The only problem with harmony, I discovered, was the way it was usually taught. But what could I do with this knowledge other than hope that it would get me through the Tripos? Though I never pictured myself as a real jazz pianist I got a fake book. I learned to play “Satin Doll” in different jazz styles, at different tempos, and with different voicings. Schoenberg once said that there was still a lot of music to be written in C major. I used to think that was a joke but now I took it as prophecy.

“
SATIN DOLL
”
OR JAZZ PIANO 101

[Parental warning: from here on things get a little technical.]

Jazz harmony is largely the domain of pianists, and its concepts today still derive from the 1930s keyboard styles of Teddy Wilson and Art Tatum. Viewed broadly, it differs from classical tonality only in requiring that all chords contain at least four different pitches. In other words, it is based on seventh chords rather than triads. Like classical harmony, jazz harmony recognizes three different chord functions: tonic, dominant, and subdominant. In classical theory these would all be the major triads (in a major key) I, V, and IV, or, in the key of C, C major, G major, and F major. The dominant creates harmonic tension that needs to be resolved by the tonic. It is therefore usually played as a four-pitch dominant seventh chord, or V7. By contrast the subdominant sounds more relaxed than the tonic, and it also has a certain antique and sacred quality associated with what musicians call a “plagal cadence,” usually heard in church when the congregation sings “Amen.”

In jazz harmony the three functions appear as three different kinds of seventh chords, a major seventh for the tonic, a dominant seventh for the dominant, and a minor seventh for the subdominant. The sub-dominant function in jazz is heard with the chord on the second degree of the scale, 117, rather than the closely related IV in classical practice. Jazz pianists, however, rarely use these chords in their simple forms. They usually add the sixth and ninth to the tonic chord, the eleventh to the subdominant, and a variety of altered tones—flat ninths, augmented ninths, sharp elevenths, and thirteenths—to the dominant. You never hear a plain vanilla V7 chord in jazz (though it sounds fine in boogie-woogie or rock).

“Satin Doll,” Ellington's closing theme song from its appearance in 1953, can serve as a jazz harmony paradigm; in its deceptive simplicity,
“Satin Doll” is, as the saying goes, as good as good bread. If you look at a lead sheet for “Satin Doll” (credited to Ellington and Strayhorn, with lyrics added later by Johnny Mercer), you will see that every chord name written above the melody except one has a “7” attached to it. The exception is the tonic chord C, but no jazz pianist would play this as a simple triad. The chords alternate between minor seventh chords and dominant sevenths, a series of ii-V progressions. (To evoke the sound of a ii-V progression just hum the opening bars of “Tea for Two.”) The harmonies begin close to the tonic key with d minor 7 and G7, which would usually resolve on C. The tune postpones that resolution with a series of moves that seem to take the harmony increasingly far from the tonic home base. Before resolving, the harmony moves to three dominant chords that don't occur within the seven pitches of the C major scale, A7, D7, and D
7, each preceded by a subdominant. To a classical theorist several things might look odd. Most of the dominant sevenths don't resolve to a tonic, and the final cadence reaches C major by way of a D
7 rather than the expected G7.

Jazz theory unlocks the mystery of this progression through the concept of substitution. The paired ii-V chords are taking the place of their implied resolution, so that we might say that the d minor 7 to G7 progression is filling in for the tonic C major chord. Likewise, e minor 7-A7 implies the subdominant (d minor 7), and a minor 7-D7 implies the dominant G7. In the fifth bar of the tune there is a subtle substitute for the a minor 7, a “borrowed” chord (either c minor 7 or a half-diminished 7) from the g minor scale, a device for harmonic darkening common in Brahms. The last two chords, the exotic-sounding A
minor 7 and D
7, are what jazz theory terms “tritone substitutes,” taking the place of chords an augmented fourth away, d minor 7 and G7. The idea of the tritone substitution comes from a common jazz practice of flatting the fifth in a dominant seventh chord, for instance, playing G, B, D
, and F as a G7. These four pitches, however, are the very same ones you would play for a D
7 chord with a flat fifth: D
, F, G, and B. Two chords that seem far apart turn out to be interchangeable. Once we understand how chords substitute for others we can see that the harmonic outline of “Satin Doll” is really a Bach-like I-ii-V-I.