Duke Ellington studies 9781139028226, 1139028227

Table of contents :
1. Ellington the entertainer: pageantry and prophecy in Duke Ellington's films Phil Ford
2. Marketing to the middlebrow: reconsidering Ellingtonia, the legacy of early Ellington criticism, and the idea of a 'serious' jazz composer John Howland
3. 'Art or debauchery?': the reception of Ellington in the UK Catherine Tackley
4. 'Nobody was looking': the unparalleled jazz piano legacy of Duke Ellington Bill Dobbins
5. 'People wrap their lunches in them': Duke Ellington and his written music manuscripts Walter van de Leur
6. The moor's revenge: the politics of Such Sweet Thunder David Schiff
7. Duke Ellington in the LP era Gabriel Solis
8. Authentic synthetic hybrid: Ellington's concepts of Africa and its music Carl Woideck
9. 'The mother of all albums': revisiting Ellington's A Drum is a Woman John Wriggle.

Citation preview

Duke Ellington Studies

Duke Ellington (1899–1974) is widely considered the jazz tradition’s most celebrated composer. This engaging yet scholarly volume explores his long career and his rich cultural legacy from a broad range of in-depth perspectives, from the musical and historical to the political and international. World-renowned scholars and musicians examine Ellington’s influence on jazz music, its criticism, and its historiography. The chronological structure of the volume allows a clear understanding of the development of key themes, with chapters surveying his work and his reception in America and abroad. By both expanding and reconsidering the contexts in which Ellington, his orchestra, and his music are discussed, Duke Ellington Studies reflects a wealth of new directions that have emerged in Jazz Studies, including focuses on music in media, class hierarchy discourse, globalization, cross-cultural reception, and the role of marketing, as well as manuscript score studies and performance studies. john howland is Professor of Music History at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway, and formerly an associate professor of Musicology, Jazz Studies, and American Studies at Rutgers University–Newark. He is the co-founder and former editor of the journal Jazz Perspectives, as well as the author of Ellington Uptown: Duke Ellington, James P. Johnson, and the Birth of Concert Jazz (2009).

Duke Ellington Studies Edited by john howland Norwegian University of Science and Technology

University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 4843/24, 2nd Floor, Ansari Road, Daryaganj, Delhi – 110002, India 79 Anson Road, #06-04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521764049 DOI: 10.1017/9781139028226  C Cambridge University Press 2017

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2017 Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd. Padstow Cornwall A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data Names: Howland, John, 1964– Title: Duke Ellington studies / edited by John Howland. Description: Cambridge ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2017. | Series: Cambridge composer studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017003311 | ISBN 9780521764049 (alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Ellington, Duke, 1899-1974 – Criticism and interpretation. | Jazz – History and criticism. Classification: LCC ML410.E44 D86 2017 | DDC 781.65092–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017003311 ISBN 978-0-521-76404-9 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

List of Illustrations page [vii] Notes on Contributors [xi] Preface [xv] Acknowledgements [xxi] Note on Reference Abbreviations

[xxiii]

1 Ellington the Entertainer: Pageantry and Prophecy in Duke Ellington’s Films [1] phil ford 2 Marketing to the Middlebrow: Reconsidering Ellingtonia, the Legacy of Early Ellington Criticism, and the Idea of a “Serious” Jazz Composer [32] john howland 3 “Art or Debauchery?”: The Reception of Ellington in the U.K. [76] catherine tackley 4 “Nobody Was Looking”: The Unparalleled Jazz Piano Legacy of Duke Ellington [108] bill dobbins 5 “People Wrap Their Lunches in Them”: Duke Ellington and His Written Music Manuscripts [157] walter van de leur 6 The Moor’s Revenge: The Politics of Such Sweet Thunder [177] david schiff 7 Duke Ellington in the LP Era [197] gabriel solis 8 Authentic Synthetic Hybrid: Ellington’s Concepts of Africa and Its Music [224] carl woideck v

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9 “The Mother of All Albums”: Revisiting Ellington’s A Drum Is a Woman [265] john wriggle Index

[299]

Illustrations

Figures 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 2.1

2.2 8.1

8.2

8.3

8.4

Michael Leavitt, MoveOn.org, A Little Green from a Lot of People (2008) page [8] Justin Hampton, That One: History (2008) [9] Tableau from W. E. B. Du Bois, The Star of Ethiopia (Crisis, August 1916) [10] Figures from W. E. B. Du Bois, The Star of Ethiopia (Crisis, December 1915) [10] Alec Lovejoy and Edgar Connor, Black and Tan (RKO, 1929) [21] The red-velvet cover and accompanying liner-note booklet to the 1943 Brunswick Records 78-rpm album, Ellingtonia, vol. 1, B1000 [35] The front and back covers of the 1946 78-rpm album, Black, Brown and Beige, SP-9 (soft cover) [37] Duke Ellington and the Senegalese poet, philosopher, and statesman L´eopold S´edar Senghor, April 1966. Ruth Ellington Collection, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. [243] The Ellington orchestra with Senegalese percussionist Gana M’bow in Dakar, April 1966. Ruth Ellington Collection, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. [250] Duke Ellington welcomed at the airport in Addis Ababa by Emperor Haile Selassie’s pet lion, Mecuria, in 1974. Courtesy of Art Baron. Photographer unknown [258] The Ellington Orchestra at the Addis Ababa Hilton Hotel on 22 November 1973, with Ethiopian vibraphonist/ keyboardist, Mulatu Astatke [261]

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List of Illustrations

Examples All examples in Chapter 4 are transcribed from the recordings by Bill Dobbins. 4.1 Black Beauty (1 October 1928), A theme, mm. 1–4 [112] 4.2 In a Mellotone (4 May 1940), introduction, mm. 1–3 [119] 4.3 Mr. J. B. Blues (1 October 1940), second blues chorus, mm. 5–8 [121] 4.4 Blue Serge (15 February 1941), last four measures of Ellington’s solo [123] 4.5 Solitude (14 May 1941, take 2), first chorus, last A section, mm. 1–4 [124] 4.6 Blue Belles of Harlem (23 January 1943), Ellington’s “bent note” effect [126] 4.7 New World A-Comin’ (11 December 1943), C theme, mm. 1–4 [128] 4.8 “Dancers in Love” (from the Perfume Suite, 19 December 1944), final A phrase, mm. 1–4 [130] 4.9. “Nobody Was Looking” (from the Deep South Suite, 23 November 1946), A theme, mm. 13–16 [132] 4.10 “Happy-Go-Lucky Local” (from the Deep South Suite, 23 November 1946), first piano solo, mm. 1–4 [133] 4.11 The Clothed Woman (27 December 1947), A section, mm. 1–4 [135] 4.12 “Reflections in D” (14 April 1953), first A section, mm. 1–3 [139] 4.13 “Kinda Dukish” (3 December 1953), 32 measures before the closing theme [140] 4.14 Band Call (26 April 1954), B section, mm. 5–8 [141] 4.15 Night Creature (16 March 1955), part two, mm. 1–3 [142] 4.16 “The Single Petal of a Rose” (from The Queen’s Suite, 14 April 1959), first A1 section, mm. 5–8 [144] 4.17 Second Portrait of The Lion (20 June 1965), second A section, mm. 7–10 [147] 4.18 “The Shepherd” (18 July 1966), B theme, mm. 9–11 [148] 4.19 “Ad Lib on Nippon” (20 December 1966), second chorus, mm. 1–4 [150] 4.20 Mood Indigo, comparison of the A theme, mm. 1–4, with corresponding Ellington introductions or solos [154]

List of Illustrations

9.1A 9.1B 9.2 9.3

9.4A 9.4B 9.5A 9.5B 9.5C 9.6

“A Drum Is a Woman Part 2 (Drums Rab)” (1:31ff.) [287] “Ballet of the Flying Saucers,” interlude (1:58ff.) [288] “Finale” (0:01ff.) [290] A (left): “A Drum Is a Woman Part 1” (1:45ff.) B (center): “Carribee Joe Part 1” (2:13ff.) C (right): “Congo Square (Mme Zajj Entrance)” (3:21ff.) [290] “Congo Square (Matumbe)” (2:00ff.) [291] “Rhumbop” (0:06ff.) [291] “Carribee Joe Part 1” (1:49ff.) [291] “Congo Square (Matumbe)” (0:28ff.) [291] “Ballet of the Flying Saucers” (1:40ff.) [291] “Congo Square (Matumbe)” (1:15ff.) [292]

Tables 6.1 6.2

9.1 9.2

Formal design of “Such Sweet Thunder,” movement 1 from Such Sweet Thunder [191] Formal design of “Up and Down, Up and Down (I Will Lead Them Up and Down),” movement 7 from Such Sweet Thunder [194] A Drum Is a Woman album and telecast sequences [270] “Ballet of the Flying Saucers,” formal outline [289]

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Contributors

bill dobbins is Professor of Jazz Studies and Contemporary Media at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. From 1994 to 2002, he was Principal Director of the WDR Big Band in Cologne, Germany. From 1998, he was also Chair of the Jazz Department at the Hochschule f¨ur Musik in Cologne. He has appeared as guest conductor of the Netherlands Metropole Orchestra in Hilversum, and has arranged for many of their concerts and radio productions. As pianist, composer/arranger, and conductor, he has collaborated with such artists as Clark Terry, Eddie Henderson, Lew Soloff, Chuck Israels, Red Mitchell, Phil Woods, Dave Liebman, Jerry Bergonzi, Steve Lacy, Gary Bartz, Gary Foster, and Peter Erskine. His publications include Jazz Arranging and Composing: A Linear Approach, A Creative Approach to Jazz Piano Harmony, and Composing and Arranging for the Contemporary Big Band. His books of piano transcriptions include Chick Corea: Now He Sings, Now He Sobs, and Clare Fischer: Alone Together/Just Me. His recent CDs include J. S. Bach: Christmas Oratorio, which he arranged and conducted, with the King’s Singers and the WDR Big Band, and Bill Dobbins: Composers Series, vol. 1, Music of Clare Fischer and George Gershwin (solo piano). phil ford is Associate Professor of Musicology at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. He previously taught at the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a fellow of the University of Texas Humanities Institute, and at Stanford University, where he was a fellow of the Stanford Humanities Fellows Program. His published work has focused on postwar American popular music (especially jazz and film music), American Cold War culture, radical and countercultural intellectual history, and sound and performance. Ford is the author of Dig: Sound and Music in Hip Culture (Oxford University Press, 2013), a cultural and intellectual history of hipness in American life from the 1940s through the 1960s. His essays have appeared in Representations, Journal of Musicology, Jazz Perspectives, The Musical Quarterly, and other scholarly journals. He is also the co-author (with Jonathan Bellman) of the musicology blog Dial “M” for Musicology, which he founded in 2006 and maintains to this day. His current interests

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revolve around music and philosophy and, more particularly, on magical styles of thought; at present, he is working on a book on this topic. john howland, an American ex-pat, is Professor of Music History at the Department of Music, Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, and lives in Lund, Sweden. He was previously a member of the Musicology, Jazz History, and American Studies faculties of Rutgers University–Newark, and the Musicology faculty of Lund University. He is the author of Ellington Uptown: Duke Ellington, James P. Johnson, and the Birth of Concert Jazz (University of Michigan Press, 2009), and the co-founder and former editor-in-chief of the Routledge journal, Jazz Perspectives. Howland is currently working on a history of orchestral pop aesthetics and practice (spanning jazz, popular music, and music in various media) from the 1920s to present. He has likewise written extensively in articles and book chapters – as well as lectured and taught widely – on a wealth of musical styles and eras, from dance bands in the 1910s to post-2000 indie rock and hip-hop topics. Jazz-musicologist walter van de leur is the author of Something to Live For: The Music of Billy Strayhorn (Oxford University Press, 2002), which received the 2003 Irving Lowens Book Award for Distinguished Scholarship from the Society of American Music. He conducted extensive research at the Duke Ellington Collection under two consecutive Smithsonian Institution Fellowships, in Washington, D.C., and furthermore researched and catalogued Billy Strayhorn’s musical legacy in the repository of his estate. He has published on Black, Brown and Beige in The Musical Quarterly (2013), and the Ellington-Strayhorn Collaboration (The Cambridge Companion to Duke Ellington, 2014). His research for the Dutch Jazz Orchestra has led to six compact discs with hitherto forgotten works by Strayhorn (one in 1995 and three in 2002), Mary Lou Williams (2005), and Gerry Mulligan and Gil Evans (2008). Van de Leur teaches at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam, and is Professor of Jazz and Improvised Music at the University of Amsterdam. He served as Senior Researcher for Rhythm Changes (2010–13, co-funded by the European Community), for which he directed the Jazz and National Identities Conference in 2011, and the Jazz Beyond Borders Conference in 2014. He is currently Principal Investigator for CHIME (2015–17; Cultural Heritage in Improvised Music Festivals in Europe), funded by Heritage Plus. david schiff is the R. P. Wollenberg Professor of Music at Reed College, Portland, Oregon. He studied English Literature at Columbia University

Notes on Contributors

and Cambridge University, and studied composition at the Manhattan School of Music and the Juilliard School. He has written books about the music of Elliott Carter, George Gershwin, and Duke Ellington, and composed operas, symphonic works, chamber music, and jazz compositions. His jazz compositions have been performed by Regina Carter, David Taylor, Marty Ehrlich, Larry Karush, and Myra Melford. gabriel solis is Professor of Music, African American Studies, and Anthropology at the University of Ilinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of the books Monk’s Music: Thelonious Monk and Jazz History in the Making (University of California Press, 2008) and Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall (Oxford University Press, 2013), and co-editor (with Bruno Nettl) of the volume, Musical Improvisation: Art, Education, and Society (University of Illinois Press, 2009). His articles on jazz, rock, pop, indigenous music, and theory in ethnomusicology have appeared in such journals as Ethnomusicology, The Musical Quarterly, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Critical Sociology, and Popular Music and Society. His work has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Madden Fund, and the Mellon Foundation, and has received awards from the Association for Recorded Sound Collections and the Society for Ethnomusicology. catherine tackley is Professor and Head of Music at the University of Liverpool, UK. Tackley’s research interests include jazz and popular music, early and European jazz, recording, jazz-influenced music, and performance practice. Her monograph on Benny Goodman’s Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert (Oxford University Press, 2012) was awarded Jazz Publication of the Year in 2013 by the All-Party Parliamentary Jazz Appreciation Group. Her first book, The Evolution of Jazz in Britain, 1880–1935 (Ashgate, 2005), was hailed as “the definitive history of jazz in Britain.” Tackley was co-investigator on the AHRC-funded project “What Is Black British Jazz?” in 2009–11, resulting in a volume entitled Black British Jazz: Routes, Ownership and Performance (Ashgate, 2014) which Tackley also co-edited. From 2012 to 2014 she was Principal Investigator of the AHRC Research Networking project “Atlantic Sounds: Ships and Sailortowns” and continues to develop work on music and the sea. Tackley is a co-editor of the Jazz Research Journal (Equinox), and a member of the U.K. Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Peer Review College. carl woideck is an instructor in jazz, rock, and blues music histories at the University of Oregon, where he began teaching in 1982. Woideck is

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also a professional saxophonist and longtime jazz radio broadcaster. He is author of Charlie Parker: His Music and Life (University of Michigan Press), and is also author and editor of The John Coltrane Companion and The Charlie Parker Companion (both Schirmer Books). He has also written compact disc liner notes extensively for the Verve, Blue Note, Mosaic, and Prestige labels. Woideck’s research awards include grants from the University of Oregon, National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute of Jazz Studies. He has presented research papers at national meetings of the American Musicological Society and the Society of American Music. john wriggle is a musicologist, composer, arranger, and performer in New York City, and his background further includes experiences working in music publishing, radio broadcasting, and film music editing. He has taught courses on Duke Ellington, Popular Music, Jazz History, and Jazz Arranging for John Jay College, Boston University, Rutgers University– Newark’s graduate Jazz History and Research program, and Jazz at Lincoln Center. His research has appeared in Black Music Research Journal, Grove Dictionary of American Music, and Journal of the Society for American Music; he is author of the book Blue Rhythm Fantasy: Big Band Jazz Arranging in the Swing Era (University of Illinois Press, 2016).

Preface

The steady stream of trade publications, critical attention, and performances that both preceded and followed the 1999 centennial of Duke Ellington’s birth has shown few signs of abating up to present. Indeed, the last decade has witnessed a significant number of monograph studies, biographies, and academic journal issues devoted to Ellington. The bandleader/composer’s legacy has continued to remain absolutely central to scholarly jazz research, a subject area that has become a major field of international interest across an impressive variety of academic disciplines since the early 1990s. Beyond its role as a subject in musicology, ethnomusicology, and music theory, the jazz tradition and its representations in popular culture have stimulated vibrant new scholarly discourses in such fields as Comparative Literature, African American Studies, American Studies, History, Sociology, Gender Studies, and Film Studies. Significant Ellington-related research can be found in each of these fields. This unusually broad scholarly interest in Ellington is a reflection of his status as a composer, his rich role as an historical figure, and his central historical importance both to the cultural elevation of jazz across the twentieth century and to jazz criticism and historiography. In 2015, Cambridge University Press published the Cambridge Companion to Duke Ellington, edited by Edward Green. The present volume was in fact originally planned as a companion to the Companion, and it too had its early roots in Green’s inspiration and his preliminary conversations with the Press. The volume began in earnest as a partnership, however, and it took much of its present shape under the joint guidance of both Green and myself. Because of the unparalleled role that Ellington’s compositions have played in the entry of Jazz Studies into the Academy, this volume represents an important step toward extending the cultural breadth of the venerable Cambridge Composer Studies series to include major composers from the fields of jazz and popular music. By both expanding and reconsidering the contexts in which Ellington, his orchestra, and his music are discussed, Ellington Studies reflects the wealth of new directions that have emerged in Jazz Studies. At the same time, this collection equally

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speaks to non-specialists in jazz historiography, as it provides an ideal forum for bridging new scholarly directions in Jazz Studies with broader cross-disciplinary issues in historical inquiry, music analysis, and cultural studies. The volume as a whole spans nearly the entire breadth of Ellington’s career, from his rise to international prominence in the late 1920s and early 1930s, to his fascinating but largely overlooked postwar career up through the 1960s. The contributors’ essays range widely in their concerns across interdisciplinary perspectives on jazz as music and jazz as culture. The chapters explore critical reception, the compositional process, cultural politics, American and British class hierarchies, jazz performance practice, period racial discourses, international cultural exchange, the intersections of music, culture, and media, and other rich topics. In progressing through these chronologically organized essays, the reader will be introduced to both a variety of critical perspectives on Ellington, as well as an equally diverse range of methodologies and frames of reference for studying Ellington and the jazz tradition. Beyond its loose chronological ordering, Duke Ellington Studies is also structured through four important thematic areas. The first organizing theme concerns Ellington’s relation to art and entertainment discourse, and while this theme can be seen across numerous essays in the volume, chapters 1 and 2 in specific explore this concern via the relation between Ellington’s image and his critical reception and promotional publicity. While Phil Ford explores the intersections of Ellington’s early career, racial uplift discourses, the modes of meaning in entertainment and spectacle, and the powerful medium of film, John Howland offers a parallel study of both class-hierarchy politics in music and the 1930s creation of Ellington’s unique image as a “serious” jazz composer, as well as the relation of this image to interwar middlebrow discourse. In the volume’s first chapter, Ford observes both how Ellington often strove to “give an American audience entertainment without compromising the dignity of the Negro people” and how the tension between entertainment and racial dignity remained unresolved and is especially marked in Ellington’s film appearances. As Ford demonstrates, “entertainment” comprises codes of historically locatable professional practice aimed at eliciting familiar responses from paying customers; it entails a repertory of picturesque scenes and characterizations that are instantly apprehended and understood. Under this view, it can be seen that entertainment comprises a syntax built on the endless varied repetition of a particular kind of sign – the sign for a character that is actually the same

Preface

as the character. This syntax of “instant character” is almost unavoidably racist, or at least racially essentializing. Ford maintains that many black characters represented in interwar film entertainments did not get to have personalities or stories, but only stereotypes; Ellington’s answer was not to do away with entertainment, but to give black characters better stereotypes. As Ford richly illustrates, these are drawn from an idealized and mythic history of the African American people, presented as a pageant. In this manner of representation, history is the solvent of the congealed sign – even as history itself covertly becomes yet another congealed sign. In Ellington’s films, the entire span of racial development is recapitulated in the single, spectacular figure of the suffering, laboring, or performing black body. In Chapter 2, Howland examines the relationship among Duke Ellington’s professional image, the promotional agenda of his publicity agents and managers, interwar symphonic jazz, and Ellington’s critical reception in the press and subsequent jazz historiography. Through this nexus, this chapter specifically explores the emergence of the sophisticated public persona of Duke Ellington, particularly his unique image as a “serious” jazz composer across the 1930s and early 1940s, but also the relation of this image to subsequent Ellington discourse. In the context of middlebrow class-hierarchy discourses across the interwar era, American and European critics began to regularly place Ellington’s name in the heady highbrow company of classical composers such as Stravinsky, Delius, and Debussy, among others. This chapter considers the personal, musical, and career impact of these classical/vernacular comparisons and how they may have ultimately led to the composer’s rejection of the term “jazz” after the early 1940s. Beyond the fascinating role of the innovative public relations campaigns that promoted Ellington and his music, this image was equally entwined with contemporary critical efforts that found Ellington’s music to be an exemplar par excellence for promoting a subversive agenda that sought to advance and culturally elevate both the idea of “jazz composition” and black jazz aesthetics in general. A second organizing theme in the volume concerns Ellington’s presence on the international stage, both in terms of his reception and cultural impact, as well as the impact of this international presence on his own creative work. This theme is centrally the focus of chapters 3 and 8, by Catherine Tackley and Carl Woideck, respectively. Tackley explores the impact of Duke Ellington in the U.K., focusing on his 1933 tour of the country, his 1948 appearances without his orchestra, his performances at the Royal Festival Hall and the Leeds Festival in 1958, and, finally, the

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three Sacred Concerts which were staged in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s. These performances, which span Ellington’s career, took place in a range of performance situations and across different regions of the U.K. This chapter specifically explores the British reception of Ellington’s developing musical style and his influence on the British jazz community during this forty-year period. A range of sources – including reviews from local and national papers together with oral history material – are used to gauge the reaction of critics and audiences. Carl Woideck’s contribution, Chapter 8, takes its inspiration from Ellington’s late-life reflections on his first trip to Africa, upon which he wrote: “After writing African music for thirty-five years, here I am at last in Africa! I can only hope and wish that our performance of ‘La Plus Belle Africaine,’ which I have written in anticipation of the occasion, will mean something to the people gathered here.” In turn, Woideck asks: if Ellington was a composer of African (not African American) music, what did Africa mean to him? As the chapter documents, Ellington’s concepts of Africa began with his youth in Washington, D.C., and then extended through each period of his career. But it was well into the early 1960s before Ellington visited Africa. Thus, Woideck explores what “authenticity” might have meant in the “African” musical evocations of Ellington, an American-born and self-described writer of “African” music. The evidence of the composer’s concepts of the continent and its music is by turns rich, fragmentary, and contradictory, but in the end – as the chapter argues – it is consistent with the complexities of Ellington, the man. A third organizing theme in the volume can be seen in the “shop talk” pairing of chapters 4 and 5, by Bill Dobbins and Walter van de Leur, respectively. These essays offer close musical studies of Ellington’s musical development as a pianist as well as the changing compositional processes behind the creation of Ellington’s big band scores. Dobbins observes that while Duke Ellington’s fame as one of the foremost jazz composers and bandleaders was well established by the mid-1930s, the significance of his contributions as a pianist has often been overlooked. Dobbins contends that the personal pianistic expression Ellington achieved in such diverse vocabularies as stride, blues, bebop, Latin, European impressionism, and elements of the musical avant-garde is, perhaps, unsurpassed in the rich legacy of jazz piano playing. Ellington the pianist is explored both in terms of basic techniques of musical development and the imaginative use of special pianistic sounds and effects across a wide variety of settings, from miniatures to extended rhapsodic forms, with and without his orchestra. By contrast, Van de Leur illustrates many important facets of how to

Preface

understand Ellington’s highly individual process of writing music – i.e., of actually committing it to paper, using pencil and eraser. As Van de Leur demonstrates, the relation between Ellington’s autographs and the performances and recordings of his orchestra is not straightforward. Clearly, Ellington’s goal was performance. He never sought to publish his music in print, which further obscured how performance and notation in his case are connected. As Van de Leur argues, this has led scholars to gloss over the role of notation in Ellington’s music, and often, to downplay its importance. This chapter explores the role of music notation in jazz in general, and in Ellington’s compositional strategies in particular. Van de Leur asks: how are his written scores and performances connected? What role does music notation play in Ellington’s creative process? How does his notated music compare to other compositional practices he applied? Lastly, as a fourth organizational theme, the volume offers several innovative reconsiderations of the bandleader’s long-undervalued postwar career. Across chapters 6, 7, and 9, David Schiff, Gabriel Solis, and John Wriggle convincingly argue for the importance and musical richness of Ellington and Billy Strayhorn’s compositions from the 1950s and 1960s, with particular attention to new media, formal musical concerns, and contemporary postwar cultural politics. In chapter 6, Schiff considers Ellington’s negotiations of American cultural politics in the 1950s, when political expression in the United States was repressed both through the operations of the anti-communist campaign of Senator Joseph McCarthy, and the pervasive ideology of the Cold War. In this environment, artists had to find new strategies for protest, and Ellington was no exception. As Schiff contends, with Such Sweet Thunder, composed in 1957, Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn extended the political arguments of such earlier works as Black, Brown and Beige, New World A-Comin’, The Deep South Suite, and A Tone Parallel to Harlem through a post-colonial counter-appropriation of the very foundation of Anglo-American culture: the works of William Shakespeare. While the implied politics of the music was ignored by contemporary critics, Schiff’s close reading of the music shows how the demand for civil and human rights is coded in its musical style and innovative musical forms. Solis in turn provides a broad-scale consideration of Ellington’s innovative mastery of the LP medium after World War II. This chapter argues that the bandleader’s work from the LP era (that is, after 1950) is important in a larger assessment of his creativity throughout his career. Long dismissed as less creative than his work from the 1930s and 1940s, Solis demonstrates that these releases in fact shed considerable light on Ellington’s aesthetics

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as well as on his approach to cultural production. Importantly, they showcase Ellington’s life-long interest in technology and its relationship to progress – both in artistic modernism and in American racial politics. In addition to looking at issues of cultural production and politics, Solis’s essay delves closely into the albums Hi-Fi Ellington Uptown, A Drum Is a Woman, Such Sweet Thunder, and more. Wriggle’s complementary chapter subsequently shifts the volume’s media focus to early television, and specifically to Ellington and Billy Strayhorn’s “musical allegory,” A Drum Is a Woman. Recorded for Columbia during 1956 and staged with an all-black cast for CBS television in 1957, this broadcast and album have long been an uncomfortable relic for Ellington fans and scholars. As Wriggle demonstrates, the stage revue narrative script – as ambitious and controversial as any of Ellington’s extended works – only begins to outline the wealth of musical, historical, and autobiographical references woven throughout. The chapter argues that A Drum Is a Woman stands as a pivotal inspiration for late-career creativity, a paragon of jazz misogyny, a groundbreaking milestone in “concept album” media, a calculated reaffirmation of the maestro’s elder-statesman status, and a triumphant “tone parallel” of African American history to join Ellington’s pantheon of programmatic works (including Symphony in Black, Black, Brown and Beige, My People, and the Sacred Concerts) that forecasted, documented, and celebrated the American Civil Rights movement. In sum, Wriggle contends that many of the factors that have made A Drum Is a Woman so awkward a fit into the jazz canon also establish the work as one of the most important projects of Ellington’s career. As suggested in my brief account of this volume, there are numerous intentional thematic and repertory links across both chapters and themes in the volume as a whole. In addition, while the range and diversity of this anthology underscores the critical and interdisciplinary breadth of contemporary Jazz Studies, this rich group of essays equally speaks to the significant role Ellington continues to play in defining and shaping the concerns of Jazz Studies in general.

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my most sincere thanks to Edward Green, whose inspiration led to the co-development and co-planning of this volume despite his ultimate decision to leave the volume’s editorship under my care. Many thanks for all your contributions, Ed. Secondly, an equally important figure in the early development of this volume was Victoria Cooper, whose patient and insightful editorial stewardship guided the first few years of this volume’s long gestation period. I need to likewise note my deep gratitude to my subsequent editor, Kate Brett, as well as to all of the volume’s contributors (I have been immensely thankful for both your contributions and patience), and the staff at Cambridge University Press, whose help, guidance, and assistance have been invaluable as this volume has moved toward publication. Lastly, the following individuals and companies have kindly granted permissions for reproducing numerous invaluable examples and figures in this volume: Michael Leavitt, MoveOn.org, A Little Green from a Lot of People (2008). Information on Leavitt can be found at http:// intuitionkitchenproductions.com. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. Justin Hampton, That One: History (2008). All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. Duke Ellington in Senegal photos from the Ruth Ellington Collection (Collection 415), Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. A Drum Is a Woman, words and music by Billy Strayhorn and Duke C 1957 (Renewed) by Music Sales Corporation Ellington. Copyright  and Tempo Music, Inc. All rights for Tempo Music Inc. administered by Music Sales Corporation. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

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Acknowledgements

Every effort has been made to secure necessary permissions to reproduce copyright material in this work, though in some cases it has proved impossible to trace copyright holders. If any omissions are brought to our notice, we will be happy to include appropriate acknowledgements on reprinting.

Reference Abbreviations

The following is a list of citation abbreviations used in the chapter footnotes for common reference sources: Cohen, America Duke Ellington Collection

Ellington, Mistress Hajdu, Lush

Hasse, Beyond

Howland, Uptown

Nicholson, Reminiscing

Ruth Ellington Collection

Stratemann, Day Tucker, Early Tucker, “Genesis”

Tucker, Reader

Harvey G. Cohen, Duke Ellington’s America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). Collection 301, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Edward Kennedy Ellington, Music Is My Mistress (New York: DaCapo, 1976). David Hajdu, Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996). John Hasse, Beyond Category: The Life and Genius of Duke Ellington (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993; reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1995). John Howland, Ellington Uptown: Duke Ellington, James P. Johnson, and the Birth of Concert Jazz (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009). Stuart Nicholson, Reminiscing in Tempo: A Portrait of Duke Ellington (Boston: Northeastern Press, 1999). Collection 415, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Klaus Stratemann, Duke Ellington: Day by Day and Film by Film (Copenhagen: JazzMedia, 1992). Mark Tucker, Ellington: The Early Years (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991). Mark Tucker, “The Genesis of Black, Brown and Beige,” Black Music Research Journal 13 (Fall 1993): 67–86. The Duke Ellington Reader, ed. Mark Tucker (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

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Note on Reference Abbreviations

Vail, Diary, Part 1

Vail, Diary, Part 2

Van de Leur, Something

Ken Vail, Duke’s Diary, Part One: The Life of Duke Ellington, 1927–1950 (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2002). Ken Vail, Duke’s Diary, Part Two: The Life of Duke Ellington, 1950–1974 (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2002). Walter van de Leur, Something to Live For: The Music of Billy Strayhorn (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

1

Ellington the Entertainer: Pageantry and Prophecy in Duke Ellington’s Films phil ford

Duke Ellington used the medium of film early, often, and as effectively as any other jazz musician from the prewar era. While he seldom speaks in his films and looks uncomfortable when he does, it does not matter. In his early sound shorts – Black and Tan (RKO, 1929), Bundle of Blues (Paramount, 1933), and Symphony in Black: A Rhapsody of Negro Life (Paramount, 1935) – as well as his guest appearances in the feature musical Cabin in the Sky (MGM, 1943) and other releases, we register his familiar image of elegance, easy mastery, and urbane self-possession. Compare him to Louis Armstrong, the other most prominent jazz musician in early sound film, who might be having more fun in front of the camera but whose image has not worn as well. Fairly or unfairly, Armstrong has come to personify the talented black artist bowing and scraping to the white audience – or, as Miles Davis put it, “grinning like a motherfucker.”1 Ellington cultivated a different and distinct film image that owes its effect to something more than his acting and has only partly to do with Ellington himself. As Krin Gabbard notes, Ellington’s image originated in a media campaign, orchestrated by Irving Mills, that took advantage of the new medium of sound film but was not limited to it. Once this image was in place, Ellington became a latent figure of the collective imagination, the emblem of a certain kind of African American glamor that could be activated in The Cotton Club (1984), a film that sought to recreate the period during which Ellington made his first films.2 This image has worn well indeed, and Ellington’s savvy use of it tells us much about the racial politics of interwar entertainment and the place of the Negro in the American imagination of this era and beyond.3

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Miles Davis and Quincy Troupe, Miles: The Autobiography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), 406. Krin Gabbard, “Duke’s Place: Visualizing a Jazz Composer,” in Jammin’ at the Margins: Jazz and the American Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 165. While Ellington and every other respectful commentator on race used the term “Negro” in the first half of the twentieth century, its use nowadays needs some explanation. As Richard Dyer points out, if the term once denoted pride and aspiration, it has since decomposed, giving off an odor of racialism that subsequent coinages have tried, with mixed success, to dispel. Richard

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A film star’s image – imagine those of Greta Garbo, Audrey Hepburn, or any figure of comparable glamor and fascination – is a strange kind of artistic creation, only partly authored by the star herself.4 The image emerges from the star’s voice and body, the roles she chooses, and the way she wishes to frame her performances in her public appearances and statements. But her image is also mediated by those who film it, light it, write ad copy for it, and make music to accompany it; not only everyone who makes a film, but everyone who writes about it, talks about it, and ultimately everyone who sees it are the co-authors of the image.5 All the same, the star does have some say over her image. She cannot entirely determine its final shape or the uses to which it will be put, but she can choose its basic shape from a range of available options and tailor it to her needs. This is a complicated creative act, the constitutive act of that artistic medium called celebrity, which must be mastered by anyone concerned with a public.6 From this point of view, it is instructive to consider Ellington in parallel with Barack Obama, who will appear several times in this essay. Whatever their differences, Ellington and Obama are both consummate artists of image, and they both faced a similar challenge at pivotal moments in their careers: how to choose an affirmative mode of blackness within

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Dyer, “In a Word,” in The Matter of Images: Essays on Representations (London: Routledge, 1993), 8. All the same, it helps to retain this term in some historical contexts, since “Negro” refers not only to those who belong to what we would now call the black or African American community, but also to a historicist idea that such people entertained in the earlier decades of the twentieth century. My use of this term is intended to register a sense of how this community felt itself to be faring at a particular moment of history – how far it had come since slavery and how far it had still to go. The topic of glamor lies close to that of stardom and the image: see Lloyd Whitesell, “Trans Glam: Gender Magic in the Film Musical,” in Queering the Popular Pitch, ed. Sheila Whiteley and Jennifer Rycenga (London: Routledge, 2006), 263–77; Joseph Roach, It (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007). This diffuse condition is mirrored in film musicals of the kind in which Ellington appeared. Salman Rushdie once remarked that while we are used to attributing the iconic details of The Wizard of Oz to a unified authorial intention, such films are “as near as dammit to that will-o’-the-wisp of modern critical theory: the authorless text.” Salman Rushdie, The Wizard of Oz (London: British Film Institute, 1992), 16. For this reason, then, it is not very helpful to ask how much Ellington himself intended his image, either in general outlines or in the context of any one film. Clearly he had much to do with it, but so too did his manager, his directors, and ultimately the entire system of American cultural representation. See Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 2002), and especially its title essay, which works through the paradoxes of “the public.” Warner’s essay “The Mass Public and the Mass Subject,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig J. Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), deals with the political uses of the image. See also Joshua Gamson, Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Su Holmes and Sean Redmond (eds.), Framing Celebrity: New Directions in Celebrity Culture (London: Routledge, 2006).

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a limited field of options, or (put another way) how to choose from available categories of racial representation in such a way as to appear “beyond category.” In the 2008 presidential election, Obama could never just happen to be black. He was entering an arena already crowded with racial images and could not but be closely observed as he picked his way among them. His opponents did their best to tag him with ready-at-hand images of the black politician: the religious firebrand of the Farrakhan type, the black nationalist with ties to the 1960s radical Left, the corrupt Chicago Machine flunky, and so on. There were many ways to make blackness a liability for a rising politician; the trick was to figure out how to make being black an asset. What Obama did was to make his blackness the emblem of a history for which Americans hungered. He drew on a powerful tradition of representation in American life: the notion that African Americans carry a special burden of history, and that their destiny is bound up with the fate of the whole nation. This is an understanding of history underwritten by prophecy. Prophecy should not be confused with fortune-telling; it is not a simple act of foretelling but a mode of historical consciousness that links historical moments into transtemporal constellations, such that past and future moments exist in the present. Prophecy can take the form of jeremiad, with the prophet damning the corrupt present and promising God’s judgment in the future, and as Anthony Bogues notes, prophecy is uniquely available as a register of dissent in Africana radical traditions. Rastafarians, for example, “develop conceptions and historical narratives that collapse past and present, making no linear chronological distinctions,” so that the Victorian colonial magnate Cecil Rhodes is a courtier of Elizabeth I, the repressive regime of Babylon comprises Roman and British empires, and Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia (1892–1975) is the living incarnation of an ancient African kingship.7 But in American political rhetoric, power lies in the appeal to what is already felt and known, or rather what is felt to be known, by the widest possible electorate. Thus, for a politician like Obama to use prophetic rhetoric effectively, its reach must extend far beyond black radical traditions.8 And indeed the tradition of historical 7

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Anthony Bogues, “Opening Chant,” in Black Heretics, Black Prophets: Radical Political Intellectuals (New York: Routledge, 2003), 19. David Chappell has argued that it was the black prophetic tradition that moved the Civil Rights movement out of stalemate and towards its eventual victory; as such, prophecy is a particularly distinguished example of a political notion that originates in Africana discourse but attains a general influence and power. David Chappell, A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

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representation on which Obama drew ranges across all divisions of American culture.9 That tradition is alloyed from what Susan Gillman calls “race melodramas,” which include both W. E. B. Du Bois’s lyrical black historiography and Thomas Dixon’s white-supremacist fiction The Clansman. The narrative engine of the race melodramas is what I call prophetic history but what Gillman calls occult history, which she describes as “a kind of futurology based on the esoteric wisdom of the past [that] constructs mystical interrelations among past, present, and future . . . the multidimensionality of occult time accounts for hidden intrusions of the past into the present as well as for ongoing and unredeemed claims of the past on the present.”10 In this essay, I add the major items of Duke Ellington’s small but remarkable interwar filmography to Gillman’s list of race melodramas. Ellington’s films recast black experience in the prophetic mood, presenting Negro history as a pageant enacted in the suffering, laboring, or performing black body. Prophetic history gave Ellington a new entertainment image to compete with the minstrel stereotypes that he despised as “ofay hocuspocus.”11 These stereotypes are tough weeds, hard to uproot, for reasons that go to the heart of what entertainment is and how it works. Entertainment comprises a syntax built on the endless varied repetition of images that drastically de-individualize characters. Blacks in film did not get personalities or stories of their own, but only such stories as their stereotypes allowed. Ellington’s answer was not to do away with entertainment, as is often alleged, but to give key black characters a better stereotype. In Ellington’s short films, history is the solvent of the image, even as history itself covertly becomes yet another image. By these means, Ellington and his collaborators offered a solution to one of the central problems of his career, which he once stated concisely as a wish to “give an American

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Obama (and Ellington) avoided the bitter tone of jeremiad that some scholars consider the essential ingredient of prophetic political rhetoric. As George Shulman notes, Obama struck a prophetic tone that was well-suited to a racially mixed electorate, much of which was not eager to be reminded of the nation’s troubled racial past: “Partly, to become ‘our first black president,’ he narrated neither a tragic retelling of American nationalism nor a jeremiad calling for fateful choices about practices long deemed legitimate, but a poetry of the future that repeats the redemptive promise of American exceptionalism.” George Schulman, American Prophecy: Race and Redemption in American Political Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 225–6. Susan Gillman, Blood Talk: American Race Melodrama and the Culture of the Occult (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 201. Duke Ellington, “Beige,” Black, Brown and Beige, undated typescript, Duke Ellington Collection, 3.

Ellington the Entertainer

audience entertainment without compromising the dignity of the Negro people.”12 Before considering Ellington’s prophetic tone, though, we turn again to Barack Obama, standing at the moment of his historic victory. Did you notice the word “historic” in the last sentence? I suspect you did not, because it is such a clich´e: everybody called Obama’s election historic. On television, in editorial pages, and in blogs and public diaries, voters wrote about the unfamiliar and heady feeling of a private moment of experience coming in contact with the great tectonic movements of national history. Writers felt their ability to participate in history and sense its movements – what we might call a historical faculty – to be gaining strength and becoming manifest in huge crowds, long voter lines, and one another’s public diaries. The master stroke of the Obama campaign was to orchestrate this sensation on a mass scale. We all imagine we know what this history is, but on reflection it becomes less clear. There are at least three different ways of framing this event as “historical,” each of which rests upon a distinct metaphysics. As political scientist W. Phillips Shively once remarked, “historical” usually means “something I’ll be able to tell my grandkids about.”13 All those commemorative plates and coins that were huckstered around the inauguration pitched the opportunity to “collect a piece of history,” which really meant to pick up a souvenir that would prove, to some hypothetical future generation, that you were there – maybe not at the inauguration itself, but you had at least watched it on television. This scenario represents a historical vernacular, an unschooled way of thinking the present moment historically.14 It is a way of taking a step back and viewing events within a wider frame, and in this respect it has something in common with a second mood of history. This is the way in which historians have always understood their subject, as a pattern of cause and effect that precipitates change and renders it legible. But the emotional appeal of the Obama 12

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Duke Ellington and Edward Murrow, “Duke Ellington on Gershwin’s ‘Porgy,’” New Theatre (December 1935), reprinted in Tucker, Reader, 116. For a valuable study of the ways in which Ellington negotiated a racialized entertainment milieu, see Graham Lock, “In the Jungles of America: History Without Saying It,” in Blutopia: Visions of the Future and Revisions of the Past in the Work of Sun Ra, Duke Ellington, and Anthony Braxton (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 77–118. W. Phillips Shively, private communication with the author. My phrasing here is indebted to Frederic Jameson’s definition of postmodernism as the “attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place.” Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), ix.

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campaign did not depend upon this analytical conception of changing time. The campaign’s strategy was to involve people by suggesting that they could feel themselves participating in history. “Change” and “hope” – Obama’s entire campaign boiled down to two words – together constitute the kernel of an entire idea of history. There is hope because change is at hand; change is at hand because there is hope. This narrative does not imply linear causality, in which thing A precedes and causes thing B; it is not that change is because of hope or vice versa. Then how do we know that change is at hand if we cannot see the cause for it? It is because change, the movement of history, is foreordained. “It’s been a long time coming, but I know a change is gonna come,” the refrain from Sam Cooke’s Civil Rights anthem, strikes the tone of prophecy, and this is the tone that Obama also sounded when he paraphrased “A Change Is Gonna Come” in his 4 November victory speech at Grant Park:15 If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer . . . It’s the answer that led those who’ve been told for so long by so many to be cynical and fearful and doubtful about what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day. It’s been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this date in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America.16

The tone of prophecy is biblical, of course, and has long seasoned the oratory of black churches. It is perhaps most familiar from the rhetoric of Martin Luther King’s speeches, but its use in civil-rights discourse goes back much earlier, for example in the writings of Reverdy C. Ransom, an African Methodist Episcopal Church bishop and major early exponent of the Social Gospel.17 The prophetic tone marks a sermon quoted in an 15

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While this speech is an especially weighty instance of Obama’s prophetic rhetoric, it is one of many. For instance, his autobiography recounts the story of his joining Trinity United Church of Christ in prophetic terms. Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (New York: Crown, 1995), 294. And as David A. Frank writes, Obama skillfully used the prophetic register in handling the fallout from Trinity pastor Jeremiah Wright’s fiery sermons, which had turned up on YouTube and threatened to end Obama’s candidacy. David A. Frank, “The Prophetic Voice and the Face of the Other in Barack Obama’s ‘A More Perfect Union’ Address, March 18, 2008,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 12 (2009): 167–94. Barack Obama, election night victory speech, in Tim Davidson (ed.), The Essential Obama: The Speeches of Barack Obama (Chicago: Aquitaine Media Corp, 2009), 67–9. Ransom was an ally of W. E. B. Du Bois and an important early voice of Christian socialist dissent. For a selection of his writings, see Anthony B. Pinn (ed.), Making the Gospel Plain: The

Ellington the Entertainer

article that took part in a discourse of historical reclamation that played out in the black press at around the beginning of Ellington’s career: I hear the pattering footsteps of 20,000,000 dusky children yet unborn, echoing down the corridors of time. A generation hence they will be here unbarring wide the gates of life. I hear them uttering the dumb and inarticulate aspiration of a race so long restrained . . . I see dark-visioned countenances everywhere walking in the paths of men and unafraid: I see unwavering eyes look forth from faces no longer mantled with agelong grime, but with a look of stern determination and resolve. I see a day of God, and not a day of color and race, in which men trace with pardonable pride the fading rays of Oriental sunshine in their veins. I see now, near at hand, the opening day of the darker races of mankind in which Americans of African descent stand forth among the first Americans.18

The power of this language is due in part to its air of antiquity; prophecy is perhaps the oldest mode of historical understanding. As Frederic Jameson notes, “some conception of divine pansynchronism, of the providential anticipation or the thoroughgoing predestination of all the acts of history, is surely the first mystified form whereby people (in the ‘West’) attempted to conceptualize the logic of history as a whole, and to formulate its dialectical interrelationship and its telos.”19 As a “dialectical interrelationship” of historical moments, prophecy is not simply foreknowledge, a present glimpse to a future time; it is the co-presence of present and future. Time is neither strictly linear nor entirely cyclical, but a procession of moments honeycombed with interconnections. The narratives of this time lead not to outcomes but destinies, great ends that are ever implicit in their beginnings. As seen in Figures 1.1 and 1.2,20 the art images of Obama that were circulated during his campaign tended to picture him as co-present with history – as the current manifestation of a transhistorical national dynasty, as a reimagining of Abraham Lincoln, as a man who is both representative and exemplary of the American people, or as a man in whom an entire

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Writings of Bishop Reverdy C. Ransom (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1999); Ransom’s essay “The Coming Vision” is particularly relevant to my argument here. Reverdy C. Ransom, quoted in F. E. Bowles, “Civilization in Africa at One Time Superior to Ours,” Chicago Defender, 11 October 1924, A9. Jameson, Postmodernism, 327. Also see the powerful image of Aniekan Udotio’s Here from 2008, which is reproduced at http://robertoormond.blogspot.se/2015/03/arte-para-campanha-de-barack-obama.html (accessed 18 May 2016).

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Figure 1.1 Michael Leavitt, MoveOn.org, A Little Green from a Lot of People (2008)

racial history is recapitulated.21 Note how in these images we see the figures of history arrayed in procession, like figures in a pageant, or in something like a historical diorama, with all the stations of history visible at once. Such images gain power from the static and hieratic vision of history they imply. If in the mood of prophecy the ends of history are present in its beginnings, history becomes a great crystallized structure, an object of revelation that the pageant makes visible as a procession of symbolically charged figures. Such a procession displays events that happen one after the other, and yet as stations of a complete circuit. Pageants are static collections presented serially. In the early decades of the twentieth century, prophetic history was given form in actual pageants. The historical pageant was the privileged form by which Americans could allegorize their history – a history in which a future destiny is sealed in past covenants and deeds. As David Glassberg notes, “the pageant form, and the peculiar historical consciousness it embodied and helped to shape, combined the new progressive view of history as social and technological evolution with the customary civil-religious view of history as divine revelation.”22 Communities used pageantry as a “ritual of social transformation” in which the future would be invoked by a kind of sympathetic magic. What distinguished the form from other kinds of public entertainment was “the belief that history could be made into a dramatic public ritual through which the residents of a town, by acting out the right version of their past, could bring about some kind of future social and political transformation.”23 While many different geographic and ethnic communities staged their own pageants, narratives of historical destiny and redemption resonated 21

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These images, and many others relevant to this essay, may be found in Shepard Fairey and Jennifer Gross (eds.), Art for Obama: Designing Manifest Hope and the Campaign for Change (New York: Abrams Image, 2009). David Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 286. Ibid., 4.

Ellington the Entertainer

Figure 1.2 Justin Hampton, That One: History (2008)

with special power among African Americans. They had the most to gain from the forward movement of history and the most to reclaim from a wounded past. W. E. B. Du Bois suggested that by enacting pageantry, African Americans were aligning with a timeless inheritance: “All through Africa pageantry and dramatic recital is close mingled with religious rites and in America the ‘Shout’ of the church revival in its essential pure drama.”24 To this end, Du Bois created The Star of Ethiopia, a vast spectacle that moved from ancient Ethiopia and Egypt through slavery and finally to freedom.25 This historical procession was bound into a transhistorical unity by a series of allegorical tableaux that represent the Negro’s gifts to the world (Figures 1.3 and 1.4). Mark Tucker and others have noticed the similarities between such pageants and Duke Ellington’s many historically minded works, most notably Black, Brown and Beige (1943) and his short film Symphony in 24 25

W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Drama Among Black Folks,” Crisis, August 1916, 169. Other notable African American pageants include O Sing a New Song (1934), which was choreographed by Katherine Dunham and provided with music by Noble Sissle and W. C. Handy, and The Open Door (1921), for which Fletcher Henderson played piano. See also Plays and Pageants from the Life of the Negro, ed. Willis Richardson (Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1930), an anthology of Negro historical pageants intended for amateur performance.

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Figure 1.3 Tableau from W. E. B. Du Bois, The Star of Ethiopia (Crisis, August 1916)

Figure 1.4 Figures from W. E. B. Du Bois, The Star of Ethiopia (Crisis, December 1915)

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Black: A Rhapsody of Negro Life (1935).26 Tucker speculates that Ellington may have attended The Star of Ethiopia. More certainly, though, Ellington had read another work of Du Bois, The Negro (1915), which Gillman describes as a race melodrama, a submerged (but nevertheless potent) expression of Du Bois’s “pan-racial, transnational, and metahistorical” vision of the Negro.27 The evidence for this connection is found in Ellington’s paraphrase of at least one passage from The Negro in an unpublished typescript scenario for Black, Brown and Beige.28 This typescript tells the tale of Boola, a black Adam who is a witness to and actor in all the signal moments of Negro history. The passage most directly modeled on Du Bois marks the moment where Boola reflects on his abject condition and takes comfort from what Ransom called the “Oriental sunshine” that has shone on every moment of his march through history and will shine at its end: Look, now, is this not the same golden sun Which fired your brain along the calm Euphrates? And smiled upon your seeking, searching sorties As you followed the course of the Ganges. Absorbing here poetic, soaring folklore, Leaving there a part of you . . . a rhythmic song? Yes. It’s the same. The same old sun which smiled Upon you as you pushed along the Nile and planted Seeds. Seeds of the first civilization Known to man! Drink them in . . . their glowing stories Of Babylon and all her glories Knowing well her culture sprang From black men. Forgotten long ago . . . Meroe . . . From whence the first bright light flamed up In Ethiopia to guide mankind along the way. Buried in the dark, uneasy conscience of Man Lies the bright and glorious Truth About your heritage. Someday it shall burst its bonds And shine forth the blinding Light of Reason.29 26

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Tucker, Early; Kevin Gaines, “Duke Ellington, Black, Brown and Beige, and the Cultural Politics of Race,” in Music and the Racial Imagination, ed. Ronald Radano and Philip Bohlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 585–602; Scott DeVeaux, “‘Black, Brown and Beige’ and the Critics,” Black Music Research Journal 13 (Autumn 1993): 125–46; Harvey G. Cohen, “Duke Ellington and Black Brown and Beige: The Composer as Historian at Carnegie Hall,” American Quarterly 56 (December 2004): 1003–34. 28 Cohen, “Duke Ellington and Black Brown and Beige,” 1032. Gillman, Blood Talk, 151. Ellington, “Black,” Black, Brown and Beige typescript, 5–6.

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Tucker argues that what Ellington’s scenario for Black, Brown and Beige has in common with a wider contemporary discourse of black historical recovery is a sense of progress: the progress of the race and the progress of history.30 While true enough, Tucker’s formulation misses the dialectical motion of Ellington’s prophetic history; movement forward is not movement in one direction only. In the prophetic mode, we see history moving forward, but the goal has always been present from the beginning. At the turning of a great wheel, we come to the place destined, which is always and necessarily the place where it all started. Africa is present in Harlem, as is Dixie and the slave ships. Ellington symbolizes this throughout the typescript through an onomatopoeic all-caps “BOOM” of the drum in all the various forms it takes throughout history. And that BOOM resounds in the opening episodes of Black, Brown, and Beige and Symphony in Black, both of which are stylized work songs. Symphony in Black is a ten-minute film structured as four episodes from Negro life, separated by interludes that show Ellington composing and performing the accompanying music as a concert work. This film presents a version of what John Howland calls the “Africa to Dixie to Harlem” narrative structure, which was a staple of nightclub revues but is here put to a different kind of cultural work. Howland writes that “the fundamental purpose of the . . . Africa-Dixie-Harlem program model of interwar entertainment was to glorify or celebrate modern Harlem as the glamorous apotheosis of the rich diversity of black musical culture.”31 I would add that Symphony in Black is glorified in another way: it is not only a celebration of progress from Dixie to Harlem, but a celebration of a racial essence that has endured through each historical stage. The glories of Harlem music recapitulate the entire span of racial history. In the opening scene of Symphony in Black, “The Laborers,” we see black bodies, muscles and sinews standing out in sculptural relief in the scene’s high-contrast lighting, monumentalized in much the same way Paul Robeson’s body is in the montage of black labor presented in “Old Man River,” the standout number of James Whale’s film of Show Boat (Universal, 1936).32 Both sequences mold black bodies into 30 32

31 Howland, Uptown, 135. Tucker, “Genesis,” 67–86. Hazel Carby’s study of the representational uses of Robeson’s body is in some ways parallel to this essay: Carby wishes to see each of Robeson’s public images as actor, musician, and athlete as “a particular modernist cultural artifact of imagination and longing, which attempts to establish a relation between the African American male body and the state of the national soul.” Hazel V. Carby, “The Body and Soul of Modernism,” in Race Men: The W. E. B. Du Bois Lectures (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 45–83.

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quasi-geometric mass forms that recall the muralist iconography of the era’s Popular Front culture. A decade later, Barry Ulanov coldly noted this resemblance and implied that Symphony in Black offered only variations on old entertainment stereotypes.33 However, Richard Dyer points out that Robeson’s performance in “Old Man River” could sustain at least two different readings. In one, the cause of black suffering could be “laid at the door of the river’s indifference and . . . transmitted into the eternal lot of mankind, as borne, conveniently for the white half of the community, by blacks.”34 In the other reading, river imagery could signify crossing to freedom and thus deliverance and futurity. Either way, the suffering and laboring black body is the medium in which history is contained and by which it is represented. If we apply these two readings to Symphony in Black, the distinction between them seems to turn on whether one chooses to interpret the historical progression of the Negro from Africa to present-day America as one of progress or eternal sameness. But what I am trying to do is suggest a third option, a historical mood in which progress and eternity are bound up with one another. This is the mood of prophetic history. Symphony in Black presents a pageant of the Negro at different points in his development, starting with labor and moving through the pleasures and pains of free city life (“A Triangle: Dance – Jealousy – Blues”), grief and redemption in the church (“Hymn of Sorrow”), and the fully modern Negro of Harlem (“Harlem Rhythm”). Just as white light refracts into different colors as it passes through a prism, Symphony in Black depicts a unified and unchanging racial essence that passes through a prism of time and manifests in human situations at different historical moments. What results is a composite image of the Negro as a history-bound subject, one whose very essence is historical. His full being is unfolded only in the superposition of images separated in time and, necessarily, presented in series, though all simultaneously present and inscribed in his body. The modern Negro contains multitudes: he is the culmination of historical process but has left nothing behind. This is the representation of the Negro with which Ellington (and his handlers) allied his own image. The dissolves between Symphony in Black’s historical tableaux and scenes of Ellington composing and performing their music present Ellington himself as the exemplary modern Negro in whom all historical stages are recapitulated and in whom future promise 33 34

Barry Ulanov, Duke Ellington (New York: Creative Age Press, 1946), 161. Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2004), 83.

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is latent. It is on this note that Ellington concludes both Symphony in Black and his typescript with a paean to Harlem, which like Ellington himself both contains and fulfills a racial past: TAKE HEART! In every land where you have been You’re left your mark on all the men Who since have perished . . . And you’ve survived! The Caribs and the Indians Have long since vanished You’ve kept a part of them alive And in your song their song’s revived! Yes, Harlem! Land of valiant youth, You’ve wiped the make-up from your face, And shed your borrowed spangles. You’ve donned the uniform of Truth And hid the hurt that dangles In heart and mind. And one by one You’ve set your shoulders straight To meet each challenge and to wait Till justice unto you is done.35

Elsewhere I have defined an “image” as a multimedia constellation of visual, auditory, and textual cues that cohere in a simple thought-shape.36 Images have a peculiar phenomenology: they detonate in the mind all at once, registering as simple and instantly comprehensible shapes that can succeed one another quickly and be shuffled like a deck of cards, or, as Don Bogle writes, sit “like square boxes on a shelf.”37 In entertainment, character is conveyed in the quickest way possible, through a radical 35 36

37

Duke Ellington, “Beige,” 5. Phil Ford, “Music at the Edge of the Construct,” Journal of Musicology 26 (April 2009): 240–73. Although he does not call them “images,” Michael Long has written an important monograph on the cultural logic of these audiovisual collections; see Michael Long, Beautiful Monsters: Imagining the Classic in Musical Media (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). For a pioneering study of film-star images, see Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (New York: Routledge, 1986; 2004); for a belletristic study of a musical performer’s image, see Wayne Koestenbaum, “The Callas Cult,” in The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire (New York: Poseidon Press, 1993; Da Capo, 2001), 134–53. Don Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattos, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, 4th ed. (New York: Continuum, 2002), 4.

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reduction: the sign for the character becomes identical to the character. I invoke the image of the Mammy, for instance, and we can all doubtless call to mind staring eyes, booming voice, stout figure, and a handkerchief wrapped around the head; perhaps we imagine her with feet planted stubbornly in the earth and hands balled up at her sides, telling off a lazy husband or delivering some folksy home truths. Now, any one of these things (the rolling eyes, for example) is itself a sign. But the signs all tend to suggest one another; when one appears, the rest jump to attention, and their mutual implication happens so quickly and completely they cohere into a single image reassembled in our memory. The image thus can always be reduced to a single metonymic trace. The “Historical Keepsake Photo” that a Tennessee Republican Party staffer got caught emailing – Obama reduced to two eyes staring out of a black field – was an effective racist dog whistle, because all the components of a complete racialized image (pop eyes, shuffling gait, dull-witted speech, etc.) are implicit in the single trace, though if you object, the perpetrator can always say, hey, it’s just a pair of eyes. This is how all images work, not just racial ones. In the opening of The Band Wagon (MGM, 1953), for example, Fred Astaire’s postwar image as the figure of a bygone era of entertainment can be reduced to a top hat and cane left unsold at auction.38 But racial images make us more keenly aware that such a reduction eliminates a character’s autonomous history. Hattie McDaniel’s Queenie from the 1936 Show Boat can be conveyed in a single frame. The hefty profile and rolling eyes constitute the sign that stands in for a character; this is all you need to know about her. If we ever learn any biographical details, it is only to reinforce the basic pattern. Thus Karen Alexander writes of the happy shock of seeing Carmen Jones (Twentieth-Century Fox, 1954) as a child and finally being able to see a black character “complete with a character, a life, a history.”39 You can see, then, why history might be an important term to oppose such racialized images, and why Obama’s and Ellington’s images were wellchosen. History is the solvent of the image. The instant character I have described is, by nature, essentializing, and entertainment cannot easily discard it. It was basic to the grammar of vaudeville, the minstrelsy that preceded it, and the sound film entertainment that replaced it. As Henry Jenkins has pointed out, vaudeville’s audiences demanded immediacy above all and compelled performers 38 39

Rick Altman, The American Film Musical (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 79. Karen Alexander, “Fatal Beauties: Black Women in Hollywood,” in Stardom: Industry of Desire, ed. Christine Gledhill (New York: Routledge, 1991), 46.

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to act with the utmost intensity and directness: “This brutal economy weighed against the exposition necessary to develop rounded characters or particularized situations. An elaborate system of typage developed: exaggerated costumes, facial characteristics, phrases, and accents were meant to reflect general personality traits viewed as emblematic of a particular class, region, ethnic group, or gender.”40 The instantaneity by which characters register as types is one manifestation of a more general entertainment syntax that Jenkins called the “vaudeville aesthetic” and which is structured by sequences of instantaneous images. George Gottlieb, booker for the New York Palace Theater at the beginning of the twentieth century, threw light on this syntax when he wrote about the structural considerations involved in putting together a variety show.41 These considerations boil down to the management of attraction, variety, audience attention, and climax – interdependent categories that have in common a purely functional aim of managing audience response. The vaudeville aesthetic, and the aesthetic of entertainment more generally, relies on a set of rational calculations with a limited and well-defined aim of engaging an audience with a series of vivid moments (character types, gags, stunts, and so on) and stringing those moments together like glittering baubles on a chain. Each moment in a series is calculated to catch and sustain attention through its mingled novelty and familiarity. Entertainment audiences do not judge by the criteria of art music traditions, where part and whole are indissolubly bound in an organic structure that offers an aesthetic and intellectual challenge to the listener. The entertainment aesthetic is geared rather to generating sensory excitement by means of an escalating series of vivid and contrasting moments that culminate in a big finish.42 If we were asked to state why, say, 42nd Street (Warner Bros., 1933) is entertainment, it would not be enough to say that it is entertaining. Even if we thought this film was stupid and annoying, we would have to acknowledge that it is entertainment in some conventional sense that is not dependent upon our taste. Defining entertainment at this more abstract 40

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Henry Jenkins, What Made Pistachio Nuts? Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 70. George Gottlieb, “Psychology of the American Vaudeville Show from the Manager’s Point of View,” in American Vaudeville as Seen by Its Contemporaries, ed. Charles W. Stein (New York: Alfred A. Knopf; Da Capo Press, 1984), 179–81; John Howland uses this article as a point of departure for his own understanding of revue entertainment; see Howland, Uptown, 83–6. This was known as the “wow finish” among vaudeville professionals; for a thorough analysis of the practical considerations involved in contriving a good finish, see Walter De Leon, “The Wow Finish,” in American Vaudeville, 193–208.

Ellington the Entertainer

level is not easy, though the general aesthetic tendencies I have suggested might help. (42nd Street is certainly entertainment by these terms.) Beyond these, entertainment also has social and institutional characteristics.43 First, entertainment is not a property of all places and times, but is a function of its characteristic institutions – the institutions of technologized mass culture within a capitalist economy. Second, entertainment is populist: it proclaims its difference from art and its ambition to satisfy as many people as possible, which, within its characteristic institutional setting, means paying customers.44 Third, entertainment belongs to the domain of leisure, the “free time” in which we do not have to discharge our duties to work or family. But unlike games, hobbies, social chat, and so on, entertainment is something we typically pay for in modern life, which means that it is by and large a professional practice. Mind you, the barrier between professional and non-professional entertainment is porous, subject to upward pressure from aspiring amateurs and downward pressure from professionals who seek to gloss over their separation from the mass audience.45 But the price an amateur pays to enter the professional sphere is the standard that professionals so often affect to transcend: the professional practice of entertainment depends on the willingness of a mass audience to pay for it, and that willingness in turn depends on very stable codes.46

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46

This discussion is freely adapted from Richard Dyer, “The Notion of Entertainment,” in Only Entertainment (London: Routledge, 1992), 11–15. For reasons that go beyond the scope of this essay, since World War II a great many of these entertainment consumers will do anything to avoid being identified as such. Their chosen forms of entertainment – punk or postpunk music, for example, like Gang of Four’s ironically titled Entertainment! – entertain precisely in flattering their audiences that what they are consuming is not, in fact, entertainment at all, but the negation of it, and furthermore that they are not even consumers, but rebels, or what Thomas Frank calls “the rebel consumer”; see Thomas Frank and Matt Weiland (eds.), Commodify Your Dissent: Salvos from the Baffler (New York: Norton, 1997). As Carl Wilson points out, punk fans set their music against what they conceive entertainment to be, namely schmaltz, and yet punk relies on a conventionalized repertory of stock gestures for its angry, defiant effects. As Wilson puts it, “punk rock is anger’s schmaltz.” Carl Wilson, Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste (New York: Continuum, 2007), 125. I argue elsewhere that this paradoxical dynamic of anti-consumerist consumerism, or anti-entertainment entertainment, long antedates punk; see Phil Ford, Dig: Sound and Music in Hip Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). As Jane Feuer has commented, the dissolution of an integral community relationship between artists and audiences in an age of mass media is the dirty secret that entertainment always tries to hide, and she devotes much of her ground-breaking monograph on the American film musical to understanding how entertainment fashions a compensatory “myth of community.” Jane Feuer, The Hollywood Musical (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982). Feuer, The Hollywood Musical; Rick Altman, The American Film Musical (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).

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Entertainment is a professional practice of giving you what you want – singing a song you have already heard, showing you characters you have already met. The pitched battle between art and entertainment in the twentieth century has tended to revolve around this point. Art is supposed to be that which challenges our settled views; it is not what you want, but what you need. Thus the language of modernist art music – actually a Babel of contending tongues – developed with dazzling speed, while the syntax of entertainment remains strict and conservative, bound by generic conventions that change at the pace of continental drift. What people want is always what they already know; however, it cannot be boring. (In everyday use, “entertaining” is the antonym of “boring.”) So we are presented with the apparent contradiction of a practice structured by endless repetition and yet dependent on constant novelty. The contradiction between novelty and repetition is really no contradiction, though: this novelty is the newness of variation on common themes, not the newness of modern art. What Jenkins says of vaudeville is equally true of our own teen pop and TV cop shows, which likewise give us “the pleasure of infinite diversity in infinite combinations,” the fixed and stereotyped items of its expressive codes shuffled like cards into colorful and ever-changing arrays.47 In short, entertainment comprises codes of historically locatable professional practice aimed at eliciting familiar responses from paying customers. However, all this means that entertainment representations of race are inherently reductive and necessarily crude. Black images are always low-res; entertainment’s phenomenology of instant character and reliance on popular received opinion work against three-dimensional black characters. For this reason, critics and scholars have always tended to settle the contradiction between Ellington the entertainer and Ellington the dignified artist by claiming that Ellington was not really an entertainer at all.48 And yet Ellington was obviously an entertainer – he was a consummate professional, popular with a mass audience, and a supreme virtuoso in manipulating vernacular codes. We can see critical anxiety about entertainment playing out in the criticism of R. D. Darrell, one of the first and most influential of Ellington’s literary admirers. In 1927, near the beginning of Ellington’s career, Darrell wrote a short record review of Ellington’s Black and Tan Fantasy where he 47 48

Jenkins, What Made Pistachio Nuts?, 63. In this they were following Ellington’s lead. For example, note Ellington’s signifying answer to the first question of the interview that concludes his memoir. “Q: What are your major interests? A: Well, I live in the realm of art and have no monetary interests.” Ellington, Mistress, 452.

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praised this arrangement’s “stunts” as “exceptionally original and striking [and] performed musically, even artistically.”49 These “stunts” were standout instrumental effects, including Bubber Miley’s famous high B at the beginning of his first solo, his plunger-muted growls and smears, an answering moan from Sam Nanton’s trombone, and the concluding allusion to Chopin’s Marche fun`ebre. Five years after his first review of this number, Darrell recalled that he had once found those “stunts” merely amusing: “I laughed like everyone else over its instrumental wa-waing and gargling and gobbling, the piteous whinnying of a very ancient horse, the lugubrious reminiscence of the Chopin funeral march.” He had, in other words, been listening to Black and Tan Fantasy with ears conditioned by entertainment aesthetics. From this perspective, he heard this music as a series of vivid events made savory through their novelty and variety. But even then, Darrell later wrote, he had sensed something more profound in this low milieu. In the intervening years, Darrell’s aesthetics had become more sober and modernistic, and from this later perspective he heard Ellington’s “stunts” as structurally and aesthetically necessary moments integrated into an organic structure. To lay out his vision of Ellington’s music as art, he begins his famous 1932 essay, “Black Beauty,” with a statement that sets the program for critical and scholarly writing on Ellington in the decades to come, wherein analysis would be employed to reveal a finer sensibility that emerges from the dross of mere entertainment: In the last century music has immeasurably enlarged its scope and enriched its texture, but there has been an increasing preoccupation with sheer rhetoric and gaudy sound splashes, the vehemence of whose statement disguises their essential incoherence and unassimilation of true feeling. Decadence sets in with its emphasis on detail at the expense of the whole. The tendency to schrecklichkeit, the striving for greater dynamic extremes, is not yet curbed. The urge to originality defeats itself, forcing into the background organic principles: economy of means, satisfying proportion of detail, and the sense of inevitability – of anticipation and revelatory fulfillment – that are the decisive qualifications of musical form.50

Make no mistake: Black and Tan Fantasy is a masterpiece, and I am not arguing that it is “really” entertainment when everybody has been thinking it was art. It seems a pointless thing to argue anyway – if the sorry history of music criticism demonstrates anything, it is that one man’s “organic 49

50

R. D. Darrell, “Criticism in the Phonograph Monthly Review (1927–1931),” reprinted in Tucker, Reader, 33–4. R. D. Darrell, “Black Beauty,” disques (Philadelphia: H. Royer Smith, June 1932); reprinted in Tucker, Reader, 57.

