The History of Jazz (41 page)

At the same time, a pronounced conservatism is evident in Ellington’s big band work from these years. After two decades of continually reinventing his sound, Ellington’s musical vocabulary evolved little after the close of the 1940s. The melodic and rhythmic innovations of modern jazz held little fascination for him. Except for token gestures (a gratuitous rock-inflected piece or a passing hint of bop), his efforts focused on reworking the fields he had plowed in earlier decades. And while other bandleaders (Stan Kenton, Gil Evans) sought out exotic instruments to add color to their orchestrations, Ellington appeared content to remain within the confines of the traditional swing band. In this light, it comes as little surprise that the turning point for Ellington in the 1950s was spurred by his revival of a composition almost twenty years old: “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue.” Ellington’s raucous performance of this piece at the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival electrified the audience. “Within an hour, reporters and critics were buzzing about it,” Ellington’s record company proudly proclaimed. “By next morning, it was generally conceded to have been one of the most exciting performances any of them had ever heard.”
¹⁶
There was a tinge of irony in this praise. The fans were ecstatic not about Ellington’s composition—or his orchestration or even his pianism. Rather, it was tenorist Paul Gonsalves’s showboating twenty-seven-chorus solo, filled to the brim with blues clichés and occasional snatches of inspiration, that brought the crowd to its feet.

Ellington’s career now had a second wind. Only a few months before Newport, interest in his band had sunk so low that Duke had resorted to playing background music for the Aquacades, a water show staged outside New York City. Better bookings were now coming his way. Ellington’s picture graced the cover of
Time
magazine. His band was again recording for a major label. On the heels of Newport, Ellington recorded
Such Sweet Thunder
, an impressive collaboration with Billy Strayhorn, which ranks among their finest moments. Television beckoned, with CBS featuring his 1957
A Drum Is a Woman
. The film industry was not far behind, commissioning Ellington to compose the score for
Anatomy of a Murder
in 1959 and
Paris Blues
in 1961. And many of the older players were returning to the fold: Johnny Hodges in 1955; Lawrence Brown and Juan Tizol in 1960; Cootie Williams in 1962.

In his final years, Ellington’s position as a public figure threatened to overwhelm his purely musical pursuits. He took on the role of elder statesman for the jazz world, traveling to Asia, Australia, North Africa, Latin America, Europe, and Russia. His seventieth birthday was celebrated at the White House. French President Georges Pompidou named him to the Legion of Honor. Haile Selassie of Ethiopia awarded him the Emperor’s Star. The Pulitzer Prize was almost presented to him in 1965, but the decision was overruled at the last minute when the Pulitzer board rejected the recommendation of the music jury—a disgraceful move at the time, which looks worse with every passing year. Doubleday paid Ellington a $50,000 advance for an autobiography, unheard of at the time for a jazz book, which eventually resulted in his elegant kiss-and-tell-little memoir
Music Is My Mistress
. Of course, there were always new musical pieces, and they continued to bespeak grand ambitions: suites commemorating Ellington’s travels (
Far East Suite
,
Latin American Suite
) or the jazz heritage (
New Orleans Suite
), coexisting alongside hoary classical adaptations (
Peer Gynt
,
The Nutcracker
). Yet the appearance of originality, in a title or dedication, could not disguise the fact that Duke was mostly working over familiar territory. “Mount Harissa” from
The Far East Suite
sounds superficially exotic, but the chord changes are essentially the same as in “Take the A Train”;
Latin American Suite
found Ellington tackling the idiomatic music of that region—but, then again, hadn’t he already pioneered this decades earlier with his masterful Latin-tinged works from the 1940s? Ellington’s massive and moving
Sacred Concerts
also appeared to break new ground as well, but even here he drew on earlier compositions such as “Come Sunday.” Time after time, Ellington’s huge ambitions were invariably measured against the even larger proportions of his own past work. These later pieces were not without their virtues—most have held up surprisingly well with the passing years— but Ellington’s works were no longer seen as pathbreaking or progressive by most jazz fans and critics. And in the hothouse jazz environment of the 1960s, where being at the cutting edge was lauded as the ultimate virtue, Ellington could no longer demand center stage. Meanwhile, outside the jazz world, only rock and Rolling Stones dotted the desolate landscape of popular music. In this context, few could appreciate the gems that Ellington or Strayhorn still composed: “Isfahan,” “Heaven,” “Blood Count.” Ellington, for his part, increasingly gravitated to settings—overseas or inside the White House—where he could flourish as an unofficial ambassador for jazz, a role for which this Duke was perfectly suited.

