by David Schiff
The updated Ellington sound arrived, like a comet, in the unlikely guise of a nineteen-year-old composition, “Diminuendo in Blue and Crescendo in Blue,” first recorded in 1937. The two sections were originally connected by an Ellington piano solo, but as early as 1951 Paul Gonsalves took over the moment with what became known as the “wailing interval.” The live recording from the Newport festival remains one of the most soul-stirring moments in jazz history. John Fass Morton astutely notes that the performance broke down the stylistic barrier between jazz and rhythm and blues: Gonsalves played a honking R&B sax.22 The performance made a subtler point as well: it demonstrated that Ellington's music transcended the pigeonhole periodization of so-called jazz history. “Diminuendo and Crescendo” was not a relic of the swing era; it was the most contemporary-sounding piece of the festival.
The explosive appearance of the new Ellington at Newport on July 7, 1956, came to be associated with a photograph that appeared on the live recording. George Avakian described the historical moment in Paul Gonsalves's twenty-seven-chorus solo in “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue”: “At about his seventh chorus, the tension, which had been building both onstage and in the audience since Duke kicked off the piece, suddenly broke. A platinum-blond girl in a black dress began dancing in one of the boxes (the last place you'd expect that at Newport!) and a moment later somebody else started in another part of the audience. Large sections of the crowd had already been on their feet; now their cheering was doubled and redoubled as the interreacting stimulus of a rocking performance and crowd response heightened the excitement.”23 The blond in question was, as John Fass Morton discovered, Elaine Anderson, whose life as a dancer, starlet, and jazz enthusiast had prepared her for her iconic close-up. Symbolically, though, we might name her Desdemona.
The 1950s also witnessed a boom in Shakespeare festivals. The Stratford (Ontario) Shakespeare Festival, directed by Tyrone Guthrie, began in 1953. Joseph Papp founded the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1954, and the American Shakespeare Festival opened in Stratford, Connecticut, in 1955. In the United States the Bard served as an antidote to anticommunist cultural pressures. Joseph Papp, once a Communist Party member, first hatched the idea of presenting Shakespeare without an admission charge in 1953; his plans evolved into Shakespeare in the Park while he was tailed by the FBI and ordered to testify before HUAC. When Papp was subpoenaed by the HUAC in 1958 he was asked whether he injected Communist philosophy into his Shakespeare productions. Papp responded, “Sir, the plays we do are Shakespeare's plays. Shakespeare said: ‘To thine own self be true,’ and various other lines from Shakespeare can hardly be said to be ‘subversive’ or of ‘influencing minds.’ I cannot control the writings of Shakespeare. He wrote five hundred years ago. I am in no position in any plays where I work to influence what the final product will be, except artistically and except in terms of my job as a producer.”24
By linking Shakespeare's uncontroversial standing and his own prerogatives as an artist Papp demonstrated the way Shakespeare could serve as a shield for political protest in the 1950s, whether at Shakespeare in the Park, or in Such Sweet Thunder or West Side Story. Without changing a word of the text Papp gave Shakespeare's plays a ripped-from-the-headlines buzz a decade before Jan Kott's book Shakespeare Our Contemporary appeared. He sought “blood-and guts actors” and ethnically diverse casts.25 His American actors spoke in their own voices rather than affecting British speech and worked in the visceral “Method” style familiar from the film performances of Marlon Brando and James Dean. Among them were Roscoe Lee Browne, Colleen Dewhurst, James Earl Jones, and George C. Scott. They made Shakespeare sound as relevant to the 1950s as Clifford Odets had been to the ‘30s.
The time seemed ripe for celebrating the connection between jazz and the Bard. On his Omnibus show “The World of Jazz,” which aired on October 16, 1955, Leonard Bernstein (who shared Papp's left-wing background) demonstrated that the blues was a poetic form by singing a blues to lines from Macbeth:
I will not be afraid of death and bane
Till Birnam forest come to Dunsinane.
