The Ellington Century

by David Schiff

  But what made melody such a hot potato? My trusty 1969 Harvard Dictionary of Music locates the tensions within the term itself. Its definition begins with bland objectivity: “In the broadest sense, a succession of musical tones, as opposed to harmony, i.e., musical tones sounded simultaneously.” Down a few paragraphs, though, we find a surprisingly reception-oriented definition: “Melody is the only element in common to music of all times and all peoples, and…the cornerstone and touchstone of artistic quality.” As a yardstick of quality, not simply an acoustical fact, melody empowers the listener. No wonder the term pushed composers' buttons! If melodic quality is measured by royalties, only a bare handful of classical melodies written since, say, 1920 have come anywhere near the earning power of popular songs. Perhaps the modernists should have just admitted flat out that they were handing melody over to Tin Pan Alley while they pursued loftier goals.

  Tin Pan Alley was the name Monroe Rosenfield gave to a block on West 28th Street where M. Witmark, publisher of the 1891 hit “The Picture That's Turned to the Wall,” had its headquarters.3 Tin Pan Alley devoted itself exclusively to publishing and promoting popular songs. Its business took off rapidly through ties to emerging media: cheap sheet music, cabarets, variety shows, vaudeville, and the player piano.

  Unlike most modernists, Tin Pan Alley understood the commercial value of its product and the makeup of its market. Adorno did not need to invent the idea that there was a mechanical formula for song production; the industry issued its own recipes for success. Charles K. Harris, both composer and publisher of the 1892 hit “After the Ball,” advised composers to “take note of public demand” and “avoid slang and vulgarisms” as well as “many-syllabled words.” He summed up his whole aesthetic creed in one sentence: “Simplicity in melody is one of the great secrets of success.”4

  At the outset, Tin Pan Alley's idea of simplicity caused its composers to turn out products that seemed merely crude, with simple hymnbook harmonies and cloying lyrics. Comparing these songs with the European art music of the time, Charles Hamm relates the rise of Tin Pan Alley in the 1890s to a wider split in musical culture: “The first Tin Pan Alley composers were contemporaries of Claude Debussy, Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler, and Arnold Schoenberg; there was almost no common ground now between popular and classical music, no possibility that a piece of contemporary art music could be fashioned into a popular song.”5

  We could replay this “melody gap” throughout the twentieth century: the 1950s, for instance, were the decade of both Boulez and Buddy Holly. But a contrast of the crude if catchy “After the Ball” and the utterly refined Das Lied von der Erde omits important parts of the story. By the late 1890s Tin Pan Alley was also selling cakewalks and ragtimes, many by African American composers, often under the racist rubric of “coonsongs.” However offensively packaged, ragtime enlivened the marketing mix of sentimental ballads and Bowery waltzes with raffish, rhythmic songs like Ben Harney's “You've Been a Good Old Wagon But You Done Broke Down” (1895) and Joseph Howard's “Hello! Ma Baby” (1899). As Hamm points out, the melodic market also had room for the operatic sounds of Reginald De Koven, Victor Herbert, and Ethelbert Nevin, whose songs spoke a language not all that distant from Strauss or Mahler.

  At the beginning of the twentieth century popular music was a mélange of cakewalks, sentimental ballads, novelty tunes, Gilbert and Sullivan, and Viennese operettas, and the broad eclecticism of popular music has continued ever since. The Alley's megamart approach also embraced contemporary classical works. Debussy's “Rêverie” became “My Reverie” Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto was reborn as “Full Moon and Empty Arms” Puccini's Tosca provided melodic inspiration for “Avalon” (1920, credited to Al Jolson) and “Smile” (1936, by Charlie Chaplin); and Stan Kenton lifted his theme song, “Artistry in Rhythm,” right out of Ravel. By 1914 popular tunesmiths like Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern were writing songs that were not one-season ephemera. For some early critics of popular culture, like Gilbert Seldes in The Seven Lively Arts (1924), “Alexander's Ragtime Band” and “They Didn't Believe Me” marked the arrival of a new art form. For much of the classical world, however, they were just more “Moon/June” rubbish.