But many of the most seasoned veterans of the Ellington band were now passing away or slipping quietly into retirement. Billy Strayhorn’s death in 1967 devastated Ellington, depriving him of a close friend and an integral part of his creative life. He responded with a tribute album, …
And His Mother Called Him Bill
, which stands out as perhaps his most emotionally charged project of the decade, rivaled only by the
Sacred Concerts
. In 1970, Johnny Hodges died suddenly during a routine dental visit. Jimmy Hamilton left in 1968, Lawrence Brown in 1970, Cat Anderson in 1971. Paul Gonsalves died only a few days before Ellington in 1974. The Ellington band, in its final days, had become faceless—almost unthinkable given its history of strong musical personalities.

In January 1974, Ellington was briefly hospitalized in Los Angeles and diagnosed with lung cancer. Released after eight days, Duke returned to the road and the incessant demands of new musical projects. In March 1974, he left the band in midtour to check into the Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York. Here he gave in begrudgingly to his illness, yet insisted on having an electric piano brought to his bedside so he could continue work on his comic opera
Queenie Pie
. On May 24, he died of pneumonia. Ellington’s funeral was held three days later, on Memorial Day, with over ten thousand people paying their respects in person, in addition to the numerous eulogies and testimonials from fans and friends around the world. Gunther Schuller compared Ellington to Bach, Beethoven, and Schoenberg. President Nixon praised him as the nation’s foremost composer. The
New York Times
concurred, in its front-page obituary, citing him as “America’s most important composer.”

The passing years have validated this high-flown praise. Ellington’s death marked only a brief pause in the expansion of his legacy. On the day of his funeral, Ellington’s son Mercer took up his father’s baton to lead the band at a Bermuda engagement (“The Duke would have wanted it that way,” he explained to a reporter
¹⁷
). Mercer Ellington also saw to the completion of Duke’s
Queenie Pie
and its premiere in Philadelphia in 1986. But the continuing activity of the band was only a small part of the posthumous explosion of Ellingtonia. Gary Giddins has estimated that, in the decade following Ellington’s death, some fifty hours’ worth of previously unissued music was commercially released. These works, including virtually complete versions of important Carnegie Hall concerts from the 1940s, only served to reinforce Ellington’s glowing and still growing reputation. Certainly in the jazz world, no later composer has matched the breadth, the depth, the inspiration of Ellington’s impressive oeuvre. And even when one casts a wider net, searching through the ranks of popular, academic, and classical composers, Ellington still stands among a select handful of masters—Copland, Gershwin, Ives, Joplin, Sousa—whose achievements represent the finest flowering of American music.

6 Modern Jazz

Long before modern jazz emerged as a distinctive style, an ideology of modernism had been implicitly embraced by the music’s practitioners. From its earliest days, jazz had been a forward-looking art, continually incorporating new techniques, more expansive harmonies, more complex rhythms, more intricate melodies. Sometimes this ideology of progress was stated explicitly, as in Beiderbecke and the Chicagoans’ oft-spoken praise of Stravinsky and other contemporary classical composers; in other instances, no words were necessary, as with the implicit modernism of Armstrong’s breakthrough recordings of the 1920s. But whether they expostulated about the future of music or merely announced its arrival through the bells of their horns, the leading musicians of early jazz were modernists in the truest sense of the term. They were admired—or chastised, as the case may be—as daring exponents of the new and bold.