Less than a fortnight after its Newport “rebirth” the Ellington Orchestra played two concerts for the Shakespearean Festival in Stratford, Ontario, along with Dave Brubeck, the Modern Jazz Quartet, and the Art Tatum Trio. According to David Hajdu's detailed account the festival had hoped for a major new work from Ellington, but not surprisingly he arrived with the same program he had played at Newport. After the Stratford performances two members of the festival staff, Louis Applebaum and Barbara Reed, asked Ellington to compose something unusual and Shakespearean for Stratford. Ellington proposed the suite form, and, according to Hajdu, “Strayhorn took it on excitedly, glowing to his friends about having an Ellington Orchestra project geared especially to him.” Strayhorn's knowledge of the Bard had already earned him the nickname “Shakespeare.”26
Both Ellington and Strayhorn brushed up their Shakespeare (as Cole Porter had recently advised in Kiss Me, Kate), but their calendar was full of other projects, particularly A Drum Is a Woman, a fanciful jazz history conceived for television. Two of Strayhorn's movements, “The Star-Crossed Lovers” and “Half the Fun,” were retitled versions of preexisting songs (“Pretty Girl” and “Lately”). Ellington's “Circle of Fourths” had already been recorded (on January 29, 1957) without any Shakespearean connection. Ellington composed “Sonnet to Hank Cinq” between sets at Birdland, where the band played from April 18 to May 1. The band recorded the new suite for Columbia in three sessions before the Town Hall premiere on Sunday, April 28:
April 15: “Sonnet for Caesar,” “Sonnet in Search of a Moor,” “Madness in Great Ones,” “Sonnet for Sister Kate”
April 24: “Up and Down, Up and Down,” “Such Sweet Thunder,” “Lady Mac”
May 3: “The Star-Crossed Lovers,” “Madness in Great Ones,” “Sonnet to Hank Cinq,” “The Telecasters,” “Circle of Fourths,” “Half the Fun”
According to the producer, Irving Townsend, many of the movements were recorded under temporary titles (“Cleo,” “Ham,” “Puck”); Townsend claimed that he had found the title “Such Sweet Thunder” in Bartlett's Quotations.27 Although the original recording credited the music to Ellington and Strayhorn, it did not make the authorship of individual movements clear. According to Walter van de Leur, only the title track was cowritten, and even that one only slightly; he attributes three bars (73–75) to Strayhorn. “Up and Down, Up and Down” was entirely Strayhorn's work, as were “The Star-Crossed Lovers” and “Half the Fun.” Van de Leur credits Ellington with the remaining eight movements, but material in the Ellington Archive indicates that Clark Terry's extended solo in “Lady Mac” may also have been written by Strayhorn. Ellington and Strayhorn did not hear the entire suite in order until the Town Hall performance.
Here are the movements with the Shakespearean parallels as given on the original liner notes:
1. “Such Sweet Thunder” (Othello, though the words come from A Midsummer Night's Dream)
2. “Sonnet for Caesar” (Julius Caesar)
3. “Sonnet to Hank Cinq” (Henry V)
4. “Lady Mac” (Macbeth)
5. “Sonnet in Search of a Moor” (Othello again, but note the pun in the title)
6. “The Telecasters” (the Witches from Macbeth meet Iago from Othello)
7. “Up and Down, Up and Down (I Will Lead Them Up and Down),” originally titled “Puck” (A Midsummer Night's Dream)
8. “Sonnet for Sister Kate” (The Taming of the Shrew)
9. “The Star-Crossed Lovers” (Romeo and Juliet)
10. “Madness in Great Ones” (Hamlet; written comments in some of the parts imply that the band assumed that the piece was also a portrait of trumpeter Cat Anderson)
11. “Half the Fun” (Antony and Cleopatra)
12. “Circle of Fourths” (the four Shakespearean genres: tragedy, comedy, history, and sonnet)
However rushed its composition may have been, Such S
weet Thunder emerged as a richly varied yet coherent statement, at once a concept album and a showcase for the band.28 The suite astutely balanced genres and grooves. There are two contrasting solos for Hodges, three swinging numbers, a rockabilly waltz, three avant-garde compositions, and four sonnets, poems without words that follow the meter and structure of the Shakespearean sonnet: fourteen lines of ten syllables. (Critics have speculated without agreement about what particular sonnets Ellington might have had in mind.) The self-imposed rigor of these musical sonnets suggests an analogy to the strict formal constraints of the blues. The suite also gave virtually every member of the band a star turn. The soloists, by track, were
1. Ray Nance, trumpet; John Sanders, trombone;
2. Jimmy Hamilton, clarinet (in some of the parts this movement is titled “Hamson,” meaning “Hamilton sonnet”);
3. Britt Woodman, trombone;
4. Russell Procope, alto sax; Clark Terry, flügelhorn;
5. Jimmy Woode, bass;
6. Harry Carney, baritone sax;
7. A concerto grosso : Jimmy Hamilton, clarinet; Ray Nance, violin; Russell Procope, alto sax; Paul Gonsalves, tenor sax; Johnny Hodges, alto sax; John Sanders, trombone; and, explicitly as Puck, Clark Terry;
