by David Schiff
As Janna Tull Steed has written, the three Concerts of Sacred Music are best characterized as a continuously evolving work in progress.1 Only the Second Sacred Concert shares no significant material with other works. Ellington did not treat any of the concerts as a finished composition; the many performances that the band gave of them varied enormously in content and the order of numbers.2 I would suggest, though, that all the concerts were emanations, extensions, and developments of Black, Brown and Beige and that there were really five sacred concerts.
By my count the first Concert of Sacred Music was not a concert proper but a recording. In 1958 Ellington released an album titled Black, Brown and Beige that differed substantially from the original suite. Ellington omitted all of Brown, replaced Beige with a setting of the 23rd Psalm, and added a vocal version of “Come Sunday,” which was heard for the first time with lyrics. The ostensible reason for these changes was the presence of the great gospel singer Mahalia Jackson. For Jackson, as for many others in the black community, gospel and blues were inimical, and Ellington showed his respect for that view here. In doing so, though, he reshaped the earlier musical representation of African American history away from the complex interplay of work song, spiritual, blues, and jazz found in the original suite and toward a picture of ascending faith. The music and its story now found their goal in the church, not in a Sugar Hill penthouse.
Ellington never hid his religious feelings. He wore a gold cross around his neck at all times, he traveled with a well-thumbed Bible (his “little brown book,” to quote the Strayhorn song), and he carefully annotated copies of Forward Day by Day, a spiritual guide published by the Episcopal church.3 Yet Ellington's turn to the realm of gospel music in the late 1950s also reflected contemporary developments in black music and politics. Moving beyond church gospel music began to reinvigorate the wider cultural climate. In 1957 and 1958 Mahalia Jackson appeared at the Newport Jazz Festival. That same year Art Blakey's recording of Bobby Timmons's tune “Moanin'” became an anthem for a jazz style that earned the awkward name “funky hard bop regression” from its emphasis on both blues and gospel. The sound of gospel music was soon popularized in Charles Mingus's “Saturday Night Prayer Meeting” and Horace Silver's “Sister Sadie.” Critics pegged hard bop as a black reaction to the cool West Coast jazz of Jimmy Giuffre and Chet Baker, but, more than another perennial attempt to take jazz back from popular white imitators, hard bop mirrored a profound change within black culture that allowed artists to travel across the previously impermeable barrier between sacred and profane styles. Gospel singing, as performed by the Clara Ward Singers or James Cleveland, had become increasingly blues inflected; Sam Cooke and Ray Charles took the gospel style over into the realm of popular music. In 1961 Ellington's friend Langston Hughes brought gospel music successfully to Broadway with the show Black Nativity. With the formation of Dr. Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957, religious leaders had become the spearhead for the movement; musical developments quickly followed the new political alignment. In the civil rights struggle spirituals were reborn as freedom songs. At the March on Washington on August 28, 1963, the day Dr. King delivered his “I have a dream” speech, Mahalia Jackson sang, “I've been ‘buked and I've been scorned.” Five years earlier, though, when she recorded “Come Sunday” with its new lyrics, politics were already interlaced with theology:
Lord, dear Lord above,
God Almighty, God of Love,
Please look down and see my people through.
Ellington's next protosacred concert, in 1963, was My People, not a concert but a musical theater “spectacular” that was performed twice a day at the Century of Negro Progress Exposition in Chicago from August 16 to September 2, 1963, at the five-thousand-seat Arie Crown Theater. The exhibition celebrated the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation and was also exactly contemporary with the March on Washington, which demanded that the promise of emancipation finally be implemented. My People, which Ellington dedicated to Dr. King, remade Black, Brown and Beige as multimedia music theater; in addition to composing the music, Ellington directed, arranged the choreography, and even helped paint the set.4 My People could be termed Ellington's Gesamtkunstwerk.
