The History of Jazz (39 page)

One evening toward the close of this fertile year, Ellington was approached after a performance in Pittsburgh by a young composer named Billy Strayhorn, who was intent on showing the bandleader one of his pieces. Sixteen years younger than Ellington, Strayhorn had spent his youth in many locales—Ohio (where he was born in Dayton in 1915), New Jersey, North Carolina, and finally Pennsylvania, where he eventually enrolled at the Pittsburgh Musical Institute. Here he pursued formal study of theory and concert music supplemented by a private passion for jazz and songwriting. Shortly before his decisive encounter with Ellington, Strayhorn had been performing with a trio and studying orchestration, but most of his income came from his day job in a drugstore. This would soon change dramatically. The piece that caught Ellington’s attention that night, “Lush Life,” stands out as one of the greatest jazz ballads, with its yearning melody line and the haunting poetry of its lyrics, supported by sweeping harmonies more characteristic of classical music than of Tin Pan Alley. Within weeks, Strayhorn was writing arrangements for the band, initiating a relationship with Ellington that would span almost three decades. During this period he would compose or collaborate on over two hundred pieces.

Ellington had long indulged in various musical collaborations with his band members, but previously these relationships were unabashedly one sided. Strayhorn, in contrast, became a true partner, playing a pivotal role in shaping the band’s sound. In fact, a Strayhorn song, “Take the A Train,” would eventually become the band’s trademark theme. But this venture into the hit parade was atypical. Strayhorn’s instincts were artistic, not commercial, and Ellington’s choice of him as a musical alter ego no doubt reflected the bandleader’s own aspirations as a serious composer. Especially in his own mood compositions—songs such as “Chelsea Bridge,” “Daydream,” “Passion Flower,” “Lotus Blossom,” “A Flower Is a Lovesome Thing,” and “Blood Count”—Strayhorn’s mastery rivaled his employer’s. Such works remain the closest jazz has ever approached to art song.

In 1939, Ellington continued to expand his efforts on many fronts. The combo sides took a high priority early in the year, but big band activity soon picked up, with the ensemble recording over a dozen numbers in March and June, including the riff-based “Pussy Willow,” the mood piece “Subtle Lament,” Billy Strayhorn’s first major contribution, “Grievin’,” and “The Sergeant Was Shy” with its evocation of “Bugle Call Rag.” In the spring, the band traveled to Europe for the second time, where Ellington celebrated his fortieth birthday in Sweden. He was feted by a large group of serenading schoolchildren on the occasion and he responded by recording “Serenade to Sweden” on his return to the States. In addition, Ellington also took a higher profile as an instrumentalist during the year, recording as a solo pianist—rare at the time for Duke—and in duet format with bassist Jimmy Blanton after the latter’s arrival in the fall of 1939.

The addition of Blanton represented a major turning point for the band. Half Ellington’s age, this twenty-year-old prodigy brought a palpable excitement, an incisiveness and momentum, to virtually every performance during his brief tenure with the group. Despite his youth, Blanton’s career would span months, not years—at the close of 1941 he would leave Ellington because of poor health and would die from tuberculosis the following July—but in that short time he managed not only to invigorate the Ellington rhythm section but also to revolutionize the role of the string bass in jazz. There had been outstanding players on the instrument before Jimmy Blanton—Pops Foster, Steve Brown, Al Morgan, John Kirby, Wellman Braud, Billy Taylor (with Ellington at the time of Blanton’s arrival), Walter Page, and others—but his virtuosity tended to eclipse their accomplishments. For all their virtues, they now seemed mere timekeepers, offering a steady beat and harmonic reinforcement, while Blanton was a complete jazz player. Today, the bass fills multiple roles in most jazz ensembles, propelling the performance, establishing a rhythmic pulse, providing embellishments, crisp walking lines, and countermelodies, and taking its place from time to time as a featured solo voice. Blanton helped define all these responsibilities. He showed that the plucked (pizzicato) bass could be as important as the drums in swinging the band, in pushing an entire jazz orchestra. He, more than anyone else, established the bass as a legitimate solo voice in the jazz idiom. With a resonant tone and a polished execution unsurpassed at the time, he laid the foundation for modern jazz bass technique. One can hear the result not only in Blanton’s own recordings but in his pervasive impact on virtually all of the leading jazz bassists of the 1940s and 1950s—including Oscar Pettiford, Ray Brown, Charles Mingus, Red Mitchell, Paul Chambers, and Red Callender. “The most impressive bass player I ever heard was Jimmy Blanton,” Callender later recalled. “When I first heard him, I said ‘This is the way the bass is supposed to be played.’ ”
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The arrival of Ben Webster, the third important addition to the band during this period, was a major coup for Ellington. A powerful soloist with a deeply personal sound, Webster ranks as the finest tenorist in the history of the Ellington orchestra. His departure left a void that Ellington never adequately filled. At his best, Webster was on a par with the most famous tenor players in jazz, mentioned by fans in the same breath as Hawkins or Young. His mature style revealed a mastery of the sonic possibilities of the tenor saxophone unprecedented in jazz, exhibiting a dazzling range of breathy tones, raspy asides, barks, whimpers, growls, glissandos, cries, and whispers. His playing at times could be aggressive, as could his personality—the pugnacious Webster once claimed to have knocked down heavyweight champion Joe Louis, and who dared challenge the story?—but his music was just as noteworthy for its gentler moments. While emulating the ripeness of Johnny Hodges’s sound, Webster added to it a warmer, airy essence. His lingering tones had a delicious, unfocused quality. Eventually he learned how to hint at phrases—a note or two sufficed— rather than state them explicitly, recalling the poet’s remark that the unheard melodies are the sweetest of all. Yet Webster was just as adept at declamatory outbursts on the saxophone, leaving behind in his most famous Ellington solo, on “Cotton Tail,” a lasting tour de force of improvisational complexity.