8. Quentin Jackson, trombone (he is often referred to in the score and parts by his nickname, “Butter”);
9. Johnny Hodges, alto sax (Hodges's parts are often labeled “Rab,” short for his nickname, “Rabbit”);
10. Cat Anderson, trumpet;
11. Johnny Hodges, alto sax;
12. Paul Gonsalves, tenor sax.
Ellington's approach to Shakespeare was radically revisionist. Irving Townsend wrote that Ellington's summaries of the plays and characters were unlike any he had heard before.29 The misreadings were deliberate; just as Papp was doing at Shakespeare in the Park, Ellington and Stray-horn presented a contemporary Shakespeare with no Elizabethan trappings. They made their stance clear in the very first bar when the trombones announce Othello's presence with a habanera-rock groove much closer to Fats Domino than John Dowland. Except for “The Star-Crossed Lovers,” a typical Hodges ballad, and “Circle of Fourths,” a romp based on the harmonic changes of “How High the Moon,” the movements were innovative even in relation to the Ellington and Stray-horn oeuvres. Strayhorn's “Up and Down, Up and Down” and Ellington's “Madness in Great Ones” pushed jazz far beyond its usual forms and harmonies, right to the brink of free jazz.
The music of the suite and Ellington's sparse comments about it nevertheless implied a bold political statement, a demonstration, by way of the Bard, of black power, a phrase first used in 1954 as the title of Richard Wright's nonfiction book about the emergence of Africa from colonialism. By composing a Shakespearean work for a Canadian festival Ellington was placing questions of black identity outside American history and geography, taking his case to the court of world opinion. The suite equated the idiom of jazz with the language of Shakespeare through the syllable-to-syllable equivalence of the four sonnets, and through an overarching theme of music as seductive communication in the stories Othello tells Desdemona or the trumpeted version of Puck's “Lord, what fools these mortals be.” (Through some glitch, Clark Terry's statement does not appear on the remastered release of the recording.) The suite also declared its equal standing with the Shakespearean canon by favoring composition over improvisation. Like a Shakespeare play, or like a symphony, Such Sweet Thunder is a text to be performed come scritto. Ellington made the comparison explicit in his program note for the Stratford premiere: “Anyone who listens to a beautifully performed symphony for the first time gains something from it. The next time he hears it, he gains more; when he hears the symphony for the hundredth time, he is benefited to the hundredth power. So it is with Shakespeare. The spectator can't get it all the first time; repeated viewings multiply the satisfaction. There is a perfect parallel with jazz, where repeated listening makes for enjoyment.”30
Once they had leveled the playing field with the Bard (and Beethoven), Ellington and Strayhorn foregrounded black sexuality in the characters of Othello and Cleopatra, but also in Lady Macbeth, Henry V (alias Hank Cinq), “Sister” Kate, Puck, and Hamlet, all of whom speak in the language of the blues. The title track and “Half the Fun” portray cross-race relationships, but not as a pas de deux. The music speaks to the white Other, not for it. The two Othello movements address Desdemona but do not represent her except as the implied listener; the title “Half the Fun” and Strayhorn's exotically static music indicate that the movement portrays Cleopatra but not Antony. The two movements share a habanera rhythm, which, thanks to Carmen, serves as a musical metaphor for difference and sexuality, but Ellington and Stray-horn have reversed the usual hierarchy of difference, reversing roles, with two African characters telling their stories to silent, passive European partners. Black speaking to white, Africa speaking to Europe, jazz speaking to Shakespeare, the music presents half of the story—the half we haven't heard before.
All but three of the movements are monologues, soliloquies. “The Star-Crossed Lovers,” of course, gives us a dialogue, though with casting that reminds us that Shakespeare's company, like the Ellington band, was all-male; in the liner notes Ellington says that Hodges's alto sax is Juliet and Gonsalves's tenor is Romeo (though I don't hear this in the music). “Up and Down, Up and Down” superimposes Puck's monologue on a babbling counterpoint of romantic confusion. The third exception to the rule, “The Telecasters,” may be an in-joke. Ellington said that the movement combined characters from two plays, the witches from Macbeth and Iago, portrayed by a trombone trio and Harry Carney, respectively. The witches, however, sound more like passing car horns, and Iago's tune is surprisingly lacking in any hint of malevolence, though his phrases are separated by suggestive silences. In addition to anchoring the band's sound with his baritone sax, Carney served as Ellington's driver; the rest of the band took the bus. I hear the movement as a double portrait of Ellington (Othello) and Carney (Iago) in transit between gigs, Carney at the wheel, Ellington in the passenger seat, composing in silence.31
Such Sweet Thunder demands close scrutiny. Let's examine it movement by movement.