Although Ellington downplayed the political aspect of the show, saying that the message was insinuated “here and there,”5 it amplified the political themes from the earlier versions of Black, Brown and Beige, most importantly the interdependence of faith and freedom.6 The show opened as if in church with three new gospel-style numbers, “Ain't But the One,” “Will You Be There?” and “99%,” sung by the Irving Bunton Singers and Jimmy McPhail. The Christian message of these songs might have seemed surprising in the context of a nonreligious exhibition, and even more surprising at an event associated with a jazz musician, not a gospel musician or a religious leader. These songs, however, would have appeared narrowly doctrinaire only to listeners unfamiliar with the coded language of the spirituals, which gave salvation a double meaning, celestial and terrestrial. The oneness of God testified to the oneness of mankind; the question “Will You Be There?” demanded a full commitment (“99% won't do”) to political struggle as well as to the demands of Scripture. The gospel tunes set down a political agenda in a language its audience would have understood.7 Following these numbers Ellington reprised the vocal version of “Come Sunday” (now performed by McPhail) but then transformed it into a new up-tempo number, “David Danced,” for the choir and the tap dancing of Bunny Briggs. Here the walls separating church and theater came tumbling down. The music hinted at the familiar spiritual melody about Joshua that would appear later in the show to honor Dr. King, explicitly: “King Fit the Battle of Alabam.'”
With the song “My Mother, My Father” (a.k.a. “Heritage”), Ellington took another unexpected turn, charming the audience with a pop-style autobiographical ballad/hymn that might have seemed self-indulgent without its clear political dimension:
My mother—the greatest—and the prettiest.
My father—just handsome—but the wittiest.
Ellington later told an interviewer that this was “everybody's song”;8 it celebrated love and origins just before “black is beautiful” became a slogan. Ellington underscored the politics, or at least reinsinuated them, by following the song with “Montage,” a retitled version of “Light,” the original third section of Black. The new title drew attention to the cinematic scope of the music, its depiction of an entire people on the verge of freedom. At many performances Ellington literally climbed up on a soapbox as an orator to make that message explicit: “My people—singing—dancing—praying—thinking about freedom.” Now, as he had done at Carnegie Hall, Ellington acclaimed the contribution African Americans had made as workers: “Cotton—sugar—indigo—iron—coal—peanuts—steel—the railroad—you name it. The foundation of the United States rests on the sweat of my people.”
Ellington's oration then segued into a reprise of The Blues from Black, Brown and Beige sung by Joya Sherrill. Just as he had earlier opened up the content of Black, Ellington followed his artful meditation on the blues with four short blues vignettes (“Workin' Blues,” “My Man Sends Me,” “Jail Blues,” and “Lovin' Lover”) that were as down-home as “The Blues” was not. Never before had Ellington made such an incursion into the rival stylistic domain of Count Basie; once again Ellington was pushing his own stylistic spectrum ever wider to encompass experiences and forms of expression that rarely before had shared the same theatrical space. Finally the show turned from insinuation to explicit statement with a calypso-groove freedom song, “King Fit the Battle of Alabam,'” that harshly recalled the misdeeds of Eugene “Bull” Connor, the commissioner of safety of Birmingham, Alabama, who had turned police dogs and fire hoses on black citizens earlier that year: “Little babies fit the battle of police dogs—mongrel police …/ And the dogs came growling—howling—growling.” Ellington could have ended on this note, but he had one more stylistic twist to play, the cat
egory-defying “What Color Is Virtue?” which sounds like a perfect Broadway vehicle for Lena Horne. The two contrasting final numbers gave a new face, or perhaps two new faces, to the militant ending of the original Black, Brown and Beige. The dizzying stylistic range of My People challenges its audience to be as proudly and unconditionally inclusive as its composer.
