The Ellington Century (60 page)

Although the
Third Sacred Concert
was titled “The Majesty of God” on its recording, it might more accurately have been called “Meditations and Variations on the Lord's Prayer.” Ellington's opening piano solo is a wordless version of that prayer, anticipating the variations
found in the extended movement “Every Man Prays in His Own Language.” Two new songs for Alice Babs (Ellington's “personified muse,” as Steed calls her) are more like mantras than conventional ballads or prayers. “My Love” and “Is God a Three-Letter Word for Love?” repeat the same phrases over and over, as if each repetition will yield a higher understanding. (The brief and very un-Handelian “Hallelujah,” based on rhythm changes, pursues a similar spiritual strategy, with a little sly humor, considering the regal setting.) Both songs have an inner calm that transfigures their pop tune formats, though listening to Ellington's interludes I have the sense that he was proud to produce, so late in the day, two more songs destined to become standards.

“Every Man Prays in His Own Language” intones the Lord's Prayer seven ways:

  1. Instrumental (Harold Ashby, tenor sax solo, fast tempo)

  2. A cappella choir (slow, in chorale style)

  3. Instrumental (reeds and cymbals, also in chorale style), with a choral “amen”

  4. Alice Babs unaccompanied singing in Swedish to her own melody

  5. Recorder solo played by trombonist Art Baron

  6. Alice Babs and the John Alldis Choir, vocalise

  7. Ellington's homily with choral background:

In a raging storm

When the captain gives the abandon ship alarm

Are we sure that the ocean

Has not taken a notion

To demonstrate the Hundred-and-fiftieth Psalm?

When a baby screams out after the doctor's first spank

Are we certain that the baby is not trying to say “Thank God.”

This easily could have been the last word, but Ellington needed to show Westminster Abbey his down-home gospel side with “Ain't Nobody Nowhere Nothin' Without God,” a catalogue of negations in the service of affirmation sung by Tony Watkins. The final number, “The Majesty of God,” feels like a threefold closing benediction (by Ellington, Carney, and Babs) framed by a modern-style processional, the kind of music you might hear as you walked out of a Broadway musical while the cast took curtain calls. This mellow, casual-sounding ending, so different from the time-stopping cadences of Stravinsky or from the
ecstatic conclusions of the two earlier concerts, has its own theological significance, Ellington's equivalent to the exaltation of minutiae in Gerard Manley Hopkins's “Pied Beauty.” Like the earlier modestly scaled Hallelujah, the ordinary-sounding tune challenges the listener to find the majesty of God in ordinary things. Ceasing rather than arriving, circular rather than linear, the
Third Sacred Concert
does not progress in spiritual understanding; it just basks in its glory.

OUTRO ULTIMO

I never had the privilege of hearing the Ellington Orchestra perform one of the Concerts of Sacred Music live, but I have attended performances by the Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra, which has been presenting the music annually since 1989. These concerts were exhilarating and rapturous, even for the unchurched. The Seattle version, available on CD, combines numbers from all three concerts, very much in the work-in-progress spirit in which the music was conceived. Their selection of tunes is a nonstop hit parade. The SRJO recording, along with that of the Big Band de Lausanne, answers resoundingly the question I often hear about Ellington's music from people in the classical world: how can we perform it? Concert musicians who have no trouble assembling the complex forces needed for a
War Requiem
or Bernstein's
Mass
get weak in the knees at the thought of playing Ellington's music. In some ways their trepidation is well-founded. Most classically trained players have no idea how to read an Ellington part; in the orchestrated versions of his music made during his lifetime the music too often sound like the generic offering of a symphonic pops concert and not at all Ellingtonian. Classical musicians who don't even know where to turn for advice on how to perform the music need to break out of their segregated sphere and begin a conversation with jazz musicians who possess the requisite skill and spirit to bring the music to life. And they have to stop thinking of Ellington's music as a repertory they don't need to know. The Concerts of Sacred Music demand all the resources of a musical community, from a coloratura soprano to a tap dancer; preparing them for performance can create a new community out of previously non-communicating musical subcultures.