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principles” are another man’s “emphasis on detail at the expense of the whole.” (Anyway, do we have to choose?) What I do argue is that Ellington’s art can be understood in terms of entertainment codes – indeed, it cannot be fully understood without them. This much John Howland has made clear in his indispensable Ellington Uptown. Moreover, we need to realize that Ellington’s image as a dignified artist was an entertainment image, and a potent one that could open up to a much larger discourse of blackness and history. Symphony in Black represents the most direct use of a recuperative trope of racial memory in Ellington’s films, but the same trope also distinguishes the earlier short film Black and Tan. The plot of this second film is simple: Ellington is a penniless artist and Fredi, his lover, is a dancer striving to support him; ignoring her ill health, she takes a new job at a nightclub but collapses during her showcase solo performance as Ellington’s orchestra accompanies her. On her deathbed, she asks Ellington to play the Black and Tan Fantasy we saw him rehearsing in their apartment at the beginning of the film. On the level of narrative, Black and Tan establishes Ellington as a performer caught in the contradictions between art and entertainment – contradictions that the film’s melodramatic ending raises to the level of tragedy. But as David Metzer points out, it was not the melodrama that attracted audiences, but the promise of “primitivist spectacle” and exotic nightlife.51 Black and Tan is a revue dressed up with a plot. This design motivates a succession of scenes that serve to introduce various kinds of entertainment (music, comedy, and dance numbers) and leads to a spectacular finale. Black and Tan is variety entertainment that makes a spectacle of its star performer’s artistic transcendence of entertainment. Let us consider each of the film’s four acts in turn: 1. The opening musical number: Ellington and trumpeter Arthur Whetsol rehearse the Black and Tan Fantasy. This scene affords the film the opportunity to showcase the “stunts” that Darrell admired and which formed the basis of Ellington’s “jungle” style, an exotica code calculated to appeal to white tourists “expecting to be transported to the depths of the African jungle.”52 All the same, this scene is unusual for presenting musicmaking as labor: Ellington – framed in a dignified, composerly fashion – plays the scene unassumingly, with his back to the camera, demonstrating 51

52

David Metzer, “Shadow Play: The Spiritual in Duke Ellington’s ‘Black and Tan Fantasy,’” Black Music Research Journal 17 (Autumn 1997): 153. Gunther Schuller, Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 341.

Ellington the Entertainer

Figure 1.5 Alec Lovejoy and Edgar Connor, Black and Tan (RKO, 1929)

his composition on the piano and giving Whetsol practical instructions for performance. 2. The comedy number: A pair of black movers set about repossessing Ellington’s piano, but Fredi pays them off with a bottle of gin. As Gabbard notes, the humor here is of a piece with the usual stereotypes of lazy, ignorant, shiftless black working men; it is, in other words, completely in line with contemporary entertainment codes.53 The comedians’ dialect, mugging, low cunning, illiteracy, and grotesquely mismatched bodies are all elements of variety/vaudeville entertainment characterization (Figure 1.5). 3. The dance numbers: In the long central sequence of the film, Ellington and his orchestra accompanies three dance acts, each with its own customized novelty appeal. Together these acts create an arc of mounting tension. First, a group of tuxedoed men (“The Five Hot Shots”) does two dances in tightly synchronized formation as the orchestra plays The Duke Steps Out and Black Beauty; as Fredi swoons in the wings, we see the troupe’s dance again from her distorted point of view (through a prismatic 53

Gabbard, “Duke’s Place,” 163.

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lens). Next, Fredi dances wildly to The Cotton Club Stomp and collapses; the club manager hustles her offstage and insists that the show go on. Finally, the Cotton Club chorus girls hurriedly take Fredi’s place and dance to the accompaniment of Flaming Youth. Their routine is interrupted when Ellington, worried about Fredi and angered by the management’s callousness, walks off stage and yells “close that curtain” as the chorines look around, bewildered. Ellington is shown pointedly refusing to accept the subservient position of the mere entertainer, and the moment the curtain closes anticipates the alienation effects of revisionist musicals. When the frenetic Flaming Youth breaks off, the ensuing confused hush reveals the entertainment as an artifice that has been used to cover up a bleaker reality. And yet the film has it both ways, as revisionist film musicals usually do, making a show of unmasking entertainment while leaving its basic structures undisturbed. We get to experience the thrill of Harlem’s hot jazz and see a little cheesecake, and then we get to feel we have transcended such tawdry things. The long dance sequence that precedes this moment of transcendence is the ostentatiously arty filmic centerpiece of the production. When the Hot Shots dance, the camera stubbornly points downward, its attention less on the dancers themselves than on the shiny floor in which they are reflected. The subsequent repetition of their dance through a prism is a variation on this conceit. It was intended as an “artistic” touch of the same sort as the touches of German Expressionist style in the montage sequence of the film version of Yamekraw, which sets Harlem pianist James P. Johnson’s own historical portrait of the Negro.54 But this scene in Black and Tan also offers a novel variation on a perennial stylistic gesture of film musical spectacle. In many film musicals (perhaps most notably in Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell’s famous pas de deux in Broadway Melody of 1940), we see the dancers’ flurried gestures picked out and magnified by mirrored surfaces or some other means – think of the way the splashes in Gene Kelly’s dance to “Singin’ in the Rain” mark his steps. In short, the optical effects in Black and Tan are plausibly “art” but firmly in line with entertainment practice. Likewise, when Fredi Washington dances herself to death (an obvious nod to Igor Stravinsky’s ballet, Sacre du printemps), we see a shot of her legs and crotch taken from beneath a transparent floor; Klaus Stratemann suggests that this moment is another expressionist touch that “increases the eerie atmosphere,” but we might just as easily see it as 54

Howland, Uptown, 91.

Ellington the Entertainer

a novel variation on the kinds of crowd-pleasing shots we see in the more frankly revue-like Bundle of Blues, another Ellington short from the same period.55 4. The big finish: Black and Tan’s finale pays off with spectacle and variety, offering us a chance to watch a dramatic death scene and an exotic tableau of black religious folklore, and also to hear a complete performance of the film’s eponymous hit number. The Hall Johnson Choir and the members of Duke Ellington’s orchestra are gathered at Fredi’s bedside, and we see looming chiaroscuro shadows of instruments and waving hands held high as the choir sings “Same Train.” Fredi makes her dying request to hear Black and Tan Fantasy once more. This closing performance of the number omits Ellington’s piano solo but is careful to work in the instrumental “stunts” that had been the record’s great attraction – the sustained high B-flat, the whinny, etc. What is new is the choir, which gives the music a more pronounced gospel tinge than we hear in Ellington’s other recordings of the piece. And we are further treated to a satisfyingly melodramatic ending as Fredi convulses with an unheard cry and dies to a more drawn-out citation from the Chopin Marche fun`ebre. Gabbard is troubled by this scene (as well as several others like it in Bundle of Blues and Cabin in the Sky), as it seems to make a point of cutting between the sophisticated Ellington and primitivist images of African Americans: The juxtaposing of sophisticated artists of the Harlem Renaissance with minstrel stereotypes at the opening of the film is comparable to the moment in the middle section when Cotton Club dancers clad primarily in animal feathers shimmy while black men in tuxedos gracefully perform on shiny brass instruments. In the deathbed scene, the “folkloric” view of African Americans as simple, rural, hymn-singing Christians is layered over the urbane, profane sounds of the Ellington band.56

Students of modernism will recognize such abrupt juxtapositions of urban modernity and folk archaism, artifice and nature. The chic Africanism of interwar modernism played on the disjuncture between an archaic and tribal Africa and modern America. Dudley Murphy, the director of Black 55 56

Stratemann, Day, 7. Gabbard, “Duke’s Place,” 166. As is always the case in these films, and for reasons that I explore in the conclusion of this essay, there is no consensus on whether such racial representations are progressive and responsible. For a more positive interpretation of this scene, see Thomas Cripps, Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900–1942 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 207.

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and Tan who had collaborated with Fernand L´eger on the avant-garde film Ballet m´echanique (1924), went on to direct The Emperor Jones (John Krimsky and Gifford Cochran, Inc./United Artists, 1933), whose opening scene effects a dissolve between an African drum circle and a circle shout at a contemporary African American worship meeting.57 Modernist artists have constantly sought a timeless folk essence within the forms of modern art; as Daniel Albright has written, the “convergence of the artificial and the natural is one of the great paradoxes of modernism.”58 We can see this convergence not only in Ellington’s films, but also in some of the surviving images of Jump for Joy, Ellington’s wartime anti-racist musical revue (from 1941) that was his most direct attempt to reconcile entertainment and racial dignity. The sudden and incongruous aura of spirituality that appears at the end of Black and Tan opens the film out to a wider historical frame of reference. In this image, the irruption of the archaic within the modern constitutes a historical simultaneity that moves the story out from the immediate context of nightclubs and tenements to the deep past of racial memory. The black church did not only supply a rhetoric of prophetic history, it also supplied the iconography of that history, and the spectacle of religious rapture, whether in mourning or exaltation, was as much a shorthand image for a larger history as the sweating bodies of the laborers. The clearest expression of this in Ellington’s filmography comes in the penultimate Symphony in Black episode, the “Hymn of Sorrow,” in which a minister presides over a child’s funeral. After showing us the mourners’ tear-stained faces, the camera pulls back and takes in the whole church, with the minister, his bearded ancient face and great white mane projecting the figure of an Old Testament prophet, standing over a tiny coffin. The minister’s hands are crossed over his chest; slowly he raises them above his head, and the mourners join him in solemn ecstasy. The spectacle of a roomful of black hands raised heavenward was by this time already well established in film as the sign for the African American folk primitive. This device, amplified by shadowy high-contrast lighting, is used not only in Symphony in Black and Black and Tan but also in Yamekraw and King Vidor’s all-black musical Hallelujah! (MGM, 1929). And like all these films, Symphony in Black uses an imagery of black 57

58

For a study of Murphy’s place in interwar “jazz modernism,” see James Donald, “Jazz Modernism and Film Art: Dudley Murphy and Ballet m´echanique,” Modernism/Modernity 16 (January 2009): 25–49. Daniel Albright, Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 242.

Ellington the Entertainer

religious folklore in vivid contrast to one of strenuous modernity: “Hymn of Sorrow” is immediately succeeded by “Harlem Rhythm,” a kinetic collage of nightclubs and dancing bodies whose discontinuities and canted angles suggest cubist abstraction. Ellington’s appearance in Cabin in the Sky presents a scene of similar incongruity between folk primitivism and urban modernity. Indeed, James Naremore suggests that such incongruities lay at the heart of director Vincente Minnelli’s Africanist style.59 Cabin in the Sky mediates between four pairs of terms: city and country; individual and the folk; modernity and tradition; profane and sacred. The first term of each pair maps onto every other, so that modernity comes to occupy a space that is essentially profane and urban, and the modern subject becomes the pleasure-seeking, irreligious individual at home only in the homeless condition of the modern city. Such is the perennial Other of reactionary populism; it is also the picture of damnation that emerges in the Great Migration narratives of race films like Blood of Jesus (Amegro Films/Sack Amusement Enterprises, 1941), in which migrants to the northern city must choose between God, family, and tradition, on the one hand, and the lures of gambling, liquor, loose women, dancing, and hot music on the other. Cabin in the Sky runs a variation on these stories. A pious countrywoman prays for her husband, Little Joe, after he has been shot in a craps game, and a troop of angels arrives in time to prevent his soul from being carried off to Hell. However, the Devil and his henchmen (including a scene-stealing Louis Armstrong) continue to vie for his soul, and Little Joe falls from his reformed ways, ending up at a nightclub in which the Ellington orchestra is performing. This is the climax of the film, and it should be the moment where the film’s structure of binary oppositions comes most clearly into focus. And yet, as Gabbard and Naremore point out, this is the moment where this structure comes undone. When we arrive at the nightclub, writes Naremore, “clearly, this is no smoky den of iniquity. It seems more like a showcase for a famous orchestra, and the lovely collaboration among Ellington’s music, Busby Berkeley’s choreography, and Minnelli’s camera crane amounts to a kind of celebration.”60 The individual merges into the folk, the archaic forms of folk community emerge from the flux of modernity, and the profane spectacle of jitterbugging bodies is transformed into something like a religious revival. 59

60

James Naremore, “Uptown Folk: Blackness and Entertainment in Cabin in the Sky,” in Representing Jazz, ed. Krin Gabbard (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 169–92. Ibid., 182.

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Consider how this scene is shot. After a quick fanfare – which underscores an establishing shot of Ellington’s name prominent on the club marquee – the camera pans down to street level as we hear the loping vamp of “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be.” The figures on the street are sharp-dressed young black men and women pairing up and sauntering into the club in time to the music. The camera picks out a couple and follows them to the doors, through which they disappear; others follow them, with one man (breaking the fourth wall for a moment) beckoning to the film’s audience to join them; and all this time, as our eye has been beguiled by the action, another couple has been arguing, unnoticed, off to one side of the frame. We notice them. He wants to go in, she thinks it is late and makes to leave – but with a sudden pirouette she gives in and they dance their way in through the front door. All of this is timed to the music: the girl acquiesces in the first 4-measure (tonic) limb of the new blues chorus, her change of mind reinforced with octave-doubled brass; a long-awaited reverse-angle shot from within the club follows the couple inside in the blues chorus’s second 4-measure limb, matching the music’s feint to the subdominant to the camera’s change of perspective; and at the final limb, the payoff of the blues’s AAB form, the camera cranes upward to show the couple within a mass of synchronized dancing bodies, all snapping fingers in time to the now-irresistible groove. Throughout this scene, Minnelli’s camera, tracking Ellington’s music, moves constantly between the individual and the crowd, narrowing in and expanding outward again, picking out hip, cosmopolitan individuals and merging them into a new kind of collectivity. And at the apex of the motion outward, our eyes take in the crowd and the benevolently patriarchal figure of Ellington, presiding over it all. Ellington is a master of ceremonies for this reconstituted urban black folk, orchestrating the crowd as well as his musicians. Ellington, famously, was the architect of spaces within which individual musicians could express themselves; this scene shows him to be a composer of a more abstract medium, the human interaction that lies behind music-making. This is another part of Ellington’s image as the exemplary Harlem Negro, one who at once fulfills a line of historical development and midwifes its destiny. He is a figure that can effect this scene’s reconciliation of the modern individual with folk tradition. Ellington does not have to speak; he needs only to stand there, resplendent in his white suit, hands moving in elegant conductors’ gestures to guide his musicians and listeners through the registers of black historical experience. We have stomped the blues; now we go to church. Lawrence Brown touches off the final dance number (“Goin’ Up”) with a

Ellington the Entertainer

solo trombone “sermon” in call-and-response with the shouting crowd. Here the timeless folk spirit encounters urban modernity, yet each frame of historical reference, the modern and the archaic, retains its particularity in the encounter. African Americans were seen, both by themselves and by others, as figures elementally bound to every stage of their development, walking a road in which history followed them as a shadow. The essentialism of this position meant that a hostile reading lay always ready at hand – the notion that black people are essentially primitive, inwardly regressing back to a state of African savagery whatever their outward affectation of civilized manners. But as I have suggested, there was always a positive reading of this narrative as well: that the most brilliant successes of the race carried Africa at its core, and that modernity and racial roots are reflected in one another, with the former the foreordained culmination of the latter. The success of Obama’s image – an updated form of Ellington’s careful self-stylization – prompts us to reflect that these are not only ways that African Americans picture themselves. Such images are fully a part of what Norman Mailer called the “dream life of the nation,” the collective repertory of fantasy images that coalesce into movies.61 To be sure, as Altman has noted, “Blacks [in 1920s films] were in no sense a part of the American “we”; instead they represented a picturesque and mysterious “they” living among us, a source of romance hardly differentiated from the operetta version of aristocratic Europe.”62 Moving black people from “they” to “we” is the cultural project that Obama and Ellington have in common. In the representations I have been describing, the time-outof-time eternity in which African Americans are traditionally pictured somehow opens up within the time of urban modernity and transforms it. There is a hidden mythic dimension of modern history, and when we find ourselves there, African Americans are its guardians and masters. The image of the black body can be used to represent the American people as history-bound subjects, and thus can be called upon at times of political urgency, when progressives find themselves in need of such representations. 2008 was one such time; the interwar era of the Popular Front, in which Ellington’s films take part, was another. Though Ellington was not involved with it, Busby Berkeley’s Gold Diggers of 1933 (Warner Bros., 1933) is a peerless document of the latter era and its hunger for history, its need to think the present historically, and its attempts to 61 62

Norman Mailer, The Presidential Papers (New York: Putnam, 1963), 38. Altman, American Film Musical, 290.

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exercise the historical faculty. This film provides us with one last image of historical blackness in which the sounding black body, the black voice, does the crucial work of articulating a historical vision. The final number of this film, “Remember My Forgotten Man,” is a standout piece of what Michael Denning has called the cultural front, meaning the left-wing bloc of cultural production to which Ellington belonged.63 Berkeley used the entertainment codes I have described to create a historical pageant of the American people from World War I to the Depression. The lyrics of the chorus efficiently mark the modern man’s stations of the cross: conscription and sacrifice in the Great War, labor and suffering in peacetime, abandonment, betrayal, and dispossession. The scene opens with Joan Blondell on the streets of a modern metropolis, briskly tagged as such by the same imagery of urban modernity that Black and Tan and Yamekraw use – a luxe pop version of Expressionist perspectival distortion.64 Blondell offers a street bum a cigarette and begins to speak the verse and chorus of the song, the camera tight on her, making sure we listen to the story she tells. Berkeley’s production numbers and Ray Heindorf’s arrangements are built around the inflexible 32-bar lyric binary (aaba) forms of Harry Warren and Al Dubin’s songs, which act as containers for spectacle. These numbers are like egg cartons, with each stanza holding a single glittering item of spectacle. So in the “Forgotten Man” number, the verse and first chorus are presented as face-to-face storytelling. The next chorus is sung, and this stanzaic container holds a crane shot that moves along the exterior of a tenement whose windows frame the faces of abandoned women; the next stanza contains a spectacle of soldiers marching off to war and marching back wounded; the fourth stanza of the chorus shows the faces of men in breadlines; and the final stanza is the big finish, a massive Berkeleyesque tableau of soldiers and the unemployed, flanked by women with imploring outstretched arms, and Blondell at the center, the orchestra playing a grandiose fortissimo accompaniment swollen with chorus. This story is not just a history – the recent history of the American common man – but a story about history: the common man buffeted by historical forces. Now, entertainment shows rather than tells, persuading 63

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For a discussion of Ellington’s role in the cultural front, see Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1997), 309–19. On luxe pop, see John Howland, “Hearing Luxe Pop: Jay Z, Isaac Hayes, and the Six Degrees of Symphonic Soul,” in The Relentless Pursuit of Tone: Timbre and Popular Music, ed. Robert Fink, Zachary Wallmark, and Mindy O’Brien (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

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us through the faculties of the senses rather than reason. How then do you show something like this? How do you make history palpable to the senses? Films of the cultural front showed you the people; as Denning writes, “The question of ‘representing’ the people – to depict and speak for the people – lies at the center of the artistic and intellectual works of the cultural front.”65 The visual means Berkeley finds for this is ingenious. Here, he uses something similar to the architectural cutaway he used for the naughty humor of the “Honeymoon Hotel” number from Footlight Parade (Warner Bros., 1933). By contrast, the “Forgotten Man” production is built around a dismal tenement that functions as an egg-carton container for images of social types: the young widow, her face as pinched and drawn as a Dorothea Lange photo, holding her child; the old widow in her rocking chair, face slack with pain; the war hero vagrant, rousted on the street by a thuggish cop with a face like a slab of beef. Social types, arrayed at any given moment of time, describe a synchronic axis and can be seen.66 The other axis, of time, can be heard – and the voice of history is Etta Moten, a raced voice, comparable in its role and gravity to Paul Robeson’s in Ballad for Americans (1939).67 Moten’s image, like Ellington’s, is not inflected by code inherited from minstrelsy, but marks a new entertainment image – the image of blackness taking the form and voice of prophecy, making history visible and audible in a single spectacular moment. I began this essay by contrasting the images of Ellington and Louis Armstrong, somewhat to Ellington’s advantage. What is left of Armstrong in the dream life of the nation is a crude, ghosted retinal after-image: a trumpet, a gravelly voice singing “What a Wonderful World,” and a huge 65 66

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Denning, Cultural Front, 125. Our Daily Bread, a New Deal-era film entertainment extraordinarily blunt in its expression of collectivist ideology, assembles its stock social types (the hustling Brooklyn Jew, the e´ migr´e German musician, the Swedish Minnesotan farmer, etc.) in order to render a visual representation of that unrepresentable abstraction, society. King Vidor, dir., Our Daily Bread (orig. King Vidor Productions/United Artists, 1934), Image Entertainment, 2005, DVD. Robeson is perhaps the only entertainer whose interwar career occupies roughly the same place as Ellington’s – a black entertainer whose media image is built around an axis of racial and artistic dignity. But while Ellington remains mute in most of his film appearances, Robeson was represented by his voice. Ballad for Americans is a historical pageant, and a kind of auditory film, in which Robeson’s voice represents America itself in its multiple manifestations; in the less well-known film Native Land, Robeson is the unseen narrator, a speaking (and sometimes singing) voice that traces invisible lines of history and society. See Lisa Barg, “Paul Robeson’s Ballad for Americans: Race and the Cultural Politics of ‘People’s Music,’” Journal of the Society for American Music 2 (2008): 27–70; Kevin Jack Hagopian, “‘You Know Who I Am!’: Paul Robeson’s Ballad for Americans and the Paradox of the Double V in American Popular Culture,” in Paul Robeson: Essays on His Life and Legacy, ed. Joseph Dorinson and William Pencak (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002), 167–79.

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ingratiating smile. As Ralph Ellison noted, for postwar bebop musicians Armstrong stood as a cautionary example of the black artist who chose to inhabit one of the clownish roles that lay, like boxes on a shelf, as ready containers for racial identity. But Ellison defends Armstrong’s role as clown by suggesting that bebop’s contrary stance of resistance was just another degrading role for black artists to play for white audiences. Indeed, he goes further. He suggests, disquietingly, that no one who performs for an audience can escape being an entertainer: “Whatever his style, the performing artist remains an entertainer, even a Heifetz, Rubinstein or young Glenn Gould.”68 Even Heifetz and Gould had images. Armstrong, at least, could wriggle free of his. Ellison believed that a clown’s mask allows its wearer to slip through the confinements of any ready-made identity. But I am not so sure. To entertain is to don a mask, and we can never be sure that the audience has not mistaken the mask for its wearer. Comedian Dave Chappelle’s decision to walk away from his television career in 2006 suggests that he had discovered this truth for himself. Chappelle’s Show played racial stereotypes for laughs, inflating them to preposterous size and letting them collapse under their own weight. But Chappelle stopped taping the show when he heard a white crew member laughing just a little too hard at a sketch in which he and rapper Mos Def played blackface minstrels. It turned out that it was still possible for laughter at the demolition of an entertainment image to become laughter at the image itself. There is no practical way to keep these things separate: an image of an image is still an image, just as a progressive image – blackness as history, the exemplary African American as the embodiment of that history – is, in the end, just another image, albeit a more flattering one. The image of the historical Negro was like a Magic Eye picture, a two-dimensional pattern that gives the illusion of three dimensions; it did not actually supply the missing third dimension. You cannot use stereotypes to transcend stereotypes; you can only offer better ones. But my repeated invocation of Obama might at least give a sense of what can be at stake in such a contest. Intellectuals deplore the blunt stupidity of images and long for alternatives. They want films to have characters drawn with a depth and realism that might do justice to the irreducible complexity of individual human beings, or they want to see laid bare the social forces that shape group identities. The writer to whom Ellington expressed his desire to “give an 68

Ralph Ellison, “On Bird, Bird-Watching and Jazz,” in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 260.

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American audience entertainment without compromising the dignity of the Negro people” ended his article by calling for a new social realism in entertainment: “There will be fewer generalized gin-guzzling, homicidal maniacs, and more understanding of rotten socio-economic conditions which give rise to neurotic escapists, compensating for overwrought nerves.”69 But Ellington never created this kind of worthy, dull art. He did not forswear images, and neither did he forswear the very real power that comes of fashioning them. That power is the ability to intervene in the Dream Life, to confront malevolent images, oppose them with your own, and draw their sting. This is a potent kind of political power – perhaps the most powerful political intervention an artist can make. The prophetic images that Ellington manipulated ended up helping to get Obama elected, after all. To forswear image-making, to abandon entertainment, is to leave the field of battle, and Ellington, gentlemanly as he was, did not shrink from this fight. 69

Duke Ellington as quoted in Edward Murrow, “Duke Ellington on Gershwin’s ‘Porgy,’” in Tucker, Reader, 117.

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Marketing to the Middlebrow: Reconsidering Ellingtonia, the Legacy of Early Ellington Criticism, and the Idea of a “Serious” Jazz Composer john howland

In 2000, JazzTimes sought to trace the history of the canonization of Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings from the 1920s. Their search led to an interview with George Avakian, who at age twenty-one for Columbia Records initiated the first commercial album reissues of long unavailable back-catalog recordings from pre-Swing era jazz.1 Following the model of the Avakian-produced 1940 compilation album, King Louis, as well as this “Hot Jazz Classics” album series, the early and mid-1940s recording industry witnessed a range of compilation album reissues, many of which aimed to document “Jazz as It Should Be Played,” to borrow the title of the second album – this time by Bix Beiderbecke – in the “Hot Jazz Classics” series, which itself was framed around a tag-line touting “reissues of the original records that made jazz history.”2 As the series name, the Beiderbecke album title, and the focus on a curated handful of top artists imply, these commerical reissue efforts involved the self-conscious canon formation of a jazz “classics” repertory, a stylistic agenda on what “hot jazz” was and how it should be played, and a commercial recording movement that went hand-in-glove with a period revival of early jazz performance styles overlapping in near tandem with the modern Swing era (and soon early bebop). In light of the Duke Ellington orchestra’s long popularity for their recordings and live engagements, as well as their broad presence in films, on the radio, and at such prestigious venues as Carnegie Hall (1943 forward), it should be no surprise that the late 1920s and early to mid-1930s recording catalog of Ellington’s music was quickly repackaged as part of this jazz “classics” commercial canonization movement. 1

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George Avakian, “The First Jazz Reissue Program,” JazzTimes, October 2000, http://jazztimes .com/articles/20273-the-first-jazz-reissue-program%20%3E (accessed 9 May 2016). Louis Armstrong, King Louis, Columbia Records C-28, 1940, 78-rpm album. Many thanks to Ricky Riccardi and Steven Lasker for helpful information on this series. Bix Beiderbecke, Jazz as It Should Be Played by Bix Beiderbecke, Columbia Records C-29, 1940, 78-rpm album.

Marketing to the Middlebrow

Ellington’s press reception history and his public-relations promotional copy from the late 1920s to early 1940s did in fact prove to be ideal material for jazz proponents to promote a relatively new popular notion of jazz “classics.” Specifically, Ellington’s long-cultivated image as a musical and cultural sophisticate enabled the era’s most prodigious cultural elevation project in efforts to associate areas of jazz performance and composition with the period’s popular-culture conception of the elevated status and cultural aura of classical music. Among the more prominent images of this elevated aura came from the widely popular “longhair” classical programming of Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony Orchestra. I reference midcentury “longhair” discourse here both figuratively, in the class-hierarchy sense (meaning devotees and proponents of the highbrow arts, particularly classical music), and literally, in the imagery and caricatures of the conductor’s wild, flowing white mane when pursuing his art.3 As I argue in this chapter, many areas of these jazz–classical associative juxtapositions in the press and Ellington’s promotional materials closely engage with the rhetoric and practices of emergent trends in interwar middlebrow culture. The popular press, promotional copy, and media imagery that cultivated the widely held interwar notion of Duke Ellington, the “serious” jazz composer, clearly document how deeply entwined this 1930s conception is with interwar middlebrow culture in the U.S.A. and U.K. This chapter both outlines this argument and explores what implications this framing has for understanding Ellington in this era – or, rather, the idea of a serious jazz composer in its contemporary interwar context. As Joseph Horowitz and Joan Shelley Rubin both observe,4 the jaundiced “highbrow” critical view of mass culture at midcentury, the American anti-intellectual tradition, and especially interwar attempts at democratizing high culture for the masses, had significant roots in the theories of the Frankfurt School (particularly the writings of Theodor Adorno and Leo Lowenthal). As Horowitz notes, by the mid-1940s, this criticism had begun to “filter down from the ivory tower toward masscirculation newspapers and magazines”5 by way of the essays of Clement 3 4

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Google “Toscanini caricature” to see a wealth of related images. Joseph Horowitz, Understanding Toscanini: How He Became an American Culture-God and Helped Create a New Audience for Old Music (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1987), and Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992). Horowitz, Understanding Toscanini, 243. During this period, the Frankfurt School theorists were living in exile on the Columbia University campus in New York.

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Greenberg, Dwight Macdonald, Russell Lynes, and others.6 While this criticism first surfaced just after World War II, the most influential essay on this subject, Dwight Macdonald’s “Masscult and Midcult,” was published in 1960.7 Macdonald had written on both mass and middlebrow culture since the early 1950s, but this particular article marked the culmination of his theories on the complex relations between American cultural strata and contemporary mass culture in the post-World War II era. Of particular interest to this current chapter are Macdonald’s concerns about commercial transferences of highbrow cultural aura to middlebrow cultural expressions. In the context of critiquing the middlebrow aesthetics of Life magazine, Macdonald in a sense echoes Walter Benjamin’s (Frankfurt School) notions of “aura” in art8 when he notes: Life is a typical homogenized [middlebrow] magazine . . . The same issue will present a serious exposition of atomic energy followed by a disquisition on Rita Hayworth’s love life; photos of starving children . . . in Calcutta and of sleek models wearing adhesive brassieres . . . nine color pages of Renoir paintings followed by a rollerskating horse; a cover announcement [prominently advertises,] in the same size type[,] two features: “A New Foreign Policy,” . . . and “Kerima: Her Marathon Kiss Is a Movie Sensation.” Somehow these scramblings together seem to work all one way, degrading the serious rather than elevating the frivolous. Defenders of our Masscult society [i.e., popular culture] . . . see phenomena like Life as inspiring attempts at popular education – just think, nine pages of Renoirs! but that rollerskating horse comes along, and the final impression is that both Renoir and the horse were talented.9

Such “homogenized . . . scramblings” of markers for the “serious,” as well as efforts at “elevating the frivolous” (whether or not one agrees on the success of this), are readily identified in the packaging and texts of two key “jazz classics” albums by Ellington in the mid-1940s. The first, a two-volume, sixteen-track Brunswick Records release, Ellingtonia: A Collection of Distinctive Recordings Played by Duke Ellington, stands apart from the period’s “jazz classics” compilation albums in a number of ways. Brunswick Records identifies these releases as part of their “Collectors’ 6

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A wonderful document of this critical legacy is the anthology Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, ed. Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1957). Dwight Macdonald, “Masscult and Midcult,” part 1, Partisan Review 27 (Spring 1960): 203–33, and part 2, Partisan Review 27 (Fall 1960): 589–631. The essay that is the source of this idea was originally published in 1936, but has been reprinted separately as Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (New York: Penguin, 2008), Kindle e-book. Macdonald, “Masscult,” Part 1, 212–13.

Marketing to the Middlebrow

Figure 2.1 The red-velvet cover and accompanying liner-note booklet to the 1943 Brunswick Records 78-rpm album, Ellingtonia, vol. 1, B1000

Series.” The April 1943 first volume appears in a red velvet-clad fabric cover with a distinctive black-and-red graphic paper label affixed to the front. (See Figure 2.1.) Nothing says sophisticated like red velvet; I know of no other 1940s albums with such a cover, whether jazz, popular, or classical. The second volume, released June 1944, sports a green velvet-clad cover.10 The other two artists in the Brunswick series are cornetist Red Nichols and boogie-woogie pianist Pine Top Smith, but their releases – and the later series releases I have seen – do not include the velvet treatment, nor anything as extravagant as the six-page detailed Ellingtonia liner-note booklet written by Dave Dexter, Jr. A distinctive compliment to the velvet covers is the subtle, iconic, black-silhouette graphic of what appears to be a concert-style pianist – with both face and clothes in black, possibly implying a tuxedoed African American? – performing “seriously” (leaning 10

Duke Ellington, Ellingtonia: A Collection of Distinctive Recordings Played by Duke Ellington, vols. 1 (released April 1943) and 2 (released June 1944), Brunswick B-1000 and B-1011, 78-rpm album sets.

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forward in musical concentration and without the jazzed-entertainment histrionics depicted in many other period jazz-pianist album graphics, including some of Ellington’s). The pianist is seated at a concert-length grand piano (an “elevated” version of the instrument not normally associated with jazz bands). This album further marks one of the earliest high-profile uses of the term “Ellingtonia,” which provides an authorial air of “works” by a single artist worthy of collecting and presenting in a compilation album. It speaks to the idea of a “legacy” – artistic, documentary, and worthy of scholarship – as “Ellingtonia” has been used ever since. A second – and even more unusual – jazz album by Ellington is the 1946 RCA Black, Brown and Beige: A Duke Ellington Tone Parallel to the American Negro release which offers excerpts from his extended concert work of the same name that he premiered in 1943 at Carnegie Hall. The album was released in both hard and soft covers, with variations on the cover graphics and accompanying texts. Figure 2.2 presents the soft-cover version, both front and back.11 One finds a collage of graphics and photograph materials with an artful array of contrasting block colors and color fades. There is the central image of the dapper, sophisticated Duke at work (performance) in dark evening wear with French cuffs and cufflinks set above the collage graphic of photographed piano keys superimposed on a brown-to-beige (semi?) concert grand piano, all superimposed over an iconic shot of Carnegie Hall’s exterior. The album cover proudly announces that this is an “RCA Victor Showpiece.” The complimentary “Jazz Immortal” back cover shows the sophisticated Ellington at leisure in a full-color photograph of him lounging on a royal purple couch in a golden-yellow smoking jacket (with rust-colored fuzzy slippers!), sitting at attention while listening to his own 1943 A Duke Ellington Panorama album set on a stylish, Art Deco-type 1940s entertainment console.12 His “leisure” presentation is the perfect picture of 1940s Hollywood glamor. This outer-cover graphic framing contrasts notably with the more traditionally jazz-centric, blue-black head shots of his performing musicians that surround the inside-cover liner notes, as well as the storybook- (or Works Progress Administration-) style African American history images seen on these pages (graphics which emphasize black-themed historical stereotypes of slavery, religion, community, dreaming, modernity, etc.). 11

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Duke Ellington, Black, Brown and Beige: A Duke Ellington Tone Parallel to the American Negro, RCA DC39 (hard cover) and SP-9 (soft cover), 1946, 78-rpm album set. Duke Ellington, A Duke Ellington Panorama, Victor P-138, 1943, 78-rpm album set.

Figure 2.2 The front and back covers of the 1946 78-rpm album, Black, Brown and Beige, SP-9 (soft cover)

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This deluxe packaging and graphic-offsetting of Ellington from thencommon models of jazz imagery on album covers (for example, the influential 1940s jazz album cover graphics of David Stone Martin) and the press and other media stands out quite distinctly from the other “jazz classics” albums of the day. The accompanying texts to both albums work in tandem with their graphics to hit home the jazz–classical aura transference notions that characterize this elevated “jazz classics” packaging. Glancing through the liner notes to Ellingtonia, vol. 1, one sees such phrases as: “most genuinely talented individual personality in the entire jazz realm”; “he felt that the existing musical culture (the European manner, of course) would stifle . . . his talents”; “he learned to compose and orchestrate music just as many other truly great [i.e., classical] artists have done, by experimentation and through practical experience”; “Ellington’s music is American music . . . in the American idiom, untouched by cheap and bawdy Tin Pan Alley Standards or the equally odorous European touch”; “Black and Tan Fantasy . . . Another immortal piece of Ellingtonia”; etc. The track-bytrack notes balance the careful accounting of facts with commentary on the entertainment value of aspects of the music, the quality of the music as the highest jazz, and routine references to formal construction. Volume 2 (unfortunately I do not have this release’s liner notes) reflects the latter Ellingtonia trope through its unusual inclusion of the two-part “extended” compositions, Creole Rhapsody and Tiger Rag, thus further emphasizing Ellington the “serious” jazz composer. Here and throughout this essay, I emphasize the use of “serious” as a common period synonym for elevated culture and art. In this era, there are a wealth of parallel words for class hierachy notions of serious, sophisticated, etc., but their gist is typically based on a judgmental essentialism that juxtaposes an elevated notion of Art (European) and “frivolous” commercial entertainment (American). One interesting aspect with the interwar elevated promotion of Ellington is the routine promotional insistence on having it both ways – Ellington is said to represent serious but playful artful entertainment. This have-itboth-ways balance is inherently middlebrow. The image juxtaposition of a Carnegie Hall Jazz Immortal and the glamorous Hollywood-style matinee idol on the purple couch captures this well. (And the liner notes to the album present a similar have-it-both-ways, art–entertainment balance.) The Avakian/Columbia “jazz classics” releases – which included two Ellington13 albums – are part of a more generalized 1940s critical push by 13

Duke Ellington, The Duke (released November 1940), no. 5 in the “Jazz Classics” series, Columbia C-38, and Ellington Special (released June 1947), no. 14 in the ”Jazz Classics” series, Columbia C-127, both 78-rpm album sets.

Marketing to the Middlebrow

jazz proponents towards promoting the artistry of hot (improvised) jazz, and more specifically jazz as a distinctly American (and specifically African American indebted) art form. By the latter, it was meant that hot jazz was not merely a frivolous American commercial entertainment for moving your feet, but it could also be seen as non-European musical artistry that at its best could involve an intellectual, artistic sophistication for the brain. (This dual mind-versus-body/art-versus-entertainment aesthetic dichotomy has a long European and American history that is beyond the scope of this essay.) By contrast, the two aforementioned Ellington releases encapsulate a different – and yet higher – level of cultural and racial elevation in midcentury American popular culture discourse. In this essay, I am not interested in debating whether or not Ellington’s musical sophistication was middlebrow. Rather, I am interested in its reception and the widespread promotion of the idea of this sophistication through the framing of middlebrow cultural rhetoric and discourse. I am interested in the aura of middlebrow sophistication in this image and its promotional practice.

Midcentury Middlebrow While the middlebrow has become a sizable topic in cultural studies,14 it remains under-researched in music scholarship. Like “popular” and “classical” music, middlebrow music culture should not be essentialized too readily. There is ample and diverse midcentury discourse on middlebrow culture by public intellectuals such as Dwight Macdonald, Russell Lynes, and others. Lynes humorously divided middlebrows into four types with different ambitions and habits.15 By contrast, as noted, some figures like Macdonald lumped middlebrows into a single troublesome category that is determined centrally by cultural “homogenization” trends. For such critics, their concern lay centrally with the production and dissemination of democratic, inclusive middlebrow ideals and their relative intrusions into – or proximity to – the formerly restrictive and exclusive domains of highbrow culture. As noted, midcentury popular-press comparisons of Ellington to classical composers were often meant to invoke a degree of cultural aura transference, by elevating the image of Ellington rather than the composers he was compared to. Similar popular-/high-culture 14

15

See, for example, the extensive bibliography of the Middlebrow Network, www .middlebrow-network.com/Bibliography.aspx (accessed 18 May 2016) Russell Lynes, “Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow,” Harper’s, February 1949, 12–28.

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juxtapositions were worrisome to midcentury critics of the middlebrow, who – to again recall Macdonald – took aim at media like Life magazine, which “scramble[d] together” the cultural strata of the brows. This not said to denigrate Ellington’s image, but to provide added perspective on midcentury modes of high-low image construction in the popular sphere. In examining the interwar construction of this notion of a ”serious” jazz composer, there is an undeniable relation to period middlebrow conceptions of the elevated “Great Composer” – or, in this case, the idea of a “hot Bach,” as Ellington was once famously called in an extended 1944 New Yorker profile article. Like a great amount of Ellington press in this era, this chapter includes many examples of mixed-class, mixed art/entertainment rhetoric, and in a manner that closely echoes the aforementioned contemporaneous Ellingtonia “jazz classics” albums.16 The middlebrow has been somewhat of a career-threatening third rail in art and music discourse of much of the twentieth century. I use “third rail” here as a metaphor – with reference to the dangerous electric third rail of commuter trains – for how a postwar middlebrow characterization became controversial enough in certain circles that it could render the legacies of certain artists as somehow “untouchable” or irredeemable. The degraded middlebrow invariably suffered in artistic assessments against the best of both art and popular entertainment. (Keep in mind that America had begun to appreciate its talents in the entertaining arts – or what Gilbert Seldes called the “lively arts” – during the interwar era.) To aspire to both spheres risked being seen as naive, hackneyed, hopelessly aspirational, or commercially pandering on the art extreme, or drearily pretentious on the entertainment side. That said, if one can step back from the heated opinions of interwar and midcentury brow discourse, from a present-day perspective the example of Ellington’s image presents a fascinating study of both this earlier era’s dialectical negotiations between art and entertainment, and the interwar American penchant for glamorous, sophisticated, or artful entertainments. One need only look as far as the 1930s RKO film musicals of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers to recognize one key period for such an artful entertainment aesthetic, which in this case involved a potent mixture of tuxedos, ballroom gowns, lavish Art Deco stage sets, and jazz (or at least jazzy syncopation), all in mixed

16

Richard Boyer, “Profiles: The Hot Bach,” part 1 (24 June), part 2 (1 July), and part 3 (8 July), The New Yorker (1944), www.newyorker.com/magazine/1944/06/24/the-hot-bach-i, www .newyorker.com/magazine/1944/07/01/the-hot-bach-ii, and www.newyorker.com/magazine/ 1944/07/08/the-hot-bach-iii (accessed 18 May 2016)

Marketing to the Middlebrow

combinations with snappy American street slang, the moneyed classes mingling with common folk (often with cases of mistaken identity), lushly scored orchestral ballroom music juxtaposed against swing-style jazz, elegant ballroom footwork set against African American-derived tap dance, and so forth.17 This interwar popular-culture aesthetic thrives on sustained high-middle-low stylistic, musical, and class juxtapositions, but above all its midcentury middlebrow core lies in the sophisticated, glamorous presentation of popular entertainment idioms through both mixed-class and mixed-race image presentations and often lavish (or at least more-complex-than-usual) production-style arrangements. One key root to this luxe entertainment aesthetic lies in the 1920s popular idiom of symphonic jazz, a musical arranging aesthetic that was most widely associated with the hugely successful orchestra of the white bandleader, Paul Whiteman, but this general stylistic aesthetic was a significant presence in the lush, jazzy big-band-plus-strings mainstream sound of certain popular music, musical theater, the variety shows of the deluxe movie palaces, and film music of the late 1920s through 1950s. In sum, symphonic jazz was the foundation for the sound of the deluxe arranging and instrumentation of much interwar and midcentury traditional pop. As I have noted extensively elsewhere, and specifically in relation to considerations of Ellington’s concert jazz works, under the sustained stylistic and class-marker juxtapositions of symphonic jazz, the “jazz” of symphonic jazz specifically paralleled 1920s journalistic uses of the term as both an adjective and verb to imply a sense of mildly irreverent and playful mixtures of white and black, high and low, and popular and culturally elevated musics.18 Alternately, the so-called symphonic aspects of this idiom specifically referenced the music’s heightened theatricality and stylistic significations, its comparatively complex formal structures, and especially its so-called “sophisticated” introductions, interludes and codas, its unexpected modulations and dramatic cadenzas, and its emphasis on orchestrational, textural, and stylistic variety. While these “pretentious” attributes provided ideal targets in purist proponents of jazz, particularly because of this idiom’s culturally “homogenizing” middlebrow commercialism, the great achievement of the Whiteman symphonic jazz formula was its skill in bridging urban entertainment styles and the aspirational 17

18

See Todd Decker, Music Makes Me: Fred Astaire and Jazz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). See, for example, Howland, Uptown, and John Howland, “Between the Muses and the Masses: Symphonic Jazz, ‘Glorified’ Entertainment, and the Rise of the American Musical Middlebrow, 1920–1944” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 2002).

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consumer interests of middle class America. This formula’s basis in broadly familiar characteristic scoring effects and the idiom’s overall veneer of sophistication proved a very powerful means of making jazz-related music respectable to the American white middle class. Such middlebrow, aspirational musical trends, though, were manifest in a variety of ways, including most prominently the new mass marketing of classical music (e.g., with Toscanini and the NBC Symphony), but they were also in many other entertainment traditions. Interwar film musicals again provide an ideal example of such entertainment trends, and not the least because of their frequent symphonic jazz-derived scoring practices. For example, this same high-low entertainment aesthetic formed the narrative framing of numerous “gold-digger” musicals and musical films of the late 1920s and early 1930s.19 The common narrative outline of this entertainment genre is equally reflective of some of the basic elements present in the contemporary popular myths concerning the highbrow reception of symphonic jazz: high society (both highbrows and blue bloods) will be morally shocked that their ranks have been broken by some smart-mouthed, street-wise (“red-blooded”) Broadway hoofer or songstress (who they presume merely wants to profit monetarily and socially from their attentions); the stuffed-shirts will lose a bit of their stuffing with a little bit of lowbrow fun; and some lowbrow minor character will do his best to pass in society but something in his vernacular demeanor or a slang turn of phrase will trip him up. In the end, after the comedy of errors has worked its natural course, a few members of Society will loosen up and learn the pleasures of slumming through their mingling with the “common” folk. Notice, however, that the central theme here is one of the high being brought down to the level of the low (or to the level of the common people), not the other way around. Here is the culturally marginalized, no-man’s land of middlebrowism – a pejorative characterization coined by midcentury white cultural critics as a means to describe the pervasive hybridization of mass and highbrow cultures between World Wars One and Two. What specifically concerned these critics (Macdonald, Lynes, et al.) was that middlebrowism had come to occupy such a major part of American culture in this period. Moreover, as noted, these critics had come to see such territorial encroachments as

19

The popular backstage-comedy theme that defined a “gold digger” as a stage-world opportunist was first introduced on Broadway in the 1919 comedy The Gold Digger. This play was transformed into film by Warner Brothers on several occasions, most famously in the landmark film musical, Gold Diggers of 1933 and the Gold Diggers of 1935.

Marketing to the Middlebrow

major threats to highbrow cultural authority and the culturally privileged positions of both the contemporary avant garde and the traditional art canons. Many historical and musicological accounts of American musical culture from World War I to midcentury rely upon a seemingly rigid generic delineation between popular music (still including jazz at least until the late 1940s) and classical music. However, these “accepted” discourses tend to marginalize a great deal of the cross-fertilization that occurred between all strata of American musical life during this period, and this is the very same cultural territory inhabited by the symphonic jazz idiom. The basic hypothesis that interwar American musical culture is centrally defined by its myriad of culturally democratizing activities is significantly supported by the evidence of the era’s musical trade magazines, such as Metronome and Down Beat. Present-day histories of interwar jazz might give the impression that both these periodicals were solely devoted to coverage of jazz and swing. However, in the 1930s and early 1940s, both magazines were committed to addressing a large cross-section of American musical activities. The front-page title banner of Down Beat, for instance, proudly proclaimed that its coverage extended to “Ballroom, Cafe, Radio, Studio, Symphony and Theater” for its first several years of operation in the 1930s. Notice that “jazz” (whatever music that term referenced, from sweet to hot) is not even mentioned. As might be surmised from this logo, these magazines often closely reported and commented on the doings of such popular conductors as Leopold Stokowski and Toscanini (the world of American symphonic music, at least in this popular frame). Both magazines were particularly interested in stylistic border crossings and the cultivation of performances of distinctively “American” music, much of which stylistically fell in or near the symphonic jazz idiom. This interest in cultural border crossing, for instance, can be noticed in such articles as “Does a Highbrow Have to Step Down in the Movies? Why Stokowski Turned to Hollywood” (on Stokowski’s work on the film 100 Men and a Girl) and “Toscanini a ‘Bring-Down’ to American Composers” (in addition to repeating the commonly voiced critique of Toscanini’s “lack of interest in American efforts,” this latter article attacks the conductor’s extreme popularity and his lush interpretive style, proclaiming him “the Rhodes of rhapsodic music”20 ). There has been surprising little research attention given to the complex middlebrow interactions between radio, mass marketing, and the 20

Both from Down Beat (November 1937): 13.

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culture of classical music in the interwar era. One notable exception is Joseph Horowitz’s book Understanding Toscanini, which contains important examinations of the nexus of modern media, middlebrowism and the culture of classical music in America.21 As mentioned, a number of cultural and literary historians have recently taken up the quest to redraw and examine the imposed boundaries in American society between high Art and popular, mass and/or vernacular culture. A primary inspiration for such studies has often been Lawrence Levine’s 1988 book, Highbrow/Lowbrow, an engaging account of the sacralization of high culture and the parallel emergence of American cultural hierarchies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.22 An important extension of Levine’s work can be seen in Joan Shelley Rubin’s equally influential book, The Making of Middlebrow Culture.23 This latter study details the further stratification of American culture across the interwar era and explores the later implications of the cultural trends that Levine first articulated. Through her examination of the rise of such institutions and phenomena as the Book-of-the-Month Club, journalistic reviews of new books, the American middle-class desire for self-education and cultural self-improvement (and the complementary publishing trend for creating “outlines” of specialized knowledge), as well as her attention to the ideologies behind the popularity of great book lists and book programs on commercial radio, Rubin uncovers the “unjustly neglected phenomenon of . . . the emergence of American middlebrow culture”24 in the 1920s through 1940s. For Macdonald and his midcentury highbrow critical peers, the most disconcerting manifestations of this cultural democratization lay in the market-driven proliferation of inexpensive copies of canonic art works (particularly the midcentury boom in “quality” paperbacks, books of collected art reproductions, and the phenomenal sales success of classical records25 ) as well as in the era’s boom in institutions for the arts (such as the multitude of symphony orchestras Macdonald notes had been established for “every city of 50,000”). In highbrow critical circles, these phenomena were not the subjects of praise. As the critic Louis Menand noted more recently, for the Greenberg/Macdonald camp, it was “as though mediocrity, or even entertainment, were a virus” eating away at American

21 22

23

Horowitz, Understanding Toscanini. Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). 24 Ibid., xi. 25 Macdonald, “Masscult,” Part 1, 211. Rubin, Making of Middlebrow.

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highbrow culture. Menand also aptly captures the essential nature of Macdonald’s cultural stance when he observes that to Macdonald, middlebrow culture was essentially seen to be “kitsch for educated people.”26 In Macdonald’s opinion, the mass marketing of inexpensive copies of canonic masterworks generally led the layman to a rather confused or misguided reception of high art – “it is one thing to bring High Culture to a wider audience without change, and another to ‘popularize’ it by sales talk . . . or by hoking it up as in Stokowski’s lifelong struggle to assimilate Bach to Tchaikowsky.”27 Thus, for Macdonald, rather than having a positive effect, this trend was a significant limiting factor for contemporary art culture: “the quality paperbacks sell mostly the Big Names . . . The records and . . . orchestras play Mozart and Stravinsky [an accessible modernist] rather than Elliott Carter. The Art museums show mostly old masters or new masters like Matisse, with a Jackson Pollack if they are daring,” etc.28 By contrast, the primary manifestations of cultural democratization in the world of music, as Joseph Horowitz amply demonstrates, included the Toscanini cult, the music appreciation “racket” (Virgil Thomson’s characterization), and a diversity of related broad cultural efforts at popularization of a frozen repertory of “nineteenth-century [European] warhorses [that] were recycled to amass a primer for radio-era listeners.”29 To Macdonald and his counterparts in the musical community, these trends lay at the heart of the dreaded middlebrow intrusions into high musical culture. Such mass-marketing of cultural monuments reached an unprecedented level of popularity in the interwar era. As Joan Rubin illustrates, a significant part of this trend was tied to the era’s great interest in cultural “self-education,” whereby individuals hoped (and were promised by advertisers) that they could achieve cultural self-improvement for the betterment of their social, intellectual or conversational prowess.30 Obviously, short-cuts were offered to attain such ends, thus the rise of abridged or popularized versions of the classics. These trends included such phenomena as Orson Welles’s popularizations of Shakespeare’s plays, abridged productions and excerpts from the classics of literature and drama on radio and television, Book-of-the-Month Club offers for album sets devoted to 26

27 29 30

Louis Menand, “Culture Club: The Short, Happy Life of the American Highbrow,” The New Yorker, 15 October 2001, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/10/15/culture-club (accessed 18 May 2016) 28 Ibid., 616. Macdonald, “Masscult,” Part 2, 615n7. Horowitz, Understanding Toscanini, 262. See especially Rubin, “Self, Culture, and Self-Culture in America,” in Rubin, Making of Middlebrow, 133.

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selections from the “best” of the classical repertory, as well as numerous compilations, “great work” lists, guides and outlines to the “masterworks,” etc. In music, such middlebrow trends for popularizing the “classics” were expressed both through abridged versions of popular canonic works and jazzed/fox-trot versions of classical melodies, as well as a diversity of great works lists, including Whiteman’s own Music for the Millions, a “how to” guide for introducing the classics to the layman.31 One of the more outrageous projects in the democratization of the classical canon, for instance, was a radio program directed by the conductor Andre Kostelanetz. In an article concerning Kostelanetz’s new show (sponsored by Chesterfield cigarettes), the conductor’s intent was described as follows: The time is ripe for mass consumption of the Classics – not just frothy, light Classics that are more or less familiar but real red meat, Brahms, Bach and others in that category. With one important difference – that is. Andre proposes pocket editions . . . In short, what the Reader’s Digest has done to literature, Andre proposes to do to music . . . The public will go for abbreviated Classics, he believes, although the originals would leave them cold. The length of these masterworks is not in keeping with modern life. Time limitations of radio for another thing rule them out. Then the people would not sit through them if they were given all the time in the world. Therefore Andre will prune his way down to melodies and delete all the preliminary preludings, developments and repetitions. There will be no arrangements of these works. What is heard will be as written by the composer only in capsule form. Another part of the plan is to present more ambitious works of the [George] Gershwin, [Ferde] Grof´e type.32

This passage naturally provides damning evidence for the media’s role in pandering to the same American ambivalence to high culture that so deeply troubled Adorno, Greenberg, Macdonald, et al. It also provides strong support for their belief that the “new media” considerably doubted the American public’s capacity to sit still for – let alone actually listen to and understand – works from the classical canon (in radio, this specifically meant the popular or “familiar” classical canon, and entirely excluded contemporary modernist music). Moreover, though it may actually reveal more about radio producers and media hype, this article also seems to 31 32

Paul Whiteman, Records for the Millions (New York: Hermitage Press, 1948). “Radio’s Pocket Edition of the Classics: In His New Show Andre Kostelanetz Proposes to Give Them Red Meat but Without the Trimmings – Believes Time Is Ripe,” Metronome, October 1937, 31.

Marketing to the Middlebrow

bolster Theodor Adorno’s claims that such populistic classical broadcasts merely encouraged “regressive” listening habits in their radio audiences by emphasizing simplified knowledge and “fetishized” works and composers, and that they underscored the entertaining rewards of being able to recognize isolated themes and moments familiarized by radio commentators and music-appreciation quiz shows.33 While the Kostelanetz quote obviously situates such trends directly in relation to the popular symphonic jazz concert works of Gershwin and Grof´e (Whiteman’s longtime arranger), as I shall subsequently demonstrate, such trends also lie at the core of how to interpret the period understandings of the image of both Ellington the “serious” jazz composer, and the Ellington-focused jazz-classical press/promotional juxtapositions. The New Yorker critic, Alex Ross, writing in 2004, aptly referred to the interwar period and midcentury as “the great American middlebrow era, when [classical] music had a much different place in the culture [and] . . . millions listened as Toscanini conducted the NBC Symphony on national radio. [This was a period when] Walter Damrosch explained the classics to schoolchildren, singing ditties to help them remember the themes . . . [and] NBC would broadcast . . . the Boston Symphony broadcast followed by the Redskins game. I was unaware of a yawning gap between the two.”34 Paired with the above discussion of classical democratization trends, this characterization of the interwar media democratization of the accessible, warhorse classical repertory for the expanding middle class resonates nicely with Macdonald’s assessments of the “scramblings” of the cultural brows, minus the midcentury highbrow angst about this “homogenization” process. Speaking of the same nineteenth-century efforts at cultural education that Lawrence Levine discussed in Highbrow/Lowbrow, Ross observes that “The rise of ‘classical music’ mirrored the rise of the commercial middle class, which employed Beethoven as an escalator to the social heights,” and this trend occurred in the influential shadow of a popular highbrow stereotype of feigning an abhorence for “virtuosity, extravagance, anything that smacked of entertainment.”35 More closely to the argument of this chapter, Ross points to the rhetoric of brow discourse, asking his readers to “consider some of the rival names

33 34

35

See Horowitz, Understanding Toscanini, 229ff. Alex Ross, “Listen to This,” The New Yorker, 16 and 23 February 2004, reprinted on The Rest Is Noise: Books, Articles, and a Blog by the Music Critic of the New Yorker, www.therestisnoise .com/2004/05/more to come 6.html (accessed 23 March 2016). Ibid.

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in circulation: ‘art’ music, ‘serious’ music, ‘great’ music, ‘good’ music.” He contends that while the music can be great and serious . . . greatness and seriousness are not its defining characteristics. It can also be stupid, vulgar, and insane . . . Yet some discerning souls believe that the music should be marketed as a luxury good, one that supplants an inferior popular product. They say, in effect, “The music you love is trash. Listen instead to our great, arty music.” They gesture toward the heavens, but they speak the language of high-end real estate.36

Ross’s views here ideally represent a modern, inclusive, musically pluralistic perspective – and the colorful, quintessentially American hype – around midcentury cultural hierarchy. That said, while he still holds to a firm distinction between art and entertainment, he recognizes that art can be entertaining, and that entertainment can be artful. Nonetheless, despite his late-blooming personal appreciation of the potential artfulness of popular culture and music (this is part of the framing of his article’s story), he admits his outlook has been informed by his parents’ midcentury generation. As such, Ross still argues for a place of special recognition for classical music as an important benchmark of musical art: “Some jazz aficionados also call their art ‘America’s classical music,’ and I propose a trade: they can have ‘classical,’ I’ll take ‘the music.’”37 In this turn, Ross cedes the tired, middlebrow aura of midcentury employments of the word “classical” but argues for a continued recognition of the long-standing hierarchical status of “highbrow” concert music. Lastly, in an essay passage that discusses (in a modern, positive light) the “hybrid” brow-bridging concert works of George Gershwin, Morton Gould, and Leonard Bernstein, Ross notably initially points to the “symphonic jazz” of Ellington’s 1943 premiere of Black, Brown and Beige at Carnegie Hall, and Ross rightly links such trends to popular film depictions and period class-hierarchy wars in entertainment. His example of the latter is appropriately the Ellington orchestra’s jazz-versus-classical “Ebony Rhapsody” production number performance in “a silly 1934 movie entitled Murder at the Vanities,” which as Ross aptly notes “sum[s] up the genre wars of the era.” (I will return to this film later.) There is of course a long history of jazz-related cultural uplift discourse that has sought to promote Ellington’s increasingly elevated status as a Composer (with a capital “C”). The interwar creation of the public image

36

Ibid.

37

Ibid., emphasis added.

Marketing to the Middlebrow

of Ellington the composer is a multifaceted construction that had several contributory streams, each of which allows for a different appreciation. Beyond the straight-ahead path of merely taking the “composer” attribution as an earned characterization – symbolizing cultural and racial uplift, as well as recognition of artistry and skill from esteemed public figures – as I argue here, midcentury middlebrow rhetoric was a not insignificant part of the creation of Ellington’s public image, as particularly seen in his promotional framing. Moreover, it should be observed that this period understanding has clearly informed Ellingtonia in jazz historiography, as shall be discussed later.

Reflections on Early Ellingtonia By the late 1920s, various white critical voices increasingly disparaged Whitemanesque symphonic jazz in the wake of newly emergent jazz criticism ideals that sought to culturally elevate the blues, African American performance aesthetics, and the music of Harlem entertainment. One key concept behind this new criticism lay in the idea of “jazz composition,” a practice that was held to be distinct from both jazz arrangement and the compositional practices of Whitemanesque symphonic jazz concert works. In fact, the latter practice was now deemed to be entirely outside “authentic” jazz. This new conception of “jazz composition” arose in the late 1920s and 1930s music criticism and journalism that sought to redefine “authentic” jazz – and Duke Ellington’s music, in specific – as “art,” or at the very least as musically sophisticated and/or artful. This critical elevation of the style and performance aesthetics of black jazz (whether actually improvised or pre-composed) took place against the backdrop of a critical confrontation with the symphonic-style, arranged “jazz” of Whitemanesque entertainment. The earliest expression of this trend can be found in the essay “Jazz Contra Whiteman” by the American critic Roger Pryor Dodge. Though this captious article was written in 1925, it was not published until 1929 in the British journal Dancing Times, by which time it was presented with the less confrontational title of “Negro Jazz.”38 Dodge was a severe critic of Whiteman and his peers. He argued that the word “jazz” was being used “too loosely and too indiscriminately,” 38

Roger Pryor Dodge, “Negro Jazz,” in Hot Jazz and Jazz Dance: Roger Pryor Dodge, Collected Writings, 1929–1964, ed. Pryor Dodge (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 38. The 1925 origins of this essay are outlined by Dodge’s son, Pryor Dodge, on p.ix of the Preface.

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it “seems to cover both true jazz and popular music in general. It covers Paul Whiteman, George Gershwin, and Irving Berlin, none of whom . . . belong[] to the ranks of jazz at all.”39 The symphonic jazz and Tin Pan Alley composers, arrangers, and bandleaders who were routinely celebrated by mid-1920s popular music critics like Gilbert Seldes and Henry Osgood were viewed by Dodge as “exponents of frivolous art.” Dodge further claimed that “if there is anything bogus about [contemporary] jazz it is certain to be found in their type of jazz.”40 His central goal in this article was to demonstrate the era’s cultural “confusion between true jazz and its bastard children of polite orchestras.” Dodge contrasts the music of these Whiteman-style, “polite” dance orchestras – ensembles that purportedly sought to “make a lady out of jazz” – with the “virile [and] non-emasculated jazz” of black entertainers, including the blues singers Bessie and Clara Smith, and influential jazz instrumentalists such as James P. Johnson and Louis Armstrong. For Dodge, the concept of “real jazz” was indelibly tied to early 1920s, jazz- and blues-based race records. Racial “authenticity” and black performance traditions were therefore positioned as the central tools for Dodge’s derision of Whiteman. He contended, for example, that the point at which pseudo-jazz stops and jazz begins is largely a matter of degree only. The Negro bands often take music foreign to their own culture and base their jazz on the very popular songs or classics which form the foundation of . . . Whiteman [-style] performances . . . But [this] is very different from the civilized and elegant versions of the symphonic jazz band. For the Negro has taken the least possible contribution from the notes of the melody. He distorts it beyond recognition, makes of it an entirely new synthesis and his product is a composition – whereas that of the symphonic band is no more than a clever arrangement.41

While this quotation underscores Dodge’s criticism of Whitemanesque dance band arranging, it also highlights his central desire to elevate black musical aesthetics and improvisation to the venerated cultural status that was typically accorded to “composition” (as opposed to the purportedly more lowly, commercial entertainment practices of dance band “arrangement”). By the late 1920s, Dodge’s views were paralleled by several prominent critical voices that similarly sought to praise the unique music of the Cotton Club-era Ellington orchestra. The most important of these figures was 39

Ibid., 3.

40

Ibid., 6.

41

Ibid., 4, emphasis added.

Marketing to the Middlebrow

R. D. Darrell, a white critic who wrote for a variety of small, classically oriented music magazines in the late 1920s and 1930s. In his reviews of the Ellington orchestra, Darrell consistently sought to portray the bandleader as a “serious” composer. This objective was accomplished through Darrell’s appropriation of the “serious” music rhetoric typically applied in the classical recording reviews of the magazines he wrote for. In his essays on Ellington, Darrell focused almost exclusively on praising the bandleader’s achievements in “jazz composition,” a subject that he tied to the Ellington ensemble’s distinctive orchestral textures and relatively complex arrangements. To Darrell, these elements suggested a new, jazz-based tonal palette which complemented the complexity and rich diversity of classical orchestration. In a July 1928 review, for example, Darrell became the first critic to comment on Ellington’s “symphonic ingenuity.”42 His assessments of Ellington’s achievements were largely built upon comparisons to the ideology, repertoire and canonic figures of classical music. In January 1931, for instance, he characterized Mood Indigo as “a poignantly restrained and nostalgic piece with glorious melodic endowment and scoring that even Ravel and Strawinski might envy.” Darrell even fancifully claimed that the scoring of this work “actually recalls those hushed muted trumpets of the beginning of the second part of the Rite of Spring.” Likewise, he further suggested that “Rimsky-Korsakov would rub his ears on hearing some of the tone colors” of Ellington’s “Jungle Nights in Harlem.”43 In Darrell’s 1932 article entitled “Black Beauty” (an essay that Ellington scholars have repeatedly characterized as “the first major critical statement on Duke Ellington’s music”44 ), Ellington’s name was provocatively placed in the heady highbrow company of Stravinsky, Bruckner, Mahler, Delius, Debussy, Sibelius and Elgar, among others.45 In this essay, Darrell sought to create a classically based appreciation for Ellington’s “orchestral technique.” This goal was approached, however, through a binary critical opposition that he had constructed between Ellingtonian “jazz composition” and Whiteman-style symphonic jazz concert works. Darrell argues that The larger works of Gershwin, the experiments of Copland and other “serious” composers are [compositional] attempts with new symphonic forms stemming 42 43 44 45

R. D. Darrell, Phonograph Monthly, July 1928; reprinted in Tucker, Reader, 35. R. D. Darrell, Phonograph Monthly (January 1931); reprinted in Tucker, Reader, 38–9. Tucker, Reader, 57. R. D. Darrell, “Black Beauty,” disques (June 1932), 152–61; reprinted in Tucker, Reader, 57–65.

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from jazz, but not of it. Not forgetting a few virtuoso or improvisatory solos (by [novelty pianist] Zez Confrey, [jazz musicians Joe] Venuti and [Eddie] Lang, Jimmy [James P.] Johnson, or others), one can say truthfully that a purely instrumental school of jazz has never grown beyond the embryonic stage.46

Darrell claimed that Ellington had singularly “emancipated American popular music” from its subservience to the banalities of Tin Pan Alley popular song. While in the above quotation he recognized the artfulness of various composed and improvised instrumental jazz solos (where he included the novelty pianist Zez Confrey among his so-called “jazz” virtuosos), he nevertheless suggested that the most artistic achievements of contemporary jazz were located in orchestral jazz composition. From this classically biased perspective, he sought to evaluate Ellington’s recordings solely in terms of their “balance and unity between content and form, written notes and sounded performance.”47 Darrell praised Ellington for his ability to weld together jazz “composition, orchestration, and performance into one inseparable whole.” In terms of evaluating his approach to form, however, Darrell went only so far as to suggest that Ellington’s “finest tunes” were “rhapsodic” in nature and as “natural . . . as those of Mozart and Schubert.” The middlebrow jazz/classical comparative framework of Darrell’s reviews is important because this critical approach was quickly reflected in a variety of texts on Ellington from the early to mid-1930s. American contributors to this literature included Darrell, Roger Pryor Dodge (especially his 1934 essay “Harpsichords and Jazz Trumpets”) and Warren Scholl (who in 1934 claimed that “as jazz king, [Ellington] has superseded Paul Whiteman”), among others.48 Yet some of the most influential texts of this trend were by European critics, a fact that was not lost on Eurodeferential American jazz critics and the music’s proponents. (Beyond the fact that many Americans in this era understood high culture to be largely Euro-centric and defined by European art history, the opinions of prominent European critics, artists, and tastemakers held an outsize importance in interwar popular culture arts discourse, particularly in light of a longheld American cultural inferiority complex in relation to the dominant

46 48

47 Ibid., 61. Ibid., 60. Roger Pryor Dodge, “Harpsichords and Jazz Trumpets,” Hound and Horn (July–September, 1934), 602–6; reprinted in full in Dodge, Hot Jazz, 12–26, and in part in Tucker, Reader, 105–10. Warren W. Scholl, “Duke Ellington – A Unique Personality,” Music Lovers’ Guide 2 (February 1934): 169–70, 176; reprinted in Tucker, Reader, 102–5.