  With the appearance of Ella Fitzgerald's “song book” albums in the late 1950s and the publication of Alec Wilder's American Popular Song in 1972, the much-maligned output of Tin Pan Alley became the much-acclaimed Great American Songbook. Wilder's book, written by a practitioner, demonstrated on every page that the creators of popular song were craftsmen, not hacks. They pursued aesthetic ideals, not just monetary gain. Today opera stars like Renée Fleming and Jessye Norman perform these songs as certified classics, but the rise of the Great American Songbook from the flotsam of Tin Pan Alley owed much to interpretations by jazz singers and instrumentalists. Louis Armstrong initiated this cross-genre, cross-race collaboration in his 1933 recording of “I Got a Right to Sing the Blues,” by Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler. The African American Armstrong strutted his right to sing a popular song by two Jewish Americans who proclaimed their right to compose in an African American genre.

  The collusion of jazz and popular song produced new ways of composing melodies, new ways of performing them, and a new form of melodic elaboration, beyond embellishment, which I call “supermelody.” The Ellington repertory richly illustrates the full range of these melodic innovations. Songs from “Solitude” to “Satin Doll,” and soloists as gifted as Johnny Hodges, Cootie Williams, and Lawrence Brown, exalted melody far beyond the habitual dualisms of high and low or brain and heart.6

  THE DUKE ELLINGTON (& CO.) SONGBOOK

  Although the Duke Ellington Songbook came third in Ella Fitzgerald's recordings (after Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hart, but before Irving Berlin, the Gershwins, Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern, and Johnny Mercer), his place of honor in the Great American Songbook was far from obvious at the time. Alec Wilder devoted just a few pages to Ellington toward the back of his book; he prefaced his praises (for the music) by claiming that “the only problem with discussing his songs is that very few of them are essentially songs, nor were they meant to be.”7The statement is both true and false. As a band leader and an African American, Ellington lived a very different life from the rest of the song-writing fraternity. Unlike the Mighty Six, he did regularly write songs for Broadway shows and Hollywood movies. Many of his songs, like “Mood Indigo,” first became popular as instrumental compositions. Once they were launched, Irving Mills or a staff lyricist, like Mitchell Parish at Mills Music, would add lyrics.

  On Broadway most lyricists and composers worked closely together, usually writing the music first and words second. As Philip Furia points out, this method allowed the lyrics to bounce off the syncopated rhythms and echo the “ragged” quality of contemporary American speech. Even after he broke with Mills, however, Ellington never sustained a hand-and-glove collaboration with a lyricist, although in 1939 he hired Billy Strayhorn for that purpose. Ellington soon discovered that writing great lyrics, like those Strayhorn had already penned for his song “Lush Life,” was just one of Strayhorn's many talents.8

  Although Wilder assumed that all of Ellington's songs were by products of his band's instrumental repertory, the young, unknown Ellington had worked as a songwriter when he first came to New York.9 In 1925, a year before the recording of “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo” put his band on the map, he composed three songs for the all-black review Chocolate Kiddies. African American songwriters, following in the footsteps of Shelton Brooks (“Some of These Days” and “The Darktown Strutters’ Ball”) and Chris Smith (“Ballin’ the Jack”) scored notable successes in the early 1920s. Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle wrote “I'm Just Wild about Harry” for their popular review Shuffle Along. Turner Layton Jr. and Henry Creamer wrote “Way Down Yonder in New Orleans,” and James P. Johnson and Cecil Mack launched the most important dance craze of the decade with “Charleston” from the 1923 show Runnin’ Wild. Ellington's song “Jig Walk” quoted “Charleston�
� explicitly (as did Gershwin's Piano Concerto in F, written in the same year), but it already revealed a personal voice hinting at the “jungle” style that would soon appear.10

  Ellington, however, pursued a different path from other black songwriters. Although all-black reviews, beginning with Sissle and Blake's Shuffle Along, were popular and influential, they were marginalized. The music industry was segregated, either as a matter of law, or marketing strategy, or custom. Broadway happily assimilated the musical advances of the all-black reviews (Gershwin, for instance, turned the catchy rhythm of “I'm Just Wild about Harry” into “Love Is Sweeping the Country”), but African American musicians like W. C. Handy, Eubie Blake, Will Vodery, and William Grant Still were kept at a remove from the commercial machinery that turned Broadway melodies into money-making hits. Even at the Cotton Club, where performers were black but the audience was white, except for a few seats in the back reserved for black celebrities, white composers and lyricists like Jimmy McHugh, Harold Arlen, and Dorothy Fields wrote “black” songs. As the film Black and Tan Fantasy shows, the Ellington Orchestra provided music for dance numbers, but not songs.

