The Ellington Century

by David Schiff

  Kind treatment make me love you, be mean and you'll drive me away.

  Kind treatment make me love you, be mean and you'll drive me away.

  You gonna long for me baby, one of these long rainy days.

  Did you ever dream lucky baby, and wake up cold in hand?

  Did you ever dream lucky baby, and wake up cold in hand?

  You didn't have a dollar, somebody had your woman.

  Basie frames three choruses of blues in E (two for Rushing, one for Basie) with a c minor blues in growling “jungle” style recalling Ellington's “Black and Tan Fantasy.” The two pieces and the two titled bandleaders seem to be conversing; listening to them side by side reveals that the blues is a form of dialogue both internally and intertextually. Basie's southwestern country style and Ellington's urbane Harlem idiom are dialects of the same language.

  We can also hear “Blue Light” as a conversation with Sidney Bechet; Ellington called Bechet the “epitome of jazz,”20 and both Barney Bigard and Johnny Hodges were Bechet disciples. Bechet's “Blue Horizon,” which received canonic status on the Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz, perfectly illustrates the central role that tone color plays in shaping blues as dialogue, even within an instrumental solo. Bechet recorded “Blue Horizon” in December 1944 with a quintet of distinguished New Orleans musicians: Wilbur de Paris, trumpet; Vic Dickenson, trombone; Manzie Johnson, drums; Pops Foster, bass; and Art Hodes, piano. Although his preferred instrument was the soprano sax, Bechet played clarinet here, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say he constructed an entire piece out of the particular timbral qualities of the clarinet, much as Stravinsky had done in 1920 in his Three Pieces for Solo Clarinet, written either after hearing Bechet play (possible but not certain) or after reading his friend Ernest Ansermet's ecstatic praise of Bechet as “the first of his race to have composed perfectly formed blues.”21 In constructing “Blue Horizon,” a six-chorus blues in E which uses only the pitches of an E blues scale (E major plus a lowered third, G and a lowered seventh, D), Bechet contrasted the three distinct registers of the clarinet. He spread an extended melodic line over a range of three octaves (from the E below middle C to the E two octaves and a third above middle C). The low (called “chalumeau”), middle, and upper (clarion) ranges of the clarinet sound almost like different instruments. Bechet placed each chorus within one or two of these ranges:

  Chorus 1: chalumeau

  Chorus 2: middle register

  Chorus 3 chalumeau

  Chorus 4: middle and chalumeau in call-and-response

  Chorus 5: middle

  Chorus 6: clarion

  In each chorus Bechet returned to the low chalumeau register for the third phrase, which serves as a refrain, unifying the piece but also bringing it back home to the timbre that is closest to speech. We might say that “Blue Horizon” is a klangfarbenmelodie for a single instrument, but its timbres differ from the classical clarinet sound, and that difference points to the particular way tone color functions in the blues. Bechet's clarinet does not sound like anyone else's. In the blues idiom the individual player's sound is far more important than an idealized notion of how an instrument should sound. Bechet's sound has a distinctive wide vibrato, but that is just one of its special sonorities. Bechet's lower register for instance, does not have the hollow, disembodied quality produced by classical clarinetists; it is a full, fat sound, almost like a trombone. Similarly the middle range is sweet, not pallid; the clarion register is trumpetlike, not shrill. Bechet also colored his sound with three ornaments, a slow downward slide, a more than usually pronounced vibrato, and a “blues” inflection, a flattening and bending of pitch that he reserves for the pitch G. Each of these ornaments points to what we might term a “blues sound ideal” of varying the color within a note rather than sustaining a single timbre all the way through. In the blues the timbre changes as much within one note as from one note to the next; every tone sounds unpredictably alive.

  Both polyvocal and polytimbral, Bechet's clarinet portrays a community of voices speaking and singing that are linked by a refrain that pulls their differences back to a common source. In “Blue Light” Ellington's piano plays a very similar function, responding, completing, and summarizing the other instruments. Both pieces seem formally self-contained yet open-ended. Blues stanzas roll on in an endless narrative; individual blues performances or compositions take up a story that has already begun and then pass it along to the next speaker.

