The Ellington Century
Page 30
“The Blues” contrasts sharply in mood and style with “Emancipation Celebration”, a contrast complicated by the fact that, as the words tell us, much of “The Blues” “ain't the blues”. The chronological sequence of “Emancipation” and “The Blues” is historically accurate, at least in terms of current research, yet it is emotionally perplexing: if people were free, why were they feeling so sad? Again Ellington's words, seemingly at odds with the music, contained a veiled message. He announced that the “third part of Brown, which we call ‘Mauve,’ is ‘The Blues,’ after the many love triangles that developed in the life of the great Negro heroes of the Spanish-American War”. Nothing in the music recalls the battle of San Juan Hill, but the idea that the blues was created by returning heroes rather than marginalized rural folk musicians was a cunning bit of anti-Hammond historical revisionism. (John Hammond predictably bemoaned that Ellington “saw fit to tamper with the blues.”)28 In these terse comments Ellington reminded his wartime audience of the failure of America to recognize and honor black participation in all of its past wars, and he was also giving notice that no one would define the blues for him. If anyone in the audience expected a country blues à la Lead Belly or a “territory” blues in the style of Jimmy Rushing they were in for a rude surprise; the opening of “Mauve” sounds more like Berg than Basie.
In Stomping the Blues Albert Murray distinguishes between “the blues as such, the feeling inside your head that tries to make you wish that you were dead or had never been born”, and the “blues as music”, which “by its very nature and function is nothing if not a form of diversion. With all its preoccupation with the most disturbing aspects of life, it is something contrived specifically to be performed as entertainment”. Ellington announced the ineffable mystery of his subject with a series of cautionary negations:
The Blues…
The Blues ain't
Then Blues ain't nothing…
Ain't nothin' like nothin' I know.
“Know” even sounds like “no”. The blues is not knowable, but it can be negated, through the blues. Or not.
Ellington brandished his contrarian intentions with the very opening of “The Blues”, a modernistic brass fanfare followed by a counterintuitive blues motive, not the expected “blue” minor third but an ambiguous descending major third, heard first in whole-tone harmonies, which the singer, Betty Roché, revealed as a diminished fourth, E to B resolving to C—a potently dissonant melodic interval but not at all bluesy. The first two stanzas are sung virtually without a sense of beat, like a recitative. There is no suggestion of a blues scale until a G appears in the sixteenth bar. Just at the point when listeners may have decided that this blues “ain't the blues”, Ben Webster leapt in (with the rhythm section) as if to prove otherwise. He played a seventeen-bar solo, lifted from “Jump for Joy”, with a blues inflection, but the harmonic structure drifts impressionistically between the keys of c minor and D rather than following the usual blues pattern. Once again, the blues ain't. The blues “as music” (and in D) only arrives at bar 52, as a call-and-response between pitch-bending trombones and growling trumpets (a passage Ellington soon expanded into a stand-alone piece, “Carnegie Blues”). Just as the music established its groove and seemed to prepare the singer to tell us how her baby left her, Webster intervened again with a short cadenza. Roché then reentered, but with an eight-bar phrase that led back, in retrograde, to the opening negations:
The Blues ain't nothin'
The Blues ain't
The Blues.
The overall form resembles a Bartókian arch, symmetrical but foreshortened:
Recitative (two stanzas, each moving from c minor to f minor)
Webster solo
Carnegie blues
Webster solo
Recitative (moving from D to c minor)
(“Emancipation Celebration”, perhaps less casual than it first appears, has a similar structure.)
In Stomping the Blues Murray places the “blues as music” in a double relationship, one historical, the other spiritual. On one side the blues is a response to suffering inflicted by history, but blues also represents one side of a dualism that Murray frames in terms of the Saturday Night Function and the Sunday Morning Service. These two opposites are so mutually dependent that the boundaries can get blurred and contested. Murray, for instance, praises James Brown for performing “as if he were a spellbinding Evangelical preacher” but criticizes the way Ray Charles “bootlegged” sacred music into profane: “the assumption seems to be that sacrilege can be nullified by sentimentality.”29 By composing “The Blues” as a monumental concert aria, Ellington counterposed it to “Come Sunday” and again raised the question of whether this opposition signified progression or codependence. Ellington understood the complex cultural tensions presented by the opposition of spiritual and blues. When he recorded Black, Brown and Beige with Mahalia Jackson in 1958, he omitted “The Blues” along with all the music for Beige, which he replaced with a new setting of Psalm 23.