  Ellington and Mills sized up this situation early and gave popular song a specific economic function in relation to a broader marketing strategy designed to set Ellington apart from the competition and to appeal to white listeners as well as black. In his 1933 advertising manual11 Mills instructed his agents not to “treat Duke Ellington as just another jazz bandleader…. Ellington's genius as a composer, arranger and musician has won him the respect and admiration of such authorities as Percy Grainger…Leopold Stokowski…Paul Whiteman…and many others.” As a “great artist” and “musical genius” Ellington recorded for the prestigious mass-market Victor label, not for labels aimed only at the “race” market. The songs, published as sheet music, aimed for the wide—that is, white—audience. The lyrics of “Sophisticated Lady,” “Solitude,” and “In a Sentimental Mood” were dreamy, romantic, and racially nonspecific. The sophisticated lady portrayed on the cover of the original sheet music could be white. Ellington and Mills tailored the songs for general use. Their unmarked racial character allowed them to cross over to romantically erotic territory not usually open to black male vocalists until the arrival of Billy Eckstine and Nat “King” Cole. Not surprisingly, “Solitude” became a big national hit for Benny Goodman, not Ellington. American dance halls, like its churches, would remain segregated either by law or custom for most of Ellington's life.

  As a reproof to Wilder's dismissive assessment of Ellington's song-writing, Gary Giddins pointed out that though Ellington only composed one-twelfth the number of songs written by Jerome Kern, they produced an equal number of “standards.” Here is his list of Ellington “standards”:12

  All Too Soon

  Azure

  Caravan (by Juan Tizol)

  Come Sunday

  Do Nothing Till You Hear from Me

  Don't Get around Much Anymore

  I Didn't Know About You

  I Got It Bad and That Ain't Good

  I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart

  I'm Beginning to See the Light

  I'm Just a Lucky So-and-so

  In a Mellotone

  In a Sentimental Mood

  Jump for Joy

  Lost in Meditation

  Prelude to a Kiss

  Rocks in My Bed

  Satin Doll

  Solitude

  Sophisticated Lady

  But wait, there are more (if we add some Strayhorn and Tizol tunes). Here are additional songs on Ella's recording:

  Bli-Blip

  Chelsea Bridge (Strayhorn)

  Day Dream (Strayhorn)

  Drop Me Off in Harlem

  Everything But You

  I Ain't Got Nothin’ But the Blues

  I Didn't Know About You

  It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)

  Just A-Sittin’ and A-Rockin’ (Lee Gaines, Strayhorn)

  Just Squeeze Me (But Please Don't Tease Me)

  Love You Madly

  Lush Life (Strayhorn)

  Mood Indigo

  Perdido (Tizol)

  Rocks in My Bed

  Squatty Roo (Hodges)

  Take the “A” Train (Strayhorn)

  This list still does not include “Black Butterfly” or “It Shouldn't Happen to a Dream” or such later standards as “Heaven,” nor does it list many great instrumental melodies, such as “Black Beauty” and “Warm Valley,” which were never given lyrics. By any measure Ellington (& Co.) was a prodigious melodist.

  Because many of his early works either quoted existing melodies (“Black and Tan Fantasy,” “Creole Love Call”) or shared credits with Bubber Miley, it is hard to pinpoint the first Ellingtonian melody. “The Mooche,” recorded in October 1928 and for many years the band's theme song, presented Ellington's trademark combination of jungle beat and chromaticism. In the spring of 1928, Ellington recorded, as a piano solo, an equally individual yet completely different melody, “Black Beauty.” Although the authorship is also shared with Miley, its style is more in the character of other lyrical pieces written for, with, or by Ellington's “sweet” trumpeter Arthur Whetsol such as “Awful Sad,” “Take it Easy,” “Zonky Blues,” and “Misty Mornin‘.” All these melodies build a plaintive mood on gliding chromatic harmonies.