My People was a version of the historical pageants of Ellington's childhood, updated musically and politically, but by its very nature—it was part of a temporary exposition—it was provisional. Too religious to run on Broadway, too full of the blues to be performed as a church service, its music imagined a hypothetical theatrical framework, at once sacred and profane, timely and eternal, that fused and transcended the usual ideas of entertainment, education, and worship. Only the largest sacred space, a cathedral, could possibly contain its vision, though perhaps it required the idea of a cathedral, the largest, most inclusive monument to God, more than the acoustic reality. As it happened, those spaces were also looking for new music to reinvigorate worship.9 In 1962 the Reverend C. Julian Bartlett and the Reverend Jon S. Yaryan invited Ellington to compose music for the dedication of Grace Cathedral on San Francisco's Nob Hill, an invitation that led to the first Concert of Sacred Music on September 16, 1965. Eventually Ellington's Concerts of Sacred Music would rattle the gothic arches of Grace Cathedral, the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York, and Westminster Abbey in London with amplified voices, blaring brass, and ricocheting drum solos, filling the vast spaces like a dense, pungent musical incense. Time magazine wrote that the devilish acoustics turned the music into an “impenetrable mass.” (On the other hand, Gary Giddins praised the music's “aural affinity for the cavernous architecture of great churches.”)10 The physics may have been problematic but the metaphysics rang out loud and clear.
The three Concerts of Sacred Music shared certain features that pushed them in the opposite direction of the contemporary jazz masses of Ellington's friend Mary Lou Williams.11 Her religious music drew on traditional Catholic liturgy, though it also added contemporary commentary on their words. Even when the music rocks, Williams intended it for worship. The Ellington concerts, by contrast, were not masses, and, if we heed Ellington's exhortations, they also were not jazz; he asked that the four-letter “J” word not appear in any of the programs or publicity. They were concerts, not services; the only liturgical text Ellington set was the Lord's Prayer. Yet, as Janna Tull Steed notes, all three concerts were conceived for performance in sacred spaces that helped “define the meaning of these events and their impact on performers and audiences, too.”12
The concerts would have been provocatively eclectic in their range of musical styles in any setting. The first concert featured two gospel singers, Esther Marrow (incorrectly listed as “Esther Merrill” in the program and much of the literature and later known as Queen Esther Marrow) and Jimmy McPhail, the jazz singer John Hendricks, and tap dancer Bunny Briggs.13 The second featured the high soprano voice of the Swedish singer Alice Babs, a blues solo for Ellington's longtime trumpeter Cootie Williams, and a prominent role for an African American children's chorus (Les Jeunes Voix, directed by Roscoe Gill). As the criticism reveals, all three concerts contained something to please or ruffle the religious or nonreligious sensibilities of just about every listener. People who loved the intensity of “Come Sunday” were baffled by the Bacharach-like slickness of “Something about Believing” or the appropriately childlike Sunday school offerings of the children's choir. Even Gary Giddins, the first critic to sense the full scope of Ellington's achievement in these works, seemed to bridle at the “outright proselytizing” of the second concert, even though the texts were notably nonsectarian. All religious music is by its very nature preachy, but it is often easier for outsiders to encounter musical spirituality either without words or in a foreign language. Ellington, however, was not satisfied with making things easy.
To amplify Giddins's appreciation of the concerts and to answer his objection, let's look at each of the concerts to see what Ellington preached and how.14
FIRST CONCERT OF SACRED MUSIC: IN THE BEGINNING GOD
Perhaps, like a medieval craftsman, intent on offering God only his best work, Ellington built the first sacred concert, entitled A Concert of Sacred Music, on well-tested material from Black, Brown and Beige, New World A-Comin', and My People: “Come Sunday” (in both instrumental and vocal versions), “Montage,” “Will You Be There?” “99%,” “Ain't But the One,” “Heritage,” “New World A-Comin'” (performed as an extended piano solo), and “David Danced.” In the case of New World, Ellington conferred sacred status on the music retroactively. In the program he wrote that the work “is really the anticipation of a very distant future place on land, at sea, or in the sky where there will be no war, no greed, no nonbelievers, and no categorization … where love is unconditional and no pronoun is good enough for God.”15 The new material was a gospel song, “Tell Me It's the Truth” (sung by Esther Marrow), and an extended multisection concert piece titled “In the Beginning God” for jazz vocalist John Hendricks (of Lambert, Hendricks and Ross), the Ellington band, and the Herman McCoy Choir, and a gospel-style setting of the Lord's Prayer, again by Marrow. To classical listeners Ellington here appeared to take on a subject already given musical form by Haydn in The Creation, by Schoenberg in the Genesis Prelude, and, most recently, by Stravinsky in The Flood (1962)—but the music might be better heard as his retort to “It Ain't Necessarily So.” It began with a six-note motive, the musical equivalent of the divine tetragrammaton in Hebrew; Ellington also placed this motive at the very opening of his memoir, Music Is My Mistress. The six notes stand for the six opening syllables of Genesis, “In the beginning God,” but when the lyrics are sung they swerve away from the Bible:
In the beginning God.