Marketing to the Middlebrow

cultures of Europe.) One of the more influential texts of this latter European jazz-criticism camp is found in the Ellington-related musings of a 1934 book entitled Music Ho!, by the Englishman Constant Lambert.49 Lambert’s Music Ho! played a major role in the journalistic reception of Ellington as a “serious” jazz composer in the 1930s and 1940s. This influence was exerted in part because Lambert was a noted European composer, critic, and ballet conductor, and he therefore represented a voice of cultural authority to the American popular music press. Lambert’s musings on Ellington were regularly cited in American journalism on the bandleader and his orchestra throughout the mid- to late 1930s. In the key extended passage of this book’s discussion of Ellington, Lambert states that Ellington . . . is a real composer, the first jazz composer of distinction. His works – apart from a few minor details – are not left to the caprice or ear of . . . [his] instrumentalists; they are scored and written out . . . [T]he first American records of his music may [thus] be taken definitively, like a full score, and are the only jazz records worth studying for their form as well as their texture . . . The real interest of Ellington’s records lies not so much in their colour, brilliant though it may be, as in the amazingly skilful proportions in which the colour is used. I do not only mean skilful as compared with other jazz composers, but as compared with so-called highbrow composers. I know of nothing in Ravel so dexterous in treatment as the varied solos in the middle of the ebullient Hot and Bothered and nothing in Stravinsky more dynamic than the final section [of this recording] . . . Ellington’s best works are written in what may be called ten-inch record form, and he is perhaps the only composer to raise this insignificant disc to the dignity of a definite genre . . . [B]eyond its limits [though,] he is inclined to fumble. The doublesided ten-inch Creole Rhapsody is an exception, but the twelve-inch expansion of the same piece is nothing more than a potpourri without any of the nervous tension of the original version . . . He is definitely a petit-maˆıtre, but that, after all, is considerably more than many people thought either jazz or the coloured race would ever produce. He has crystallized the popular music of our time and set up a standard by which we may judge not only other jazz composers but also those highbrow composers, whether American or European, who indulge in what is roughly known as “symphonic jazz.”50

This often-cited text reflects a number of tropes that are central to the classically biased Ellington literature discussed above. These themes include 49

50

Constant Lambert, Music Ho!: A Study of Music in Decline (originally 1934; republished London: Penguin Books, 1948). This passage forms the centerpiece of Tucker’s excerpt from the book in Tucker, Reader, 110–11. Lambert, Music Ho!, 155–7.

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the then-provocative statement that Ellington was “a real composer” and “the first jazz composer.” To support this thesis, Lambert claims – without providing any evidence – that Ellington’s works are “written out” (obviously this was true, but there were quite a number of contradictory period critical statements that claim Ellington did not write out music for his band). This bias toward the artistic authority of notation in turn allowed Lambert to argue that Ellington’s records “may [thus] be taken definitively, like a full [classical] score,” and that they were “worth studying [both] for their form” and their “combination of themes.” (He thus takes a rather progressive stance by regarding the recording itself as the definitive medium of the “work,” whether or not the “composition” exists in fully notated detail.) Lambert pigeonholed Ellington as a master of “ten-inch record form,” and he claimed that the composer/bandleader was “inclined to fumble” beyond the limits of this medium (again, this was stated without any proof of his evaluative criteria). Like the rest of this body of criticism, Lambert couched his discussion of Ellington’s artistic merits in elaborate comparisons to the works of various classical composers he held in high esteem (including Grieg, Delius, Ravel, Stravinsky, Hindemith, Johann Strauss, and others). However, while the term “symphonic jazz” is mentioned in this excerpt, the precise relationship that Lambert sought to establish between Ellington and this idiom is lost without referring to the larger context of this quotation in Music Ho! Like R. D. Darrell, Lambert distinguished between “composed” jazz and “symphonic jazz.” However, Lambert idiosyncratically reserved “symphonic jazz” as a term that specifically referred to the jazz-derived compositions of a select group of “highbrow” composers (Darius Milhaud, Kurt Weill, Copland, etc.). Despite this biased reading, the contemporary journalistic appropriations of Lambert’s musings on Ellington consistently presented a selective and skewed reading of Lambert’s original intent. His cultural view of the relationships between symphonic jazz, Ellington and “jazz composition” are more directly evident in this lesser-known passage from Music Ho!: The development of jazz is now clearly in the hands of the sophisticated [highbrow] composer. The negro composer [Ellington] was able to give new life to his music by moving . . . [toward] the harmonies . . . of Delius, but he cannot execute a similar move today for the simple reason that the post-impressionist experiments, the ´ are hardly of the type that lend austerities and asperities of Stravinsky and Bartok, themselves to [Ellington’s] sentimental exploitation. The scoring and execution of jazz reach a far higher level than any previous form of dance music, and in Duke

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Ellington’s compositions jazz has produced the most distinguished popular music since Johann Strauss; but having caught up with the highbrow composer in so many ways the jazz composer [Ellington] is now stagnating, bound to a circle of rhythmic and harmonic devices and neglecting the possibilities of form. It is now for the highbrow composer to take the next step.51

The overlooked subtitle of Lambert’s book is “A Study of Music in Decline,” and this condescending highbrow attitude toward the rising cultural influence of popular music reflects Lambert’s view of Ellington as a “light” composer for the masses. For Lambert, this artful popular music occupied the same cultural territory as democratic, middlebrow concert works (though the fully formed critical idea of “middlebrowism” is slightly anachronistic at this date). In terms of the Whitemanesque symphonic jazz idiom, Lambert suggested that American attempts at the “synthesis of jazz” in concert works were too often manifest in a manner in which “European sophistication [had] been imposed over coloured [racially evocative musical] crudity.” He contended that this was “what happened in that singularly inept albeit popular piece, Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.” On this, Lambert claimed that in “trying to write a Lisztian concerto in jazz style,” Gershwin had “used only the non-barbaric elements in dance music, the result being neither good jazz nor good Liszt.”52 In addition, he argued that the “jazz” of most Whiteman-style works was “either too Hollywood or too Harlem” (the latter being Lambert’s socalled “coloured crudity”), and these works “rarely suggest[ed] the dusty panorama of American life which [gave] such strength to even second-rate films.”53 The idea of Ellington’s mastery of “ten-inch record form” first emerged in Lambert’s journalism of the early 1930s and was based solely on the Ellington orchestra’s Cotton Club-era, “jungle”-style recordings. In 1931, a year before the commercial release of Ellington’s Creole Rhapsody, Lambert praised the Harlem bandleader for the fact that all of his compositions/recordings “only occupy one side of a 10 in[ch] record.” Lambert suggested that these recordings were “all the better for this limitation. A jazz record should be as terse as possible, and it would be a pity if Ellington started to produce rambling, pseudo-highbrow fantasies such as Gershwin’s more ambitious essays. The two best Ellington records . . . are Hot and Bothered . . . and Mood Indigo . . . and neither of them attempts 51

Ibid., 161–2, emphasis added.

52

Ibid., 162, emphasis added.

53

Ibid., 164.

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any change of mood.”54 Once again, Ellington’s “authentic,” ten-inch record compositions were pointedly placed in critical juxtaposition against the “false” jazz and “pseudo-highbrow fantasies” of middlebrow Whitemanesque concert works. Music Ho! was published shortly after the Ellington orchestra had completed a highly successful European tour. This tour encouraged significant American press coverage of the European musical community’s reception of Ellington, his music, and his orchestra. The subsequent secondary and biographical Ellington literature that has examined this reception has routinely pointed to this ballyhooed tour as a major turning point in the public’s reception of Ellington – and in his own view of himself – as a “serious composer.” This thesis has been based on the fact that on this tour Ellington was presented for the first time as a concert artist, and that European music critics had routinely discussed Ellington’s music through the cultural rhetoric of “serious” concert music (as opposed to treating it as “frivolous” dance band entertainment). Moreover, many European critics had encouraged Ellington to perform only his “pure” “orchestral” music (items like Creole Rhapsody), rather than his commercial song hits.55 Lambert was one of these critics (writing for the London Referee at the time), and the opinions of his subsequent book were presaged in his criticism of this period. In addition to the 1933 European tour and the influence of Music Ho!, there is a third key event that was perpetually mentioned in the classically biased, Ellington music journalism of the early 1930s. This occurrence was a November 1932 performance/demonstration lecture that Ellington and his orchestra participated in at New York University. This event was organized by the noted composer (and NYU Music Department chairman) Percy Grainger, and included such distinguished guests as the conductors Leopold Stokowski and Basil Cameron (of the Seattle Symphony), and the composer Wallingford Riegger. Ellington’s NYU appearance resulted in a number of widely reported remarks by Grainger that compared Ellington’s compositions with the orchestral genius of Delius and the melodic inventiveness of Bach. Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, American popular music journalism on Ellington regularly referred to these events (and others like them) as a means to distinguish Ellington’s accomplishments

54

55

Constant Lambert, “Gramophone Notes,” New Statesman and Nation (1 August 1931), 150. Quoted in Hasse, Beyond, 154. For a good overview of this tour, see Hasse, Beyond, 169–75.

Marketing to the Middlebrow

from the “frivolous” activities of his peers in contemporary jazz and dance orchestras.

“Tips on Exploitation”: The Role of Ellington’s Publicity Machine The reader might wonder how the opinions of these relatively obscure critics from various niche magazines (critics such as Darrell and Scholl), or how an equally obscure British composer and critic such as Lambert (obscure, that is, to the American public), could have received so much attention in American popular music journalism. One answer can be found in Ellington’s public relations machine. From 1926 to 1938, Ellington’s career was intimately guided by Irving Mills, a man who was reputed to be one of the shrewdest managers in the entertainment industry of that era. In 1938, Ellington and Mills had a major falling out, after which Ellington joined the talent stable of the famous publicity agency of William Morris. It is likely that this choice in management was influenced by Ellington’s long-time publicist with Mills Artists (the publicity wing of Irving Mills’s outfit), Ned Williams, who had left that organization some time before Ellington to join William Morris.56 Because of the relative continuity of Williams’s presence in guiding Ellington publicity from the late 1920s through the 1940s, there is a great similarity in the promotional themes that were central to the management of Ellington at each of these agencies. Nevertheless, it was Mills’s long-standing promotion of Ellington as a “serious” composer that had contributed to the public persona of this composer/bandleader. This dignified persona was ultimately able to transcend the initial race-bound, “jungle music” themes that defined Ellington’s Cotton Club-era career (themes that were also tied to Mills-era publicity). Mills was thus a major force in shaping the coverage of the 1933 European tour, and he likely helped stage such classical-themed events as the 1932 NYU lecture. The legacy of Mills’s public relations agenda for Ellington can be sensed in an extant William Morris Agency “Manual for Advertising” that was prepared for the Ellington orchestra in 1938. This document was presumably developed under the guidance of Ned Williams. The folio describes itself as a “manual of publicity stories, tips on exploitation and advertising suggestions . . . prepared to assist the managers of theatres and ballrooms 56

Ibid., 194 and 220.

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to more intelligently sell this attraction [Ellington].”57 Publicity’s role in this era’s classically biased journalism on Ellington can be seen in the fact that even in 1938, Grainger’s Ellington/Delius comments are mentioned in no fewer than eight articles and clippings in this nine-page press packet (six years after the band’s NYU appearance). In its advice on “Exploitation,” the Morris Agency provides the following introduction to the artist for his potential promoters: Ellington’s genius as a composer, arranger and musician has won him the respect and admiration of such authorities as Percy Grainger, head of the department of music at the New York University; Basil Cameron, conductor of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra; Leopold Stokowski, famed conductor of the celebrated Philadelphia orchestra; Paul Whiteman, whose name is synonymous with jazz; and many others. Sell Ellington as a great artist, a musical genius whose unique style and individual theories of harmony have created a new music . . . He has been accepted seriously by many of the greatest minds in the world of music, who have regarded it a privilege to study his art and to discuss his theories with him.58

A related passage of ready-made press copy notes that “Grainger compares Ellington’s jazz compositions, from a melodic standpoint, with those of Delius and Bach.”59 Another article suggests that promoters organize similar “music classes” by asking local music teachers “to play Ellington records for their classes and to discuss and analyze them thoroughly, particularly from the standpoint of Grainger’s opinions . . . If some minor controversy arises on the subject, so much the better from getting space in the news columns of your daily newspapers.”60 Like the Manual’s recycling of the NYU event, R. D. Darrell’s “Black Beauty” essay is quoted twice as a means to emphasize the idea that “in the exploitation of the new tonal coloring, Ellington has proceeded further than any composer – popular or serious – of today.”61 This press packet additionally provides an excerpt from a 1933 Lambert review in which this critic foreshadowed many of the Ellington themes that were to become central to Music Ho!: “Duke Ellington is a real composer, the first jazz composer of note and the first Negro composer of note . . . Ellington is no mere band leader and arranger . . . but a composer of uncommon merit [and] probably the first composer of real character to come out of America.”62 57

58 62

The William Morris Agency’s Manual for Advertising, c. 1938, for Duke Ellington and His Orchestra, from the first page entitled “Advertising Manual.” Assembled on loose pages without numbers. From the Duke Ellington Collection. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid. Ibid., from a page entitled “Exploitation.” Ibid., “Ellington’s Music and Mickey Mouse Only Original Art,” from a page entitled “Press Stories.”

Marketing to the Middlebrow

Beyond their recycling of this Mills-era middlebrow promotional material, the Morris Agency were strongly committed to expanding upon the public image of Ellington as a “serious” jazz composer. In the late 1930s and 1940s, some of these Mills-era materials were simply used as lead-ins for new commentary, as in the following press copy that appears after a passage on the Grainger event: Other indications of the growing artistic appreciation of Ellington in the United States are contained in the fact that the annual award of the New York Schools of Music to an American composer was voted to Duke Ellington in 1932 for his Creole Rhapsody, and, more recently, Paul Whiteman’s inclusion of Ellington’s Mood Indigo in his program with the New York Philharmonic Symphony. So, while English newspapers all assign their first-string [classical] music critics to Duke Ellington openings, he remains within the province of dramatic, motion picture and radio editors in the United States. But in one year . . . it may be common practice to employ the New Yorker’s recent ranking of “Gershwin, Ellington and Grof´e,” when writing of contemporary American composers.63

A related passage of copy, which is revealingly titled “Ellington’s Ability as Composer Given Serious Approval,” provides another spin on the themes of this previous quotation: The jazz blues era and the hey-day of the popular orchestra as we hear it on the stage, over the radio, and in hotels, ballrooms and night clubs, have produced few musicians whose accomplishments as composers and conductors have received serious critical approbation. The men who have achieved something more than popular and evanescent acclaim can still be numbered on the strings of one violin – George Gershwin, Paul Whiteman, Ferde Grof´e and Duke Ellington. The last name is indeed a unique figure in American music.64

As these excerpts suggest, the Morris manual provides very selective readings of the critical materials it appropriates, and its spin on “Ellington, the serious composer” distinctly places him within the nexus of Whitemanesque symphonic jazz. In the first quotation, this perspective is evidenced in the promotional citations of both the New Yorker comment and the 1932 New York Schools. In this press packet, many passages read as a potpourri of Whitemanesque and Darrell/Lambert/Grainger themes. A good example of this type of Whiteman/classical thematic merging can seen in a passage which claims that “critics have said that Ellington 63 64

Ibid. Ibid., “Ellington’s Ability as Composer Given Serious Approval,” from a page entitled “Press Stories.”

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has mastered the small form as thoroughly as Gershwin, that he has found the happy identity between material and medium which characterized Delius and Debussy . . . and that his finest tunes spring into being as simply and naturally as those of Mozart and Schubert.”65 The Ellington scrapbooks at the Smithsonian make clear that this middlebrow, Whiteman-colored reading of “Ellington, the composer” dominated much of the press coverage on the orchestra’s national tours of the 1930s. This was especially the case outside of major urban centers, in smaller cities and towns whose local journalistic coverage displays a greater reliance on this type of pre-prepared, promotional material. This demographic disparity between original, semi-original and agency-prepared journalism is also likely applicable to Mills-era Ellington press coverage, a body of literature that also reflects these promotional themes. The Morris Agency materials also reveal a new promotional topic that emerges in late 1930s Ellingtonrelated journalism: the theme of Ellington’s “symphonic” compositional aspirations. In the 1938 Manual, this subject can be seen in such press copy as the following excerpt: While Ellington is believed by critics to have mastered the small forms as completely as Gershwin, the possibility of still greater success in the formal field still lies before him. His one attempt at a larger form, the two-part Creole Rhapsody, has attracted much critical attention. At present, Ellington is engaged in the composition of a five-part symphony in which he intends to interpret the successive stages of fortune and misfortune of his race – [this symphony begins with] a prelude given over to prehistoric speculation, then an African movement of jungle rhythms, frankly pagan, then a slave-ship interlude, followed by a Southern suite, a blending of all of these in a movement expressive of Harlem today, and a final rhapsody of the colored race. will include not Thus, Ellington’s audiences at the only those attracted by an exceptional and nationally famous orchestra, but serious students of music who will pay tribute to the artistry of an internationally famous composer.66

In light of Gershwin’s recent death (1937), it is intriguing to observe that this copy suggests that Ellington was following a Gershwin-like developmental progression based on his mastery of ever-larger and ever-more complex musical forms – from song, to extended jazz composition, and, lastly, to his plans for a “serious” concert work (the projected “Negro symphony”). Ellington’s capacity for this middlebrow heroic trajectory of artistic growth is meant to be evidenced through this article’s references 65

Ibid.

66

Ibid., from a page entitled “Press Stories.”

Marketing to the Middlebrow

to his previous “critical attention” and his “international fame as a composer.” Contemporaneous with the circulation of this press packet are several 1938 interviews that conveniently mentioned Ellington’s work on an opera and/or a symphony. These pronouncements document the long gestational period that led to the composition of Ellington’s 1943 Black, Brown and Beige,67 but also the Ellingtonia-focused “jazz classics” albums of the same decade.

“The Real Jazz”?: The Critical Creation of a “Serious” Jazz Composer As demonstrated, the campaign to promote a culturally elevated image of Ellington as a “serious” jazz composer was developed in near tandem with the rise of the classically biased criticism of Dodge, Lambert, Darrell, et al. In most cases, the central themes of this latter circle developed independently of Mills’s publicity machine, although excerpts from this criticism were quickly put to work in the press materials of the Mills Artists agency. While there must have been some professional advantage to promoting Ellington in these glorified, middlebrow terms, it remains unclear what proportion of this promotional rhetoric was instigated by Ellington’s publicists, on the one hand, and how much can be ascribed to Ellington himself, on the other. Obviously, there can be major differences between an artist’s publicity and the views he himself holds. However, Ellington – the self-described “Aristocrat of Jazz” and “Duke of Hot” – cultivated this sort of refined cultural image well before he met Irving Mills, and long after that association had ended. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, the interviews and the essays that appeared under Ellington’s name68 strongly suggested that he had long aspired to compose concert-style works. Prior to the symphonic scale of 67

68

Florence Zunser, “‘Opera Must Die,’ Says Galli-Gurci! Long Live the Blues!,” New York Evening Graphic Magazine, 27 December 1930; reprinted in Tucker, Reader, 44–5. Duke Ellington, “The Duke Steps Out,” Rhythm (March 1931): 20–2; reprinted in Tucker, Reader, 46–50. Wilder Hobson, “Introducing Duke Ellington,” Fortune (August 1933): 47–8, 90, 94, 95; reprinted in Tucker, Reader, 95–6. Jess Krueger, “Duke Ellington Plans Symphony: Orchestra Director Humming Parts of Composition,” American (Chicago), 2 January 1935 (from the Ellington Scrapbooks of the Duke Ellington Collection). Carl Cons, “A Black Genius in a White Man’s World,” Down Beat (July 1936): 6. For a sampling of Ellington’s essays from this period, see Tucker, Reader. While I assume these texts were authored by Ellington, the William Morris Manual raises the valid question of whether there may have been some additional editorial help in shaping these statements.

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Black, Brown and Beige and his Carnegie Hall appearances in the 1940s, this goal had been progressively realized through such early extended works as Ellington’s Rhapsody Jr. (1926), Creole Rhapsody (1932; in two versions), Reminiscing in Tempo (1935), his score to the film short Symphony in Black (Paramount, 1935), Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue (1937), and several 1930s “Modern American Music” score commissions for the publisher Robbins Music and bandleader Paul Whiteman.69 Contrary to the typical Whiteman/Ellington aesthetic opposition that was central to the critical arguments of Lambert, Darrell, Dodge, et al., both Ellington and his publicists regularly situated his compositional aspirations within the cultural sphere of Whitemanesque (or Gershwinesque) symphonic jazz. The extensive pre-1940 cultivation of Ellington’s image as a symphonic jazz-style composer/bandleader can be seen, for example, in the orchestra’s performance of Gershwin’s American in Paris score as a ballet in Ziegfeld’s 1928 musical, Show Girl, in his acting roles as a “serious” jazz composer for the film shorts Black and Tan (RKO, 1929) and Symphony in Black (Paramount, 1935), and in his band’s cameo role in the “Rape of a Rhapsody” sequence in the film Murder at the Vanities (Paramount, 1934). As noted, the latter was a jazzed classics number which parodied Franz Liszt’s Second Hungarian Rhapsody. Alex Ross aptly captures the irreverent artful entertainment of the latter production number: It is set behind the scenes of a Ziegfeld-style variety show, one of whose numbers features a performer, dressed vaguely as Franz Liszt, who plays the Second Hungarian Rhapsody. Duke Ellington and his band keep popping up behind the scenes, throwing in insolent riffs. Eventually, they drive away the effete classical musicians and play a takeoff called “Ebony Rhapsody”: “It’s got those licks, it’s got those tricks / That Mr. Liszt would never recognize.” Liszt comes back with a submachine gun and mows down the band. The metaphor wasn’t so far off the mark . . . The contempt flowed both ways. The culture of jazz, at least in its white precincts, was much affected by that inverse snobbery which endlessly congratulates itself on escaping the e´ lite. (The singer in “Murder at the Vanities” brags of finding a rhythm that Liszt, of all people, could never comprehend: what a snob.) Classical music became a foil against which popular musicians could assert their earthy cool.70

Here again we find the issue of two-way aura transference in a high–low entertainment juxtaposition (i.e., in the manner described earlier with regard to the 1930s gold-digger film musical narrative clich´es). This is 69 70

This score series is discussed at length in Howland, Between the Muses and Uptown. Ross, “Listen to This.”

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also another prime example for Macdonald’s fear of homogenized cultural scramblings. While Ross does not comment on the elevation aura that Ellington gained in this presentation, he is quite right in his characterization of this number as a sustained juxtaposition that does not truly “homogenize” these cultural scramblings – Ellington retains his “earthy cool,” Liszt remains an elevated European classical composer despite his American entertainment comeuppance, and Ellington has yet another media moment where he is depicted as being on equal cultural footing with a classical icon, while at the same time his quintessential jazz hipness sophistication is seen to transcend such playful Hollywood nonsense and class hierarchy stodginess. In all of these Ellingtonian symphonic jazz-based activities of the 1930s, it is hard to separate the bandleader himself from the image being promoted by his publicity machine and the media events that were instigated by his manager. These blurred boundaries between publicity, manager, and client are even apparent in the origins of Ellington’s earliest concertstyle works. According to Ellington’s son, Mercer, for instance: Irving [Mills] understood the importance of adding prestige to the [Ellington] product, almost, I would say, of packaging it. So did Ellington. When Irving came to him in his managerial capacity in Chicago . . . [in 1931] and told [Ellington] he wanted him to write a “rhapsody” for performance [the] next day, [Ellington] sat up all night writing Creole Rhapsody. This was recorded by “The Jungle Band” for Brunswick [the first recording] and by Duke Ellington and His Orchestra for Victor [the second version]. What made it particularly significant at that time was that it occupied both sides of a ten-inch 78 rpm record on the former label and both sides of a twelve-inch record on the latter. Apart from Paul Whiteman’s, few bands had had this privilege, so for a black band it was a major step forward and the first example of Pop’s ability in “extended” composition.71

In Mercer Ellington’s account of this landmark event in Ellingtonian “extended” jazz composition, the motivating factor behind the composition of Creole Rhapsody was Irving Mills’s managerial scheme to broaden the social spectrum of Ellington’s audiences by directly encroaching on Whiteman’s signature cultural territory. In the passage following this quotation, Mercer implies that Mills built Ellington’s career through a series of ever-widening and ever-rising steps into new cultural arenas and performance contexts. This progressive career trajectory is traced from Ellington’s origins at the lowly Kentucky Club, to his prestigious tenure at the 71

Mercer Ellington with Stanley Dance, Duke Ellington In Person (New York: Da Capo, 1979), 34.

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Cotton Club, to his headlining of first-class vaudeville stage shows, to backing the French singer Maurice Chevalier, to his orchestra’s appearance in a Ziegfeld show, to their achievement of national fame through live radio broadcasts, to Hollywood films, and to the concert stages of Europe. This latter accomplishment is said to be the catalyst that allowed the Ellington orchestra to perform at prestigious concert halls throughout the U.S. The promotion of Ellington’s image as a combination of bon vivant maestro and “serious” composer in the manner of Whiteman and Gershwin, respectively (albeit a black conductor/composer in Ellington’s case), was the means by which Mills moved Ellington’s career up this complicated ladder of symbolic cultural and racial achievements. What did Ellington think of all of this? Throughout his career, he was known for his guarded and often evasive statements on other public figures and his own beliefs on various cultural, racial, and political issues. In general, I believe his interwar and midcentury press-reported responses cannot be trusted at face value as entirely accurate reflections of his opinions on any given matter. In his later autobiography though, Ellington confirmed Mills’s role in the genesis of Creole Rhapsody, a work that Ellington characterized as “the seed from which all kinds of extended works and suites later grew.”72 Like his son’s account of this event, Ellington recollected that one evening Mills simply remarked that “tomorrow is a big day . . . [w]e premiere a new long work – a rhapsody.”73 In his reflections on this interaction, Ellington wrote that Mills “was always reaching toward a higher plateau for our music,” and he felt that this proposed rhapsody was merely another expression of this larger goal.74 From such modest evidence, it seems that Ellington was largely in agreement with the general direction of the promotional image that positioned him as Harlem’s answer to Whiteman and Gershwin. However, this comparative association directly contradicts the critical reception of Ellington that more often sought to distance this composer/conductor from Whitemanesque entertainment. In the 1930s, Ellington’s compositional aspirations became a highly divisive issue for two distinct critical camps. Beyond the Lambert/Darrell/Dodge circle of classically biased jazz critics, there was also a second group of music critics who sought to redefine the tradition, canon, future – and art – of jazz specifically through improvisational achievement and African American performance aesthetics. While jazz composition

72

Ibid., 82.

73

Ibid.

74

Ibid.

Marketing to the Middlebrow

was still a significant topic to this latter critical circle, it was not a privileged aesthetic criterion; rather, the formal structure of an arrangement was primarily viewed as a vehicle for other more important elements of the jazz tradition. The aesthetic agenda of this latter group can be seen in the landmark jazz criticism of John Hammond and the Frenchman Hugues Panassi´e. Ellington was an exalted darling, though, of each of these circles of critics. Like Lambert, in this latter circle, the praise of Ellington’s band – in terms of composition, jazz authenticity, and improvisation – lay particularly in Ellington’s masterpieces of “ten-inch record form.” To appropriate the title of one of Hammond’s famous articles of the 1930s though, for Hammond and Panassi´e, “The Tragedy of Duke Ellington” was his interest in “extended” composition. This critical issue heatedly came to the fore in 1935 with Ellington’s Reminiscing in Tempo, a composition that covered four sides of two ten-inch, 78-rpm records.75 Following the commercial release of this recording, Hammond, Panassi´e, and other like-minded critics soon claimed that Ellington had, sadly, begun to take himself seriously as a composer in the wake of the classically biased praise of such British composer-critics as Constant Lambert and Spike Hughes during the band’s 1933 European tour. In his scathing review of Reminiscing in Tempo (“The Tragedy of Duke Ellington”), Hammond claimed that when Ellington was “confronted with the undiscriminating praise of critics like Constant Lambert, he felt it necessary to go out and prove he could write really important music, far removed from the simplicity and charm of his earlier tunes.”76 This remark blatantly ignores the fact that Lambert equally discouraged Ellington from attempting to compose anything longer than one side of a ten-inch record. Nevertheless, in such criticism, the chief theme was that with these efforts at “extended” composition, Ellington had regrettably moved into the problematic cultural territory of Whitemanesque symphonic jazz and was in danger of abandoning “real jazz.” With the rise of the Swing era in the mid-1930s, the new concept of “real jazz” quickly rooted itself in American popular music criticism (as distinct from sweet jazz, novelty music, popular song, and so forth). This project of genre clarification was largely instigated as a defense against the musical and critical legacy of Whitemanesque symphonic jazz, which

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See my extensive discussion of this work in Howland, Uptown. John Hammond, “The Tragedy of Duke Ellington, the ‘Black Prince of Jazz,’” Down Beat (November 1935): 1, 6. Originally published in the Brooklyn Eagle, 3 November 1935; reprinted in Tucker, Reader, 118–20.

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in the mid-1930s was primarily manifest in the music of contemporary radio and theater orchestras, various film scores, the continued entertainment presence of Whiteman himself, the Robbins Modern American Music score series, Artie Shaw’s “Symphonic Swing,” and similar trends. While French critics such as Robert Goffin (in his Aux fronti`eres du jazz of 1932) and Panassi´e (in Le Jazz Hot of 1934) led the critical path toward defending and culturally elevating “hot jazz,” the landmark American text in this critical vogue was the 1939 anthology Jazzmen that was edited by Frederick Ramsey, Jr., and Charles Edward Smith.77 The final essay of this collection is Roger Pryor Dodge’s “Consider the Critics,” an extended – and scathing – overview of both 1920s liberal “jazz” criticism and Whitemanesque symphonic jazz. By 1942, the concept of “hot jazz” had been replaced by the idea of “real jazz,” as can be evidenced in the translated title of Panassi´e’s 1942 book, The Real Jazz. (This book was adapted for American publication by Charles Edward Smith.) Even at this late date, the critical contrast between “real” jazz and symphonic jazz remained a vital distinction, as can be seen in the fact that Panassi´e’s book presents an attack on Whiteman in its very first page. Panassi´e ultimately dismisses the 1920s Whitemanesque dance bands in the following terms: Certain white bands, deliberately turning their backs to the style of the colored orchestras, offered the [white] public the kind of music most calculated to flatter its taste, and at the same time preserving a superficial resemblance to jazz for its “novelty” value. Instead of improvising, they used arrangements and played them with the utmost softness. Since these arrangements were often somewhat complex, as with Paul Whiteman’s orchestra, the term “symphonic jazz” began to appear, an expression that shows how far afield the music in question tended to go from real jazz.78

The accusation that Ellington’s artistic ambitions were bolstered by the highbrow-oriented praise of the British composer-critics merits consideration. In his reflections on this tour, for instance, Ellington recalled that “the esteem our music was held in was very gratifying.”79 Regardless, 77

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´ Robert Goffin, Aux fronti`eres du jazz (Paris: Editions du Sagittaire, 1932); Hugues Panassi´e, Hot Jazz: The Guide to Swing Music (New York: Witmark & Sons, 1936), originally Le Jazz Hot ´ (Paris: Editions R. A. Corrˆea, 1934); and Frederick Ramsey, Jr. and Charles Edward Smith, eds., Jazzmen: The Story of Hot Jazz Told in the Lives of the Men Who Created It (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1939; reprinted New York: Limelight, 1985). Hugues Panassi´e, The Real Jazz, trans. Anne Sorelle Williams, adapted for American publication by Charles Edward Smith (New York: Smith & Durrell, 1942), 12, emphasis added. Ellington, Mistress, 83–4.

Marketing to the Middlebrow

even as early as 1930 (prior to Mills’s suggestion of a rhapsody and the potential critical influence of Lambert, Grainger, et al.), Ellington’s compositional aspirations had emerged in several press interviews, and these early ambitions were characterized by their overt Whitemanesque leanings. In December 1930, for example, an interviewer claimed that Ellington had “been playing . . . not only ‘jazz,’ but [an idiom] which is a totally new type of modern music, and which he believes, is to take the place of our present-day symphonies, concertos and opera.” The interviewer quoted Ellington as having said both that “the future of music . . . lies in the hands of those writers of Tin Pan Alley who see in popular songs and melodies of today the embodiment of the voice of the people,” and that “Beethoven, Wagner and Bach . . . have not portrayed the people who are about us today, and the interpretation of these people is our future music.” In response to this latter cultural problem, the interviewer claimed that Ellington was “at work on . . . the writing, in music, of ‘The History of the Negro,’ taking the Negro from Egypt, going with him to savage Africa, and from there to the sorrow and slavery of Dixie, and finally ‘home to Harlem.’”80 Mark Tucker has observed that this interview marked one of the first documented statements of Ellington’s long-held “interest in composing music that embodied the experience of black Americans.”81 Over the next decade, this specific work-in-progress was subsequently described as an opera and a symphony, and it was ultimately realized in the guise of Ellington’s 1943 “tone parallel,” Black, Brown and Beige. While the scattered journalistic references leading up to this work provide important information about Ellington’s aspirations as a composer, these texts also reveal clues as to how his creative goals related to a variety of contemporary cultural trends. In his March 1931 essay “The Duke Steps Out,” for example, Ellington states that “what is being done by Countee Cullen and others in [Harlem] literature is overdue in our music.” Following this racially provocative proclamation, Ellington echoed his 1930 interview by noting that I am . . . now engaged on a rhapsody unhampered by any musical form in which I intend to portray the experiences of the coloured races in the syncopated idiom. This composition will consist of four or five movements, and I . . . hope that I shall have achieved something really worth while in the literature of music, and

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Florence Sunser, New York Evening Graphic, 27 December 1930; reprinted in Tucker, Reader, 44–5. Ibid., 44.

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that an authentic record of my race written by a member of it shall be placed on record.82

Despite his prophecy that “the future of [concert] music . . . [lay] in the hands of [the] writers of Tin Pan Alley,” this latter statement presents a newly personal and racially defined coloring of Ellington’s intentions, and this latter agenda more directly reflects the Harlem entertainment circle’s concert jazz aspirations.83 By the mid-1940s, following major changes in both popular music criticism and the landscape of jazz, Ellington became somewhat more forthright about his opinions on the Lambert/Darrell criticism of the previous decade. For example, in 1944, in near parallel with the aforementioned Elingtonia “jazz classics” albums, he pointedly stated that: I am not writing classical music, and the musical devices that have been handed down by serious composers have little bearing on modern swing . . . If anyone finds Schoenbergian “images” in Solitude, Mood Indigo or any of my other compositions, they should charge it to subconscious activity. I did not intend them and in all probability they do not exist anywhere but in the minds of self-important, oversophisticated musicologists who like to make an occasional comparison. That I owe a debt to . . . classical composers is not to be denied but it is the same debt that many composers, for generations, have owed to Brahms, Beethoven, Debussy and others of their caliber. They have furnished us with wholesome musical patterns . . . and have given us a definite basis upon which to judge all music, regardless of its origin. . . . Comparisons, especially in the case of a “hot” composer, are dangerous . . . [T]he professional jazz critics . . . have put me on the witness stand in the case of Bach, Ravel, Stravinsky, Sibelius, and quite a few others . . . It is very flattering to read such things about one’s self as this choice quotation I have picked out at random: “If any so-called ‘long-hair’ musician really wants to be able to distinguish Ellington’s band from any other he needs to only listen for the one that sounds most like Rimsky-Korsakov” . . . I could no more compose like Brahms than he could beat out the jive in a 52nd Street night spot. So let’s forget about comparisons and leave each man to his trade, huh?84

From the evidence of extant William Morris Agency press packets of the later 1940s, in his postwar publicity, both Ellington’s Carnegie Hall appearances and his premieres of extended concert works at these events were 82

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Duke Ellington, “The Duke Steps Out,” Rhythm (March 1931), 20–2; reprinted in Tucker, Reader, 49–50. See Howland, Uptown. Duke Ellington, “Certainly It’s Music!,” Listen (October 1944), 5–6. From the Ellington Clipping Scrapbooks, 1931–1973, housed at the Duke Ellington Collection.

Marketing to the Middlebrow

generally taken for granted and not routinely presented with the type of classical comparative rhetoric that accompanied the first concert of this series in 1943. Nevertheless, the classically biased Ellington criticism of the 1930s was still regularly employed in postwar promotional materials for Ellington, albeit in a much more diluted fashion. In the press manual that promoted Ellington’s post-Carnegie Hall concert tour of 1946, for instance, comparative references to classical music were still actively used to maintain an aura of cultural prestige around Ellington, although in this later era these references more frequently appear in the simple context of name-dropping, whereby press materials mention various figures who had acclaimed Ellington. A prime illustration of this postwar practice can be seen in this 1946 description of a staged media event at Ellington’s first Carnegie Hall concert of 1943: “In honor of the event and in tribute to Ellington’s genius he was presented with a plaque, containing the signatures of Leopold Stokowski, Deems Taylor, Fritz Reiner, Artur Rodzinski, Walter Damrosch, and some twenty-five others.”85 Even in this era, the cultural affirmation of the classical community was still an important ingredient in the promotion of Ellington’s compositional and concert hall achievements. When the 1930s criticism of Lambert, Darrell, Winthrop Sargeant, and other Ellington proponents is referenced in postwar promotional materials, however, these appropriations take a somewhat different form than they had in the 1930s and early 1940s. The 1946 press packet, for instance, is far less invested in the cultural authority of this criticism, as can be seen in a passage that states: “In Europe, Ellington gave concerts which were listened to and commented upon as seriously as one listens to a Bach or Beethoven composition. The programs were annotated in scholarly style. Learned implications were read into his compositions.”86 Despite the more humble tone of this last statement (where “learned implications were read into his compositions”), in several instances, the 1946 William Morris manual repeats almost verbatim from a number of the Lambertand Grainger-themed paragraphs that were used in the 1938 manual. This occurs, for example, in a made-for-use article entitled “Ellington’s Music [Is] an Art Form,” that employs the same sort of highbrow affirmation construct that was used in Ellington’s 1930s publicity. By contrast, in a press snippet entitled “Immortal Gershwin Pays Tribute to the Duke,” it is clear that the earlier Gershwin/Ellington comparison still carried 85

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William Morris Agency, Press Manual, 1946, from a series of pages entitled “Ellington’s Concerts Attract Wide Acclaim,” 1. From the Duke Ellington Collection. Ibid., from a series of pages entitled, “Duke Ellington a National Favorite,” 1.

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significant cultural cachet in the postwar promotion of Ellington. The manual states, for instance, that “the compliment to his music that the Duke values most highly . . . is that paid [to] him by the renowned George Gershwin” (the quotation concerns Gershwin’s prizing of his Ellington recordings and sheet music).87

Reflections on Contemporary Ellingtonia (the Past in the Present) As noted, this period middlebrow symphonic-jazz and artfulentertainment promotional rhetoric has clearly informed Ellingtonia in jazz historiography. As stated, following his 1999 centennial, there has been a growing wave of new research devoted to Duke Ellington. Among the more recent publications is Terry Teachout’s Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, which the author describes as “not so much a work of scholarship as an act of synthesis, a narrative biography . . . based on the work of . . . scholars . . . [who] have unearthed a wealth of new information.”88 This book’s mixed reception in the press and blogosphere allows for some useful quick reflections on contemporary “Ellingtonia.” Duke is the first trade biography of Ellington since 2001. Teachout contends that his is the first biography to consider Ellington’s broader role in American arts and culture, though this aim is likewise central to Harvey Cohen’s 2010 Duke Ellington’s America.89 While reviews routinely praise Duke in this area, critics take issue with the book’s frank accounts of Ellington’s character, his propensity to procrastinate and to take credit for the work of others, and what Teachout sees as Ellington’s failings with extended works. The book’s work as a critical biography introduces significant authorial opinion (another point of criticism) while at the same time it hits all the key marks of this favorite jazz history story, by reframing, expanding, and occasionally debunking often-recounted biographical details. In certain respects, the book offers an important corrective to various earlier biographies, but it also reflects a tradition. Jazz Studies attracts many sorts of passionate researchers from the professional to the amateur. The flashpoints of this community’s interpersonal politics often center on figures like Ellington, particularly in response to 87 88 89

Ibid., from a page entitled “Immortal Gershwin Pays Tribute to the Duke.” Terry Teachout, Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington (New York: Gotham, 2013), 363. Cohen, America.

Marketing to the Middlebrow

biographies. Among the most sacred ground of Ellingtonia is the positioning of Ellington as a pillar of the jazz canon and a “genius” composer “beyond category.” As demonstrated, such themes began with the late 1920s marketing promotion of Ellington’s manager, Irving Mills, and quickly entered early jazz criticism. These tropes were further refined in post-1950 scholarship that helped jazz to enter the academy as a respected musical art. In sum, Ellington’s centrality to Jazz Studies has much to do with his historiographic construct as THE quintessential jazz composer. Recent writings have enriched and expanded the discourse range of Ellington studies. However, while Cohen and Teachout provide important new thoughts on the commercial strategies behind the Mills/Ellington marketing plan, I find that both authors largely perpetuate the aforementioned essentialized view of interwar musical culture as either high (elite “classical” music) or low (jazz and popular music), without really considering the many class nuances that Ellington negotiated between these stereotypes. The strongest criticism against Duke comes from the Ellington “true believers,” which include the Duke Ellington Society’s William McFadden, who characterizes Duke as “the most unsettlingly harsh Ellington biography,” warning that “serious aficionados will find its contents disturbing.”90 Blogger Steven Cera similarly contends that Teachout portrays “Duke as a master of deception, a procrastinator . . . a robber of the work of others, a self-taught musician who lacked conservatory training and . . . a supreme egotist.”91 By contrast, the Bad Plus pianist Ethan Iverson posted one of the more thoughtful blog responses to the book.92 Like many print critics, despite his ambivalence about specific issues, Iverson praises the book’s historical framing through the lens of “all of twentieth-century art and pop culture.” Iverson considers two “bumbling,” self-serving book reviews (in the New York Times and The New Yorker), and provides an interview with Teachout and his own well-argued disagreements.93 While 90

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William McFadden, review “Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington by Terry Teachout,” Washington Post, January 2014, reprinted http://villesville.blogspot.se/2014 01 01 archive.html (accessed 18 May 2016). Steven Cera, “Terry and the Duke,” Jazz Profiles, 16 December 2013, http://jazzprofiles .blogspot.se/2013/12/terry-and-duke.html (accessed 18 May 2016). Ethan Iverson, “Interview with Terry Teachout,” Do the Math, 6 January 2014, https:// ethaniverson.com/interview-with-terry-teachout/ (accessed 14 January 2017). James Gavin, “Big Band: Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington by Terry Teachout,” New York Times, 6 December 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/12/08/books/review/ duke-a-life-of-duke-ellington-by-terry-teachout.html? r=3&, and Adam Gopnik, “Two Bands: Duke Ellington, the Beatles, and the Mysteries of Modern Creativity,” The New Yorker,

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noting that the way Teachout “discusses Ellington is not like any jazz player I’ve ever known,” Iverson further muses that Teachout “looks at Duke as a composer first, and maybe Terry’s right, that Duke really aspired to be that kind of Great Composer. It certainly seems like . . . the gatekeepers wanted him to be the ‘hot Bach’” (a direct reference to the aforementioned 1944 New Yorker article). My own Ellington research has focused on the pre-1950 extended compositions, seeking to understand this music and its cultural context, especially in relation to interwar entertainment and concert music. I was pleased to see some of my work reflected in Teachout’s “synthesis.” However, a repeated complaint against the book lies in its negative assessments of these same extended works. For example, both Howard Reich94 and Iverson take Teachout to task for his statements concerning Ellington’s supposed failings for not knowing “elementary principles of symphonic musical organization,” and his claims that Ellington was not suited to “large-scale . . . organically developed musical structure” (to which Iverson quips “I’ve never hung out with a great jazz musician who doubted Duke’s grasp of form”).95 Elsewhere, Teachout adds that “What Ellington’s large-scale works . . . sound like is theatrical production numbers [and] . . . those aren’t very effective musical models.”96 One jazz-writer/blogger intriguingly called Teachout a “professional middlebrow.”97 While this was intended as an insult, I want to stress that “middlebrow” is not necessarily a pejorative, as this idea captures key historical notions of social aspiration and cultural power, and it invokes associative markers of self-conscious sophistication, glamor, and class (social class and the high–low mixed adjective, “classy”). That said, the tone of these “opinionated” areas of Teachout’s prose are somewhat midcentury middlebrow. Teachout’s approach here reminds me of the 1960s writing style of jazz historian Gunther Schuller, who similarly employed

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23 and 30 December 2013, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/12/23/two-bands (both accessed 18 May 2016). Howard Reich, “Review: Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington by Terry Teachout, Teachout’s Flawed Attempt to Deconstruct a Genius,” Chicago Tribune, 10 November 2013, http://articles .chicagotribune.com/2013-11-10/features/ct-prj-1110-duke-terry-teachout-20131110 1 edward-kennedy-ellington-billy-strayhorn-printers-row-journal (accessed 14 January 2017). Iverson, “Interview.” Darcy James Argue, “Arranging Ellington: Interview with Terry Teachout,” Carnegie Hall Musical Exchange, http://musicalexchange.carnegiehall.org/profiles/blogs/ arranging-ellington-interview-with-terry-teachout (accessed 18 May 2016). Larry Kart, “Terry Teachout’s Duke: Any Thoughts?,” Organissimo: Jazz Forums, 6 November 2013, www.organissimo.org/forum/index.php?/topic/ 74595-terry-teachouts-duke-any-thoughts/ (accessed 18 May 2016).

Marketing to the Middlebrow

classical formal rhetoric (“organic” development, etc.), style analysis as a weapon for value judgment, and displays of topical thoroughness (suggesting “I’ve examined everything!”) to reinforce his writerly authority.98 A companion element is the too-quick dismissal of non-jazz vernacular arranging traditions (e.g., production numbers) without consideration of relevant interwar jazz and pop connections to a wealth of concertstyle music across stage, screen, recordings, and radio.99 Many top-name Broadway, Tin Pan Alley, Hollywood, and big band musicians contributed to this trend, as can be seen in Meredith (“Music Man”) Willson’s 1941 Decca album, Modern American Music, a project tied to Willson’s Maxwell House radio program which premiered the lushly orchestrated tracks on the album, including Ellington’s Whitemanesque composition, “American Lullaby,” alongside compositions from Vernon Duke, Harold Arlen, Harry Warren, Ferde Grof´e, and others.100 Beyond brief considerations of George Gershwin and Paul Whiteman, neither Teachout nor Cohen consider such trends or the pops orchestra tradition, both of which are important middlebrow contexts for understanding both Ellington’s extended works and Ellington the composer in pre-1950 marketing. More importantly, this interwar artful-entertainment rhetoric needs to be understood in its full popular-culture context of the abundant interwar popular-culture tropes that juxtapose the cultural, class, race, and musical markers associated with “classical” and “jazz,” such as the Ellington band’s aforementioned Hollywood cameo role in the “Rape of a Rhapsody” production number. Such prime examples of period artful entertainment invite far less essentialized readings of brow discourse through their tongue-in-cheek presentations of both the “Great Composer” (Liszt) and Ellington’s composerly image.

Conclusion Were areas of Ellington’s interwar music – pre-Carnegie Hall and Black, Brown and Beige – somehow middlebrow?101 I stop short of saying this. 98

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See, for example, Gunther Schuller, Early Jazz: Its Roots and Development, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). See Howland, Between the Muses, and John Wriggle, Blue Rhythm Fantasy: Big-Band Jazz Arranging in the Swing Era (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006). Decca Presents an Album of Modern American Music Played by Meredith Willson and His Concert Orchestra, Decca Album 219, 1941, 78 rpm (3 discs). Duke Ellington, “American Lullaby”(New York: Robbins Music, 1942). For an extended discussion of the formal connections between Ellington and Whitemanesque symphonic jazz, see Howland, Uptown.

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Surely Ellington was complicit in his aspirational framing as a (semi) “serious” Composer (with a capital “C”), and his pursuit of a concert music ideal in a popular culture context was likewise squarely overlapping with – and at times in direct dialog with – Whitemanesque middlebrowism. And surely there is such a thing as an interwar African American middlebrowism that parallels and partakes of white middlebrow culture. But the sophisticated, artful music of the Ellington orchestra overall – including his concert-styled music, even despite its often middlebrow criticism and marketing by white proponents – is difficult to nail down as somehow being directly middlebrow in the classic interwar and midcentury manner of the music of Kostelanetz or Whiteman. In this Ellingtonia, there is a witty, self-aware, distinctly African American critical and stylistic distance that is somewhat akin to the hip-but-playfully-deconstructive “Ebony Rhapsody” composerly portrayal. While midcentury middlebrow discourse is surely part of his interwar artistic persona and image, I sense that this signifying distance is a signal difference that makes it stand apart from the areas of middlebrow musical and cultural discourse that it otherwise directly engages with. As discussed above, as well as elsewhere in this volume, Ellington developed a cross-class popular image built on an amalgam of high–low cultural symbols that presented a refined, commercially savvy musician, entertainer, and businessman who wrote hip but “serious” (and/or “sophisticated”) popular music, on the one hand, and a lauded, “serious” concert music composer, on the other hand. At the center of midcentury jazzis-art discourse, in an era where educators, aesthetes, and professional musicians typically restricted “composition” to mean traditional highculture music (as opposed to the work of “tunesmiths,” “songwriters,” “arrangers,” etc.), Ellington’s extended works presented artful expressions of black urbanity and modernity through their rich juxtapositions of black and white vernacular and cultivated music traditions. The popular ascription of “composer” to Ellington was a major victory for proponents of jazz as art, and (as noted) is central to the rhetoric of the “true Ellington believers.” What this discourse and Teachout’s narrative synthesis in Duke reveal are the continuing tensions within Ellingtonia between generations of invested individuals, older and more recent views on jazz as art, and mixed-class understandings of jazz composition. Iverson astutely suggests that “part of Duke’s genius was to mean many different things to so many different people.” I agree. Teachout’s biography has great value as an historical corrective/update and a synthesis of certain areas of recent Ellington studies. In the end, I think of Kenneth

Marketing to the Middlebrow

Prouty’s comments on the jazz canon: “The canon survives because it is the basic historical language of the musical academy . . . It has its uses . . . [even despite our] qualification[s], [and] a metaphorical ‘but there’s more to it.’”102 Teachout’s book offers a sort of biographical “changing same” (to paraphrase Amiri Baraka) – he redraws core familiar stories that many have found great meaning in. The critical response has predictably found important faults and added its “but there’s more to it!” commentary, even while knowing that biographies rarely tell the whole story, particularly with an individual whose private life was as elusive and multisided as Ellington’s. Ellington continues to attract such invested engagement because he attained such a remarkable synthesis of cross-cultural impact, media savvy, racial and social relevance, and undeniably artful entertainment.

102

Kenneth E. Prouty, “Toward Jazz’s ‘Official’ History: The Debates and Discourses of Jazz History Textbooks,” Journal of Music History Pedagogy 1 (Fall 2010), www.ams-net.org/ojs/ index.php/jmhp/article/view/4/26 (accessed 18 May 2016).

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“Art or Debauchery?”: The Reception of Ellington in the U.K. catherine tackley

In a 1952 Down Beat article, Duke Ellington chose his opening night at the London Palladium as one of his “10 Top Thrills in 25 Years,” and commented that “the entire first European tour in 1933 was a tremendous uplift for all our spirits.”1 Certainly, the reviews of Ellington’s initial performances in the U.K. were generally positive, which was definitely not the case with Louis Armstrong and Cab Calloway, who each visited around the same time. However, there are nuances in the writing published in response to Ellington’s visit which tell us not only about the performances themselves, including details that are otherwise unobtainable, but also about British attitudes to jazz. This chapter explores the impact of Duke Ellington in the U.K., focusing on his 1933 tour of the country, his 1948 appearances without his orchestra, his performances at the Royal Festival Hall and the Leeds Festival in 1958, and, finally, the three Sacred Concerts which were staged in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s.2 These performances, which span Ellington’s career, took place in a range of performance situations and across different regions of the U.K. While the artistic inspiration that global touring offered to Ellington has been considered elsewhere,3 this chapter will explore the British reception of Ellington’s developing musical style and his influence on the British jazz community during this forty-year period, contributing to the growing knowledge and understanding of the attitudes to jazz in different periods, places, and situations.

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Duke Ellington, “Duke Tells of 10 Top Thrills in 25 Years,” Down Beat, 5 November 1952, 1. Ellington’s appearances at the London Palladium in 1933 are considered in detail in chapter 9 of the author’s (n´ee Catherine Parsonage) The Evolution of Jazz in Britain, 1880–1935 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). The title of this chapter is a reference to an article written by Stanley Nelson for the British theatrical trade paper, The Era, in response to Ellington’s 1933 visit: Stanley R. Nelson, “Ellington and After! Art or Debauchery?,” Era, 21 June 1933: 3. I acknowledge the valuable work of Howard Rye in reconstructing detailed tour itineraries for many visiting American groups, including Ellington in 1933. See Howard Rye, “Visiting Firemen 1: Duke Ellington,” Storyville, 88 (April 1980): 128–30. See, for example, Brian Priestley “Ellington Abroad,” in The Cambridge Companion to Duke Ellington, ed. Ed Green (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 55–66.

“Art or Debauchery?”

The 1933 Tour Duke Ellington and his orchestra arrived in the U.K. on 12 June 1933, and departed for the continent on 24 July of the same year. The group was resident at variety halls in London, Liverpool, Birmingham, and Glasgow, and also played Sunday concerts (a concert was the only form of entertainment legally permitted to take place on Sundays in Britain at this time) and late night dances at other venues. They broadcast on the BBC and recorded for Decca in London. Given the number of engagements and the distances involved, it is hard to imagine that the musicians would have agreed with Irving Mills’s initial assertion that “the proposed trip is more in the nature of a holiday . . . a break and a change of scenery.”4 Despite the considerable demographic differences between the cities visited on the tour, research using local newspapers illuminates a relatively consistent and positive attitude to Ellington across the country. One reason for this was the degree of advance publicity which his visit received, meaning that critics and audience alike had a good idea of what to expect. Ellington had been anticipated in the trade press for at least seven months prior to his arrival, and new details of the tour were confirmed in Melody Maker each subsequent month.5 The British musician and critic Spike Hughes was able to play a significant role in the build-up to Ellington’s appearances. Hughes published accounts of his experiences in America in Melody Maker, the foremost British music trade periodical, and one of these articles included a description of Ellington performing at the Cotton Club.6 The day after Ellington’s arrival, and in anticipation of the band’s BBC broadcast, an article by Hughes entitled “Meet the Duke” was published in the Daily Herald, one of the best-selling daily newspapers in Britain at the time.7 The consistency in language between many British reviews and a contemporary advertising manual issued around this time illuminates the role of Mills in ensuring that the British press was well briefed.8 Mills was probably also involved in a piece supposedly written by Ellington which was published in the British Rhythm magazine just prior to his arrival. Related coverage included subsequent features in the trade press “written by” 4 5 6 7 8

“Ellington for Us – Spike for U.S.,” Melody Maker, January 1933, 66. Parsonage, Evolution, 228–30. Spike Hughes, “Day by Day in New York,” Melody Maker, May 1933, 353. Spike Hughes, “Meet the Duke,” Daily Herald, 13 June 1933, 8. Nicholson, Reminiscing, 152–9.

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individual musicians from the band, as well as numerous tie-ups with instrument manufacturers and record shops, the most enterprising of which has to be Ellington’s endorsement of haggis in Glasgow.9 Of particular interest is Mills’s insistence that Ellington should be presented as “a great artist, a music genius whose unique style and individual theories of harmony have created a new music.”10 Much of the early British writing on jazz shares the common feature of the use of classical music to provide the criteria against which jazz was evaluated.11 Although the importance of individual improvising musicians was increasingly recognized in British criticism (especially in Stanley Nelson’s 1934 book, All About Jazz, which includes comparative discussion of different British and American musicians), there was still a tendency to look towards composers to improve the basic material upon which jazz was built. This idea is carried through specifically in early British writing on Ellington in which he is identified as “the first genuine composer of jazz,” and “the first jazz composer of distinction, and the first Negro composer of distinction.”12 Although the individual musicians of Ellington’s band were introduced to the British public in numerous articles and programs, Hughes tended to adhere to the conventional idea of the subservience of the performers to the composer: “There is not a note which comes from the remarkable brass section, or from that rich tone of the saxes, that is not directly an expression of Duke’s genius.”13 While the cognoscenti – headed by Hughes and the British composer and critic Constant Lambert – had specific expectations of Ellington’s performances, many others drew more readily upon their general experiences of dance or jazz bands in specific performance settings – in variety entertainment, on the radio, in the dance hall, and in concert. To a large extent, Ellington’s initial reception in Britain was dependent on how he conformed to, subverted, or revolutionized the conventions of these performance contexts.

Variety Shows In 1933, Ellington and his band spent most of their time in Britain performing as an individual act in larger variety theater shows, where they were generally well received. Dance bands had been appearing on the 9

10 12

13

Duke Ellington, “‘I’ll Be Seeing You!’ Says Ellington,” Rhythm, June 1933, 34–6; also see Rye, “Visiting Firemen 1,” 129. 11 Parsonage, Evolution, 53–4. Nicholson, Reminiscing, 153. Hughes, “Meet the Duke,” 8, and Constant Lambert, Music Ho! (London: Faber, 1934; reprint 1966), 187. Hughes, “Day by Day,” 353.

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British variety stage for many years and there were clear audience expectations of this type of “act,” as the bandleader Jack Hylton noted in an article for the Radio Times: “Scenic backgrounds and artistic effects are useful to a stage band, but easy good humour and a fair leavening of comedy is a necessity, because no music-hall audience can be kept serious for a long time without signs of restiveness. They pay to be entertained.”14 Ellington and his band appeared at the Palladium alongside acts such as skating, juggling, comedy, Arab acrobatics, patter dialogue, ventriloquism, a football match on bicycles, and the risqu´e comedian Max Miller. With this context in mind, it is unsurprising that Hughes felt the need to point out in the Daily Herald that Ellington’s “is not a ‘show’ band; its members do not wear funny hats, nor do they attempt any ‘comedy.’”15 However, Ellington was clearly well prepared for the variety halls with the inclusion of vocalist Ivie Anderson, Bessie Dudley (“The Original Snake-Hips Girl”), and tap dancers Bill Bailey and Derby Wilson in the touring group. These additional entertainers contributed visual interest to the band’s performances.16 Predictably, knowledgeable critics disapproved of these aspects of the performances which seemed “to be so unnecessary as they detracted from the performances of the band.” Although the quality of Anderson’s performances was acknowledged, she too “seemed to interfere with the band.” Moreover, Melody Maker’s correspondent (probably Hughes) was frustrated that the band had to play stop-times for the tap dancing.17 Lambert commented similarly that “It is a little irritating to see them [the band] reduced to a subordinate role for the sake of a cabaret turn.”18 Most other reviews tended to comment on the singing, dancing, and visual aspects of the act rather than the band’s performance. Such writings often carefully noted various non-musical details, such as in their first week at the Palladium when the band wore light grey tail suits, and in the second, white tail coats with green trousers. Certainly, the visual effect was stunning, but such elements were crucially paired with the highest musical standards, as the Evening Standard reported on the opening night at the Palladium: There are subdued lights and monstrous shadows. His jazz drummer has the flamboyance of a cocktail mixer. His trumpeters abandon themselves in a frenzy. Yet, 14 15 16

17

Jack Hylton, “The Dance Orchestra in Vaudeville,” Radio Times, 8 February 1929, 319. “Variety News,” Performer, 14 June 1933, 4; Hughes, “Meet the Duke,” 8. “The Duke at the Palladium: Long Awaited Debut to Packed Houses,” Melody Maker, 17 June 1933, 2. 18 Constant Lambert, “Matters Musical,” Sunday Referee, 25 June 1933, 18. Ibid., 1–2.

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stripped of all its ornamentation, his band has great technical skill, and under his direction carries jazz to a high degree of syncopation and “hot” rhythm.19

Vital to the audiences’ acceptance of “frenzied” trumpeters was the perception of Ellington as an effortless showman who was in control of all aspects of the performance: “The calm, collected Ellington, [was] sitting at the piano, playing and directing his mighty band, without any ostensible effort whatever.”20 There are two contextual points to be made here. First, Ellington’s visit followed hot on the heels of Armstrong (who also appeared at the Palladium), whose stage presence many Britons considered to be excessive. Secondly, the prominent style of dance band directing at the time was noticeable exertion with a baton; in comparison, Ellington’s direction must have appeared almost magical. An editorial in Rhythm magazine admired Ellington’s “Whispering Tiger,” the antithesis of many British performances of the early jazz standard Tiger Rag (which was introduced to Britain by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band), noting: “Never have I heard men play so perfectly together, with such thorough understanding and so perfectly effortless.”21 The reaction in some of the national newspapers was more muted than the specialist publications: “In short, a very good dance band, playing ingeniously orchestrated music. I do not pretend to appreciate its merits to the point of fashionable ecstasy; but I like it – as a dance band.”22 Similarly, the Liverpool papers in particular referred to Ellington’s performance as a “stunt,” albeit an effective one, showing how in a variety context Ellington appeared to be just the latest novelty: “It is a highly stylised, hy[p]er-sophisticated stunt, staged with a subtly satirical modernistic setting, and put over with the last ounce of showmanship.”23 Although the basic format of Ellington’s performance broadly conformed to the expectations of a variety show act, the obvious differences between the sound of Ellington’s band and British dance orchestras meant that for some the music was virtually incomprehensible: “as fascinating and inexplicable as a congress of ship’s sirens, motor horns and pneumatic drills in the majority of his numbers, and sublimely beautiful in Mood Indigo.”24 For the reviewer in the Glasgow Evening News, Ellington’s performance 19 20 22

23 24

“London After Dark: Varieties,” Evening Standard, 13 June 1933, 9. 21 Ibid. “Editorial: Amazing Ellington,” Rhythm, July 1933, 9. “The Duke at the Palladium: Composer-Conductor of All Black Band,” Daily Express, 13 June 1933, 11. “Round the Theatres,” Liverpool Echo, 27 June 1933, 10. “Duke Ellington’s Triumph at the Holborn Empire,” Era, 12 July 1933, 20.

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went beyond all expectations of a dance band: “Ellington has carried syncopation to subtleties which the popular little Lancashire lad [Hylton] has never risked. Curiously enough, the gramophone has not conveyed much of this band’s virtuosity. You have to sit before it to grasp the multitude of sounds that its instruments can achieve.”25 Even for fans of Ellington’s music, the experience of hearing the band live was considerably more intense in comparison with recordings: “You all know how Ellington’s band plays through listening to his records, and I can only say that in the flesh, it is like that, only a thousand times more so. It literally lifts one out of one’s seat.”26 However, due to familiarity with his recordings, the experience of hearing Ellington live was unsettling for some: “I came across to England to hear Ellington, and I returned, severely doubting the genius that had been attributed to him. Long after midnight, however, I played over five of his records, of my own choosing, and retired to bed – reassured.”27 With all the advance publicity in Rhythm and Melody Maker, it is not surprising that many musicians and jazz fans, such as Stanley Nelson, reacted ecstatically to the performances: How to describe in so many words the most vital, emotional experience that vaudeville in England has ever known? An orgy of masochism, a ruthless exercise in sensuality . . . it mined deep the fundamentals of every human in that multitudinous audience . . . Here was music far removed from the abracadabra of the symphony; here was a tenuous melodic line which distilled from the emotions all heritage of human sorrow which lies deep in every one of us.28

Many of those who were most familiar with Ellington’s work were critical of his choice of repertoire for the Palladium shows, which was perceived to be overly commercial.29 There was, however, overwhelming consensus about the quality of Mood Indigo, which Ellington used to close his performances. The reviewer in the Liverpool Evening Express referred to this number as “Blue Indigo,” a “captivating waltz tune.”30 This error belies the appreciation of Mood Indigo as a new type of “sweet” number still beloved in Britain and typified by the waltz, but yet the distinctive orchestration and blues basis also rendered this acceptable to more discerning 25 26 27 28 29 30

“So This Is Harlem!,” Glasgow Evening News, 4 July 1933, 3. “The Duke at the Palladium,” Melody Maker, 1. “Readers Views on the Ellington Concert,” Melody Maker, 15 July 1933, 14. Stanley R. Nelson, “Ellington Over London!: Introspection in Indigo,” Era, 14 June 1933, 1. “The Duke at the Palladium,” Melody Maker, 1–2. “Revue and Variety on Merseyside,” Liverpool Evening Express, 27 June 1933, 8.

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listeners. Similarly, overall, Ellington managed to achieve performances which conformed to the British idea of a “band act,” fulfilling the demand for novel but yet good-quality entertainment.

Broadcasts Ellington broadcast a very brief interview with Jack Hylton on BBC radio on the evening of his arrival in Britain, but his main opportunity to reach the whole nation came a few days later. There were high expectations surrounding this broadcast, which would have had an impact on potential provincial audiences who had not yet been able to hear the band in person. In fact, the broadcast had the most controversial reception of all Ellington’s activities in 1933, as exemplified by the reaction published in the Manchester Guardian the following day: There are those who make a cult of “hot” music and think that its opponents misunderstand it, but when all arguments are finished it is surely true to say that something that is thoroughly ugly from start to finish is fairly to be opposed. Even if the “music” would be more bearable if the words were not so stupid and if the ideas which exist vaguely behind it were not so pathetically crude.31

Similarly, Nelson claimed in his “Art or Debauchery” article that “with just one exception, every layman I have questioned concerning the Ellington broadcast disliked it.”32 Such strong reactions to a broadcast might seem surprising, but it should be remembered that the BBC had pursued a policy of broadcasting tightly regulated “dance music” since its inception. Indeed, the overriding BBC policy on jazz and popular music remained constant, fuelled by the recent appointment of Henry Hall as the director of the BBC Dance Band. Executives hoped Hall would maintain a suitably controlled version of popular music, within which jazz was usually subsumed. With this in mind, it is maybe not surprising that in the “Radio Reports” column of Melody Maker, the main criticism of Ellington’s broadcast was that “the arrangements seemed too heavy and complicated for the air, there was so much going on all at once that this was difficult to sort it out.”33 Indeed, the critic for the Yorkshire Observer commented “Duke Ellington I suffered for 15 min. and then switched off. Give me Henry Hall every time.”34 In March 1933, just a couple of months before Ellington’s visit, two significant articles on jazz appeared in a special “Dance Music” issue of 31 32 34

“Wireless Notes,” Manchester Guardian, 15 June 1933, 12. 33 “Radio Reports,” Melody Maker, 24 June 1933, 7. Nelson, “Ellington and After!,” 3. Quoted in Barry Ulanov, Duke Ellington (London: Musicians Press, 1946), 139.

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the Radio Times, the BBC’s magazine. Lawrence Duval’s article, entitled “The Genesis of Jazz,” traces the black origins of jazz through folk music, minstrelsy, ragtime, and (unusually for British writing at this time) the blues.35 Lambert developed his article “The Future of Highbrow Jazz” for his 1934 book Music Ho!36 Given that the Radio Times was often used to support the BBC’s programming decisions, it seems likely that the inclusion of these articles was to prepare the ground for Ellington to broadcast during his time in Britain. As usual, the magazine printed a diverse selection of listeners’ comments following Ellington’s broadcast, ranging from “It was the greatest three-quarters of an hour I have listened to,” to “I am forced to protest most strongly against our good English air being polluted by Duke Ellington and his famous orchestra.”37 This was entirely typical of the BBC’s tendency to justify controversial decisions by proving that it was impossible for them to please everyone all of the time.

Dances The third type of engagement that Ellington fulfilled during his time in Britain was to play for dances in Streatham (south London), Brighton (on the south coast), and Bolton (north of Manchester), as well as in clubs in each of the major cities on the tour. There had been a dramatic increase in dance venues in Britain following World War One; some were converted from ice and roller skating rinks, others were purpose-built. Outside London, the music was usually provided by a local dance band playing stock arrangements and occasionally by famous, London-based bands such as Jack Hylton’s. The popularity of Ellington’s dance engagements is not surprising considering that rather than having to sit through a dozen acts on a variety bill for a brief segment of Ellington, the band could be heard for much longer and in less formal surroundings than a theater. Indeed, while in variety and in concert the performances and audience reactions had been controlled by the physical confines of a theater, at dances, journalists reported something akin to the furor which attends modern-day pop stars: The dance which took place at the Streatham Locarno last Friday (June 16) was a literal riot. Enormous crowds besieged the door and some people got forced in 35

36 37

Lawrence Duval, “The Genesis of Jazz and the Birth of the Blues,” Radio Times, 17 March 1933, 658. Constant Lambert, “The Future of Highbrow Jazz,” Radio Times, 17 March 1933, 659. Quoted in A. H. Lawrence, Duke Ellington and His World (New York: Routledge, 2001), 205.

