by David Schiff
The central choruses present two aspects of Othello's private side, divided by a brief flare-up. Perhaps Ray Nance's seductive talking blues solo in chorus four is the Ellington/Othello known to a few intimates, while the almost whispered trombone solo of chorus five is the man known only to himself. Chorus six places the hero back on stage: The Moor of Venice, the Duke of Ellington.
“Sonnet for Caesar”
The first of the four sonnets is also the furthest from usual notions of jazz; its groove suggests a military dirge, a suggestion evocatively filled out by Sam Woodyard's percussion. Sketches indicate that Ellington first composed a tentative melody that established the rules for translating the sonnet form into music; each melodic phrase of two bars contains ten notes, the equivalent of the syllables in a line of iambic pentameter. The structure also mirrors the sonnet form:
Introduction: Four bars of piano, four bars of trombone chorale with drums.
Octave (two quatrains): Two statements of an eight-bar harmonic structure (articulated by chords in the trombones). The tonality hovers somewhere between D Lydian and B Dorian over a drone on B and F throughout. The clarinet melody is different in each quatrain, but the saxophones punctuate the ending of each line with a three-note “comma.”
Sextet (one quatrain and one couplet): In the first eight bars the texture thins to two lines (clarinet and sax), with sparse entries of the bass offering only a hint of harmonic framework. The trombones return for the couplet, suggesting at first a harmony of e minor. The second line of the couplet does not “rhyme” with the first but offers a surprising, discomforting contrast. The first couplet phrase is the melodic peak and harmonically the most conventionally structured progression of the work, but the second phrase clouds the certainty of the first with melodic chromaticism. The final cadence on a D chord in second inversion leaves us hanging.
Who is Caesar? He certainly would not be mistaken here for Othello. Ellington assigned the melody to his most classical-sounding player; Hamilton bends pitches to a blues inflection only once in the movement. The saxophones and trombones similarly play it straight. Commentators have guessed that Ellington was alluding either to the warning about the Ides of March or Mark Antony's oration, but the movement is neither ominous nor rabble-rousing. The music speaks to Caesar in a stately, proper language, only slightly tinged by the vernacular. Perhaps it is addressed to a president rather than an emperor. Townsend described the piece as “imperial,” a term also suited to much of the architecture of Washington, D.C. As of April 1957 President Dwight Eisenhower's support for civil rights was lukewarm and ambiguous, but the Republican Party was still the party of Lincoln. In his 1957 State of the Union address Eisenhower urged passage of a bill that would create a civil rights commission and strengthen the enforcement of voting rights. Eisenhower, however, was powerless to overcome the opposition of Southern Democrats in Congress. A much watered-down bill passed only on September 9, 1957, a week after Governor Faubus ordered the National Guard to block the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. In this context we might hear the calm, serious demeanor of “Sonnet for Caesar” as a legal brief addressed to the highest authority in the land, with no certain outcome.
“Sonnet to Hank Cinq”
Heard after “Sonnet for Caesar” this movement sounds like its negative image, an impetuous sonnet in black. The clarinet filigree of the introduction unleashes Jimmy Hamilton's wild and crazy side. The structure balances sonnet form against blues (in A):
Intro
Quatrain: Trombonist Britt Woodman plays four blustering ten-note phrases. The rhythm mimics the short-long alternations of iambic meter as a cross-rhythm to the walking pulse in the bass. The four lines correspond to the first two lines of a blues stanza. The expected third blues line, completing the thought, goes unspoken over a two-bar turnaround in double time.
Quatrain: Two lines for the solo trombone (eleven and ten notes, respectively) over the double-time groove, repeated by the section.
Quatrain: Repeat of the first quatrain in the original tempo.
Couplet: An out-of-time cadenza for Woodman, in two ten-note phrases, followed by a two-note “fatal” cadence.
Perhaps this sonnet is meant to show Caesar how a real leader would act, or to portray a less polite strategy for protest. Ellington wrote that “the changes in tempo have to do with the changes of pace and the map as a result of wars.” The two tempos conflate the two Hanks, the riotous Prince Hal and the slightly more measured Henry V. As he did in “Such Sweet Thunder,” Ellington upends Shakespeare's dramatic oppositions. Henry, Hal, and Hank are one and the same.
“Lady Mac”
Structure: A (twenty bars), A', A'', X (eight bars), B (sixteen bars) A''', B', X, A''''.
Listeners who might not have noticed Ellington's subversions get a wake-up call with this spiky gospel-inflected waltz in F, a weird sister to Kay Ballard's 1955 hit “Rock and Roll Waltz” and Brubeck's “It's a Raggy Waltz” of 1961. Ellington coyly explained the raucous mood by explaining that though Lady Macbeth “was a lady of noble birth, we suspect there was a little ragtime in her soul.” The portrait is more complicated than it appears to be at first. The first phrase (A), played by piano and repeated by saxes, is twenty bars long, stretched by a menacing descent in the bass line under a two-beat cross-rhythm in the melody. When the brass enter for a third statement of the phrase the violence escalates and is then developed in a new eight-bar riff theme (X). Russell Procope defuses the tension in a sweet-toned sixteen-bar solo that acts formally like a bridge (B). Clark Terry seems to take up where Procope leaves off, but his solo covers both the twenty-bar phrase structure of A and sixteen bars of B and takes the music into a post-bop sound world far from its raggy roots. X returns followed by the most clangorous statement of A—and another fate motive.