Beige
Ever since the premiere of Black, Brown and Beige, Beige has been the most problematic part of the triptych. While Ellington continued to program parts of Black and Brown for the rest of his career, Beige mainly lived on as a movement titled “Sugar Hill Penthouse”. In the 1965 studio recording Ellington revived the opening sections of Beige, but he never performed or recorded its dramatic ending. Walter van de Leur has conjectured that Ellington simply ran out of time and brought Strayhorn in to help complete the movement; otherwise the music of Black, Brown and Beige is all by Ellington. Strayhorn composed a long cadenza for Ben Webster, accompanied by a series of chords based on earlier parts of the suite, and interpolated his own older composition, “Symphonette-Rhythmique, which now became “Sugar Hill Penthouse”. When Ellington later performed and recorded a piece by that name, however, it was sometimes Strayhorn's composition and at other times was just its last section, which uses the same melody that Ellington used for a waltz in the earlier part of Beige. It is not clear if this phrase, with its distinctive scoring for clarinets and saxes that reminded many critics of Glenn Miller, was collaborative; the Ellington archive contains a sketch for this passage in Ellington's hand.
As presented in January 1943, however, Beige was a sizable movement in many contrasting sections:
1. Modernistic, dissonant, fast introduction
2. Ragtime-style piano solo that Ellington later called “Bitch's Ball”
3. Waltz
4. Interjection of a trumpet solo
5. Waltz continued
6. Saxophone cadenza
7. Short piano solo, leading to…
8. “Symphonette”, a.k.a. “Sugar Hill Penthouse”, ending with reed chorus
9. Coda: Fanfares, reprise of “Come Sunday”, portentous piano solo, Meistersinger-style thematic summation, like an anthem; up-tempo codetta
Ellington never stated his self-critical thoughts about Beige; its performance history, however, suggests that he was happier with Stray-horn's contributions than his own. “Sugar Hill Penthouse” soon entered the band's repertory. The poem reveals that Ellington had set himself a difficult task, contrasting the fake view of Harlem with the real one. The opening sections of Beige show that, as we might expect, Ellington had no problem evoking the 1920s fantasy Harlem of “Mongrel Manhattan”. He had been there, and his music, particularly in its jungle substyle, had defined the era. If we compare the music of Black, Brown and Beige with that of Symphony in Black, however, we can see how far Ellington had evolved in musical technique and in historical awareness. The score for the short film, a mix of new music and old, illustrated scenes from black life that were clichés of 1920s theater and nightclubs—a little bit of Show Boat, a little Cotton Club, a little Green Pastures. The stylized visual language of much of the movie treated black bodies as aesthetic objects, African sculptures, with one-dimensional emotions: sorrow, jealousy, revelry. The “Laborers” section just revived the imagery of “
Old Man River”. The song of sorrow featured a preacher with arms stretched upward like De Lawd in Green Pastures. The central “Jealousy” section, known for its performance by Billie Holiday, linked the blues in a stereotyped way to a fallen woman, an association Ellington excoriated in Porgy and Bess.