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without paying. The attendance looked to be in the neighbourhood of 4,000, of whom hardly anybody attempted to dance to the band. They just crowded around the stand and cheered themselves hoarse.38

Many accounts of Ellington’s dance hall performances mention audiences crowding around the bandstand in a manner that would not be possible or acceptable in theaters. Ellington’s dance at the Grafton Rooms in Liverpool was highly anticipated in the local community, and a special souvenir brochure was produced. A piece in the Liverpool Echo pointed out that the late-night performance would be significant in allowing “musicians, members of the profession and other experts” to experience the impact of Ellington’s music in the ballroom.39 Although traditional couple dancing remained the norm at this time, At no time during the evening, although there were about 1000 people present, did the number of couples dancing exceed one hundred. The majority remained throughout the session packed solidly around the band platform fascinated by the amazing skill and virtuosity of the musicians . . . It was quite apparent that most people were intent on seeing the band in action, and having a close-up view, than of testing its adaptability for dancing purposes.40

The lack of dancing to Ellington indicates that audiences differentiated his band from other ensembles providing the music in these venues. By actively choosing listening over dancing, these audiences reflected in their behavior the growth of a contemporary distinction between “hot” jazz and dance music.41 As the Liverpool Echo put it: “They certainly conquered the dancers, but not from a dancing point of view.”42

Concerts Ellington gave several Sunday concerts while in the U.K., including some at relatively prestigious regional venues such as the Blackpool Tower ballroom and the Royal Hall in Harrogate, as well as two sponsored by Melody Maker at the New Trocadero Cinema in Elephant and Castle, which lies south of the River Thames in London. The latter were intended specifically for musicians and enthusiasts. Many of these events attracted audiences of 3,000–4,000 people. The first Melody Maker concert was announced in 38 39 40 41

“Ellington Fever Peak,” Melody Maker, 24 June 1933, 2. “Ballroom vs. Stage,” Liverpool Echo, 28 June 1933, 6. “Dancing on Merseyside,” Liverpool Echo, 5 July 1933, 4. 42 “Dancing on Merseyside,” Liverpool Echo, 4. See Parsonage, Evolution, 191ff.

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the publication in May and had sold out even before Ellington arrived in London. This strong interest in these concerts seems to suggest that some discerning audience members might have been aware of the limitations that the variety setting placed upon Ellington’s performances. In the days before the concert, Melody Maker issued instructions in an attempt to influence a mode of behavior similar to that expected of an audience for classical music: “May we also suggest that everybody keeps his enthusiasm within bounds and refrains from applauding individual solos so that subsequent sequences may not be drowned. We have promised [Ellington] a quiet and appreciative audience which will know what to expect and how to listen.”43 The organizers of the concert had invited the record shop Levy’s of Regent Street to give a hot record recital prior to the band’s appearance, maybe with the intention of encouraging similarly attentive listening from the audience when the band came on stage. However, in the concert, “not only did the applause keep breaking through as each trumpeter, saxophonist, or trombonist finished each of his little ‘turns’ but even the shrill top notes or rumbling low notes in the middle of a tune were applauded.”44 Although the audience reception appears to have been very positive, Hughes and some other readers of Melody Maker were not happy with the concert. Writing under his critical pseudonym “Mike,” Hughes objected not only to the applause during numbers, but more fundamentally to the balance of the program: Is Duke Ellington losing faith in his own music and turning commercial through lack of appreciation, or does he honestly under-estimate the English musical public to such an extent that a concert for musicians does not include The Mooche, Mood Indigo, Lazy Rhapsody, Blue Ramble, Rockin’ in Rhythm, Creole Love Call, Old Man Blue, Baby, When You Ain’t There or Black Beauty?45

As implied, Hughes and the organizers of the Melody Maker concerts were keen to present Ellington in a formal concert situation, complete with a relatively passive audience. This was commensurate with their desire to uphold Ellington as a great artist, compatible with the Western art music canon, as the fundamental basis for appreciating and valuing his music. Ellington’s performance at the second Melody Maker concert seemed to satisfy Hughes, who commented that “there is very little for me to say 43 44 45

“Ellington Fever,” Melody Maker, 2. “Our London Correspondence,” Manchester Guardian, 26 June 1933, 8. Spike Hughes, “Four Thousand Delighted Fans but ‘Mike’ Is Not so Pleased about It,” Melody Maker, 1 July 1933, 2.

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in the way of criticism . . . Only three pieces played were not actually Duke Ellington’s compositions.”46 However, although dances and variety performances in London and elsewhere continued to be well attended, tickets were available on the door for the second Melody Maker concert, thus possibly indicating that the rather contrived format may have had limited appeal to general audiences. This lack of interest may also illustrate an evolving strand within the British attitudes to jazz in which its differences with classical music began to be celebrated rather than suppressed. The presentation of Ellington and his band in familiar settings served to highlight these musical and cultural differences, and made a significant contribution to the growing British understanding of the importance of African American musicians in jazz. On a basic level, Ellington and his band presented undoubted exoticism, albeit in a controlled way, for British audiences. It should be further noted that Mills’s advertising manual encouraged writers to exploit the “primitive” and “jungle” characteristics of the band’s music: Mr. Duke Ellington’s overwrought and highly sophisticated cult of the primitive is one of the most effective stunts that have appeared for a long time on the stage. It is [as] though he had applied a process of desiccation to the primitive music and tribal dance which were the far-away origins of the kind of thing he plays. By comparison with those origins the present entertainment is exceedingly cultivated.47

Beyond this, a more profound appreciation of Ellington was linked with a better understanding of the context for his music. This is seen, for instance, in the impressions Hughes had gained through his experiences in Harlem and then disseminated. The personal accounts in these writings went beyond a reliance on familiar stereotypes. Several reviewers noted that the band’s performances were imbued with, and provoked in listeners, deep emotion. For example, in one Liverpool Echo article it is said that Black and Tan Fantasy “may express the soul of a submerged race struggling out of abysmal depression.”48 Similarly, the Liverpool Evening Express commented that “His music seems to be absolutely alive, primitive and vital. It expresses the soul of the people.”49 It became clear that Ellington’s music offered something profoundly different to British dance bands, and this difference ought to be taken seriously: “We are of the opinion that the 46

47 48 49

Spike Hughes, “Mike’s Report on the Second Ellington Melody Maker Concert,” Melody Maker, 22 July 1933, 3. “Empire Theatre,” Liverpool Post and Mercury, 27 June 1933, 8. “Round the Theatres,” Liverpool Echo, 27 June 1933, 10. “Revue and Variety on Merseyside,” Liverpool Evening Express, 23 June 1933, 10.

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time is ripe for the advent of another coloured band in this country, as our bands have been in a stereotyped rut and it is time that a certain judicious kick in the pants was administered.”50 This realization had important practical consequences for British musicians. In a 1933 Melody Maker article, for instance, one writer notably argues: Our education, hitherto so woefully neglected, is being attended to. We now have the opportunity to learn; to emulate, at least, to try to copy. We wonder how many of our bands and musicians will learn anything! Brass players will, of course, growl in the accepted Cooty [sic] and [“Tricky”] Sam [Nanton] style, but beyond that, we fear, little will be learnt. Let us, therefore, all seize these opportunities before they are too late. Let us not miss an opportunity to hear these visiting celebrities, and to learn what we can. It is madness and musical suicide not to do so.51

The “Musicians’ Union Ban” Unfortunately, the opportunities for direct education of British musicians were limited, as Ellington’s orchestra did not return until 1958. This major gap was the result of restrictions placed upon American musicians performing in Britain. As I detail elsewhere, this state of affairs had developed gradually from the mid-1920s, when questions began to be asked about the presence of American bands in Britain when native musicians were out of work. This debate gained further momentum in the context of economic decline at the end of the decade.52 By the time of Ellington’s 1933 tour, American bands could perform only in variety and dance halls where the resident British group was retained, and not in restaurants, where free admission was perceived to deprive British bands playing elsewhere of their audiences.53 Nevertheless, there were converse U.S.–U.K. musician employment problems, as seen in press coverage at the time which noted that even the band of Jack Hylton – a main supporter of Ellington’s visit – was forbidden from performing in the U.S.A. Hylton probably hoped that his role in Ellington’s visit might open up reciprocal opportunities for himself in the States, but when these were not forthcoming, he actually protested against an application for Ellington to return to Britain in 1934. The effect of this was to draw the lack of transatlantic reciprocity to the attention of the British government. A risky strategy was employed by the Ministry of Labour on the basis that a refusal to grant the necessary permits for Ellington’s orchestra might influence the American Federation 50 51 52

“The Duke to Open at the Palladium on June 12th,” Rhythm, June 1933, 11. “Our Education,” Melody Maker, 22 July 1933, 8. 53 Ibid., 220. Parsonage, Evolution, 218–20.

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of Musicians to be more receptive to British bands. Ultimately, this plan backfired, and in 1935 a stalemate situation was reached whereby neither British nor American governments would grant permits to bands from the opposite country.54 Ironically, the lack of “jazz in Britain” following Ellington’s 1933 appearances – in terms of American musicians visiting and touring – acted as an impetus for the further development of an independent British jazz. Ellington’s initial visit helped to stimulate British jazz criticism which would sustain enthusiasts for the music, but the visit also helped to create a demand for black jazz musicians. This need was met not by African Americans, but instead by resident and immigrant black Britons and citizens of the British Empire, particularly West Indian musicians, whose performances were certainly more than just imitations of American models.55 Such trends contributed to defining British jazz. In addition, although the restriction on American musicians from 1935 is often referred to as the “Musicians’ Union ban,” this development was actually instituted by the Ministry of Labour, who had jurisdiction over work permits; and the reality of the so-called “ban” was rather more subtle.56 Certainly, it was virtually impossible for whole bands, British or American, to perform on the opposite side of the Atlantic; but individuals were able to circumvent the restrictions in various ways. For example, Hylton received a permit to visit the U.S. as a conductor, but he was also able to broadcast performances to America both with his band from London, and even from a ship off the U.S. coast. He was further able to work with American musicians while the promoter paid for his band to have a twoweek holiday.57 Similarly, American saxophonist Benny Carter worked in Britain primarily as an arranger, but was able to take a calculated risk and indulge in a small amount of playing in informal situations such as nightclubs and “rhythm clubs” (fan-based social clubs organized by hot music enthusiasts). He also recorded legitimately in the U.K. and even starred in a Sunday concert organized by Melody Maker.58 54 55

56

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Ibid., 253–4. Catherine Tackley, “Race, Identity and the Meaning of Jazz in Post-Second World War Britain,” in Black Music in Post-Second World War Britain, ed. Jon Stratton and Nabeel Zuberi (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014). See the detailed account by Martin Cloonan and Matt Brennan, “Alien Invasions: The British Musicians’ Union and Foreign Musicians,” Popular Music 32 (2013): 277–95. Parsonage, Evolution, 256. For a more detailed account of Carter’s time in Britain, see Catherine Tackley, “Benny Carter in Britain, 1936–37,” in Eurojazzland, ed. Luca Cerchiari, Laurent Cugny, and Franz Kerschbaumer (Lebanon, NH: Northeastern University Press, 2012), 167–88.

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The 1948 Tour Some American musicians – such as Coleman Hawkins, Fats Waller, and Art Tatum – obtained permits by presenting themselves as solo cabaret or variety artists. These situations actually encouraged the visitors to interact with their British colleagues and thus provided significant educational opportunities. It was this loophole that allowed Ellington to return Britain in 1948 as a pianist with singer Kay Davis and Ray Nance, who sang, danced, and played trumpet and fiddle. The latter’s experience of variety performance would have been invaluable since the group spent the first two weeks of their visit at the London Palladium, performing under the heading “Sepia Panorama,” on a bill which also included comedy singer Pearl Bailey and the Nicholas brothers tap dancing duo. During this time, these US entertainers were each accompanied by Woolf Phillips and the Skyrockets, the Palladium’s resident orchestra, but Ellington’s sheet music arrived late and the resultant lack of rehearsal led to the first performance being branded as “scrappy.”59 As in 1933, Ellington’s 1948 U.K. “act” remained largely congruent with the expectations of mainstream variety theatre. Davis’s songs were “purely sentimental,” Nance was “an energetic and versatile entertainer,” and Ellington himself was described as both “a composer of over a thousand of the tunes which crooners croon” and a performer of “intricate arrangements which are soothing rather than exciting.”60 However, a review in Billboard (a US publication) suggested that Ellington “appeared lost without his orchestra” and while Pearl Bailey was accorded a tremendous reception, and was subsequently moved from first to last on the bill, Ellington “failed to go over with any great enthusiasm. The audience tried to warm up to his playing but the sparkle of the old Duke just didn’t seem to pass over the footlights.”61 Unlike his previous visit, Ellington’s 1948 tour was not extensively previewed in the British press. As a result, at the Palladium, “there was not, on the whole, the number of tried Ellington enthusiasts present to give Duke the response he is undoubtedly accustomed to.”62 British musicians who performed with Ellington recall the tremendous reception upon his arrival in Paris at the start of the 59

60 61

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Stuart S. Allen, “London Largo: A Weary Duke Errs by Not Rehearsing with Ork,” Down Beat, 28 July 1948, 2; “Ellington Is Here!,” Melody Maker, 26 June 1948, 1. “Palladium,” The Times (London), 22 June 1948, 7. “Palladium, London,” Billboard, 3 July 1948, 44; “Fallon Trio to Accompany Duke on Concert Tour,” Melody Maker, 3 July 1948, 1. Ibid.

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subsequent tour of mainland Europe, but there were no reports of similar scenes in connection with his British appearances. Indeed, notification of his arrival was printed in Melody Maker only on the day of his landing, and it was later reported that: “As the time of the Duke’s arrival was only known at the last minute, and only to a few, there was not the crowd that would normally have turned out to meet him.”63 The British tour which commenced after the Palladium engagement avoided variety theaters in favor of venues such as the Guildhall in Southampton, City Hall in Sheffield, the New Opera House in Blackpool, St. Andrew’s Hall in Glasgow, and King’s Hall, Belle Vue, Manchester, which were more akin to concert halls than variety theaters or nightclubs. The program for these engagements was accordingly described as a concert: “The first half of each concert will feature Duke himself at the piano, the Jack Fallon Rhythm Trio, British guest artists64 and one of Duke’s singers. The second half will be the concert version of the Ellington revue.”65 A trio of Canadian expatriot bass player Jack Fallon, British guitarist Malcolm Mitchell, and drummer Tony Crombie was employed for the British and continental tour. Undoubtedly, this engagement represented a great opportunity for these musicians, and Fallon commented at the time that the experience had been “an education as well as a pleasure.”66 Fallon and Crombie both recall the extensive entourage which accompanied Ellington, including his road manager Al Celly, barber Billy Black, publisher Jack Robbins, the songwriter Kermit Goell, others whom Crombie termed “court jesters,” and various “ladies” who joined and left along the way. The British musicians learned and performed some music by ear, but they also recall Ellington jotting down charts for them. Commensurately, the programs included familiar numbers such as Sophisticated Lady, Caravan, and Solitude, and Fallon recalled performing the more recent Transblucency, a feature for Davis.67

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65 66 67

“Duke Ellington Palladium and Concert-Tour Plans,” Melody Maker, 19 June 1948, 1; “Ellington Is Here!,” 1. For example, the harmonica player Ronald Chesney – who played a largely classical repertoire – was included at several, if not all, destinations. Fallon and Crombie recall the Nicholas brothers travelling as part of the Ellington entourage, but it seems unlikely that they usually performed in the concerts. In Manchester, for example, the brothers performed at the city’s Palace Theatre. Exceptionally, Fallon remembered Harold Nicholas sitting in for Crombie on drums on one of the European dates. “Fallon Trio,” 1. Jack Fallon, “Play It as You Feel It, Says Duke,” Melody Maker, 24 July 1948, 3. “Palladium, London,” Billboard, 44; Tony Crombie, interview by Tony Middleton, and Jack Fallon, interview by Tony Middleton, both 1995, the Oral History of Jazz in Britain, British Library Sound Archive.

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These performances seem to have been very well received, and as in 1933 there was a sense among critics that the concert-style presentation was more appropriate than a variety bill for an artist of Ellington’s stature: When the Palladium moguls have finished with Duke, they will unquestionably have knit his somewhat spreadeagled presentation into a slick West End show. That will be fine and will, no doubt, please the general public – but we can’t help feeling that it is not Duke Ellington. Perhaps on his concert tour, when he has the chance to play the music associated with his genius rather than his music-publishing interests, he will make the fans realise that this is indeed the one and only Duke who to them is a legend and an idol.68

The 1948 visit represents a transitional phase in Ellington’s presentation and reception in Britain. Unlike 1933, Ellington was no longer reliant on the enthusiasm of fellow musicians (such as Hughes and Hylton) as the tour was arranged under the auspices of the promoter Harold Fielding. Compared with 1933, the balance between variety shows and concerts had shifted in favor of the latter which were also more successful. This may have been because there was greater awareness of the visit by the time the provincial tour commenced, but may also be an indication that Ellington himself – especially without the spectacle of his band – was no longer as successful in variety entertainment but increasingly appealed to a concert-going audience.69 However, the distinction was not absolute at this stage. Although the writer of the Melody Maker editorial cited above found Ray Nance’s “comedy dancing and over-vigorous singing” “almost embarrassing” at the Palladium, Max Jones noticed that the same “vocal antics and rebop dancing drew as big a hand as anything I heard” at the concerts.70 Also, that “an appearance scheduled for Nottingham’s Albert Hall was cancelled by its trustees, a church organisation, on the grounds that jazz was not suitable for the institution,” indicates resistance to jazz in some areas of British society and provides an interesting backdrop to the British Sacred Concerts, discussed later in this chapter.71

The 1958 Tour In 1956, the Musicians’ Union and the American Federation of Musicians reached an agreement whereby there could be reciprocal exchange 68 69 70

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“Editorial: Apprehension,” Melody Maker 26 June 1948, 4. “Ellington Provincial Concert Triumphs,” Melody Maker, 10 July 1948, 1. “Editorial: Apprehension,” 4; “Duke Ellington to Follow British Provincial Triumph with Dates on the Continent,” Melody Maker, 17 July 1948, 1. Strateman, Day, 292.

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of bands between Britain and the US. The program for Ellington’s 1958 concerts acknowledged “Harry Francis, Assistant Secretary of the Musicians’ Union, for his help in negotiating the Anglo-American exchange details.”72 Francis recalled that while many British promoters were keen to book American bands, few had the knowledge required to set up a tour for a British band in America. The first Anglo-American exchange in 1956 brought Stan Kenton to England under the auspices of promoter Harold Davison while Ted Heath performed in America.73 This arrangement set a precedent for a large number of such exchanges prior to Ellington’s return to the U.K. in 1958 – this time with his full orchestra, while Heath again performed in New York. By the time of Ellington’s visit, so many bands had taken advantage of the policy of reciprocity that Melody Maker reported that there was even some danger that the market had become over-saturated, with tickets for some American acts being slow to sell. This precipitated some debate in the pages of the magazine on the reasons for dwindling audiences, which identified poor value for money (short performances for a high price); lack of publicity, especially in the provinces; the timing of shows (which adhered to the decades-old model of two performances each evening, the times of which did not seem to suit 1950s lifestyles); and the tendency to present “a few musicians under a fancy title” rather than an established group. By contrast, tickets for Ellington’s opening concerts were reported to be selling well.74 Unlike in 1948, there was great anticipation of Ellington’s arrival and subsequent coverage in the national press, but this attention consistently referred back to 1933, with little or no mention of his intervening appearance. In the weeks prior to his arrival, Melody Maker printed a “message from Ellington” which referred to the inclusion of Harry Carney and Johnny Hodges who were said to have also been on his “last tour of the U.K.” Max Jones contributed a feature entitled “This World of Jazz. The Duke – 25 Years After.” Jones mentioned hearing Ellington in 1933 and 1950 but not in 1948, although he had reported on performances given in that year.75 Ellington’s visit was perceived to have great historical 72

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Souvenir Programme: Norman Granz in Association with Harold Davison Presents Duke Ellington and His Famous Orchestra in Concert (1958). Harry Francis, “Jazz in Britain, 1924–1974: Reciprocal Arrangements,” http://jazzpro .nationaljazzarchive.org.uk/Francis/As%20I%20heard%20it%20Part%205.htm (accessed 30 September 2014). “Cool-Off Fans Puzzle Agents . . . but Ellington Tour Looks Good,” Melody Maker, 20 September 1958, 1. Duke Ellington, “Frankly – This Is the Greatest!,” Melody Maker, 27 September 1958, 1; Max Jones, “This World of Jazz: The Duke, 25 Years After,” Melody Maker, 4 October 1958, 11.

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importance, as demonstrated by assertions from writers such as Steve Voce that it was “the most outstanding event in our jazz history since the war.”76 Personnel and repertoire were the principle subjects of these preview articles. Having pointed out the inclusion of musicians who some readers would have heard live in 1933, Ellington’s message stated explicitly that, “As always, our main object will be to showcase the men in the band as soloists.” Leonard Feather provided detailed introductions to the band’s expected personnel.77 With regard to repertoire, in addition to “material that goes way back,” Ellington promised numbers from his recent albums Ellington at Newport (1956), Such Sweet Thunder (1957), and A Drum Is a Woman (1956), and “Portrait of Ella Fitzgerald” (from Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Duke Ellington Songbook [1957]) was later added to the list as a nod to co-promoter Norman Granz.78

The Royal Festival Hall Concerts Ellington began his October, 1958 tour with two concerts at London’s Royal Festival Hall, a 2,900-seat concert hall which had been built for the 1951 Festival of Britain. Although he had already presented concerts in Britain – and, in 1958, such concert presentations were actually performed mainly in Gaumont and Odeon cinemas – his inclusion in a London venue known primarily for classical music performances gave the impression of completing his transition from the variety circuit into the realms of high art in a British context. This narrative was anticipated by Feather who noted that “the last time Duke Ellington brought his full band to Europe the jazz world was incredibly different. It was 1933. Duke had never played a concert. He had written only one arrangement (Creole Rhapsody) that was more than three or four minutes long.” Feather’s commentary thus fostered an expectation of serious concerts of Ellington’s extended works.79 However, as seen in several reviews, these latter hopes were confounded in terms of both presentation and repertoire which, as in 1933, were considered to be aimed at popular taste: Those who went to hear “the first serious jazz composer” were no doubt startled to be confronted with a sophisticated entertainer who treated his audience, his orchestra and himself with an air of urbane frivolity.80 76 77

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Steve Voce, “And All the Duke’s Men,” Jazz Journal, October 1958, 2. Ellington, “Frankly,” 1; Leonard Feather, “Ellington: Meet the Band!,” Melody Maker, 4 October 1958, 2–3. 79 Feather, “Ellington,” 2–3. Ellington, “Frankly,” 1. Humphrey Lyttelton, “If They Criticize Duke I May Get Violent,” Melody Maker, 11 October 1958, 10.

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Above all, the show was gay and lighthearted, with none of the atmosphere of pious dedication to art that overcomes some jazz groups when they get into a concert hall.81 The programme was surprising, consisting of medleys of Duke’s most popular numbers of the past thirty years, with but the slightest reference to the more recent orchestral suites.82

Specifically, criticism levelled against Ellington focused on his presentation of “soloists – every man in the band had a considerable solo spot to himself – rather than on the orchestra as a whole.”83 An influential factor here was the inevitable comparison with Count Basie, who had visited Britain twice in the twelve months prior to Ellington. This was exacerbated by a Melody Maker feature, “This Week’s Great Jazz Controversy: Count versus Duke,” in which leading jazz musicians were invited to indulge in a “snap poll.” While Ellington was preferred for those who were interested in soloists, Basie was appreciated for his ensemble work.84 For Vic Bellerby, Ellington’s performances were too contrived: “Basie was quite confident to let his band sit back, find the beat and play number after number, improving all the time. Duke, the showman, played safely, far too safely – thus giving jazz lovers a sad disappointment.”85 Humphrey Lyttelton, the only musician in the poll who refused to side with either Ellington or Basie, pointed out that “Duke doesn’t work like Basie. It’s only on rare occasions that he rocks you in your seat with body blows from the full orchestra.”86 However, Ellington’s emphasis on soloists left his performances liable to similar criticisms leveled at American importations which were perceived as less coherent ensembles put together for commercial gain, such as Norman Granz’s “Jazz from Carnegie Hall.”87 Under the heading “I Was Disappointed,” Bellerby wrote: The main trouble was that Duke, with typical modesty, wrongly demonstrated his unrivalled solo strength by asking nearly every member of the band to take a solo routine. And all the time we felt conscious of the hundreds of Ellington compositions waiting to be played. The true secret of Ellington’s genius is his uncanny ability to weave his soloists into an individual composition, continually absorbing our interest by the ever-changing pattern and colour. We were not given one number in which this happened.88 81 82 84 85 86 87

Philip Gaskell, “Ellington Returns,” Observer (London), 12 October 1958, 18. 83 Ibid. Ibid. “This Week’s Great Jazz Controversy: Count versus Duke,” Melody Maker, 11 October 1958, 1. Vic Bellerby, “I Was Disappointed (Ellington Tour),” Melody Maker, 11 October 1958, 2. Humphrey Lyttelton, “About Ellington,” Melody Maker, 25 October 1958, 10. 88 Bellerby, “I Was Disappointed,” 2. “Cool-Off Fans,” Melody Maker, 1.

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Despite such reservations, for some, the opening of the concert served to reaffirm the transformative power of Ellington’s presence on audience and musicians alike: Ellington himself did not come on . . . [T]hey launched straight into their signature tune, “Take the ‘A’ Train”. It was sad: no drive, no sparkle, no swing. Then, at the end of the number, Duke Ellington walked lightly into the hall . . . We knew everything was going to be alright now, and it was. The music suddenly bubbled and the musicians – except for Hodges and Gonsalves who scowled throughout both sets – managed to look as if they were enjoying themselves.89

More often, the democratic presentation of the individual members of the band directly challenged the idea of Ellington as an autonomous, great artist which had persisted in British commentary since 1933, as well as upheld the value of his ensemble as a mere conduit for his individual artistic expression, a view that was in accordance with a traditional view of classical music practice. At the first mention of a possible visit in 1958, Melody Maker’s readers were reminded that Ellington and his ensemble had been voted top band, composer, and arranger in the magazine’s most recent poll. Critics continued to struggle towards an appreciation of Ellington, and were seemingly reluctant to depart entirely from the notion that he was a conventional composer who wrote for “player, not instrument”:90 Even inside the jazz world, the precise nature of Ellington’s method is woefully misunderstood. He is neither the archetypal pianist-dance-band-leader who plugs his own material, nor the ordinary kind of western composer. Ellington writes not for woodwind, brass and rhythm, but for the individual members of his orchestra.91

No other writers go as far as Stanley Dance, whose essay in the tour program suggests that by 1958 many of the band’s sidemen could be accorded similar artistic status as their leader, thereby exposing a more equal and collaborative quality in the ensemble’s creative work: The band is a band of personality – and personalities. As a unit, it expresses Duke’s personality. He plays piano in it, but essentially the orchestra is his instrument. It interprets his ideas and compositions as no other ever could or can, but the individuality of its components, the musicians within it, is never suppressed.92 89 90 91 92

Gaskell, “Ellington Returns,” 18. H. J., “Score for Player, Not Instrument,” Manchester Guardian, 6 October 1958, 5. “The Observer Profile: Duke Ellington,” Observer, 5 October 1958, 9. Stanley Dance, “The Eloquence of Ellington,” in Souvenir Programme, 3.

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It was perhaps hardly surprising that the British public did not fully appreciate the subtlety of the relationship between Ellington and his musicians. Sinclair Traill’s editorial in the October issue of Jazz Journal pointed out the reliance of the British public on Ellington’s recorded output since his previous visit. Traill’s commentary is reminiscent of the situation prior to Ellington’s 1933 appearances: “We bought all his available records that we hadn’t already got, imported others from America, and have been collecting them ever since.” Ellington’s music was thought to be particularly well suited to consumption in this way, as his was “one band whose records, exhibiting an apparently inexhaustible range of tone colours, have always managed to hold our interest and titillate our musical appetite.”93 Other writers expected that being able to hear Ellington’s band live would improve his popularity: “It has been very noticeable recently – particularly in the case of Count Basie – how much personal presence comes over at a live performance, and consequently how much must be lost on wax.”94 It was also possible for adverse comparisons to be made with well-loved recorded versions of Ellington repertoire: “[Sam Woodyard] and Paul Gonsalves tried valiantly through 30 choruses to whip up the excitement of the recorded ‘Diminuendo [and Crescendo in Blue]’ solo. But it is asking too much to expect this to strike fire regularly.”95 Interestingly, in an interview for Melody Maker, saxophonist Harry Carney indicated an awareness of the dominance of recordings and their influence on audiences: “‘Do you play the same choruses all the time, Harry?’ ‘Yes, I do. Because when I saw Hawkins I wanted to hear exactly the same notes as he did on the records. I wanted to see his movements, the expressions on the face – everything. So I play the same choruses, too, in case there may be a kid who might want it that way as well.’”96 That said, such replication would not be expected by critics and audiences who upheld spontaneity as a criterion for valuing jazz performances. For instance, Dance encouraged Jazz Journal readers that “because Duke’s band is less like a machine than most other big jazz groups, we suggest you catch it at as many concerts as possible. Even in the very unlikely event of its playing the same programme every night, there are sure to be substantially rewarding 93 94

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Sinclair Traill, “Editorial: Duke’s Back,” Jazz Journal, October 1958, 1. Dave Houlden and Frank Dutton, “The Duke Steps Out Once More,” Jazz Journal, November 1958, 7. Max Jones, “A Knockout, of Course, but . . . ” Melody Maker, 11 October 1958, 13. Maurice Burman, “Harry Carney Talks: All I Want Is to Stay with Duke,” Melody Maker, 11 October 1958, 2.

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differences in performance.”97 Lyttelton assumed a more critical stance, arguing that the myths surrounding legendary artists were exacerbated by the unnatural climate brought about by distance and the Musicians’ Union ban, when our knowledge and judgement of musicians was based almost exclusively on gramophone records. And we have seen over and over again how discrepancy between the legend and reality has led to impaired judgement and bewilderment.98

Of course, the period 1933–48 encompassed the American recording ban which restricted the flow of music still further.99

The Leeds Concerts Ellington’s visit to Leeds is frequently noted by commentators, as it was on this occasion that he was introduced to Queen Elizabeth II, a meeting which inspired the subsequent composition of The Queen’s Suite. However, the distinct changes in Ellington’s approach for the Leeds concerts – especially when compared with his opening concerts at the Royal Festival Hall – have attracted less attention. Ellington’s booking for the Leeds Festival appears to have been a key factor in the development of his British tour, as this was reported as a possibility as early as February.100 In 1858, a music festival was staged in Leeds – a city in Yorkshire, north-east England – to celebrate the opening of the town hall by Queen Victoria. Thereafter, this event continued roughly triennially. The Festival usually included only classical music, and featured new work from significant living composers, including Arthur Sullivan, Anton´ın Dvoˇra´ k, Edward Elgar, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Sergei Rachmaninoff, and William Walton. The Festival expanded in length and scope in the years leading up to its centenary, and “by 1958 . . . had spread to even more venues, lasted for a week and included other genres.”101 The Earl of Harewood took over as president of the Festival in the centenary year, and his brother – jazz enthusiast and writer Gerald Lascelles – undoubtedly influenced the 97 98 99

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Stanley Dance, “Lightly and Politely,” Jazz Journal, October 1958, 25. Lyttelton, “If They Criticize Duke,” 10. A strike by members of the American Federation of Musicians against the record industry in 1942–4 meant that union musicians were prohibited from participating in recording sessions, thus restricting the flow of records onto the market. “Ellington Ork for Britain?,” Melody Maker, 15 February 1958, 1. Richard Wilcocks, 150 Years of Singing: A Concise History of Leeds Festival Chorus [cover title: A Brief History . . . ] (Leeds: Meerkat Publications, 2016; orig. pub. 2008); www .leedsfestivalchorus.co.uk/history/ (accessed 14 January 2017).

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introduction of jazz into the program. Described as “the most ambitious week of jazz ever staged in a British city,” there were concerts by Muddy Waters, Jimmy Rushing, and the British bands of Humphrey Lyttelton, John Dankworth and the Jazz Today Unit, in addition to Ellington’s concerts.102 As in 1933, critics attempted to influence Ellington’s programming. Traill travelled with Ellington on the train from London to Leeds and tried to persuade him to dispense with what he perceived were the more commercial elements of his previous performances: We did try to impress upon him that in our opinion he could dispense with the drum solo routine; plus other parts of his programme which had fallen uneasily upon ears attuned to catch Ellington-sounds only. We were informed that the programming for the vast audiences he plays for has been guided by experience. It is an effort to try to please everybody. But, we insisted in our smoothest tones, could not the drum solo be dropped at least from the Leeds shows? The drum routine stayed where it always had been and received by far the greatest applause of the night! “Ah,” said Duke, when we visited his dressing room after the show, “here’s my friend who knows all about drum solos!”103

As this encounter demonstrates, Ellington was well aware of how to approach playing at the festival. He wrote, albeit retrospectively, in Music Is My Mistress: “Festivals of one kind or another had by now become the springboard for new works, much in the same way as our annual Carnegie Hall concerts had previously been. In 1958, I was invited to perform at the first [sic] festival of the arts in Leeds, England, where I had the great honor of being presented to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth.”104 In addition to retaining the drum feature, Hi Fi Fo Fum, at the start of the second half, Ellington began his Leeds concerts with the same sequence of numbers as at the Royal Festival Hall (Take the “A” Train, Black and Tan Fantasy, Creole Love Call, The Mooche, and Newport Up). He then introduced “surprises” by changing the features for individuals. For example, Jimmy Hamilton was heard on My Funny Valentine instead of Tenderly, Clark Terry was featured on Juniflip instead of Perdido, Cat Anderson on Caravan instead of El Gato, and a particular high point, Johnny Hodges on Things Ain’t What They Used to Be rather than Jeep’s Blues.105 Critics who had heard several of Ellington’s performances on tour appreciated this variety. This 102

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“Ellington to Meet the Queen,” Melody Maker, 18 October 1958, 1; “Queen to Hear Jazz at Leeds,” Melody Maker, 11 October 1958, 9. Sinclair Traill, “Editorial: Leeds, Music and Musicians,” Jazz Journal, November 1958, 1. 105 Lyttelton, “About Ellington,” 13. Ellington, Mistress, 196.

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approach also appeared to have the effect of rejuvenating the band, with Max Jones reporting that “the orchestra was playing very keenly, with more bite than I had heard at any concert except at the Kilburn State.”106 Most notably, Ellington also performed six pieces from Such Sweet Thunder prior to the interval, whereas previously only the “Sonnet to Hank Cinq” had been included. Moreover, in the first Saturday concert at Leeds, which was attended by Prince Philip, the “monologue” “Pretty and the Wolf” was included. These works were notably associated with Ellington’s appearances at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario. Although this might appear to be a direct response to the demands of British critics for performances of demonstrably artistic works, it is entirely consistent with Ellington’s more adventurous programming not only for concerts and festivals, as indicated above, but also on his recent albums which, as previously discussed, were largely responsible for setting British critical expectations of his live performances.107 For Dance, these alterations to the program did not go far enough, but he did not blame Ellington. Instead, this choice reflected the state of British jazz audiences who continued to respond favorably to numbers which he perceived not to be “most typical and worthy of Duke Ellington”: A year or so ago we felt that a discerning jazz audience was in the process of creation here. The undiscriminating reaction and applause to Duke’s programme painfully indicated that this was not so. It is a shock to realise that, despite all the magazines, books and records, the audience of 1958 knows far less about jazz and its verities than that of 1933.108

Although Ellington employed some similar alterations in subsequent concerts in Croydon and at the final concerts of the tour in Kilburn, the opening Festival Hall concert provided the blueprint for the majority of the tour.109 As a result, far from the variation in Ellington’s performances that Dance had anticipated, critics and Ellington fans who attended several concerts were particularly disappointed by the (almost) “machine-like” replication of the same program. This observation brought Jones full circle, in his summation of the tour, to the concerns about visiting American 106

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Max Jones, “This World of Jazz Visits Leeds . . . and Leeds Takes Its Festival Calmly,” Melody Maker, 18 October 1958, 13. Here Jones refers to the concerts at the Kilburn State, which immediately proceeded Ellington’s first concert in Leeds. The band returned to Kilburn for the final concerts of the tour. Jones, “A Knockout,” 3; Jones, “This World of Jazz,” 13; and Traill, “Editorial: Leeds,” 1. Stanley Dance, “Lightly and Politely,” Jazz Journal, November 1958, 27. Vic Bellerby, “Jazz Fans ‘Bewildered,’” Melody Maker, 1 November 1958, 11.

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performers which were being debated at the time of Ellington’s arrival, and in particular the detrimental effect of what he perceived as the more-orless pre-formulated “jazz concert” on British audiences. Jones maintained the view that in order to hear the Ellington orchestra at its best, it was necessary “to go to a place where the band played for dancing.”110 However, Ellington’s Sacred Concerts offered a significant counterweight to this view, and they also more generally challenged established ideas about the most appropriate presentation of Ellington.

The Sacred Concerts Ellington presented his First Sacred Concert in Coventry Cathedral and at Great St. Mary’s, Cambridge, at the conclusion of his 1966 and 1967 British tours, respectively. According to an article in The Guardian newspaper, Ellington was responsible for initiating the Coventry concert by sending a tape of his sacred music to the provost of the Cathedral. Other sources suggest that the approach came directly from ABC Television, which broadcast to the Midlands and north of England at weekends until 1968.111 In any case, the concert was organized rapidly and announced at short notice as an unplanned extension to the 1966 tour. Ellington commented at the time: “I’ve been invited to do this programme in many churches and I’m always honoured of course. When the chance came to play at Coventry I was delighted. No, I’ve not seen the cathedral yet.”112 No doubt this comment might have caused a frisson for the majority of readers who would be familiar with the uncompromisingly modernist style of Britain’s newest cathedral. The church of St. Michael in Coventry, West Midlands, was designated as a cathedral in 1918 but was destroyed as a result of bombing in World War Two. A decision was taken to build a new cathedral while leaving the ruins of the former building “as a moving reminder of the folly and waste of war.” The new cathedral, designed by Basil Spence, was consecrated in May 1962, an occasion marked by the premiere of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem.113 Undoubtedly, the interior of the cathedral provided a visually striking backdrop for Ellington’s performance which was particularly important for the television 110 111

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Max Jones, “Impact Could Have Been Stronger,” Melody Maker, 1 November 1958, 11. “Cathedral Jazz Concert,” Guardian (London), 11 February 1966, 3; Geoffrey Beck, “In the Cathedral” [letter], Observer (London), 13 March 1966, 31. “Ellington Stays on for Coventry,” Melody Maker, 19 February 1966, 5. “Our History: Coventry Cathedral,” www.coventrycathedral.org.uk/wpsite/our-history/ (accessed 14 January 2017).

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broadcast. As Jones observed, “Just to see the Ellington band set up on the Chancel steps, in front of the High Altar and Graham Sutherland’s Great Tapestry [of Christ], was a memorable experience.”114 In the Coventry concert, Ellington drew on numbers from his previous Sacred Concerts with the addition of “Come Easter,” which was described as “a shortish and nicely grave band piece.” The concert culminated with “In the Beginning God” (ITBG) before the band offered encores of “West Indian Pancake” and “La Plus Belle Africaine.”115 The following year, Ellington performed a U.K. Sacred Concert with a similar program in the more modest and traditional surroundings of Great St. Mary’s, the university church in Cambridge. Ellington’s high-profile 1973 European tour – which also included a return to the Palladium for an appearance in the Royal Variety Performance that was broadcast on national television – began with the premiere of his Third Sacred Concert at Westminster Abbey. The Abbey is located at the heart of the capital, next to the Houses of Parliament, and has enjoyed particular association with British royalty as a free chapel of the Sovereign and the coronation church since 1066. The concert was organized by Gerald Lascelles, who had been so influential on Ellington’s inclusion in the 1958 Leeds Festival and a figure who would undoubtedly have been able to secure the venue through his royal connections. Lascelles was also Chairman of the United Nations Association Concerts Committee and Ellington’s concert was given in celebration of United Nations Day, which marks the signing of the UN charter on 24 October 1945. The concert was attended by the then Prime Minister, Edward Heath, and the Queen’s sister, Princess Margaret. Critics identified some significant problems with the Sacred Concerts. First, the musical material rarely escaped criticism: ITBG a trifle too “bitty” for this reviewer, though, and contains several excruciating moments, the classic low spot being sustained by the long-suffering Cliff Adams Singers, refugees from the television commercial and Top-40 backing group, conscientiously chanting the names of the books of the Bible in ghastly mid-Atlantic accents.116 The newer pieces seem to add little to what Ellington has previously done, and done well.117 114

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Max Jones, “Caught in the Act: Duke Swings in the Aisles,” Melody Maker, 26 February 1966, 23. Ibid. Valerie Wilmer, “Duke Ellington/London Philharmonic, Royal Albert Hall, London,” Down Beat, 6 April 1967, 28. Ronald Atkins, “Duke Ellington at Westminster Abbey,” Guardian (London), 25 October 1973, 14.

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In addition, the acoustic properties of the surroundings contributed to a less-than-perfect experience for the audience: The occasion was momentous, the jazz superb, the acoustics, unfortunately, vile, translating the impeccable precision of the Ellington brass into the shambling tones of a third-rate pit orchestra.118 Hearing them, in a nave which is eighty feet high, eighty wide, and more than three times that in length, was a more powerful experience, though acoustically the lofty hall seemed far from perfect.119 Although I was sitting approximately thirty yards from the rostrum, much of the proceedings were indistinct or inaudible to me . . . And when we can buy the record and hear how it all actually sounded, I think it will be evident that the great man’s visit to Westminster Abbey was time well spent.120

With such views in mind, it perhaps seems odd that reviewers were generally in agreement that the Ellington Sacred Concerts were successful. This general assessment was both despite and because of the use of what a photo-journalism piece in Jazz Monthly termed “improbable” venues for Ellington performances.121 The concerts have to be put into the context of earlier objections to jazz on moral grounds in Britain (sometimes actually advanced by members of the clergy), which would have precluded its inclusion in religious buildings.122 Certainly, this history was not far from the minds of the critics in attendance in 1966: On Duke Ellington’s first British tour in 1933, such an occurrence would have been unthinkable. Indeed, had the Duke band stolen into some holy place and played Mood Indigo, there would certainly have been clerical dismissals, questions in the House and thunderings in a Times leader.123 There was certainly no sense that either [the music] or its composer and his artists being out of place in a cathedral.124

This underlying tension between genre and venue illuminates the significance of the traditional-yet-modern Coventry Cathedral as the venue for Ellington’s first British Sacred Concert. Indeed, the success of this concert – where the presence of television cameras attracted more criticism than the actual performances – must have encouraged the use of a more traditional venue in Cambridge the following year (a location where jazz 118 119 120 121 122 123 124

Vic Bellerby, “Duke Ellington Coventry Cathedral,” Jazz Journal, April 1966, 4. Jones, “Caught in the Act,” 23. Les Tomkins, “Duke Ellington at the Abbey” [c. October 1973], in Vail, Diary, Part 1, 442. David Redfern, “I.T.B.G. in the Cathedral,” Jazz Monthly, March 1966, 18. Parsonage, “Evolution,” 22, 42, and 187–8. Bellerby, “Duke Ellington Coventry Cathedral,” 4. Dennis Barker, “Review: Ellington at Coventry,” Guardian (London), 22 February 1966, 6.

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appreciation and performance was well established in the university community and likely to result in an enthusiastic audience).125 Reflecting on the Cambridge concert in Down Beat, Valerie Wilmer commented on the lack of tension between the traditional religious surroundings and modern jazz: “The hallowed portals of the 13th-century church didn’t daunt the swingers as much as had the forbidding atmosphere of the Albert Hall.”126 Ultimately, Ellington’s 1973 concert was presented in surroundings which were not only traditional but steeped in significant British history: “The Abbey is a deal more imposing than Coventry Cathedral, and more oppressive, I would imagine, so far as jazz spirit is concerned.”127 The largely positive reception of the two earliest British Sacred Concerts must also be considered with reference to the tours of which they were the concluding event. The Coventry performance took place at the end of Ellington’s tour with Ella Fitzgerald, a billing which provoked debate in Melody Maker’s letters pages before the performances had even commenced. A letter from Vic Bellerby strongly rearticulates familiar arguments around the commercial nature of vocal performances which he clearly distinguishes from the artistry of instrumental jazz, portraying the inclusion of Fitzgerald as detrimental to the proper presentation of Ellington.128 By contrast, tickets for the Coventry concert were free and thus appeared to subvert commercial motives of promoters, although the reported “black market” activity was perhaps inevitable.129 In 1967, the Cambridge concert was immediately preceded by a concert in the Royal Albert Hall with the London Philharmonic Orchestra (LPO). Despite decades of arguing for the presentation of Ellington as a serious artist, the performances of works such as A Tone Parallel to Harlem in an established concert hall by a renowned symphony orchestra were problematic for the critics. Both Wilmer for Down Beat and Ronald Atkins for The Guardian felt that the orchestra added little to Ellington’s work, due in part both to weaknesses they perceived in the extended compositions which were performed and to the fact that they preferred the intimacy of the Cambridge concert: At the little university church of Great St. Mary, last month, [singer Esther Marrow] touched more hearts and moved more souls with a few magnificent bars of

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Beck, “In the Cathedral,” 31; Parsonage, Evolution, 74–5. Wilmer, “Duke Ellington/London Philharmonic,” 28. Max Jones, “Duke at the Abbey,” Melody Maker, 3 November 1973, 14. Vic Bellerby, “A Plot Against the Duke’s Fans?” [letter], Melody Maker, 15 January 1966, 16. “Potpourri: Duke Ellington at Coventry,” Down Beat, 24 March 1966, 15.

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Ellington’s Come Sunday than the combined forces of the composer, his orchestra, and the London Philharmonic had succeeded in doing the previous evening when they all but filled the vast arena of London’s acoustically antiquated Royal Albert Hall.130 Neither event was outstanding, understandably enough, as Ellington was not on home ground . . . The evening at Cambridge was more satisfying if not noticeably uplifting . . . . As a warm and unpretentious religious spectacular it was very well received.131

In a 1967 column in Jazz Journal, Bellerby was specific in linking presentations of Ellington alongside both Fitzgerald and the LPO as unsuitable, in his view forcing London audiences out to the provinces to hear a “band concert.”132 In essence, critics objected to the performances with Fitzgerald and with the LPO as commercially contrived, whereas the Sacred Concerts, despite the musical and acoustic problems, were appreciated as a direct, albeit calculated, expression of Ellington’s persona: The suite [sic] was Ellington at his most complex and perhaps self-conscious, but certainly not least effective.133 But something was lacking. Could it be that in his aspirations toward the acceptance that is already his, Ellington’s pretentiousness has conquered his “soul”?134

In 1973, Jones could not disguise a similar yearning to Bellerby’s for the Ellington of old, regretting that the Westminster event was “less of a band concert, less of a swinging affair, than previous concerts had been.” In Jones’s view, Ellington’s performances within a religious context had always been received with minimal controversy in Britain, but latterly there was generally a greater sense of acceptance and understanding.135 And, according to Les Tomkins, If anybody went to the Abbey thinking in terms of the Ellington band’s vast jazz repertoire, they would have been dissatisfied. This had little to do with that. It included jazz rhythms, it was motivated by that innate jazz feel, but essentially it was Duke Ellington’s elaborate, eloquent hymn to his maker.136

Moreover, most reviewers of the Coventry and Cambridge concerts note that the audience were given permission to applaud, indicating that Ellington’s performances transcended the usual behaviors associated with such 130 131 132 133 135

Wilmer, “Duke Ellington/London Philharmonic,” 28. Atkins, “Duke Ellington at Westminster Abbey,” 7. Vic Bellerby, “Jazz in Britain: Duke Ellington,” Jazz Journal, March 1967, 26. 134 Wilmer, “Duke Ellington/London Philharmonic,” 28. Barker, “Review,”6. 136 Tomkins, “Duke Ellington at the Abbey,” 442. Jones, “Duke at the Abbey,” 14.

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venues, but it was a wider sense of transcendence which dominated the reception of the final British Sacred Concert. In 1973, Ellington’s autobiography, Music Is My Mistress, was about to be published, and although his lymphatic cancer was not yet public knowledge, Ellington was noticeably weaker. In this context, it is perhaps not so surprising that Derek Jewell’s extensive Melody Maker article previewing the Westminster Abbey concert already sounds like a retrospective: “Any Ellington performance these days is an event to be treasured, not missed, since logic dictates that even the Iron Duke and his musicians will not be able to go on indefinitely.”137 For an artist clearly in the final phase of his career, if not his life, the expression of personal faith was appreciated as more genuine than before, especially as Ellington repeatedly asserted around this time that the Sacred Concerts were the most important things he had ever done. Jewell understood the Sacred Concerts as one part of an artistic persona which transcended boundaries between art and popular genres, venues, and performance practices: In Europe we tend to treat the Duke so seriously and so royally (as he truly deserves) that we’ve perhaps lost sight of the whole aura of the man’s background. He plays sacred concerts, yes; he plays seriously to serious people, yes; but he is also of the world, and one facet of his multi-faceted music is about that too . . . He plays cathedrals, concerts, casinos. He’s for fun as well as for fundamental.138

Despite his reservations about the concert performance itself, Ronald Atkins appreciated the wider artistic importance of Ellington’s sacred work, making an explicit reference to racial identity which was relatively rare in post-1933 British writing on Ellington: “By remaining true to his roots, by exploiting the gospel elements which make up a powerful strand of the black American tradition, he has, however, produced a form that can surmount the barrier relegating religious music to High Art.”139 For Jones, too, the impact of the concert transcended cultural boundaries to make a unique contribution to the wider history of Britain: Westminster Abbey holds a unique historical place in the consciousness of most English-speaking nations. Nothing like the sweet thunder of Duke’s concert of sacred music had ever infiltrated its domes and pillars, tombs and pews, its choir and nave before. And in all probability, nothing ever will again.140 137

138 140

Derek Jewell, “Iron Duke: Derek Jewell Welcomes DE to Britain for the Opening of His 1973 European Tour,” Melody Maker, 27 October 1973, 49. 139 Atkins, “Duke Ellington at Westminster Abbey,” 7. Ibid. Jones, “Duke at the Abbey,” 14.

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Conclusion In 1933, Ellington’s reception was governed by expectations associated with variety theatre, radio broadcasting, dance engagements, and concerts. British critics upheld values associated with high art music as the principal criteria for evaluating Ellington, and attempted to influence both performers and audiences into conforming to conventions associated with concert presentations. Realization that these compromises were unsuccessful for either side was fueled by the growing awareness of the particular qualities of Ellington’s art, influenced by a developing understanding of the racial dimension of his work and jazz more widely. Ellington’s 1948 performances have been neglected by commentators both then and now. However, they represent an important phase in the transition from variety theater to (provincial) concert halls, and notably advanced the presentation of a combination of what would have previously been classified as “art” and “popular” aspects of Ellington’s work. In retrospect, it is not surprising that following Ellington’s absence from the U.K., during which his ensemble work was represented exclusively through his albums, concerts staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1958 disappointed the critics. However, his Leeds performances drew on a “festival” presentation model which was new – and successful – in Britain, and which again featured a balanced program. At the same time, the replication of concert programs elsewhere on the tour meant that some critics continued to uphold dance engagements as the best way to experience Ellington, now employing criteria more typically associated with jazz, such as variety and spontaneity, in their judgments of his performances. This perception was challenged by the Sacred Concerts, which presented Ellington in a new situation where – unlike variety theaters, dance clubs, and concert halls – there were no particular performance practices to which he would be expected to conform. Significantly, the Sacred Concerts prompted critical appreciation of the unique qualities of the live event, complete with acoustic and even musical imperfections, which could not be replicated by recordings – on which British Ellington fans had been so reliant in the past. Ultimately, Ellington’s sacred music could not be understood other than as a personal expression. This view was commensurate with his status as an artist, albeit in a rather romantic sense, especially given the retrospective tone of contemporary commentary. The concerts were also perceived to be largely transcendent of particular expectations concerning genre, venue,

“Art or Debauchery?”

and performance practices, and therefore could be more readily evaluated on their own terms. However, this assessment of Ellington was not entirely new, notwithstanding the numerous diversions along the way which have been discussed across this chapter. In 1933, when Stanley Nelson posed the question of whether Ellington’s music was “art or debauchery,” he identified its direct appeal to the senses, and the Liverpool Post and Mercury commented: “When a man is taken up with equal enthusiasm by lovers of jazz and the musical intelligentsia there is obviously something very special about him.”141 Rather, it was the Sacred Concerts that finally provided opportunities for the long-held desire of British critics to understand and promote Ellington as an artist to be fully realized. 141

“Band of Memory Musicians,” Liverpool Post and Mercury, 28 June 1933, 7.

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“Nobody Was Looking”: The Unparalleled Jazz Piano Legacy of Duke Ellington bill dobbins

On the evening of 23 November 1946, the Ellington orchestra played its annual concert at New York’s Carnegie Hall, which had become a tradition since the great success of its debut appearance on 23 January 1943. Ellington and his writing partner, Billy Strayhorn, always had a new major work or suite ready to premiere at these special occasions, and the fall 1946 program included the first New York performance of the Deep South Suite. Although “Happy-Go-Lucky Local” was the only movement from this work that the orchestra kept in its repertoire, Ellington’s solo piano contribution, “Nobody Was Looking,” was a highly evocative and musically significant piece in its own right. It is interesting to note that, having not performed the piece publicly for more than fifteen years, Ellington dusted it off for a rare solo concert at New York’s Museum of Modern Art on 4 January 1962. In fact, the title of the piece is a plausible answer to the question of why Ellington’s wide-ranging and, at times, visionary work as a jazz pianist rarely achieved the recognition it deserved. Throughout Ellington’s extraordinary career as the leader of one of the most important orchestras in the history of jazz and one of the most original and prolific composers in the history of Western music, his unique contributions as a jazz pianist were easy to miss, especially when that was not where the attention of the jazz audience was most keenly focused. In the later years when the orchestra played in nightclubs, Ellington had a witty opening in which he would stride out to center stage as the band’s theme song, Strayhorn’s Take the “A” Train, was coming to a close. After greeting the audience in typically glowing Ellingtonian terms, he would raise an arm toward the piano, palm turned upward, and announce, “And now, ladies and gentlemen, we would like you to meet our piano player.” As author and jazz critic Ralph Gleason suggested, the gesture and manner were so convincing that at least a few Ellington novices over the years may actually have seen a pianist at the instrument before the applause rose and they got the joke. As effective as Ellington’s humor and showmanship 108

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were, however, he also said once, “There has never been a serious musician who is as serious about his music as a serious jazz musician.”1 Ellington the composer and Ellington the pianist were both constantly learning from everyone and everything, while always managing to utilize all that was taken in from an unmistakably personal point of view, and often in a more convincing manner than the sources from which such appropriations came. In his ability to both consolidate and refine the music of his time, Ellington resembles another of the most powerful of Western composers and keyboardists, Johann Sebastian Bach. Bach voraciously absorbed the forms and local idioms or mannerisms of the important composers and regions of his day, but managed to utilize his sources and inspirations in such an exceptional manner that his compositions are still among the highest expressions of the broad language of chromatic tonal music. Ellington’s mastery of the musical common practice of twentiethcentury America was equally impressive at a time when the language had expanded to include many elements from African American folk music, spirituals, the blues, ragtime, American popular song, and jazz. To hear the Ellington orchestra in concert was to hear the entire history of jazz to that point in time. Ellington’s piano playing similarly reflected the history of jazz piano in a manner rarely equaled by pianists who were more highly acclaimed. He incorporated elements of most influential jazz styles or idioms in at least some of his music, and he anticipated more modern elements than he is usually given credit for. Just as Ellington’s music contained and reconciled seemingly contradictory elements – such as sweet and pungent or sophisticated and primitive – it also contained both the old and the new, and Ellington was never one to automatically equate either modernity or tradition with musical quality or the lack of it. This chapter explores this legacy through close studies of key examples from Ellington’s recorded piano performances.

Ellington’s Early Pianistic Study and Development As a child, one of Ellington’s first preoccupations was baseball; but after he was hit on the head with a bat while playing with a friend, his mother convinced him that he had to find a less hazardous passion. The switch to 1

Ralph J. Gleason, Celebrating the Duke, and Louis, Bessie, Billie, Bird, Carmen, Miles, Dizzy and Other Heroes (Boston: Little, Brown, 1975), 159. In this quote, the first “serious” in the sentence implies “classical.” In the 1930s, when this statement was made, serious music was understood to mean classical music, implying that all other music was not really serious.

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piano lessons became permanent when, having participated in a number of house parties, he noticed that “when you were playing piano there was always a pretty girl standing down at the bass clef end of the piano.”2 Ellington’s combination of the practical and creative aspects of life continued throughout his career, whether coming from basic situational necessities, personal experience, deadlines, or challenges of one sort or another. He wrote his first piano piece while working as a soda jerk at Washington D.C.’s Poodle Dog Caf´e. As titles are often the final necessities for jazz composers, he ended up naming the number Soda Fountain Rag.3 Many of the local pianists that Ellington listened to and learned from while growing up in Washington – including Doc Perry, Louis Brown, Louis Thomas, Claude Hopkins, and Les Dishman, among others – specialized in music from the ragtime repertoire and they typically developed their own ways of playing the most popular numbers. It was through Doc Perry’s tutelage that Ellington learned to read music. Perry never charged a penny for their informal lessons and there was often food in the bargain as well. Ellington said that most of the local pianists were eager to pass on their tricks to younger enthusiasts; and if someone at an informal session asked one of them what they had just done, the pianist would play the passage again. There was also a good deal of musical exchange between those who could read music and those who could not. Another important figure during Ellington’s youth was his high school music teacher, Henry Grant, who also gave private classical piano and harmony lessons. Billy Taylor, an important jazz pianist who studied with Grant during the 1930s, remembered that his lessons were sometimes interrupted by a phone call to Grant from Ellington. Whether the caller was just paying respects or getting another tip from his old friend and mentor, in such instances the remainder of Taylor’s lesson would be about Duke Ellington.4 While Ellington continued his harmony studies with Grant, he was always paying attention to the musical influences that surrounded him in everyday life. As he put it, “I could also hear people whistling, and I got all the Negro music that way. You can’t learn that in any school.”5

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4 5

Ellington, Mistress, 22. According to Ellington, the name of his first piano teacher was Mrs. Clinkscales. Although Ellington never made a commercial recording of Soda Fountain Rag in its entirety, there is an incomplete version on the recording Duke Ellington, Live at the Whitney, Impulse IMPD-173, 1972, LP. For more on this piece, see Tucker, Early, 33–41. Billy Taylor. Telephone interview with the author, August 2007. Ellington, Mistress, 33. For more on Ellington’s pianistic influences and experiences before his move to New York, see Tucker, Early, and Cohen, America, 18–19.

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After moving to New York in 1923, his informal type of studies continued, this time with the composer, conductor, and violinist Will Marion Cook. Ellington’s most extensive education in jazz piano, however, consisted of the many jam sessions, known as “cutting contests,” that were a regular part of the New York nightclub and “after hours” scene. All the finest jazz pianists in New York frequented these sessions, including James P. Johnson, Willie “The Lion” Smith, and Thomas “Fats” Waller. One of the most well-known venues for these events was an establishment called Mexico’s on 133rd Street in Harlem, which was run by George James, a Harlem resident who was born in the South and had actually fought as a mercenary in Mexico. Johnson and The Lion befriended the young Ellington during his first years in New York. Sonny Greer, the drummer in the Ellington orchestra from its inception until 1950, introduced him to The Lion shortly after Ellington’s arrival in New York. As for Johnson, Ellington had learned his Carolina Shout from a piano roll before leaving Washington, D.C. Carolina Shout was one of the contest pieces used at the late-night piano sessions, and Johnson was impressed when Ellington sat right down at the piano and played it for him at the occasion of their first meeting. Once again combining the practical with the creative, Ellington’s strategy at these “cutting contests” was to start them.6 After buying all the participants a drink, he would perform first and then enjoy the inspiration of hearing some of New York’s finest pianists trying to outplay one another, without ever risking the unenviable position of being beaten to a degree that might be humiliating. At the same time, he was cleverly taking in a wealth of musical knowledge that he would make use of throughout his career.

Refining His Craft and Finding His Voice Ellington’s first important solo piano composition was Black Beauty, which he recorded on 1 October 1928.7 The piece is also notable in that it both received many reincarnations in arrangements for the Ellington orchestra and remained in the group’s repertoire. Although the New York 6

7

Ellington relates this story in his own words in the film, A Duke Named Ellington, dir. Terry Carter, Council for Positive Images, 2007, DVD (first aired on PBS on 18 July 1988). Black Beauty was recorded earlier in 1928 in two versions by the Ellington orchestra, one for the Brunswick label on 21 March (The Washingtonians, Black Beauty, Brunswick 4009, 78 rpm), and the other for Victor on 26 March (Duke Ellington and His Orchestra, Black Beauty, Victor 21580-A, 78 rpm). Interestingly, the piano version came after the orchestra version.

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Example 4.1 Black Beauty (1 October 1928), A theme, mm. 1–4, transcribed by Bill Dobbins

pianists used formal designs in their compositions that were different from the ragtime forms heard in the music of Jelly Roll Morton and other New Orleans pianists, both schools of musicians were fond of pieces that consisted of several contrasting thematic sections or strains. After a 4-bar introduction, Black Beauty features a 32-bar AABA grouping of eight-bar phrases followed by a contrasting sixteen-bar C section and 16-bar variation, and, finally, a variation of the opening AABA material and a 2-bar coda. The introduction consists of dominant thirteenth arpeggios that ascend in whole steps (E13–F13– G13) leaving the key of the music in doubt. However, by proceeding through the circle of fourths to C13 and F7+5 , Ellington establishes the key of B. The A theme of Black Beauty (Example 4.1) makes very colorful use of so-called “rootless” voicings, in which the notes being played imply a chord root that is not actually present. The left-hand voicings in the second and third measures could be analyzed as incomplete E and D half-diminished chords, respectively. However, the sound of these voicings strongly suggests an F7+5 chord followed by B9, both with no root. Rootless voicings became much more common in jazz during the 1940s. Pianists such as Bud Powell, Hank Jones, and Al Haig – who were among the primary keyboard contributors in developing the bebop style of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie – preferred these kinds of voicings for their transparent and open sonority; but many early jazz pianists, including Ellington, were already using them. Half-step dissonances in the right hand, as in the second measure of the A theme, were used by James P. Johnson and others, often to intensify the bluesy quality in a melody. While the first A section ends in a half cadence on an implied F9+5 chord, the second A section moves from a second inversion B triad in measure 7 to E13 in measure 8. Moreover, the right-hand melody is an abbreviated version of the E13 arpeggio heard in the very first measure of the introduction. Here, however, this E13 chord is a passing harmony

“Nobody Was Looking”

to D7, the first chord of the B section. The 8-bar B section modulates to the relative G minor in the first three measures, then quickly shifts to the key of F and a common turnaround in that key: F–D7–Gm7–C7. The third A section concludes on the tonic B triad, but in second inversion. Ellington arrives at this chord through a return to the first three left-hand voicings of the A theme, but the harmonic rhythm is now accelerated to one beat for each chord (B/F–F9+5 – B9–F9+5 ), a simple yet highly effective means of developing his material. The contrary motion in the final measures between the melody (F– G–A–G–F) and the bass line (F–E–D–E–F) is a masterstroke. The most interesting thing about Black Beauty’s C theme is that, while the first chord is F7, the music does not, in fact, remain in the key of B-flat. Instead, the F7 chord is simply the first in a series of dominant seventh chords, changing every two measures, that move through the circle of fourths (F7– B7–E7). The 2-measure break in mm. 7–8 seems to indicate that the E7 chord is the functional dominant, leading to A-flat in m. 7. However, as this A-flat chord is a dominant ninth chord rather than a simple triad, there is a hint of more harmonic motion to come. Here, Ellington moves back and forth between A9 and C9, resisting a definite commitment to any particular tonic. The A9 chord ultimately connects back to F9 for the second 8-bar phrase, completing a pattern of descending minor thirds (C–A–F). The second 8-bar phrase of the C section is nearly identical to the first, but ends with chromatically descending dominant chords (A9–G9–G9–F9), eventually setting up the return to the B-flat tonic chord at the beginning of the closing variation of the AABA material. In the two 8-bar C phrases, Ellington harmonizes his right-hand melody with parallel first inversion triads, a basic harmonic texture that he exploited throughout his career, finding musical contexts that always seemed to yield fresh and surprising sonorities. In the C theme variation here, he develops the sound of these parallel triads throughout the sixteen measures. Ellington may have discovered such material in the playing of Willie “The Lion” Smith, who used it quite effectively. Both Morning Air and Sneakaway, from Smith’s 1939 Commodore recordings, contain characteristic examples of his triadic melody harmonization.8 Ellington’s variation of the opening AAB material introduces fresh colorations of the original harmonies, including a whole-tone scale flourish in place of the blue-note dissonance in the second measure of the 8

Willie “The Lion” Smith, Morning Air, Commodore Mx B-531–2, 1939, 78 rpm, and Sneakaway, Commodore Mx B-537–1, 1939, 78 rpm.

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A sections. Although the whole-tone scale was not an uncommon sound in early jazz piano (particularly in the late 1920s), Ellington often used it in ways that clearly informed the vocabulary of Thelonious Monk in the years to come. Ellington sets up the B theme variation with a series of chromatically descending dominant thirteenth chords, beginning with B13 and played as staccato, even eighth notes. The shift from swing eighths to even eighths creates a double-time feeling, as the staccato eighth notes feel like quarter notes in the doubled tempo. These eighth notes continue for the first two measures, decorating the D13 chord and its dominant, A13, with half-step embellishments (E13–D13– B13–A13). The dizzying chromaticism ends in two right-hand breaks on the Gm tonic chord and Bm6, respectively, with the cascading descents returning smoothly to the key of F and the original lilting swing tempo. The last four measures of this variation are nearly identical to those of the original B theme. The broken tenths and octaves in the left hand, as heard in measures 5 through 8 of the B theme variation and elsewhere, provide rhythmic interest and effective alternatives to the more common stride piano lefthand pattern of alternating bass notes and mid-register chords played in steady quarter notes. Actually, the common stride pattern is rarely heard in many early jazz piano recordings, and Black Beauty is a typical example of these. There were numerous approaches to stating and embellishing the pulse in early jazz piano playing, and Ellington’s recordings from the 1920s through the 1940s demonstrate that he was aware of them all, incorporating whatever best suited the music at hand. It is impressive to notice how Ellington makes subtle yet unmistakable connections between the different sections of Black Beauty by utilizing simple and easily identifiable material in different musical contexts, sometimes disguising it through chromatic embellishment and rhythmic augmentation or diminution, including the harmonic rhythm. For Ellington, this was most likely the result of an extremely well-focused attention or, as he liked to call it, “mental isolation,” rather than a premeditated or academic process. The musical vocabulary of Black Beauty is typical of the piano music of James P. Johnson, Fats Waller, and Willie “The Lion” Smith. The infectious lilt in the playing is reminiscent of Waller, whose earliest solo piano pieces, such as Muscle Shoals Blues, were recorded in 1922.9 Still, Ellington’s piano playing already exhibits signs of individuality, especially in the phrasing 9

Fats Waller, Muscle Shoals Blues, Okeh 4757-A, 1922, 78 rpm.

