The Ellington Century

by David Schiff

  OUTRO ULTIMO

  I never had the privilege of hearing the Ellington Orchestra perform one of the Concerts of Sacred Music live, but I have attended performances by the Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra, which has been presenting the music annually since 1989. These concerts were exhilarating and rapturous, even for the unchurched. The Seattle version, available on CD, combines numbers from all three concerts, very much in the work-in-progress spirit in which the music was conceived. Their selection of tunes is a nonstop hit parade. The SRJO recording, along with that of the Big Band de Lausanne, answers resoundingly the question I often hear about Ellington's music from people in the classical world: how can we perform it? Concert musicians who have no trouble assembling the complex forces needed for a War Requiem or Bernstein's Mass get weak in the knees at the thought of playing Ellington's music. In some ways their trepidation is well-founded. Most classically trained players have no idea how to read an Ellington part; in the orchestrated versions of his music made during his lifetime the music too often sound like the generic offering of a symphonic pops concert and not at all Ellingtonian. Classical musicians who don't even know where to turn for advice on how to perform the music need to break out of their segregated sphere and begin a conversation with jazz musicians who possess the requisite skill and spirit to bring the music to life. And they have to stop thinking of Ellington's music as a repertory they don't need to know. The Concerts of Sacred Music demand all the resources of a musical community, from a coloratura soprano to a tap dancer; preparing them for performance can create a new community out of previously non-communicating musical subcultures.

  As with classical music, performance of Ellington's work raises all sorts of questions of textual authenticity, performance practice, and interpretation.24 As the music continues to be played we will doubtless see a range of responses comparable to those we are used to in performances of, say, Beethoven, though I would prefer to see a much broader spectrum of possibilities. I can imagine bands dedicated to reproducing the music as it was first played, others modernizing the beat, and still others putting the Ellington oeuvre through an electronic remix. Ellington himself updated much of his music, even classics like “Black and Tan Fantasy.” It would be academic in the worst sense of the word to treat the Ellington repertory only through the aesthetic of “early music” and perform the music by mimicking old recordings, though, to be academic in the best sense, every note of those recordings has something to teach the musicians of the future. Ellington's music, however, was written for and played by giants: Hodges, Nanton, Webster, Bigard, Babs, and others. It requires masterly musicians, just as Bach's music does. We expect such musicians to bring music to life on their own terms; otherwise there would be no point in hearing new performances. On the Lausanne recording, Jon Faddis, a latter-day giant, splendidly remakes the solos of both Cootie Williams and Cat Anderson in his own image. To paraphrase Stravinsky, love trumps respect.

  The jazz orchestra itself may be an endangered species. Or not. There are astonishingly virtuosic ensembles today at Lincoln Center and at many of the universities and conservatories that teach jazz performance. These ensembles, rarely money making, may continue to thrive just because of the desire to preserve the rich musical legacies of Ellington, Basie, Henderson, Lunceford, Woody Herman, Stan Kenton, and Gil Evans, among many others, as living repertories, not just as recordings. But those legacies might also evolve within other musical contexts, some of which no doubt will leave the moldy figs of the future shaking their fists in fury. One fine example of creative Ellington performance can be heard on a recording of the Far East Suite made by the Asian American Orchestra, directed by Anthony Brown, in 1999. They add the colors of Persian and Chinese instruments to Ellington's timbral palette with imagination and conviction. And they swing. Perhaps a similar treatment awaits the Latin American Suite.

  The biggest challenge of all, perhaps neither possible nor even desirable, may be the long-delayed acceptance of Ellington's music, not just its tunes, but its totality, by the concert world. Ellington's lone CD of his symphonic music includes a piece titled “Non-Violent Integration.” That would be a good place to begin.

  Notes

  The following acronyms are used for the sources most frequently cited.

  DER Mark Tucker, ed., The Duke Ellington Reader

  EJ Gunther Schuller, Early Jazz

  JCAC Robert O'Meally, ed., The Jazz Cadence of American Culture

  MBA Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans

  MIMM Duke Ellington, Music Is My Mistress

  SE Gunther Schuller, The Swing Era

  UC Robert O'Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards, and Farah Jasmine Griffin, eds., Uptown Conversation

  VJ Gary Giddins, Visions of Jazz

  PART I

  Epigraphs, p. 1: Mercer Ellington, quoted in Perlis and Van Cleve, Composers' Voices from Ives to Ellington, p. 371; Claude Debussy, quoted in Debussy on Music, p. 297.

  1. Denby, Dancers, Buildings and People in the Streets, p. 110.

  2. Tick, Ruth Crawford Seeger, p. 214.

  3. Ibid., p. 357.

  4. Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity, pp. 237-38.

