The Ellington Century
Page 36
17. Malcolm Floyd, Composing the Music of Africa, p. 58.
18. The sheet music is reprinted in Jasen, ed., “For Me and My Gal” and Other Favorite Song Hits, 1915-1917.
19. Schuller, EJ, 186.
20. The resilient “bones” of the four-phrase structure are still evident in the most famous “Tiger Rag” descendant, Jerry Herman's “Hello Dolly!”
21. Schuller, EJ, p. 111.
22. Tucker, ed., DER, p. 36.
23. Ellington's repeated use of “Tiger Rag” was noted in 1970 by Martin Williams in The Jazz Tradition.
24. Tucker, ed., DER, p. 111.
25. The solos are listed by Stanley Dance in the liner notes for The Okeh Ellington.
26. Schuller, for instance, termed it “ephemeral” (SE, p. 483).
27. Schuller, EJ, p. 346.
28. Hasse, Beyond Category, p. 55.
29. Quoted in notes by John Szwed to Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings.
30. Jones, “Blues People,” p. 108.
31. Floyd, The Power of Black Music, p. 110.
32. See Magee, The Uncrowned King of Swing. p. 131.
33. Schuller, EJ, p. 268
34. Southern, MBA, p. 135.
35. Ibid., p. 99.
36. Ibid., p. 160
37. The caveats are raised by Wayne Shirley (in his 1978 introduction to the reissue of Afro-American Spirituals, Work Songs, and Ballads), so they are serious. Shirley pointed out Lomax's way of manufacturing an air of primitive authenticity in his field recordings and noted that the performance of “Run, Old Jeremiah” on Afro-American Spirituals, Work Songs, and Ballads, while a ring shout, the style with the clearest connections to African practice, traces no straight line from Africa to this 1934 recording: the Louisiana community heard here had only “recently reintroduced the ring-shout as a means of attracting” a younger, dance-oriented generation to the church.
38. See http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d75759/.
39. For an extended theoretical discussion of shout, see Samuel A. Floyd Jr., “Ring Shout, Signifyin(g), and Jazz Analysis,” in Walser, ed., Keeping Time.
40. Ibid., p. 21.
41. Blesh and Janis, They All Played Ragtime, p. 188.
42. Copland, The New Music, p. 66. See also my chapter, “Copland and the Jazz Boys,” in Dickinson, ed., Copland Connotations.
43. See rehearsal number 86 in the coda of Apollo, rehearsal number 92 in the boogie-woogie Pas d'action of Orpheus, and bars 352-64 of Agon.
44. Laki, Bartók and His World, p. 52.
45. The idea that Bartók's music springs from binary oppositions was first proposed by Erno Lendvai. Although recent scholarship has questioned many of Lendvai's claims, particularly that Bartók employed Golden Section proportions systematically, they often reconfigure the dialectics outlined by Lendvai rather than rejecting them. Botstein's restatement is typical. See also Kárpáti, Bartók's Chamber Music, p. 213.
46. The ethnomusicologist Timothy Rice claims that 3 + 3 + 2 meter does not exist in Bulgarian music and that therefore two of the six studies from Mikrokosmos were really meant to “capture the syncopated rhythms of American popular music and jazz” (Antokoletz, Fischer, and Suchoff, eds., Bartók Perspectives, p. 198). In klezmer music, however, the pattern is common and is called either “Freylechs” or “Bulgar.” Bartók, moreover, uses the 3 + 3 + 2 rhythm in a folklike style that does not sound like jazz or klezmer in Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta. Bartók had used 3 + 3 + 2 patterns in pieces based on Romanian folk music as early as the popular Romanian Dances of 1915.
47. See Tirro, Jazz: A History, p. 336.
48. Ulanov, Duke Ellington, p. 231.
49. Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, p. 1357.
50. See Van den Toorn, The Music of Igor Stravinsky, pp. 99-100.
51. Jones, Studies in African Music, vol. 2, p. 71.
52. Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 1306-7. Taruskin confuses matters, though, by anachronistically comparing Stravinsky's ragtimes with Joplin's. The dotted rhythms in the Histoire “Ragtime” and the 1918 Ragtime for Eleven Instruments show that Stravinsky was keeping up with more advanced evolutions of the form; both works are really fox-trots (a dance rage launched by Vernon and Irene Castle and their musical director James Reese Europe in 1914) rather than rags, though the confusion of nomenclature persisted for some time on both sides of the Atlantic. Stravinsky cubisticly rearranged the elements of the fox-trot just as he would with many other historical styles.