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and pacing of the introduction, and in the tone quality and touch in the more expressive moments. Of course, all of the more advanced harmonies that early jazz pianists were using had been used at least a generation earlier by European and American classical composers. The point here is that music is like a language, and the most creative musicians do not need to try to invent a new language in order to express their individual take on things. In fact, Ellington could spice up a traditional jazz context with sounds that, in the hands of other pianists, might seem no more than fashionable modernism in the cult of the bizarre, appearing and vanishing as quickly as the fashions of the pop culture. For Ellington, however, music had something to do with singing, dancing, and praying (in some of his piano music after 1950, meditating also comes to mind). An economy of means and imaginative development of basic material gave his writing for his orchestra the same durable qualities found in his piano playing: simplicity and directness that spoke to the mainstream jazz audience combined with an effectively judicious infusion of imaginative harmonies and unusual or angular melodies that intrigued musicians and the more adventurous listeners. This is another example of how Ellington combined seemingly contradictory elements in a manner that showed them to be complementary and, ultimately, representing the best of both worlds. If, as many jazz masters have contended, the creative process moves from imitation to assimilation to innovation, Ellington’s piano playing in the late 1920s and early 1930s illustrates the degree to which he was already assimilating the broad pianistic vocabulary that was the common parlance of New York piano players. But even as early as 1930, he was also beginning to make contributions as an innovator. For instance, the third measure of Mood Indigo, which consists of nothing more than a simple minor triad, is an example of pure genius, not by the material presented, but by the context in which it is placed.10 After hearing a B-flat triad followed by a C9 chord, the kind of F chord that is expected is some variety of F7. When, however, a totally unadorned F minor triad appears, it is as though we are hearing this familiar chord for the very first time, purely and without the usual associations. To this day, few jazz musicians outside of Ellington’s orchestra have played the opening phrase of Mood Indigo as Ellington composed it, and to inadvertently omit that simple chord in an unexpected place is to overlook the one thing that really makes the whole phrase something unique. Mood Indigo will be revisited toward the end 10

The Jungle Band, Mood Indigo, Brunswick E34928-A, 1930, 78 rpm.

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of this chapter in relation to Ellington’s pianistic variations from different recordings throughout his career. The late 1920s and early 1930s found Ellington knee deep in composing and arranging for his orchestra’s nearly nonstop engagement at New York’s Cotton Club, an extremely popular venue with the somewhat surreal arrangement in which an all-black roster of musicians and dancers performed for an all-white clientele. In addition to the purely instrumental numbers that were floorshow and radio broadcast highlights for the band or for customer dancing at the club, Ellington also had to compose and arrange music (typically by the revue composers) for the floorshow dancers, singers, and variety skits, thus leaving little time for practicing the piano. Whether or not Ellington sensed during these years that recording a definitive solo piano number was better done sooner than later, he came up with a short but breathtaking tour de force called Lots o’ Fingers. Neatly packaged in a medley that started and ended with the slow and plaintive orchestra numbers East St. Louis Toodle-O and Black and Tan Fantasy, Ellington recorded the piece on 9 February 1932.11 This performance leaves no doubt that he could deliver the kind of knockout display piece expected of all the great Harlem pianists. The blistering tempo is, on average, about 300 quarter notes per minute. The key centers of the thematic sections in Lots o’ Fingers move through the circle of fourths from C to F, B-flat, E-flat, and A-flat. Later extended works such as Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue (1937) and Blue Belles of Harlem (1943) used a similar key scheme to at least some extent.12 Of course, Ellington’s piano playing was informed by many sources other than his keyboard peers and elders. In the January 1931 Brunswick recording of his two-part orchestra composition, Creole Rhapsody, part two begins with an extended solo piano interlude. The interlude ends with a 12-bar blues solo in E-flat, coincidentally the same key as Louis Armstrong’s famous West End Blues, recorded in 1928.13 Ellington’s phrasing and melodic content shows some influence not only from Earl Hines, 11

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Duke Ellington and His Orchestra, East St. Louis Toodle-O – Lots o’ Fingers – Black and Tan Fantasy, Victor 71836–2, 1932, 78 rpm. Duke Ellington and His Famous Orchestra, Diminuendo in Blue, Brunswick M648–1, 1937, 78 rpm, Crescendo in Blue, Brunswick M649–1, 1937, 78 rpm, and Duke Ellington and His Orchestra, “Blue Belles of Harlem,” The Duke Ellington Carnegie Hall Concerts: January 1943, Prestige 34004, 1977, LP set. The Jungle Band, Creole Rhapsody, Parts 1 and 2, Brunswick E35939-A and Brunswick E35940-A, 1931, 78 rpm; Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five, West End Blues, Okeh 8597, 1928, 78 rpm; Duke Ellington and His Orchestra, Creole Rhapsody, Part 1 and 2, Victor 68231–2 and Victor 68233–3, 1931, 78 rpm.

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who was the pianist on West End Blues, but also from Armstrong’s lines. Nearly five months later the Ellington orchestra recorded a completely different version of Creole Rhapsody for the Victor label. The comparison of content, development, and form in the two versions makes for a fascinating study in itself.14 Of particular interest in the second version is Barney Bigard’s rubato statement of the main theme toward the end of part two, with Ellington’s accompaniment displaying an exemplary balance of spontaneous creativity and solid support. There are many brilliant jazz piano soloists who are not particularly good accompanists, and vice versa. Ellington was exceptional in both roles. He could vary the manner and content of his accompaniment to suit a particular soloist; and he had the rare ability to drop in a minimal response to a phrase of the orchestra, or one of its horn sections, which framed it perfectly. A typical example in Ellington’s early piano playing of finding a new wrinkle in a familiar situation can be heard in the introduction to Uptown Downbeat, recorded on 29 July 1936.15 In response to the ensemble’s opening figure, Ellington puts the ninth, C, on the bottom of his widely spaced B-flat minor voicings (a situation where someone like Count Basie would have used the more consonant B). This creates a prickly dissonance that he resolves to B at the end of the phrase. There are many jazz theory and arranging texts that discourage students from using exposed minor ninth intervals because they are “too dissonant.” Ellington, however, was already using them convincingly in the early 1930s. For him, there was only one simple rule for making music: “If it sounds good, it’s good music, and if it doesn’t, then it is the other kind.”16

Piano in the Background: The Middle Years The late 1930s and early 1940s were watershed years for Ellington the composer, and there are moments in many of the recordings from this period where Ellington the pianist shines through as well. These middleperiod pianistic displays begin with Ellington’s Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue, recorded on 20 September 1937. The first and second parts of this remarkable virtuoso ensemble showcase are connected by an exotic piano solo with rhythm section accompaniment. Formally, the solo consists of a chorus of blues in D-flat with the last two measures repeated as a tag. 14 15 16

There is an insightful comparison in Howland, Uptown, 167–71. Duke Ellington Orchestra, Uptown Downbeat, Brunswick B19628–1, 1936, 78 rpm. Ellington, Mistress, 455.

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Although the half-step/whole-step diminished scale had certainly been used in classical music before 1937, this is certainly one of its earliest appearances in jazz.17 In this solo, Ellington selects a minimal amount of content and develops it in a straightforward and convincing manner. He begins with right-hand voicings just above the treble clef that contain the raised ninth of the D7 chord (enharmonically the minor third) on top and the seventh and third below. The left hand takes on the melodic function with a descending line in the middle of the treble clef that repeats the lowered ninth, root, and seventh (D, D, and C), concluding on the fifth (A). This material is played once more to complete the first four measures of the blues form. All the notes in these measures belong to the D half-step/wholestep diminished scale (D–D–E–F–G–A– B–C–D). In the next four measures, Ellington moves this material a perfect fifth lower to G7, then a perfect fourth lower, back to D7. In the last four measures of the chorus he continues down another perfect fourth to A7 and, finally, a perfect fifth lower to D7. As the last two measures of the chorus are played two more times as a tag, a gradual ritardando leads to a final sustained D7+9 chord.18 Ellington’s gradual descent from medium-high to medium-low register provides a brief recap of the overall shape of the “diminuendo” half of the composition. His emphasis on the raised ninth or blue third makes a subtle connection to the “crescendo” half that follows. In this second part of the number, the unison clarinets begin by repeating a short motive that moves from the root to the blue third in the new key of E-flat. While the piano truly shines at the close of the first movement of the piece, it is completely absent in the second. In recording studio practice of this era, especially before the development of long-playing records, piano solos longer than twelve measures were a rare exception for Ellington. A choice example of his piano making the most of a few notes is found in his completion of the recurring 17

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The general term “diminished scale” refers to either mode, alternating whole step and half step or vice versa, and stems from the fact that the scale contains two fully diminished seventh chords a half-step apart, thereby dividing the octave into four equal parts. Perhaps due to the fact that it contains eight tones rather than the customary seven of Western tonal music, classical music theorists commonly refer to it as the octatonic scale, even though it is not the only eight-tone scale to be found in musical common practice. This piano solo was later extended further, and a long “wailing interlude” featuring the hard-driving tenor saxophone of Paul Gonsalves was added in the mid-1950s. Although these extended versions of the piece were often exciting, they tend to obscure the many interesting connections between the two parts of Ellington’s composition.

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Example 4.2 In a Mellotone (4 May 1940), introduction, mm. 1–3, transcribed by Bill Dobbins

unison-saxophone refrain in the 1940 Jack the Bear.19 This recording features the extraordinary bassist Jimmy Blanton, and was named for a Harlem bassist that Ellington knew. Here, following the opening thematic sections, the saxophones play a 4-bar unison line that introduces a contrasting theme. Ellington continues the concluding E of the saxophones with a dissonant major second interval, D–E, and then resolves the tension by further contrary motion to the major third, D–F. It is difficult to imagine a pair of dyads creating a more striking musical effect. A piano texture used by Ellington in the introduction to In a Mellotone, recorded just two months after Jack the Bear, employs right-hand octaves with another chord tone in between and three-note rootless voicings in the left hand (Example 4.2).20 By doubling only the melody, these six-note voicings deliver an extremely rich sonority. In this case the harmonies are simply parallel dominant ninth chords, but the same texture can be employed with any type of harmony. Although Ellington certainly did not invent these harmonic structures, the manner in which he used them had a major impact on many younger pianists. Billy Taylor has said that figuring out the voicings from Ellington’s introduction to In a Mellotone inspired him to develop his own comprehensive block-chord approach.21 Apparently Taylor was not alone, as this texture became a stock-in-trade used by nearly every important jazz pianist since (including, for example, such influential artists as Ahmad Jamal and Red Garland). Arrangers have also incorporated piano solo material of this kind into big band arrangements. A particularly impressive example of this approach can be heard in Gil Evans’s orchestral adaptation of Ahmad 19 20 21

Duke Ellington and His Famous Orchestra, Jack the Bear, Victor 044888–1, 1940, 78 rpm. Duke Ellington and His Famous Orchestra, In a Mellotone, Victor 053428–1, 1940, 78 rpm. Taylor interview.

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Jamal’s “New Rhumba,” as heard on the 1958 Miles Davis recording, Miles Ahead.22 An important case in which Ellington’s mid-career music clearly anticipated later developments in jazz is that of bebop, in general, and Thelonious Monk in particular. Ellington’s Cottontail, written in 1940 to feature tenor saxophonist Ben Webster and the saxophone section of the Ellington orchestra, already embodies the most essential qualities of bebop. The main theme – loosely based on the harmonic progression of the George Gershwin song, “I Got Rhythm” – could be mistaken for a Dizzy Gillespie line, except for the fact that Gillespie’s influential compositions (which helped launch the new music) did not begin to appear until several years later. In terms of piano playing, it is clear that Ellington was a primary influence on Monk. For instance, Ellington’s playing on Black Beauty and Uptown Downbeat illustrates the use of minor ninth dissonances and the whole-tone scale, two sounds that occupied a prominent place in Monk’s vocabulary. Further evidence of this influence can be heard in Ellington’s 1940 recordings, Jack the Bear, Ko-Ko, Cottontail, Sepia Panorama, and I Never Felt This Way Before.23 In fact, Cottontail and Sepia Panorama contain the same three-note voicing heard in the introduction to Uptown Downbeat, but Ellington uses it differently in relation to the specific context of each piece. In the hands of a master pianist or composer, even an unusual voicing can suggest a wide variety of different meanings and be developed in different ways depending on the details and mood of the musical situation. Ellington recorded a group of duo numbers with his bassist Jimmy Blanton on 1 October 1940. In one of these pieces, Ellington’s Mr. J. B. Blues, the connection with Monk is undeniable.24 The piece begins with two 8-bar phrases in G consisting of solo bass responses to a brief bluesy piano figure. This opening section is followed by two choruses of blues in G, the first of which starts with a 4-bar piano sendoff. In Ellington’s accompaniment to Blanton’s second chorus, he uses voicings that are 22

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Evans based the arrangement on a 1955 trio version by Jamal. Miles Davis, Miles Ahead, Columbia CL1041, 1958, LP. Duke Ellington and His Famous Orchestra, Ko-Ko, Victor 04889–2, Cottontail, Victor 049655–1, Sepia Panorama, Victor 054625–1, I Never Felt This Way Before, Victor 053581–1, all 1940, 78 rpm. Duke Ellington and Jimmy Blanton, Mr. J. B. Blues, Victor 053507–1, 1940, 78 rpm. Monk’s comping on “Hackensack” (from Monk with Sonny Rollins and Frank Foster, Prestige LP 7053, 1982, LP) and “Bye Ya” (from Monk’s Dream, Columbia CL 1965, 1963, LP) includes widely spaced sixth chord voicings like those used by Ellington in Mr. J. B. Blues.

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Example 4.3 Mr. J. B. Blues (1 October 1940), second blues chorus, mm. 5–8, transcribed by Bill Dobbins

characteristic of Monk’s comping. For example, instead of voicing the notes of the G6 chord relatively close together, as was more common, he uses an extremely wide spacing in which the top note in the right hand is the sixth (E), and the fifth (D) is placed a major ninth below. Even with the third (B) in between, the dissonance of the major ninth interval imparts an unusual sonority to this otherwise conventional harmony. When the harmony changes to C9 in m. 5, Ellington puts the root (C) in a register in which it creates another major ninth interval with the ninth of the chord (D) in the right hand (Example 4.3). Due to the change in harmony, the placement of the third and ninth, just as in Uptown Downbeat, is the opposite of the usual one. Moreover, the two adjacent major ninth intervals (E–D and D–C, in descending order), give the C9 chord a much higher degree of dissonance, which is resolved somewhat when the harmony changes back to G6 in m. 7. In terms of rhythm, Ellington bases his accompaniment for the entire chorus on one of the most typical two-note rhythms in jazz: the main rhythm of the much earlier James P. Johnson standard, Charleston. It is easy to find passages in jazz theory and harmony texts from the last fifty years that refer to sixth chords as “old fashioned” harmonies that were avoided by “modern” jazz musicians. The example above clearly shows that it is the manner in which a chord is used rather than the chord’s type that determines the degree of harmonic interest. As the old song from the Swing era says, “‘Tain’t What You Do, It’s the Way That You Do It.”25 Following a modulation to the key of D and a 12-bar blues chorus by Blanton, Ellington develops his own solo chorus from a pair of dyads that, together, make up a close voicing of a dominant thirteenth chord. 25

This song was written by Sy Oliver and Trummy Young, and was first recorded in 1939 by both Jimmie Lunceford and Ella Fitzgerald.

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The opening D13 is split into the major seventh interval, C–B, and the minor sixth interval, F–D. Ellington follows this with an E13 in which the original order of the intervals is reversed to minor sixth (G–E) and major seventh (D–C). In the second bar of the chorus, the second chord is changed from a chromatic upper neighbor to a chromatic lower neighbor (C13) before returning to D13 (and an enthusiastic response from Blanton’s bass). Ellington develops the remainder of the chorus simply by decorating the basic harmonies of the blues form with the same material: G13–G13–A13–C13–D13 in measures 5–8 of the chorus, followed by A13– B13–B13–E13–D13 in measures 9–12. These phrases begin with dominant thirteenth chords based on IV and V, respectively. However, measures 9–12 end with E13–D13, in contrast to the opening phrase of the chorus (E13–D13–C13–D13). Such symmetrical use of chromatic parallel harmonies that are colored by some dissonance can be clearly heard in some of Monk’s themes, such as Epistrophy.26 The content of Ellington’s chorus in Mr. J. B. Blues could easily have come from Monk, except that Monk’s earliest recordings as a sideman did not appear until 1944; and it was the late 1940s and early 1950s before Monk’s fully mature conception was documented on record. While on tour with his orchestra in England in 1948, Ray Nance played Ellington some of Monk’s first recordings on a portable phonograph Nance had just bought. After listening for a while, Ellington commented, “Sounds like he’s stealing some of my stuff.” It was obvious to Nance that Ellington clearly understood what Monk was doing.27 Yet another masterpiece from 1940, Warm Valley, recorded only a couple of weeks after the duets with Blanton, is as beautiful a feature for the sensuous alto saxophone of Johnny Hodges as Ellington ever wrote.28 However, Ellington’s 4-bar unaccompanied introduction immediately captures the listener’s attention. In establishing the key of B, Ellington begins on an Eflat minor triad with a major seventh followed by an E diminished seventh chord, both over a B pedal tone. The voice leading is especially ingenious, with the right-hand melody moving in contrary motion (D–D) to the left hand’s minor thirds (E–G, E–G). In the final measure, the pedal tone descends from B to A, implying a rootless F13 chord with a lowered ninth. The right-hand melody emphasizes large leaps that are resolved stepwise, a common characteristic of Ellington’s and Strayhorn’s ballad 26 27 28

Thelonious Monk, Genius of Modern Music, vol. 1, Blue Note 5002, 1951, 10-inch LP. Derek Jewell, Duke: A Portrait of Duke Ellington (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980), 107. Duke Ellington and His Famous Orchestra, Warm Valley, Victor 053430–1, 1940, 78 rpm.

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Example 4.4 Blue Serge (15 February 1941), last four measures of Ellington’s solo, transcribed by Bill Dobbins

melodies that was already evident in the A phrase of Black Beauty. Here again, Ellington achieves rich musical content with a minimum number of notes. A striking example of Ellington’s use of blue notes in a completely different context from Mr. J. B. Blues is the haunting ballad, Blue Serge, written for the Ellington orchestra by his son, Mercer.29 Along with fine melodic interpretation from trumpeter Ray Nance and saxophonist Ben Webster, as well as an outstanding improvisation from Webster, there is another Ellington piano gem to be enjoyed here. In just a 2-bar pick-up and an 8-bar solo, Ellington gracefully balances on the high wire between the relaxed walking ballad tempo and a double-time feel, right up to the perfectly placed somber harmonies of the solo’s final cadence (Example 4.4). While the basic chords in this cadence are not unusual (D7–9 , D9, and Cm11), the G in the melody above the D9 chord creates a strong disturbance with the F, a minor ninth below, before the stepwise resolution in the final measure of the solo. However, as the G is a blue note in the key of C minor, the ear readily accepts its melodic validity. In fact, it perfectly complements the gloomy mood of the piece. Still more tasty tidbits of Ellington piano can be heard on the 1941 recordings, Just A-Settin’ and A-Rockin’, Clementine, and I Don’t Know What Kind of Blues I Got, as well as the 1942 recordings, Perdido, The “C” Jam Blues, I Don’t Mind, and Sherman Shuffle.30 The “C” Jam Blues provides an extended view of Ellington the accompanist in a basic blues format, while the piano introduction to Sherman Shuffle features descending 29

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Although the noun “serge” refers to a fine cloth, in his notes to Duke Ellington: The Blanton Webster Band (Bluebird RCA 5659–2-RB35, 1986, compact disc boxed set), Mark Tucker speculates that the title may also refer to Serge Rachmaninoff. All of these releases can be found on the Duke Ellington: The Blanton Webster Band boxed set.

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Example 4.5 Solitude (14 May 1941, take 2), first chorus, last A section, mm. 1–4, transcribed by Bill Dobbins

chromatic lines between the major sevenths and sixths of the descending harmonies in a manner frequently used by bebop pianists in the generation to come. A rare Ellington solo recording from this period, a 1941 version of his popular song hit, Solitude, illustrates his ability to freshen up familiar material through reharmonization.31 The clever 6-bar introduction starts with a beautifully creative decoration of a B-flat minor chord, with the left hand shifting back and forth between the seventh and sixth, implying rootless voicings of Bm7 to E9.32 In m. 5, Ellington continues in the circle of fourths to a suspended A dominant, voiced as Em7 over A. Before resolving the suspension, however, he intensifies the dissonance by playing the upper notes of an altered E7 harmony above the A bass note, with the strong tension of the G resolving by half step to the seventh of A9+5 . The same suspended A7 voicing is used in the fifth measure of the first two A sections, creating a subtle harmonic link. In the first two A sections, Ellington uses ascending passing chords, C diminished and major triads with their thirds in the bass, to get from the opening D-flat tonic chord to the F minor chord in the second measure. The harmony then moves through the circle of fourths to B-flat minor and Em7. Before the arrival of the suspended A7 chord in bar 5 of the A sections, Ellington interpolates the dark sounding C ninth chord with a raised eleventh. Also of note is the last A section of the first chorus, where Ellington uses substitute harmonies in the first two measures of the section (Example 4.5). Following the D-flat major seventh chord (with the third in the 31 32

Duke Ellington, Solitude, Victor 065605–2, 1941, 78 rpm. Ellington came upon a variation of this vamp during his 1962 recording session with John Coltrane, as can be heard in the introduction to “In a Sentimental Mood” on Duke Ellington and John Coltrane (Impulse! 8045, 1963, LP). As Coltrane chose the key of D-flat rather than the original key of F, the A section starts in B-flat minor.

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bass), he uses secondary dominant chords, C7 and F7–9 , to lead to the Bflat minor chord at the end of bar 2 of the section. By extending the B-flat minor harmony with the chromatic line on the bottom of the left hand (B–A–A), he avoids the E-flat minor chord altogether, while the implied E9 chord at the end of bar 4 of the section sounds much brighter than the expected C ninth chord heard earlier. Furthermore, in bar 4 of the final A section, Ellington returns to the very same left-hand voicings used in the introduction. Such ingenious and compelling musical storytelling is as typical of Ellington’s piano playing as of his composing.

Piano in the Foreground: The Carnegie Hall Concerts Between 1943 and 1948, due largely to the annual Carnegie Hall concerts by the orchestra, Ellington’s piano playing began to be showcased in a more prominent manner. The first of these, on 23 January 1943, saw the New York premiere of Ellington’s monumental tribute to the history of the American Negro, Black, Brown and Beige. Although this more than 40-minute orchestral work offered some noteworthy passages for Ellington’s piano, it was Blue Belles of Harlem that featured him to fullest advantage.33 Blue Belles of Harlem was originally written for a 1938 concert of Paul Whiteman’s orchestra for which he had commissioned five American composers to write pieces that would in some way suggest the tones of bells. Like most of Ellington’s extended compositions, as distinguished from the later suites, Blue Belles of Harlem has a freewheeling, rhapsodic character in which several themes are introduced, varied, and sometimes combined in imaginative ways. The piece opens with two clarinets repeating an upper register minor third interval, G–B, with bell-like articulation in a moderately slow, ceremonial rhythm. As the full ensemble develops this material, the lower tone moves from G to G and back, lending a blues coloration that justifies the increasingly dissonant harmonies. This development leads to the main theme of the piece, which is stated by Ellington’s unaccompanied piano. Here Ellington combines an extremely active and subtly agitated melodic line with rootless voicings consisting simply of chromatically ascending tritone intervals. It is difficult to miss the fact that the first three notes of the A theme (the fifth, sixth and seventh degrees of the tonic major scale) 33

Ellington, Ellington Carnegie Hall Concerts: January 1943.

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Example 4.6 Blue Belles of Harlem (23 January 1943), Ellington’s “bent note” effect, transcribed by Bill Dobbins

are exactly the same as the opening of Solitude, from 1934, even including the repetition of the third note. This is a revelatory example of how a great composer can begin with exactly the same material, yet proceed in completely different but equally convincing directions. A little over four minutes into this five-and-a-half-minute work, Ellington emphatically uses a special piano technique that can be heard frequently in later recordings of Monk.34 By sharply accenting the half step dyad, C–D, and then releasing the D while holding the C, Ellington creates the illusion of a so-called “bent note” on the piano (Example 4.6). The effect occurs again in the parallel phrase two measures later, and lends a strong blues feeling to this section. Some of the piano textures and thematic material of Blue Belles of Harlem are closely related to the major Ellington work introduced at the Carnegie Hall concert of the following season. This latter composition is a kind of miniature concerto or rhapsody for Ellington’s piano and orchestra entitled New World A-Comin’.35 Inspired by the book of the same name by Roi Ottley, which looked toward a social revolution that would improve the prospects of African Americans, New World A-Comin’ represents a different kind of extended composition from the more ambitious, multimovement Black, Brown and Beige. Ellington uses a single movement as in Blue Belles of Harlem, but the thematic material here is developed much more extensively and in a more disciplined manner. The result is a 13-minute dialog between Ellington’s orchestra and his piano playing. The orchestra begins the work with a statement of the main theme section, the first eight measures of which emphasize a melodic motive built on the third, fourth, and fifth scale degrees in the key of C, with 34

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Listen to the second chorus of Monk’s solo on “I Mean You” on Thelonious Monk, Big Band and Quartet in Concert, Columbia, CL2164, 1964, LP. Duke Ellington, Live at Carnegie Hall December 11, 1943, Storyville 1038341, 2001, compact disc boxed set.

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each statement of these notes returning to the opening note, E. This passage is backed by a series of reharmonizations. The next eight bars begin with an exact chromatic transposition of this melodic cell from E–F–G to G–A–B, with the lowered sixth and seventh scale degrees accommodating further harmonic variation. The tessitura of the thematic material gradually ascends toward the end of this section, leading to the first piano entrance. Ellington’s piano continues the development of the opening motive, moving it further up to the seventh, root, and ninth of the C major chord (B–C–D). The D9 chord in the second bar of this passage moves abruptly back to the C chord, but in bar 4 the implied rootless F9 chord that follows the D9 adds a blues color before the return to C. At the end of bar 5, Ellington inverts the opening interval of the ascending half step (B–C) and the resulting pair of notes (B–A) are reharmonized several times, continuing the development of this material. While the rhythm of the opening motive suggests the spoken words of the title, the descending half-step motive suggests a variant of the opening four notes of Mood Indigo.36 The descending half step is then transposed, reharmonized, and extended to three-note groups (A–B–A–C, A–B–A–G), temporarily leading to the key of A. Ellington’s harmonic progression that leads back to the opening key of C and the next ensemble section is ingenious and dramatically effective: AMaj7/E – E7+9 – AMaj7/E – E9sus – F7/E – Dm7 –DMaj7 – G7–9 . Moreover, the right hand gradually ascends from A to C above the chromatically descending bass line (E–E–D–D), before the final descending half step from C to B, the third of G7. The main motive of the B theme, following a passage for the saxophones that reworks some of the solo piano’s freely stated opening, is related to the solo piano’s descending half-step variant (B–A–B–A). The new theme, stated in an assertive medium swing tempo, begins with an ascending F minor triad framing an octave C before its descent to C (B–A becomes C–C, or B). Moreover, the descending half step now has a strong blues flavor, created by the fifth and lowered fifth in F minor. Although the harmonic motion between tonic and dominant in the first eight measures of this passage is quite basic, Ellington uses four completely different C7 sonorities. The most surprising of these is in the second bar where 36

For a more detailed formal analysis of the composition see David Schiff, “Symphonic Ellington? Rehearing New World A-Comin’,” The Musical Quarterly 96 (Fall–Winter 2013): 459–77, and Howland, Uptown, 266–80.

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Example 4.7 New World A-Comin’ (11 December 1943), C theme, mm. 1–4, transcribed by Bill Dobbins

the melody note, C, creates an unusual C7 with an enharmonic major seventh on top. Because of the resolution back to C in the third bar, the ear accepts the C as a blue note, even though it is clearly outside the chord. Such extreme non-harmonic tones also exist in classical tonal music, normally occurring as accented chromatic neighbor tones, passing tones, or appoggiaturas. The C section, which occurs only once in the piece, provides effective contrast with a bright tempo and a bluesy melody harmonized in parallel thirds, supported by a jaunty left-hand ostinato. The ostinato is related to boogie-woogie and rhythm-and-blues styles, and foreshadows the ostinatos of Keith Jarrett’s solo concerts and related phenomena in the solo jazz piano world of the late 1960s and after.37 The main melodic motive emphasizes the same three notes as the opening motive of the piece, E– F–G, but here these pitches are in the second voice, with the upper notes, G–A–B, adding a blues color (Example 4.7). In the third and seventh measures the G in the lower voice is altered to G, intensifying the blues color in combination with the B above. Although harmonies associated with European impressionism can be heard in Ellington’s music from the late 1920s, their presence is quite prominent throughout New World A-Comin’. From the 1940s onwards, this vocabulary plays an increasingly significant role in Ellington’s musical palette, sometimes providing an effective contrast to the blues elements and sometimes blending with them to create strikingly personal combinations. Ellington’s trio sessions for the Capitol label in the early 1950s are among the more convincing and well-known manifestations of such cross-fertilization.38 37

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For example, listen to Jarrett’s performance of the short encore at the end of side three of Keith Jarrett, Solo Concerts: Bremen/Lausanne, ECM 1035–37, 1973, LP set. Duke Ellington, Piano Reflections, Capitol M-11058, 1972, LP.

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As with Blue Belles of Harlem, Ellington never made a definitive studio recording of New World A-Comin’ in its original form for his orchestra. He did smooth out some minor rough edges in the interpretation, however, and the 1945 radio broadcast from the Duke Ellington Treasury Shows is, overall, a tighter and more convincing performance.39 The piece was resurrected in a version for the Ellington orchestra and the Symphony of the Air Orchestra in 1955, with a performance at Carnegie Hall on 16 March. As amazing as Ellington’s musicians were in broadening the tonal palette of possibilities in relation to the instruments normally found in a jazz orchestra, the content and musical character of New World A-Comin’ clearly benefited from the additional colors of orchestral woodwinds, French horns, and strings, and the solo piano part also improved with Ellington’s editing through the intervening years.40 The 19 December 1944 Carnegie Hall concert included the premiere of Ellington and Strayhorn’s Perfume Suite. The third movement, Ellington’s “Dancers In Love,” is a charming and sometimes humorous piano feature with the alternate title, “Stomp for Beginners.”41 The multi-themed formal structure hearkens back to the Harlem piano repertoire of Ellington’s youth. The most remarkable element in the piece is the ingenious melody of the A theme. It consists of a sequence of chromatically descending perfect fourth intervals. Although the perfect fourths are descending chromatically, Ellington begins with the lower note so that the brokenfourth interval itself goes up. Further, by switching the direction of every fourth pair of notes from ascending (C–F) to descending (D–A), Ellington creates even more interest in what, otherwise, would be a fairly predictable pattern. At the beginning of “Dancers,” this melody is accompanied by a simple harmonic turnaround in the key of F with one chord per measure: F/A–G7–G7–F. At the end of the piece, however, Ellington extends the original 4-bar phrase to seven bars. Beginning with the pickup note to the downbeat of the fourth measure of the section, the broken fourth intervals ascend chromatically, still with every fourth pair of notes changing from ascending (C–F) to descending (G–D) (Example 4.8). However, the bass 39

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The Treasury Shows consisted of live weekly radio broadcasts from April to November of 1945, and April to October of 1946. Duke Ellington and His Orchestra, The Treasury Shows, vol. 6, Storyville 9039006, compact disc boxed set. The 1970 album, Duke Ellington: Orchestral Works, features Ellington as soloist with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Erich Kunzel. This release notably offers a very convincing performance of the symphonic reworking of New World A-Comin’. Duke Ellington, Orchestral Works, MCA MCAD-42318, 1989, compact disc (orig. 1979, LP). Duke Ellington, The Duke Ellington Carnegie Hall Concerts, December 1944, Prestige P-24073, 1977, LP set.

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Example 4.8 “Dancers in Love” (from the Perfume Suite, 19 December 1944), final A phrase, mm. 1–4, transcribed by Bill Dobbins

line begins on the third of the tonic chord and descends chromatically to the third one octave lower, and then leaps down to the tonic note for the final tonic chord. “Dancers In Love” remained in the Ellington repertoire and never failed to engage and delight audiences. Between the Carnegie Hall concerts of December 1944 and November 1946, there are a few studio recordings from the years 1945 and 1946 in which Ellington’s piano playing is exceptionally creative. The 11 May 1945 version of Caravan has some of the most imaginative comping to be heard during this period from any pianist.42 In the 16-bar orchestral A sections that alternate long stretches of dense C7 and other altered dominant chords with resolutions to F minor, Ellington is using the highest and lowest Cs together as a percussion effect and persistently nudging at the G below middle C. In the 16-bar B section, which moves through dominant seventh chords in the circle of fourths (F7–B7–E7) to a cadence in the relative key of A-flat, he interjects flashes of perfect fourth chord arpeggios that contain relevant chord tones. Ellington cuts the orchestra’s last A section down to eight measures, percussively emphasizing the D below middle C in the C7 measures and C in the F minor measures. The next phrase suddenly returns to the 16-bar B section, where Ellington jabs at the flatted fifths of the dominant seventh chords in the medium low register. The coup de grˆace, however, is saved for the end of the piece. Above a simple F minor triad in the upper bass clef register Ellington hammers out chime-like fourth chords with notes beginning in the middle of the treble clef (B–E–A–D). No other jazz orchestra could have recorded such a mysterious sounding piece in 1945, and no other pianist could have painted such a stunning accompaniment with so few notes.

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Duke Ellington and His Famous Orchestra, Caravan, Victor D5VB262–1, 1945, 78 rpm.

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Another exceptional display of Ellington’s masterful skills as accompanist can be heard in the version of Transblucency that was recorded on 9 July 1946.43 This is certainly one of Ellington’s most poignant and original series of variations based on the 12-bar blues form. In a cut-down and more transparent instrumentation, the combination of Kay Davis’s beautifully controlled wordless vocal with Lawrence Brown’s trombone and Jimmy Hamilton’s clarinet is totally captivating, with the lines sometimes crossing to a point at which they blend into a single entity that is clearly much more than the sum of its parts. Ellington’s piano is the thread that holds everything together, sometimes subtly implying a double-time feeling, often seamlessly connecting one section of the piece with the next and guiding the ensemble in and out of rubato interludes to re-establish the tempo. There are few pianists who could have convincingly performed the piano’s role in this piece, and Ellington makes it all sound so effortless. Returning to the subsequent Carnegie Hall concerts, the 23 November 1946 program included the Deep South Suite, whose third movement, “Nobody Was Looking,” was devoted solely to Ellington’s piano playing.44 The piece is a miniature tone poem, and reveals the degree of synthesis he had already achieved of the myriad elements of stride piano, blues, American popular song, and the chromatic harmony and dissonance of early twentieth-century classical music. According to Ellington, the music recalls the trials of a playful puppy attempting to make contact with a pretty little flower. Every time he reaches out, a breeze comes along and blows the flower away. Ellington points out that there is no antagonism between the puppy and the breeze; each is simply following its natural tendencies. The title of the piece refers to an observation that, for Ellington, had a significant connection to the story: “when nobody is looking, many people of different extractions are able to get along well together.”45 It also illustrates his ability to address America’s racial issues in an imaginative, winning manner, without being preachy or confrontational. After a 12-bar introduction, the piece displays a rondo-like design: ABACA. It is the A sections which convey the storyline in musical terms, while the B and C sections provide suitable contrasting themes. Ellington’s manner of playing in the A sections is masterful in communicating the innocent enthusiasm of the puppy as it darts after the flower. The

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Duke Ellington, Black, Brown and Beige, RCA Bluebird 6641–2-RB, 1988, compact disc boxed set. Duke Ellington, Carnegie Hall, November 23, 1946, Queen Disc 018, 1976, LP. Ellington, Mistress, 184.

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Example 4.9 “Nobody Was Looking” (from the Deep South Suite, 23 November 1946), A theme, mm. 13–16, transcribed by Bill Dobbins

ritardando to ad libitum tempo, combined with the somber C7 chord with a lowered fifth and a descending melodic phrase with prominent blue notes perfectly depict the puppy’s disappointment as the breeze suddenly whisks the flower away. The series of ascending seventh chords, leading through the keys of C, E-flat, G-flat, and A before drifting gradually back to C, suggests the flower becoming momentarily airborne and then floating safely back to earth (Example 4.9). The B section, in the key of G, sounds as if the puppy is trying to figure out just what is going on, and demonstrates Ellington’s deft use of non-harmonic tones in the relationship between right and left hands. In bar 7 of the section, the blue note (F) is harmonized with a B-flat minor triad, creating a dissonance with the bass note (D). The resolution to an A minor triad implies an incomplete D9 chord. When the left hand affirms this on beat four, however, the melody note (D) is harmonized with a G triad, anticipating where the harmony is heading while clashing with the left hand. The right hand’s dyad at the end of this measure confirms the D7 chord while reiterating the blue note (B) that recurs throughout the measure. Finally, the G7 chord in the next measure moves on to C7, appropriate to the bluesy character of much of the piece. Instead of a fully resolved C7 chord, however, Ellington puts a stubbornly non-harmonic tone (F) squarely in the melody, delaying the final resolution until the end of the sixteenth-note line in the following measure. The chromatic sequence of fourth intervals that lead to the descending G diminished seventh arpeggio and the concluding phrase of the B section add an appropriately humorous touch to this lighthearted musical tale. The final movement of the Deep South Suite, “Happy Go Lucky Local” also included strong doses of Ellington’s piano playing. It was one of many Ellington compositions inspired by trains and train travel.46 The 46

For Ellington’s complete description of “Happy-Go-Lucky Local,” see ibid., 184–5.

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Example 4.10 “Happy-Go-Lucky Local” (from the Deep South Suite, 23 November 1946), first piano solo, mm. 1–4, transcribed by Bill Dobbins

piece begins with the horn sections sounding the train’s whistle, and then opens with two 12-bar choruses of spirited A-flat blues in a powerful medium swing tempo. The first chorus features 2-bar exchanges of triplet eighth-note lines between Ellington and bassist Oscar Pettiford. This is followed by Ellington’s own blues chorus, superbly crafted around his own insistent train whistle of dissonant cluster harmonies that imply a doubletime feeling (Example 4.10). The clusters contain the basic A7 chord tones, but add the notes in between for percussive effect. In the second 4-bar phrase, the rapid descending cascades of whole-tone scales are like bursts of steam, followed by broken chords in left-hand eighth notes as the contented train moves patiently down the tracks. A variation of the opening cluster chords is heard in the final two measures of the chorus, completing a highly adventurous yet thematically concise solo statement. Variants of the same material can be heard in Ellington’s solos from the numerous radio broadcasts and studio recordings of “Happy-Go-Lucky Local,” leaving no doubt about the significant contribution of “the piano player.”47 The 27 December 1947 Carnegie Hall concert included the premiere of one of Ellington’s most original piano pieces, The Clothed Woman.48 It is also one of the most stunning instances of his ability to effectively combine aesthetic opposites. Within a four-and-a-half-minute span, Ellington anticipates the abstract piano sounds of Cecil Taylor, pays homage to Willie “The Lion” Smith, takes an improvised solo that foreshadows so-called modal jazz, and ends up back in the world of abstraction, albeit with a 47

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The fact that “Happy-Go-Lucky Local” was premiered six years before the release of Thelonious Monk’s Little Rootie Tootie, whose train-whistle clusters are remarkably similar to Ellington’s in both register and texture further indicates the probability of Ellington’s influence. Duke Ellington, The Duke Ellington Carnegie Hall Concerts, December 1947, Prestige P-24075, 1977, LP set.

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clear hint that he understands the basic principles that connect the most important European and American music of the last three centuries. Following a brief introduction by the orchestra and the exclamation point of Harry Carney’s baritone saxophone, Ellington sets up the A section with a dissonant upper register dyad and a descending arpeggio that lands on the lowest G octave. All of this material from the E diminished scale (E–F–G–A–B–C–D–E) leads to the lowest F octave. Although the A section of The Clothed Woman has been described as atonal,49 it is actually a cleverly disguised blues in F, and a basic blues at that. For most ears, the “clothing” Ellington selected for this particular lady has covered the subject exceedingly well. Upon arriving in the tonal area of F, the first four measures of the A section emphasize an F triad, an incomplete C13+11 chord (only the third is missing), another F triad and, in the fourth measure, an F7–5 chord. Just as in a basic blues, this leads to B7 in bar 5. It is the grace notes and “shadow” harmonies that most effectively obscure the otherwise basic content. The grace notes that encircle the third of the F triad in the first measure of this section are rather basic chord tones, except for the B, which creates some tonal ambiguity. In the second bar the notes of the grace-note chord in the right hand are a whole step above those of the half note, and are in a higher octave, but it is still the B that most strongly obscures the connection to C7. In the third bar, the right hand quintuplet on beat two is simply an embellishment of the F chord by its dominant, C7, with a lowered fifth. The melody then resolves back to the seventh and fifth of F7, descending stepwise to the third on the downbeat of the fourth measure. Here the grace-note cluster implies a half step decoration of F7 with the root, third, and ninth of a G-flat chord. The F7 sound is embellished with an incomplete descending C whole-tone scale, implying F7 to C7 and back to F7, as in the previous measure. In the fifth bar, the B7 chord is decorated with the E and B grace notes. These are simply altered chord tones, but the close voicing and low register add a definite degree of abstraction. In the second B7 measure, the lower register E triad resolves like a leading tone back to F in the next measure, exactly as in a basic blues. Here the grace-note chords combine the sixth of the E chord with an F triad, to which the harmony is returning. Ellington’s use of a special pedaling technique, in which the damper pedal is pressed just in time to catch the ring of the grace-note chords, 49

See Gunther Schuller, “Duke Ellington,” in The New Grove Dictionary of American Music, vol. 2 (E–K) (London: Macmillan, 1986), 39.

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Example 4.11 The Clothed Woman (27 December 1947), A section, mm. 1–4, transcribed by Bill Dobbins

blends the sound with the primary chords that follow. This creates a pianistic approximation of the “wa-wa” effect of brass instruments played with the plunger. Just as with Ellington’s bent-note effects in Blue Belles of Harlem, he creates the illusion of something that is technically impossible, proving to be as much of an alchemist at the piano as he was with his orchestra. In bars 9 and 10 of the A section, the harmonies include G7 to C7 and B6 to C7, abstracted in a similar fashion, and a final return to the F triad in measure 11 of the section. Instead of using the usual 12-bar form, however, Ellington recaps the first four measures of the A section to make fourteen measures. The final F7–5 chord leads to a bop-like interlude in B-flat, the key of the more substantial B section, which evokes the spirit of The Lion. The melody of the B section to The Clothed Woman is mostly pentatonic, and the blue note (D) in the final cadence of the 8-bar principal theme adds an appropriate hue to its musical personality. The left-hand accompaniment here is built on staccato quarter notes, creating a jazz march feeling. Below the repeated third interval of B and D, a chromatic line moves from the major seventh to the fifth of the B-flat chord and back, in a 2-bar vamp. The entire B section follows an AABA form in 8-bar phrases, with the march feeling throughout.50 The B section is followed by a return to the short melodic figure that introduced it, but now over a left-hand vamp consisting of alternating second inversion B-flat triads and E half-diminished chords (two quarter notes of each). This vamp implies the sound of a decorated C9 chord, and 50

The Lion used a similar accompaniment in the middle section of his solo piano piece, Morning Air, recorded in 1939.

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the string-bass line (whether by Oscar Pettiford or Junior Raglin) centers around C as well.51 Since Ellington’s entire solo is based on this static harmony rather than on a sequence of chords, it deserves to be considered as an early forerunner of modal jazz improvisation. (Unfortunately, Ellington decided not to stretch out in the studio version of The Clothed Woman.52 ) The Clothed Woman was recorded before the earliest modal efforts of George Russell, a decade before both the modal Miles Davis and Gil Evans collaborations and the jagged expressionistic work of Cecil Taylor’s first recordings (from 1956). That some critics and listeners considered Ellington old-fashioned by the end of the 1940s may be due to the fact that by the time a new trend had been around long enough for critics to notice it, Ellington had already extracted what suited his purposes and moved on. Moreover, he had an extraordinary ability to incorporate fresh sounds into his music in such an organic manner that it never stood out as unnatural, unless it was clearly intended for either comic or melodramatic effect. Although the last of the annual Carnegie Hall concerts on 13 November 1948 offered no piano work of special significance, the 1940s clearly saw Ellington’s unique pianistic abilities receiving broader public exposure. The duet recordings with the virtuoso bassist Jimmy Blanton and the important solo features in several of the Carnegie Hall performances put anyone who was paying attention on notice that Ellington could bring something out of the piano that was just as personal and captivating as the musical tapestries he devised for his orchestra. Ellington’s piano playing on recordings with his orchestra between the mid-1930s and late 1940s must have attracted the attention of the young Gil Evans. The biting major second dissonance and its resolution in response to the saxophones’ recurrent unison phrase in Jack the Bear, the percussive jabs and whole-tone scale flourishes in Ko-Ko, the groundbreaking blues voicings throughout “Happy-Go-Lucky Local” and the single note lines suggesting dialog rather than comping behind a soloist are only a few of the sources that clearly informed the manner in which Evans played piano in his own orchestra beginning in the late 1950s. The playing on his arrangement of Chant of the Weed and the originals La Nevada and Las Vegas Tango, offer numerous striking examples of Ellington’s 51

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Ellington had two bassists in the orchestra for this concert, and he wrote a new piece to feature them, Basso Profundo. Unfortunately, the liner notes to commercial releases of the concert fail to mention which bassist played which piece in the rest of the program. Duke Ellington, The World of Duke Ellington, vol. 2, Columbia PG33341, 1975, LP set.

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influence.53 However, while Ellington rarely wrote down even a single note for the piano in any of his scores, varying much of this material from one performance to the next, Evans meticulously notated nearly everything the piano was to play, including most of his solo passages.54

The First Trio Sessions and the Capitol and Columbia Years In 1950 Ellington composed what is often considered to be his most convincing extended composition, Harlem (a.k.a. A Tone Parallel to Harlem and Harlem Suite), which was recorded by the orchestra on 7 December. In sharp contrast to the Deep South Suite, which featured generous portions of Ellington’s piano, Harlem excluded the piano altogether. Perhaps it was the extensive focus on composing this major work for the orchestra alone (sans piano) that suggested, as a kind of aesthetic equipoise, a need to develop an appropriate recording showcase for his piano playing. Unfortunately for Ellington, the competition from early rock ’n’ roll, rhythm and blues, and a greater demand for small groups, made the early 1950s a difficult time to keep the orchestra working. When Ellington signed with Capitol Records in 1953, he did his best to make some hit recordings that might lead to greater visibility and attractive offers for performing. Although none of this materialized to the degree that he might have hoped, the new Capitol contract did result in the release of his first major collection of trio performances. The 1953 album, Piano Reflections, with its combination of Ellington hits and new compositions, contains some of his finest piano work. While “Who Knows?,” “Janet,” and the cryptically titled “B Sharp Blues” show that Ellington was well aware of bebop developments, several of the other compositions on the album make use of harmonies associated with the French impressionist composers (e.g., Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel).55 “Retrospection,” “Melancholia,” and “Reflections in D” are, in this regard, unique in jazz piano offerings 53

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“Chant of the Weed,” from Gil Evans, Great Jazz Standards, World Pacific WP 1270, 1959, LP; “La Nevada,” from Gil Evans, Out of the Cool, Impulse A4, 1960, LP; “Las Vegas Tango,” from Gil Evans, The Individualism of Gil Evans, Verve V6–8555, 1964, LP. The careful reconstruction of nearly all of Gil Evans’s music by Ryan Truesdell confirmed this during visits to the Eastman School of Music throughout the 2010–11 school year in which much of this music was performed by student ensembles. (Truesdell discovered many previously unrecorded pieces, and was given access to the scores of the commercially released music by Evans’s widow, Anita.) The scores of much of Ellington’s work can be perused at the Duke Ellington Collection. As Strayhorn’s fondness for the music of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel was well known, it is possible that much of Ellington’s exposure to their music came indirectly through Strayhorn’s piano playing and his musical contributions to the Ellington orchestra. For

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of the period.56 While the specific influence of Debussy and Ravel on Strayhorn’s work has been clearly documented by Walter van de Leur, there has been no definitive evidence as to exactly how these harmonic leanings affected Ellington.57 The A section of “Retrospection” begins with arpeggios and broken chords in double notes that outline major seventh chords in minor third relations: D, A, and B. Finally, a succession of descending major thirds leads to an F major chord, which completes the sequence in thirds. The B section is developed above a chromatically descending harmonic progression: Bm7, B7+5 , D/A, Gm7–5 , A7/G, D/F, Fdim7, and Em7. The first six chords of this progression seem to foreshadow such Strayhorn works as “Star-Crossed Lovers,” from Such Sweet Thunder (1957) and “Haup´e,” from the film score to Anatomy of a Murder (1959).58 Following a brief introduction of quiet bell tones with a marked pentatonic emphasis, the A section of “Reflections in D” uses chromatic harmonic decoration of a gradually descending D scale, emphasizing the triads of G minor, F minor, F-sharp minor, D-sharp minor, E minor, and finally, C-sharp to D, all above a D pedal tone (Example 4.12). A brief move from F7 to B minor soon returns to D and a colorful use of the minor second interval, C–D, as a double melodic pedal tone in the last two measures, above the basic diatonic harmonies of D, E minor, D, and A7. In the second A section, Ellington extends the opening material, beginning this extension with a colorful C13+11 chord. The new material is clearly an organic continuation of the A section rather than a contrasting theme. This extended A section is repeated with some variation before returning to the shorter opening A section and a brief coda, which returns to the quiet bell tones of the opening sonorities. “Melancholia” begins with diatonic cluster voicings that gradually broaden below a D pedal tone in the piano’s middle register. The A

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insightful commentary and analysis in relation to Strayhorn’s music, see Van de Leur, Something, 50–1, 58–9. Bud Powell’s “Dusk at Sandi,” from The Genius of Bud Powell (Norgran MGN 1063, 1956, LP), may well have been influenced by Ellington’s use of impressionistic harmony throughout the 1940s. See Van de Leur, Something. Such Sweet Thunder, also referred to as the Shakespearean Suite, was recorded between August 1956 and May1957, while the score for Anatomy of a Murder was recorded in May and June of 1959. Duke Ellington, Such Sweet Thunder, Columbia 65568, 1999, compact disc (orig. 1957, LP), and Anatomy of a Murder, Legacy/Sony BMG 65569, 2008, compact disc (orig. 1959, LP). Whether Ellington influenced Strayhorn or whether he was influenced by earlier Strayhorn arrangements is impossible to determine, but the connections in Retrospection are clear enough.

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Example 4.12 “Reflections in D” (14 April 1953), first A section, mm. 1–3, transcribed by Bill Dobbins

sections make imaginative use of dominant seventh chords with raised ninths. These function as secondary dominants in the key of D-flat. The use of Gm6 above an A bass note as a substitute for a more conventional A7 is particularly attractive in the cadence to the DMaj7 tonic chord. In the B section, Ellington begins with ascending diatonic seventh chords: DMaj7, Em7, and Fm7. These lead to a dramatic arrival on Gm7, which Ellington underscores by a sudden shift from an increasingly loud dynamic on the first three chords to a very quiet one on the minor subdominant. In most tonal music, the minor subdominant tends either to proceed to the dominant or simply resolve back to the tonic chord, so Ellington’s shift from Gm7 to GMaj7 is a real surprise. These ascending diatonic seventh chords are reminiscent of the rubato phrases in the opening section of “Nobody Was Looking” from the Deep South Suite (see Example 4.9 above), but achieve a remarkably different result here. “Retrospection,” “Reflections in D,” and “Melancholia” are all rubato mood pieces, and Ellington’s touch, phrasing, and sense of dynamics are extremely effective in communicating the subtle nuances that so clearly differentiate the specifically intended mood of each. During his final two decades, Ellington returned from time to time to a musical vocabulary similar to the one used so skillfully in these relatively brief musical selfportraits. Of the three pieces recorded at the second session for Piano Reflections, “Kinda Dukish” is arguably the most important. In 1956, it was attached as an extended introduction to the rip-roaring arrangement of one of Ellington’s most popular instrumental hits, Rockin’ in Rhythm, and was a major piano feature for Ellington in his final two decades. The main theme is based on a variation of the “I Got Rhythm” chord progression in

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Example 4.13 “Kinda Dukish” (3 December 1953), 32 measures before the closing theme, transcribed by Bill Dobbins

C. In the A sections, Ellington demonstrates how rich a simple three-voice piano harmonization can sound when voiced in adjacent sixth intervals, starting with the opening triad voicing: B–G–E. The emphasis of the lowered fifths in the dominant chords of the B section adds a boppish flavor. After the opening 32-bar theme, Ellington’s improvisation is based simply on 8-bar phrases in the key of C, with a modulation to the relative key of A minor after sixteen measures. Two 16-bar A minor sections follow, with a cadence back to C major at the end of each. The strong establishment of these tonal centers made the pairing with Rockin’ in Rhythm a natural one, since it alternates between the same two keys. Before the main theme returns, Ellington plays two remarkable 8-bar strains that are each repeated. The first makes thunderous use of the low register of the piano (Example 4.13), in a manner that Beethoven would certainly have appreciated. The second is a dizzying mixture of a driving syncopated 2-bar riff in the right hand with a three-beat, left-hand cross rhythm that James P. Johnson favored. In the later versions with the orchestra, Ellington would suddenly light into the original 4-bar introduction to Rockin’ in Rhythm at the beginning of the seventh bar of the repetition, creating a powerful dramatic effect. In this initial version of “Kinda Dukish,” the entire opening theme returns, ending with a reference to Monk’s Fifty-Second Street Theme and the astonishing percussive effect of a strong accent on the lowest note of the piano (A). It is interesting that Art Tatum sometimes ended rapid ascending arpeggios on the highest note of the piano, even when that note was not in the chord. Similarly, Ellington enjoyed surprising the listeners by sometimes ending pieces with this low A, even when the piece was in a completely unrelated key. Since the precise pitch of the highest and lowest

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Example 4.14 Band Call (26 April 1954), B section, mm. 5–8, transcribed by Bill Dobbins

notes on the piano is less perceptible than the others, they are well suited to such dramatic or comic effect, as Tatum and Ellington recognized. Piano Reflections was released two years before Bill Evans’s first recordings as a sideman. Although Bill Evans recorded a solo piano version of “Reflections in D” on the 1978 album, New Conversations, he was unaware of the Ellington recording.59 Nevertheless, his inclusion of the piece in his repertoire speaks to the significance of Ellington’s previous exploration of impressionistic vocabulary that is often associated with Evans. It is quite enjoyable to listen to the Ellington and Evans recordings back-to-back, and this experience reveals interesting similarities and differences in approach between two iconic jazz piano masters. From all the Capitol sessions with the Ellington orchestra, the most unique piano work is found in the 1954 piece, Band Call. Reportedly, Ellington often started the second set in nightclubs with this piece, literally to call the more lackadaisical members of the orchestra back to the bandstand; and if some took a little longer than usual, Ellington’s playing became more insistent and percussive.60 The theme has an unusual form with an 8-bar A section and a 14-bar B section, the B section being unified by an insistent walking line played by both piano and bass. The B section begins with a simple one-bar riff emphasizing the sixth and tonic degrees in A-flat (Example 4.14). The notes on the downbeats and syncopations in the chromatic bass line suggest Bdim7 to A6/E for the first two measures, and Bm7 to A6/E for the next two. The first two measures return, leading to a root-position A-flat chord and an Am6 chord with the fifth in the bass. It soon becomes apparent, however, that these two measures of A-flat were not the end of an 8-bar phrase, but the beginning of a new one. 59 60

Nat Hentoff, liner notes to Bill Evans, New Conversations, Warner Bros., BSK 3177, 1978, LP. Stanley Dance, liner notes to The Complete Capitol Recordings of Duke Ellington, Mosaic 99362, 1995, compact disc boxed set.

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Example 4.15 Night Creature (16 March 1955), part two, mm. 1–3, transcribed by Bill Dobbins

Ellington was an expert at placing these musical speed bumps in inconspicuous places to regain the listener’s attention. The stridently dissonant A-flat right-hand voicing, facilitated by the thumb playing two adjacent notes, sends out the loud and clear message, “Band Call, gentlemen. The next set is already under way!” On 16 March 1955, the Ellington orchestra with the Symphony of the Air Orchestra premiered the three-movement Ellington work, Night Creature. Arguably the most convincing of all the Ellington compositions for symphony orchestra, the second movement contains one of the most marvelous uses of the extreme registers of the piano in the history of the instrument. The ghostly atmosphere at the opening and closing of the movement is meant to portray, in Ellington’s words, “that imaginary monster we all fear we shall have to meet some midnight, but when we meet him I’m sure we shall find out that he too does the boogie-woogie.”61 A more charming description of the grim reaper has never been conjured. The musical description is just as imaginative, with the top four notes of the piano creating the finger-snaps on the off beats for the monster lurking in the depths of the bass register (Example 4.15). The popular rebirth of the Ellington orchestra following the unprecedented audience response at the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival roughly coincided with a long and extremely fruitful relationship with Columbia records.62 The 1956 album, Ellington at Newport, included the extended version of Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue, which features several choruses of Ellington’s energetic and imaginative blues playing before Paul 61

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See Mark Tucker’s essay included in liner notes to Duke Ellington, The Reprise Studio Recordings, Mosaic MD5–193, 1999, compact disc boxed set. For insight into both the Newport Festival and the Columbia relationship, see Cohen, America, 321–9.

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Gonsalves begins his legendary, 27-chorus odyssey that worked the audience up to a fever pitch. The 1957 Columbia release, Such Sweet Thunder, also featured some memorable Ellington piano work, especially the raggy waltz opening of “Lady Mac” and the uncanny improvised introduction to “Sonnet in Search of a Moor.” In addition, the intimately revealing slow blues solo on the title tune of the 1959 recording, Blues in Orbit, is one of the best examples of Ellington’s ability to imbue each note with clear intent and personality.63 For the most part, however, Ellington the pianist is once again in the background throughout much of the Columbia sessions. Still, his ever-present support as accompanist and supreme musical team player helps to create many memorable moments on these excellent recordings of the orchestra, certainly among the best of the later part of his career. Apart from the Capitol trio sessions, it is the fifth movement of the Queen’s Suite, “The Single Petal of a Rose,” that contains some of Ellington’s most personal piano work of the 1950s.64 The piece also has an interesting historical background. While touring Great Britain with the orchestra in 1958, Ellington was introduced to Queen Elizabeth II. This meeting inspired the creation of The Queen’s Suite, which he recorded at his own expense, having just one copy pressed, for her ears alone. The recording was not released commercially until after Ellington’s death. During his time in Leeds Ellington attended a party given by close friends at their new apartment and, at one point in the evening, sat down to play the baby grand piano he had just sent them as a house-warming gift. Observing that one petal had fallen from the roses in the vase on the piano, Ellington began to play the material that later became “The Single Petal of a Rose.”65 Whether or not these musical ideas had previously been occupying his imagination, the incident surely documents his knack for the dramatic public gesture. After a brief introduction that establishes the key of D-flat, “Single Petal” begins with an AA1 AA1 BB1 AA1 formal design, followed by a slightly varied repetition from B to the end. The content itself is simple yet poignant. The main motive in the A sections is an ascending D-flat arpeggio in the medium-low register that ends with the ascending whole step, E– F. In this piece, the usual roles are reversed, with the left hand playing most of the melodic content and the right hand supplying the harmonic accompaniment. In the A sections, the material mainly alternates between 63 64

Duke Ellington, Blues in Orbit, Columbia CL-1445, 1960, LP. Duke Ellington, The Ellington Suites, Pablo 2310–762, 1976, LP.

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Jewell, Duke, 133–4.

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Example 4.16 “The Single Petal of a Rose” (from The Queen’s Suite, 14 April 1959), first A1 section, mm. 5–8, transcribed by Bill Dobbins

the tonic and subdominant chords, concluding with a half cadence on the dominant, A13. In the more extended A1 sections, however, the harmony moves from the subdominant, G, to Gm7–5 , which brightens the harmonic effect in this context. Although this chord wants to resolve up to A7 or D/A, Ellington shifts suddenly to DMaj7, creating a feeling of total harmonic surprise. Perhaps the effect of the Gm7–5 chord followed by the abrupt diversion to DMaj7 (the enharmonic equivalent to EMaj7 in Example 4.16) depicts the petal’s break from the rose and its tumble to the piano’s surface. Finally, the D major chord convincingly resolves by half step to the tonic D6 chord, with Cadd9 interpolated as a harmonic embellishment in the breathtaking final resolution. The B section shifts to the relative key of B-flat minor, with just one subtle change in the main thematic motive: the B-flat minor arpeggio ends with a descending whole step, in contrast to the ascending whole step of the A section. The right-hand accompaniment makes further emphasis of this change. Where the right-hand chords of the A sections continue the ascending gesture of the left-hand melody, the rapid right-hand arpeggios of the B sections strengthen the effect of the descending whole step that concludes the left-hand melodic gestures. The piece concludes with a slowly ascending D6/9 arpeggio in perfect fourths with the damper pedal sustained, and a final G and C, all shimmering like a quiet pond in the moonlight, reflecting the entire scene.

The Later Years: International Tours, Personal Honors, and the Sacred Concerts The 1960s was a decade full of international travel for Ellington and his orchestra, and the opening years were marked with particularly memorable small-group recordings. These included the 1960 Columbia

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recordings that were issued nineteen years later under the album title Unknown Session.66 These tracks feature one of the best of the many Ellington small bands assembled over the years. This group included Johnny Hodges, Paul Gonsalves, Harry Carney, Ray Nance, Lawrence Brown, Aaron Bell, and Sam Woodyard. It featured economical but rich-sounding arrangements of familiar Ellington and Strayhorn songs, with uniformly exemplary solos and superb rhythm-section support. The same period also included small group dates with Coleman Hawkins, John Coltrane, two recordings with Louis Armstrong, and two trio sessions (one with Ellington’s rhythm section of Bell and Woodyard, and the other a highly touted musical encounter with bassist Charles Mingus and drummer Max Roach).67 All of these recordings are excellent sources for further listening and study with regard to Ellington’s exceptional comping skills. In fact, Mingus was quick to point out that, whereas most pianists repeated many of their comping voicings in one chorus after another, Ellington made use of every conceivable texture in his comping, from single-note figures to ten-note chords.68 In 1963, a European tour by the Ellington orchestra was soon followed by a tour of the Middle East and the Far East that was sponsored by the U.S. State Department. Although the subsequent Far East Suite was not recorded until 1965, the music was inspired by the experiences of Ellington and Strayhorn during this State Department tour. Moreover, Ellington’s piano playing was not limited to a featured solo movement in the suites that were composed during the 1960s and 1970s, but is heard more and more in the exposition of important themes in orchestral movements as well; and as some of the later suites were inspired by travels to foreign lands, Ellington increasingly found ways to use the piano to decorate the orchestral textures with colors and rhythms that reflected these ethnic musical traditions.

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Duke Ellington, Unknown Session, Columbia 35342, 1979, LP. Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong and The Great Reunion were for Roulette Records (Roulette SR-52074, 1961, LP, and Roulette 400505, 1970, LP, respectively); Duke Ellington Meets Coleman Hawkins and Duke Ellington and John Coltrane for Impulse! records (Impulse! AS-26, 1962, LP, and Impulse! 8045, 1963, LP, respectively); Piano in the Foreground (with Bell and Woodyard) for Columbia (Columbia CL2029, 1963, LP); and Money Jungle (with Mingus and Roach) for United Artists, later reissued by Blue Note Records (UAJS 15017, 1963, LP; Blue Note BNP25113, 1980, LP). Although Ellington the pianist sounds most comfortable on the Armstrong and Hawkins sessions, the other recordings are fascinating in their mixture of strong musical personalities that had rarely, if ever, made music together. Mingus expounds on the exceptional creativity of Ellington’s comping in the film, A Duke Named Ellington.

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Ellington also began to gain more of the kind of public recognition that his accomplishments had always merited. In addition to popular honors (such as the appearance of his portrait on the cover of Time magazine following the orchestra’s 1957 Newport Jazz Festival performance), Ellington was awarded the President’s Gold Medal by order of Lyndon Johnson in 1966 and received the first of his numerous honorary degrees in 1967 (this first being from Yale University). It is interesting to note that at a time when he was absorbing so many new impressions from travels throughout the world and writing some of his most adventurous music for his orchestra, he also wrote the Second Portrait of The Lion, a number that recalled his longtime admiration for the piano playing of Willie “The Lion” Smith.69 Ellington’s initial Portrait of The Lion, written in 1939, primarily featured the orchestra after the short piano introduction. The second portrait is a solo piano piece with a ternary form whose relation to the order of the material is exactly the opposite of The Clothed Woman. The opening and closing sections here reflect The Lion’s colorful stride piano style, with the contrasting material of the middle section drawing on Ellington’s impressionistic vocabulary. After a brief introduction, establishing the key of A, the opening phrase group employs an AA1 BB form. The A sections feature a happy, syncopated theme whose accompaniment utilizes walking bass, stride, and chords moving at a half-note duration – all in a manner that perfectly suits the melodic content. The contrary motion between the melody and bass line is striking and effective. The first 8-bar A section modulates to the key of C-sharp, ending with an E7 chord to return to the key of A. The second A section modulates to B minor in its fifth and sixth measures, with an incomplete Adim chord leading back to the key of A in the seventh measure of the section. Ellington makes an interesting musical elision here by beginning a new 4-bar phrase that extends the second A section to ten measures. In the seventh bar, the F-sharp minor triad is used as a pivot chord back to C-sharp in the eighth measure, where Ellington then interpolates an F triad to return to A in the next bar, completing the sequence of major chords at major-third intervals: A, C, F, and A (Example 4.17). Although the temporary clash of the broken F-sharp minor triad with a major seventh above the F triad in the eighth measure is unusual, the combination of common tones and smooth voice leading in the melodic line make the resolution to A6 in the section’s ninth bar completely convincing. 69

Duke Ellington, Solos, Duets and Trios, Bluebird 2178–2-RB, 1990, compact disc.

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Example 4.17 Second Portrait of The Lion (20 June 1965), second A section, mm. 7–10, transcribed by Bill Dobbins

The key of F is more fully explored in the two 8-bar B sections in which the thematic material conveys a strong blues character. A freewheeling rubato transition leads to the long middle section, also in the key of F, which is played in an open, ad libitum tempo and follows a basic CCDC design. The melody of the C section consists of a succession of decorated melodic long tones (A, B, B natural, C, C, and D) with the bass line moving through the circle of fourths: F, E, A, D, G, C.70 The initial AA1 B group then returns, and a concluding C section ends with an unresolved B triad above the tonic F triad. In his later years, Ellington must have been fascinated by this particular combination of major triads a tritone apart, as it appears from time to time in pieces for the orchestra as well as in his piano pieces.71 “The Shepherd,” from the posthumous 1974 album, Duke Ellington: The Pianist (which contains recordings from 1966 and 1970), contains one of his most striking blues themes in a minor key.72 The 16-bar A section features somewhat rubato melodic statements, each followed by a two-chord cadence, thereby providing an “amen” in the call-andresponse format. The B theme sets the tempo and continues the call-andresponse through the first eight measures of the 12-bar blues form. The opening melodic phrases use the pentatonic fragment, E–G–A, answered by harmonic responses of B7–9 to Em. In bars five and six of the chorus, Ellington extends the melody’s range to B and D, adding a strong blues color, and substitutes C7 for the more common subdominant, 70

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These two elements were revisited in the more elaborately developed composition, A Chromatic Love Affair, which was written in 1967 as a feature for Harry Carney’s baritone saxophone. Two clear examples of these tritone triads are heard on the recording, . . . And His Mother Called Him Bill (RCA LSP3906, 1968, LP): the piano introduction and ending to “After All”; and the orchestra’s final F major chord at the end of “Day Dream,” to which Ellington adds a B triad. Duke Ellington, The Pianist, Fantasy 9462, 1974, LP.

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Example 4.18 “The Shepherd” (18 July 1966), B theme, mm. 9–11, transcribed by Bill Dobbins

A minor.73 After returning to E minor in bars 7 and 8, the melody again emphasizes the blue note, B, but now accompanied by F7, a secondary dominant to B7. Curiously, however, the melody and harmony are put together in a manner that combines the B with the B7 chord, with the melody’s enharmonic major seventh grinding against the lowered seventh of the harmony (Example 4.18). Due to the smooth stepwise resolution of the B to A and, finally, to the third of the E minor tonic chord, this major seventh against a dominant seventh chord simply intensifies the blues feeling. Ellington seemed to delight in breaking what many considered incontrovertible rules in ways that sounded completely convincing, or even preferable, to the ear. Of all the music that Ellington recorded in the 1960s and 1970s, there is nothing in which his piano playing has such a prominent role as in the aforementioned Far East Suite.74 Eight of the work’s nine movements were inspired by the orchestra’s State Department tour of the Middle East in 1963, while “Ad Lib on Nippon” reflected impressions from a trip to Japan in the following year. In “Depk,” sparked by the observation of a native dance, Ellington’s percussive interjections and brief but sprawling solo, beginning with an ascending sequence of Lydian arpeggios, contribute enthusiastically to the festivities. In “Mount Harissa,” his statement of the lengthy and captivating opening and closing theme exhibits effective modal overtones and an awareness of what Horace Silver had been 73

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The dominant seventh on the lowered sixth degree in major or the natural sixth degree in minor was already used by Ellington in Black and Tan Fantasy (recorded three times in 1927: Brunswick 3526, Victor 21284, and Okeh 8521, all 78 rpm) and The Mooche (Victor 24486-B, 1928, 78 rpm). The lowered sixth degree of a key was perhaps his favorite harmonic color, whether as a tone in an important functional harmony or as the bass note, in which case it may or may not be the chord root. It is doubtful that any jazz pianist or composer found as many variants of these colors as Ellington did. Duke Ellington, The Far East Suite, RCA LSP-3781, 1967, LP.

