by David Schiff
Smith produced a different timbre for each of the song's three strains. By compressing the melody in the first part she saved the B for the opening of the second, tango-rhythm part, and to further dramatize that entrance she delayed it, singing “St. Louis Woman” right on the beat rather than as three upbeats. And then in the third section she makes her voice smile just by adding a touch of a growl. Armstrong responds to this phrase (“Got the St. Louis Blues jes blue as I can be”) with a melody so ripe for the plucking that Ellington stole it for the opening of his “Clarinet Lament.”
Billie Holiday recorded “St. Louis Blues” at an easy bounce tempo and sang it in C. Although this is lower than Smith's recording, it sounds higher because Holiday's style is microphone-based. She sings the notes in this relatively low register as if she were speaking them, without using the chest voice needed in acoustic singing. Her style sounds so relaxed that you don't notice that she has extended the range of the melody to a major ninth, from G to A. The faster tempo allows Holiday to sing two stanzas of the last section, first using a compressed melody similar to Bessie Smith's and then, following Benny Carter's clarinet solo, a more extroverted version as befits the unexpectedly hip lyrics (“I love that man like a school boy loves his pie, like a Kentucky colonel loves his mint and rye”). Holiday brings several new elements of ornamentation into play. In her singing, as in that of opera singers of the past, vibrato is an ornament with many different shapes (steady, increasing, decreasing, or added suddenly). It allows her to apply a wide spectrum of vocal colors, from the spoken to the instrumental, to just a few pitches. Another ornament is a muted sound caused by darkening the vowel, which makes the note less forward sounding, almost as if it were hummed. And finally there is rubato, a rhythmic ornament. In European music rubato, in which the tempo seems to slow down and speed up almost from note to note, is associated with performances of romantic piano music (Chopin) or opera. In a Puccini aria, for instance, the singer will often give every beat a different value, and the conductor has to be careful to line up the orchestral accompaniment with the unsteady pulse. In Holiday's performance the tempo stays constant but her melody lags behind much of the time, a more complicated, contrapuntal situation. Putting melody and harmony out of phase, this type of rubato is both a rhythmic and harmonic embellishment.
Historians of popular song credit the blend of blues and pop singing into a new style to Louis Armstrong and Bing Crosby, who recorded similar repertory in similar styles around 1930, thereby proving that the new style was not tied to race, region, or repertory. Crosby's singular recording with Ellington, an extended four-and-a-half-minute arrangement of “St. Louis Blues,” celebrates that synthesis. Crosby's performance combines aspects of the Bessie Smith recording with Louis Armstrong's uptempo rendition, recorded in 1929, but it also sounds recognizably like Crosby.
Ellington placed Crosby's vocal in dialogue with hot solos by Cootie Williams, Joe Nanton, and Johnny Hodges. The arrangement is in three parts, a slow section in B with Williams playing the first strain of Handy's song and Nanton growling; the second, tango, strain, a central section in F ushered in by modulating arpeggios from Ellington, where Crosby sings all three strains; and a fast concluding section back in B launched by Hodges with Crosby scat singing along. Ellington and Crosby turned Handy's tune into a stylistic panorama, a symphonic showcase for Crosby's three singing styles. Crosby moves easily between a fairly literal performance of the melody to much freer singing that is similar to the way Armstrong sang Hoagy Carmichael's “Rockin' Chair,” which he first recorded with the composer in 1930. Crosby leaps over into what was once jazz territory when he starts to scat. Armstrong had put scat singing on the map with his 1926 recording of “Heebie Jeebies” and expanded its expressive range in “Hotter Than That” and “West End Blues.” The technique made the voice an instrument, freeing it from the words to pursue instrumental-style melodic improvisation, a step beyond melodic embellishment. (Ellington first used the device as a compositional color for Adelaide Hall in “Creole Love Call” and “The Blues I Love to Sing” in 1927.)
Gary Giddins and Will Friedwald have claimed that Crosby and Armstrong were learning from each other. Crosby, who had sung with Paul Whiteman since 1926, assimilated Armstrong's rhythmic freedom and blues ornamentation so that he could improvise like a jazz instrumentalist. Armstrong entered the field of popular song with his 1928 recording of Fats Waller's “Ain't Misbehavin'.” In the early 1930s he covered most of the songs made popular by Guy Lombardo. These recordings demolished the line between sweet and hot styles. In “I'm Confessin' That I Love You” (1930) Armstrong begins with a laid-back Crosby-like vocal laced with a Hawaiian guitar accompaniment but then issues a shot across the bow with one of his hottest and highest trumpet solos to date. Through emulation and competition Armstrong and Crosby helped define a new fusion of pop material and jazz performance, which Will Friedwald nicely dubs the “jazz ballad.”26 In his arrangement of “St Louis Blues” Ellington just put the icing on the cake.