As with classical music, performance of Ellington's work raises all sorts of questions of textual authenticity, performance practice, and interpretation.
²⁴
As the music continues to be played we will doubtless see a range of responses comparable to those we are used to in performances
of, say, Beethoven, though I would prefer to see a much broader spectrum of possibilities. I can imagine bands dedicated to reproducing the music as it was first played, others modernizing the beat, and still others putting the Ellington oeuvre through an electronic remix. Ellington himself updated much of his music, even classics like “Black and Tan Fantasy.” It would be academic in the worst sense of the word to treat the Ellington repertory only through the aesthetic of “early music” and perform the music by mimicking old recordings, though, to be academic in the best sense, every note of those recordings has something to teach the musicians of the future. Ellington's music, however, was written for and played by giants: Hodges, Nanton, Webster, Bigard, Babs, and others. It requires masterly musicians, just as Bach's music does. We expect such musicians to bring music to life on their own terms; otherwise there would be no point in hearing new performances. On the Lausanne recording, Jon Faddis, a latter-day giant, splendidly remakes the solos of both Cootie Williams and Cat Anderson in his own image. To paraphrase Stravinsky, love trumps respect.

The jazz orchestra itself may be an endangered species. Or not. There are astonishingly virtuosic ensembles today at Lincoln Center and at many of the universities and conservatories that teach jazz performance. These ensembles, rarely money making, may continue to thrive just because of the desire to preserve the rich musical legacies of Ellington, Basie, Henderson, Lunceford, Woody Herman, Stan Kenton, and Gil Evans, among many others, as living repertories, not just as recordings. But those legacies might also evolve within other musical contexts, some of which no doubt will leave the moldy figs of the future shaking their fists in fury. One fine example of creative Ellington performance can be heard on a recording of the
Far East Suite
made by the Asian American Orchestra, directed by Anthony Brown, in 1999. They add the colors of Persian and Chinese instruments to Ellington's timbral palette with imagination and conviction. And they swing. Perhaps a similar treatment awaits the
Latin American Suite.

The biggest challenge of all, perhaps neither possible nor even desirable, may be the long-delayed acceptance of Ellington's music, not just its tunes, but its totality, by the concert world. Ellington's lone CD of his symphonic music includes a piece titled “Non-Violent Integration.” That would be a good place to begin.

The following acronyms are used for the sources most frequently cited.

PART I

Epigraphs, p. 1: Mercer Ellington, quoted in Perlis and Van Cleve,
Composers' Voices from Ives to Ellington
, p. 371; Claude Debussy, quoted in
Debussy on Music
, p. 297.

1
. Denby,
Dancers, Buildings and People in the Streets
, p. 110.

2
. Tick,
Ruth Crawford Seeger
, p. 214.

3
. Ibid., p. 357.

4
. Thompson,
The Soundscape of Modernity
, pp. 237-38.

1. “BLUE LIGHT”: COLOR

Epigraphs, pp. 11-12: Billy Strayhorn,
DownBeat
, November 5, 1952; Aaron Copland,
Copland on Music
, p. 31; André Previn, quoted in Giddins,
VJ
, p.
105; Cecil Taylor, in A. B. Spellman,
Black Music
, p. 74; Arnold Schoenberg,
Theory of Harmony
, p. 421; O'Meally, ed.,
JCAC
, p. 178. Epigraphs, pp. 26-27: Rainer Maria Rilke,
Sonnets to Orpheus
XV; Mahler to Alma on Puccini's
Tosca
, quoted in de la Grange,
Gustav Mahler
, p. 601; Zola,
Au bonheurs des dames
, pp. 86-87.

1
. Ellington,
MIMM
, p. 17.

2
. De Long,
Pops
, pp. 80-81.

3
. Tucker,
Early Years
, p. 250.

4
. Hasse,
Ragtime
, p. 134.

5
. Tucker, ed.,
DER
, pp. 339-40.

6
. A transcription appears in Porter, Ullman, and Hazell,
Jazz: From Its Origins to the Present
, p. 104.

7
. Schuller,
SE
, p. 109.

8
. The piano solo sheet music, published for copyright purposes, I assume, contains little of what is heard on the recording apart from the trombone melody of the third chorus. Curiously, it is in A
, while the recorded performance is in G.

9
. Tucker, ed.,
DER
, p. 70.

10
. Southern,
MBA
, p. 192.

11
. Ibid., p. 334.

12
. Ellington,
MIMM
, p. 47.

13
. Ibid., p. 33.

14
. Titon,
Early Downhome Blues
, p. 144.

15
. Olly Wilson, “The Heterogeneous Sound Ideal in African-American Music,” in Wright, ed.,
New Perspectives on Music.

16
. Floyd,
Power of Black Music
, p. 80.

17
. Brothers,
Louis Armstrong's New Orleans
, p. 43.

18
. Ibid., p. 57.

19
. Tucker, ed.,
DER
, p. 172.

20
. Ibid., p. 369.