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doing,75 without the least hint of imitation in either case. Ellington’s introduction to “Amad,” along with bassist John Lamb and drummer Rufus Jones, forcefully and decisively establishes the proper ambience for the Islamic call to prayer.76 Ellington then insistently hammers out the tonic G as the powerful ensemble unison lines begin the spiritual entreaty in earnest. Soon after the orchestra’s inspired ensemble playing reaches a truly transcendent state, the majestic tone of Lawrence Brown’s trombone begins to bring the listener back to the earthly plane as Ellington’s disturbingly dissonant bell sound of adjacent ninth intervals (G above middle C, the minor ninth, A, and the major ninth, B) announces the end of this intensely moving devotional. It is impossible to imagine these pieces creating the unbelievable impact they deliver with any pianist other than Duke Ellington, and the final composition, a mini suite in one uninterrupted movement, is the pi`ece de r´esistance. “Ad Lib on Nippon” was a collaboration between Ellington and clarinetist Jimmy Hamilton. Hamilton was largely responsible for the fourth and final part, which also featured his agile abilities as clarinet soloist. Parts one and two of “Ad Lib on Nippon” feature some of Ellington’s most adventurous pianistic writing in the minor blues format. The opening gesture of rising fifth intervals, A–E–B–F seems to imply A Dorian, but the continuation up to D is completely unexpected. It leaves the sonority suspended by withholding the third, whether major or minor. An even greater surprise is waiting at the end of the second phrase, where the D is extended upward to an octave B, with its unmistakably Oriental intent; and while all the previous notes were played percussively and with no pedal, the final D and B are sustained with the damper pedal. The third phrase simply transposes the first down a fifth (to D-A-E-B-G), and the fourth phrase is identical to the second. As is common in 12-bar blues, the last four bars introduce a contrasting motive. Here Ellington uses a series of dominant seventh chords with lowered fifths in the melody: F7, E7, D7, and C7. The melody presents the third degree of the A minor tonality for the first time, then descends in whole steps to F. The left-hand pickups to the next measure continue the whole-step descents to E, the dominant in A minor, after which bars three and four return to complete the chorus.

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A good comparison can be heard, for example, in Silver’s “Enchantment,” from Horace Silver, Six Pieces of Silver, Blue Note BLP 1539, 1957, LP. In his later years, one of Ellington’s cryptic practices in finding titles was to reverse the first few letters of a word or name. In this case, “Amad” comes from the first four letters of “Damascus.”

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Example 4.19 “Ad Lib on Nippon” (20 December 1966), second chorus, mm. 1–4, transcribed by Bill Dobbins

This clear emphasis of a gradual descent provides an effective balance to the steep melodic ascent in the other phrases. In the second chorus, Ellington uses simple diatonic material for contrast. A two-note figure consisting of the dyads B-E and D-G proves to be convincing in both the tonic and subdominant measures of the blues form (Example 4.19). In bars nine and ten of the chorus, however, Ellington uses the same series of descending, dominant seventh chords heard earlier, thereby creating a link between the two choruses. The shock in this chorus is the dissonant bell-like sound that punctuates the end of each 4-bar phrase. The top right-hand note of this chord, A, combines with the left-hand voicing to suggest an A Phrygian harmony, including the ever-present B. The lower right-hand notes are responsible for the harsh dissonance, as each is a major seventh above the corresponding lower notes of the left hand. The harmonic effect is similar to that used in the grace-note harmonies of The Clothed Woman, but the pedal is not used to catch the ring of the right-hand chord, leaving the left-hand chord clear and unobscured. Ellington’s piano also states the opening theme of the second part of “Ad Lib on Nippon.” Whereas the theme of part one consisted mostly of ascending lines with one important descending figure for contrast, the theme of part two reverses these characteristics. The tempo is double that of part one, and the first ten measures of the minor blues theme consist mostly of descending eighth-note lines, with a sudden ascending phrase providing contrast in the last two bars. The tonality here is a more straightforward A minor, with a decided emphasis on the edgy color of the major seventh. A contrasting 12-bar theme uses the thematic material from the third chorus of part one (C–E–C–B–C), but transposed down a step (to B–D–B–A–B), and played simply in octaves without the minor second dissonances heard earlier. In measures nine and ten of this chorus

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the descending series of dominant chords heard throughout part one is simplified to the more basic sequence (of F7, B7, E7), before resolving to AmMaj7 in bar eleven. The remainder of part two features the orchestra in brilliant section and full-ensemble writing. Just before the return of the main themes Ellington exchanges short jabbing piano chords with powerful chords from the orchestra, using this simple technique in an utterly majestic manner that is all too rarely heard in jazz. Ellington hangs on to the G of the final Am chord in part two and begins a rubato solo transition to part three by reharmonizing it as the third of an Fm chord, and then as the lowered thirteenth of an altered C7 chord, establishing the new key center of F minor. Part three consists of two themes, with the first played more freely and developed more extensively, and is devoted entirely to Ellington’s piano. The first statement of the A theme continues the A from the transition as a melodic pedal tone throughout the 12-bar phrase. The melody is mostly limited to the motive of adjacent fourths, E–A–B– E. This group of intervals is developed in a different manner by Jimmy Hamilton in the thematic material of part four. Although Ellington uses the basic harmonies found in minor blues forms, he disrupts the expected resolution from C7 back to F minor in bar nine, substituting the surprising EMaj7. Moving through the circle of fourths to AMaj7, Ellington resolves the harmony to the relative major key of A-flat in a manner that results in a 12-bar phrase. This suggests a hybrid blues form that begins in a minor key and ends in the relative major key. In the melody, the lower E of the initial motive moves stepwise to D and, finally, to the third of the A-flat tonic chord, C. In the pickup phrase to the second A theme statement, Ellington transposes the main motive up a step to F–B–C–F. This new combination of notes sounds completely fresh in relation to the original chords, while maintaining the integrity of the melodic content of the first A section. In the last four bars of the second A section, Ellington returns to the melody as stated initially, with just a few octave displacements. The B theme makes ingenious use of simple major triads in the left hand (A–G–F–G–E-D–D), ending with a half cadence on E7. Because the whole-note melody consists of colorful tones in relation to the accompanying chords (D–E–D–A–B–E–F–F), the effect is magical. Except for bars five to six, the melody and bass line move in contrary motion. This theme is another strong example of Ellington’s economy of means. It is amazing to hear how differently the same content sounds when orchestrated for the full band at a fast swing tempo in part four. Ellington was

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able to take just a bit of what Hamilton wrote and, by simplifying the harmony and slowing down the tempo, transform it so completely that many listeners would never recognize the specific connection. A single measure of D7+9 leads to the final A section and the completion of Ellington’s thematic development in part three. Here Ellington uses the melody notes of the second A section, but now transposes the original harmonies up a step. The melody and harmony have the same relationship as in the first A section, but now in the key of G minor. As the initial A section ended in the relative major key of A-flat, the final A section ends in the relative major key of B-flat, which is to be the key of part four. Ellington eventually shifts into an improvised rubato cadenza to set up the new key in a more imaginative manner, finally landing on the piano’s lowest B. Jimmy Hamilton then takes over with a brief but captivating unaccompanied clarinet cadenza that leads to part four and the relentlessly swinging conclusion to “Ad Lib on Nippon.” Although there were several more suites that followed the Far East Suite, none would feature either the orchestra or Ellington’s piano in a more spectacular fashion. As Ellington began the second half of his seventh decade, he accepted an invitation to present what became his first Concert of Sacred Music on 16 September 1965 at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco.77 The invitation obviously struck a personal chord in him, as he responded, “Now I can say openly what I have been saying to myself on my knees.”78 The Concert of Sacred Music featured Ellington in a solo piano version of New World AComin’, and the numerous recordings of this version stand convincingly alongside the earlier orchestral versions. On 19 January 1968, the Ellington orchestra premiered the Second Sacred Concert at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York.79 Of all the piano features in Ellington’s long and fruitful career, none is more perfectly fashioned or more deeply expressive than “Meditation,” from the Second Sacred Concert. “Meditation” is related to Ellington’s earlier impressionistic piano pieces, yet each one of these is quite distinctive from all the others. The overall form of “Meditation” is ABAB1 CA1 B2 , with a brief coda that returns to the opening motive of the piece. The A section’s melody is based on an ascending half step, E–E, which is harmonized with an altered C7 chord resolving to FMaj9. This material is repeated and then the melody is transposed down a step to D–D. while the harmony shifts to an altered F7 77 78 79

Duke Ellington, Concert of Sacred Music, RCA PL43663, 1966, LP. Ellington, Mistress, 261. Duke Ellington, Second Sacred Concert, Prestige 24045, 1968, LP set.

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chord that resolves to B6/9Maj7. The half-step motive then moves down a fourth to A–A, with the accompanying harmonies of D7+9+11 and G13. The resolution of C to D in the triplet eighth note melodic figure refers to the earlier D and D, and the G13 chord resolves deceptively to A minor at the beginning of the B section. The B section’s melody is based on the resolution of large leaps, first jumping up to the fourth or eleventh of the A minor chord, and then resolving stepwise to the third. The expressive repeated notes and melismatic ornamentation in the melody of the B section complement the modal flavor of the harmonies, even though the music never really leaves the tonal axis of F major and D minor. The C section is a development section, transforming the melismatic idea of the B section in relation to a new sequence of impressionistic modal colors that suggest the modal piano pieces of Erik Satie, especially his Trois Gymnop´edies.80 This dramatically compelling section ends with a suspended C dominant ninth chord with the third next to the ninth. In this dense yet beautiful voicing, the third sounds like an upper extension, hovering a major seventh above the fourth. The A1 section that follows extends the A material to ten measures. The closing B2 section begins like B1 , but eventually leads to a thundering low octave C that generates an ascending series of F triad inversions. The dynamic gradually fades to hushed tones and the intriguing suspended C9 chord with the added third, leading back to the first two chords of the piece. The final resonating FMaj9 chord is quietly adorned with a mid-register B triad, rendering the attentive listener completely speechless, aglow in a transcendent state of consciousness. If “Kinda Dukish” demonstrates how Ellington’s piano playing could succinctly epitomize jazz, Meditation demonstrates just as clearly how his piano playing could completely transcend jazz, reaching that state of expressive perfection that Ellington described as “beyond category.” Ellington’s growing realization of his own mortality may have brought a heightened sense of presence to some of his performances during the final years, including the last recording to focus on his piano playing, a duo session with bassist Ray Brown.81 Maybe this was what Ellington 80

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Any connection between Erik Satie and Ellington is likely the result of Ellington hearing something in passing, such as Satie’s Trois Gymnop´edies, no. 1, which was a very popular piece during the late 1960s. (For instance, one can hear a small-group arrangement of this composition on the eponymous second LP of the group, Blood, Sweat and Tears, from 1969.) Recorded in December 1973, the music was released on the Pablo label under the title This One’s for Blanton (Pablo 2310721, 1975, LP).

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Example 4.20 Mood Indigo, comparison of the A theme, mm. 1–4, with corresponding Ellington introductions or solos, transcribed by Bill Dobbins 17 October 1930

11 May 1945

31 May 1964

11 May 1966*

was feeling in 1973, when he was asked why it was taking him so long to complete his Third Sacred Concert. He replied, “You can jive with secular music, but you can’t jive with the Almighty.”82 Perhaps the best way to get a brief overview of Ellington’s lifelong evolution as a pianist is to compare different solo treatments of the opening four measures of Mood Indigo, certainly one of his most enduring melodies (Example 4.20). We begin with the first four measures of the ensemble version of Mood Indigo from 17 October 1930, with the beautiful individual lines for muted trumpet and trombone, clarinet, and bass. Following this 82

Jewell, Duke, 217.

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orchestrated version are Ellington’s solo interpretations from 11 May 1945, January 1956 (featuring Rosemary Clooney), 31 May 1964 (live), and 11 May 1966.83 Each version follows a particular method of harmonic variation or substitution in a logically consistent yet imaginative and musically satisfying manner. Probably none of them were improvised entirely on the spur of the moment, but rather evolved gradually over time. From the hundreds of recordings of Mood Indigo by the Ellington orchestra, there are other versions that are also worthy of attention, but these four suffice to put Ellington in a class by himself among jazz pianists. Without going into a measure-by-measure analysis, it is worth noting that the most special harmony in the early orchestration, the simple F minor triad at the beginning of bar 3, is nowhere to be found in any of the later solo versions; nor does Ellington ever revert to the common progression heard in bar 3 on most recordings of Mood Indigo apart from those made by Ellington and those Ellingtonians who really knew the piece: Cm7 to F7+5 . Many jazz musicians have paid lip service to Ellington’s music over the years, but few have really studied even the handful of Ellington and Strayhorn tunes that are far too often passed off as an adequate representation of a truly vast repertoire.

Conclusion In concluding what could be considered a highly detailed introductory chapter in the epic saga of Ellington’s unique contribution to jazz piano playing, it should be clear by now that there is no jazz pianist whose piano music and piano playing has exceeded the mixture of stylistic range and expressive depth to be found in the pieces presented here; and these represent only the tip of the iceberg. While it is true that Ellington was never the kind of improviser who spun out chorus after chorus of thematic content developed from a particular melody or chord progression (as Paul Gonsalves did, for example), he was nevertheless an incomparable master of finding endless variations of a set piece or making slightly different solos each night from the same basic ideas (as Johnny Hodges did). For Ellington, the quality of a solo statement had more to do with the clarity of 83

Jungle Band, Mood Indigo; Duke Ellington and His Famous Orchestra, Mood Indigo, Victor D5VB264–1, 1945, 78 rpm; Rosemary Clooney and Duke Ellington, Blue Rose, Columbia CL-872, 1956, LP; the 31 May 1964 performance can be heard on Duke Ellington, All Star Road Band, vol. 2, Doctor Jazz Records W2X40012, 1985, LP; and the 11 May 1966 performance can be heard on Duke Ellington, The Popular Duke Ellington, RCA LSP-3576, 1966, LP.

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the impression left behind than the number of notes or choruses played. (Monk obviously shared this point of view.) Unfortunately, this aspect of improvisation, the ability to play the same melody differently every night yet make each version seem like it must be the definitive one, has become a neglected goldmine. It can certainly be argued that subtle variations of an exceptional set piece can ultimately be more rewarding than ten choruses of technical display in which the theme has been forgotten before the first chorus is finished. As Ellington reflected on the role of improvisation in jazz, he said, “Anyone who plays anything worth hearing knows what he’s going to play, no matter whether he prepares a day ahead or a beat ahead. It has to be with intent.”84 Indeed, it is sobering to begin to comprehend just how much Duke Ellington contributed to the timeless legacy of jazz piano playing between the late 1920s and 1974, the year of his passing. In light of everything that has been documented about Ellington’s music up to this point in time, it seems like much of this unparalleled contribution was made while nobody was looking. It is time to start looking now.

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Ellington, Mistress, 465.

5

“People Wrap Their Lunches in Them”: Duke Ellington and His Written Music Manuscripts walter van de leur

Throughout his career, Duke Ellington often referred to the process of writing music – meaning, the act of actually committing it to paper, using pencil and eraser.1 Indeed, he left a large body of written music manuscripts. But the relation between Ellington’s autographs and the performances and recordings of his orchestra is not straightforward. Clearly, Ellington’s goal was performance. He never sought to publish his original orchestral scores in print, and this disinterest further obscured how performance and notation are connected in his music. This situation has led scholars to gloss over the role of notation in Ellington’s music, thereby leading some writers to downplay its importance in his music practice. Moreover, mystifications and comparisons with classical music notation (frequently from a rather limited understanding of the latter practice) have often served to demonstrate Ellington’s uniqueness. In this essay, I discuss both the role of music notation in jazz in general, and in Ellington’s compositional strategies in particular. In specific, I investigate the following key questions around the latter subject: How are Ellington’s written scores and performances connected? What role did music notation play in his creative process? And, lastly, how does his notated music compare to the other compositional practices he applied? Before we turn to the particularities in Ellington’s notated music, it is important to understand music notation in general. The history of music notation systems harks back to centuries-old civilizations, including those of North Africa, Asia, and Europe. In Western Europe, a symbolic-linear musical notation system gradually developed over the course of centuries into what is now known as modern music notation. It uses a five-line staff on which various symbols – such as clefs, key signatures, notes, dots, 1

This essay builds on research delivered at various conferences and taught at various conservatory courses. Parts of this work have been published in German in “Scores of Scores: Einige Anmerkungen zu Manuskripten der Billy-Strayhorn- und Duke-Ellington-Sammlungen in den USA,” in Duke Ellington und die Folgen, ed. Wolfram Knauer (Hofheim: Wolke, 2000), 225–47. The author wishes to thank Michael Fitzgerald, Sjef Hoefsmit, John Howland, Bruce Boyd Raeburn and Michiel Schuijer.

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ties, and accidentals – represent pitches, rhythmic values, phrasing, and accents. Additional (abbreviated) text markings indicate instrumentation, dynamics, character, and tempo. This notational system is most visibly connected to European concert-music practice – commonly referred to as classical music – but this notation tradition is used in other musical genres as well. (In addition, of course, a number of other sophisticated musical notation systems exist.) It is important to distinguish between descriptive and prescriptive notation.2 Most notation is prescriptive: it provides performers with visual guidelines that allow them to translate a particular piece into actual sound. On the other hand, descriptive notation aims to capture an actual performance (usually a recorded performance) in written symbols. Translating notation into actual sound is a complex process. Performers need to understand the many conventions and practices that underlie any notational system. These practices are not necessarily explicit, but reside in what is termed tacit knowledge. Modern music notation transmits certain musical parameters quite well – pitch, meter, rhythmic subdivision, etc. – but other qualities remain vague, such as dynamics, tempo fluctuations, sound and timbre, and intonation. According to Nicholas Cook, musicians who perform a Mozart string quartet “may well play the notes exactly as Mozart wrote them . . . yet [they] don’t play them exactly as Mozart wrote them, because every note in the score is subject to the contextual negotiation of intonation, precise dynamic balance, articulation, rhythmic subtleties, timbral quality, and so forth.”3 Such negotiation deals largely with parameters that are poorly transmitted by the score, and this is where performers need to draw upon their tacit knowledge. This knowledge becomes apparent both in their performative skills, and their understanding of repertoire and style. Tacit knowledge is largely learned in practice – it is mostly transmitted orally. Therefore, the farther we are removed from the musical practices that produced specific musical texts, the more difficulty we will have translating such potential music into actual music. The so-called historically informed performance practice of early classical music is a case in point. Sympathizers with this movement seek to faithfully reconstruct the original intentions of the composer, as expressed

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See Charles Seeger, “Prescriptive and Descriptive Music-Writing,” The Musical Quarterly 44 (1958): 184–95. Nicholas Cook, “Making Music Together, or Improvisation and Its Others,” The Source: Challenging Jazz Criticism 1 (2004): 15.

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through a score, or try to come to historically authentic performances.4 Nevertheless, ongoing research on musical texts, treatises, and other sources (such as instruments, performance practices, and contexts) invariably leads to ever-changing interpretations and vehement debates over what this authenticity is. After all, scores are full of uncertainties with respect to tempo, tuning, phrasing, dynamics, instrumentation, articulation, embellishments, timbre, and so forth. Even though this music was created in a literate culture, its context was orally transmitted through apprenticeship, observation, and practice. This practice of musical orality is the main topic in Richard Taruskin’s 1995 collection of essays titled Text and Act. Taruskin maintains that the musical process simply cannot be captured in writing, and that therefore any attempt to glean historic verisimilitude from documents will inevitably fail.5 Still, prescriptive notation has wielded tremendous authority in classical music practices of the last two centuries, up to the point where many believe that musicians have no other option than to execute the notated music as closely and exactly as possible.6 Clearly, such a limited view overlooks the ambiguities of music notation, and ignores the complexities of classical music performance. As Richard Middleton has warned, with this growing emphasis on the notated score in analysis comes the danger of a “notational centricity . . . [which] tends to equate the music with the score. This leads to an overemphasis on features that can be notated easily (such as fixed pitches) at the expense of others which cannot (complex rhythmic detail, pitch nuance, sound qualities).”7 The ultimate consequence of such notational centricity is the reification of the musical score. According to Taruskin, this often leads to a failure “to make the fundamental distinction between music as tones-in-motion and music as notes-on-page.”8 (As should be apparent, Taruskin has been a major opponent of the historically informed performance practice

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Certain jazz repertory orchestras similarly strive for historically authentic performances. Here, recordings set the standard, and the goal is to reproduce the music as accurately as possible. See Richard Taruskin, Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). For instance, the eHow website contributor, Carl Harper, suggests that “Classical musicians usually perform musical notes exactly as written out on the page by a composer.” Carl Harper, “The Difference Between Classical Music and Jazz Music,” at www.ehow.com/about 6508509 difference-between-classical-jazz-music.html (accessed 27 September 2014). Richard Middleton (ed.), Reading Pop: Approaches to Textual Analysis in Popular Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 4. Richard Taruskin, “The Authenticity Movement Can Become a Positivistic Purgatory, Literalistic and Dehumanizing,” Early Music 12 (February 1984): 3–12.

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movement.) An opposite view was once expressed by Arnold Schoenberg, who said both that “music need not be performed any more than books need to be read aloud, for its logic is perfectly represented on the printed page,” and that “the performer, for all his intolerable arrogance, is totally unnecessary except as his interpretations make the music understandable to an audience unfortunate enough not to be able to read it in print.”9 In such comments, Schoenberg seems to overlook that much as the recipe is not the soup, the score is not the music. Of course, he knew this point full well – his remark was mostly an ironic stab at performers. Indeed, as shown in recent studies of the 1940s recordings of Schoenberg as conductor of his own Pierrot Lunaire, he too allowed for different interpretations of his work.10 Descriptive notation captures an actual (recorded) performance into written symbols. In jazz, such notation is commonly referred to as a transcription.11 Scholars and musicians transcribe music for which so far no notation existed (such as folk musics, improvised musics, etc.), or for which the original notation is lost. Transcribing recorded music is a widespread practice in jazz. Jazz transcriptions can serve different goals, which are not necessarily clearly delineated. For example, a transcription can be aimed at performance or at study and analysis (and often both). A performance transcription enables the recreation of the original recording from which the music is taken. Descriptive notation now becomes prescriptive. Such recreation can try to be as literal as possible – a reproduction, as it were – or it can be aimed at reinterpretation, where the performers deal with the music as if no previous recording exists. Either way, it is a complex process that involves many decisions. The transcriber can choose to fully write out improvised solos and rhythm section parts, or they can decide to reconstruct the score that the original performers might have had available to work from. The amount of tacit knowledge that can be assumed has to be factored in as well. For example, scores aimed at amateur performers tend to carry more articulation signs than those created for professionals.

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These comments were recalled by Dika Newlin, a former student of Schoenberg’s, in Dika Newlin, Schoenberg Remembered: Diaries and Recollection, 1938–76 (New York: Pendragon Press, 1980), 164. Avior Byron, “The Test Pressings of Schoenberg Conducting Pierrot Lunaire: Sprechstimme Reconsidered,” Music Theory Online 12 (2006), at www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.06.12.1/toc.12 .1.html (accessed 17 September 2015). In European classical music, transcription can also refer to rewriting a piece of music for another instrument or ensemble than for which it was originally written.

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While a transcription can be based on a single recording, it can also try to reconstruct the “original” musical text from multiple existent recordings, which can include alternate takes, different sessions, and live recordings. Original scores and parts in the Smithsonian’s Duke Ellington Collection show that different recordings of a title are often based on the same written material. Such recordings can help to reconstruct the original material, but this process is still quite complicated. For instance, two recordings, even if based on the same manuscript, can differ to various degrees. Ellington may have changed the order of musical sections, musicians may have altered their phrasing, articulation, and dynamics, they may have made mistakes, the rhythm section might play differently, and the solos will differ. With such variations, it is inherently difficult for a transcriber to decide what the original score might have looked like. Even if the original chart is accurately reconstructed (which can only be known if at some point the manuscript score surfaces), its status as an authoritative text is still not clear. Composers in the European concert-music tradition have often overseen the publication of their work in print. The published version can therefore be taken as “the work” (although here too there are many problems and issues).12 By contrast, as noted, Ellington published his scores on records rather than in print. Recordings then constitute “the work,” rather than his autograph scores. The precise delimitation of the nature and extent of these works is still debatable, since the recorded versions tend to differ, and Ellington’s pieces were notoriously in a state of flux. This issue may be illustrated by the fact that the seemingly simple job of establishing how many titles Ellington composed has turned out to be a daunting task, with quite different outcomes, depending on how one defines an Ellington “work.”13 12

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These may range from mistakes in editions to composers who keep changing their materials. A case in point are the editions of Chopin’s piano music, of which many versions circulate. Chopin often published a manuscript in small quantities in different countries with different publishers. He would later make changes and corrections, but his publishers and students made changes as well. As a result, Chopin’s published piano music differs from his autographs, which can be ambiguous as well, and therefore do not necessarily bear out what the composer had in mind. See for instance Eva Badura-Skoda, “Textual Problems in Masterpieces of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” The Musical Quarterly 51 (1965): 301–17; and Oswald Jonas, “On the Study of Chopin’s Manuscripts,” Chopin-Jahrbuch (Vienna: Internationale Chopin-Gesellschaft, 1956), 142–55. On the subject of counting Ellington’s production, a good overview of the various issues can be found in Jørgen Mathiasen, “Duke Ellington’s Production as a Composer: A Survey of a Selection of Sources to his Entire Production and a Methodological Discussion,” www .roundaboutjazz.de/depages/Survey.htm (accessed 27 September 2014). Mathiasen estimates that Ellington wrote and co-wrote about 1,700 works. Mathiasen’s list includes some hundred

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Often a transcription serves to facilitate musical analysis. If the analysis is aimed at pitch-relationships and general rhythmic traits, standard notation can do the job. But if the focus is on different parameters, standard notation may fall short. Therefore, musicologists have developed alternative notational systems in order to transcribe musics or musical traits that would be misrepresented in standard Western notation. Nevertheless, any transcription system must answer to the specific analytical perspectives of the transcriber. For instance, in order to more accurately represent the kind of rhythmic displacement that tends to occur in jazz, Milton Stewart proposes a system of grid notation for jazz transcriptions.14 Others adapt standard notation to meet specific analytical goals. Regardless of the approach though, it is important that the transcriber is aware of the analytical purposes of the transcription. Just as with prescriptive notation, the issues that surround descriptive notation are manifold, regardless of the genre in question. No music can simply be captured in notation, and every notational system has its limitations. Clearly, one must be careful not to unquestioningly use a transcription for musical analysis, since even when it comes to only notating the pitches, the score will in all likelihood have mistakes, and this may lead to questionable interpretations.15 The apparent importance of notation in European concert-music practice is often used to demonstrate how jazz and classical music are different. Since one of the defining qualities of jazz is improvisation, it is often assumed that musical literacy is hardly a requirement for jazz musicians. Conversely, in classical music, musical literacy has taken on tremendous importance. Furthermore, it is argued, jazz is largely rooted in aurally and

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titles of suites as well as their separate movements (e.g., Perfume Suite and Dancers in Love), and at least fifty works that I have positively ascribed to Strayhorn (including Smada, Your Love Has Faded, Overture to a Jam Session, Cashmere Cutie, Isfahan, and Day Dream; see Van de Leur, Something, Appendices B–D. With the latter adjustments, this makes about 1,550 known (co-)compositions a better estimate. See also Jørgen Mathiasen, “Title key to Duke Ellington’s oeuvre,” www.roundaboutjazz.de/depages/titlekey.htm (accessed 27 September 2014), and Erik Wiedemann, “Duke Ellington: The Composer,” Annual Review of Jazz Studies 5 (1991): 37–64. Despite this documentation, such prominent sources as the 2009 Jazz, by Scott DeVeaux and Gary Giddins, persist in stating that Ellington “wrote . . . thousands of instrumental miniatures.” (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), 132. See Milton L. Stewart, “Grid Notation: A System for Jazz Transcription,” Annual Review of Jazz Studies 1 (1982): 3–12. For examples of misheard notes in transcriptions of Ellington orchestra recordings, see Van de Leur, Something, 291n4, and Scott DeVeaux, “The Early Years by Mark Tucker; Duke Ellington: Jazz Composer by Ken Rattenbury” (review), The Musical Quarterly 76 (Spring 1992): 121–35, passim.

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orally transmitted traditions which seem diametrically opposed to the written traditions that have dominated European music practices. However, as explained above, literate musical cultures rely heavily on orality too. In any musical genre, prescriptive notation requires a deep understanding of the musical practice that has produced the score. Some jazz scholars argue that due to its special characteristics, jazz cannot be truly notated. For these proponents, the music’s very refusal to be adequately captured on paper thus shows its uniqueness. It is true that characteristics of jazz – such as improvisation, individual sound quality, rhythmical nuances, variable intonation, idiosyncratic accents and phrasing, and ensemble interaction – simply cannot be accurately captured in standard musical notation, as numerous jazz transcribers readily admit.16 Yet, as explained above, music notation is a challenge in any genre. The task of transcribing a Cootie Williams solo can be as complicated as transcribing a piece of Carnatic music. The problems may vary from genre to genre, and from piece to piece, but all music is difficult to notate, and all notation is difficult to perform. Therefore, it is not possible to draw clear lines between various music genres on the basis of notation practices. Contrary to what has often been claimed and implied, notation has always played a role in jazz. David Chevan’s research on musical literacy in the 1920s and 1930s bears out that even many early jazz musicians were musically literate.17 They often received formal or informal musical instruction in school, or from a band member, or they studied with a private music teacher. Sooner or later, most jazz musicians learned to read (and write) music. The pianist Lil Hardin, for instance, reports that she wrote out the arrangements and “even the solos” for the first Louis Armstrong Hot Five sessions in July 1926.18 Musical literacy greatly enhanced a musician’s career opportunities, since knowing how to read music gave access to jobs in all kinds of aggregations – from marching bands, circus and tent show bands, pit bands in movie theatres and vaudeville shows, to dance orchestras and recording studio bands. 16

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See, for instance, Gunther Schuller, The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz, 1930–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 64n14 and 123n43. A transcription of a classical performance would run into exactly the same problems. See David Chevan, Written Music in Early Jazz (Ph.D. diss., City University of New York, 1997); David Chevan, “Musical Literacy and Jazz Musicians in the 1910s and 1920s,” Current Musicology 71–3 (Spring 2001–Spring 2002): 200–31. William Russell, interview with Lillian Hardin Armstrong, 1 July 1959, Hogan Jazz Archive Oral Histories Collection, 1943–2002, item 45, Reel I.

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Where at first jazz bands could work with so-called head arrangements that were worked out during rehearsals, across the 1920s, the growing size of ensembles and the increasing complexity of the arrangements inevitably called for notation. In the swing orchestras of the 1930s and 1940s – part of an industry that employed thousands of jazz musicians – reading music was virtually a sine qua non. There is extensive documentation on written practices in jazz. Apart from oral histories which stress that musicians read and often wrote music, in hundreds of photographs musicians can be seen reading music on the bandstand. Archival jazz collections house impressive repositories of handwritten music manuscripts pertaining to the careers of dozens of early jazz musicians, including Louis Armstrong, “Jelly Roll” Morton, Mary Lou Williams, Charlie Barnet, Jimmie Lunceford, Claude Thornhill, and Duke Ellington. Yet relatively little attention has been given to this written practice in Jazz Studies, and one cannot help but get the feeling that for some those reams of written music carry an unwelcome message that counteracts notions of jazz’s unique orality. In 1988, the Smithsonian Institution acquired about 310 cubic feet (8.7 cubic meters) of archival material from Mercer Ellington that documented the career of his father.19 Today this material is archived in sixteen series. The collection contains sound recordings, photographs, business records, scrapbooks, publicity materials, books, and awards. More than half of the material (166.6 cubic feet, or 4.7 cubic meters) is located in Series 1: Music Manuscripts. This material forms the largest series in the Collection and includes original manuscripts (parts and scores), [copyist’s] scores, lead, lyric and copyright sheets, published music and arrangements of compositions by Duke Ellington and his main collaborator, Billy Strayhorn . . . The bulk of the scores and parts are hand-written by Ellington, Strayhorn or Tom Whaley (Ellington’s chief copyist, ca. 1942–69).20

These materials are now stored in over 470 archival boxes. More materials pertaining to Ellington and his closest collaborator, Billy Strayhorn, are housed in the Billy Strayhorn Collection (in the possession of his estate). Beyond published sheet music, the latter source includes some seven hundred scores in Strayhorn’s hand, close to five dozen autographs by Ellington, original music by the likes of Luther Henderson, (Ellington 19

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This does not account for another 300 cubic feet of music stands, awards, clothing, and other band ephemera (including Ellington’s electric piano for travel). For notes on scope and content, as well as history and provenance of the Duke Ellington Collection, see http://amhistory.si.edu/archives/d5301.htm (accessed 27 September 2014).

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band trumpeter) Freddie Jenkins, and others, and numerous copyist’s scores and parts in the hands Juan Tizol, Thomas Whaley, John Sanders, Herbie Jones, and various unidentified extractors.21 Most all of these materials – from both collections – were part of the library of an orchestra that was year-round on the road. Therefore, scores often miss pages, and sets of parts often are incomplete. Music Manuscripts Sub-Series 1D, “Unidentified Music,” consists of boxes full of loose pages and untitled scores that cannot be identified (over the last twenty years, thanks to the work of archivists and scholars, hundreds of such orphaned pages have been reunited with their parent documents). Moreover, it is safe to assume that Ellington produced more written music than currently survives. Still, many of Ellington’s works are documented in full, whether through original autograph scores, sets of copied instrumental parts, or copyist’s scores. In light of this overwhelming evidence that notated music played a crucial role in the gestation of the Ellington orchestra’s music, it is incomprehensible that the numerous articles and books on Ellington that have appeared since the Duke Ellington Collection became publicly accessible dedicate precious little attention to his autograph scores.22 Andrew Homzy – who was among the first Ellington scholars to go through the Smithsonian Institution’s newly acquired collection – warned researchers not to overlook this important resource: “Today, anyone claiming to be a scholar of Ellingtonia and jazz must acknowledge and conduct research in this treasure trove of documents and information.”23 Yet, the few texts that do refer to Ellington’s written music often tend to downplay its importance and relevance. In Jazz, for example – which promises to be the textbook of choice for generations of jazz appreciation course college instructors to come – Scott DeVeaux and Gary Giddins do exactly that: European classical music has taught us to think of composers as working in isolation, scribbling music on manuscript paper for others to perform. Ellington could work this way. Whenever he traveled, he carried with him a pad of paper and a pencil in his pocket. At odd moments throughout the day . . . he jotted down ideas as they came to him . . . Ellington liked collaborating with his musicians. Rather than 21

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For more on Strayhorn’s autographs, his compositions, and his collaboration with Ellington, see Van de Leur, Something. For an inventory of Ellington-themed writings, see “Duke Ellington: Biography and Bibliography,” http://www.jazzinstitut.de/jazz-index-duke-ellington/?lang=de (accessed 14 January 2017). Andrew Homzy, “Duke Ellington: Jazz Composer by Ken Rattenbury” (review), Notes 48 (1992): 1241–6.

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present them with a score, he would invite the band to work with him: explaining the mental picture that inspired it, playing parts, and assigning musicians roles.24

Ellington not only could work like his European classical colleagues, he most often did. He would not just jot “down ideas as they came to him,” but as a rule developed his ideas into written-out compositions, prior to taking them to his orchestra. Also, it should be noted here that classical composition practices are much more complex and diverse than “scribbling music on manuscript paper for others to perform.” Rather, many classical composers (e.g., Felix Mendelssohn, Anton Bruckner, and Johannes Brahms) regularly altered and revised their written music, so that in those oeuvres too, it is not clear what exactly constitutes “the work.” Moreover, other classical composers were the main performers of their own compositions (e.g., Johann Sebastian Bach, Arcangelo Corelli, and Fr´ed´eric Chopin) and often strayed from the written notes. In the twentieth century, composers completely redefined music notation by embracing graphic scores (Morton Feldman, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Yuji Takahashi), open form (Earle Brown, John Cage), and deliberately unplayable scores (Brian Ferneyhough’s new complexity). And, lastly, with Ellington’s practice in mind, it should be observed that classical composers have often collaborated closely with the performers of their music (Brahms, Luciano Berio). DeVeaux and Giddins also describe some of the material in the Duke Ellington Collection: No permanent record survives for Ellington’s music, which was reconceived whenever new soloists entered the band. There’s a set of scores at the Smithsonian Institution, derived from recordings and manuscripts, that combine carefully notated Ellington harmonies with vague verbal directions (for example, “Tricky ad lib,” meant for Sam Nanton to take a solo). They were presented to Ellington on his sixtieth birthday; the composer thanked everyone, but forgot to take the scores home. He knew his music could not be contained by notation.25

That Ellington’s music “could not be contained by notation” is true, but then again, no music can. DeVeaux and Giddins suggest here that Ellington’s scores were quite cryptic, and in the end were of little relevance to the composer himself. Even though many other authors have made similar statements, this assumption could not be further from the truth.26 24 26

25 Ibid. Italics in original. DeVeaux and Giddins, Jazz, 212. The scores mentioned by DeVeaux and Giddins hardly contained Ellington autographs. They were indeed “derived from recordings and manuscripts,” and consisted of copyist scores (mostly lead sheets) compiled by friends, band members, and family for Ellington’s sixtieth

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As a rule, beyond Billy Strayhorn, the only people who laid eyes on Ellington’s scores during his life were his copyists, who translated the music manuscripts into fairly standard instrumental parts for the various band members. The orchestra relied on written parts, so much that many were written on customized music paper with Ellington’s signature printed in the bottom right-hand corner. Among the myths surrounding the Ellington orchestra are stories of music written on napkins, matchboxes, hotel stationery, and shirt sleeves.27 Precious few examples of this “practice” survive, and I strongly suspect that a composer who ordered personalized manuscript paper had little reason to resort to such awkward writing materials. If there is any substance to those stories, they must be considered exceptions to the rule. Ellington’s scores were not intended for usage outside the orchestra, and this limited environment allowed him to develop a number of economic notational short-cuts. His copyists had to be familiar with the at times non-standard notation conventions that he used, but these conventions were not as complex as has been suggested, for instance by his son Mercer, who recounted that The lack of formal knowledge set him [Ellington] on a way of creative thinking that others hadn’t approached. Then he learned that there was a way of writing it down and still have it make sense. Yet after he learned to write, he wrote in such a cryptic fashion that the average person couldn’t figure out what he was doing. He’d put clefs that really didn’t belong on that particular staff, and he had a system of not changing the accidental so long as the accidental didn’t belong to the particular part that that instrument was playing. For example, in one place there would be a chord with a G flat in it, and another chord later with just a G in it, with nothing on it. You would assume it was G flat, but it wasn’t. It was because the guy playing the third alto part never played a G prior to that, so there was no necessity to put a G natural in front of it. As a result, people who had a chance to look at the music, and maybe play it, found it didn’t make sense. And, of course, it sounded horrible.28

Yet, Mercer Ellington’s account does not hold up when one considers the majority of the actual documents. Among the many surviving scores, “I

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birthday. These sheets were organized in twenty-four so-called Presentation Albums (blue, leather-bound volumes). The idea was to give an overview of Ellington’s composing career (hence including no arrangements or reworked versions), rather than to collect his autographs. Among other sources, see Hasse, Beyond, 336. DeVeaux and Giddins recount how an unnamed “bassist found his entire part for a piece scrawled on a cocktail napkin.” DeVeaux and Giddins, Jazz, 212. Mercer Ellington and Stanley Dance, Duke Ellington in Person: An Intimate Memoir (New York: Da Capo, 1979), 43.

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Never Felt This Way Before” can serve as a case in point. It was a romantic pop song recorded for Victor Records in two takes with singer Herb Jeffries on 28 October 1940.29 The number was also recorded live at the Crystal Ballroom in Fargo, North Dakota, 7 November 1940.30 In addition, an earlier instrumental version of the piece had been recorded for Columbia on 14 October 1939.31 Though somewhat idiosyncratic and incomplete, the score is far from cryptic. The key is B-flat, and the score is notated in concert pitch. The clefs may change from system to system, but they are not out of the ordinary.32 The first system gives a harmonized melody for “Wallace [Jones, trumpet], [Juan] Tizol (valve-trombone), and [Barney Bigard on] Clar[inet].” Remarkably, the rhythm section is absent, which is customary in Ellington’s scores. Since “I Never Felt” is a 32-bar ABAC song, the chord changes and the form of the arrangement could easily be explained to the rhythm section in rehearsal. Similarly, there is no vocal part further down the score. Jeffries must have learned the tune directly from Ellington. Themes are often missing in Ellington’s scores; if they were not already known to the soloist (as was the case with many of his famous pieces), they were typically provided directly on a part, to save time. Other performance indications – such as dynamics, tempo, slurs, and accents – are missing too. These sorts of musical instructions were simply worked out on the bandstand. Bars five and six of Ellington’s first chorus call for a repeat of mm. 1–2. Ellington has left the bars empty and numbered them 1 and 2. The copyist will write out those bars in the musicians’ parts, which will also be transposed. Throughout, Ellington carefully notates naturals and courtesy accidentals. To avoid confusion, he gives an F-sharp a courtesy accidental in system 4, bar 2. Although this latter detail might seem to be consistent with Mercer Ellington’s description (accidentals are only valid for one particular voice), elsewhere in this score there are passages 29

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The score is in the Duke Ellington Collection, Series 1, Box 156, folders 8–10. For further details, email the author at [email protected]. For an example of Ellington’s music handwriting see Van de Leur, Something, Appendix A. Take 1 was reissued on Duke Ellington, The Blanton-Webster Band, Bluebird 5659–2-RB, three compact-disc set, 1986, take 2 on Duke Ellington, The Works of Duke, vol. 12, RCA FXM1–7094, LP, 1975. The live recording was reissued on Duke Ellington, Live at Fargo, ND, Vintage Jazz Classics 1020–2, two compact-disc set, 1990. Reissued on Duke Ellington, The Complete Duke Ellington, vol. 14 (1939), CBS 88521, two-LP set, 1981. Ellington’s G-clefs have an extra curl, which make them look a bit like the capital E.

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which defy the claim that Ellington consistently used accidentals in the way suggested by his son. A passage marked “Tutti,” which corresponds with mm. 70–2 from the recording, shows Ellington canceling a previous accidental in another voice, to avoid confusion. The autograph for “Never Felt” is replete with such courtesy accidentals.33 In the entire score, there is only one ambiguous spot, where Ellington indeed does not cancel an earlier accidental in another voice (here, the third note for the lead alto reads B because of the earlier B in the second alto, but it is to be played as B). However, since this passage consists of chromatically descending diminished seventh chords it leaves little doubt about how Ellington intended this passage. System 2 on the first page shows a new division of voices. The top staff is now assigned to tenorist Ben Webster, marked “Ten.” The middle staff, marked “Co” (for cornets; often marked “Cor”), carries a two-part trumpet line, and the bottom staff – now with a bass clef – is for two trombones. The division of voices is not difficult to figure out. The soloists of the top system are not part of the ensemble (the rule of thumb), hence the voices go to the remaining musicians – in this case Rex Stewart and Cootie Williams on trumpet, and Lawrence Brown and Joe Nanton on trombone. The tenor player is Webster, since Bigard is on clarinet. In the third system, Ellington directs his copyist (Juan Tizol) to an earlier instrumental score of the piece: “First 6 [bars] of A Cho[ru]s [and] Transpose to B.” The provenance of this score (titled “- NO – 3 -”) is unclear, but it is written after December 1939 because it refers to “Ben [Webster]” who had joined the band on 8 January 1940.34 This A-flat version is not known to have been recorded at another occasion.35 After the 6-bar insertion, the first chorus continues as written. At the end, Ellington returns to his A-flat score to set up the modulation from Bflat to G, for the vocal chorus, via a 4-bar modulatory saxophone section, marked “E” in the autograph. The baritone here is not written out, but it needs to double the lead an octave below, which is another rule of thumb. The connection from B-flat to A-flat is made by a short piano transition played by Ellington, and this material is obviously not in the score. 33

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A similar instance can be found on page 2, system 2, bar 2, which corresponds with m. 48 of the recording. Luciano Massagli and Giovanni M. Volont´e, The New DESOR, vols. 1 and 2, An Updated Edition of Duke Ellington’s Story on Records, 1924–1974 (Milan: n.p., 1999), 1502. In the New DESOR, Massagli and Volont´e list five recordings of “I Never Felt This Way Before” that are based on two different versions: the instrumental 1939 version and the 1940 vocal version.

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The ensuing vocal chorus – sung by Herb Jeffries, but initially assigned to Cootie Williams on trumpet – closely follows the score. Notational short-cuts abound (this time Roman numerals refer to bars that need to be repeated), but the only issue lies in the final 8-bar tutti, where the score does not spell out how the four notated voices are to be divided over the various instrument groups. In Ellington’s scores, the convention is that the saxophones play the chord as written (with the baritone doubling the lead in the octave), and that the three trumpets get the top three notes, while the three trombones play the bottom three. Ellington’s copyists knew that. A final “Chaser after Vocal” rounds out the piece, which concludes with a reusage of the last two bars of the earlier tutti section. This tag may have been added on in rehearsal; the score gives no indication. Clearly, it takes some prior knowledge to turn this score into playable parts, but it is not nearly as complicated as suggested by (again) DeVeaux and Giddins, who maintain that Ellington’s “orchestral parts [recte: scores]” were “a copyist’s nightmare.”36 Tellingly, apart from the regular copyists who extracted parts for the orchestra (Juan Tizol, Thomas Whaley, and John Sanders), dozens of others were occasionally called upon to copy out Ellington’s scores. Apparently, these copyists had no difficulty deciphering the “nightmare,” since they provided perfectly readable and playable parts. Their autograph manuscripts, too, can be found in the Duke Ellington Collection. Notation thus allowed Ellington to compose more complex – and, at times, longer – works. It is hard to know how much Ellington relied on notation in the first decade of his work with the orchestra. (The Duke Ellington Collection does not document this early period well, although some so far unidentified works for what might be the a late-1920s version of the band have survived, under mysterious titles such as “Bottle.”37 As the orchestra grew in size, Ellington increasingly worked out the music in advance. That practice can be illustrated with Reminiscing in Tempo (recorded 12 September 1935), for which a complete and detailed 16-page score on standard music manuscript paper in his hand exists.38 Ellington actually refers to this score in his autobiography: “After I lost my beautiful mother, I found mental isolation to reflect on the past . . . I wrote music, 36 38

37 Duke Ellington Collection, Series 1, Box 61, folder 13. DeVeaux and Giddins, Jazz, 212. The autograph suggests that it was written over a longer period, since the different sections match with different brands of paper (Standard Brand for Reminiscing in Tempo, parts 1 and 2, MM 10 staves for Reminiscing in Tempo, part 3, and King Brand for the final part). For a detailed analysis of Reminiscing in Tempo and the provenance of these autographs, see Howland, Uptown, 171–6.

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and it came out as Reminiscing in Tempo . . . Every page of that particular manuscript was dotted with smears and unshapely marks caused by tears that had fallen.”39 It is important to note that Ellington connects his grief over the passing of his mother to actually writing the music (rather than performing it, or making the recording). Reminiscing in Tempo runs close to thirteen minutes of music (at the time, recorded on two double-sided 78-rpm discs). The recording closely follows the score, which carries all the hallmarks of Ellingtonian composition. Solo parts or individual notes may be given to specific musicians: “Cooty” (Williams), “Rab” (Johnny Hodges), “Otto” (Hardwick), (Juan) “Tizol,” “Tricky” (Joe Nanton), and (Lawrence) “Brown.” Elsewhere, he specifies how a four-part tutti-section is to be distributed over the various voices. Part of the compositional process becomes apparent here too. On the second page of the manuscript, Ellington instructs his copyist to go to a sheet marked “X” for a 10-bar insertion. Such reshuffling occurs again later, when Ellington notes to “Inject Part 4,” which is a section marked “K.” To avoid confusion, he has numbered the bars afterwards. In the final part, the copyist has to “Leave two (2.) lines,” for a passage that was filled out on the recording by Ellington’s piano. Again, copyist Juan Tizol must have had little difficulty putting the instrumental parts in order. It is important to note that in this case Ellington did all this structuring and restructuring on paper, prior to the recording. No further reorganizations were made in the recording studio. Reminiscing in Tempo demonstrates how Ellington composed the work in stages. Going over what he had written, he decided that a specific section needed additional material, and consequently he made an insertion. It now becomes clear that notation did not serve merely to capture his ideas. Rather, as Nicholas Cook has observed, notation is a “culture of visible symbols, an esoteric form of literature . . . [and] a stylized way of picturing sound patterns . . . Music [on paper] is able to circulate as an intelligible text.”40 As intelligible text, Ellington’s scores talked back to him and helped him to shape his music, adding layers as he went along – at times restructuring sections, revisiting others, or using earlier material that he had kept on hand for later use. Once the score was extracted into parts, it had served its goal. There was no need to go back to it to make corrections, adjustments, or edits, 39

40

Ellington, Mistress, 86. The score is actually quite clean and readable (DEC, Series 1, box 305, folders 1–5). Cook, “Making Music Together,” 6–7.

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particularly since the score was not intended for publication. With the instrumental parts in front of his band members, Ellington would try out the music in rehearsal, and usually make edits. The rhythm section would work out its parts, and Ellington would add piano introductions, interludes, or codas. Therefore, more often than not, recordings differ from the surviving written music, but the differences mostly pertain to the order of material. Musicians who newly entered the band could be confused by the performance practices of the organization. For instance, when recalling his early days with the orchestra in 1944, tenorist Al Sears noted: Really, you’ve got no idea what it’s like till you’ve actually tried playing in the band. You start at the letter A and go to B and suddenly, for no reason at all, when you go to C, the rest of the band is playing something else, which you find out later on isn’t what is written at C but what’s written at J instead. And then the next number, instead of starting at the top, the entire band starts at H – that is, everybody except me. See, I’m the newest man in the band and I haven’t caught on to the system yet!41

But – as hundreds of fully coherent recordings by the orchestra show – before long, most newcomers managed to indeed catch on to the “system.” The notational detail in this and every other Ellington score shows that the musicians in the band could read music well. Proficiency in reading may have varied, however. Nevertheless, a player like Juan Tizol – who during his first stay with the band copied out the larger share of Ellington’s scores – had great music reading skills, and fellow trombonist Britt Woodman “reported that in the 1950s Tizol had devilishly difficult sight-reading exercises on which he liked to test the new members of the band.”42 As the orchestra grew, notation became more important, and consequently the band members had to read more and become better readers. While in the early days of the orchestra, Ellington may have taught the musicians their individual parts one by one,43 this practice disappeared altogether in the 1930s. In the postwar LP era, more than once, the orchestra recorded scores that were only performed at a specific recording session, to be shelved afterwards. This practice called for expert sight readers.

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Nicholson, Reminiscing, 260. Kurt Dietrich, Duke’s Bones: Ellington’s Great Trombonists (Rottenburg: Advance Music, 1995), 53–4. This practice does not exclude the possibility that Ellington himself had notated music in front of him.

“People Wrap Their Lunches in Them”

As stated, Ellington would finalize his compositions in rehearsal. This was a process of editing and re-editing, which mostly meant that he would reorganize the order of various segments – or at times insert sections written afterwards. This sort of bandstand editing would happen in other significant ways as well. “Ellington plays the piano,” Strayhorn wrote, “but his real instrument is his band. Each member of his band is to him a distinctive tone color and set of emotions, which he mixes with others equally distinctive to produce a third thing, which I like to call the Ellington Effect.” As he further explained: “Sometimes this mixing happens on paper and frequently right on the bandstand. I have often seen him exchange parts in the middle of a piece because the man and the part weren’t the same character.”44 In sum, regardless of whether he was inserting sections, instructing the band to play their parts in a different order, or even exchanging parts, Ellington’s methodology relied heavily on notation. It was a conscious and deliberate process. As is readily apparent from the materials in the Duke Ellington Collection, in writing down his music, from sketches to full compositions, Ellington kept them on hand for future use. The aforementioned Reminiscing in Tempo is a case in point. After its 1935 recording, Ellington revisited the score in 1945 (the 21 July broadcast performance for ABC was part of the Your Saturday Date with the Duke show). For this, Ellington reassigned voices to his now larger band, and added parts to his autograph. The score refers to Cooty (for trumpeter Cootie Williams) and Sears (for tenorist Al Sears) – two musicians who never played together in the band.45 In other instances, he could go back to music that for some reason had not been used, as exemplified by the inserted segments in “I Never Felt This Way Before.” The surviving scores for the 1941 theater production, Jump for Joy, or the 1951 soundtrack for the film Anatomy of a Murder similarly show how Ellington went back and forth between blocks of music.46 At various points across his career, Ellington would convey the impression that he was notoriously careless about conserving his legacy for posterity. For example, he once said: “We hardly ever keep scores. We have 44

45

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Billy Strayhorn, “The Ellington Effect,” Down Beat, 5 November 1952, 2; reprinted in Tucker, Reader, 269–70, emphasis added. Williams’s first stay with the band ended November 1940, while Sears joined in mid-1944. Sears left in January 1949, and Williams returned in September 1962. In both cases, Strayhorn’s contributions were added to the mix as well – which is another example of how notation was essential to the working methods of Ellington. These extended works are not only a copyist’s, but also an archivist’s nightmare.

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nothing to go back to. Out of the thousands of numbers we’ve done, only about ten percent of the scores remain. They disappear. People wrap their lunches in them.”47 Likewise, he maintained in his autobiography Music Is My Mistress that he had “no interest in posterity,”48 and his disinterest in the leather-bound volumes presented at his sixtieth birthday could serve as case in point. On this, Strayhorn recounted that Ellington “really doesn’t care about this sort of thing you know – collecting his stuff. To him it doesn’t matter at all. Not too long ago, for his [sixtieth] birthday, we thought it would be a good idea to collect all [of] Duke’s work together and present it to him . . . It ran to several leather-bound volumes. Now it’s in a warehouse.”49 Despite such impressions, Ellington knew that his band’s materials were safeguarded. Tom Whaley (1892–1986), a pianist and accomplished orchestrator, was trusted with the library and kept it in shape. Whaley was in fact the unofficial “head librarian” from 1941 through to his retirement in 1968. He replaced worn parts with new ones, reconstructed scores from existent parts, added titles and band book numbers to parts, etc. Whenever Ellington needed to revisit a score, or whenever the band needed new or additional parts, they quickly showed up. When the music materials that eventually would form the Duke Ellington Collection came to the Smithsonian Institution in 1988 they were in disarray, but these papers showed obvious signs that they had once been organized. Ellington archivist Annie Kuebler (who worked for thirteen years in the Duke Ellington Collection) believes that “Ellington could afford such a casual public stance [about his scores] because he was well aware that Tom Whaley was behind the scenes documenting Ellington’s role in twentieth-century American music.”50 There are other signs that the bandleader was less indifferent about posterity. From the 1950s, he tended to record his compositions at his own cost. Many of these so-called “stockpile” sessions were first issued after his death. In addition, while he was in the hospital during his terminal illness, Ellington continued to work on the comic opera Queenie Pie, though he knew he would never see its performance. (The unfinished opera was completed by others, and premiered after his death.) 47 48 49

50

Derek Jewell, Duke: A Portrait of Duke Ellington (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 20. Ellington, Mistress, 459. Jewell, Duke, 20. See also Irving Townsend, “Ellington in Private,” The Atlantic Monthly, May 1975, 78–83. Annie Kuebler, “Tom Whaley: Footnotes and Whole Notes in Jazz History,” Newsletter of the Duke Ellington Society, Chapter 90 (December 1996), 2.

“People Wrap Their Lunches in Them”

Ellington’s nonchalant posture may have been part of the cool image he cultivated, but it may also have been a way to overcome his demons. He was a known hypochondriac and did not like to be reminded of his own mortality.51 To some extent, the leather-bound presentation albums so loyally compiled by his colleagues (Strayhorn, band member John Sanders, and his physician Arthur Logan) did just that: the hundreds of pieces that documented a life in music must have hammered home to the Ellington that he was moving past his middle age. At any rate, there is no way of knowing what moved him to disregard the gesture of his friends. He may have felt that his music could not be truly represented by such notated lead sheets, he may have not liked that it reminded him of his progressing age, or he may have been interested in the future rather than the past (“Q. Which of all your tunes is your favorite? A. The next one. The one I’m writing tonight or tomorrow, the new baby is always the favorite.”52 ). As this chapter makes quite clear, notation played an essential role in Ellington’s work. Notated music served at least five different, related purposes: it was an essential part of his compositional strategies; it enabled quick and efficient communication with his band; it was prerequisite at rehearsals and performances; it allowed him to build on his earlier music; and it was safeguarded for posterity. Notation never was a goal for Ellington, but a tool, and a crucially important one at that. Ellington’s autographs reveal how notation helped him to shape his ideas. Working on paper allowed him to capture and store his ideas and to develop them into much larger and more complex textures, sounds, and structures. It allowed him to structure and organize his music. The rich detail in Ellington’s music – his complex harmonies, the sophisticated structural design, the ever-changing cross-section instrumentations, the on-the-man writing – could not be achieved without notation. By working in a written medium, Ellington – like any other composer who uses notation – engaged in dialog with the written musical text. Notation was a vital means of communication between Ellington and his copyists, and through the instrumental parts they created, with his orchestra. Ellington’s music was too intricate to work out from scratch on the bandstand. If in the early days of his career he may have resorted to teaching his musicians their parts individually, this was no longer an option from the 1930s forward. (Even prior to this shift, Ellington may have had written music in front of him while instructing the band.) At 51

See Hajdu, Lush, passim.

52

Ellington, Mistress, 463.

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times, the communication with his collaborators also occurred through scores, as mail envelopes in both the Duke Ellington Collection and the Billy Strayhorn Collection attest. Once the parts were handed out to his band, Ellington’s composing entered another phase. In rehearsal with his orchestra, he would finalize the work at hand, albeit often for the moment, since the same score could later lead to another version. Typically, he would change the order indicated by the parts. At times he inserted music from other sources. Sometimes such inserts were written and copied out on the spot. These were the reworkings that could confuse new band members, who had to figure out in which order a particular part had to be played. Their stories have led to all kinds of mystifications. Musical form often relied on non-written information, as did the rhythm section parts. Bassist John Lamb told me that playing without parts could be tough, especially if Ellington left the piano in the middle of a piece to conduct the band.53 In rehearsal, as recounted previously in the words of Strayhorn, Ellington might even exchange musicians’ parts. Again, such maneuvers called for written media. It should come as no surprise that many scores and parts have disappeared from the library of a band that was on the road for close to half a century. Hundreds of different musicians came through the orchestra, and the organization could be in a New York recording studio one day, only to find itself embarking on an international tour the next day. Still, an impressive amount of material has survived thanks to people like Thomas Whaley, who cared for the music. Duke Ellington knew his music was highly regarded by many. Despite his supposed indifference about what would happen to it after his passing, he may have expected that his music would outlive him. When he died, his otherwise modest worldly possessions included a stockpile of unissued recorded works, an unfinished opera he hoped would still see completion, and an extensive collection of autograph scores and parts in a rented Manhattan warehouse. Apparently, not too many people were allowed to wrap their lunches in Ellington’s scores. In sum, music notation was an integral part of Ellington’s composing. His music is simply unthinkable without it. 53

John Lamb, personal conversation with the author at the Ellington Reunion Project, the American Jazz Institute, Claremont McKenna College, 8 February 2004.

6

The Moor’s Revenge: The Politics of Such Sweet Thunder david schiff

More than a half-century since its premiere Such Sweet Thunder stands as one of the greatest achievements of the Ellington/Strayhorn collaboration, and yet its title remains a provocative mystery.1 The three words come from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act IV, scene 1: theseus: Go, one of you, find out the forester; For now our observation is perform’d; And since we have the vaward of the day, My love shall hear the music of my hounds. Uncouple in the western valley; let them go: Dispatch, I say, and find the forester. [Exit an Attendant] We will, fair queen, up to the mountain’s top, And mark the musical confusion Of hounds and echo in conjunction. hippolyta: I was with Hercules and Cadmus once, When in a wood of Crete they bay’d the bear With hounds of Sparta: never did I hear Such gallant chiding: for, besides the groves, The skies, the fountains, every region near Seem’d all one mutual cry: I never heard So musical a discord, such sweet thunder.

The musical sounds figured in Shakespeare’s text are the cry of hounds on the hunt, echoing throughout the landscape. In appropriating “such sweet thunder” as a title for both a single movement and the entire Shakespearean suite, Ellington dared listeners to hear the music and its far-reaching echoes in conjunction – and perhaps also let us know that the music had both fangs and claws. At the same time, though, he sowed more than a little “musical confusion” by skewing the Bard’s words to his own purposes in a series of displacements beginning by transferring the title

1

This is a revised version of a paper given at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society, Indianapolis, 5 November 2010. Some of the content of this chapter appears in different form in my book, The Ellington Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).

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words themselves from the comic world of A Midsummer Night’s Dream to the tragedy of Othello, a move that announces, with King Lear, the music’s “darker purpose,” and then portraying the Moor of Venice with a brash blues-infused stride that instantly evokes his powerful physical presence and African origins. While the political echoes of the opening motto seem clear today, reception history shows that early critics praised the music without drawing out the political implications; in the New York Times, John S. Wilson called the piece “provocative” but limited the scope of that term to the ways that the music reimagined Shakespeare’s characters.2 Less friendly critics have cast doubts on its authors’ grasp (or even right to grasp) of the greatest figure in English literature. James Lincoln Collier, for instance, later dismissed most of the suite as “selfindulgent fragments that are tied to Shakespeare by great leaps of logic and that show very little understanding of what the plays are actually about.”3 To understand both Ellington’s calculated strategies of appropriation and displacement and also the apparent tone-deafness of much of the criticism to the music’s wider echoes, we need to look at the particular way that jazz and Shakespeare functioned in American society in the Cold War decade of the 1950s. In the years after World War II, the political and artistic cultures of the United States changed direction sharply. As the U.S.S.R. suddenly morphed from ally to enemy, Congress launched an anti-communist campaign that peaked in the early 1950s with the hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Senate Internal Security Committee chaired by Senator Joseph McCarthy. These hearings were staged to expose communist influence in all areas of American life from the army to the arts. At the same time, the world of popular music witnessed a sudden and unexpected reconfiguration. Soon after the war’s end, many of the big bands whose music had attained anthem-like status during the war broke up. The big band era quickly passed into history, and by the early 1950s, singers like Patti Page and Nat King Cole topped the charts, not bands. By 1952, two years before rhythm and blues crossed over as rock ’n’ roll, Down Beat magazine reported that only the bands of Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Woody Herman, and Stan Kenton were still in business. Although these two phenomena may appear unrelated, they can help illuminate Ellington’s creative strategies at the time. 2

3

John S. Wilson, “Jazz: Ellington; ‘Duke’ Bounces Back with Provocative Work,” New York Times, 13 October 1957. James Lincoln Collier, Duke Ellington (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 285.

The Moor’s Revenge

During the 1940s, Ellington had presented a series of strongly political works outside the usual jazz venues. These efforts included the musical review Jump for Joy, the extended “tone parallel” to African American history, Black, Brown and Beige, and its three sequels, New World a-Comin’, the Deep South Suite, and A Tone Parallel to Harlem. Black, Brown and Beige premiered at Carnegie Hall in January 1943 at a highly publicized benefit concert for Russian war relief. This work placed Ellington and his music at the center of Popular Front politics (the alliance of left-leaning organizations, including the Communist Party) in the fight both against fascism and for workers’ rights and civil rights. While most of Black, Brown and Beige was a musical narrative about the African American past, its three sequels – premiered at Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Opera House – dealt with contemporary issues: the hope for full civil rights, the persistence of racism, and the myths and realities of the country’s largest African American community. Despite the prestigious concert hall setting for the premieres of these works, or perhaps because of it, they encountered a surprising amount of resistance from professional (and white) jazz critics who accused Ellington of “losing contact with the basic fundamentals of jazz,”4 while barely mentioning the political content of the music, even when it was spelled out in program notes. In the music world, the Popular Front may be said to have ended with two traumatic events of 1949: the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace held at the Waldorf Astoria in March, and the August anti-communist riots in Peekskill, New York, which followed a concert given by Paul Robeson and Woody Guthrie. The conference – attended by, among others, Lillian Hellman, Clifford Odets, and Leonard Bernstein – was portrayed as a Commintern initiative in the American press even before Nicholas Nabokov (composer and CIA operative) baited Dmitri Shostakovich into saying that he fully agreed with the denunciations of Paul Hindemith, Arnold Schoenberg, and Igor Stravinsky printed in Pravda. The statement was a gift to the anti-communist movement. A month later, Life magazine ran a two-page spread on the conference denouncing both the Kremlin and its American dupes, which in their opinion included Bernstein, Aaron Copland, and Langston Hughes.5 The Peekskill riot – in truth, a well-organized act of terror – was provoked by comments that the Associated Press had attributed erroneously to Paul Robeson: 4 5

Bob Thiele, “The Case of Jazz Music” (1943), reprinted in Tucker, Reader, 176. Francis Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War (New York: New Press, 1999), 52.

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We colonial peoples have contributed to the building of the United States and are determined to share its wealth. We denounce the policy of the United States government, which is similar to that of Hitler and Goebbels . . . It is unthinkable that American Negroes would go to war against a country [the Soviet Union] which in one generation has raised our people to the full dignity of mankind.6

As Robeson’s biographer Martin Duberman wrote, even had the activist/singer actually spoken these words, they would not have been out of line with those of other prominent black leaders (such as A. Phillip Randolph). Nor would this statement have been entirely alien to much of the social critique found in the unpublished script that Ellington had written for Black, Brown and Beige.7 The Peekskill riot illustrates how the anti-communist purge was also an attack on the Civil Rights movement. As Ellen Schrecker has written, the Civil Rights leaders of the 1940s pursued both domestic and international concerns. Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois linked “their struggle for racial equality to that of Africans and other colonized peoples for national liberation.”8 But, as Schrecker observes, the anti-communist purge “destroyed Robeson’s career, reputation and health, while the elderly Du Bois was first marginalized and then fired by the NAACP, the organization that he himself had founded.”9 When HUAC summoned Jackie Robinson to denounce Robeson at its public hearings, he bravely began his testimony by saying “the fact that it is a Communist who denounces injustice in the courts, police brutality, and lynching when it happens doesn’t change the truth of his charges.”10 The relentless pressures of the anti-communist movement led many Civil Rights organizations to drop any vestige of anti-colonial language, and drove a wedge been labor unions and the Civil Rights movement, each movement trying to disconnect from its older communist alliances, but in different ways. Given this history, it is hardly surprising that Ellington’s politically inspired music seemed to come to a halt with Harlem, or that Ellington’s music was also marginalized from Carnegie Hall to the Aquacade at Flushing Meadows where the band performed in the summer of 1955. The ads for the latter show literally surrounded Ellington’s name with promises of “dancing waters, ice show and water show.”11 As cultural symbolism, 6 7 8

9

Martin Duberman, Paul Robeson: A Biography (New York: Ballantine, 1989), 342. See, for example, the various extended passages reprinted in Cohen, America, 216–17. Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 375. 10 Duberman, Paul Robeson, 360. 11 Vail, Diary, Part 2, 81. Ibid.