  1. “BLUE LIGHT”: COLOR

  Epigraphs, pp. 11-12: Billy Strayhorn, DownBeat, November 5, 1952; Aaron Copland, Copland on Music, p. 31; André Previn, quoted in Giddins, VJ, p. 105; Cecil Taylor, in A. B. Spellman, Black Music, p. 74; Arnold Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, p. 421; O'Meally, ed., JCAC, p. 178. Epigraphs, pp. 26-27: Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus XV; Mahler to Alma on Puccini's Tosca, quoted in de la Grange, Gustav Mahler, p. 601; Zola, Au bonheurs des dames, pp. 86-87.

  1. Ellington, MIMM, p. 17.

  2. De Long, Pops, pp. 80-81.

  3. Tucker, Early Years, p. 250.

  4. Hasse, Ragtime, p. 134.

  5. Tucker, ed., DER, pp. 339-40.

  6. A transcription appears in Porter, Ullman, and Hazell, Jazz: From Its Origins to the Present, p. 104.

  7. Schuller, SE, p. 109.

  8. The piano solo sheet music, published for copyright purposes, I assume, contains little of what is heard on the recording apart from the trombone melody of the third chorus. Curiously, it is in A, while the recorded performance is in G.

  9. Tucker, ed., DER, p. 70.

  10. Southern, MBA, p. 192.

  11. Ibid., p. 334.

  12. Ellington, MIMM, p. 47.

  13. Ibid., p. 33.

  14. Titon, Early Downhome Blues, p. 144.

  15. Olly Wilson, “The Heterogeneous Sound Ideal in African-American Music,” in Wright, ed., New Perspectives on Music.

  16. Floyd, Power of Black Music, p. 80.

  17. Brothers, Louis Armstrong's New Orleans, p. 43.

  18. Ibid., p. 57.

  19. Tucker, ed., DER, p. 172.

  20. Ibid., p. 369.

  21. Chilton, Sidney Bechet, p. 40.

  22. Stewart, Jazz Masters of the Thirties, p. 98.

  23. Timner, Ellingtonia, p. 39. See Schuller, SE, pp. 105-7, for a discussion of the differences between takes.

  24. See the transcription in Schuller, SE, p. 107.

  25. See the transcription in ibid., pp. 124-25.

  26. Lawrence Gushee in Tucker, ed., DER, p. 430.

  27. Ellington had employed vocalise earlier, in “Creole Love Call,” recorded in 1927 with Adelaide Hall, and in “Rude Interlude” with Louis Bacon in 1933. Bacon scatted Armstrong-style.

  28. See the liner notes by Andrew Homzy to Black, Brown and Beige.

  29. Tucker, ed., DER, p. 249.

  30. Ibid., p. 145.

  31. Ulanov, Duke Ellington, p. 253.

  32. Looser, faster performances can be heard on recordings from Fargo, North Dakota (November 7, 1940) and Carnegie Hall (January 23, 1943). A study score, transcribed from the first recording by David Berger and Alan Campbell, is published by United Artists Music; a simplified piano version appears in Hasse, Beyond Category.

  33. Rattenbury, Duke Ellington, J
azz Composer, p. 105.

  34. See Bushell and Tucker, Jazz from the Beginning, p. 55.

  35. Peinkofer and Tannigel, Handbook of Percussion Instruments, p. 43.

  36. Fulcher, ed., Debussy and His World, p. 161.

  37. See Katz, Capturing Sound, pp. 74-77.

  38. See the accounts of Schoenberg's life in Hahl-Koch, Arnold Schoenberg / Wassily Kandinsky, and Meyer and Wasserman, eds., Schoenberg, Kandinsky and the Blue Rider.

  39. Meyer and Wasserman, eds., Schoenberg, Kandinsky and the Blue Rider, p. 25.

  40. Hahl-Koch, Arnold Schoenberg/ Wassily Kandinsky, p. 21.

  41. Ibid., p. 2.3.

  42. Meyer and Wasserman, eds., Schoenberg, Kandinsky and the Blue Rider, p. 30.

  43. Ibid., p. 50.

  44. Schoenberg and Stein, Style and Idea, p. 145.

  45. Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, p. 9.

  46. Ibid., p. 13.

  47. Hahl-Koch, Arnold Schoenberg / Wassily Kandinsky, p. 149.

  48. Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, pp. 38-41.

  49. See Covach, “Schoenberg and the Occult,” pp. 103-18.

  50. Hahl-Koch, Arnold Schoenberg / Wassily Kandinsky, p. 96. See Meyer and Wasserman, eds., Schoenberg, Kandinsky and the Blue Rider, p. 107, for Schoenberg's scale of colors.