21
. Chilton,
Sidney Bechet
, p. 40.

22
. Stewart,
Jazz Masters of the Thirties
, p. 98.

23
. Timner,
Ellingtonia
, p. 39. See Schuller,
SE
, pp. 105-7, for a discussion of the differences between takes.

24
. See the transcription in Schuller,
SE
, p. 107.

25
. See the transcription in ibid., pp. 124-25.

26
. Lawrence Gushee in Tucker, ed.,
DER
, p. 430.

27
. Ellington had employed vocalise earlier, in “Creole Love Call,” recorded in 1927 with Adelaide Hall, and in “Rude Interlude” with Louis Bacon in 1933. Bacon scatted Armstrong-style.

28
. See the liner notes by Andrew Homzy to
Black, Brown and Beige.

29
. Tucker, ed.,
DER
, p. 249.

30
. Ibid., p. 145.

31
. Ulanov,
Duke Ellington
, p. 253.

32
. Looser, faster performances can be heard on recordings from Fargo, North Dakota (November 7, 1940) and Carnegie Hall (January 23, 1943). A study score, transcribed from the first recording by David Berger and Alan
Campbell, is published by United Artists Music; a simplified piano version appears in Hasse,
Beyond Category.

33
. Rattenbury,
Duke Ellington, Jazz Composer
, p. 105.

34
. See Bushell and Tucker,
Jazz from the Beginning
, p. 55.

35
. Peinkofer and Tannigel,
Handbook of Percussion Instruments
, p. 43.

36
. Fulcher, ed.,
Debussy and His World
, p. 161.

37
. See Katz,
Capturing Sound
, pp. 74-77.

38
. See the accounts of Schoenberg's life in Hahl-Koch,
Arnold Schoenberg / Wassily Kandinsky
, and Meyer and Wasserman, eds.,
Schoenberg, Kandinsky and the Blue Rider.

39
. Meyer and Wasserman, eds.,
Schoenberg, Kandinsky and the Blue Rider
, p. 25.

40
. Hahl-Koch,
Arnold Schoenberg/ Wassily Kandinsky
, p. 21.

41
. Ibid., p. 2.3.

42
. Meyer and Wasserman, eds.,
Schoenberg, Kandinsky and the Blue Rider
, p. 30.

43
. Ibid., p. 50.

44
. Schoenberg and Stein,
Style and Idea
, p. 145.

45
. Kandinsky,
Concerning the Spiritual in Art
, p. 9.

46
. Ibid., p. 13.

47
. Hahl-Koch,
Arnold Schoenberg / Wassily Kandinsky
, p. 149.

48
. Kandinsky,
Concerning the Spiritual in Art
, pp. 38-41.

49
. See Covach, “Schoenberg and the Occult,” pp. 103-18.

50
. Hahl-Koch,
Arnold Schoenberg / Wassily Kandinsky
, p. 96. See Meyer and Wasserman, eds.,
Schoenberg, Kandinsky and the Blue Rider
, p. 107, for Schoenberg's scale of colors.

51
. Hahl-Koch,
Arnold Schoenberg / Wassily Kandinsky
, p. 111.

52
. Theosophical music was brought to the United States in 1916 by a French composer, Dane Rudhyar, who became an important figure among the American “ultra-modernists” and whose ideas would influence Ruth Crawford, John Cage, Lou Harrison, and James Tenney (Oja,
Making Music Modern
, pp. 99-100).

53
. Joseph,
Stravinsky and Balanchine
, p. 89.

54
. Ibid., p. 144.

55
. Ibid., p. 68.

56
. Lederman, ed.,
Stravinsky in the Theater
, p. 81.

57
. Kirstein,
Thirty Years/The New York City Ballet
, p. 65.

58
. Walsh,
Stravinsky: A Creative Spring
, p. 469.

59
. Edmund Wilson's 1930 study
Axel's Castle
remains the best introduction to the Symbolist movement.

60
. C. .F. MacIntyre, trans.,
French Symbolist Poetry
, p. 12.

61
. See Rosemary Lloyd, “Debussy, Mallarmé, and ‘Les Mardis,'” in Fulcher, ed.,
Debussy and His World
, pp. 255-69.

62
. Lockspeiser also compares this song to the ironic poetry of Debussy's friend Jules Laforgue, who mocked the enforced boredom of Parisian Sundays in his collection of poems entitled
Dimanche.
Lockspeiser,
Debussy
, vol. 1, p. 133.

63
. Nichols,
Debussy Remembered
, p. 83.