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playing the Aquacade, we might say, was like being exiled to Siberia. The politically engaged audiences Ellington had drawn to Carnegie Hall were now intimidated by the strategies of red-baiting and black-listing of the anti-communist movement. From the low point of the early 1950s, the Civil Rights movement, the American left, and Duke Ellington all had to reinvent themselves to survive in an environment where any hint of communist influence might unleash the machinery of the blacklist. A new political model emerged in 1957 with the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC). It developed in the wake of the Montgomery Alabama bus boycott under the leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King. In his 4 June 1957 speech, “The Power of Non-Violence,” King replaced Marxist arguments for social change with Christian ones: “Agape is understanding, creative, redemptive good will for all men. Biblical theologians would say it is the love of God working in the minds of men . . . It is the type of love that stands at the center of the movement that we are trying to carry on in the Southland – agape.”12 Several years before Ellington and King actually met (in 1963), Ellington affirmed King’s spiritual approach in the version of Black, Brown and Beige that was recorded in February 1958, with Mahalia Jackson singing lyrics for the previously instrumental “Come Sunday”: “Lord, dear Lord above, God almighty, God of love, Please look down and see my people through.” For this album, Ellington composed a new setting of the Twenty-Third Psalm to replace the older Beige movement. While Ellington would pursue this religious/political fusion explicitly in the 1960s with My People (which contained the song “King Fit the Battle of Alabam”) and the Concerts of Sacred Music, for his major compositional projects of 1957 – the fanciful retelling of jazz history in A Drum Is a Woman and the equally fanciful retelling of Shakespeare in Such Sweet Thunder – he chose to explore themes which seemed, at least on the surface, free of both religious content and political relevance. Such Sweet Thunder, however, turned out to be both timely and political in spite of its Shakespearean trappings; it was Shakespeare ripped from the headlines. The thrust of the Civil Rights movement in 1957 was the integration of schools and other public facilities in the face of mounting resistance to court-ordered desegregation by Southern whites. The struggle for integration emerged as a national crisis in September 1957 with the confrontation of federal soldiers, Governor Faubus, and state troopers at 12

Martin Luther King, “The Power of Nonviolence,” [published on] 1 May 1958, www .thekingcenter.org/archive/document/power-nonviolence# (accessed 24 July 2015).

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Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. The issue of integration also surfaced that year in parts of the musical world not usually associated with political activism. Integration – and love – are central to three of the most important cultural productions of 1957: Such Sweet Thunder, music by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn (28 April); the musical West Side Story, music by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim (opening, 26 September); and the ballet Agon, music by Igor Stravinsky, choreography by George Balanchine (premiere, 1 December). In confronting the continuing and escalating instances of racist injustice, all three works revived aspects of the Cultural Front (to borrow Michael Denning’s term13 ), but wrapped their politics in several layers of anti-anti-communist armor. For instance, West Side Story cushioned its Blitzstein-inspired radicalism both within the framework of the more politically acceptable, psychologically driven form of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, and also by dressing its story in the leather garments of juvenile delinquency, a problem that was framed at the time as a matter of social maladjustment, not political protest. (In its most caustically political moment, the show torpedoed the prevalent idea of “social disease” with the song “Officer Krupke.”) Agon presented itself as an apolitical, abstract, plotless dance contest that just happened to contain, at its core, an erotic interracial pas de deux for the white Diana Adams and the black Arthur Mitchell. However, in this political climate, abstraction could serve as a political tactic just because it appeared to be non-political. (Advocates for the two vanguard styles of the time – abstract expressionism in painting and serialism in music – framed them as aesthetic movements devoid of political agendas.) Critics hailed the Stravinsky/Balanchine ballet Agon, which premiered six months after Such Sweet Thunder, as a plotless work of pure dance set to a 12tone score, but as Edwin Denby wrote, the male dancer in the Sarabande suggested “a New York Latin in a leather jacket”14 and Stravinsky had found ways of bending serialism to evoke contemporary jazz. The ballet brought the musical idiom of Schoenberg and Webern into the mean streets of New York; the City Center, where Agon premiered, was just a few blocks from the West Side turf of the Jets and Sharks. West Side Story had opened a few months before Agon, and Denby recognized the clear link 13

14

Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1997). Edwin Denby, “The Three Sides of Agon,” in Dancers, Buildings and People in the Street (New York: Popular Library, 1965), 110.

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between Balanchine’s abstract, elite eroticism and the more vernacular jazz-inspired style of Jerome Robbins’s choreography (for instance, in the show’s “Dance at the Gym” scene). While Denby reverted to notions of apolitical abstraction in claiming that the mixed-race casting of the pas de deux (for Diana Adams and Arthur Mitchell) was “neither stressed nor hidden,” he observed that this casting “adds to the interest.”15 Melissa Hayden (who also danced in Agon) saw things differently: “The first time you saw Diana Adams and Arthur Mitchell doing the pas de deux it was really awesome to see a black hand touch a white skin. That’s where we were coming from in the fifties.”16 That said, abstraction danced around censorship and racism. Had Balanchine titled his ballet “Romeo and Juliet,” an interracial pas de deux might have caused some outrage. Even in West Side Story, which depicted inter-ethnic romance explicitly, Maria – whether played by Carol Lawrence on stage or Natalie Wood on screen – was the whitest Puerto Rican in the neighborhood.

The Stratford Shakespearian Festival During the Cold War era, Shakespearean productions often served as an outlet for political protest. As Lawrence Levine reminded us in Highbrow/Lowbrow, Shakespeare had long been as American as apple pie.17 The 1950s witnessed a boom in Shakespeare festivals that paralleled the newly arrived venues of the summer jazz festival. The Stratford (Ontario) Shakespearian Festival, directed by Tyrone Guthrie, began in 1953. Joseph Papp founded the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1954, and the American Shakespeare Festival opened in Stratford, Connecticut, in 1955. In the USA, politically inspired productions revived the interpretive strategies from the 1930s, as exemplified by Orson Welles’s all-black “voodoo” Macbeth for the Federal Theater Project in 1936. Joseph Papp, once a Communist party member, first hatched the idea of presenting Shakespeare without an admission charge in 1953; his plans

15 16

17

Ibid., 112. Charles M. Joseph, Stravinsky and Balanchine: A Journey of Invention (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 257. Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).

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evolved into Shakespeare in the Park while he was tailed by the FBI and ordered to testify before HUAC. He later recalled the period: The fifties . . . looked like the end of the world with no light at the end of the tunnel. People forced to choose between informing on other people or saving themselves, people scared into silence. People stopped writing. Some of those who were blacklisted tried to clear their names, some committed suicide, some were unemployed for years.18

When Papp was subpoenaed by the HUAC in 1958, he was asked whether he injected Communist philosophy into his Shakespeare productions. Papp responded: Sir, the plays we do are Shakespeare’s plays. Shakespeare said: “To thine own self be true,” and various other lines from Shakespeare can hardly be said to be “subversive” or “influencing minds.” I cannot control the writings of Shakespeare. He wrote five hundred years ago. I am in no position in any plays where I work to influence what the final product will be, except artistically and except in terms of my job as a producer.19

By linking Shakespeare’s uncontroversial canonic standing and his own prerogatives as an artist, Papp demonstrated the way Shakespeare could serve as a shield for political protest in the 1950s – whether at Shakespeare in the Park, or in Such Sweet Thunder, or West Side Story. Without changing a word of the text, Papp made Shakespeare feel current a decade before Jan Kott’s book, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, appeared.20 His productions used American actors speaking in their own voices rather than affecting British speech. He sought “blood-and-guts actors”21 and integrated, ethnically diverse casts. His actors worked in the visceral modern style (most familiar from the film performances of Marlon Brando and James Dean) influenced by what was called The Method. Among them were Roscoe Lee Browne, Colleen Dewhurst, James Earl Jones, and George C. Scott. They made Shakespeare sound as relevant to the 1950s as Clifford Odets’s plays had been to the 1930s. With the simultaneous boom in jazz festivals and Shakespeare festivals, the time seemed ripe for linking jazz and the Bard. On his 1955 Omnibus television show, “The World of Jazz” (aired on 16 October), Leonard Bernstein – who shared Papp’s left-wing background and was already working on West Side Story – demonstrated that the blues was a poetic 18 19 21

Quoted in Helen Epstein, Joe Papp: An American Life (Boston: Little, Brown, 1994), 124. 20 Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary (New York: Norton, 1974). Ibid., 127. Epstein, Joe Papp, 167.

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form by singing a blues to lines from Macbeth: “I will not be afraid of death and bane / Till Birnam forest come to Dunsinane.” In this same cultural direction, less than a fortnight after its Newport Festival “rebirth” on 8 July 1956, the Ellington orchestra played two concerts for the Shakespearean Festival in Stratford, Ontario, along with Dave Brubeck, the Modern Jazz Quartet, and the Art Tatum Trio. According to David Hajdu’s detailed account, the Festival had hoped for a major new work from Ellington, but not surprisingly he arrived with the same program he had played at Newport. After the Stratford performances, two members of the Festival staff – Louis Applebaum and Barbara Reed – asked Ellington to compose something unusual and Shakespearean for Stratford. Ellington proposed the suite form, and, according to Hajdu, “Strayhorn took it on excitedly, glowing to his friends about having an Ellington Orchestra project geared especially to him.” Strayhorn’s knowledge of the Bard had already earned him the nickname “Shakespeare.”22 Strayhorn’s oft-quoted statement that he and Ellington read through all of Shakespeare does not quite comport with the apparent authorship of the suite. The manuscript sketches in the Duke Ellington Collection of the Smithsonian show that Ellington composed all but three of the movements, though several of these contain phrases by Strayhorn, while two of Strayhorn’s compositions were composed before the Shakespeare project was hatched. The manuscripts, however, do not necessarily raise doubts about Strayhorn’s involvement, but suggest instead that there may well have been considerable verbal collaboration not apparent on the page. (We know from other evidence, for example, that Ellington and Strayhorn did much of their work over the phone.) Such Sweet Thunder, a suite in twelve movements composed by Ellington and Strayhorn for the Shakespearean Festival in Stratford, Ontario, was in fact premiered at a Music for Moderns concert (titled “Twelve-tone to Ellingtonia”) at New York’s Town Hall on 28 April 1957, a day before Ellington’s fifty-eighth birthday; the band played the suite again at Stratford on 5 September. At Town Hall, the curtain raiser was Kurt Weill’s early, astringent Violin Concerto, Op. 12, played by Anahid Ajemian and members of the New York Philharmonic under Dmitri Mitropoulos. (Weill’s music was enjoying a posthumous boom thanks to the revival of The Threepenny Opera in Marc Blitzstein’s English translation, but his concerto gave only a foretaste of the jazz-influenced Weill.) The New York Times critic, Ross Parmenter, found the new Ellington/Strayhorn work far 22

Hajdu, Lush, 155.

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more persuasive than Weill’s concerto and “thoroughly winning.” Most jazz critics and historians have since considered the suite a high point of the Ellington band’s repertory. As Harvey Cohen has written, the suite demonstrated that “black artists were not ghettoized in purely black categories and were free to roam anywhere in the musical universe.”23 Sharing the bill with a classical concerto work in a classical venue, Such Sweet Thunder beat out the competition on its own terms, without resorting to the devices of crossover. The successful premiere of Such Sweet Thunder came less than a year after the band’s triumphant July 1956 “rebirth” at the Newport Jazz Festival, and Ellington in turn appeared on the 19 August 1956 cover of Time and won a new contract with Columbia Records. He was on a roll across period media. On 15 March 1957, he appeared, with his sister Ruth and son Mercer, on Edward R. Morrow’s television program, Person to Person. Ellington’s musical-theater fantasy of jazz history, A Drum Is a Woman, aired on the U.S. Steel Hour on CBS-TV a week after the Such Sweet Thunder premiere. Six weeks later, the band recorded The Duke Ellington Songbook album with Ella Fitzgerald. Still later that summer, the band played the Ravinia Festival in Chicago, the summer home of the Chicago Symphony, then in its Fritz Reiner heyday. Suddenly surrounded by honors from the white cultural world, Ellington had good reason to liken himself to the original black superstar: Othello. Although the title phrase “Such Sweet Thunder” came from a line in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (“I never heard so musical a discord, such sweet thunder”), Ellington’s program notes described the title movement of the suite as the sweet and singing, very convincing story Othello told Desdemona. It must have been the most because when her father complained and tried to have the marriage annulled, the Duke of Venice said that if Othello had said this to his daughter, she would have gone for it too.24

It should be noted here that Othello was a role strongly associated with Paul Robeson, who had played the character against such prominent white Desdemonas as Peggy Ashcroft and Uta Hagen. Ellington’s choice for the lead character in the musical suite therefore had inescapable political (and sexual) resonances. Many of the instrumental parts for this title piece bear a different title, “Cleo,” which suggests that the supposed tone parallel for a Moorish 23 24

Cohen, America, 335. From Irving Townsend’s original liner notes to Duke Ellington and His Orchestra, Such Sweet Thunder, Columbia CL 1033, 1957, LP.

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general had in fact been conceived to portray an Egyptian Queen. Somewhere along the line, the musical subject had changed genders while retaining an African setting and protagonist; either character, however, aimed the music squarely at the core anxiety of American racism – sex between the races – a theme Ellington had explored previously in the Deep South Suite. In Music Is My Mistress, Ellington wrote that “Nobody Was Looking” (from the Deep South Suite) “illustrated the theory that, when nobody was looking, many people of different extractions are able to get along together.” He described the movement as a parable about a puppy and a flower following their “natural tendencies.”25 A decade after this work, Ellington, shielded by the Bard, presented an even bolder parable about interracial sex, an act which was still illegal in many American states both north and south. (The Supreme Court did not declare anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional until 1967; sixteen states still had such laws in 1957.) The following is a list of the movements of the suite with their Shakespearean parallels (as given on the original album liner notes) and main soloists: 1. “Such Sweet Thunder” (Othello, though the title comes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream), solo: Ray Nance. 2. “Sonnet for Caesar” (Julius Caesar), solo: Jimmy Hamilton. 3. “Sonnet to Hank Cinq” (Henry V), solo: Britt Woodman. 4. “Lady Mac” (Macbeth), solo: Clark Terry (the solo may have been written by Strayhorn). 5. “Sonnet in Search of a Moor” (Othello again, but note the pun in the title), solo: Jimmy Woode. 6. “The Telecasters” (the witches from Macbeth meet Iago from Othello), solo: Harry Carney. 7. “Up and Down, Up and Down (I Will Lead Them Up and Down)” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream), solos: Jimmy Hamilton, Ray Nance (violin), Russell Procope, Paul Gonsalves, Johnny Hodges, John Sanders, and Clark Terry. Written by Billy Strayhorn and originally titled “Puck.” 8. “Sonnet for Sister Kate” (The Taming of the Shrew), solo: Quentin Jackson. 9. “The Star-Crossed Lovers” (Romeo and Juliet), solo: Johnny Hodges. Based on an earlier Strayhorn song, “Pretty Girl.” 10. “Madness in Great Ones” (Hamlet), solo: Cat Anderson. 25

Ellington, Mistress, 184.

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11. “Half the Fun” (Antony and Cleopatra), solo: Johnny Hodges. Based on an earlier Strayhorn song, “Lately.” 12. “Circle of Fourths” (the four Shakespearian genres: tragedy, comedy, history, and sonnet), solo: Paul Gonsalves. Ellington’s approach to Shakespeare was radically revisionist – today we might even term it “post-colonial” on a number of levels. Stylistically, the music was contemporary American, not Elizabethan English. Paralleling Papp’s approach at Shakespeare in the Park, Ellington and Strayhorn presented a contemporary Shakespeare shorn of period trappings. They made their stance clear in the very first bar when the trombones announce Othello’s presence with a habanera-rock groove that sounds like Fats Domino not John Dowland. The music was also provocatively modern, not comfortably retro. Except for “The Star-Crossed Lovers,” a typical Hodges ballad, and “Circle of Fourths,” a romp based on the harmonic changes of “How High the Moon,” the movements were boldly innovative even in relation to the Ellington and Strayhorn oeuvres. Strayhorn’s “Up and Down, Up and Down” and Ellington’s “Madness in Great Ones” pushed jazz far beyond its usual forms and harmonies, right to the brink of free jazz. The suite radically re-envisioned Shakespearean familiar characters, revealing their flip side. Lady Macbeth appears as a hip chick like Eartha Kitt, rather than a cold-blooded monster; while Hamlet is refigured in the image of Ellington’s screech trumpeter, Cat Anderson, rather than the familiar blond-wigged Dane of Lawrence Olivier. But the suite shows its post-colonial essence most clearly by giving voice to the Other, whether the Other is racial or sexual, or musical. Without words or a visual component, the music of the suite and Ellington’s sparse comments about it implied a daring political statement – a demonstration, by way of the Bard, of black power, a phrase first used in 1954 as the title of Richard Wright’s non-fictional book about the emergence of Africa from colonialism. By composing a Shakespearean work for a Canadian festival, Ellington was placing questions of black identity outside American history and geography, taking his case to the court of world opinion. Form mirrored the political content. As an emblem of equality, the four “sonnet” movements matched up the idiom of jazz with the language of Shakespeare through syllable-to-syllable equivalence. Each “sonnet” presents a melody with rhythms and phrase structures that correspond to fourteen lines of iambic pentameter. The suite also declared its equal standing with the Shakespearean canon, by favoring composition over improvisation. Like a Shakespeare play, or like a symphony, Such Sweet Thunder is a text to be

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performed. Ellington made the comparison explicit in his program note for the Stratford premiere: Anyone who listens to a beautifully performed symphony for the first time gains something from it. The next time he hears it, he gains more; when he hears the symphony for the hundredth time, he is benefited to the hundredth power. So it is with Shakespeare. The spectator can’t get it all the first time; repeated viewings multiply the satisfaction. There is a perfect parallel with jazz, where repeated listening makes for enjoyment.26

Once they had leveled the playing field with the Bard (and, for that matter, with Beethoven, in such extended quasi-symphonic works as Black, Brown and Beige or the Deep South Suite), Ellington and Strayhorn foregrounded black sexuality not only in the characters of Othello and Cleopatra, but also in Lady Macbeth, Henry V (alias Hank Cinq), “sister” Kate, Puck, and Hamlet, all of whom speak in the language of the blues. The title track and “Half the Fun” portrayed cross-race relationships, but not as a pas de deux. The music, upending the Bard, speaks to a white Other from the point of view of a black subject. The two Othello movements do not represent Desdemona except as the implied listener; the title “Half the Fun,” and Strayhorn’s exotically static music, indicated that the movement portrays Cleopatra but not Antony. The two movements share a habanera rhythm, which, thanks to Carmen, serves as a musical metaphor for difference and sexuality (the film of Carmen Jones, music by Georges Bizet, words by Oscar Hammerstein II, had recently put Dorothy Dandridge on the cover of Life magazine as an African American femme fatale). Ellington and Strayhorn reversed the usual hierarchy of difference, exchanging roles, with two African characters telling their stories to silent, passive European partners. Black speaking to white, Africa speaking to Europe, jazz speaking to Shakespeare. The music presents half of the story – the half we have not heard before. Like Stravinsky’s score for Agon, and Bernstein’s for West Side Story, Such Sweet Thunder demands close scrutiny.27 To suggest some directions for further analysis, I will examine two movements, Ellington’s title track “Such Sweet Thunder” and Strayhorn’s “Up and Down, Up and Down (I Will Lead Them Up and Down).”

26 27

Ibid., 192. The work receives a more detailed examination in my book, The Ellington Century.

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“Such Sweet Thunder” Othello is a play about race (“an old black ram is tupping your white ewe”) and about being and seeming. Othello seals his doom early by believing that the self-evident facts of his existence will prevail against injustice: “My parts, my title and my perfect soul, / Shall manifest me rightly.” Iago acts out the opposite principle: “I am not what I am.” Othello, like Oedipus, the model tragic hero, falls because of hubris; he does not understand that his own power is as much a product of eloquence as are Iago’s malignant fabrications; Othello’s military and amatory success depends on the power of his discourse. He is both a soldier and a showman. When he says “Rude am I in my speech,” he is deploying a classical tool of rhetoric, humilitas. Unlike Oedipus, Othello also falls because of racism. To the Venetians, he is a hero one moment and a “black ram” the next. As a minority of one, he is particularly vulnerable to Iago, his white “manager.” They interlock in a fatal co-dependence: iago: I humbly do beseech you of your pardon, For too much loving you. othello: I am bound to thee forever.

Ellington’s career depended on a number of Iagos (you can fill in the blanks), but the movement “Such Sweet Thunder” tells a different tale. It is a “swerve” signaled, as Brent Hayes Edwards points out, by the title which links the music “with an entirely different moment from a different play.”28 Tragedy only enters with the ominous last note. The music inverts the play’s poisonous hatred and instead explores Othello’s “constant, noble, loving nature,” which inspires Desdemona’s fierce love (“That I did love the Moor, to live with him, / My downright violence, and score of fortunes, / May trumpet to the world.”) and Iago’s equally fierce strangelove. Shakespeare portrayed Othello in five acts; Ellington needed just six 12bar blues choruses plus a 4-bar shout phrase (composed by Strayhorn). “Such Sweet Thunder” is a blues in a Phrygian-tinted G that wavers between minor and major. Each chorus gives us a significant part of the picture, as shown in Table 6.1. Chorus one presents Othello’s proud stride through rhythm and his exotic background through harmonies that defy the expected European 28

Brent Hayes Edwards, “The Literary Ellington,” in Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies, ed. Robert O’Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards, and Farah Jasmine Griffin (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 336.

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Table 6.1 Formal design of “Such Sweet Thunder,” movement 1 from Such Sweet Thunder Section

Musical description

Chorus 1

The bass instruments lay down an altered habanera rhythm spiked by backbeats on the drums and R&B style triplets on the piano. In the even-numbered bars, the long–short rhythm of the habanera reverses to short–long, prolonging the already provocative As. The three muted trumpets superimpose a wah-wahed, chromatic chord-melody on a restatement of Chorus 1. Saxes enter in a riff chorus in dissonant five-note harmonies over a walking bass. A call-and-response alternation of saxes and an improvised trumpet solo by Nance. On the last two bars, the trombones reprise the opening habanera figure. Four bars tutti, fortissimo. (This may have been composed by Strayhorn as a conclusion, then inserted as a climactic interlude instead.) A composed, legato trombone solo played against a swung version of the habanera rhythm in the saxes, all pianissimo. The last two bars quietly reprise the habanera idea, harmonized and played by the reeds. Repeat of Chorus 2, plus a fatal low F on the piano.

Chorus 2 Chorus 3 Chorus 4

Shout insert

Chorus 5

Chorus 6

scale patterns. The rhythmic theme adds a kick of swagger to the usual habanera rhythm, but its connotations – like those of the other stylistic musical “topics” that Ellington employs – should not be reduced to a caption. Besides indicating character, by refashioning Othello in the image of Joe Louis or Sugar Ray Robinson, the rhythm stands in for the meter of Shakespearian verse, equating the temporal structures of the two art forms. Chorus two, with its echoes of early Ellington jungle music, reveals the African inflections of Othello’s voice and develops his resistance to European habits of thought; notice how Ellington slantrhymes the phrases with alternating G major and G minor chords. The chorus sounds the trumpets that Desdemona, defying difference, will echo in her proclamation of love. The sudden change of gait (from gut-bucket habanera to walking bass) and timbre (from brass to reeds) in Chorus 3 moves us from the public theater of the Venetian Council Chamber (act one, scene three) toward the private bedchamber (act five, scene two), a scenic jump-cut that compresses the story almost as compactly as the three words, “such sweet thunder.” With Ellington, the move from public to private does not sound like an exposure of weakness, as it does in the play; the man behind the

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public mask is just the other side of the coin. Ellington was “Duke” to the public, “Edward” to friends and family. Othello’s thunderous and sweet aspects may be the two sides of celebrity, or they may refer to W. E. B. Du Bois’s famous definition of African American double consciousness, or “twoness – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings.”29 Othello’s strivings, though interrupted by the inserted shout phrase, do not sound disjunct, incongruous, or even tragically flawed. Ellington’s music may be affirming Du Bois’s formulation by portraying an integral non-American African. 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 4 is the Ellington/Othello known to a few intimates, while the almost whispered trombone solo of Chorus 5 is the man known only to himself. Chorus 6, a reprise, places the hero back on the public stage: The Moor of Venice, the Duke of Ellington.

“Up and Down, Up and Down (I Will Lead Them Up and Down)” Strayhorn’s title comes also comes from A Midsummer Night’ Dream – but from act three, scene two: 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.

This movement was Strayhorn’s one new contribution to the suite. It is probably the most complicated piece he ever wrote,30 and also may be the greatest musical response to A Midsummer Night’s Dream since Felix Mendelssohn. It was originally titled “Puck” – a title which brings to mind the image of the young Mickey Rooney in the famous Max Reinhardt film from 1935. In the play, Puck, attempting to do the bidding of his master Oberon, creates two mismatched couples, Helena/Lysander and Titania/Bottom (the weaver given the head of an ass by Puck’s spell), and disrupts a third, Hermia/Demetrius, then undoes the damage by leading 29

30

W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Dover Publications, 1903), quotation online at http://scua.library.umass.edu/duboisopedia/doku.php?id=about:double consciousness (accessed 24 July 2015). See the analysis in Van de Leur, Something, 159–61.

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them all “up and down.” Strayhorn’s music, like Mendelssohn’s, does not tell the story but captures the mood of giddy, moonlit confusion. Strayhorn divides the band into “characters” portrayed by groups of instruments. There are three instrumental couples: Jimmy Hamilton, clarinet, and Ray Nance, violin; Russell Procope, alto, and Paul Gonsalves, tenor; Johnny Hodges, alto, and John Sanders, 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 (as we do, in amazement). The only character who 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. Strayhorn may well have thought of the piece as a self-portrait, with Strayhorn as Puck, and Ellington off in the background as Oberon. We can read the implications of this hypothesis 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 wrote, 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 is 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.31

The confused couples and the band of Mechanicals both portray the band, some of whose members barely spoke to each other for years, and many of whom lived rough lives that were masked by their musical sophistication. Strayhorn was admired by all, and 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. Moreover, as Hajdu shows, Ellington supported Strayhorn unconditionally, a support that Strayhorn found “priceless.” George Greenlee, Strayhorn’s close friend, told Hajdu, “Duke didn’t question his manliness.”32 31

Hajdu, Lush, 82.

32

Ibid., 79.

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Table 6.2 Formal design of “Up and Down, Up and Down (I Will Lead Them Up and Down),” movement 7 from Such Sweet Thunder mm.

Reh. letter in score

1–8 9–10 11–13

A

14–15 16–24

25–29 30–33

B

34 –41

C

42–53

D

54–61

E

62–65 66–75

F

76–81

82–93

G

94–101 102–103

H

Musical description Main subject first played by clarinet, alto, tenor; then by clarinet and violin in thirds over tonic (C) pedal in bass. Interjection by “rude” Mechanicals (playing sophisticated harmony). 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. Second brass interjection. Contrapuntal development of three couples over ostinato riffs in brass and bass; harmony wavers between A-flat and G dominant 13ths. Each couple now play inverted (mirror) imitations rather than parallel thirds. At m. 24 the three couples play the “rude” figure, perhaps indicating even greater confusion. Double contrary motion between couples. Puck leaps in, brings the couples together and clarifies the harmony (C7). 8-bar call-and-response tune in F played twice (abab). In first four bars, the trumpet follows, in the last four it takes the lead. This is the first time in the piece where the bass articulates a clear chord progression. Call-and-response dialog between each couple and ad lib trumpet, over C pedal in bass, two bars for each call and response. Contrapuntal imbroglio over a dominant pedal (G7) ostinato by the Mechanicals. The sax and trombone couple, trombone now muted, play a new chromatic chorale-like figure (Oberon?). Puck and Mechanicals recall the tune. Call and response between Puck and couples who now appear to imitate his calls. Second imbroglio over ii-V alternation in bass. Clarinet and alto bring back mirror figure from m. 17; alto and mute trombone play the menacing “Oberon” theme; clarinet and violin play the squeaky riff from m. 7; Puck tries to reassert leadership with a rising diminished seventh arpeggio. Return of F major tune beginning with its second 4-bar phrase then restating the original 8-bar form (bab) with Puck leading (reverse of first time). Recap of mm. 1–8 (minus tenor sax in first four bars). Final cadence, like a compressed version of the “rude figure.” Above the sustained FMaj7 (or C major over F major) the trumpet “plays the quotation.”

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In this reading then, Puck’s cadential quotation can be heard as a gay comment on the follies of the straight world (“what fools these mortals be!”), a reversal of hierarchies that perfectly matches the overturning of values already seen in the title track, and a point of view that would be hard to find so openly expressed in films or novels from that time. Because of its contrapuntal design, “Up and Down” feels more like a Bach concerto grosso than a typical jazz chart. It alternates contrapuntal episodes with a ritornello in the form of an 8-bar straight-ahead jazz tune in F. I have outlined the form on Table 6.2, which shows, I hope, how carefully Strayhorn shaped the music as a concerto for Puck, and why the composition looms much larger than its actual temporal dimension of just over three minutes.

Conclusion My readings of the political implications of these two movements fall somewhere between an empirical historical approach, such as found in Harvey Cohen’s Duke Ellington’s America, and Theodor W. Adorno’s antiempirical notion of the inherent politics of musical idioms. An awareness of the historical conditions is necessary to understand Ellington’s changing strategies for political statement; at the same time, though, the music, like any work of art, invites interpretation that goes beyond historical evidence such as statements of an author’s attention and instead draws out the inferences and implications of the text itself. Despite Ellington’s repeated statements about his artistic mission, many of his critics have resisted the notion that Ellington’s music even belonged in the category of art, a political resistance often masked in terms of technique or taste. Attempts to manage the overt or implied politics of Ellington’s music were further complicated by the fact that, as Harvey Cohen has written: “As in other areas of his life and like the music he most respected, Ellington, in his politics and lifestyle steadfastly remained ‘beyond category,’ impossible to pin down.”33 In statements Ellington made throughout his career he laid claim to the same broad expanses of musical expression represented by other American composers, such as Charles Ives and Aaron Copland, and by the great European masters as well. But where critics recognized both the overt and more subtle politics of the Concord Sonata or Appalachian Spring early 33

Cohen, America, 511.

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on – and even endowed these works with the power to define national identity – much of the older jazz criticism, and even some recent writings, questioned the ability of jazz in general and the Ellington/Strayhorn extended works in particular to go beyond the bounded category of entertainment. As Graham Lock put it: “much of the critical controversy around Black, Brown and Beige . . . came down to the same notion – Ellington should stick to playing dance music.”34 Over and over again, critics from both the right and the left praised Ellington for his three-minute masterpieces, but took him to task for any music that pushed past the narrow confines of that genre. The claim that jazz is essentially performers’ music, and the more pernicious charge, recently promulgated, astonishingly enough, on the pages of the New Yorker in 2013 that Ellington was not really a composer at all but just stole ideas from his band, have served to delimit, contain, disarm and even erase the expressive intentions and achievements of this huge body of music.35 The loss, however, has not been to the music, which survives and thrives, but to the broader American culture which has resisted viewing itself in the magnifying mirror of the Ellington/Strayhorn oeuvre. In The Ellington Century, I discuss Such Sweet Thunder in a chapter about love rather than about politics, but in African American music, as in African American literature – as in Shakespeare – the two subjects are inseparable. In the writings of Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Malcolm X, James Baldwin, and Alice Walker, the freedom to love demands a reclamation of manhood and womanhood. In Such Sweet Thunder, Ellington and Strayhorn replaced the degraded images of Porgy and Bess with regal portraits of Othello and Cleopatra. In these figures, sexuality is both private and public, tender and powerful. At its most daring, Such Sweet Thunder envisions sexuality as the foundation of freedom. 34

35

Graham Lock, Blutopia: Visions of the Future and Revisions of the Past in the Work of Sun Ra, Duke Ellington, and Anthony Braxton (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 119. Adam Gopnik, “Two Bands: Duke Ellington, the Beatles, and the Mysteries of Modern Creativity,” The New Yorker, 23 and 30 December 2013, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/ 12/23/two-bands (accessed 24 July 2015).

7

Duke Ellington in the LP Era gabriel solis

Duke Ellington’s work in the LP era – which is to say, after 1950 – has only recently begun to be viewed as canonical by critics and historians, and is still relatively de-emphasized in the literature in comparison with his work from 1945 and before. In an entry on Ellington in the standard reference work for jazz history, Gunther Schuller and Andr´e Hodeir said, three separate times, that it is generally agreed that Ellington’s most creative, best work comes from the period prior to 1945. The same entry discusses, at some length, Ellington’s approach to composition, arranging, and the piano, all with reference only to works composed for the pre-1945 band. James Lincoln Collier’s biography of Ellington dedicates seventeen chapters out of twenty-three to the years before 1945, portentously titling chapters 18 and 19 “The Old Hands Begin to Depart” and “Decline and Fall,” respectively. Of course, there is no question that Ellington’s work from the 1920s, 1930s, and early 1940s is excellent, and groundbreaking in many ways. By 1945, he had long-since developed his “jungle” style; he had written dozens of exemplary popular songs; he had developed an arranging style that was distinctive, famously highlighting the particular voices of the musicians in his band; and he had begun exploring largescale forms with, most famously, Black, Brown and Beige (1943). That said, Ellington’s work in the LP era is not so easily dismissed as these older critical paradigms suggest. The Far East Suite, the Sacred Concerts, and the live recording from the Newport Jazz Festival are now generally accorded places in the pantheon of Ellington’s best work. More importantly, from a historical standpoint, the period after 1950 saw Ellington consolidating his place in American musical history and engaging with changes in sound recording technology in ways that were vital to the development of his legacy as an artist and bandleader. I do not intend to survey Ellington’s work after 1950 here, nor to provide an apology for that body of work. Instead, I want to consider the ways his work as a composer and bandleader, and the work of his band as musical co-creators, creatively engaged the technological innovations of the midtwentieth century: magnetic tape, long-playing microgroove recordings, 197

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and stereo high fidelity.1 On a number of pre-1950 occasions, Ellington had pushed the limits of recording technology by conceiving and recording works substantially longer than the limits of a single 78-rpm side, and by experimenting with stereo in the 1930s while recording for Victor. In many ways he continued to push the boundaries of technology in his artistic endeavors after World War II. For instance, like many of his midcentury contemporaries, Ellington was pleased with and ready to exploit and test the potentials of the new LP format. While contemporary musicians and audiences seem to have been more favorably disposed to Ellington’s albums from this time, critics were often quite harsh in their judgments of these releases. The signal exception is the 1956 Columbia album, Ellington at Newport, which at the time was seen as a major turning point in his career and as a remarkable revitalization of Ellington’s orchestra. This “rebirth” reception has been immortalized by Ken Burns as much as by anyone as a moment of reclamation, where Ellington – through the vitality of tenor soloist, Paul Gonsalves – recaptured his jazz bona fides. The “rebirth” narrative surrounding the Newport recording may lead to an over-reliance on a two-part periodization of Ellington’s career. We might, along with contemporary critics, see an early Ellington, up to roughly 1950, and a late Ellington, following his resurgence in the mid1950s. The interstitial years – 1950 to 1956 – might be seen as part of the later Ellington or a transitional period; but in any case, we would be stuck with a historiography that compartmentalizes Ellington’s work. Instead I argue here that a careful examination of examples of Ellington’s LP-era work may serve to better understand both his postwar work and aspects of his career as a whole. Ultimately, methodologies from media studies, focusing on media and technology as well as on musical works themselves, help us to see Ellington after 1945 as a musician who continued to build, often quite successfully, on his earlier work, while also exploring new terrain.

Ellington and Music Technology before 1950 Duke Ellington was a technophile well before midcentury. Mark Tucker established quite clearly the extent to which Ellington came into jazz 1

In response to the box set reissue of Ellington’s complete Victor recordings (Duke Ellington, The Centenial Edition: Complete RCA Victor Recordings, 1927–1973, RCA 09026633862, 1999, 24-disc set), Gary Giddens wrote an unusual article that serves as both survey of, and apology for, Ellington’s later work: Gary Giddens, “The Long-Playing Duke,” Village Voice, 27 April 1999, www.villagevoice.com/music/the-long-playing-duke-6421848 (accessed 2 February 2011).

Duke Ellington in the LP Era

primed with heady ideas from the major thinkers of the Black Renaissance in the 1910s.2 His “renaissance education,” as Tucker described it, included a number of components – notably a clear relationship with and interest in both African American history and the connections between black Americans and other people of the African diaspora. Although Tucker does not dwell on contemporary ideas of modernism, following Davarian Baldwin’s work on popular flowerings of Black Renaissance culture in the 1920s, I suggest that a positive orientation towards modernism, and the promises it made about the role of technology in the progressive enterprise, might also be an important facet of Ellington’s “renaissancism.”3 Ellington was a master in the use of the technologies of his time, savvy at deploying them to his desired ends, and often, if not always, a connoisseur. The European experience of World War I may have left artists of all sorts with mixed feelings about the role of technology in human life, but many Americans could reasonably see technology as the key to a prosperous future; the African American elite was no different in this regard than much of white America. Flanders’ fields and the terror of mechanized warfare were a very long way from Harlem and Washington, D. C. American cities were not bursting with legless, armless, blind and deranged casualties of war, the way British and continental towns were in the 1920s. For black artists and intellectuals, pre-Depression New York was not death and dehumanization, not Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, nor even Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles, but rather a place of life, liberation, and opportunity. For instance, Ellington prominently romanticized the city and his long life as a New Yorker in his 1973 autobiography, Music Is My Mistress, stating “New York is a dream of a song, a feeling of aliveness, a rush and flow of vitality that pulses like the giant heartbeat of all humanity. The whole world revolves around New York, especially my world. Very little happens anywhere unless someone in New York presses a button!”4 2

3

4

Mark Tucker, “The Renaissance Education of Duke Ellington,” in Black Music in the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Samuel A. Floyd (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990). Davarian Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negros: Modernity, Mass Migration, and Black Urban Life (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). Ellington, Mistress, 65. Music Is My Mistress is a problematic text, as are most jazz autobiographies, and I use it advisedly here. Holly Farrington has noted that its “epic” quality – placing Ellington’s life in a nearly biblical narrative of love and brotherhood, “accentuating the positive,” so to speak – makes it unreliable, at best, for many details of Ellington’s career, and even less useful for any objective understanding of jazz in American and European culture in the period between 1920 and 1970. Holly E. Farrington, “Narrating the Jazz Life: Three Approaches to Jazz Autobiography,” Popular Music and Society 29 (July 2006): 379–80. Nevertheless, the book is an important source for Ellington’s own meta-commentary on his life and music, and, if read critically, it can shed light on what he thought was important in an assessment of his own past.

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This outlook was long held by Ellington and dates back as far as his D.C. youth. As Joel Dinerstein points out, Ellington seldom mentioned technology, per se, in interviews from the 1930s.5 That he did not should hardly be surprising, and has at least two reasonable explanations. First, the interviews reflect not only Ellington’s thoughts and interests, but the preoccupations of his interlocutors. His earliest interviews, both from 1930, are primarily about race, particularly the creation of an authentic African American art.6 Certainly this was Ellington’s life-long occupation, but it was also on the minds of the sorts of intellectuals just beginning to take jazz seriously as an American expression at the time. By the end of the 1930s, articles written by Ellington himself (or at least appearing under his name) dealt extensively with his compositions, with what he saw as good music, and with the question of where swing was headed.7 Again, these writings reflected Ellington’s interests and voice, but also questions on the minds of jazz writers of the day. Second, beyond not addressing technology because of a focus on Ellington’s art, more than his career, it also seems unlikely that Ellington or the writers interviewing him would have addressed the kinds of questions about technology that interest scholars today as the publications were primarily written for fans and broad, popular consumption. Nuts-and-bolts questions about recording techniques or the structure of the industry and its place in America’s larger industrial and commercial landscape might well have seemed too mundane to interest popular audiences of the time. There is, however, one hint in this Ellington journalism that points towards the kind of value technology would have had to the composer/bandleader: throughout this literature, Ellington shows a consistent orientation towards progress, and this concern is very much in line with the African American social and political landscape he occupied. Progress of many kinds was potentially interlinked, so an interest in seeing the band grow, adding instruments, and working towards technical refinement may be seen as encoding a belief in the progress of African American people towards greater status 5

6 7

Joel Dinerstein, Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African American Culture between the World Wars (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003). Tucker, Reader, 42–4. See, especially, “The Duke Steps Out” (1931) and “My Hunt for Song Titles” (1933), both published in Rhythm magazine and anthologized in Tucker, Reader, 46–9 and 87–90. The exact provenance of these articles is perhaps questionable – given the workings of the music PR/management business at the time, it is altogether possible these articles were ghost written. Nonetheless, it is fair to say they represented something like Ellington’s ideas about his own music.

Duke Ellington in the LP Era

and recognition as citizens of America and the world. Such concerns may also reasonably be coupled with a belief in growing prosperity, and with a kind of optimism that technology could both represent and facilitate in interwar America.8 The most obvious pre-1950 expressions of Ellington’s interest in technology that look forward to his work in the “LP era” are in his playful, open, and creative engagements with recording technology. In Music Is My Mistress, Ellington describes an early experience with studio electronics as a source of musical sound – or more precisely with reinterpreting studio noise as musical material: When we had made “Black and Tan Fantasy” with the growl trombone and growl trumpet, there was a sympathetic vibration or mike tone. That was soon after they had first started electrical recording. “Maybe if I spread those notes over a certain distance,” I said to myself, “the mike tone will take a specific place or a specific interval in there.”9

An emergent technology always has idiosyncrasies, in this case a contemporary microphone’s inability to reproduce certain sounds without adding noise. Ellington reports here having grasped that fundamental fact not as a flaw, but as a source of creative potential, and he sought to use this added “tone.” He describes it as having “come off” and having created “an illusion.” This technological epiphenomenon clearly became part of how Ellington viewed the sonic nature of the piece itself. As he said, “To give it a little additional luster for those people who remember it from years ago, we play it with the bass clarinet down at the bottom instead of ordinary clarinet, and they always feel it is exactly the way it was forty years ago.”10 Beyond reacting to phenomena introduced by the exigencies of recording gear, Ellington and the people with whom he worked – notably his manager, Irving Mills – manipulated the studio and production technologies of the interwar era to achieve specific musico-sonic effects. He described trying to get a studio “sound” like what he was hearing in recordings of British bands made in London this way: 8

9

10

Among other sources in Tucker, Reader, see Ellington’s thoughts on swing originally published in Down Beat in 1939. These comments highlight “superior musicianship,” consistency, and professionalism as the benefits of increasing commercialization of the music throughout the 1930s (ibid., 134). Ellington, Mistress, 80. It is not entirely clear which recording of Black and Tan Fantasy Ellington means here (he recorded the song at least five times between 1927 and 1929). It seems likely that he meant the first recording of the number for Victor in October 1927 (released as Victor 21137 B, with Creole Love Call on the A side). Ellington, Mistress, 80.

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[They] always seemed to have a special kind of resonance and echo, and Irving [Mills] was attracted by this. One day, when we were recording a new tune called “Empty Ballroom Blues,” we decided to try to get this effect. So he, we, and the engineers all began experimenting. Before the session was finished, we had a microphone put in the men’s john, and there we found the effect we wanted! It was the first Echo Chamber, I think, and it has become a major recording device since then.11

Ellington’s work at Victor during the 1930s also suggested an imagination that looked beyond the technology of the moment and in fact anticipated two of the major innovations of the postwar period, the LP era. First, he routinely sought the opportunity to record works that extended beyond the three-and-a-half-minute framework of the 78-rpm single side. Whether these were medleys (like the combination of “East St. Louis Toodle-O,” “Lots o’ Fingers,” and Black and Tan Fantasy that he recorded in 1932) or rhapsodies (like the two 1931 versions of “Creole Rhapsody”), he routinely recorded pieces that required both sides of a 78-rpm record or even multiple discs or an album of multiple 78-rpm discs (e.g., the 1935, two-disc release of Reminiscing in Tempo,12 or the 1944 album release of Black, Brown and Beige excerpts, respectively). While this was normal for classical recordings – for instance, works by Anton Bruckner or Gustav Mahler could require a dozen discs – it was rare in prewar jazz, though not necessarily in popular music trends like the symphonic jazz vogue of the 1920s.13 Reminiscing in Tempo may not have been released as an “album” in the era of the 78-rpm disc (that is, its two discs may have been sold separately, and the release may not have had accompanying promotional apparatus to integrate the discs, such as graphic design or liner notes). That said, it was certainly seen as a single work by Ellington. It is notable 11

12

13

Ibid., 87. Albin Zak describes the formal interest in the “sound” of recordings as a preoccupation of rock “recordists,” his term for musicians and engineers for whom the recording is the primary musical work. Albin Zak, The Poetics of Rock: Cutting Tracks, Making Records (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 12–13, 48–50, 60–96). While Zak has more recently looked to certain key producers from the 1940s, especially Mitch Miller, as pioneers in this regard, it is interesting to note this same kind of musical logic apparently infusing Ellington’s work with Mills as early as 1936 (or even the late 1920s, if one considers the employment of microphone noise in Black and Tan Fantasy as the same kind of “sonic” formal logic). Reminiscing in Tempo was recorded in a single session on 12 September 1935. Each of its four parts had two takes (see Vail, Diary, Part 1, 114). Enzo Archetti reviewed the album (and its reviews) in 1936, and he clearly treated the number as a complete work that takes up four sides. Originally published as Enzo Archetti, “In Defense of Duke Ellington and His ‘Reminiscing in Tempo’,” American Music Lover 1 (April 1936), 359–60, 364; reprinted in Tucker, Reader, 121–5). See the discussion of symphonic jazz, and Ellington’s relation to this trend, in Howland, Uptown.

Duke Ellington in the LP Era

that its four sides were recorded in a single session in September of 1935, with each of the four parts receiving two takes.14 Nevertheless, it is clear from the contemporary reviews that critics, at least, along with Ellington himself, clearly saw the four sides as constituting a single, long-form work.15 Black, Brown and Beige was, indeed, not only conceived as a longform work, but released by Victor as such. Following the 1948 advent of the long-playing disc, extended-track recording in popular music and jazz ultimately became commonplace, but Ellington’s long-standing interest in such a possibility anticipated this technological advance in the decades before it became commercially possible. Even more explicitly technological were Ellington’s experiments with stereo recording. In 1932, well before stereo playback equipment was available to a consumer market, Ellington used Victor’s studio technology to make a stereo recording of Mood Indigo, Hot and Bothered, and Creole Love Call, in a fluid medley version, no less. Using two microphones, placed on opposite sides of the recording room, recording separately to two synchronized master discs, Ellington and Victor’s engineers were able to capture a performance with a reasonable stereo field that literally could not be played on home audio equipment of the time. If the recording studio was the central location for making musical products that could be sold to Ellington’s growing audience, it was only one small part of the band’s commercial and creative activity. Live performance and radio broadcasts certainly occupied more of their time, and both activities were more important in establishing their reputation – at least in the interwar period – and their ability to sell records. Ellington remarked on his understanding of this dynamic in Music Is My Mistress, describing “location” work, or engagements, lasting more than a week at a given club, in the 1940s: The money was often far from the greatest, but in addition to easing up on the travel there was the big advantage of a regular radio broadcast. The air time could be used by a band to plug its new music, and it was more or less a sure thing that, after you had aired a particular song every night for four weeks, there would be some reaction from the public. Having been raised in the Irving Mills tradition, I knew how important it was to pick out something recently recorded and released, so that it had a good chance of being ballyhooed.16 14

15

16

Vail, Diary, Part 1, 114. See Howland, Uptown, 171–6, for a more recent interpretation of this work’s formal design. See Archetti’s review of the discs and meta-review of the work’s reception in Tucker, Reader, 121–5. Ellington, Mistress, 136.

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While the interlocking technologies of the recording industry (as discussed above, technologies of the recording studio and of industrial production and distribution) would have had the most obvious appeal to Ellington in pursuing artistic goals, they were intricately interwoven with the rest of the era’s entertainment technologies. Ellington, his management, Irving Mills (and from 1938, the William Morris Agency), his musical bandmates and collaborators, and the RCA Victor company (with which he would do all of his major recording of the period) worked together to use these interlocking technologies in the service of what was becoming a coherent musical career. Each of the major technologies at Ellington’s disposal – recording technology, growing transportation systems, broadcast communications networks, motion pictures, and more – allowed for the creation of positive images that were invested in race pride and built the Ellington brand. Attention to these interlocking technological spheres was positive and profitable, and worked in Ellington’s interests and the interests of Mills and the other institutional entities with which he intersected. It is instructive to look at the things Ellington lists as his achievements while under Irving Mills’s management (1931–8): recording only his own music and getting it into hitherto white-only record catalogs; getting his music into the Cotton Club and RKO Palace, both of which had broadcasting contracts; making films, notably Black and Tan Fantasy (1929); securing entrance into ASCAP; meeting the British royal family; performing with Maurice Chevalier; and touring the Deep South and Texas in their own Pullman cars.17 Of these, only two – playing with Maurice Chevalier and meeting the royal family – did not in some way involve career advancement (and more or less explicitly the advancement of the race) via modern institutions and the technologies that supported them. I suggest that not only are industrial recording and publishing, broadcasting, trains, and film contiguous in Ellington’s list, they are significantly interrelated in the way he pursued his career in the context of modernity; and, inasmuch as this is so, these interlocked technologies also relate to the connections with Chevalier and the royal family. All these associations amount to an argument about black advancement in the face of racial hostility and retrenchment in the United States. Black musicians were frozen out of the most lucrative jobs, but Ellington and Mills fought for his band’s access; black bands were kept off the airwaves, but Ellington and Mills found cross-racial distribution avenues for their work; black people were negatively stereotyped on the silver screen, but Ellington and Mills crafted 17

Ibid., 77.

Duke Ellington in the LP Era

positive images for his film appearances; black composers were underpaid for their work, but Ellington and Mills used a new rights agency to ensure compensation; and black musicians were degraded by Jim Crow laws when they toured, but Ellington and Mills used a technology of the day (private Pullman cars) to circumvent the worst depredations. Modern technology and modern institutions could thus be used to secure black progressive ends; access to those technologies and institutions were also the fruits of progress. Given the extent and depth to which this logic was embedded in Ellington’s life as a successful musician, it is not altogether surprising that he never wrote meta-theoretically about them directly, as Dinerstein points out. They were so ubiquitous, they could easily have seemed unremarkable. In any case, seeing the importance of these aspects of Machine Age innovation moves beyond Dinerstein’s argument in Swinging the Machine on the musical mediation of mechanical sound and on the presence of machines as topoi in musical works.18 From a different perspective, I argue that Machine Age technologies pervaded Ellington’s musical life regardless of whether one considers programmatic recordings that supposedly invoke machine culture, like Daybreak Express and Take the “A” Train, or recordings that innovatively used technology for artistic expression, such as Mood Indigo.

The LP Era? The mid-twentieth century represents a significant break in virtually all aspects of American and European cultural life, and jazz is no different in this regard. The 1940s may be seen as a long decade of transformation, the decade that saw the end of World War II, the emergence of atomic weapons, major growth of the movement for black liberation in its Civil Rights phase, and origins of the shift to a service-sector economy and suburbanization of the country through the G. I. Bill and development of mass higher education. In jazz, the 1940s saw the beginnings of modern jazz, overlapping with the peak and ultimate decline of big band swing, and the flourishing of the “trad jazz” revival. For the music industry, this was a time of massive social change and technological innovation, both substantially set in motion by the investment of bodies and resources in the war. In the early 1940s, the balance of economic weight shifted from live performance and broadcast to the sale and (most importantly) 18

See Dinerstein, Swinging the Machine.

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broadcast of recordings. For a number of reasons, the major recording companies – Decca, Victor, and Columbia – who had consolidated their position in the market by weathering the Depression were challenged in the 1940s by a great flowering of small labels, most of which were oriented towards specific genre niches.19 In fact, as John Howland has pointed out, jazz itself emerged as a marketing category distinct from the rest of popular music only in the 1950s.20 This was part of a larger process of postwar market differentiation that gradually led to the fine-grained niche marketing of the current time. Critically, jazz was not the only musical genre to emerge as a marketing category at the time. The 1940s and 1950s most importantly saw the rise of rock ’n’ roll out of blues, jazz, and country and the development of “youth” as a primary market for entertainment. Duke Ellington was no longer a young musician at the forefront of new developments, but as a recognized star of the old guard, he was in a prime position to exploit these technological advances to his own ends. By the early 1950s, the trauma and deprivations of the war were fading, but its institutional and technological consequences were being consolidated and musicians were able to capitalize on these developments. For the purposes of this chapter, I refer to the period of consolidation after the 1940s as the “LP era,” but it is worth asking how reasonable it is to identify this period as such. Would it be as well or better to write about Ellington in the era of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements? Ellington in the postwar era, the Cold War era, in the era of American colonial crises, in the era of Asian military interventions? In the era of television and the interstate highways? Mark Katz, whose book Capturing Sound makes a strong case for “recording’s influence on human activity and of phonograph effects,” suggests a reason for focusing on the LP not as the only determinant of the era, but as a significant one.21 Katz is wary of “hard” technological determinism – the idea that “tools, machines, and other artifacts of human invention have unavoidable, irresistible consequences for users and for society in general” – but continues to focus on the “causal powers” technology exerts in people’s activities.22 I suggest that as with understanding the bundle of technologies that Ellington used to 19

20

21

22

Andr´e Millard, America on Record: A History of Recorded Sound, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 251; Scott DeVeaux, The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 299. John Howland, “Jazz With Strings: Between Jazz and the Great American Songbook,” in Jazz/Not Jazz: The Music and Its Boundaries, ed. David Ake, Charles Hiroshi Garrett, and Daniel Goldmark (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 140–1. Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 3, emphasis in the original. Ibid.

Duke Ellington in the LP Era

move forward his artistic goals in the 1920s and 1930s, understanding his relationship to new technology and new media in the 1950s and 1960s is a matter of seeing how specific technological innovations were connected with changing social institutions as media for individual creativity. My point here is not simply to use the “LP era” as a shorthand for the years between 1950 and 1985 or 1990; nor is it to argue that the LP is somehow a, or the, prime historical motivator of Ellington or the era. Instead, I offer a more limited argument: that the LP was one of three major, interlinked technologies – along with magnetic tape and hi-fi stereo recording and playback – that became widely distributed over the course of the 1950s and had a broad impact on music and the music industry between their introduction and being supplanted by digital recording and playback in what we might call the CD Era. I further contend that they did so in connection with all of the other changes that characterized America and the American music industry at the time. Circa 1960, the stereo, hi-fi, long-playing, microgroove record – the LP – sold to be played on a home stereo system, was the culmination of a process that had its roots in military research in World War II. The technologies behind the LP allowed for increased sonic control in the studio, production of longer works without the breaks necessitated by a 78’s three-and-a-half- or four-to-five-minute single-side limitations (for ten- and twelve-inch discs, respectively), and much more robust editing, both in production and post-production. Recording typically moved from one- and two-microphone ambient recording to more close recording, often with baffles between musicians to isolate sounds for later editing.23 In the late 1940s and early 1950s, most studios moved from recording direct to disc to utilizing magnetic tape, which could be cut and spliced easily to compile recordings from multiple takes, and could ultimately be used for overdubbing, although the ethos of “one good take” remained central to most recording – especially to jazz – for decades. Indeed, minimally edited live recording informs ideas about jazz recording even today.24 Most obviously, the new vinyl records could hold as much as twenty-five minutes per side. Each of these technologies allowed for more lifelike sound reproduction – high fidelity, or “hi-fi” – and a notable recreation of “space” via the stereo field, but they also facilitated the creation of “studio audio art,” that is, the creation of sonic virtual realities.25 Ellington ultimately used 23 25

24 Ibid., 289–90; Zak, Poetics, 10–11. Millard, America, 285. Thomas Turino, Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 78; Zak, Poetics, 13.

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the first two of these potentialities more directly, but as noted previously, he was interested in the sonic phenomena that emerged only in the studio, via recording technology, even before the hi-fi era, and he was not opposed to similar experimentation in the 1950s and 1960s. Most importantly, but not always noted by music historians, the LP stimulated the market for music after the war, giving musicians – at least those, like Ellington, who operated at a high level in the industry – access to income that allowed them secure, middle-class lives. Jazz recordings used all of these features to aesthetic and practical ends, and Ellington’s recordings were no exception.26 Shifts in the music industry and jazz’s place in it were as important as these changes in recording technology. The obvious story for the industry is the rise of rock ’n’ roll, and the full-scale emergence of young people as a market sector. The most common story told about jazz in this context is its gradual move from popular, demotic, music for dancing – swing – to niche, elite music for listening – modern jazz – as it was displaced by 1950s rock ’n’ roll and later 1960s and 1970s rock. I suggest that Ellington’s work in the LP era (and the hi-fi LP format) can be seen as a creative response to – even an embrace of – this process. Keir Keightley has charted the ways that discourse about hi-fi systems and hi-fi music between 1948 and 1959 correlate to the development of postwar, middle-class, white, masculine culture. I would add “hip” culture, as what he is describing is the re-coding of the “middlebrow” as feminine, and the embrace of a high/lowbrow hip alternative as both masculine and adult.27 While classical music was one important realm for the growth of masculine hi-fi culture, jazz was its music, par excellence. Although bebop and later postbop were the clearest examples of music embraced by this audience as hip and anti-middlebrow, it is instructive to look at Ellington’s work in the LP era in relation to this social and aesthetic shift. Modern jazz directly found a place in American culture after the war in this new social milieu, but Ellington had to find a way to transition from prewar to postwar American culture in order to remain successful. His work before the war already pointed in some of the directions modern jazz would take, but was decidedly middlebrow in other ways. The use of the term “hi-fi” in at least one of Ellington’s album titles from the period suggests his (or, rather, Columbia’s) interest in marketing his music to this audience. 26 27

Millard, America, 201. Keir Keightley, “‘Turn It Down!’ She Shrieked: Gender, Domestic Space, and High Fidelity, 1948–59,” Popular Music 15 (1996): 173.

Duke Ellington in the LP Era

Ellington’s LPs Duke Ellington’s work in the LP format should be seen as multiply authored. Ellington himself clearly had a primary authorial voice in the material that was released under his name, as he had in the years before, but he was as (or even more) reliant now on others to create his commercial recordings. For instance, Ellington leaned heavily on Billy Strayhorn to craft his compositions into performable arrangements, as well as to provide new compositions for the band’s repertoire; he relied on the musicians in the band as interpreters and improvisers; and more than ever he was in dialog with engineers and producers to shape compositions into albums. Nevertheless, in retrospect, it is reasonable still to think of this output as a coherent body of work, if only because of the fact that it was released using Ellington’s name as both an organizing device and promotional hook. Not everything Ellington recorded from the 1950s on was released in LP format. For example, particularly in the 1950s, jazz singles continued to be important for radio airplay, as were 16-inch transcription discs. Moreover, Ellington’s work was released on a number of less-common formats, including 7-inch extended-play discs (both 45 rpm and 33⅓ rpm) and 45-rpm singles. Nevertheless, Ellington’s work on LP was extensive, encompassing three major types of albums: r LPs recorded as such with some clear organizing concept, specifically

utilizing the length afforded by the format, not only to produce longer tracks, but to make some kind of musical “argument” over the LP as a whole; r LPs by default – quotidian works, either newly recorded or reissued, that do not clearly use the LP as a technology, but that are on LP because that was the format of the period; and r concerts, which constitute a special category, because they were not necessarily conceived as LPs, but use the length of the format to an obvious end. Of these three types, the first most consistently used para-musical aspects of the LP as a commodity – cover art and liner notes – to extend the albums’ work-like qualities. Ellington’s first album recorded and released as an LP, the 1950 Masterpieces by Ellington, is indicative of the ways he and his collaborators would exploit the format.28 The album contained extended performances 28

Duke Ellington and His Orchestra, Masterpieces by Ellington, Columbia ML4418, 1950, LP.

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of three older pieces – a fifteen-minute “Mood Indigo,” twelve-minute “Sophisticated Lady,” and just over eight-minute “Solitude” – along with an eleven-minute rendering of “The Tattooed Bride.” This final composition, which the band premiered at Carnegie Hall in 1948, is a throughcomposed work in the mold of Reminiscing in Tempo or the movements of Black, Brown and Beige, but unlike these more discussed extended works, “Tattooed Bride” sits in a sense on the edge of Ellington scholarship. Max Harrison, Stuart Nicholson, and Ted Gioia all gesture towards its importance. In 1976, Harrison said the piece “may eventually emerge as his unacknowledged masterpiece,” but by 1999 Nicholson still found that it was “among his least understood works, often with a grittiness and awkwardness that flew in the face of jazz conventions.”29 As it prominently proclaims in its title, the notion of “masterpieces” underwrites this album project as a whole and clearly connects Columbia’s marketing to the emergent “highbrow” discourse of hi-fi music, as Keightley suggests. A press release for the album, titled “Duke to Cut ‘Different’ LP” plays up the importance of the LP format, and reminds potential audiences of their new opportunity to buy Ellington’s art as he (and then Columbia A & R chief, Mitch Miller) conceived it. “Columbia records is planning a unique excursion into Ellingtonia,” it begins, having drawn readers’ attention with the highlighted, quote-mark-enhanced “Different.” It further adds, “Using LP records, the company is anxious to have Ellington and the band do standard works like Caravan, Mood Indigo, Creole Rhapsody, and Black and Tan Fantasy without the time and space problems created by the 78-rpm record.” It is smart marketing, if nothing else; building on insider audiences’ knowledge that in concert the band often played the same pieces it had recorded in much longer versions than the 78-rpm format allowed, Columbia marks technology as both a problem (78s) and solution (LP records). The press release finishes, “Columbia artist and repertoire chief Mitch Miller wants Duke to record his works exactly as they are performed . . . without having to worry about when the three minutes are up.”30 The symbiotic relationship implied here between studio (in the person of Mitch Miller) and artist is notable, giving the jazz aficionado and record collector audience a sense of “inside scoop.” This strategy also provides two figures with which to identify in buying the album – Miller, the business executive, with his widely recognized goatee and horn-rimmed glasses marking him as “hip” (at least in 1950), and Ellington, the creative genius, whose works had previously suffered 29

Tucker, Reader, 392; Nicholson, Reminiscing, 257.

30

Vail, Diary, Part 2, 9.

Duke Ellington in the LP Era

cuts in recording. Interestingly, the press release does not mention new or extended compositions, although both areas of artistic production were central to later reviews of Ellington’s work from the period. Columbia followed up Masterpieces with the 1953 release, Ellington Uptown. The latter album was released in three separate versions – as Ellington Uptown (ML4639), and in two versions under the title Hi-Fi Ellington Uptown (CL830 and CL848) – with slightly different repertoire on each. The release marketing and production strategies for the album stay close to the template set by Masterpieces, particularly as it notably exploits the new technology as a selling point.31 This could easily have been the impetus of producer George Avakian, or even more likely an executive in the company’s marketing department. The title of Hi-Fi Ellington Uptown points prominently to the new technology, in a way that the first release of the album had not, but the outstanding feature of the CL830 release is the prominence of period hi-fi hype on the back record jacket. In what was standard product design for Columbia at the time, the lowest, rightmost quarter of the cover is dedicated entirely to promoting the new LP format. Listeners are told – twice, once in italics and once in bold caps – that Columbia guarantees “high fidelity in ‘360’ hemispheric sound,” and further titillating potential buyers with the promise of enlarged “horizons of listening pleasure.” Columbia also provides technical guidelines for use, remonstrating users that full satisfaction requires proper handling, notably suggesting the recommended needle life for metal, sapphire, and diamond styluses. That this was part of Columbia’s general marketing at the time and not unique to Ellington’s releases should not obscure the importance of finding it here along with Hi-Fi in the album’s title. Ellington at this point was being marketed to a predominantly adult consumer, as this design suggests. Stanley Dance’s liner notes (printed, it should be noted, in much smaller type than the needle life chart or the touting of “360” hemispheric sound) confirm the upmarket value of this music that deserves its highfidelity presentation. Noting the “full-length concert arrangements” of the pieces on this album, and the “careful craftsmanship” in arrangement and performance, Dance makes a plea for Ellington’s work as the only true music of its kind. In a virtuoso flourish of highbrow/lowbrow prestidigitation, he says, “Without ever making pretentious claims to officiating at the ridiculous marriage of popular and classical music, the Ellington 31

Duke Ellington and His Orchestra, Ellington Uptown, Columbia ML4639, 1953, LP, and Hi-Fi Ellington Uptown, Columbia CL830 and CL848, 1953, LP.

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orchestra nevertheless serves as an almost solitary ground where imaginative popular thought is controlled by classical traditions. In the development of an Ellington arrangement, no matter how exciting it becomes as it builds, is a classical precedent.” John Howland has shown convincingly, elsewhere, just how complicated the application of “brow” discourse to Ellington’s work was – not only at this point in his career, but already decades before.32 In light of this, I would think of Dance’s movement back and forth between “brows” as precisely the discursive constitution of middlebrow, or as Russell Lynes suggested, tongue-in-cheek, at the end of the 1940s, “upper middlebrow.” Dance casts Ellington here as a “tastemaker,” but one whose connections to the vernacular put him in a “sweet spot”: less stuffy than a true highbrow tastemaker, and more refined than a run-of-the-mill jazzer, so to speak. One interesting thing about it is that it seems clear that Columbia, Dance, and Avakian thought Ellington’s work in the 1950s was ideally suited to – and could be sold to – precisely the hi-fi audience that Keightley identifies, who were looking to records to provide an antidote to the anodyne middlebrow. It is classical (highbrow) and popular (lowbrow), but importantly not “the ridiculous marriage of classical and popular music” (middlebrow, the specter of Paul Whiteman, Andre Kostalanetz, and the Boston Pops, under the baton of Arthur Fiedler at the time). As Gary Giddens has said of Ellington’s work from this period, “Performers like Ellington . . . could no longer compete on AM radio; the LP was ideal for them and their audiences.”33 What role Ellington played in exploiting the technological possibilities for this recording is unclear except inasmuch as he clearly selected repertoire that showcased the potentials of the long-playing format.34 An unsigned review of the ML4639 release in Down Beat homed in on the presentation of extended works as the most important aspect of this recording for jazz audiences. After both describing Louie Bellson’s drum solo in “Skin Deep” as “sensational on the stage, slightly jejune on the

32 33

34

Howland, Uptown. Gary Giddens, “The Long-Playing Duke,” Village Voice, 27 April 1999, www.villagevoice.com/ music/the-long-playing-duke-6421848 (accessed 4 September 2015) While his exploitation of the technology, per se, may be unclear, the fact of his interest in exploiting his recordings, generally, was absolutely clear. As Ralph J. Gleason wrote in a brief interview with Ellington from 1953, “It’s . . . significant that he is interested in promoting his records to such an extent that he spent hours in San Francisco working out a letter to be mailed to disc jockeys!” Vail, Diary, Part 2, 57.

Duke Ellington in the LP Era

phonograph” and “The Mooche” performance as “virile” and “mysterioso,” the reviewer quickly moves to the album’s recording of “A Tone Parallel to Harlem”: “But let’s get to the point: the real reason this LP is a must for collectors is the presence of Duke’s Harlem suite, first played by the band at the Met in Jan., 1951, now recorded in its 14-minute entirety.”35 In fact, in a sense, Ellington was already, perhaps, looking beyond the LP’s thirty-five- to forty-minute capacity as the repertoire on the three issues of this album attests. For the project, Ellington essentially recorded four slightly extended versions of several of his standard works (“The Mooche,” “Take the ‘A’ Train,” and “Perdido,” plus the new Louie Bellson drum feature, “Skin Deep”), two of which were released in advance as a 7-inch, 45-rpm EP, plus three major extended works (“A Tone Parallel to Harlem,” “Controversial Suite,” and “Liberian Suite”).36 While these tracks all fit handily on a CD, they collectively exceeded the time limitations of a period LP, and so they were released variously on three different albums.37 These recordings certainly use the length of the new format to some end; they were also clearly intended to exploit the sound quality of the new recording technologies. The LPs do sound remarkably clear and vibrant, and while they were recorded before Columbia had transitioned to stereo recording, they do notably use “vertical” effects (via mix volume, essentially, to mimic up- and downstage aural presence) which create the illusion of “being there” with the musicians, wherever one imagined “there” to be – the studio, concert hall, or one’s own living room.38 On “The Mooche,” for instance, Louie Bellson’s drums – primarily ride cymbal, the clearest part of the drumset – are crisp, but quiet, and mixed well to the back of the space, while Wendell Marshall’s bass – which is often the muddiest instrument in the track, and the least satisfyingly recorded instrument on LPs from this period – is clear and punchy, while retaining a full, deep sound, mixed somewhat forward of the drums and piano. By contrast, the ensemble horns are remarkably clear, making their harmonies easily distinguishable. The soloists, when they enter, are almost disconcertingly present. They are close to the microphones, their sound 35 37

38

36 “Skin Deep”/“The Mooche,” Columbia B-386, 1953, 7-inch EP. Ibid., 56. Ellington Uptown, Columbia ML 4639 (with “A Tone Parallel to Harlem”), Columbia CL 830 (with “Controversial Suite”), and CL 848 (“Liberian Suite” and “A Tone Parallel to Harlem”). Later re-issues, including LPs, use “pseudo-stereo” effects, panning low frequencies disproportionately into the left channel and high frequencies to the right.