Much of the music in Beige departed from the two contrasting voices—one satiric, one prophetic—found in the poem, suggesting that Ellington was pursuing a different musical program. In his memoirs Mercer Ellington suggested an angle in the music not present in the poem: “It also embodied a criticism of his own race and its caste system.”30 Roi Ottley spelled out that system in a chapter titled “The Café-au-Lait Society” in New World a-Comin', which also appeared in 1943: “Social distinctions developed among Negroes as early as slavery. At first, house servants drew the line against field-hands; later the mark of distinction was the amount of aristocratic ‘white’ blood one possessed, and finally the length of time one was freed.”31 In Harlem the light-skinned elite lived in the elegant apartment buildings on Sugar Hill, “the most modern and beautiful residential area for Negroes in Black America.”32 Ottley, though, further distinguished between the older Negro elite, professionals who moved in their own segregated world, and the “café society” of Harlem's artists and intellectuals who might be heard discussing “the relative merits of Count Basie and Benny Goodman, or the possible musical importance of Duke Ellington's ‘Concerto for Cootie.’”33
We may hear Ellington's tone parallels for both of these “beige” elites in the two extended lyrical sections of Beige, the waltz and “Sugar Hill Penthouse”. These sections may also represent two different generations. Though Ellington's parents were middle class, they emulated the tastes and decorum of the black aristocracy. They lived in Northwest Washington, whose residents, according to Rex Stewart, “were the lighter complexioned people with the better-type jobs, such as schoolteachers, postmen, clerks or in government service.”34 We can hear the waltz as an affectionate portrait of his parents, both his father, who “raised his family as though he were a millionaire” and was, Ellington recalled, “ a great dancer (ballroom that is), a connoisseur of vintages, and unsurpassed at creating an aura of conviviality”,35 and his mother, whom he thought of as “the most beautiful mother in the world.”36 Ellington viewed their social aspirations in a kindly manner; after all, they were the source of his own nobility. The waltz, an extended lyrical “concerto” for trumpeter Harold Baker, gradually loses its inhibitions and reveals a “ragtime” subtext that Ellington deployed more overtly later in the waltz depicting Lady Macbeth. His parents also must have had a less inhibited, down-home side.
If his parents aspired to the life of the African American elite, Billy Strayhorn, who was around the same age as Ellington's son, Mercer, represented the other facet of the upper crust, its café society. Unlike Daisy Ellington, Billy Strayhorn was by no means beige in complexion, nor was he conventional in his lifestyle. A free spirit, not deterred by his short stature, dark skin, or homosexuality, he was as at home in Paris or Hollywood as he was in Harlem. His music demonstrated an equal disregard for convention; his “Dirge”, which was performed at Carnegie Hall after the intermission, barely seemed like jazz at all. Barry Ulanov wrote that it “stumped the audience and sounded more like Milhaud and the latter-day Stravinsky than Ellington”, but the “Stomp” that followed, more familiar as “Johnny Come Lately”, was as swinging a number as could be imagined. Strayhorn could be seen as an embodiment of the freedom that Boola had first perceived as a possibility hundreds of years before. What better way to illustrate that freedom than through Strayhorn's own music? Ellington may have incorporated “Symphonette” into Beige not as an act of last-minute bricolage but as a deliberate tribute. Strayhorn, after all, would also contribute significantly to the Perfume Suite and the Deep South Suite without the impetus of a looming deadline.
Emblems of a past and future unfettered by prejudice, Ellington's parents and Billy Strayhorn represented aspects of the unseen Harlem that Ellington hoped would dislodge the old stereotypes. But in giving so much of Beige over to these intimate portraits, Ellington had strayed far from the much more public and political agenda he outlined in the poem, and when the more rhetorical closing section of Beige finally arrived, it sounded tacked on. Rather than rewrite the movement, however, Ellington soon composed two works that stayed focused on its political goals and also worked out some unresolved musical problems. We can hear Ellington's critique of Beige in two of its sequels, New World A-Comin' and Harlem.