Ellington's resident master of the jazz ballad was not a singer but a saxophone player, Johnny Hodges. (To my taste, Ivie Anderson was more compelling on rhythm songs like “Don't Mean a Thing” and “Killin’ Myself” than on ballads.) Although Hodges had a wide stylistic range, including rough-and-tumble numbers like “Jeeps Blues” and “The Gal from Joe's,” he inspired Ellington and Strayhorn to compose a series of slow ballads that range in expression from the erotic (“Warm Valley”) to the tragic (“Blood Count”). Strayhorn's “Day Dream” was Hodges's signature tune, and there are four outstanding recordings:
1. With his own orchestra (actually an octet of Williams, Brown, Hodges, Carney, Ellington, Blanton, and Greer), on November 2, 1940
2. A live performance with the Ellington Orchestra at Carnegie Hall on January 3, 1943
3. With Ella Fitzgerald and the Ellington Orchestra on June 24, 1957 (recorded for the Songbook album)27
4. With the Ellington Orchestra on November 15 or 16, 1967, issued on And His Mother Called Him Bill; most of the other tracks were recorded in August 1967 after Strayhorn's death
In ballads Hodges assumed the role of a jazz diva; Charlie Parker dubbed him “Johnny Lily Pons Hodges.”28 Playing without any sign of emotion on his face, he would scour out every drop of feeling in a tune. Listeners who assume that jazz is about getting as far as possible from the original melody may be surprised by Hodges's respect for the composed line. A comparison of the 1940 and 1967 versions of “Day Dream” shows how decades of experience with the tune allowed him to play it even straighter.
I hear three components of Hodges's ballad style. First is his shaping of the phrases of the melody; second is the selective application of ornaments, which often became fixed additions to the tune; and third is the elaboration of connecting phrases, usually fast, fluttering, and spontaneous sounding. The ornaments Hodges added to a tune were fixed but never inert. He would often bend the second note of “Day Dream,” turning an octave into a blue note, but he would never do it the same way twice. Most of his ballad recordings are in the format AABABA, with the second half of the tune returning in a highly ornamented variation. Usually Hodges would save his “connecting” phrases for this section so that the listener could hear them retrospectively as a counterpoint to the original. Hodges uses vibrato and rubato in very similar ways. They seem ever-present in his playing but they actually come and go with unexpected results. On the 1967 recording, for instance, he makes the opening two notes of the song sound more soulful by playing them straighter than the sheet music. Just imagine what “Lily Pons Hodges” could have done with “Nessun dorma”—even though Puccini's melody sounds a tad cheesy next to Strayhorn's.
“U.M.M.G.”: THE ART OF THE JAZZ HEAD
If you drop by your local jazz club or tune into your local jazz station, if you're lucky enough to have one, the music you hear will most likely be improvised on the basis of the blues or some popular tune or on a distinctive subgenre o
f melody I'll call a jazz head. Where pop tunes were designed for the marketplace, jazz heads are esoteric. They have titles but not hooks or lyrics, unless someone adds them later. For the uninitiated the titles can seem as arcane as those for abstract paintings such as De Kooning's “Ruth's Zowie.” In form they may follow the blues format, or one of the pop outlines, or the composer's whim. Their raison d'être is provocation, laying down a challenge. They may just set a rhythmic impetus in motion, or plot out a harmonic conundrum. The rest is up to the performers. You hear the head once or twice and then it disappears into the whirl of improvised solos, only to return twenty minutes later to put the cat back in the bag.
Ellington's “C Jam Blues” is the platonic model of the jazz head, as minimal as a composition can be. First recorded as “C Blues” by Barney Bigard and His Orchestra (with Strayhorn at the piano) in September 1941, and soon rearranged as a three-minute big band composition by Strayhorn, recorded by the Ellington Orchestra as “C Jam Blues” in January 1942, it morphed into a vocal called “Duke's Place” in 1958 and has lived a successful triple life (as head, arrangement, and song) ever since as one of the most played tunes in the jazz repertory.29 It uses just two pitches, G and C, and a single simple riff played identically three times, marking the three phrases of the blues. The jazz repertory is full of riff tunes, like “Stompin' at the Savoy,” “Jumpin' at the Woodside,” “In a Mellotone,” and “So What,” but “C Jam Blues” is so stripped down that it's a wonder it ever got copyright protection. More than a riff, though, it is an elegantly mathematical demonstration of the blues essence:
Rhythm: One bar to establish the breath, one bar to establish the beat, one bar to announce African origins with a Charleston rhythm, and one bar of silence, to leave room for a response.
Pitch: Two pitches define the tonality. Each of three statements colors the pitches with a different harmony. The G appears first as the fifth of the tonic triad, then more dissonantly as the ninth of the subdominant, then even more dissonantly as the eleventh of the supertonic.
Form: One phrase three times tells a story. That's the blues boiled down to a Zen koan.
In blues heads like “Misterioso,” “Blue Monk,” and “Straight, No Chaser,” Thelonious Monk, Zen master of the jazz head, pushed the conceptual provocations of “C Jam Blues” even farther. The last of these could be the jazz version of Ives's Unanswered Question, though its first five notes seem to quote Till Eulenspiegel, also an apt comparison. It states this riff motive eleven times over twelve bars. The motive expands to ten notes or contracts to four, sprouting up in weedlike defiance of the bar lines, the chord changes, and even the tripartite phrase structure of the blues. As the riff bounces and bumps against the fixed matrix of the blues its pitches and rhythms are constantly reinflected, consonant here, dissonant there, on the beat or off the beat. It's a head that messes with your head.
