The Ellington Century (52 page)

Black:
“Come Sunday”

Just as the audience was getting a grip on “Work Song” it segued into “Come Sunday”. In his introductory remarks Ellington briefly referred to the section as a spiritual that was closely related to the work song; he must have known that further words were not necessary because he had two winning cards up his sleeve, a great tune and Johnny Hodges, whose solo voice had not yet been heard. The structure of “Come Sunday” mirrors that of “Work Song” in two respects: it places its defining theme last, and it unfolds with three solo instrumental voices, Juan Tizol's valve trombone, Ray Nance's violin, and finally Hodges's alto sax. The melodic presentation reverses the usual jazz or symphonic practice of exposition followed by development. Here, instead, the theme is heard first in fragmented form and then finds its true shape.

Ellington chose to write his own spiritual rather than quote from a well-known and revered repertory of “sorrow songs”. Surprisingly, he created a hybrid of spiritual and pop tune, following the AABA form of Tin Pan Alley, which is not characteristic of the spiritual literature. With a deceptively plain-style diatonic melodic line over rich harmonies, the tune has resonances of both “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” and “Summertime”. (To hear the first, sing the words “motherless child” and then “Sunday O Come” or “Please look down and” to Ellington's melody. To hear the second, play the progression F9-E
9.) Its AABA design, moreover, suggests an ironic parallel to “Old Man River”, which Ellington had already mocked with his “Old Man Blues”, part of which will appear at the end of “Light.”

Writing “Come Sunday” in a hybrid style, Ellington lifted its spirituality out of the chronological frame; he would bring the theme back at
the end of
Beige
as an emblem of Harlem's living piety, not as a vestige of the past. Before its full statement, though, he used instrumental colors to convey the story line of the poem, where Boola sits outside the master's church:

The music was soothing and sweet…

Even from the outside looking in.

He longed to enter and be a part

Of this silv'ry tongued

Ding! Dong! Ding! Dong!

At the opening of the original “Come Sunday” Ellington superimposed the chimes (a timbral metamorphosis of the opening drumbeats) over an organlike chorale played by the brass, and echoed by the saxes, that hints at the melody to come. The melody next appears solemnly intoned on the valve trombone, the “whitest” instrument in Ellington's orchestra; a brief interjection by the alto sax (Otto Hardwick) may represent Boola's commentary on its alien sound. After the trombone solo concludes with a bit of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”, the sax section seems to recall some of its “Work Song” music. The harsh labors of the workweek return, but time has a new organization, measured from Sunday to Sunday. In the next section Ray Nance plays an expressive obbligato over the trombone tune. The counterpoint may represent the group of slaves worshipping outside the church and their dawning recognition of the liberating content of Scripture, its call for justice:

“A false balance is abomination to the Lord;

But a just weight is his delight…”

“When pride cometh, then cometh shame,

But with the lowly is wisdom.”

“The integrity of the upright shall guide them:

But the perverseness of transgressors

Shall destroy them.”

The distant promise of liberation, though, appears only in a short passage of “train effect” music at the close of the violin solo; in spirituals the train signified the network of escape known as the Underground Railroad. And then Hodges steps out and finally plays the entire melody to the bare accompaniment of guitar and bass. The poem presents this climactic performance, the keystone of the trilogy's arch, as both a religious and musical calling:

God was good, but in his infinite wisdom

Would allow one blessing at a time….

He touched Boola's heart

And gave those golden sounds a lilt…

A depth…that no one else could duplicate.

He nudged the whites

And said to them: “LISTEN!”

The programmatic storytelling that sets up Hodges's solo allows the tune to expand its expressive domain to include the secular and the sacred. It is at once a ballad, a prayer, and a protest.

Black:
“Light”

In the last parts of the poetic script for “Black” Ellington pursued the idea that the development of black music paralleled the evolving consciousness of the cause of freedom. Boola discovers that his songs placated his master but also could manipulate him:

It is not true…that all his songs

Were songs of sorrow. Tantalizingly

His humor slyly touched upon

His master's gullibility.

“Yassa, boss!” Simple, wasn't it?

This story, though, is not immediately apparent in the music of “Light” that brings
Black
to a close, yet more than the previous sections, “Light” shapes a musical narrative through the devices of thematic recall, embellishment, and superimposition and constantly weaves together melodic ideas from the previous two sections. It achieves this new synthesis by building on a platform of repeated phrase structures; in other words, it fuses work song and spiritual through the medium of jazz.
²⁵
Finally endowing the music with both the physiognomy and drive of his three-minute compositions, Ellington was also cryptically rewriting jazz history, backdating its origins by a century.

Expanding on the thematic superimpositions Ellington deployed in “Harlem Air Shaft”, “Light” is a virtuosic display of contrapuntal
ars combinatoria.
A detailed outline is needed to map out the polyphony:

Introduction (mm. 1-16): Beginning with a solo trumpet cadenza by Rex Stewart, which serves as a transition from “Come Sunday”, this section restates the Riding on a Blue Note and Blues Riff ideas from “Work Song” and ends with an allusion to the bridge of “Come Sunday.”

First chorus (mm. 17-56): A forty-bar AABBA in B
that begins with the shout chorus from Riding on a Blue Note. In the first A the trumpet superimposes the Fanfare motive from “Work Song”. In the second A it superimposes the sax section Work Song theme. In the first B a reprise of the trombone section's Jump for Joy theme takes the place of the piano solo bridge heard in Riding on a Blue Note. The second B combines a shout in the trumpets, riffs based on the bridge of “Come Sunday” in the saxes, and statements of the Fanfare motive and the Blues Riff motive in the trombones. The final A is a harmonized unison shout chorus for all three choirs. On the last bar the bass enters with the Riding on a Blue Note motive.

Second chorus (mm. 57-77): Bass solo, ABA, but with a harmonic twist. The bass continues its solo with four bars by quoting four bars from Nanton's solo in “Work Song” that recall the spiritual “Good News” the next four bars uses the Blues Riff motive to modulate to A
. The equivalent of a bridge consists of a four-bar variant of the Blues Riff in A
followed by a restatement of the Sax Section Work Song in C major, the key of Nanton's “Work Song” Epiphany. A shortened, four-bar A returns the music to B
by way of the Blues Riff.

Mm. 77-119: This section contains a thirteen-bar phrase that sounds like a condensed AA, followed by a four-bar reinterpretation of the Fanfare motive by the trumpet section in counterpoint to an augmentation of “Swing Low” in the saxes. The AA begins by superimposing the Good News motive in the saxes on Riding on a Blue Note in the trombones. In the first B phrase the sax section recalls the bridge of “Come Sunday”. The second bridge phrase brings in the solo trombone (Lawrence Brown) against a new sax riff. In the extended ten-bar A that follows, Brown recalls the melody of “Come Sunday” against “Riding on a Blue Note” in the saxes.

Transition (mm. 120-25): The music suddenly broadens.

First coda (mm. 126-165): A series of climactic superimpositions of the motives of “Work Song” and “Come Sunday” beginning in B
then modulating to C with a faux final cadence in the saxes.

Second coda (mm. 166 to end): Suddenly the music starts up again at a faster tempo and in A
, with a three-way superimposition: the Riding on a Blue Note motive in the saxes, Nanton's Epiphany in the trumpets, and the Fanfare in the trombones.