When the Ellington Orchestra returned to Carnegie Hall in December 1943 it did not reprise any of Black, Brown and Beige but instead presented the premiere of New World A-Comin', which Graham Lock aptly terms its “conceptual successor, the evocation of the visionary future”. The new work, a compact piano concerto in one movement, took its title from Roi Ottley's book about Harlem, which had appeared in August 1943 and would win the Peabody Award for literature. Born in Harlem, Ottley had a successful career as an athlete and journalist, eventually becoming a regular columnist for the Chicago Tribune. His charmingly knowledgeable book was a far more sophisticated work of literature than Ellington's poem and a more nuanced history; it might be considered an uptown equivalent of Frederick Lewis Allen's Only Yesterday, a masterfully written account of New York in the roaring 1920s. Where Allen, writing in 1931, described a recent past that suddenly seemed remote, Ottley's book looked toward a future: “The Negro may not be able to predict the future, but he knows what he wants—liberty and peace, and an enriched life, free of want, oppression, violence and proscription.”37
Ottley's words were not hollow rhetoric. His book contained a specific agenda, the “Eight Point Program” that black leaders had presented to the President demanding the end to all laws that distinguished citizens on the basis of color, the guarantee of civil liberties, abolition of the poll tax, an end to lynching, and “representation for Negroes on all missions, political and technical, which will be sent to the peace conference”. Ottley also documented how Nazi and Japanese agents were already exploiting widespread if not majority disaffection with the war in the black community. The war would only be won, Ottley argued, as a shared fight for American freedom: “This war, undeniably, belongs to the Negro as well as to the white man. To this extent, it may be called a ‘People's War’—for in spite of selfish interests a new world is a-coming with the sweep and fury of the Resurrection.38
Though it used Ottley's title, Ellington's composition surprisingly leapfrogged across the burning rhetoric of the present to the imagined future. Ellington was once again demonstrating musically the ideological point he had made in “Light”, that freedom had to be imagined in order to be realized. In sharp contrast to the militant fanfare of Black, the opening theme seems to sing Ottley's title with a comforting, almost nostalgic warmth. It represented, as Ellington said, a vision of the “beautiful things to come that have already been enjoyed”. Instead of mounting a fight for equality Ellington composed music for a time when that fight would be only a memory.
New World A-Comin' also fulfilled the transmuted operatic ambitions of Black, Brown and Beige. The one instrumental voice that had not come to the fore in Black and Brown was Ellington's own. He had reserved this personal statement for Beige, but it appeared half-formed in the piano solo, which Ellington later identified as “Bitch's Ball”, a piece he had written in 1914, and in the Gershwinesque cadenza that serves as a transition to the final section of the movement. Ellington would include piano solos similar to “Bitch's Ball” in the Perfume Suite (“Dancers in Love”) and the Deep South Suite (“There Was Nobody Looking”); in Beige, however, it seems all too short and unrelated to the extended waltz that follows. The modernistic cadenzas in Beige sound like vestiges of an anxious rivalry with Gershwin that went back at least as far as “Creole Rhapsody”. If the piano were to assume a leading role in Beige it would unavoidably risk a comparison with Rhapsody in Blue. In Beige, though, that
starring role emerged only tentatively; in New World A-Comin' it appears in terms that are so thoroughly Ellingtonian that further comparison to Gershwin is irrelevant. The piece is a free-flowing dialogue between a piano and orchestra equally steeped in the Ellington style; the orchestra does not oppose the soloist but amplifies its ideas.
Although it was composed in 1950 (aboard the Île de France on the way back from a European tour), Harlem (commissioned by the NBC Symphony and premiered at the Metropolitan Opera House) captured the mood and scope of Ottley's book even more powerfully than New World and can be heard as the ultimate realization of Beige. Ottley, whose parents emigrated to Harlem from Grenada, emphasized the diverse communities of Harlem in his provocatively titled chapter “How Colored Is Harlem?” In Beige, Ellington had shaped African American history so that it all seemed to lead to magenta-hazed Sugar Hill and its privileged inhabitants. That may have been his story, but it was only part of a far broader picture.
Harlem, we might say, turns time into space; it is geography rather than history, traversing neighborhoods populated by black, brown, and beige rather than moving from past to future. And yet, more successfully than any of Ellington's extended works, it tells a musical story, a transformation and reevaluation of the poetic “Beige”. The poem set out to contrast false and true views of Harlem. The music offers a different and inclusive vision, more parallel with Ottley's description: