The Ellington Century (3 page)

No single oeuvre spans the full cross-categorical range of mid-twentieth-century music better than the vast repertory of the Duke Ellington Orchestra, most of it composed by Ellington and Strayhorn. This rich body of music, written over nearly fifty years, includes enduring songs, instrumental “tone parallels,” jazz concertos, extended suites, ballet music, film music, and sacred music. Just consider this alphabetical list, far from complete, of Ellingtonian classics:

Across the Track Blues

All Too Soon

Anatomy of a Murder

Are You Sticking?

Awful Sad

Battle of Swing

Birmingham Breakdown

Black and Tan Fantasy

Black Beauty

Black, Brown and Beige

Blood Count

Blue Cellophane

Blue Light

Blue Serge

The Blues I Love to Sing

The Blues with a Feeling

Bojangles

Boy Meets Horn

Braggin' in Brass

C Jam Blues

Chelsea Bridge

Clarinet Lament

Clothed Woman

Concerto for Cootie

Controversial Suite

Cotton Tail

Creole Love Call

Creole Rhapsody

Day Dream

Daybreak Express

Deep South Suite

Delta Serenade

Diminuendo in Blue and

Crescendo in Blue

Dusk

East St. Louis Toodle-Oo

Echoes of Harlem

Echoes of the Jungle

Far East Suite

Giddybug Gallop

Harlem Airshaft

Hot and Bothered

Immigration Blues

In a Mellotone

In a Sentimental Mood

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

It's Glory

Jack the Bear

Jubilee Stomp

Jump for Joy

Ko-Ko

Liberian Suite

Lotus Blossom

Main Stem

Merry Go Round

Misty Morning

The Mooche

Mood Indigo

Moon Mist

The Mystery Song

New Orleans Suite

Night Creature

The Nutcracker Suite

Old Man Blues

On a Turquoise Cloud

Perfume Suite

A Portrait of Bert Williams

Prelude to a Kiss

Queen's Suite

Rain Check

Reminiscing in Tempo

Ring Dem Bells

The River

Rockin' in Rhythm

Rocky Mountain Blues

Rude Interlude

Satin Doll

Saturday Night Function

Second Sacred Concert

Sepia Panorama

Showboat Shuffle

Sloppy Joe

Solitude

Sophisticated Lady

Such Sweet Thunder

Suite Thursday

Symphony in Black

Take the A Train

Tattooed Bride

Tiger Rag (arr.)

A Tone Parallel to Harlem

U.M.M.G

Warm Valley

Washington Wabble

Someday scholars will refer to these works by the equivalent of Köchel numbers. They bring together the popular and the serious, improvisation and composition, African rhythms and European harmonies in ways that, I would propose, can shed some unexpected light on the more category-bound, or similarly unbounded, music around them from Berg to Zappa. In the chapters that follow a single Ellingtonian work will lead into a broader exploration of different technical aspects of music, color, rhythm, melody, and harmony, and different realms, both profane and sacred, of musical representation.

SEGUE: THE MUSIC OF SOUND

The “century of aeroplanes” is a catchy rubric, but what would its music sound like? For some composers the answer was literal: it would sound like an airplane, as in George Antheil's
Ballet mécanique
, whose orchestra featured a giant propeller. But the airplane could also be a metaphor—for speed, freedom, anxiety, change. It suggested new harmonies, colors, rhythms. The airplane soared across boundaries and Maginot lines, connected once-distant places and cultures in a matter of hours.

For other composers the new music would sound like sound itself, freed from its traditional burden of connotations and associations. The third of Schoenberg's Five Pieces for Orchestra, op. 16, originally titled “Farben” (Colors) and later retitled “Summer Morning by a Lake,” may be the earliest “sound” piece. It seems, at first hearing, to lack melody, rhythm, and harmony so that all that remains is tone color. If we ignore Schoenberg's later palliative attempt to associate the color with a time and place, we can enjoy a kind of categorical (and Cagean) vertigo as we ask ourselves how this “color” is any more musical than the random sounds in the room. Later examples of “sound” music, whether by Webern or Varèse or Xenakis, similarly push us against the imagined boundary between musical and nonmusical sounds, which calls into question the legitimacy of the border line. What forces determine the kinds of sound that will be admitted to the realm of music? What sounds and voices does the boundary line wall out?

The third movement, Andante, of Ruth Crawford's String Quartet (1931) shows how the disorienting power of sound can allow a new, previously suppressed voice to emerge. Crawford highlighted the special character of this movement by surrounding it with contrapuntal movements made up of splattered, splintered, or polarized elements. In the Andante this broken discourse yields to a “complex veil of sound.”
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For most of the movement the four instruments knit a tight harmonic fabric based on half steps that slowly ascend in pitch. The individual swelling dynamics imbue this harmonic idea with a sense of breath and pulse, as if the sound itself were a living organism, a breathing body. As the four instruments blend in what Crawford termed a “heterophony of dynamics”
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they also articulate a melodic line that passes from one instrument to another, creating one voice out of many. The sound not only breathes, it sings. As Judith Tick explains, this effect was so novel that Crawford felt compelled to revise the score repeatedly; seven years after she started she inserted a three-bar episode in which the four instrumental lines suddenly come unglued and then just as suddenly fuse on two shrieking tone clusters. Is this the sound of tragic struggle or the birth pangs of a voice from within the female body?

If the airplane defied gravity and redefined space, the new sound technologies—recording, radio, and sound-on-film—allowed music to defy and redefine time. It is only possible to contemplate
Such Sweet Thunder
fifty years after its creation because it was recorded; from the earliest days of his band Ellington understood the importance of broadcasting his music and of putting music on disc with the highest possible
illusion of fidelity. Edison's 1877 invention (first used for music right around the beginning of the twentieth century) changed music economically and conceptually, far more so than “mechanical reproduction” impacted the visual arts. Unlike the unique visual artwork, with its defining “aura,” a work of music exists
only
as a reproduction; every performance is a reenactment of an idea. Ever since the invention of the reed flute and lyre in antiquity, musical machines—instruments—have reproduced the sound of the voice, or the sound of each other. Even as the development of a symphonic culture in the nineteenth century conferred an “aura” on a small group of works performed in concert halls and opera houses, these works were being re-created on the parlor piano, by amateur string quartets, by a band in the park, or by the organ grinder in the street. Listeners accepted recordings as
music
(not as some defective facsimile) almost from the beginning. Tone tests sponsored by the Edison Company between 1915 and 1926 challenged listeners to distinguish live and recorded sounds and proved, as Emily Thompson claims, that “the act of listening to reproduction was implicitly accepted as culturally equivalent to the act of listening to live performers.”
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A recording of an opera aria (Caruso was the biggest star of early recordings) conveyed that aria far more convincingly and conveniently than most amateur performances could. With the arrival of cheap record players during the First World War and radio broadcasts of music in the 1920s, almost anyone could reproduce a musical work at home.

The first recordings, however primitive, were the first electronic music. The new sound technologies translated all music, regardless of origin, into electric impulses and then back to sound emanating from some kind of loudspeaker. Increasingly, the manipulation of sound, previously attainable only through intermediary performers or instruments, came to be seen as the essence of music. It makes sense, then, to begin our journey across the categorical boundaries of twentieth-century music with a discussion of timbre, the color of sound, and its connotations, the sounds of color.

Ellington plays the piano but his real instrument is his band. Each member of his band is to him a distinctive tone color and set of emotions which he mixes with others equally distinctive to produce a third thing which I like to call the Ellington Effect.

—Billy Strayhorn

In modern orchestration clarity and definition of sonorous image are usually the goal. There exists, however, another kind of orchestral magic dependent on a certain ambiguity of effect. Not to be able to identify immediately how a particular color combination is arrived at adds to its attractiveness. I live to be intrigued by unusual sounds that force me to exclaim: Now I wonder how the composer does that?