53. The pairing is analyzed in Crawford, American Musical Landscape.
54. Thomson and Kostelanetz, A Virgil Thomson Reader, p. 164.
55. Ibid.
56. See Oja, Making Music Modern, p. 143.
57. Tick, Ruth Crawford Seeger, pp. 217-21.
58. Nicholls, American Experimental Music, p. 55.
59. The complex relation of the Cage avant-garde to jazz is explored in detail in Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself.
60. Tirro, Jazz: A History, p. 377.
61. For Gunther Schuller's “out” genealogy, see “The Avant-Garde and Third Stream,” in his Musings, pp. 121-33.
62. The movement is surveyed in the important studies Litweiler, The Freedom Principle; Jost, Free Jazz; Spellman, Black Music; and Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself.
63. Litweiler, The Freedom Principle, p. 75.
64. Tucker, ed., DER, p. 334.
3. “PRELUDE TO A KISS”: MELODY
Epigraph, p. 89: T. W. Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, p. 25.
1. Stravinsky, Poetics of Music. p. 43.
2. “Heart and Brain in Music,” in Schoenberg and Stein, Style and Idea, p. 69.
3. Hamm, Yesterdays, pp. 285-86. For accounts of the rise of Tin Pan Alley see Hamm, Yesterdays, and Goldberg, Tin Pan Alley, still informative and fun to read despite its age. See also Hamm's commentaries in the three-volume Irving Berlin's Early Songs, published by MUSA.
4. Hamm, Yesterdays, p. 290.
5. Ibid., p. 294.
6. In discussing Ellington's songs (and Strayhorn's), I will refer to the versions found in “The Great Music of Duke Ellington,” first published by Belwin Mills in 1985.
7. Wilder and Maher, American Popular Song, p. 412.
8. Ellington was listed as composer of two musicals and one opera, the 1946 Beggars' Holiday, with lyrics by John Latouche, based, like The Threepenny Opera, on The Beggars' Opera. According to Walter van de Leur, Billy Stray-horn did most of the composing, “occasionally conferring with Ellington over the telephone” (Something to Live For, p. 98). The musical Pousse-café, based on The Blue Angel, appeared briefly in 1966. Queenie Pie, an opera buffa, was produced only after Ellington's death. None of these shows had a successful run or produced enduring songs.
9. Tucker, Ellington: The Early Years, chapter 8.
10. Ibid., pp. 126-33.
11. Reprinted in Nicholson, Reminiscing in Tempo, pp. 152-59.
12. Giddins, VJ, p. 117.
13. When I wrote my book on Rhapsody in Blue I noted that “Black Beauty” begins with the same harmonies as the opening piano solo in the Gershwin; it's even in the same key. I hadn't noticed, though, that “Swampy River,” which Ellington recorded at the same piano solo session as “Black Beauty,” began with an even more explicit allusion to Rhapsody in Blue. I also hadn't noticed that Gershwin returned the compliment, because the bridge of “I Got Rhythm,” written two years later, recalls the second strain of “Black Beauty.” Tipping his hat to Gershwin, Ellington flaunted his compositional and pianistic chops. Both pieces are complex multistrain piano compositions in the manner of James P. Johnson. But the main melody in “Black Beauty” is neither Gershwinesque nor Johnsonesque, and it does not display the creamy chromaticism of many Ellington tunes.
14. Collier, Duke Ellington, p. 118.
15. Wilder and Maher, American Popular Song, p. 414.
16. For a more modern and
much sexier vocal rendition, check out Sarah Vaughan's recording on the Smithsonian Jazz Singers collection. Johnny Hodges's exultant 1957 recording, with what sounds to me like a Strayhorn arrangement, appears on Duke Ellington Indigos.
17. Furia, Ira Gershwin, p. 72.
18. Pollack, George Gershwin, p. 456.
19. Furia, Ira Gershwin, p. 72.
20. Tucker, ed., DER, p. 341.
21. A great sampling of twentieth-century performance styles across a wide spectrum can be heard on I Got Rhythm: The Music of George Gershwin, a four-CD set from the Smithsonian Collection of Recordings.
22. See Pleasants, The Great American Popular Singers; and Friedwald, Stardust Melodies.
23. Taylor's 1929 performance leads off the album The Jazz Singers, edited by Robert G. O'Meally, who describes her as a “pre-jazz singer with a vaudeville twist.”
24. Ken Romanowski, liner notes for Mamie Smith: Complete Recorded Works in Chronological Order, vol. 1, Document Records DOCD-5357.