“Such Sweet Thunder”
A blues in a Phrygian-tinted G, the title track wavers between minor and major. There are six choruses with a four-bar shout chorus (by Strayhorn) inserted between choruses three and four:
Chorus 1: The bass instruments lay down an altered habanera rhythm spiked by backbeats on the drums and R&B-style triplets on the piano. In the even-numbered bars the long-short rhythm of the habanera reverses to short-long, prolonging the already provocative A s.
Chorus 2: The three muted trumpets superimpose a wa-wa-ed, chromatic chord-melody on a restatement of Chorus 1.
Chorus 3: Saxes enter in a riff chorus in dissonant five-note harmonies over a walking bass.
Chorus 4: A call-and-response alternation of saxes and improvised trumpet solo by Nance. In the last two bars the trombones reprise the opening habanera figure.
Shout insert: Four bars tutti, fortissimo. (This may have been intended by Strayhorn as a conclusion, then inserted as a climactic interlude instead.)
Chorus 5: A composed legato trombone solo played against a swung version of the habanera rhythm in the saxes, all pianissimo. The last two bars quietly reprise the habanera idea, harmonized and played by the reeds.
Chorus 6: Repeat of Chorus 2, plus a fatal low F on the piano.
Othello is a play about race (“an old black ram is tupping your white ewe”) and about being and seeming. Othello seals his doom early by believing in the self-evident facts of his existence: “My parts, my title and my perfect soul, / Shall manifest me rightly.” Iago acts out the opposite principle: “I am not what I am.” Othello's tragic pride stems from a failure to understand that his noble character is as much a product of eloquence as is Iago's malignant fabrications; Othello's military and amatory success depends on the power of his discourse. When he says “R
ude am I in my speech,” he is deploying a classical tool of rhetoric, humilitas. Unlike Oedipus, Othello also falls because of racism. To the Venetians he is a hero one moment and a “black ram” the next. As a minority of one, he is particularly vulnerable to Iago, his white “manager”; they interlock in a fatal codependence:
Iago: I humbly do beseech you of your pardon, For too much loving you.
Othello: I am bound to thee forever.
Ellington's career depended on his own silken eloquence and on services rendered by a number of rough Iagos, but “Such Sweet Thunder” tells a different tale, a swerve signaled, as Brent Hayes Edwards points out, by the title, which links the music “with an entirely different moment from a different play.”32 Tragedy only enters with the last note, a concise fate-motive. The music inverts the play's poisonous hatred and instead limns Othello's “constant, noble, loving nature,” which inspires Desdemona's fierce love (“That I did love the Moor, to live with him, / My downright violence, and score of fortunes, / May trumpet to the world”) and Iago's equally fierce strangelove.
Shakespeare portrayed Othello in five acts; Ellington needed just six twelve-bar blues choruses. Each chorus gives us a significant part of the picture. Chorus one figures Othello's proud stride exotic background. Previsioning Isaac Hayes's funk groove for “Shaft,” Othello's rhythmic theme adds a kick of swagger to the usual habanera rhythm, but its connotations, like those of the other “topics” that Ellington employs, should not be reduced to a caption. Besides refashioning Othello in the image of Joe Louis or Sugar Ray Robinson, the rhythm reminds us of the meter of Shakespearean verse, thereby equating the temporal structures of the two art forms. Chorus two, with its echoes of jungle music, reveals the African inflections of Othello's voice with alternating G major and g minor chords. The chorus sounds the trumpets that Desdemona, defying difference, will echo in her proclamation of love. The sudden change of gait (from gutbucket habanera to walking bass) and timbre (from brass to reeds) in chorus three moves us from the public theater of the Venetian council chamber (act 1, scene 3) toward the private bedchamber (act 5, scene 2), a scenic jump cut that compresses the story almost as compactly as the three words “such sweet thunder.” The music now reveals the man behind the public mask. Much as Ellington was “Duke” to the public, “Edward” to friends and family, Othello's thunderous and sweet aspects may be the two sides of celebrity, or they may also refer to W. E. B. DuBois's famous definition of African American double consciousness, or “twoness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings.” Othello's strivings, though interrupted by the inserted shout phrase, do not sound disjunct. Ellington may be questioning DuBois's formulation, or affirming it by portraying an integral non-American African.