—Aaron Copland

Stan Kenton can stand in front of a thousand fiddles and a thousand brass and make a dramatic gesture and every studio arranger can nod his head and say, “O yes, that's done like this.” But Duke merely lifts a finger, three horns make a sound, and I don't know what it is.

—André Previn

One thing that I learned from Ellington is that you can make the group you play with sing if you realize each of the instruments has a distinctive personality; and you can bring out the singing aspect of that personality if you use the right timbre for the instruments.

—Cecil Taylor

Now if it is possible to create patterns out of tone colors that are differentiated according to pitch, patterns we call melodies…then it must also be possible to create such progressions out of the tone colors of the other dimension, out of that which we call simply “tone color.”

—Arnold Schoenberg

Hear with your eyes and see with your ears.

—Charlie Parker

 

 

 

Duke Ellington, born on April 29, 1899, could easily have become a painter rather than a musician. Though he began piano studies, with Marietta Clinkscales, when he was seven, he later recalled that “all through grade school, I had a genuine interest in drawing and painting, and I realized I had a sort of talent for them.”
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In 1963 he even helped paint the sets for
My People
, a multimedia theater piece marking the centenary of the Emancipation Proclamation. Ellington called many of his compositions “tone parallels” or “portraits”; his music linked sounds and images. Coloristic titles located the music on a chromatic spectrum: azure, magenta, turquoise, indigo, black, sepia, beige, and tan. Ellington's palette of many colors
signified:
blue of whatever shade referred to the musical form, expressive vocabulary, and social function of the blues; the gradations leading from tan to black announced the central subject of his creative work, the history, experience, and culture of African Americans. Just consider this panchromatic catalogue of Ellington titles:

Azure

Beige

Black

Black and Tan Fantasy

Black Beauty

Blue Serge

Blutopia

Brown

Brown Betty

Brown Skin Gal

Café au lait

Creamy Brown

Crescendo in

Blue

Diminuendo in Blue

Black, Brown and Beige

Black Butterfly

Blue Belles of Harlem

Blue Bubbles

Ebony Rhapsody

The Gold Broom and the Green

Apple

Golden Cress

Golden Feather

Lady in Blue

Lady of the

Lavender Mist

Magenta Haze

Midnight Indigo

Blue Cellophane

Blue Goose

Blue Harlem

Blue Light

Blue Pepper

Blue Ramble

Mood Indigo

Moon Mist

Multicolored Blue

On a Turquoise Cloud

Purple Gazelle

Sepia Panorama

Transblucency

Ultra-violet

Violet Blue

Ellington's gift for translating visual colors into tone colors set his music apart early on. By the time the Duke Ellington and his Kentucky Club Orchestra recorded “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo” on November 29, 1926, the better-known bands of Paul Whiteman and Fletcher Henderson had already configured the standard sound of large ensemble jazz. In 1925 the Whiteman band had twenty-six players: six violins, two violas, two cellos (including the young William Schuman), string bass, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, four saxes, banjo, guitar, drums and piano
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—no wonder they called this style of jazz “symphonic.” For its highly influential 1926 recording of “The Stampede” the Henderson band had eleven players: one trumpet, two cornets, one trombone, tuba, three saxes (all doubling clarinet), banjo, drums, and piano. Despite the difference in size, both Whiteman and Henderson configured their bands in instrumental choirs (reeds, brass, and, for Whiteman, strings), a method codified as early as 1924 in Arthur Lange's
Arranging for the Modern Dance Orchestra.
Classical composers had similarly deployed the orchestra in terms of instrumental choirs, winds, brass, and strings, the better to synchronize articulations and intonation. Hybrid sonorities, mixing instrumental families, can sound muddy if they are not well rehearsed. Or they can sound magical.

Although Ellington's early “orchestra” was smaller than Henderson's by just one trumpet, this slight difference meant that the Ellington band really had only one full section, the reeds. Instead of playing choir against choir and hot soloists against sidemen, Ellington treated every member of the band as a soloist and blended the sounds of different instruments and players.

The contrast of Bubber Miley's muted, growling trumpet and the smoldering accompaniment in the baritone sax and tuba, blue against black, “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo” put Ellington's distinctive approach to timbre on the map. By the time of its third recording, on December 19, 1927, the interplay of Miley, Harry Carney (baritone sax), Joe Nanton (muted trombone), and Rudy Jackson (growling low clarinet) formed a terse study in shades of brown that matched Miley's visual parallel for the piece: “This is an old man, tired from working in the field since sunup, coming up the road in the sunset on his way home to dinner. He's tired but strong, and humming in time with his broken gait.”
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Fine-tuning the color balance as the piece evolved, Ellington abridged the statements of a contrasting theme (reminiscent of A. J. Piron's song “I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate”) in this third recorded version. Foreshortened and refocused, the conventional “sweet” coloring now set the gritty darkness of the rest of the composition in starker relief. Ellington was composing in colors—like Matisse.

Though he may have used the band as his palette, timbre for Ellington was neither abstract nor dehumanizing. Colors were also human voices. Ellington hired players with idiosyncratic and instantly recognizable playing styles, and composed parts for specific players rather than instruments. The musicians of the band formed a spectrum of strongly characterized timbre styles: Miley's aggressively rough sound contrasted with Arthur Whetsol's almost humming introversion; the liquid croon of Johnny Hodges's alto played against the rude honk of Harry Carney's baritone. Within a few years the trombone section of Nanton, Lawrence Brown, and Juan Tizol produced three completely different timbres: raspy, smooth, Latin.

Early on Ellington saw that the new mechanisms for amplification and recording could enhance coloristic explorations. Long before the advent of recording “production,” let alone of electronic music, Ellington revealed his genius for technologically enabled sound synthesis in “Mood Indigo,” first recorded on October 17, 1930, but written especially for the “microphonic transmission” of a radio broadcast.
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In a radio interview in 1962 Ellington recalled the radical role played by the microphone as a lucky accident: “When we made ‘Black and Tan Fantasy'…[we used] the plunger mute in the trumpet and in the trombone in that duet and always got a ‘mike' sound.…They hadn't conquered this yet, and they messed up a lot of masters because every time they'd get the mike they'd throw it out.” For the recording session
of “Mood Indigo” in 1930 “the aim was to employ these instruments in such a way, at such a distance, that the mike tone would set itself in definite pitch—so that it wouldn't spoil the recording. Lucky again, it happened.”
⁵

To signify the deepest “blue” in “Mood Indigo” Ellington scored the opening melody in a choralelike texture for three players: Whetsol (trumpet), Barney Bigard (clarinet) and Nanton (muted trombone). He painted his mood with the three instrumental colors found in New Orleans jazz but arranged them counterintuitively with the trumpet on top, the trombone a third below it, in its highest register, and the clarinet an octave and a fourth lower than the trombone, an acoustic gap labeled an “error” in the conservatories that Ellington, fortunately, never attended.
⁶
The apparently upside-down scoring demonstrates Ellington's astute command of the acoustical properties of each instrument and of the individual styles of each performer, the haunting, hollow quality Bigard brought to the clarinet's low register, Whetsol's plaintive lyricism, Nanton's insidiously sliding speechlike inflections. It shows his prophetic instinct for technology as well: together the three sounds blend into a whisper that would be undetectable without amplification. No wonder that Billy Strayhorn dubbed such timbral magic “the Ellington effect.”

“BLUE LIGHT”

A slow, intimate blues recorded in 1938, “Blue Light” demonstrates how Ellington used tone color to shape mood and form. From its first meditative, bell-like chords on the piano, it suggests the indigo atmosphere of the last set in some nearly deserted nightclub; just one couple remains on the dance floor, perhaps with nowhere else to go, clinging to each other in the blue-tinted, smoke-filled air. “Blue Light” is that rare kind of music that evokes a specific time of day, temperature, and atmospheric condition. “The most neglected and least known of Ellington's masterpieces,”
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“Blue Light” was recorded twice on December 22, 1938, by an eight-man subgroup of the Ellington Orchestra: Bigard, clarinet; Carney, clarinet (?); Wallace Jones, trumpet (?); Brown, trombone; Fred Guy, guitar; Billy Taylor, bass; Sonny Greer, drums; and Ellington, piano.
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Here's an outline of the form:

Intro: Piano solo four bars.