25. Jasen and Jones, Black Bottom Stomp, p. 219.
26. Friedwald, Stardust Melodies, p. 32.
27. See van de Leur, Something to Live For, pp. 152-59, for an extensive discussion of Strayhorn's arrangement.
28. Giddins, VJ, p. 113.
29. Van de Leur, Something to Live For, p. 63.
30. Ibid., p. 27.
31. Ibid., p. 171.
32. Kahn, Kind of Blue, p. 71.
33. See Slonimsky, Perfect Pitch, pp. 173-80.
34. Berliner, Thinking in Jazz, p. 192.
35. For late Renaissance divisions, see William Byrd's “My Ladye Nevels Grownde”; for a twentieth-century version, see Prelude no. 21 from Shostakovich's Preludes and Fugues, op. 87. For a romantic and more dissonant expansion of Bach's moto perpetuo technique, see Chopin's Prelude in B Minor, op. 28, no. 16.
36. Published by Hal Leonard in 2001.
37. O'Meally, ed., JCAC, p. 269.
38. According to Kahn, Kind of Blue (p. 110), he quotes a melodic line from Junior Parker's 1957 R&B tune “Next Time You See Me.”
4. “SATIN DOLL”: HARMONY
Epigraphs, p. 120: Duke Ellington, in Tucker, ed., DER, p. 42; Ferruccio Busoni, “Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music,” in Debussy, Busoni, and Ives, Three Classics in the Aesthetic of Music, p. 93; Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music, p. 37.
1. Tucker, The Early Years, p. 243.
2. Transcribed by John Mehegan in Tonal and Rhythmic Principles.
3. In Mingus, Charles Mingus: More Than a Fake Book.
4. See Orenstein, Ravel, p. 209, and Orenstein, ed., A Ravel Reader, pp. 519-20.
5. Orenstein, ed., A Ravel Reader, pp. 519-20.
6. Baraka, Blues People, pp. 229-30.
7. Van den Toorn, Music of Igor Stravinsky, pp. 407-8.
8. Stravinsky and Craft, Stravinsky in Conversation with Robert Craft, p. 38.
9. Schoenberg and Stein, Style and Idea, p. 210.
10. Ibid., p. 30.
11. Ibid., p. 446.
12. Ibid., p. 109.
13. Ibid., p. 144.
14. Reprinted in liner notes for The Music of Arnold Schoenberg, Vol. III.
15. Schoenberg and Stein, Style and Idea, p. 49.
16. Kárpáti, Bartók's Chamber Music, pp. 96 and 286.
17. Ibid., p. 34.
18. Robert Craft, “The Emperor of China,” New York Review of Books, November 5, 1987.
PART II
Epigraph, p. 153: Duke Ellington, in Tucker, ed., DER, p. 43.
1. Tucker, ed., DER, p. 50.
2. Ibid., p. 12.
3. For the history of many of these pieces, see Lock, Blutopia; Early, Tuxedo Junction; and Cohen, Duke Ellington's America.
4. Ellington's schedule is documented in Stratemann, Duke Ellington, and Vail, Duke's Diary.
5. See Alvin Ailey's account of The River in Perlis and Van Cleve, Composers' Voices from Ives to Ellington, pp. 400-404. Van de Leur, Something to Live For, and Hajdu, Lush Life, offer many detailed descriptions of the Ellington/ Strayhorn collaboration.
6. For Ellington's frank assessment of his work with Henderson see Howland, “Ellington Uptown,” p. 165.
5. “WARM VALLEY”: LOVE
Epigraph, p. 157: Duke Ellington, in Ellington, MIMM, p. 53. Epigraph, pp. 159-60: Duke Ellington, “Sex Is No Sin,” Ebony, May 1954. Epigraph, p. 187: Arnold Schoenberg, quoted in Beaumont, Zemlinsky, p. 207.
1. See Stratemann, Duke Ellington, pp. 5-23.
2. See Metzer, Quotation and Cultural Meaning in Twentieth-Century Music, for a discussion of the film's cultural setting.
3. Ellington, MIMM, p. 6. Ellington's father died two years later; he suffered these two great losses just as the swing era was taking off.
4. Tucker, ed., DER, p. 120.
5. Lawrence, Duke Ellington and His World, p. 246.
6. Hasse, Beyond Category, p. 23.
7. Howland, “Ellington Uptown,” p. 176.
8. Tucker, ed., DER, p. 244.
9. Ellington, MIMM, pp. 12-15.
10. See Tucker, Ellington: The Early Years, p. 16.
11. Tucker, ed., DER, p. 124.
12. See also Gunther Schuller's thematic analysis in SE.
13. Van de Leur, Something to Live For, pp. 93-94.
14. Ellington, MIMM, p. 20.
15. See Appel, Jazz Modernism, pp. 225-27.
16. See Chambers, “Bardland,” 43.
17. Liner notes for original album.
18. Vail, Duke's Diary, p. 35.
19. Quoted in Nicholson, Reminiscing in Tempo, p. 290.
20. See Gennari, in O'Meally, Edwards, and Griffin, eds., UC, p. 129.
21. Hajdu, Lush Life, p. 148.
22. Morton, Backstory in Blue, p. 147.
23. Tucker, ed., DER, p. 291.
24. Epstein, Joe Papp, p. 127.
25. Ibid., p. 167.
26. Hajdu, Lush Life, p. 155.
27. Tucker, ed., DER, p. 321.
28. Its precedent as an album-long composition was soon followed by the Miles Davis / Gil Evans Miles Ahead and Charles Mingus's Black Saint and the Sinner Lady. Both albums acknowledged their debt to Ellington/Strayhorn. Miles Ahead included Evans's arrangement of Dave Brubeck's “The Duke”; on Black Saint Mingus asked saxophonist Charles Mariani to imitate Johnny Hodges.
