The Ellington Century (53 page)

Much of this section is driven by repeated trumpet notes, alternatingly muted and open, that recall a figure from “Old Man Blues.”
²⁶
Just as that earlier piece inverted “Old Man River” into a celebratory shout, this second coda blows the blues away and serves as an apt summary of the path
Black
has traveled (in around twenty minutes) from enslavement to enlightenment.

“Light” celebrates freedom and jazz at the same time. In backdating jazz, Ellington also backdates freedom; the understanding of liberation precedes emancipation. Freedom, the music says, was not something bestowed on blacks by whites. It is the rightful claim of all humanity as proven by Scripture:

The master carried his fear with him…

Clutched to his bosom, into the haven of love.

Boola sang his way into the gallery of the church,

He could sing…yes…

But he couldn't sit with the worshippers

Of the Christ who said: “Peace on earth

To men of good will”. Boola sat upstairs,

In the “Crow's Nest” they called it.

Did they not realize he was above them…

Closer to that Heaven they were shouting about?

The idea that freedom is a counterpoint of faith and justice may sound awkward in words, but it translates powerfully into a musical texture. Ellington's polyphony sounds improvised but had to be calculated in advance; it's not an effect a composer can leave to chance. At the same time, though, the constant interplay of allusions recalls the techniques of scat singing.

Brown:
“West Indian Dance”, “Emancipation Celebration”, “The Blues”

If we briefly allow ourselves to think of
Black, Brown and Beige
as a kind of symphony,
Brown
combines scherzo and slow movement;
²⁷
like Mahler's Second and Third, it has two scherzos, “West Indian Dance” and “Emancipation Celebration”. Heard in operatic terms, it feels like two ballets followed by a substantial aria, a fine second act. Unlike the complexly interwoven parts of
Black, Brown
presents itself as three freestanding vignettes, with no thematic exchange between sections. We therefore need to interpret them in terms of contrast rather than continuity, and the contrasts are provocative. Generically Caribbean rather
than specifically Haitian, “West Indian Dance”, originally prefaced by a brief snatch of Revolutionary War fife and drum sounds and post-faced with fragments of “Old Folks at Home” and “Yankee Doodle”, expands the African American story beyond the United States, placing it within the larger story of the African diaspora. Coming before the “Emancipation Celebration”, it makes the jubilant mood of “Emancipation” feel provincial, of one place and one time. Ellington told the audience that the “Emancipation Celebration” illustrated “two sides of a story”, the hopes of the younger generation and the exhaustion of “a small group of old people who had earned the right to sit down and rest on somebody's property and of course their song was a very plaintive but tragic one”. The music, however, hardly sounds tragic and is only vaguely plaintive; it feels like a catchy swing number. Listening to the live recording, I sense that the warm applause that followed this section may have expressed a sense of relief that Ellington was finally playing the kind of music the audience had come to hear; Ellington's little parable about young and old may really have been a well-masked critique of a public who just wanted to hear the same old songs. Or it could allude to the contrasting political ideas of DuBois and Washington.

“The Blues” contrasts sharply in mood and style with “Emancipation Celebration”, a contrast complicated by the fact that, as the words tell us, much of “The Blues” “ain't the blues”. The chronological sequence of “Emancipation” and “The Blues” is historically accurate, at least in terms of current research, yet it is emotionally perplexing: if people were free, why were they feeling so sad? Again Ellington's words, seemingly at odds with the music, contained a veiled message. He announced that the “third part of Brown, which we call ‘Mauve,' is ‘The Blues,' after the many love triangles that developed in the life of the great Negro heroes of the Spanish-American War”. Nothing in the music recalls the battle of San Juan Hill, but the idea that the blues was created by returning heroes rather than marginalized rural folk musicians was a cunning bit of anti-Hammond historical revisionism. (John Hammond predictably bemoaned that Ellington “saw fit to tamper with the blues.”)
²⁸
In these terse comments Ellington reminded his wartime audience of the failure of America to recognize and honor black participation in all of its past wars, and he was also giving notice that no one would define the blues for him. If anyone in the audience expected a country blues à la Lead Belly or a “territory” blues in the style of Jimmy Rushing they were in for a rude surprise; the opening of “Mauve” sounds more like Berg than Basie.

In
Stomping the Blues
Albert Murray distinguishes between “the blues as such, the feeling inside your head that tries to make you wish that you were dead or had never been born”, and the “blues as music”, which “by its very nature and function is nothing if not a form of diversion. With all its preoccupation with the most disturbing aspects of life, it is something contrived specifically to be performed as entertainment”. Ellington announced the ineffable mystery of his subject with a series of cautionary negations:

The Blues…

The Blues ain't

Then Blues ain't nothing…

Ain't nothin' like nothin' I know.

“Know” even sounds like “no”. The blues is not knowable, but it can be negated, through the blues. Or not.

Ellington brandished his contrarian intentions with the very opening of “The Blues”, a modernistic brass fanfare followed by a counterintuitive blues motive, not the expected “blue” minor third but an ambiguous descending major third, heard first in whole-tone harmonies, which the singer, Betty Roché, revealed as a diminished fourth, E
to B
resolving to C—a potently dissonant melodic interval but not at all bluesy. The first two stanzas are sung virtually without a sense of beat, like a recitative. There is no suggestion of a blues scale until a G
appears in the sixteenth bar. Just at the point when listeners may have decided that this blues “ain't the blues”, Ben Webster leapt in (with the rhythm section) as if to prove otherwise. He played a seventeen-bar solo, lifted from “Jump for Joy”, with a blues inflection, but the harmonic structure drifts impressionistically between the keys of c minor and D
rather than following the usual blues pattern. Once again, the blues ain't. The blues “as music” (and in D
) only arrives at bar 52, as a call-and-response between pitch-bending trombones and growling trumpets (a passage Ellington soon expanded into a stand-alone piece, “Carnegie Blues”). Just as the music established its groove and seemed to prepare the singer to tell us how her baby left her, Webster intervened again with a short cadenza. Roché then reentered, but with an eight-bar phrase that led back, in retrograde, to the opening negations:

The Blues ain't nothin'

The Blues ain't

The Blues.

The overall form resembles a Bartókian arch, symmetrical but foreshortened:

Recitative (two stanzas, each moving from c minor to f minor)

Webster solo

Carnegie blues

Webster solo

Recitative (moving from D
to c minor)

(“Emancipation Celebration”, perhaps less casual than it first appears, has a similar structure.)

In
Stomping the Blues
Murray places the “blues as music” in a double relationship, one historical, the other spiritual. On one side the blues is a response to suffering inflicted by history, but blues also represents one side of a dualism that Murray frames in terms of the Saturday Night Function and the Sunday Morning Service. These two opposites are so mutually dependent that the boundaries can get blurred and contested. Murray, for instance, praises James Brown for performing “as if he were a spellbinding Evangelical preacher” but criticizes the way Ray Charles “bootlegged” sacred music into profane: “the assumption seems to be that sacrilege can be nullified by sentimentality.”
²⁹
By composing “The Blues” as a monumental concert aria, Ellington counterposed it to “Come Sunday” and again raised the question of whether this opposition signified progression or codependence. Ellington understood the complex cultural tensions presented by the opposition of spiritual and blues. When he recorded
Black, Brown and Beige
with Mahalia Jackson in 1958, he omitted “The Blues” along with all the music for
Beige
, which he replaced with a new setting of Psalm 23.