  51. Hahl-Koch, Arnold Schoenberg / Wassily Kandinsky, p. 111.

  52. Theosophical music was brought to the United States in 1916 by a French composer, Dane Rudhyar, who became an important figure among the American “ultra-modernists” and whose ideas would influence Ruth Crawford, John Cage, Lou Harrison, and James Tenney (Oja, Making Music Modern, pp. 99-100).

  53. Joseph, Stravinsky and Balanchine, p. 89.

  54. Ibid., p. 144.

  55. Ibid., p. 68.

  56. Lederman, ed., Stravinsky in the Theater, p. 81.

  57. Kirstein, Thirty Years/The New York City Ballet, p. 65.

  58. Walsh, Stravinsky: A Creative Spring, p. 469.

  59. Edmund Wilson's 1930 study Axel's Castle remains the best introduction to the Symbolist movement.

  60. C. .F. MacIntyre, trans., French Symbolist Poetry, p. 12.

  61. See Rosemary Lloyd, “Debussy, Mallarmé, and ‘Les Mardis,’” in Fulcher, ed., Debussy and His World, pp. 255-69.

  62. Lockspeiser also compares this song to the ironic poetry of Debussy's friend Jules Laforgue, who mocked the enforced boredom of Parisian Sundays in his collection of poems entitled Dimanche. Lockspeiser, Debussy, vol. 1, p. 133.

  63. Nichols, Debussy Remembered, p. 83.

  64. Ibid., p. 84.

  65. Lockspeiser, Debussy, vol. 2, pp. 45-46.

  66. Roberts, Images, p. 143.

  67. Paul Jacobs suggested that the first follows the model of Liszt's Transcendental Etudes (perhaps no. 2 in a minor) (liner notes to Nonesuch recording); Roger Nichols proposes a relationship to a Hans Christian Anderson story, “The Garden of Paradise,” about the four winds, or to Shelley's “Ode to the West Wind,” which Debussy knew in translation (liner notes to recording on DGG by Krystian Zimerman); and Paul Roberts hears a connection, which I don't, to “Orage” from Liszt's Années de pèlerinage. The clearest musical precedent, though, is the third movement, “Dialogue of the Wind and Sea,” from Debussy's own La Mer, a tumultuous representation of death and rebirth; both pieces could refer to paintings by Turner.

  68. Debussy composed several other snowscapes, two of which employ the rising four-note motive from Tristan to convey contrasting qualities of tristesse: “Le Tombeau des naiads,” from Trois chansons de Bilitis, and “Snow Is Dancing,” from Children's Corner. In two works from his last years, the third movement of En Blanc et Noir and the “Etude in Chromatic Steps,” the dance of snow seems to transcend human suffering and becomes a gently whirling interplay of the natural world and the human imagination, Wallace Stevens's “Snow Man” avant la lettre.

  69. In her article “Tristan in the Making of Pelléas,” Carolyn Abbate noted that Debussy often alludes to Wagner's opera through puns. The “triste” landscape evoked here in the opening performance instruction and repeated, with a different nuance, later (“Comme un tender et triste regret”) points to the desolate (but not wintry) stage décor that Wagner calls for in the third act of Tristan: “The whole scene gives the impression of being deserted, ill-tended, here and there in poor repair and overgrown.” But behind that hidden allusion is another, a hothouse or “Treibhaus” as described in a poem by Mathilde Wesendonck, which Wagner set as a compositional study for the prelude to act 3. This hothouse is also surprisingly “triste”:

  Weit in sehnendem Verlangen

  breitet ihr die Arme aus,

  und umschlinget wahnbefangen

  öder Leere nicht'gen Graus.

  Wide, in yearning desire

  you spread your arms,

  and in the bonds of delusion you embrace

  the futile horror of a desolate void.

  (Wagner's song is in the same key as Debussy's prelude. Debussy had written the words and music for his own hothouse prose poem “De fleurs …” in his Proses lyriques, but it sounds more like Parsifal than Tristan. Symbolists preferred hothouse flowers to the lilies of the field.)

  70. Lockspeiser, Debussy, vol. 2, p. 46.

  71. Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity, p. 118.