“C Jam Blues” reduces the melodic content to a single interval, the perfect fourth. In “Misterioso” Monk similarly wrote a blues exclusively in sixths that amble up and down in nonstop, nonswinging even eighth notes. The sixths also outline a four-note rising-falling melodic motive ( D-E-F-E) that appears in subtle variations. These mutant restatements gain in intensity in the last four bars until the pattern finally breaks with five ascending notes in a row ending on the flat seven. The final sixth, C and A over a B bass, is the only syncopation (and only enriched harmony) in a piece whose mystery resides in the way it implies a jazz feel with rhythms and a groove that should produce only a geometric squareness. In twelve bars Monk lays out a conceptual parable about the most basic aspects of the blues.
If Monk ran with Ellington's minimalist side, Billy Strayhorn took his complexities up a notch or ten. As early as “Day Dream,” written in 1939 while he was living in Ellington's apartment and studying his scores,30 Strayhorn expanded the chromatic boundaries of the newly minted “Prelude to a Kiss” with an opening phrase that outlined an augmented octave and ended with an augmented triad and a bridge that used eleven of the twelve tones. The weird intervals nevertheless sound effortlessly romantic.
Listeners to NPR know the first eight notes of Strayhorn's “Rain Check” from the “All Things Considered” theme; they are also buried inside The Beatles’ “I Will.” It's not easy to write a tune that sounds like common property. What you can't hear in these near quotations is the way Strayhorn planted the seeds for the whole melody with a two-chord introductory fanfare. Where Ellington composed through montagelike contrast, Strayhorn constructed pieces through similarity, generating new-sounding episodes from unexpected aspects of an opening premise. In form the melody of “Rain Check” is not the expected AABA, with its sharp contrast of two ideas, but instead ABAC, the theatrical form rarely used in jazz heads, a double statement with different outcomes. The B phrase begins as if it were just repeating the opening (making us expect an AABA), then modulates surprisingly up a major third from F to A. The structure seems at once comfortably familiar and intriguingly eccentric; it forms a harmonic loop that a soloist will want to traverse over and over.
When I hear “U.M.M.G.” (1954) I get the impression that Strayhorn had been listening to Cole Porter's “All of You” (which had just debuted in Silk Stockings) and Brahms's Second Piano Concerto (specifically the consoling cello solo that opens the slow movement) and decided he could improve on both. The title refers to the Upper Manhattan Medical Group (run by Strayhorn's friend and Ellington's personal physician, Dr. Arthur Logan), but unlike Strayhorn's terminal medical ballad “Blood Count” (1967)—which, as Walter van de Leur writes, “conjures the devastating consequences of Strayhorn's progressing cancer”—“U.M.M.G.” is an uptempo celebration of life.31 Like “All of You,” “U.M.M.G.” hovers between major and minor, but at a riskier tonal altitude. Every stressed note in the melody sits “high in the chord,” to use the language of bebop. The very first note, B is an eleventh over an already dissonant F half-diminished seventh chord (a.k.a. the Tristan chord). The B resolves briefly then bounces up to a C, heard as the minor ninth over a B seventh chord. The first half of the opening phrase moves in small intervals like the Brahms theme, but its second half rockets upward in thirds from a low A to a high E When the phrase repeats (the song is an AABA) it shoots even higher to a G, so that the melody spans almost two octaves. While the bridge seems to relax the tension with a surprising move to F major in its first four bars, it ratchets up the tension with a sequence that transposes the pitches up a half step to a piercing climax on a D perched dissonantly atop an E
This melodic high-wire act seems to rely on the safety net of a predictable tonal progression until we notice that the opening phrase never settles on a tonic chord. Here Strayhorn employed a Brahmsian technique that Schoenberg dubbed “schwebende Tonalität,” or “suspended harmony.” The tonal balance wavers between D major and G major without settling on either one until the end, when it just melts into D. If you played the melody slowly and began with a consonant G major triad instead of that provocative Tristan chord, the tune would sound dolefully Brahmsian. Counterintuitively, though, Strayhorn propelled this weighty harmonic material with a suave, nonchalant Porteresque bounce. Such nonchalance is no easier to achieve on Sugar Hill than at the Waldorf.
THE ART OF THE SUFERTUNE: IMPROVISED MELODIES
For many listeners the ne plus ultra of jazz is not Ellington's “Ko-Ko,” as ultra as that work may be, but the unrelated Charlie Parker composition “Koko,” which is erected on the chord changes of “Cherokee” (a sturdy pop tune by the non-Cherokee English band leader Ray Noble.) Parker's “Koko” can serve us here as an exemplary “supermelody,” a neologism I define in three ways. First a supermelody is composed on top of a preexisting melody. Second, it sounds not like a substitute melody but like melody raised to a higher power. Third, like Superman, a supermelody flies. It may be preplanned, and its components may be a set of preexisting melodic figures and phrases, but the actual assemblage happens as it is performed.