Ellington's refashioning of Shakespeare's prime villainess as a spunky sister takes black power over a sexual divide. Without pushing things too far, I might suggest that the sequence from Procope's sax to Terry's flügelhorn recalls Lady Macbeth's moment of gender-bending:
Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood;
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
The effect and it! Come to my woman's breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature's mischief!
If we recall this reference “Lady Mac” further intensifies the political stance of the two previous sonnets.
“Sonnet in Search of a Moor”
Ellington pointed out the pun in the title (a Moor = amour). The sonnet returns to the g minor tonality of “Such Sweet Thunder” but strips it of its modal exoticism. Ellington sets the mood with a tinkling piano solo. The sonnet proper is a plucked bass solo (Jimmy Woode) accompanied by three clarinets (Hamilton, Procope, Carney). It follows the same rules as the previous sonnets but feels more like a lightly swung pop tune:
Octet: Eight ten-note lines
Quatrain: Four ten-note lines, beginning like a restatement of the octet
Couplet: A ten-note line followed by a nine-note line; the piano adds the missing note
The music shows Ellington or Othello relaxing at home and far less complicated or exotic or scary or Other than you might have expected.
“The Telecasters”
Ellington said that this movement brought together the three witches from Macbeth with Iago, but see above (p. 175) for my quite different reading. The mood and texture relate closely to the previous movement; again a low melody instrument plays against a trio (trombones here). The form also resembles a pop tune: Intro, A (eight bars), A, A (tutti), B (twelve bars), A, outro.
Puck: Up and down, up and down
I will lead them up and down.
I am fear'd in field and town.
Goblin, lead them up and down.
(A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act III, Scene II)
This movement was Strayhorn's one new contribution to the suite. It is probably the most complicated piece he ever wrote,33 and it may also be the greatest musical response to A Midsummer Night's Dream since Mendelssohn. In the play Puck, attempting to do the bidding of his master, Oberon, creates two mismatched couples, Helena and Lysander and Titania and Bottom (the weaver given the head of an ass by Puck's spell), and disrupts a third, Hermia and Demetrius, then undoes the damage by leading them all “up and down.” Instead of telling the story, Strayhorn's music, like Mendelssohn's, captures the mood of giddy moonlit confusion. Strayhorn divided the band into “characters” portrayed by groups of instruments. There are three instrumental couples: Jimmy Hamilton on clarinet and Ray Nance on violin; Russell Procope on alto and Paul Gonsalves on tenor; and Johnny Hodges on alto and John Sanders on valve trombone. There are also a reed trio (clarinet, alto, tenor) and a mostly brass quintet (two trumpets, two trombones, baritone sax—perhaps representing the mechanicals). The bass and drums keep things moving throughout; the pianist just listens. The only character we can recognize consistently is Puck, impersonated by Clark Terry, who increasingly takes charge of the action as the piece unfolds and concludes the music by “speaking” the line “Lord, what fools these mortals be.” Throughout the piece Puck's style is freer and bluesier than the other characters.
Because of its contrapuntal design “Up and Down” feels more like a baroque concerto grosso than a typical jazz chart. Contrapuntal sections alternate a ritornello in the form of an eight-bar straight-ahead jazz tune in F. The layout is as follows:
Bars 1-8: Main subject first played by clarinet, alto, and tenor, then by clarinet and violin in thirds over tonic (C) pedal in bass.
Bars 9-10 (letter A in score): Interjection by “rude” mechanicals (playing sophisticated harmony).
Bars 11-13: Double canon on main subject over dominant pedal in bass: clarinet and violin lead, alto and tenor follow down an octave one bar later; alto and trombone enter a bar later playing the inversion.
Bars 14-15: Second brass interjection.
Bars 16-24: Contrapuntal development of three couples over ostinato riffs in brass and bass; harmony wavers between A and G dominant thirteenths. Each couple now plays inverted (mirror) imitations rather than parallel thirds. At bar 24 the three couples play the “rude” figure, perhaps indicating even greater confusion.
Bars 25-29 (letter B in score): Double contrary motion between couples.
Bars 30-33: Puck leaps in, brings the couples together, and clarifies the harmony (C7).
Bars 34-41 (letter C in score): Eight-bar call-and-response tune in F played twice (abab). In the first four bars the trumpet follows, and in the last four it takes the lead. This is the first time in the piece where the bass articulates a clear chord progression.
Bars 42-53 (letter D in score): Call-and-response dialogue between each couple and ad lib trumpet, over C pedal in bass, two bars for each call-and-response.
Bars 54-61 (letter E in score): Contrapuntal imbroglio over a dominant pedal (G7) ostinato by the mechanicals. The sax and trombone couple, trombone now muted, play a new chromatic choralelike figure (Oberon?).
Bars 62-65: Puck and mechanicals recall the tune.