  72. Ibid., p. 49.

  73. Giddins, VJ, p. 348.

  74. Zak, The Poetics of Rock, pp. 88, 87.

  75. Ibid., p. 35.

  76. Ibid., p. 88.

  2. “COTTON TAIL”: RHYTHM

  Epigraphs, p. 50: Zora Neale Hurston, “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” in O'Meally, ed., JCAC, p. 302; Murray, Stomping the Blues, p. 144; Irving Mills, lyrics to “Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing),” also attributed to Bubber Miley. Epigraph, p. 000: Louis Armstrong, quoted in Teachout, Pops, p. 280. Epigraphs, pp. 71-72: Igor Stravinsky, Stravinsky in Conversation with Robert Craft, pp. 128-30; Gene Krupa, in Gottlieb, ed., Reading Jazz, p. 774; Stravinsky, Memories and Commentaries (2002), p. 136; George Antheil, cited in Albright, Modernism and Music, p. 395; Mercer Ellington, quoted in Nicholson, Reminiscing in Tempo, p. 124.

  1. Octave Mirabeau in 1908, quoted in Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918, p. 113.

  2. Walter Lippman in 1914, quoted in ibid., p. 124.

  3. Porter, Ullman, and Hazell, Jazz, p. 464. For spurious definitions see Virgil Thomson's articles “Swing Music” and “Swing Again,” which appeared in Modern Music in 1936 and 1938; Thomson trots out his much-used theories about “quantitative” rhythms.

  4. Murray, Stomping the Blues, p. 138. See Michael Denning's discussion of the broader political resonances of swing in The Cultural Front, pp. 328-38.

  5. Schuller, SE, p. 129.

  6. As with many other works in the Ellington repertory, there is some debate about authorship, despite Ellington's unshared listing as composer on all published versions. Webster told Milt Hinton that he had composed the tune (Büchmann-Møller, Someone to Watch over Me, p. 69). Rex Stewart, in a lovingly limned portrait, wrote that Webster was its composer and arranger, and, somewhat contradicting that claim, “also wrote the now-famous saxophone section chorus” (Stewart, Jazz Masters of the Thirties, p. 129). Mercer Ellington, on the other hand, wrote that the chart sprang from a “device” of Webster's (Ellington and Dance, Duke Ellington in Person, p. 87).

  7. Büchmann-Møller, Someone to Watch over Me, p. 61.

  8. In later jazz the sectional sax solo has come to be called “supersax” after a Charlie Parker tribute band formed by Med Flory and Buddy Clark that debuted in 1972 featuring harmonized arrangements of Parker's solos.

  9. A score of the full composition as transcribed from the recording by David Berger is published by Jazz at Lincoln Center. Webster's solo is transcribed (somewhat differently) by Gunther Schuller in SE, pp. 582-83. An incomplete set of parts and detailed sketches for the shout chorus are in the Ellington Archive at the Smithsonian, but t
here is no complete manuscript score and parts. A superb Ellingtonian performance of “Cotton Tail” as a “head” followed by improvised solos appears on Duke Ellington's Jazz Violin Session. Two other recordings of the six-chorus composition with Webster were made in Fargo, North Dakota, in November and at Carnegie Hall in January 1943, the latter at a much faster clip than the studio recording. Not by Ellington but not to be missed: the vocalized version of the 1940 recording by Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross.

  10. Oliver, Blues Fell This Morning, p. 66.

  11. See Schuller, SE, p. 128.

  12. Sublette, Cuba and Its Music, p. 80.

  13. You can find extensive descriptions of African rhythms in Jones, Studies in African Music; Chernoff, African Rhythm and African Sensibility; Floyd, Black Music in the Harlem Renaissance; Arom; African Polyphony and Polyrhythm; and Floyd, Composing the Music of Africa, as well as clear accounts of the relation between African and Cuban rhythms in Fernandez, From Afro-Cuban Rhythms to Latin Jazz; and Sublette, Cuba and Its Music. See also Wilson, “The Significance of the Relationship between Afro-American and West African Music”; and Agawu, “The Invention of ‘African Rhythm.’” Many listeners today will be familiar with the minimalist appropriation of West African rhythms found in such Steve Reich pieces as Drumming and Music for Eighteen Musicians. There are now many recordings of traditional Ewe music, but for a Caribbean perspective I recommend the CD released as Our Man in Havana, produced originally by Mongo Santamaría in the 1950s, which presents rural Cuban music very close to its African origins and also to modern Cuban popular music.

  14. A classic statement of this misunderstanding appears in Richard Waterman's “‘Hot’ Rhythm in Negro Music.”

  15. I wonder if a similar experience of temporal terror underlies the phase-shift pieces of Steve Reich, such as Clapping Music, which start in phase, go out, and gradually come back, something that might happen in West African music if you got totally lost and tried, step by step, to find your way back.

  16. Chernoff, African Rhythm and African Sensibility, p. 51.