No heaven,
No earth,
No nothin'.
As he had done in Harlem, Ellington used a recurring motive to announce and reiterate his theme, with or without actual words; it is even “spoken” by the drums.
Rather than being a depiction of chaos and creation akin to those offered by classical composers, “In the Beginning God” is an extended meditation on the first principles, God and the Bible, from which all else flows. The sections of the piece are as follows:
Piano introduction hinting at the six-note theme (e minor).
Slow, out-of-time statement of theme on the baritone sax (Harry Carney), repeated and extended in tempo.
Clarinet solo (Jimmy Hamilton) ushered in by a harsh dissonance that, to my ears, evokes the words “the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” Clarinet continues the theme in a moderate tempo. Clarinet cadenza.
Singer intones the opening words (b minor).
Hendricks sings the motto over a swung accompaniment then begins an Ellingtonian rap: “No mountains, no valleys/No main streets, no back alleys …”
Hendricks again intones the opening melody slowly, ending on a climactic high F.
Swung music returns with a solo for Paul Gonsalves over which the choir reels off the titles of the books of the Old Testament.
A fanfare followed by a trumpet solo (Cat Anderson) that gradually moves to the highest possible note (I think this solo announces the incarnation of Christ).
Piano interlude.
Over a soft drumroll and piano punctuations the choir declaims the titles of the books of the New Testament.
An extended drum solo (Louis Bellson) initiated by the six-note theme played on the cymbals.
Choral restatement of the opening motive. Final chord combines notes of the e minor and D major scales.
Although all this material was new, we can hear how it continues the practice of earlier Ellington, particularly in its deployment of motivic unity to knit together a wide variety of tempos and solo voices, including, most theatrically (especially given the cathedral acoustics), the voice of the drums and cymbals. As usual, Ellington knew how to make the most of eac
h of his soloists. Carney's weighty tone established the work's foundation, Hamilton's ethereal, cool-sounding clarinet evoked a sense of intergalactic emptiness, and Anderson's screech trumpet literally scaled the heights. Ellington brought in Bellson especially for the occasion, knowing well his instinctive ability to stop the show. He told the drummer, “You are thunder and lightning,” and that was all that needed to be said.16 The knowing simplicity of late Ellington and Bellson's artistry turned one of the oldest clichés of jazz, the big, loud drum solo, into a cosmic event. Much of Bellson's solo feels more like an ecstatic aria than a percussive display. It sets the stage for further lyric utterances: two versions of “Come Sunday,” first the 1958 vocal version, sung by Marrow, and then the original, played, as it was in 1943, by Johnny Hodges (the two separated by the new setting of the Lord's Prayer), and then Ellington's solo performance of New World A-Comin', which has a meditative intensity in its execution reminiscent in feeling if not in style to the last part, “Psalm,” of Coltrane's A Love Supreme. The only thing that could possibly top that solo would be the tap dancing of Bunny Briggs. As Gary Giddins wrote, Ellington had brought the Cotton Club into the cathedral, but it was a Cotton Club cleansed of its sins.
