The Ellington Century (38 page)

While driving along the south shore of the Columbia River east of Portland, Oregon, we had a good view of the mountains on the north shore. They had the most voluptuous contours, and to me they looked like a lot of women reclining up there. “Warm Valley” came directly from that experience.

—Duke Ellington

 

 

 

INTRO: LOOKING FOR LOVE IN ALL THE WRONG PLACES

Though Ellington garnered prestige through concert performances, most of his gigs were at dance halls and nightclubs, where his music propelled couples, rocking in rhythm or gliding cheek to cheek, around the floor. Music can move us both physically and emotionally; this double power links it to love in multiple and mysterious ways. Musicians are sometimes asked to play “
con amore,
” but what does that mean? One answer, by way of example, would be “Warm Valley,” a slow instrumental ballad that Johnny Hodges intoned “
con amore
” to the delight of thousands of slow-dancing couples. Despite Ellington's charmingly risqué account of its inspiration, “Warm Valley” is not obviously descriptive of either geography or anatomy; instead of observing love from the outside, it turns listeners into lovers. Long before Nietzsche termed this phenomenon “Dionysian,” musicians recognized the erotic power of their art in the genres of the serenade and nocturne. Much of Ellington's oeuvre (like Mozart's or Chopin's) is music of the night, enveloping the listener in the sensuality of sound. When Johnny Hodges keened a melody with vibrato and rubato, hesitations, swells, and slides, his tone was like an intimate touch.

Modernist classical music, by contrast, often served up sex on the rocks. When Tom Rakewell, the young protagonist of
The Rake's Progress
, heads down the road to perdition by losing his virginity at Mother Goose's brothel, librettists Auden and Kallman and composer Stravinsky give the scene all the erotic charge of a trip to the dentist; even the pretty chorus “Lanter-loo” sounds like Muzak piped in to anesthetize a painful but necessary procedure. Rakewell seems more turned on by the prospect of getting rich than getting laid. The libretto dwells more on his utopian delusions than on the kind of dalliances we might expect of a rake. If he ever has sex with his bearded wife, Baba the Turk, whom he marries in an existentialist
acte gratuit
, we never hear about it. Oddly enough in the century of Freud and Kinsey, a lot of twentieth-century music seems similarly antierotic; apparently
Tristan und Isolde
and
La Bohème
were hard acts to follow. As early as 1907, in his comic opera
L'Heure espagnole
, Ravel portrayed sex as just a normal part of a Spanish lunch hour, no agony, no ecstasy. It still looks like fun, though, which is more than can be said for the depictions of deranged romance in
Pelléas, Salome, Lulu, Mahagonny
, or
Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District
. Or, for that matter,
Madama Butterfly
and
Turandot
.

In their treatment of eros, popular and classical music in the twentieth century sent conflicting messages. While popular songs celebrated falling in love and dancing in the dark, modern operas charted the course of love as a sequence of pathologies from infatuation to suicide, death in childbirth, or insanity. Forged in the cauldron of fin de siècle Decadence, Salome, Mélisande, and Lulu were daughters of the Yellow 1890s. Pierrot and Petrouchka were its sons. Modernist operas and ballets figured sexuality through the thematics of decadence: hysteria, femmes fatales, castration anxiety, the battle of the sexes. Modern popular song, by contrast, took shape in jazz age America, which was also the era of Prohibition. Songs mirrored the national duplicity. They pictured sex in contrasting sweet and lowdown images of boy-meets-girl puppy love and torch song degradation. The binarisms of American popular song up to 1960 resemble the map of a typical racially zoned American city:

These contrasts mirrored larger anxieties about the erosion of Victorian values and white political dominance. Sexual liberation (“Let's do it!”) implied political liberation. Fear of either form of liberation could spawn anxious fantasies of inverted power, black over white. Americans, and Europeans as well, conflated jazz and sex, and imagined jazz as a black Dionysus, like the title character of
Jonny Spielt Auf
, or Crown and Sportin' Life in
Porgy and Bess
. No wonder that Ellington, even in the racist décor of the Cotton Club, tried to detach his own music from the rubric of jazz and strove to construct a counternarrative free of Euro-American racial and sexual fixations. Those fixations, however, shaped musical modernism both high and low.

In the USA love was not racially blind. Black artists who gained a presence in the national media, such as Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Paul Robeson, Ethel Waters, Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, Lena Horne, and Nat King Cole, faced particular racist restrictions, most obviously in the movies, where they were never allowed to appear in romantic situations. For all her glamour, Lena Horne was rarely granted an on-screen lover; in the one exception,
Stormy Weather
, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson looks old enough to be her father. Broadway, Hollywood, and the radio perpetuated the stereotypes of the mammy, the lazy serving man, and the “high yellow” prostitute. Black actors had to choose to accept work in shows like
Green Pastures
or
Cabin in the Sky
or
St. Louis Woman
that softened the stereotypes slightly, or turn down roles and end their film careers. After a decade of being forced to walk through movie sets like an isolated visiting royal, Horne called it quits and developed her artistry in the freer setting of cabaret, or listening to recordings with her best friend, Billy Strayhorn.

“LOVE YOU MADLY”: THE DUKE'S MUSICAL LADIES

I want to tell you what I think the sex act is. I think it is like a lovely piece of music, conceived quietly in the background of mutual affection and understanding, made possible by instincts which lean toward each other as naturally as the sunflower slowly turning its lovely face to the sun. I think it is an aria of the sex symphony, an aria which begins beautifully certain in its rightness, moves with that certainty to a distinct tempo of feeling, sings itself happily, steadily,
working, working, to a screaming, bursting climax of indescribable beauty and rapture then throbs, spent and grateful in a rededication for the next movement of its perfection.

—Duke Ellington

In order to demolish the toxic stereotypes of African American sexuality, Ellington created new images of black lovers. Ellington's erotic oeuvre appears in two genres: romantic ballads and evocatively titled portraits. “Black Beauty,” one of his first portraits, was both a great tune and a strong, if implicit, political statement. Ellington later called it a “Portrait of Florence Mills” to honor the internationally famous black singer and actress who died suddenly in 1927. The actress most associated with the song, however, was Fredi Washington, who played the female lead in
Black and Tan
, the only film where Ellington himself played a dramatic role, albeit of himself.
¹
The two-reel short, directed by Dudley Murphy for RKO in 1929, employed a startling range of period styles, including urban realism, art deco nightclub scenes, and a deeply shadowed expressionist funeral. Breaking with stereotypes, Washington and Ellington, and Arthur Whetsol as well, appear young, good-looking, talented, and utterly normal, perfect emblems of the Harlem Renaissance's New Negro.
²
Together they conspire to promote Ellington's hot-off-the-piano masterpiece “Black and Tan Fantasy.” In a Harlem cabaret that appears both chic and sleazy, the character Fredi, named after Washington but modeled on Mills, dances to Ellington's music despite a heart condition. She falls fatally ill in the middle of her routine. When the white manager demands that the show go on and sends out a group of light-skinned Cotton Club beauties to continue her dance, Ellington orders the band to stop and rushes to her bedside. On her deathbed she asks to hear one last performance of “Black and Tan Fantasy.”

For all its obvious contrivances the short film was nevertheless a culturally revolutionary depiction of Ellington as a black creative genius. Likewise, the film and the song “Black Beauty” presented “Fredi” as a glamorous, intelligent, strong-willed, and dignified black woman, the first in a long line of sophisticated ladies (and satin dolls).

Ellington's first extended portrait of a lady was “Reminiscing in Tempo,” an elegy for his mother, Daisy Kennedy Ellington (known to the family as “Aunt Daisy”), who died in May 1935; Ellington wrote that “no one else but my sister Ruth had a mother as great and as beautiful as mine.”
³
This work, twelve minutes of music spread over four record sides, elicited some of the harshest criticisms Ellington ever
received. John Hammond called it “formless and shallow,”
⁴
and the English critic Spike Hughes termed it “a rambling monstrosity that is dull as it is pretentious and meaningless.
⁵
These objections may have stemmed from cultural discomfort about both form and content. While “Reminiscing” sounded nothing like classical music, it contained no hot solos, indeed little improvisation of any kind. Its style seemed far removed from Ellington's more familiar “jungle music” or the blues, or even from the spiritual, a genre Ellington had recently invoked for the “Hymn of Sorrow,” a dirge accompanying a baby's funeral in
Symphony in Black
, a short sequel to
Black and Tan
. By contrast, the singular musical idiom of “Reminiscing in Tempo” served notice that Ellington's mother was no mammy and no floozy, neither Aunt Jemima nor Bess; she was simply “the most beautiful mother in the world.”
⁶

“Reminiscing” has baffled even sympathetic critics like A. J. Bishop and Gunther Schuller, who had the disadvantage of working from a single recording, without access to any written material. John How-land's recent analysis, making use of Ellington's sketches and parts in the Ellington Archive, outlines the work in two unequal parts, sides one through three of the original 78 rpm recording and side four. Howland concludes that side four, which sounds complete in itself, was composed first and served as “a template that was deconstructed to build Parts I-III.”
⁷
He also locates the work's style provocatively within the framework of Paul Whiteman's genre of symphonic jazz. The music, however, lacks the modernistic markers characteristic of the symphonic jazz style and is devoid of the gushy buildups and climaxes typical of the crossover works of Gershwin and Grofé. If we need some classical parallel for its style we might say that “Reminiscing” feels more like Mahler in his ruminating Adagietto mode than Whiteman. It's non-mawkish Mahler, if such a thing is imaginable; a Mahlerish fox-trot. Ellington himself pointed out the ruminative character of the piece: “I wrote ‘Reminiscing in Tempo' that year [of his mother's death]. It was one of my first ambitious things. It was written in a soliloquizing mood. My mother's death was the greatest shock. I didn't do anything but brood. The music is representative of that. It begins with pleasant thoughts. Then something awful gets you down. Then you snap out of it and it ends affirmatively.”
⁸

Perhaps like Ellington's own emotional recovery, the music sounds less straightforward than the simple sequence he described. We can understand “Reminiscing” better if we note how drastically Ellington restricted himself here, and then ask why he chose these particular
constraints. The first three parts avoid the forms found in Ellington's earlier music such as blues or the AABA form, and they present no stylistic contact with the spiritual, or even with prayer, although later in life Ellington described his mother's broad-minded piety: “She was mainly interested in knowing and understanding about God, and she painted the most wonderful word pictures of God. Every Sunday she took me to at least two churches, usually to the Nineteenth Street Baptist, the church of her family, and to John Wesley A.M.E. Zion, my father's family church. It was never made clear to me that they were of different denominations, and to her, I'm sure, it did not matter. They both preached God, Jesus Christ, and that was the most important thing.”
⁹
The blues would have been inappropriate for a woman of Daisy Ellington's religious devotion and middle-class background; her father had been a captain in the District of Columbia police. The absence of music suggesting a spiritual or hymn indicates that “Reminiscing in Tempo” was intended less as a eulogy for the dead than as a celebration of a life along lines that Ellington made explicit many years later in
My People:

The men before them worked hard and sang loud

About the beautiful women in this family of mine.
¹⁰

Excluding the forms of blues or hymn, the remaining option would have been the popular song. Here, too, Ellington's refusal was based on his mother's upright character. While Daisy Kennedy Ellington might have been termed a “Black Beauty” or a “Sophisticated Lady,” her son chose not to portray her within the idioms used for Cotton Club dancers. He would not eulogize his mother within the thirty-two-bar framework of a commercial tune.