64
. Ibid., p. 84.

65
. Lockspeiser,
Debussy
, vol. 2, pp. 45-46.

66
. Roberts,
Images
, p. 143.

67
. Paul Jacobs suggested that the first follows the model of Liszt's
Transcendental Etudes
(perhaps no. 2 in a minor) (liner notes to Nonesuch recording); Roger Nichols proposes a relationship to a Hans Christian Anderson story, “The Garden of Paradise,” about the four winds, or to Shelley's “Ode to the West Wind,” which Debussy knew in translation (liner notes to recording on DGG by Krystian Zimerman); and Paul Roberts hears a connection, which I don't, to “Orage” from Liszt's
Années de pèlerinage.
The clearest musical precedent, though, is the third movement, “Dialogue of the Wind and Sea,” from Debussy's own
La Mer
, a tumultuous representation of death and rebirth; both pieces could refer to paintings by Turner.

68
. Debussy composed several other snowscapes, two of which employ the rising four-note motive from
Tristan
to convey contrasting qualities of tristesse:
“Le Tombeau des naiads,”
from
Trois chansons de Bilitis
, and “Snow Is Dancing,” from
Children's Corner.
In two works from his last years, the third movement of
En Blanc et Noir
and the “Etude in Chromatic Steps,” the dance of snow seems to transcend human suffering and becomes a gently whirling interplay of the natural world and the human imagination, Wallace Stevens's “Snow Man” avant la lettre.

69
. In her article “Tristan in the Making of Pelléas,” Carolyn Abbate noted that Debussy often alludes to Wagner's opera through puns. The
“triste”
landscape evoked here in the opening performance instruction and repeated, with a different nuance, later
(“Comme un tender et triste regret”)
points to the desolate (but not wintry) stage décor that Wagner calls for in the third act of
Tristan:
“The whole scene gives the impression of being deserted, ill-tended, here and there in poor repair and overgrown.” But behind that hidden allusion is another, a hothouse or
“Treibhaus”
as described in a poem by Mathilde Wesendonck, which Wagner set as a compositional study for the prelude to act 3. This hothouse is also surprisingly “triste”:

Weit in sehnendem Verlangen
breitet ihr die Arme aus,
und umschlinget wahnbefangen
öder Leere nicht'gen Graus.
 

Wide, in yearning desire
you spread your arms,
and in the bonds of delusion you embrace
the futile horror of a desolate void.

(Wagner's song is in the same key as Debussy's prelude. Debussy had written the words and music for his own hothouse prose poem “De fleurs …” in his
Proses lyriques
, but it sounds more like
Parsifal
than
Tristan.
Symbolists preferred hothouse flowers to the lilies of the field.)

70
. Lockspeiser,
Debussy
, vol. 2, p. 46.

71
. Thompson,
The Soundscape of Modernity
, p. 118.

72
. Ibid., p. 49.

73
. Giddins,
VJ
, p. 348.

74
. Zak,
The Poetics of Rock
, pp. 88, 87.

75
. Ibid., p. 35.

76
. Ibid., p. 88.

 

2. “COTTON TAIL”: RHYTHM

Epigraphs, p. 50: Zora Neale Hurston, “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” in O'Meally, ed.,
JCAC
, p. 302; Murray,
Stomping the Blues
, p. 144; Irving Mills, lyrics to “Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing),” also attributed to Bubber Miley. Epigraph, p. 000: Louis Armstrong, quoted in Teachout,
Pops
, p. 280. Epigraphs, pp. 71-72: Igor Stravinsky,
Stravinsky in Conversation with Robert Craft
, pp. 128-30; Gene Krupa, in Gottlieb, ed.,
Reading Jazz
, p. 774; Stravinsky,
Memories and Commentaries
(2002), p. 136; George Antheil, cited in Albright,
Modernism and Music
, p. 395; Mercer Ellington, quoted in Nicholson,
Reminiscing in Tempo
, p. 124.

1
. Octave Mirabeau in 1908, quoted in Kern,
The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918
, p. 113.

2
. Walter Lippman in 1914, quoted in ibid., p. 124.

3
. Porter, Ullman, and Hazell,
Jazz
, p. 464. For spurious definitions see Virgil Thomson's articles “Swing Music” and “Swing Again,” which appeared in
Modern Music
in 1936 and 1938; Thomson trots out his much-used theories about “quantitative” rhythms.

4
. Murray,
Stomping the Blues
, p. 138. See Michael Denning's discussion of the broader political resonances of swing in
The Cultural Front
, pp. 328-38.