  THEME AND VARIATIONS: A BLUES GALLERY

  Ellington reworked “Blue Light” over a decade, creating a variegated gallery of related nocturnes: “Subtle Lament,” “Dusk,” “Transblucency,” and “On a Turquoise Cloud.” Like Monet's series of haystack paintings, these works bathe identical subjects in changing light; heard back-to-back they might be termed “blues-as-process.” They demonstrate how small changes in instrumental combinations or in their ordering can transform musical signification. They also reveal the range of Ellington's creative process, from informal on-the-spot improvisation to contrapuntal construction. Rex Stewart wrote that Ellington might arrive at a recording session, listen to a run-through, and then call for changes, “perhaps starting with bar sixteen, playing eight bars, then back to letter C, and when we got to letter E he'd call a halt. Then he'd sit at the piano and play something, have a consultation with Tom Whaley [the band's copyist], and some new music would be scored on the spot.”22 Ellington's sketches, preserved at the Smithsonian, show that the music was usually written out in detail before such impromptu reshuffling.

  “Subtle Lament,” a moderate blues in G recorded on March 20, 1939, and again in the fall of 1940,23 sounds at first like an informal rearrangement of “Blue Light” with the “Mood Indigo” chorus placed right after a new piano and bass intro and rescored for four reed instruments.24 Following is a call-and-response chorus for piano (using material similar to the intro to “Blue Light”) and trombone trio, a solo chorus for Rex Stewart (cornet using half-valve muting) over a low reed background in place of Lawrence Brown's chorus but without his melody, a chorus for trombone trio, a chorus by Barney Bigard with brass and reed accompaniment, and a four-bar restatement of the “Mood Indigo” section as outro. Moving the furniture around, however, Ellington altered the structure and timbre. The “Mood Indigo” chorale now became the binding element. It appears three times: at the beginning and end, but also as a background to the Stewart and Bigard solos. As it increases in thematic importance, however, the chorale also sheds its mysterious coloration; it is now played within a single instrumental choir, not as a hybrid color. Ellington compensated for this loss by introducing a new timbral contrast of low trombone trio against the high reeds. The three trombones become the mysterious element through the blend of their sounds (Brown, Nanton, and Tizol had sharply contrasting styles of playing) and also through their unexpected Debussyan harmonies.

  Heard as a nocturne, “Subtle Lament” seems to depict midnight rather than the 3 A.M. of “Blue Light.” On May 28, 1940, moving the clock and the quality of light back by several hours, Ellington recorded “Dusk,” a considerable reworking of the elements in those two predecessors and of their template, “Mood Indigo.” Like “Mood Indigo,” “Dusk” is in B and has a sixteen-bar AABA phrase structure that nevertheless sounds like a twelve-bar blues. It begins with a piano and bass intro very similar to “Subtle Lament.” The first chorus is a chromatic melody scored in the “Mood Indigo” voicing, with muted trumpet and muted trombone in thirds, with a clarinet an octave and a half below, and, like “Indigo,” with a ripe late romantic altered dominant ninth as its second chord. As in “Subtle Lament,” Rex Stewart has a solo chorus, and in the third chorus the low trombone trio counters the high reed choir, but here the reeds sound like a tree full of birds chirping at sunset. The timbral heart of “Dusk,” the last phrase of the third chorus, however, is new and also carefully composed for the entire band.25 Here Ellington blended five reeds and six muted brass in darkly dissonant
harmonies that nevertheless produce a luminous tone color. This example of the “Ellington effect” has inspired superlatives ever since it appeared: “I know of no other work for jazz orchestra that conveys such an impression of tranquility on the verge of tears.”26

  Ellington, however, had even more changes to ring on his nocturnal theme in general, and on “Blue Light” in particular. On January 4, 1946, he premiered “Transblucency” (a.k.a. “Transbluency,” a.k.a. “A Blue Fog That You Can Almost See Through”) at Carnegie Hall. Essentially, “Transblucency” is an overt variant of “Blue Light,” significantly transposed upward from G to B. Here, though, nonchalant improvisation evolved into a classical-sounding, contrapuntally strict composition. Ellington signaled the classical turn by rescoring the “Mood Indigo” trio, replacing the trumpet with a wordless soprano (Kay Davis).27 Davis's vocal purity would suit Rachmaninoff's famous “Vocalise.” The second chorus brings back Lawrence Brown's tune, even creamier and croonier than it was in “Blue Light” thanks to the upward transposition. Here, though, Ellington gives Brown's melody a Bach-like treatment.28 It serves as the cantus firmus for two choruses, the first a duet for soprano and clarinet (Jimmy Hamilton, whose classical tone blends perfectly with Davis's voice), the soprano intoning the cantus, the clarinet playing a new counterpoint; and the second with the cantus in the low reeds and brass with the soprano singing a new counterpoint. Sketches preserved in the Ellington Archive show how carefully Ellington planned the contrapuntal devices. Ellington's slightly frantic piano intro and outro have an impromptu air that contrasts tellingly with the work's contrapuntal and coloristic logic.