It is easy to lose sight of just how remarkable this modernist bent was, given its context. The concept of progress has played a modest role in most ethnic music traditions. Those who draw connections between jazz and African music miss this important difference. The griots of West Africa, for example, aim to preserve their cultural legacy as it is handed down to them. This is not a mere aesthetic choice, but a cultural imperative: they are the historians of their society and must maintain the integrity of their precious musical heritage. Such an attitude defies casual experimentation. In other preindustrial settings, music partakes of a quasi-sacred efficacy. It may accompany a ritual or initiate a supernatural change. In such charged contexts, any modification in the music is viewed as a risky act, never encouraged and at best tolerated with anxiety and distrust. Of course, musical practices have evolved over time, even in traditional non-Western cultures, but at the slowest of paces. “Performers” raised in such environments have only gradually (and often with great reluctance) accepted the Western concept of music as casual entertainment, with its attendant expectations of novelty (hence change) in the idiom. And it is far from clear whether this ostensibly more “progressive” Western attitude really represents progress for those whom, previously, music had partaken of the divine.

Almost from the start, jazz players embraced a different mandate, accepting their role as entertainers and pursuing experimentation with an ardent zeal. This created a paradoxical foundation for jazz, one that remains to this day: for the jazz musician soon proved to be a restless soul, at one moment fostering the tradition, at another shattering it, mindless of the pieces. Even more striking, this progressive attitude of early jazz players came from members of America’s most disempowered underclass. Recall that this music was not only viewed with apprehension by much of the ruling class but was often belittled and derided even within black America’s own ranks. In the face of this hostility, simply preserving the African American vernacular music heritage—saving the legacy of a Buddy Bolden or King Oliver from the oblivion that obscures the early history of most traditional forms of music— would have been a major achievement. But advancing the jazz idiom to produce an Ellington or Armstrong was nothing short of miraculous—and all in the span of a single generation. One searches in vain through all the countries of the world to find another example of such a rapid and dramatic transformation from folk music to art music.

Given this feat, the rise of a more overt modernism in the early 1940s should not be viewed as an abrupt shift, as a major discontinuity in the music’s history. It was simply an extension of jazz’s inherent tendency to mutate, to change, to grow. Jazz had already revealed its ability to swallow other musical idioms—the march, the blues, the spiritual, the American popular song, the rag—and make them a part of itself. To do the same with Stravinsky and Hindemith, Schoenberg and Ravel presented, no doubt, an extraordinary challenge, but also an inevitable one. By the 1930s, the question now was not whether jazz would embrace modernism, but when and how and by whom. As early as 1931, journalists were comparing Ellington to Stravinsky and Ravel. A few years later, Benny Goodman made a more overt attempt to affiliate himself with contemporary classical music, commissioning works from Bartók, Hindemith, and Copland. And these were only the most prominent examples. Who can deny the modernist leanings of an Art Tatum? Or a Coleman Hawkins? Or a Don Redman? Or a Bix Beiderbecke?

The irony is that modern jazz sprang from none of these roots. It came neither from the Carnegie Hall concerts of Ellington and Goodman, nor from the virtuoso pianists of Harlem stride, nor from the other experimental big band sounds of the Swing Era. True, it drew bits and pieces of inspiration from all these sources, but it sounded like none of them. Instead, the leading jazz modernists of the 1940s developed their own unique style, brash and unapologetic, in backrooms and after-hours clubs, at jam sessions and on the road with traveling bands. This music was not for commercial consumption, nor was it meant to be at this embryonic stage. It survived in the interstices of the jazz world. Its comings and goings were not announced in the newspaper of record. Its early stars were, at best, cult figures from beyond the fringe, not household names. Its evolution was not preserved on acetate by record companies—our few glimpses into its early development come mostly from tapes or discs made by amateur engineers, enthusiasts willing to lug bulky equipment to nightclubs or private sessions where the new music was being made. In short, modern jazz was an underground movement, setting the pattern for all the future underground movements of the jazz world, initiating the bunker mentality that survives to this day in the world of progressive jazz. There is irony here, too: at a time when jazz was sweeping the nation, the music’s next generation was moving further and further outside the mainstream of popular culture.