Born in Kansas City, Missouri, on March 27, 1909, Webster developed his skills alongside some of the finest saxophonists in jazz, apprenticing in bands led by Bennie Moten and Andy Kirk. After moving to New York in 1934, Webster worked for a time with Fletcher Henderson and Cab Calloway, among others, before joining Ellington on a regular basis in 1940. His tenure with the Duke would be brief: Webster left Ellington in 1943, rejoining the band for a short stint at the close of the decade, but soon departing again to pursue a successful career as a freelance performer and studio player.

Ellington was also making important changes in his business dealings during this period. He parted ways with Irving Mills in 1939 and initiated a new arrangement with the William Morris Agency. Around this same time, Ellington also entered into a long-term relationship with the Victor recording label, signing a contract for five years. One suspects that the security of these new arrangements played some role in the burst of creativity that followed. At a minimum, Ellington must have been given enormous artistic freedom while at Victor. The sides he recorded for the label have only the lightest veneer of commercialism. They are full of subtleties and intricacies—arcane compositional structures, surprising modulations, hints of dissonance—that may have endeared Duke to serious jazz listeners, but probably put off more casual fans.

Ellington’s frequent departures from standard song form warrant particular mention. By the time of the Swing Era, the thirty-two-bar form had become entrenched as the dominant structure for both popular song composition and jazz improvisation. The most common variant employed two eight-bar melodies, an A theme and B theme according to standard terminology, which were played in the sequence AABA. A second approach, even simpler in construction, was also frequently used: this was an AA' form, in which both themes spanned sixteen bars, and with only a slightly different ending distinguishing the A melody from the A' version. These two structures, AABA and AA', remain dominant in jazz music to this day. In a typical performance, a jazz band will simply repeat the underlying structure over and over again, in a constant thirty-two-bar loop, with an opening and closing melody statement encapsulating improvisations over the same form. Certainly when the occasion so warranted, Ellington employed these simple thirty-two-bar structures, especially when he was aiming for commercial acceptance. But, just as often, Ellington broke out of this Tin Pan Alley straitjacket, at times squeezing four or more themes into a three-minute song. And instead of restricting himself to eight-or sixteen-bar melodies, Ellington sprinkled his music with occasional sections of other lengths: lasting ten or twenty bars or some even more lopsided duration, not to mention his frequent use of twelve-bar blues structures. These melodies of different length often coexisted alongside each other in a single composition, where they might be further spiced with equally unconventional introductions, codas, or interludes.

Ellington’s famous recording of “Jack the Bear” from 1940 is, for the most part, a twelve-bar blues driven by the stunning bass work of Jimmy Blanton. But midway through the piece the song shifts gears into an AABA form. To a seasoned jazz musician, this immediate juxtaposition of blues and pop song form would be like eating spaghetti and pancakes at the same sitting. Yet Ellington not only pulls off this odd mixture without causing indigestion but creates a masterpiece in the process. “Sepia Panorama,” also from this period, is another example of Ellington’s predilection for arcane forms. Its four-theme structure unfolds ABCDDCBA, with the second half of the song serving as a mirror image of the first. Once again the melodies vary in length, with the A and D themes following a twelve-bar format, while the B and C sections are built on standard eight-and sixteen-bar structures. Moreover, the moods of the various sections are strikingly different, with the pensive B theme separating the more energetic A and C sections, and the two improvised D choruses featuring the outstanding blues work of Ellington, Blanton, and Webster. This represented a level of complexity that swing fans, raised on a diet of simple riffs, may well have found puzzling. But Ellington dared to be different, even using “Sepia Panorama” as the band’s theme song during this period.