  “On a Turquoise Cloud,” premiered at Carnegie Hall on December 27, 1947, might be termed an encore for “Transblucency.” It uses all the same elements (adding the color of the bass clarinet), but now they are employed in a delightfully informal fashion, transposed down to a mellow D yet built on a new color, the floating timbre of Kay Davis's high As (and singular high B). No longer a blues, somewhere between a pop tune and an opera aria, it is a siren song. The only further steps Ellington would make in this direction move upward to celestial realms: Mahalia Jackson's wordless humming after “The Twenty-Third Psalm” and Alice Babs's coloratura in “Heaven.”

  “Ko-Ko”: THE COLOR BLACK

  Shades of blue make up one half of Ellington's color spectrum; variants of black, from café au lait to ebony, form their complement. The breathy but warm sound of the New Orleans clarinet, with Bechet as the foundation amplified by Bigard and Hodges, signified blue. The dark growl of Miley's trumpet, Nanton's trombone, and Carney's baritone sax, all derived from the sound of Joe Oliver's cornet, connoted black. Ellington uses both blue and black timbres in music that belongs, in form and gesture, to the genre of the blues, though often the black pieces state the blues harmonic progression in the minor mode. Ellington's noir style (branded—some say by George Gershwin—as “Jungle Music” at the Cotton Club) portrayed characters who are more African than American, representing the resilience and strength that existed before slavery and that survived beyond it. The black-to-tan spectrum also represented two momentous events in the African American experience, the traumatic Middle Passage from Africa to America and the Great Migration from the rural South to the urban North. Ellington sounded this theme in the 1920s with “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo” and “Black and Tan Fantasy,” in the ′30s with “The Saddest Tale,” “Echoes of Harlem” and “Menilek,” and in the ′50s with “Such Sweet Thunder.” Throughout his career he referred to an operatic presentation of the theme, called Boola, “which tells the story of the Negro in America.”29 In 1941 Ellington told Almena Davis, an interviewer for a black newspaper, the California Eagle, that he had “practically finished a full-length opera based on the history of the American Negro, and is readying a synopsis of it to submit to a prospective producer.”30 The opera never appeared, but, according to Barry Ulanov, Ellington drew two of his most important works of the 1940s, “Ko-Ko” and Black, Brown and Beige, from the operatic sketches.31 Both works reflect Ellington's political engagement, which reached a peak of militancy in the early 1940s, when the United States entered a war against racism without addressing racism on the home front. Because of its scale and ambition, Black, Brown and Beige will receive its own chapter, but here “Ko-Ko” can exemplify the color black, with all its resonances, very well on its own.

  Ellington recorded “Ko-Ko” for the first time on March 6, 1940, at the first Victor recording session of what has come to be known as the Blanton-Webster Band because of the revivifying arrivals of Jimmy Blanton on bass and Ben Webster on tenor sax. The session also produced “Jack the Bear” and “Morning Glory.”32

  In form, “Ko-Ko” is eight blues choruses in e minor (the blackest possible key, at the furthest remove from the white harmony of C major) preceded by an eight-bar intro. Each chorus is in call-and-response format:

  Intro. Baritone sax (Carney) answered by trombones (eight bars)

  1. Bass trombone (Tizol) answered by saxes

  2. Saxes answered by plunger-muted trombone (Nanton) assisted by muted brass

  3. Same as 2 but with higher-pitched trombone responses

  4. Saxes answered by muted brass and piano

  5. Trumpets answered by saxes and trombones

  6. Brass answered by solo bass

  7. Shout chorus; brass (and clarinet) answered by saxes

  8. Eight bars same as chorus 1; four-bar coda

  Almost every chorus begins with the Beethovenian rhythmic figure:

  33

  This motive is pounded out first on the tom-toms, then intoned by the baritone sax; in the first chorus it becomes a four-note melodic figure in the valve trombone. It provides the rhythm for the saxophone, trumpet, and trombone calls in choruses three through six. Thematic urgency mirrors the massive, dense coloration of the score. Except for the piano, the only solo voices heard are dark and deep: tom-tom, baritone sax, bass trombone, muted trombone, string bass. Higher-pitched colors appear as doubled melodies or as chords that become increasingly dissonant sounding as the piece progresses, reaching a peak with the first chord of the shout chorus, an E minor eleventh chord made up of all the black notes on the piano. Even at the beginning, though, the parallel triads in the trombones have a modernistic sting, an aspect of the piece pushed further in the jabbing chords and wailing whole-tone scales of the piano.

  While “Blue Light” emphasized the contrasting timbres of individual players, “Ko-Ko” draws its color from massed instrumental groupings. It treats saxes, trumpets, and trombones as if each section were a single voice and gradually fuses these three elements together in the sixth chorus with three increasingly dissonant fanfarelike chords. In the technical terms of the European tradition, Ellington scored “Ko-Ko” in a tutti style, exploiting the massed timbral possibilities of the entire ensemble. This approach to the orchestra, like the rhythmic motto, reminds the listener of the heroic side of Beethoven, the Third, Fifth, Seventh, and Ninth symphonies. To continue the Beethoven analogy, we might say that the sound of “Ko-Ko” is a Promethean theft, a defiant transfer of the image of heroism from white to black. Ellington composed “Ko-Ko” in 1939. Its heroic coloring anticipates some of the most important classical works of the war years that made similarly symbolic use of Beethoven's rhythms, in particular Schoenberg's Ode to Napoleon (1942) and Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements (1945). Precociously postcolonial with a vengeance, “Ko-Ko” reclaimed and rewrote the primitivism of early modern classical music and the tom-tom-grooved “jungle” numbers that white audiences demanded from black entertainers, using the most esteemed devices of European art music as emblems of African American integrity, pride, and power.34

  Ellington composed music with color in order to write a “colored” music; throughout his career he defined his artistic project as giving musical expression to the experience of African Americans. Although much of his music evolved in the dubious “plantation” atmosphere of the segreg
ated Cotton Club, Ellington's painterly titles were not floor show gimmicks; they directed listeners to the music's timbral essence. He told one interviewer that his orchestra played “unadulterated American Negro music,” not jazz or swing. Ellington was acutely conscious of art's responsibility to represent experience and of the inability of European forms of music and media to represent the particular experiences of his life. The forms of his music and the sounds of his orchestra presented an alternative system of representation based in sound, form, and social function on the blues. Altering a musical culture at a most basic level meant rewiring the way music was perceived and processed: Ellington's music asks us to see with our ears and hear with our eyes. This disruption of the habitual sensory pathways makes Ellington a “nationalist” in the way Bartók or Falla were, but it also makes him a quintessential modernist like Debussy and Schoenberg, who similarly sought to transform the experience of music by fusing sound and sight.

  SEGUE: AFTERNOON OF THE XYLOPHONE

  A few notes of music, a tapping, a faint hum: you girls, so warm and so silent, dance the taste of the fruit you have known! Dance the orange.

  —Rainer Maria Rilke

  A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu: voyelles.…

  —Rimbaud, “Voyelles”

  These days every shoemaker's apprentice can orchestrate to perfection.

  —Mahler to Alma on Puccini's Tosca

  Firstly, hanging from the ceiling, were Smyrna carpets with complex patterns picked out on a red background. Then on all four sides were door-curtains from Kerman and Syria, striped with green, yellow and vermilion. Coarser door-curtains from Kiarbekir, rough to the touch like a shepherd's cloak; and still more carpets which could be used as hangings, long carpets from Isphahan, Tehran, and Kermanshah, the wider carpets of Shumaka or Madras, strange flowerings of peonies and palms where the imagination was let loose in the garden of dreams. On the floor, which was strewn with thick fleeces, there were more carpets: in the center, an Agra, an astonishing piece with a wide, soft, blue border against a white background, on which were exquisitely imagined patterns in a blueish violet. After that, wonders were displayed on all sides.…Here were Turkey, Arabia, Persia and India: palaces had been emptied, mosques and bazaars ransacked.…Visions of the East hovered beneath the extravagance of this savage art amid the strong scent that this ancient wool had kept from lands of sun and vermin.