Bars 66-75 (letter F in score): Call-and-response between Puck and couples who now appear to imitate his calls.
Bars 76-81: Second imbroglio over ii-V alternation in bass. Clarinet and alto bring back mirror figure from bar 17; alto and mute trombone play the menacing “Oberon” theme; clarinet and violin play the squeaky riff from bar 7; Puck tries to reassert leadership with a rising diminished seventh arpeggio.
Bars 82-93 (letter G in score): Return of F major tune beginning with its second four-bar phrase then restating the original eight-bar form (bab) with Puck leading (reverse of first time).
Bars 94-101 (letter H in score): Recap of bars 1-8 (minus tenor sax in first four bars).
Bars 102-3: Final cadence, like a compressed version of the “rude figure.” Above the sustained F major 7 (or C major over F major) the trumpet “plays the quotation.”
The outline shows, I hope, how carefully Strayhorn shaped the music as a concerto for Puck, and why it looms much larger than its actual temporal dimension of just over three minutes. Strayhorn may well have thought of the piece as a self-portrait, with Ellington off in the background as Oberon. We can read the implications in several different ways. Strayhorn played a Puck-like role in relation to Ellington's music, which he was often handed in a state of disorder and asked to complete (as he did here with “Such Sweet Thunder”). As David Hajdu writes, Strayhorn's gift for order complemented Ellington's personality: “Ellington resisted completion…. ‘As long as something is unfinished,’ Ellington said, ‘there's always that little feeling of insecurity, and a feeling of insecurity is absolutely necessary unless you're so rich it doesn't matter.' With Strayhorn on hand, Ellington could keep that insecurity and gain the security of knowing that something he dropped could now not only be finished but possibly improved.”34
The confused couples and the band of mechanicals may both portray the band itself; some of its members barely spoke to each other for years, and many lived rough lives that comported oddly with their musical sophistication. Admired by all, Strayhorn may have served as a peacemaker, while Ellington preferred just to look the other way. Because Strayhorn often did not tour with the band but remained in New York he was in some way a breed apart, above the fray and the frayed nerves of constant touring. Strayhorn was also a breed apart sexually, as the band knew and accepted, and Ellington supported unconditionally. As George Greenlee, Strayhorn's close friend, told David Hajdu, “Duke didn't question his manliness.” Puck's quotation can be heard as a gay comment on the follies of the straight world, a reversal of hierarchies that perfectly matches the overturning of values already seen in “Such Sweet Thunder” and “Lady Mac.”
“Sonnet for Sister Kate”
Quentin “Butter” Jackson “speaks” the final sonnet on his muted trombone accompanied by a sax trio and rolled cymbals. The title conflates Shakespeare's shrewish Katherine with the shimmying Sister Kate of A. J. Piron's song, which Ellington had echoed in “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo.” If Lady Macbeth had some ragtime in her, Kate speaks with a deep knowledge of the blues. Whatever words we may imagine for this sonnet, they are probably not those of Katherine's apology, which Cole Porter had set to music in Kiss Me, Kate:
I am ashamed the women are so simple
To offer war where they should kneel for peace,
Or seek to rule, supremacy, and sway
When they are bound to serve, love and obey.
Ellington's sketch explicitly divides the piece into fourteen lines:
Introduction: Two bare phrases, hazily recalling the opening of “Such Sweet Thunder” on the piano, each with ten notes.
Octave: Eight ten- or eleven-note phrases over a choralelike harmonization wavering between C major and a minor in the saxes. The end of the octave is indicated by a repeated melodic couplet.
Quatrain: Four phrases in d minor.
Couplet: The highest note and the sassiest sound. Cadence (with four saxes) on an added sixth chord combining C major and a minor.
Outro: Piano.
The music sounds neither shrewish nor apologetic but more like an elegy for Joe Nanton, who made the “talking trombone” a signature sound for the band, and in particular the voice of its African heritage. In the eleventh phrase Jackson plays a figure with an echo of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” that Nanton played, in the same key, in Black, Brown and Beige.35
“The Star-Crossed Lovers”
According to David Hajdu, Ellin
gton suggested that Strayhorn base his Romeo and Juliet number on his song “Pretty Girl,” which Johnny Hodges had recorded a year earlier. Strayhorn was less than amused when he found himself sharing credit with Ellington in the published sheet music,36 though on the recording Ellington framed Strayhorn's song with two passionate cadenzas. The song is an AABA’ in D; on the recording it is played twice, with Gonsalves playing the melody on AA and Hodges returning for the rest. A brief chromatic interlude links the two iterations; the second statement is completely rescored with a prominent role for Carney in the bridge. The sensitively plush scoring throughout shows how Strayhorn served as a model for Gil Evans. The piece also exemplifies Strayhorn's harmonic and melodic finesse. It begins on a IV major 7 chord rather than the tonic, saving a more traditional harmonization for the last phrase. The harmony toys throughout with G, the raised fourth degree. Strayhorn also creates his personal version of the blue note by raising a pitch rather than lowering it; the melody moves to A and D as if it were tightening up the pitches of the D scale to a greater intensity. Hodges explores every corner of the tune's writhing dissonances.