Chorus 1: twelve-bar blues. Clarinet solo with piano fills.

Chorus 2: twelve-bar blues. Trio for muted trumpet, muted trombone, and clarinet with piano fills.

Chorus 3: twelve-bar blues. Trombone solo with reed accompaniment. (Trombone melody composed by Lawrence Brown.)

Chorus 4: Piano solo.

Borrowing Schoenberg's term, we might term “Blue Light” a
klangfarbenmelodie
blues, a formal expansion of the color synthesis of “Mood Indigo.” Each chorus presents a different kind of blue: the smoky middle range of Bigard's clarinet, the “indigo” scoring of the trio, the vibrato-rich warmth of Brown's trombone (set in relief by a low reed trio in the background), and Ellington's restrained pianism (with a brief homage, to my ear, to Earl Hines). Each timbre evokes a different aspect of the blues. Ellington's brief intro sounds urbane and modernistic; his first chord replicates exactly (if not intentionally) the opening harmony of Berg's Piano Sonata op. 1. Bigard's solo, by contrast, is roots music, straight out of New Orleans and Sidney Bechet. The trio, more muted and rhythmically steady, choralelike, than in “Mood Indigo,” also has the ghostly gaslight sonority Ellington had used in his “Mystery Song” in 1931. Brown's solo, by contrast, feels fully embodied, like a warm embrace. In 1933 Spike Hughes had complained that Brown's sophisticated sound was out of place in “Duke's essentially direct and simple music,”
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thereby underestimating both musicians, but Brown's lyricism here illustrates how Ellington could paint a jazz panorama (from Bechet to Tommy Dorsey) even within such a small framework. Ellington's closing solo chorus begins with the dissonant major-minor chord he habitually used to signify “the blues,” momentarily muses on a fragment from Earl Hines's solo in “West End Blues,” then turns out the lights.

“BLUE LIGHT” AS BLUES

A meticulously balanced tone-color composition, “Blue Light” is also a blues, although not in a way that devotees of, say, B. B. King might recognize. The term “blues” itself appears in bewilderingly various ways; it is used narrowly, to denote a chord progression, or grandly, as in Albert Murray's
Stomping the Blues
, to characterize an entire culture. Historically, the blues emerged after the Civil War from the sorrow songs of the antebellum period.
¹⁰
As much a poetic as a musical genre, it has its own verse form, syntax, vocabulary, imagery, and subject matter:

When a woman gets the blues she hangs her head and cries,

When a woman gets the blues she hangs her head and cries,

But when a man gets the blues, he grabs a train and flies.
¹¹

We can parse this blues stanza as follows:

Form: a thought stated, repeated, completed (surprisingly)

Syntax: lines broken midway by a caesura, and at the end by a comma; these breaks usually filled with a guitar response

Imagery: Love, tears, the railway

Subject: Suffering and escape from suffering

Most recorded blues consist of five or six stanzas that tell a story, though usually more as a sequence of images rather than a linear narrative. Jazz musicians refer to these stanza structures as choruses.

Often blind or lame, and so excluded from manual labor, early blues performers, or “blues men,” sang to their own guitar accompaniment. At once outsiders and shamanic representatives of the community, they sang about themselves, and about everyone. Within African American culture the blues formed part of a larger musical landscape that included work songs, religious songs, and ragtime. These genres denoted class and region, the sacred and profane. Until around 1900 the blues was heard only in the Deep South, and in Mississippi and Louisiana in particular. Growing up in Washington, D.C., Ellington did not hear the blues until he encountered Sidney Bechet: “I shall never forget the first time I heard him play, at the Howard Theatre in Washington around 1921. I had never heard anything like it. It was a completely new sound.”
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