  With its first melodic interval, a downward leap of a minor seventh, “Black Beauty” announced Ellington's uninhibited approach to melody. The tune unfolds without repetition, leaping back up a major ninth to end its first phrase. Its melodic notes enrich the harmony and insinuate the blues. Although the main phrase of melody doesn't seem to allude to the blues, its two accidentals, the flatted third and flatted seventh, come from the blues scale. Ellington, though, avoided the stereotypical blues markers that Gershwin depended on; the blues feeling saturates “Black Beauty” without calling attention to itself.13

  Ellington must have been particularly proud of “Black Beauty.” It is featured in the central art deco dance sequence in the short film “Black and Tan,” and it remained in the band's book for years. “Awful Sad” (also from 1928), by contrast, is a nearly forgotten gem. Its even more modernistic harmonies have led some critics to suspect the influence of Bix Beiderbecke's impressionistic “In a Mist,”14 but as the title of James P. Johnson's tune “You've Got to Be Modernistic” implies, modernistic chords were very much a la mode. What was not in the air, at least not for another forty years, is the melodic line that, in its easy grace, sounds more like Brian Wilson's “God Only Knows” than like anything from the 1920s.

  “PRELUDE TO A KISS”

  With two of his earliest hit songs, “Mood Indigo” (1931, coauthored with Barney Bigard) and “Sophisticated Lady” (1933), Ellington already demonstrated a style of melodic writing that set his songs apart from those of contemporaries, even those as adventurous as Gershwin and Arlen. “Mood Indigo” begins with a typical device of indicating a “blue note” by wavering between the major and minor third of the key (A in the sheet music version). In the second phrase, though, to the words

  .

  You ain't been blue,

  Till you've had that mood indigo

  the tune seems to fly off the tonal rails as the harmony shifts to E major. This harmonic move is not as weird as it first looks, but its sinuous chromaticism sounds more like Bartók than Chopin.

  True to its title, “Sophisticated Lady” is even more up-to-date. The sheet music version, also in A, begins with an altered F dominant seventh chord with the fifth lowered so that all the notes are part of a whole-tone scale. The ultrasophisticated chord is an emblematic modernistic touch, the first of more to come. The tune begins by climbing up in thirds, F-A-C-E-G, to outline the dissonant interval of a minor ninth, from F to G; it then proceeds chromatically downward, with the harmony moving in parallel with the melody, in nonfunctional dominant seventh chords. Like the whole-tone scale, this device is conspicuously Debussyan. El
lington sustains the harmonic tension in the “bridge” of the song, later given the words

  Smoking, drinking,

  Never thinking

  Of tomorrow, nonchalant.

  The harmonic progression ( I-vi-ii-V) is an Alley cliché and might sound harmonically uninteresting if Ellington had not placed it in the key of G major, far distant in tonal terms from the A tonality of the other phrases. Even though the Broadway tunesmiths prided themselves on the harmonic deviousness of the “bridge” (Rodgers's “Have You Met Miss Jones?” is the classic example), few can match Ellington's nonchalant chromatic elegance here.

  Alec Wilder termed “Prelude to a Kiss” (1938) “another chromatic idea supported by very gratifying, satisfying harmony” and granted that “except for a totally instrumental release, it comes close to being a song. Even the lyrics by Irving Gordon (in lock step with Irving Mills) have a few moments, though the image of a ‘flower crying for the dew’ somehow fails.”15 The tune appeared almost simultaneously as both an instrumental and a vocal recording (August 8, 1938, for the instrumental, August 24 for the vocal by Mary McHugh, accompanied by Johnny Hodges and His Orchestra).16

  “Prelude to a Kiss” is a thirty-two-bar AABA song. Although this format is typical, by Alley standards the melody of “Prelude to a Kiss” is indecently chromatic. Its sensuous chromatic descent recalls erotic arias like the “Habanera” from Carmen or “Mon Coeur s'ouvre à ta voix” from Samson et Dalila. While the two French examples begin on the tonic and outline the tonic triad clearly, Ellington's melody starts on the dissonant seventh degree of the tonic C major scale and does not settle down tonally for eight bars, where it comes to rest not on the tonic C but on an A, the “added six” floating above the dominant. Ellington goes even further at the bridge, belying the lyrics (“Though it's just a simple melody”) with a jump into a distant key (E major) and approaching every note in that key with a half-step chromatic “neighbor tone.” The interval of the half step, the building block of the chromatic scale, becomes a subliminal melodic motive, or what Schoenberg might term a Grundgestalt, a basic shape. The downward curve of D#-C#-B-A-C (which then resolves up to C#) is so devious that even Ella Fitzgerald (or whoever copied the music for her) felt the need to “correct” it, making that low C a C#. Ellington here turned the pitch C, which should be the most consonant note, into the strongest dissonance, a diminished ninth that resolves upward to a slightly milder dissonance (major ninth) rather than downward to an octave.