Sometimes he might simplify matters in performance, just playing the opening sections of the work, but often he treated audiences to a full-blown version. A live recording of the band made in Fargo, North Dakota, on November 7, 1940—a neglected masterpiece on a par with Ellington’s more celebrated Carnegie Hall performances or
Sacred Concerts
—captures a vibrant five-minute rendition of “Sepia Panorama” with Blanton and Webster playing at absolute top form. The Fargo tracks, taken as a whole, are important documents of Ellington’s 1940 band, showing that the complex and challenging pieces that were a specialty of this ensemble could also serve as spirited, hot jazz for a dancing audience. Indeed, there are few other recordings of the Ellington band, in any setting, that find the group playing with such energy and verve. There was no contradiction in this for Ellington. His artistry was just as much at home in a dance hall in North Dakota as on the stage of Carnegie Hall. Ever so gently and politely, he raised the audience to his level wherever he went. And the band’s aficionados invariably learned to expect the most inspired performances in some of the humblest venues.

The Ellington recorded legacy from the beginning of the 1940s is extraordinarily rich. The Victor sides from this period rank with the finest achievements of the jazz idiom, on a par with Armstrong’s Hot Fives and Hot Sevens or with the Charlie Parker Savoy and Dial sessions. Where to begin? The ominous “Ko-Ko,” with its throbbing pedal tones, evokes Ellington’s “jungle music” of earlier years, but now drawing on an even darker palette, almost despairing in its tone. If one didn’t know that a world war was in the making, one could almost guess it from this foreboding musical portrait. “Harlem Air Shaft” is poised at the opposite end of the spectrum: jubilant, spirited, carefree. Midway through the piece, Ellington toys with his audience. The rhythm section suddenly drops out, and the horns articulate a more reflective theme in half time. Has the party ended prematurely? Not at all. After a moment of pregnant hesitation, drummer Sonny Greer leads the band back in full force. This cat-and-mouse game is repeated twice, a masterpiece of deferred gratification.

Some of the band’s loveliest ballads and mood pieces date from this period, but the surprise is that many of them are written by sidemen. No doubt Ellington’s creativity in this vein was still at peak form—as witnessed by “All Too Soon,” “Warm Valley,” and “Dusk”; but Strayhorn’s “Chelsea Bridge,” Mercer Ellington’s “Blue Serge,” and Juan Tizol’s “Bakiff” also stand out as first-class works. Yet this was more than a writers’ band. Anyone doubting the improvisational talent of the Ellington orchestra need only hear Cootie Williams on “Concerto for Cootie,” Ben Webster on “Cotton Tail,” Jimmy Blanton on “Pitter Panther Patter,” or Johnny Hodges on “Main Stem.” In fact, it is hard to think of any other body of recordings in the jazz idiom that reflect such an ideal balance between composition, orchestration, and improvisation as these Ellington efforts from the early 1940s.

A number of circumstances conspired to put an end to this fertile period in the history of the Ellington band. Cootie Williams decided to join Benny Goodman in November 1940, after eleven years with Ellington. Jimmy Blanton left the band in November 1941 and died from tuberculosis a few months later. In the summer of 1942, Barney Bigard departed, and a month later vocalist Ivie Anderson followed suit. This exodus continued in 1943, with Ben Webster leaving the band. The middle years of the decade also saw the departure of Rex Stewart, Juan Tizol, Tricky Sam Nanton (felled by a stroke), and Otto Hardwick. After years of relying on stable personnel, Ellington now had to cope with an unprecedented level of turnover. Nor was this all. The larger problems of the music industry also served to curtail his activities. A 1941 conflict between ASCAP, which represented composers, and the nation’s radio broadcasters effectively limited Ellington’s access to airplay (although it did give him a financial incentive to feature songs written by Strayhorn and other band members who were not ASCAP members). Then, for almost two years, Ellington was kept out of the recording studio due to the prolonged strike called by James Petrillo, the hard-headed boss of the American Federation of Musicians. Fans looked on in dismay as the majestic (and prolific) recorded output of 1938–41 was followed mostly—at least for a spell—by silence.