29. Tucker, ed., DER, p. 321.
30. Ellington, MIMM, p. 192.
31. See Dyer, But Beautiful, pp. 3-4.
32. O'Meally, Edwards, and Griffin, eds., UC, p. 336.
33. See an analysis in van de Leur, Something to Live For, pp. 159-61.
34. Hajdu, Lush Life, p. 82.
35. See Tucker, ed., DER, p. 191.
36. Hajdu, Lush Life, p. 160.
37. You can find the music in Ellington, The 100th Anniversary Collection.
38. Berg and Berg, Alban Berg: Letters to his Wife, pp. 341-42.
39. See Jarman in Pople, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Berg, p. 177.
40. For an updated, clear-eyed assessment of both the affair and the music, see Simms, “Alban Berg and Hanna Fuchs.”
41. See Douglas Jarman, “Secret Programmes,” in Pople, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Berg, pp. 167-79.
42. Dietschy, Ashbrook, and Cobb, A Portrait of Claude Debussy, p. 127.
43. Quoted in Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918, p. 25.
44. Reich, Alban Berg, p. 71.
45. Perle, The Operas of Alban Berg, p. 710.
46. In September 1925 Berg wrote Schoenberg, “Casting a glance at our new score [the Wind Quintet, op. 26] a while back was immeasurably exciting. How long will it be before I understand the music as thoroughly as I fancy, for example, that I understand Pierrot?”
6. BLACK, BROWN AND BEIGE: HISTORY
Epigraphs, p. 200: T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”; F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby; Sun Ra, quoted in Graham Lock, Blutopia, p. 140.
1. Adorno, Prisms, pp. 119-32.
2. T
ucker, ed., DER, p. 207.
3. See Anderson, Deep River, pp. 221-25.
4. Lewis, W. E. B. Dubois, p. 507.
5. Cripps, Slow Fade to Black, p. 52.
6. May, Screening out the Past, pp. 81-82.
7. Ibid., 83.
8. George, The Death of Rhythm and Blues, p. 7.
9. Tucker, Ellington: The Early Years, p. 8.
10. Gennari, Blowin' Hot and Cool, p. 29.
11. Ibid., p. 30.
12. Duberman, Paul Robeson, p. 250.
13. Ottley, “New World A-Coming,” p. 289.
14. Tucker, ed., DER, p. 147.
15. Ibid., p. 166.
16. For a detailed account of these concerts and Hammond's role in shaping jazz history, see Anderson, Deep River, chapter 5.
17. Tucker, ed., DER, pp. 155-65.
18. See Tucker, “The Genesis of Black, Brown and Beige”; Cohen, Duke Ellington's America.
19. See Edwards in O'Meally, Edwards, and Griffin, eds., UC, p. 345.
20. Denning, The Cultural Front, p. 310.
21. Tucker, ed., DER, p. 504.
22. See Ulanov, Duke Ellington; Tucker, ed., DER; Giddins, “In Search of Black, Brown and Beige” in Tucker, ed., DER,; Tucker, “The Genesis of Black, Brown and Beige”; DeVeaux, “‘Black, Brown and Beige’ and the Critics”; Lock, Blutopia; Peress, Dvoák to Duke Ellington; Cohen, Duke Ellington's America; Knauer, “Simulated Improvisation”; Howland, “Ellington Uptown.”
23. The critical literature covers the considerable and varied formal history of Black, Brown and Beige. Here I will consider the work as heard on the January 1943 recording with the help of Maurice Peress's version of the score, which, however, is not a critical edition. I discuss this version of the piece because of its historical importance, not because I think it represents an urtext or is definitive either in its composition or performance.
24. The short phrases are outlined by Howland, “Ellington Uptown,” p. 188.
25. Brian Priestley and Alan Cohen note how the work uses material from the 1938 version of “Riding on a Blue Note.” Tucker, ed., DER, p. 193.
26. You can see this effect in the 1930 film Check and Double Check.
27. See Tucker, ed., DER, p. 197.
28. Ibid., p. 172.
29. Murray, Stomping the Blues, p. 36.