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being mixed with slightly more reverb than the rest of the band. During the quieter moments of melodic filigree in Russel Procope’s clarinet solo, it is easy to hear the light clicking of key noise – a sound, incidentally, that was largely absent from recordings before multiple miking, but also not usually audible in a concert hall or ballroom setting. These two post-1950 albums remain “albums,” in the older, 78-rpm sense of the term, a collection of recordings with no through-line, no program, or no obvious concept at work. Around this time, however, Ellington and his collaborators in the industry began to produce recordings with a sense of cohesion to them as well, beyond that provided by the fact that all the pieces on any given album showcased the same musicians. In 1953, for instance, Capitol Records, Ellington’s new label, released a concept album, Premiered by Ellington, composed of songs that Ellington had popularized but not written. The songs – “Stormy Weather,” “My Old Flame,” “Flamingo,” “Stardust,” “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love,” “Liza,” “Three Little Words,” and “Cocktails for Two” – have relatively little to do with one another, aside from their shared association with Ellington.39 The album may well have been Ellington’s (or his producer’s at Capitol) entry into the “mood music” format that was popular in the day. Though the recording does not use strings, its emphasis on prewar pop standards and smooth sound certainly link it to the format.40 Evidence of the way this album sat between mainstream pop and jazz taste as a “middlebrow” product can be seen in the words of one reviewer, writing in Down Beat, who said, “The preponderance of ballads at times gives the result a sedative quality.” Calling it “an ideal album . . . to play for elderly relatives,” the reviewer nonetheless also suggested it was “a novel premise.”41 The interest in creating a conceptually (if not musically) unified album was important, would become common in jazz, and ultimately pointed in the direction of the rock concept album. The 1956 Bethlehem release, Historically Speaking: The Duke, uses Ellington’s own catalog as a conceptually unifying device, offering new recordings of historical arrangements of such major works as “East St. Louis Toodle-O,” “Jack the Bear,” and “Ko-Ko.”42 The value of hi-fi, in and of itself, was wearing off by this point, when the LP had all but completely dominated the market, and would soon be the only album format 39 40 41 42

Duke Ellington and His Famous Orchestra, Premiered by Ellington, Capitol H440, 1953, LP. For more on “mood music” in the 1950s, see Howland, “Jazz with Strings,” 130. Vail, Diary, Part 2, 64. Duke Ellington and His Orchestra, Historically Speaking: The Duke, Bethlehem BCP60, 1956, LP.

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available, in any case. As another Down Beat reviewer noted: “The album as a whole is enjoyable but not indispensable, since none of the re-created tracks are equal in quality to their originals as available on reissue LPs on Brunswick, Victor, Columbia, etc. . . . There are . . . solid kicks, but I would counsel those of you buying on a budget to get the originals before you add this to your library, hi-fi notwithstanding.”43 The 1956 release, A Drum Is a Woman, Ellington’s “tone parallel” of the mythic origins of jazz (recorded in late 1956 and then refashioned for a 8 May 1957 U. S. Steel Hour telecast, as discussed by John Wriggle in this volume), and the 1957 album of Such Sweet Thunder, his tribute not just to William Shakespeare but more specifically to the Stratford, Ontario, Shakespeare Festival (discussed by David Schiff in this volume), were his first extended, multi-movement jazz works to be released specifically as LPs, and they are among the first extended jazz compositions to take advantage of the new medium. (Other early releases in this vein include Stan Kenton’s 1951 ten-inch Capitol Records LP, City of Glass, a multimovement work by Bob Graetinger.) These two recordings set the stage for Ellington’s production of numerous such suites in the 1960s. Unlike Ellington’s previous extended works (from Creole Rhapsody to the suites he recorded for the Uptown sessions), but like virtually all the later suites, A Drum and to a lesser extent Thunder are works conceptualized more or less explicitly as albums. (As noted, Thunder was written for the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, but it was premiered at New York’s Town Hall on 28 April 1957, rather than at this festival or via the album.) Both suites ideally utilize the length of the LP of the time – with Drum coming in at roughly forty-four minutes, and Thunder close to thirtyseven minutes. Moreover, both divide coherently into two halves, and thus two sides of a record. Drum’s fifteen short pieces are organized into four parts, each one of which features one place in the geography of the fable of jazz’s early history: the West Indies, where Carribee Joe first plays his drum, called Madam Zajj; New Orleans, where Madam Zajj is at Buddy Bolden’s side for a Mardi Gras parade and plays for a dance in Congo Square; in the cities of the world and out into space (in “Ballet of the Flying Saucers”); and, finally, in New York where the West Indies and African America come together in “Rhumbop.” Parts I and II fit on side A, and parts III and IV handily take up side B. The two sides also emphasize a break between the mythic past in the West Indies and New Orleans, and a mythic future-oriented present, in outer space and Manhattan. 43

Millard, America, 207; Vail, Diary, Part 2, 91.

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Such Sweet Thunder less clearly uses the A and B sides of the LP as a conceptual or even practical device, but this release suggests the emerging close conceptual connections that existed between Ellington’s LP releases of post-1950 suites and the origins of these works as specially conceived live performance events. My concern, however, is how well this work fits the recording medium of the LP. As a whole, the suite moves convincingly through a series of medium, slow, and up-tempo numbers, opening with appropriate gravitas and ending energetically. No strong case can be made for the break between the end of side A (“The Telecasters”) and the beginning of side B (“Up and Down, Up and Down”) being conceptualized in terms of the LP, per se. The second half is, in general, more upbeat, and less introspective, opening with Midsummer’s Puck and closing with a paean to “the Bard” himself. This, however, is as easily explained by the suite’s origins as a concert work, as it follows a common (and effective) way of managing the energy of a performance, by starting mid-tempo and grand, then introducing slower, more contemplative material, and then gradually moving to light, faster movements just when audiences might otherwise begin to tire. The most interesting moment in the Thunder LP, particularly in terms of Ellington’s use of technology, is the piano solo at the beginning of the “Sonnet in Search of a Moor,” which Irving Townsend’s liner notes tell us “Duke calls a ‘Hi-Fi’ introduction.”44 Here Ellington provides what appears to be a winking nod to the much touted benefits of the new recording formats, both the “full frequency range recording” pioneered by British recording engineers and the “‘360’ Hemispheric Sound” touted on the cover of Such Sweet Thunder as capable of producing recordings “covering the entire 30 to 15,000 cycle range within a plus or minus 2-decibel tolerance.” The solo almost perversely jumps between extreme bass and treble registers, Ellington striking the highest notes at a pianissimo that would likely have been inaudible on recordings of fifteen or twenty years earlier. One imagines him amused by, but also pleased with the sonic, artistic possibilities afforded by the format. This use of the LP medium, itself, as a part of the form of musical works is one of the hallmarks of the Rock Era. Rock writers consistently point to the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, from 1966, and the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, from 1967, as the first full-fledged concept albums. From a broader generic perspective, one might point to Ray Charles’s Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music albums and 44

Irving Townsend, liner notes for Duke Ellington and His Orchestra, Such Sweet Thunder, Columbia CL1033, 1957, LP.

Duke Ellington in the LP Era

The Genius Hits the Road, as precursors in the early 1960s, and even to Frank Sinatra’s Capitol releases in the 1950s, which were indeed described as concept albums.45 I hesitate to suggest that Ellington’s suites from the 1950s are concept albums in the way that Sgt. Pepper’s, The Who’s 1969 rock opera, Tommy, or Pink Floyd’s The Wall (1979) are. If nothing else, these Ellington releases from the 1950s do not incorporate para-musical materials (liner notes, photography, film) into the work’s narrative. But unlike earlier program music from the classical tradition, music which is a usual point of comparison for these Ellington suites, these releases do very much work like albums: they fit on albums, and each of their constituent parts is a typically short, three-to-five minute length. The most important point here is not whether any particular Ellington recording should be seen as a concept album, but rather that Ellington was quick to see and use one of the format’s major potentials, and one that would be recognized and exploited massively by rock artists in the following decade. The most celebrated of Ellington’s LPs from the 1950s – and possibly the most celebrated of all his LPs – was the Columbia release of his performance at the Newport Jazz Festival of 1956 – except that, as many people now know, it was not actually a recording of that specific performance. Ellington at Newport was, rather, a hybrid, as it was made in the studio as much as on stage at Newport. It combined the original tapes of the 1956 concert with studio overdubs added the following week in New York.46 Phil Schaap’s liner notes for the CD reissue of Newport (Complete) decry the “doctoring” of the original recording, casting George Avakian, the initial producer of the recording (until he was replaced, at Ellington’s insistence, by Irving Townsend) as a villain – if more misguided than nefarious, perhaps. The full details of Avakian, Townsend, Ellington, and the band’s work to make something releasable out of the Newport concert are now largely known, and can be found in short form in Schaap’s liner notes and in long form (and somewhat more sympathetically) in John Fass Morton’s book, Backstory in Blue.47 While Avakian’s decision to replace much of the live performance with studio work may now seem problematic, it is at least understandable in light of contemporary audience expectations of recordings. It seems that 45 46

47

Will Friedwald, Sinatra! The Song Is You (New York: Scribner, 1995), 26–7. Phil Schaap, liner notes for Duke Ellington and His Orchestra, Ellington at Newport (Complete), Columbia Records/Legacy C2K 64932, 1999, CD, 21–2. John Fass Morton, Backstory in Blue: Ellington at Newport ’56 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008). Also see Darren Mueller, “Quest for the Moment: The Audio Production of Ellington at Newport,” Jazz Perspectives 8 (2014): 3–23.

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Avakian wanted to create the impression of “being there” while also delivering hi-fi sound. Paul Gonsalves’s tenor solo in the interlude between Diminuendo in Blue and Crescendo in Blue was the height of the performance, and was mythologized almost as soon as it happened. For Avakian’s work, the most obvious problem with the original tapes was, famously, that Gonsalves played into the wrong microphone (his solo was recorded by Voice of America for broadcast). Columbia needed a version of this performance where the solo was audible over the band. Schaap argues that Columbia might have been better off simply rerecording the concert in its entirety, in the studio; but one doubts Ellington would have been happy with that. As Schaap says, Ellington was already worried that the band would not be able to recapture the energy from the festival performance – which was, by all accounts, exceptional.48 Overdubbing, however, was a relatively new and exciting technology, and a producer might reasonably have thought it offered the best solution to the dilemma, thereby keeping mostly the original performance, but enhancing it. That many of the other solos were also rerecorded, stage announcements newly produced, and canned audience noise edited in, follows the same basic logic. Ellington may have been unhappy with how Avakian went about editing the tapes, but the fundamental issue – the mixing of live and studio bits to create a composite track – was probably not the problem. It is only more recently, as general listeners have become more familiar with the processes of recording – with the development of in situ (site-specific) recording technology more capable of producing high fidelity, and the culture at large more wary of technological manipulation of the apparently “real” – that Columbia’s hybrid Newport recording could become truly controversial. Ellington’s forays into pop “crossover” in the mid-1960s, particularly the albums Ellington ’65 and Ellington ’66 (both on Reprise), are minor items in Ellington’s oeuvre, certainly. The albums’ crossover intentions were signaled by the choice of repertoire, which was drawn largely from the “Great American Songbook,” or from contemporary rock. Ellington ’65, for instance, included Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” (which had been popularized by Peter, Paul, and Mary in 1963), and Ellington ’66 included two Beatles songs, “All My Loving” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” Beyond repertoire, the albums follow the “Songbook” style, including lush, arranged sound, and limited solo improvisation. As Brian Felix notes, in his dissertation on rock repertoire in 1960s jazz, “rock and 48

Schaap, liner notes to Ellington at Newport, 22.

Duke Ellington in the LP Era

pop tunes did not become a part of Ellington’s regular repertoire and [thus] function as something of a blip-on-the-radar when considered in the overall arc of Ellington’s career.” What is more, while Ellington ’66 was something of a critical success within jazz – winning Down Beat’s critics’ poll “album of the year” and the year’s Grammy award for “Best Instrumental Jazz Performance, Large Group” – it did not have the sort of crossover success, as did, for instance, Lee Morgan’s “Sidewinder.”49 The albums are most interesting not for the compositions, arrangements, or solos, as much as for the sound of the recordings. Felix points out that Ellington and Strayhorn (who provided the arrangements) made relatively little attempt to incorporate rock idioms beyond repertoire. As he points out, the tracks importantly retain jazz rhythmic frameworks and jazz arranging styles, but Felix does not address the issue of recording sound, which does show an attempt to engage rock on its own terms. The use of stereo field and miking to produce a sense of space is, in fact, dramatically different on both of these recordings than any of Ellington’s Columbia and RCA recordings from the 1950s or 1960s. While the stereo Columbia and RCA recordings produce a three-dimensional space, with minimal panning, substantial bleed-through between channels, and, most importantly, a differentiation of front and back (or upstage and downstage, as it were), these two Reprise albums have more extreme panning, limited bleed-through, and a nearly flat space.50 Throughout the album the reeds are placed to the right, brass to the left, and rhythm section in the middle, with soloists placed on the same side as their section, but somewhat closer to the center. There is so little bleed-through that on headphones the experience can be aggressive. For instance, when the claves enter in “All My Loving,” their click is loud and present, but totally disconnected from the other instruments. The sound is far more similar to rock of the period than to contemporary jazz recordings, though unlike the Beatles or Jimi Hendrix, who were using panning effects (along with extensive delay and other tape manipulations) to produce non-naturalistic audio recordings,

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Brian Felix, “Rock Becomes Jazz: Interpretations of Popular Music by Improvising Artists in the 1960s” (DMA thesis, University of Illinois, 2010), 30. This is a matter of degree, of course – . . . And His Mother Called Him Bill (1967) has remarkably subtle use of stereo, while The Far East Suite (1966) has a noticeable separation between right and left. For instance, on the latter album, “Isfahan” presents saxes in the right, brass in the left, and Johnny Hodges’s solo and rhythm section in the center, with Hodges to the front and everyone else behind him. Still, the level of bleed-through between each part is more pronounced than on Ellington ’66.

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Ellington’s two releases use stereo mostly to produce crisp, clearly separated instrumental sounds. Notably, in line with rock production of the time, the drums on Ellington ’66 are much more prominent than on most of his other albums – not relegated to the background, they come out on the musical surface, panned to one side. In addition to the remarkable number of albums Ellington recorded in this period with his own band members – in large-ensemble formats, and often in smaller groups, such as the 1959 recordings Back to Back and Side by Side, which he co-led with Johnny Hodges – Ellington also recorded with major figures in “all-star” lineups in the 1960s. Of these collaborations, with Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins, Count Basie, Charles Mingus, and Max Roach, the 1963 Impulse! recording, Duke Ellington and John Coltrane, stands out. Ellington seldom recorded in a quartet setting, and in smaller ensemble contexts (as well as larger) he primarily played and recorded with musicians he employed, particularly his long-term sidemen. In this release and in Money Jungle, also from 1963, Ellington faced the challenge of dealing with the egos of musicians he would not necessarily work with again. In the case of the recording with Coltrane, Ellington’s long experience in the studio, and his generally pragmatic approach to recording technology, were decisively important. As the date’s producer, Bob Theile, recalled, Coltrane was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with his own recorded work throughout the early 1960s, recording multiple takes of virtually every piece on a date. Theile said, “Of course, Ellington knew, from decades of experience making classic records in the studio, if you get it, save it.”51 With Ellington’s encouragement, the band – which included members of each leader’s working rhythm section of the time in alternation (respectively, Aaron Bell, bass, and Sam Woodyard, drums, and Jimmy Garrison, bass, and Elvin Jones, drums) – recorded virtually the entire album as a series of first takes. Over the course of the “LP era,” Ellington’s creative process drew considerably on technology. In some sense the recording studio, which had always been a significant part of his creative practice, served as an increasingly important workshop to him. If, in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, recordings were one of a set of interlocking technologies that allowed Ellington to not only make his music, but make his image and his career as a creative musician, in the 1950s, and after, the new recording technologies grew in importance. Perhaps the clearest evidence of Ellington’s belief in recording as a creative endeavor, and in the importance of controlling to whatever 51

Nicholson, Reminiscing, 336.

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extent he could the process, is seen in his “private” recordings. Throughout the LP era, Ellington produced a series of his own recordings, at considerable personal expense, many of which were not released until much later. Working extensively with Billy Strayhorn (whose importance to this work should not be underestimated), Ellington and his band recorded new and old pieces, often renting out the major labels’ studios. The attention to sound, the search for music that would be contemporary and relevant, and perhaps most of all the drive to make music in the recording studio under his own control, make these recordings a testament to Ellington’s enduring “renaissancism.”

Conclusion The technologies of the LP era offered a number of clear benefits to musicians and audiences, and Ellington took advantage of most of them. To shed some final light on what he was doing as a recording artist in the 1950s and beyond, and how that work relates to his music before 1950, it is useful to look at the one potential in the new technology that he did not use extensively. Magnetic tape offered recording artists, composers, producers, and engineers – “recordists” in Albin Zak’s terms – both the opportunity to manipulate recorded sound in far more extensive ways than had any previous medium (wax, wire, shellac, acetate) and the capacity to create recordings that held very little direct relationship to the musical activities used to initially produce the recordings. Postwar musique concr`ete composers in France (including Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry) were some of the first to utilize this aspect of tape technology, and these techniques were taken up in the 1960s to be used extensively by rock recordists, ultimately becoming so fundamental to rock’s sounds that technologies had to be developed to recreate non-naturalistic recorded sound in live performance.52 The jazz-centered uses of such tape techniques have been quite spare, and almost never foregrounded. I have argued elsewhere, with regard to modern jazz recording, that an aesthetic of the “real” – or of 52

Zak also notes that the embrace of these techniques was not immediate for rock recordists, many of whom came initially from the worlds of jazz and R & B (Zak, Poetics, 15). Steve Waksman argues that in an important way the line that divides blues from rock ’n’ roll might be seen in the difference between Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry and their relationships to recording technology. Chuck Berry, the rock and roller, was “recording endemic,” so to speak, having internalized recording technology as a youth. Steve Waksman, Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2001), 148–9.

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the recording as snapshot – prevails, and so much so that musicians like Lennie Tristano have suffered with critics and fans for using tape effects as extended techniques.53 That Ellington, who was an “early adopter” of new technologies, eschewed this one aspect of technologies he was otherwise quick to use bears notice, particularly inasmuch as it was an aspect that at least some self-consciously “forward-looking” musicians embraced. At the heart of this issue is Ellington’s placement within jazz. Essentially every other aspect of tape, LP, and high-fidelity recording technology served the ends for which Ellington had already been using recordings, radio, and to some degree other Machine Age technologies before World War II. They showed him to be progressive, enhanced his presence for audiences, made his music cheaper and easier to distribute to wider audiences, conferred a sense of dignity on his work, and made it easier for him to appear to “be there” for his audiences. Tape effects were either neutral in this regard – to the extent that they were opaque to record buyers – or worse, inhibited his ends, the more transparent they became. Possibly the most significant change to happen to the music industry in the LP era was the sheer volume of recording time that became available to musicians and record labels. Cutting discs in the prewar period (when recordings were made direct to acetate or other kinds of masters) was expensive, difficult, and time-consuming. Not only did the LP allow musicians to record more minutes per disc, the advent of recording to magnetic tape – which was cheaper, easier, faster, and had great results – allowed recording companies to produce nearly unlimited hours of music for a fraction of the cost per minute. Storage was still problematic, and would remain so until the advent of digital recording, but even so, companies could record multiple albums’ worth of material to tape, and then tweak, edit, and work with the music after the fact, releasing it commercially on 45s, EPs, and LPs. A look at Duke Ellington’s schedule in the period after 1950 shows a breathtaking level of activity in the studio. In part, this can be explained by the fact that live radio broadcasts, the “location” gigs that had been a staple of the band’s life throughout the 1930s and 1940s, were on the wane. Ellington appeared on television occasionally, but the sound capability of that format was rudimentary at the time, even as audio recording was 53

Gabriel Solis, “‘A Unique Chunk of Jazz Reality’: Authorship, Musical Work Concepts, and Thelonious Monk’s Live Recordings from the Five Spot, 1958,” Ethnomusicology 48 (Fall 2004): 341.

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leaping ahead in its capacity to produce lifelike sound. If live radio had remained popular over the second half of the twentieth century, Ellington might have remained consistently active in that capacity, but in any case the recording studio offered him kinds of control over his music that radio did not. What he sacrificed in immediacy he more than made up in manipulability and permanence. For an artist consistently interested in African American history and progress – twin legacies of his “Renaissance education” – the technologies of the LP era (hi-fi sound, stereo recording, magnetic tape, and the long playing disc) offered a glimpse of the fruits of progress and the promise of preserving his musical voice for posterity much more extensively and robustly than had previous technologies. It comes as no surprise, then, that given the opportunity to record with increasing regularity, Ellington made so many post-1950 recordings. That not all of them rise to the level of his work from the late 1920s or the early 1940s may be partly a simple matter of percentages: the more recordings Ellington and his band made, the more chances that some of them would be pedestrian. Nevertheless, viewed as a coherent body, they are at least of historical interest above and beyond the acknowledged masterpieces, like the 1966 Far East Suite or Such Sweet Thunder. Ellington’s work from the LP era shows a musician working creatively with emergent technologies, much as he had with previous technologies, working collaboratively with a range of others to craft a vision and speak to an expanding audience.

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Authentic Synthetic Hybrid: Ellington’s Concepts of Africa and Its Music carl woideck

In his memoir, Music Is My Mistress, Duke Ellington recalled thinking upon his arrival in Africa in 1966: “After writing African music for thirtyfive years, here I am at last in Africa! I can only hope and wish that our performance of ‘La Plus Belle Africaine,’ which I have written in anticipation of the occasion, will mean something to the people gathered here.”1 If Ellington was a composer of “African” (as opposed to African American) music, what did Africa mean to Ellington? Given that Ellington called himself a “student of Negro history,”2 one is led to the question: what did he study? What were his concepts of Africa as a young professional musician? And what were his concepts of Africa as an experienced and world-traveled artist? According to Ellington, not long before he first visited Africa he told his musicians that a piece “should be executed from the African philosophical point of view.”3 What did Ellington know of African philosophy? Moreover, Ellington used the term “authentic” to describe an African American drummer’s work on a 1960s jungle-themed piece.4 What did African “authenticity” mean to Ellington? During much of his career, Ellington often wrote – or claimed he had written – music that was inspired by specific places in the world. With this in mind, did he claim that any of his music was inspired by his experiences during his two visits to Africa (Senegal in 1966; Ethiopia and Zambia in 1973)? In this chapter, I use these questions as points of departure, focusing on the period from Ellington’s breakthrough engagement at New York’s Cotton Club in 1927 to his death in 1974. I examine what evidence and clues we have regarding his pre- and post-Senegal concepts of Africa, both from cultural and musical perspectives. Whenever possible, I begin these examinations with Ellington’s own words and music. When our knowledge as to his concepts of Africa is incomplete or contradictory (which it often is), I present the available evidence as such. In the decades before his African journeys, Ellington wrote many compositions whose titles or descriptive programs refer to some aspect of 224

1

Ellington, Mistress, 337.

2

Ibid., 419.

3

Ibid., 243.

4

Ibid.

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Africa. Some of these are in the so-called jungle style, whose musical characteristics I outline here and identify in some of his early works. However, Ellington soon discontinued references to the jungle in his titles, and then, after 1947, discontinued references to Africa in general. Ellington’s conceptions of African music and culture became less theoretical and more based on observation when he performed for over a week with a Ghanaian musician in 1957, and his direct knowledge became even more concrete with the orchestra’s two trips to Africa in 1966 and 1973. Although these travels to Africa were highly important to him, many details of these visits are little known and have been only briefly mentioned in print. For example, neither of the two major Ellington biographies, John Hasse’s 1995 Beyond Category and Terry Teachout’s 2013 Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, mentions his ten days of playing with an African-born drummer in 1957. Beyond Category has thirty-four words about that justmentioned Senegal trip, and fifteen words about Ellington receiving a medal from Ethiopia’s Haile Selassie on his second African journey, in 1973.5 The more recent Duke has three words about Ellington visiting “Africa in 1966,” and the two words “Ethiopia” and “Zambia” in mentioning the second trip.6 From 1961, Ellington’s compositional titles and programmatic back stories notably started to include references again to the jungle and Africa. To remedy the lack of published discussion of these trips, surviving members of the Ellington bands that traveled to Africa were able to recall for me various aspects of these tours, including encounters with African musicians and with Haile Selassie. In this essay, I look for traces of African-inspired music in a host of these 1961–5 pieces, and examine Ellington’s post-1966 work for possible musical influences from his Senegalese, Ethiopian, and Zambian experiences. Finally, in light of Ellington’s post-1957 experiences with African music and musicians, I re-examine his notions of authenticity, and his 1966 assertion that he was a writer of “African music.”

Ellington’s Early Concepts of Africa We know little of how exactly Duke Ellington’s concepts of Africa were formed during his childhood in Washington, D.C., but, in that city, family, community, and public school fostered race pride. In his memoir, Music Is 5 6

Hasse, Beyond, 370, 377. Terry Teachout, Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington (New York: Gotham, 2013), 320, 356.

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My Mistress, Ellington does not discuss his youthful concepts of Africa, or what he read while living in Washington, though the community offered many opportunities for exposure to period resources and events that celebrated African American racial pride and cultural legacy. For instance, Ellington could have read The Journal of Negro History, which was published in Washington. Similarly, while it is not known whether Ellington attended either event, during his youth the theatrical productions The Evolution of the Negro in Picture, Song and Story and W. E. B. Du Bois’s pageant The Star of Ethiopia (“10,000 years and more of the Negro race”) were performed to significant acclaim in Washington.7 A 1915 publication, presumed to have been written by Du Bois, notes of the latter production: “The Star of Ethiopia” presents the story of the history and development of the black race from the prehistoric times down to the present. It is divided into five Scenes and thirteen Episodes. It begins with the prehistoric black men who gave to the world the gift of the welding of iron. Ethiopia, Mother of Men, then leads the mystic processions of historic events past the glory of ancient Egypt, the splendid kingdoms of the Sudan and Zymbabwe [Zimbabwe] down to the tragedy of the American slave trade.8

John Howland points out that we must also look beyond Washington, D.C., for potential “artistic-cultural” influences upon the fledgling Ellington. For example, the still-young Ellington was already based in New York when Will Marion Cook’s “dual-purpose historical/varietyentertainment” show, Negro Nuances, was performed in Harlem in January 1924. According to a “working outline” for the show, the first scene of the first section (called a “Nuance”) was set in Africa.9 What – if any – historical research went into that section is not clear. Not surprisingly, we do not know if Ellington saw this production. Lengthy discussion of Ellington’s youth is outside the scope of this essay, but neither his youthful education, nor The Star of Ethiopia, nor The Evolution of the Negro in Picture, Song and Story, nor Negro Nuances could have fully prepared Ellington for the experience of being asked to write music for faux-African dance numbers for the revues at New York’s Cotton Club. 7

8

9

Tucker, Early, 7–8, 12. See also David Krasner, “‘The Pageant Is the Thing’: Black Nationalism and The Star of Ethiopia,” in Performing America: Cultural Nationalism in American Theater, ed. Jeffrey D. Mason and J. Ellen Gainor (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 106–22. “The Star of Ethiopia,” in W. E. B. Du Bois, Pamphlets and Leaflets, ed. Herbert Aptheker (White Plains, NY: Kraus-Thomson, 1986), 162. Howland, Uptown, 115–17.

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Ellington and his band began playing at Harlem’s Cotton Club on 4 December 1927, and they were the house band at this venue for long stretches until 3 February 1931. A floor show at the Cotton Club consisted of various combinations of dancers, singers, and musicians presenting an exotic entertainment experience to an often all-white audience. The exoticism came on at least two levels: one was that the white audience members experienced the novelty of seeing contemporary African Americans (the artists) in a controlled, and therefore reassuring, environment; the second was the exotic roles that the singing and dancing acts took on, which included Bohemians (“Fantasie de Paris”), Arabic figures (“The Splendor of Arabia”), Spaniards (“Andalusian Nights”), plantation dwellers (“We’re Goin’ a Pickin’ Cotton”), or Harlem dwellers (“Harlem’s Hot as Hades”). The most-often noted exotic routines cited in Ellington literature (but not necessarily the most prevalent at the club) have been the jungle routines. Few programs from the Harlem era of the Cotton Club have been reprinted or have circulated among collectors. (The club relocated downtown to Broadway and 48th Street in 1936.) In those Harlem-era programs that this author has seen that identify the names of individual stage routines in the shows, jungle-themed numbers were no more prevalent than other exotic-themed acts. The most African-specific title is “Congo Jamboree” (from September 1929) that promises “An exhibition of unrestrained Nubian abandon.”10 Jazz historian and author Marshall Stearns visited Harlem’s Cotton Club during Ellington’s tenure and later described one of the venue’s African-themed routines: The floor shows at the Cotton Club, which admitted only gangsters, whites, and Negro celebrities, were an incredible mishmash of talent and nonsense which might well fascinate both sociologists and psychiatrists. I recall one where a light-skinned and magnificently muscled Negro burst through a papier-mˆach´e jungle onto the dance floor, clad in an aviator’s helmet, goggles, and shorts. He had obviously been “forced down in darkest Africa,” and in the center of the floor he came upon a “white” goddess clad in long golden tresses and being worshiped by a circle of cringing “blacks.” Producing a bull whip from heaven knows where, the aviator rescued the blonde and they did an erotic dance. In the background, Bubber Miley, Tricky Sam Nanton, and other members of the Ellington Band growled, wheezed, and snorted obscenely.11

10 11

Stratemann, Day, 129. Marshall Stearns, The Story of Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956; repr., Mentor Books, 1958), 133.

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Decades later, Ellington gave a more general description of the Cotton Club’s African-themed entertainment: “During one period at the Cotton Club, much attention was paid to acts with an African setting, and to accompany these we developed what was termed ‘jungle style’ jazz. (As a student of Negro history I had, in any case, a natural inclination in this direction.)”12 This “jungle style” became known as “jungle music.” Ellington’s drummer, William “Sonny” Greer, traced the term to a celebrity encounter at the Cotton Club. Greer explains, “so they were sitting up at the Cotton Club and George Gershwin said to Paul [Whiteman], I know what that is, that’s jungle music.”13 Given the jungle routines described above though, any number of individuals could have independently come up with this term. Ellington never publicly defined jungle music, but in jazz literature, the most-often recurring musical characteristic discussed is the sound of the band’s plunger-muted and growling trumpet and trombone that seemed to pronounce syllables like “wah wah” and “yah yah.” This was a technique that had been brought into the Ellington band by trumpeter James “Bubber” Miley and was well displayed on the band’s first recording of “East St. Louis Toodle-O” (29 November 1926). A minor tonality, as heard in this number’s opening growl section, is also sometimes associated with the jungle style. Trombonist Joe “Tricky Sam” Nanton likewise mastered the plunger technique, and by the 3 February 1927 recording of “Song of the Cotton Field,” growl/plunger trumpet/trombone and a minor tonality were united in one recording. These pieces, along with 1927’s Black and Tan Fantasy, were recorded before Ellington began playing at the Cotton Club.14 Did Ellington essentially just take techniques he was already using and give them an African association for use at the Cotton Club? Or could he have begun to associate such growl/plunger brass playing with jungle skits before his Cotton Club tenure? In this light, can any pre-Cotton Club Ellington compositions be considered to be Ellingtonian jungle music? The Cotton Club did not invent African-themed stage acts; in fact, when Elmer Snowden’s band (the “Washington Black Dot Orchestra”) – with Ellington as pianist – was featured at New York’s Hollywood Club in 12 13

14

Ellington, Mistress, 419. William “Sonny” Greer, Jazz Oral History Project interview, January 1979, conducted by Stanley Crouch, cassette 1, transcript, 33, Institute of Jazz Studies, John Cotton Dana Library, Rutgers University, Newark, NJ. For more on the development of this sound during the early years of the orchestra, see Tucker, Early.

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1923, a review in the New York Evening Telegram described such an act at the club: The revue, which is composed of entirely colored entertainers, is an elaborate one and withal, mirthful and characteristically musical. Standing out most prominently is an ensemble number called “Stamboula,” in which a decidedly dusky [darkskinned] king (Slick White) leads. Clad in a leopard skin with a “gold” crown on his head and war club in his hand, the King with his much lighter colored wives (the chorus) presents a striking picture. White has a very good voice and puts the song over in very fine style. One of the wives, Anita Rivera, put on a dance which almost stopped the show. Needless to say she charmed the King.15

When Snowden left the band (already called the Washingtonians) in early 1924, Ellington took over the group and continued to play at the Hollywood Club. Trumpeter Miley soon joined and brought with him the growl/plunger sound. As Ellington notes of this development, “Our band changed its character when Bubber came in. He used to growl all night long, playing gutbucket on his horn. That was when we decided to forget all about the sweet music.”16 Indeed, both jungle routines and plungermuted growl trumpet were present at the Hollywood Club (renamed the Club Kentucky in 1925) and may have begun to be associated with one another well before their use at the Cotton Club. If it was performed for jungle routines at the Hollywood/Kentucky night club, a composition like Black and Tan Fantasy would indeed qualify as pre-Cotton Club jungle music. Ellington’s The Mooche, first recorded in October 1928 (and for four different record labels in total), has the distinction of being the only Ellington composition linked to a jungle routine by mention in a known Cotton Club program. Although it was likely featured at the Cotton Club around the time of its initial 1928 recordings, the composition’s one appearance in a program available to me is for a segment in the 1932 show Rhyth-Mania (Ellington had returned to the Cotton Club for a one-week engagement). The routine is titled “The Mooche” and features Banana Girls and a Queen.17 In its recorded arrangement, The Mooche features wailing clarinets, plunger-muted trumpet, and a minor tonality for a 15

16 17

David G. Casem, “News of New York’s Hotels and Popular Restaurants,” The Evening Telegram, 8 September 1923, p. 10. Thanks to Ken Steiner for sharing his research. “Jazz as I Have Seen It,” Swing, June 1940, 11. On Ellington’s engagement, see Stratemann, Day, 50. The program is reproduced on p. 68 of Horst J. P. Bergmeier’s and Rainier E. Lotz’s liner notes to Live from the Cotton Club, Bear Family Records BCD 16340 BL, 2003, compact disc boxed set.

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good part of its length. On the very first recording (1 October 1928 for Okeh), Sonny Greer can faintly be heard using what sounds like mallets on his tom-tom drums or tympani at the beginning and end. Similarly, on the number’s first live recording, Greer is clearly using mallets on drums.18 Tom-toms are not universally found in the jungle music of jazz, but for most of the twentieth century, Westerners, including Ellington, often generically associated tom-toms with the music of African jungles. Following this association, in Ellington’s unpublished typed program for the 1943 Black, Brown and Beige, he began: A message is shot thru the jungle by drums. BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! Like a tom-tom in steady precision.19

This text is a product of Ellington’s middle years, but early in his career, what were his conceptions of African music? In 1933, Ellington referred to “the jazz element, based on primitive jungle rhythms.”20 As this suggests, he was not immune to invoking the popular period notion of jazz having primitive (as opposed to sophisticated) rhythms that derived from a generic African jungle. Even though Ellington might have been exposed to more well-informed concepts of Western African music and culture in his youth in Washington, D.C. (see above), or through subsequent possible contact with Harlem Renaissance ideas, the dominant African cultural tropes in American mass media came from popular sources such as the Tarzan movies and novels. Although Ellington later claimed to have been writing “African music” by the early 1930s, he certainly had limited information on the actual practices of African music to rely on. In addition, from 1929 through 1931, Ellington’s band was sometimes credited on record labels as The Jungle Band. On one hand, this name allowed Ellington to record for both Brunswick (as The Jungle Band) 18

19 20

7 November 1940, Fargo, North Dakota. There have been numerous commercial releases of this famous live recording. See, especially, Duke Ellington, The Duke at Fargo 1940: Special Sixtieth Anniversary Edition, Storyville 8316, 2001, compact disc. This typescript is held in the Duke Ellington Collection, series 4b, box 3, folder 7. Doran K. Antrum, “After Jazz – What? Is American Music Stymied or Are We Going Somewhere?,” Metronome, December 1933, 23. The full passage reads: “It is my honest belief that the musical rhythm known as jazz will never bow out for a full exit. I do feel though, that its accepted forms are due for radical changes but there will remain in the background the jazz element, based on primitive jungle rhythms.” In his memoir, Ellington puts a new spin on the term “jungle” and associates himself with primitivism: “Roaming through the jungle, the jungle of ‘oos’ and ‘ahs,” searching for a more agreeable noise, I live a life of primitivity with the mind of a child and an unquenchable thirst for sharps and flats.” Ellington, Mistress, 447.

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and for Victor (under his own name, often as Duke Ellington and His Cotton Club Orchestra) contemporaneously. But, on the other hand, this alias acknowledged that his band was associated with the Cotton Club’s famous jungle routines. This shrewd billing was likely the work of Ellington’s manager Irving Mills, not Ellington. On a 1929 recording, Mills referred to Ellington as “the greatest living master of jungle music.”21 Also in 1929, “jungle” began to appear in a few titles recorded by Ellington, such as “Jungle Jamboree,” “Jungle Blues,” “Jungle Nights in Harlem,” and “Echoes of the Jungle.” That said, only “Jungle Nights in Harlem” was written by Ellington. And after he left the Cotton Club in 1931, Ellington showed little interest in the term “jungle”; the next Ellington piece to have the word in its title was “Air Conditioned Jungle” (co-composed with Jimmy Hamilton) in 1944. Even as Ellington’s recordings less often used jungle titles in the 1930s and early 1940s, the Cotton Club retained a close association with the theme of the exotic jungle. Even after 1936, when the club moved downtown from Harlem to Broadway at 48th St. (thereby losing its potential for tourists’ Harlem slumming), it continued to identify itself with African primitivism. English critic and diarist James Agate visited the latter-day Cotton Club during a May 1937 Ellington residency and later described the exotic show: Wound up the evening at the Cotton Club. This is the place to hear swing music as the negroes like it. What I personally think about it doesn’t matter; it stirs American audiences to frenzy. Duke Ellington conducts, presuming conducting is the word. A first-class cabaret follows. This takes place in a purplish penumbra, in which the dancers, naked except for diamond girdle and breastplate, are a twilit salmon-pink. They are extraordinarily attractive.22

A Cotton Club program from a March 1938 Ellington engagement notably has a cover painting that depicts naked Africans at the edge of a jungle, dancing and playing a drum. The males have darker skin colors than the females, and each character’s genitals are cleverly covered.23 21

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Duke Ellington, “A Night at the Cotton Club,” Victor 741029 (rec. 12 April 1929), 78 rpm; reissued on Duke Ellington, The Centennial Edition: The Complete RCA Victor Recordings, 1927–1973, RCA 63386, 1999, compact disc boxed set. James Agate, Ego 3: Being Still More of the Autobiography of James Agate (London: George G. Harrap, 1938), 113. Terry Teachout posted this passage to the Jazz Research List ([email protected]) on 4 January 2012 (although without the book title and page being cited). Cover art signed by Julian Harrison. From the author’s personal collection.

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The Idea of Africa and Ellington’s Middle Years As early as 1930, Ellington planned to write a composition titled “The History of the Negro,” that would include musical references to Africa.24 As we have seen earlier in this chapter, performance works with African/African American historical objectives such as The Evolution of the Negro in Picture, Song and Story, The Star of Ethiopia, and Negro Nuances preceded Ellington’s plans. In 1933, Ellington spoke of intending to write a “suite in five parts” whose first section was to be titled “Africa.”25 By 1941, he was planning to create a four-part work and had settled on a mythic character, Boola, to symbolize Africans/African Americans over time. He remarked: “My opera traces Boola’s whole history in four scenes. The first scene is laid in Africa. The music there is mostly imaginary, because no one today knows what African Negro music was like in the days of the early slave traders.” At this time, the entire work was said to be titled Boola.26 By 1943, however, when he premiered his 43-minute concert work Black, Brown and Beige, none of the major sections – now three – was primarily set in Africa. (By comparison, the first scene of Negro Nuances was entirely set in Africa and was projected to run ten to twelve-and-a-half minutes.27 ) One musical element of Black, Brown and Beige that does hearken back to the previously planned African section is heard at the very beginning of the work, with quarter notes played by drummer Sonny Greer on his tom-toms (“A message is shot through the jungle by drums,” as Ellington wrote in his unpublished, typed program).28 By 1943, Ellington likely knew more about African history than he had during his early Cotton Club days, so why did he so radically scale back the previously proposed Africa-based scene of his “History of the Negro?” It could have been for lack of very specific knowledge of Western African music at the time of the slave trade. If that was indeed Ellington’s reason, it would be a bit surprising, because, as we will see, creating “imaginary” African music would not be a problem for him in the future. Although Black, Brown and Beige’s musical references to Africa are limited, Ellington’s written supporting material does offer clues to the depth 24

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Florence Zunser, “‘Opera Must Die,’ Says Galli-Curci! Long Live the Blues!,” New York Evening Graphic Magazine, 27 December 1930, n. p.; reprinted in Tucker, Reader, 45. Wilder Hobson, “Introducing Duke Ellington,” Fortune, August 1933, 47–8, 90, 94–5; reprinted in Tucker, Reader, 98. Alfred Frankenstein, “‘Hot Is Something about a Tree,’ Says Ellington,” San Francisco Chronicle, 9 November 1941, n. p.; cited in Tucker, “Genesis,” 75. 28 Duke Ellington Collection, series 4b, box 3, folder 7. Howland, Uptown, 116.

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of his knowledge of African history by the early 1940s. In his unpublished, typed program for the work, Ellington refers to historical Egypt (“Seeds of the first civilization/Known to man!”), Babylon (“Knowing well her culture sprang/From black men”), the Nile “Meroe [or Mero¨e] . . . /From whence the first bright light flamed up/In Ethiopia to guide mankind along the way”), and South Africa (“The Bantus in South Africa”). After a discussion of the Sudan (“First to smelt the iron and use the forge”), Ellington asks “How many scholars know the ‘Epic of the Sudan,’/To measure the classics of any land?”29 “Epic of the Sudan” is a reference to the Tarikh es Sudan (or Tarikh-es-Sudan), written in 1596 by Abdurrahman Es-Sadi or perhaps several authors.30 These passages, and similar ones elsewhere in the typescript, offer our clearest early traces of Ellington as a “student of Negro history.” Ellington could easily have learned about African history through discussions with various knowledgeable individuals, but we do not know specifically which books or journals he read on the subject. It is possible, however, to make some informed guesses about his possible awareness of the more widely circulated sources that address the ideas and historical references he mentions. For instance, one likely source for knowledge about the Epic of the Sudan/Tarikh es Sudan can be found in a passing reference in W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Negro, published in 1915.31 Another possible source, interestingly enough, was a journal that Ellington could have encountered in Washington, D.C., even before leaving for New York City in 1923. The Journal of Negro History was co-published in Washington, D.C., and Lancaster, Pennsylvania. In the journal’s July 1921 issue, there appeared an article by William Leo Hansberry titled “The Material Culture of Ancient Nigeria.” This article notably discusses the Epic of the Sudan/Tarikh es Sudan a bit more specifically than Du Bois had six years earlier.32 Harvey G. Cohen has found similarities between a passage in Ellington’s typed program and a quotation of Franz Boas found in Du Bois’s The Negro.33 He has also noted parallels between the typescript and Du Bois’s The Star of Ethiopia, which, as discussed earlier, Ellington could have seen performed during his youth in Washington, D.C. Cohen suggests “Ellington’s references to the smelting of iron, the notion of slavery 29 30 31 32

33

Ibid. John G. Jackson, Introduction to African Civilizations (New York: Citadel, 2001), 196. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Negro (orig. 1915; repr. Radford, VA: A & D Publishing, 2008), 63. William Leo Hansberry, “The Material Culture of Ancient Nigeria,” The Journal of Negro History 6 (July 1921): 263–4. Cohen, America, 214–15.

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strengthening the resiliency and character of blacks, historians’ general ignorance of African and African American history, and the inclusion of Toussaint L’ouverture [L’Ouverture] and slave-revolt leaders as an essential part of African American history is echoed in Du Bois’s 1910 pageant The Star of Ethiopia.”34 Not long after the premiere of Black, Brown and Beige, Maurice Zolotow reported that Ellington had amassed “a collection of eight hundred well-read books on Negro history and prehistorical [prehistoric] African Art.”35 During the same period, Richard O. Boyer interviewed Ellington and wrote: Duke sometimes thinks that it is good business to conceal his interest in the Bible, just as he conceals his interest in American Negro history. He doubts if it adds to his popularity in Arkansas, say, to have it known that in books he has read about Negro slave revolts he has heavily underlined paragraphs about the exploits of Nat Turner and Denmark Vesey . . . New acquaintances are always surprised when they learn that Duke has written poetry in which he advances the thesis that the rhythm of jazz has been beaten into the Negro race by three centuries of oppression. The four beats to a bar in jazz are also found, he maintains in verse, in the Negro pulse. Duke doesn’t like to show people his poetry. “You can say anything you want on the trombone, but you gotta be careful with words,” he explains.36

Unfortunately, neither The Journal of Negro History, nor Du Bois’s The Negro, nor books about Nat Turner and Denmark Vesey, nor any books about African history are among Ellington’s former possessions housed in the Duke Ellington or Ruth Ellington archives at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.37 All of these leads are enticing, and give us a sense of what written sources Ellington had at his disposal, if he had chosen to avail himself of them. He was a “student of Negro history” with hundreds of books on the subject, but he left only small clues as to his reading habits of the time, perhaps because “you gotta be careful with words.” 34 35

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Ibid., 609n23. Cohen based his observations on Krasner, “Pageant Is the Thing.” Maurice Zolotow, “The Duke of Hot,” in Never Whistle in a Dressing Room (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1944), 302. This essay was originally published in the Saturday Evening Post, 7 August 1943, n.p. Duke Ellington’s granddaughter, Mercedes Ellington, told me that she had never seen any such African book collection (even remotely similar in size) in Ellington’s possession. Personal communication, 14 May 2014. Richard O. Boyer, “The Hot Bach – III,” New Yorker, 8 July 1944, 26, 27. The three Ellington-owned books in the archive that are closest to this article’s focus are Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery (1903), Charlotte and Wolf Leslau’s African Proverbs (1962), and Ethiopian artist Afewerk Tekle’s Afewerk Tekle (1973).

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One of Ellington’s most direct creative expressions of interest in Africa in this period was first heard at the 1947 Carnegie Hall concert, where he premiered his Liberian Suite, commissioned by the Liberian government. Ellington certainly knew about Liberia’s unique relationship to the United States, and likely much more. In his memoir, Ellington described the work: “In form, it consisted of an introduction, ‘I Like the Sunrise,’ dramatically sung by Al Hibbler, and five contrasting dances, whose moods and rhythms were related to what I knew of the Liberian past and present.”38 Note that Ellington does not say that his suite’s rhythms were based on Liberian rhythms, but that his music’s moods and rhythms were related to his knowledge of Liberian history. Significantly for an African-themed composition, on a live recording from the premiere concert, Sonny Greer is featured playing mallets on tom-toms and/or timpani on four of the five dances, and the last dance unites Greer’s mallets with wah-wah (and occasional growl) trombone from Tyree Glenn. Also played at the 1947 Carnegie Hall concert were two Ellington pieces that are associated with the jungle style: East St. Louis Toodle-O and Black and Tan Fantasy. Not surprisingly, Greer again uses mallets on his drums in jungle-style gestures. After the Liberian Suite, the next Ellington composition (as far as I can determine) whose title explicitly refers to Africa is “Cong-go,” which was recorded well over a decade later, in 1961. From September to December 1956, Ellington recorded the music for his music-dance-acting-singing television spectacular A Drum Is a Woman, which was broadcast in 1957. Like Black, Brown and Beige, A Drum Is a Woman makes only a brief reference to the continent of Africa. For example, in the song “Rhythm Pum Te Dum” it is said, “Rhythm came to America from Africa . . . Africa to the West Indies.”39 Beyond that, the recording of the show is set everywhere from New Orleans’s Congo Square to a flying saucer in the skies. In 1957 came what was Ellington’s first chance to play for an extended period with an African-born musician, drummer/percussionist Guy Warren. Born Kpakpo Akwei in the British African colony Gold Coast (from 1957, Ghana), he used the name Guy Warren in the middle of his career, and Kofi Ghanaba later. Warren had been based in Chicago since approximately 1955. For an engagement at Chicago’s Blue Note night club from 10 to 21 July 1957, Warren played with Ellington, reportedly substituting 38 39

Ellington, Mistress, 187. Duke Ellington, A Drum Is a Woman, Columbia CL 951, 1957, LP.

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for Sam Woodyard on drum set.40 On 12 July, this band was recorded as it broadcast three selections on radio.41 The drummer acquits himself well and is particularly prominent on “Rock City Rock,” where he plays many accents and fills. If this is indeed Warren (and the aggressive drum fills and accents are unlike Woodyard’s on Ellington’s earlier 1957 studio recording), he seems to understand the conventions of showy big band drumming. Around this time, Warren was also playing in Billy Strayhorn’s trio at the Blue Note.42 (The trio began at the club a week before Ellington’s band started, and may have continued to play opposite Ellington during the big band’s engagement.) Ellington attended a Strayhorn trio rehearsal in which Warren played an African talking drum on The Mooche, thus bringing an actual African instrument to Ellington’s jungle music. The occasion was described by Warren: And Billy Strayhorn. We had a trio going, substituting for the big band – that’s what it was, you see – Billy Strayhorn on piano, myself on drums, and somebody else on bass; and Duke would come and supervise rehearsals, you see. We used to spotlight my Talking Drum in “The Mooche,” and whenever I did a break on my drum, he would say “No, no Guy – do it this way” – the other way, you see – so I would say, “Oh – like this?” and I would do it his way – But, I would then go again into my solo, and end up doing my break! So he thought I was putting him on or something – but I just couldn’t feel it his way! I knew his jazz, but he did not know mine, and I did not intend to play his jazz for mine! 43

Warren asserts that he understood Ellington’s music (a notion reinforced by his appropriate big band drumming on “Rock City Rock” above), but Ellington did not meet Warren half way by accepting some of Warren’s Ghanaian drum traditions. Ellington did not mention Warren in his memoir, perhaps because of contentiousness in their relationship and/or 40 41

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Stratemann, Day, 377. Many thanks to the ever-generous Ellington expert Sjef Hoesmit for sending me these three selections. “Eli’s Chosen Six and comic-philosopher Mort Sahl are winding up a Blue Note booking. The Billy Strayhorn Trio and singer Lurlean Hunter follow for the July 3–7 period. The Duke Ellington band, with drummer Guy Warren added, will be at the Note for a pair of weeks beginning July 10.” From “Strictly Ad Lib: Chicago – Jazz Chicago-Style,” Down Beat, 11 July 1957, 8. From a tape-recorded interview with Les Tomkins, London, June 1962. In Guy Warren, I Have a Story to Tell (Accra: New Guinea Press, 1962), 176–7. All capitalization, boldface, and punctuation are from the original. It is not clear what “substituting for the big band” means; they may have played during intermissions between Ellington big band sets, or this may refer to the fact that Strayhorn’s trio began their engagement at the Blue Note one week before the Ellington big band.

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perhaps because their musical encounter was not particularly memorable to Ellington. This is not the place to address the two musicians’ artistic or personality differences (in his book, Warren devotes notable space to discussing individuals who had wronged or failed to support him). In any case, when Warren was playing with the big band, Ellington of course had ultimate artistic judgment on how to deal with Warren’s West African-derived musical ideas. In the case of Strayhorn’s trio, Ellington perhaps overstepped his interest as the piece’s composer by asserting how he wanted this version of The Mooche to sound, and what he wanted Warren to contribute to it. Despite the above artistic conflict, was Ellington subsequently influenced by the musical concepts of this African drummer? Years later Ellington described his preferred way of dealing with influences from other cultures: “You let it roll around, undergo a chemical change, and then seep out on paper.”44 Did performing for approximately ten days with an African drummer lead over time to a “chemical change” that seeped into Ellington’s compositions? I have not detected any specific effect upon his recordings of the following period, nor have I found any references to the experience in statements by Ellington. However, Ellington’s process of “chemical change” was often elusive, and looking in his music for direct influences from his personal experiences is not always fruitful.

Invitation to Africa Although the now-legendary Premier Festival Mondial des Arts N`egres took place in Dakar, Senegal, in 1966, it was by one account announced and postponed three times (1961, 1963, 1965) before the event was successfully held.45 It is not clear when Ellington was first invited to perform at the festival, but the offer could have come as early as 1961. That year would neatly coincide with a sudden resurgence in African-themed titles in Ellington compositions. Although perhaps his last composition whose 44 45

Duke Ellington, “Orientations: Adventures in the Mid-East,” Music Journal, March 1964, 35. Aboubacar Demba Cissokho, “Il y a 40 ans, Dakar accueillait le Premier Festival mondial des Arts N`egres,” Agence de Presse S´en´egalese, available online at www.aps.sn/articles.php?id article=17525 (accessed 6 October 2012). “Dakar, 31 mars (APS) – Il y a 40 ans, du 1-er au 24 avril, se tenait a` Dakar le Premier Festival mondial des Arts n`egres, lequel, report´e a` trois reprises (1961, 1963, 1965), se tient finalement au moment ou` le S´en´egal fˆetait ses six ans d’ind´ependance.” The Dakar festival in part grew out of the Congress of Black Writers and Artists (Paris, 1956) and the second such congress (Rome, 1959). L´eopold S´edar Senghor, President of Senegal, attended both.

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title referred to Africa had been 1947’s Liberian Suite, the 1960s brought Ellington pieces such as “Cong-Go” (1961), “Springtime in Africa” (1961), “Birdie Jungle” (1961), “Money Jungle” (1962), “La Fleurette Africaine” (1962), “Afro-Bossa” (1963), “After Bird Jungle” (1963), “Jungle Triangle” (1963), “Jungle Kitty” (1965), “Virgin Jungle” (1965), and “La Plus Belle Africaine” (1966). Given Ellington’s great imagination in naming his compositions, some of these may have no connection with Africa beyond their titles. Nevertheless, Ellington specifically commented on the African connections for at least two of these pieces, “La Fleurette Africaine” (discussed here) and “La Plus Belle Africaine” (mentioned at the beginning of this chapter and discussed below). In his memoir, Ellington wrote of the 1962 recording of “La Fleurette Africaine” with bassist Charles Mingus and drummer Max Roach. For the piece, he had a jungle image in mind: One of the numbers recorded was approached something like this: I announced the key signature and continued into the annotation. “La Fleurette Africaine,” I explained, “is a little African Flower. The piece should be executed from the African philosophical point of view, with which it is concerned. The jungle, to Africans, is a place deep in the forest where no human being has ever ventured, and this little flower was growing in the middle of it, miles away from human eyes in the central part of the jungle that is God-made and untouched. The little flower just grew prettier and prettier every day.”46

Of course, Ellington’s statement of what the jungle means to Africans (which Africans?) was in large part a colorful story that he was creating (or embellishing from another source) with great poetic license. Of the performance/recording that followed his jungle “annotation,” Ellington wrote: “Roach’s rhythmic embellishments could not have been more fitting, nor have sounded more authentic.”47 To Ellington, an American-born musician and self-described writer of African music, what constituted authenticity? As we have seen, African authenticity was not paramount to Ellington when he coached Guy Warren; Ellington’s own artistic vision was his concern. On this recording, Roach’s drumming was certainly not “authentic” African music, nor was it intended to be. Roach, of course, knew Ellington’s music and had previously substituted for drummer Sonny Greer in Ellington’s band in the early 1940s.48 Roach’s 46 48

47 Ibid. Ellington, Mistress, 243. As quoted in Marian McPartland’s Piano Jazz, “Marian McPartland’s Piano Jazz with Max Roach,” orig. broadcast Fall 1998, available online at http://www.npr.org/2008/02/22/ 19269815/drumming-legend-max-roach-on-piano-jazz (accessed 14 January 2017). Roach says that this happened while he was in high school.

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“embellishments” on “La Fleurette Africaine” employ mallets on tomtoms; he does not use his cymbals and never plays swing patterns. It is possible that when Roach heard Ellington’s verbal jungle imagery while on this 1962 recording date, he used mallets on his tom-toms because of their association with Ellington’s previous jungle music as much as because of Roach’s first-hand knowledge of African music. If Roach’s playing on this recording was in some sense “authentic,” it might be called authentic Ellington African music. However, Roach’s drumming in this era was informed in part by African traditions. Roach recalled playing with African and Afro-Cuban percussionists as early as 1947 in “a concert with just Dizzy and Charlie Parker at the hotel Diplomat, right across the street from Town Hall in New York City. We played with a group of African drummers that was visiting the United States. It was just Dizzy, Charlie Parker, and myself and about six or seven drummers. No piano, no bass or anything.”49 Roach’s encounters with African musicians continued in the 1950s with Guy Warren. Interestingly, Ellington and Roach had Warren in common as a source for African musical practices. In 1974, Roach recalled Warren enthusiastically: “I met Ghanaba [Guy Warren] in Chicago in 1956 . . . Ghanaba was so far ahead of what we were all doing, that none of us understood what he was saying – that in order for Afro-American music to be stronger, it must cross-fertilize with its African origins.”50 Another major encounter between Roach and African percussionists came in 1960, when he recorded his LP Freedom Now Suite, an album that in part featured Nigerian-born percussionist Babatunde (Michael) Olatunji.51 Writing about the track “All Africa,” Nat 49

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Max Roach, in Dizzy Gillespie and Al Frazier, To Be, or Not . . . to Bop (New York: Da Capo, 1985), 233. A news item in the New York Amsterdam News reported on the event: “The African Academy of Arts and Research presented Asadata Dafora in ‘African Interlude,’ a program of music and dance at the Hotel Diplomat, 11 West 43d Street, on Wednesday night, 7 May. Dafora, a noted exponent of African dance from Sierra Leone, has just returned from a reportedly successful nationwide tour, and is probably best known for his dance dramas of several years ago, ‘Kykunker’ and ‘Zunguru.’ One of the more popular presentation[s] of the affair was the ‘Bombastic “Be-Bop”’ featuring Dizzy ‘Bebop’ Gillespie, standing above, who was assisted by Bill [Billy] Alvarez, Pepe [Pep´e Beck´e], [Eladio] Gonzales, Diego [Iborra], Ralph [Raphael Mora], Max Roach, and Charlie Parker.” “Bombastic Bebop,” New York Amsterdam News, 17 May 1947, n. p., which is reproduced on p. 67 of Jordi Pujol’s liner notes to Chan Pozo, Chano Pozo: El tambor de Cuba, Tumbau TCD305, 2001, compact disc boxed set. Max Roach, as quoted in Ian Carr, “Max Roach,” in Ian Carr, Digby Fairweather, Brian Priestley, and Charles Alexander, The Rough Guide to Jazz, 3rd rev. ed. (London: Rough Guides, 2004), 288. This quote is said to be from 1974. The passage continues, “We ignored him. Seventeen years later, Black Music in America has turned to Africa for inspiration and rejuvenation, and the African sound of Ghanaba is now being imitated all over the United States.” Max Roach, We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite, Candid 79002, 1997, compact disc. Selections with Olatunji recorded 6 September 1960.

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Hentoff reported that “it was Olatunji who set the polyrhythmic directions . . . His is also the leading drum voice.”52 Because Ellington respected Roach and praised his “authenticity,” it is appropriate to compare the two musicians’ relationships to African music and musicians. From the above statement, we know that Roach actively collaborated with Olatunji and encouraged his musical input. We know that Ellington did not pursue further collaboration with Guy Warren (perhaps because of personality conflicts or artistic differences); but, significantly, Ellington did not move on from that failed attempt and try to actively pursue musical collaboration with any other African musician. In Zurich in 1962, Ellington met the South African pianist Abdullah Ibrahim, who was then known professionally as Dollar Brand (and born Adolph Johannes Brand). Although they did not collaborate on a project, Ellington arranged for Brand to record, and in 1966, Brand even filled in for Ellington on several engagements: “I did five dates substituting for him. It was exciting but very scary, I could hardly play.”53 It is not clear what Ellington might have learned from Brand about African cultures and music; conversely, Brand took a reverential approach to Ellington: “Duke Ellington was symbolic of music for us in South Africa, I guess through all of Africa . . . he was not an American musician. We never regarded him as an American; Ellington was just the wise old man in the village, the extended village.” He also noted, “The meeting with Ellington was just . . . you ask for confirmation, not with music, but of the path, the Tao. There are formulas that have to be confirmed, and the only way you can confirm it is to ask the elders.”54 On 5 January 1963, Ellington recorded in the studio a new composition that early on was called “Boola” or “Bula.” Boola was, as mentioned, the name of the symbolic African/African American character who appeared repeatedly in the program for the 1943 Black, Brown and Beige. How Ellington connected this later piece to the earlier script character of Boola is unknown. When Ellington performed the number in concert on 1 February 1963, he introduced it by saying: “I’d like to do now a sort 52 53

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Nat Hentoff, liner notes to Roach, Freedom Now Suite. “Biography,” Abdullah Ibrahim official website, www.abdullahibrahim.com/htmls/features/ biography.html (accessed 13 November 2010). Interview between Abdullah Ibrahim and Karen Bennett. I thank Bennett for her unedited transcript of these passages (email communication, 13 November 2010). An edited version of this interview appeared in Karen Bennett, “An Interview with Abdullah Ibrahim,” Musician, March 1990, 41.

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of gutbucket bolero, in a primitive rhythm, executed in a pre-primitive manner. It’s called ‘Boola.’”55 In 1933, Ellington had used the phrase “primitive jungle rhythms” when speaking of jazz (see above); by 1963, his use of the terms “primitive” and “pre-primitive” was of course slyly ironic. By the time that the 5 January studio version was issued, “Boola” had been re-titled “Afro-Bossa.”56 The change in title superficially connected the composition to the bossa nova music that was then becoming popular in the United States, but in stage announcements after the title had changed, he clearly pronounced “bossa” as BOE-sa,” and indeed the piece uses a bolero pattern from the drums, not a bossa nova beat. “Afro-Bossa” does not attempt to be “authentic” bossa nova, and its association with Ellington’s African/African American figure Boola has been dropped.

“La Plus Belle Africaine” From late January to late February 1966, Ellington and his band undertook a lengthy tour of Europe and England. A few days into the tour, he premiered the composition “La Plus Belle Africaine.” After their later return from Africa, the composer often announced in concert that the piece had been written in anticipation of the trip to Senegal, but Ellington scholar Sjef Hoefsmit reported that in none of eighteen pre-Senegal live recordings of the piece that he surveyed does Ellington mention composing the piece in connection with their imminent African journey.57 No studio recording of the composition has been released to date, but a few live performances from soon after the African trip were commercially recorded with Ellington’s approval and have been issued.58 He continued to perform the piece for years to come. Although the formal details in its performance varied over time, “La Plus Belle Africaine” is divided into two harmonic sections. One features a forte part in which the band plays a unison melody (based on what is now called the blues scale) over a static E-flat minor tonality. The other section 55

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Duke Ellington, The Great Paris Concert, Atlantic Jazz 304–2, 2005, compact disc. This track was recorded 1 February 1963. On this release’s packaging, the title is spelled “Bula,” although “Boola” is probably what Ellington had in mind, given Ellington’s use of the name in Black, Brown and Beige. Duke Ellington, Afro-Bossa, Collectibles 6730, 2005, compact disc. Sjef Hoefsmit, email communication to author, 11 August 2010. For example, The Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington Cˆote d’Azur Concerts on Verve, Verve 314 539 033–2, 1998 (compact disc boxed set), has three versions of “La Plus Belle Africaine” from July 1966.

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is gentler and is based around an E-flat Mixolydian (E7) tonality, and has both a harmonically static section and a moving chord progression that departs from and returns to E-flat. In all four of the commercially issued 1966 recordings of the piece,59 drummer Sam Woodyard opens and closes the number by playing quietly with his hands on his drums and with his hi-hat cymbals on beats two and four. In the forte passages he plays powerfully with sticks on his tom-toms and cymbals. What about the conception of “La Plus Belle Africaine” symbolized Africa to Ellington? Certainly, at no time does the arrangement employ swing roles for the rhythm section, nor do the melodic passages involve swing phrasing, and large parts of the number do not employ moving chord progressions and/or functional harmony. For Ellington, perhaps the piece’s lack of those techniques was sufficient to suggest an African woman. “La Plus Belle Africaine” has a connection to Cotton Club-era “jungle music” and to the opening of Black, Brown and Beige in that it features prominent tom-toms. It also looks forward to post-Senegal Ellington compositions like “Afrique” and “Right On Togo” in that long sections are based on one scale or one chord.

Premier Festival Mondial des Arts N`egres In the literature on Ellington, few specifics have been given on Ellington’s participation at the Premier Festival Mondial des Arts N`egres, held in Dakar, Senegal, 1–24 April 1966. This extended immersion in Dakar suggests a key moment in Ellington’s growing knowledge of African musical culture. However, there is question as to how many times they performed, which pieces they played at which occasion, and most importantly: what demonstrable effect – if any – did the festival have on Ellingon. The festival was hosted by Senegal and its president, the poet, philosopher and statesman L´eopold S´edar Senghor. Senghor had already written of Ellington in a poem: The impatient fit leaves me. Oh! the dull beat of the rain on the leaves! Just play me your “Solitude”, Duke, till I cry myself to sleep.60 59

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The three versions cited directly above, plus Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald: Live at the Greek, Status DST 1013, 1994, compact disc. L´eopold S´edar Senghor, “Nd´ess´e” or “Blues,” in The Collected Poetry, trans. Melvin Dixon (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1991), 15. The poem was originally published in Senghor’s 1945 book, Shadow Song (Chants d’ombre).

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Figure 8.1 Duke Ellington and the Senegalese poet, philosopher, and statesman L´eopold S´edar Senghor, April 1966. Ruth Ellington Collection, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

While at the festival, Ellington encountered Senghor at a performance (Figure 8.1), and the two reportedly later met for thirty minutes on 8 April 1966.61 The festival brought together artists from Africa and countries of the African diaspora. From Africa, the festival’s program lists performing groups from Mali, Nigeria, Burundi, Senegal, Nigeria, Zambia, Togo, Congo, Ivory Coast, Libya, Uganda, Gabon, Ghana, Ethiopia, Morocco, Upper Volta, Dahomey, Cameroon, and more. From non-African countries, it lists performances of artists from the U.S.A., France, Trinidad, Tobago, Jamaica, Brazil, and Haiti. That said, not all of the individual participants listed in the book-length pre-festival program actually appeared. (For example, singer Ella Fitzgerald did not perform at the festival although she was pictured and written about in the festival’s program.)62 Visual artists exhibited their works, and writers also participated. There were juried cinema and literature competitions, and nearly every evening ˆ de there was some sort of elaborate show (“spectacle f´eerique”) on the Ile 61 62

Cohen, America, 503, 653n19. Based on United States State Department documents. Unsigned, Premier festival mondial des arts n`egres (Dakar: n.p., 1966), 81.

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Gor´ee, a symbol of the former slave trade, just off the coast of Dakar. The festival was thus a relatively high-profile international event and noted intellectuals, government representatives, and arts officials from many countries were present. While in Senegal, Ellington spoke to the press and was recorded answering questions at least once, and perhaps more times. He answered an interviewer’s query “Do you think that this festival is very important for all the Negro art[ists] of the world?” by saying, “I think so. Definitely. I’m gonna be very happy to know a lot more about the Negro artists internationally. It’s gonna be very instructive, and I think will help all artists to adjust their perspective to the future.”63 To another question, he commented, “We have accepted the fact that jazz [is] an African export.” (Ellington was of course highlighting the African-derived aspects of jazz and not focusing on jazz’s use of European instruments and European-related harmonic concepts.) During the same press conference, he was asked the meaning of Senghor’s term “n´egritude”: This is the word that I hear. I’m not sure I know what it means. Other than it implies – which of course would be true, if it’s supposed to imply – that the foundation of all the music that is being heard today at such a popular level is founded – or the foundation of this music is – African, or Negro . . . I think N´egritude has to do with the actual Negroes around the world who are contributing to art on a certain level.64

He told an interviewer that although it was his first trip to of Africa, “Of course, I’ve dreamt of it so much, and written so much pseudo African music. Because, at my distance, of course, it would have to be imitation.”65 Around the same time, Ellington said much the same to a print reporter who filed a story with the Associated Press: “I’m really happy to have the opportunity to be here. I’ve been writing this pseudo-African music for the past 35 years. Now I’ll be happy to know a lot more about what the music sounds like over here.”66 One example of Ellington hearing “what the music sounds like” is documented in a photo that shows him closely 63

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Unknown interviewer, “Duke Ellington, Arriv´ee a` Dakar.” Recorded 1 April 1966. Institut national de l’audiovisuel (France), item PHD86071223. Ibid. Unknown interviewer, “Festival des arts n`egres de Dakar: Le jazz et l’Afrique.’ Recorded 1 April 1966. Institut national de l’audiovisuel (France), item PHD86001587. Unsigned Associated Press wire story; one version of this article was published in The Times of Corpus Christi, Texas on 2 April 1966, n. p., from the microfilmed Duke Ellington scrapbooks of the Duke Ellington Collection series 8, Scrapbooks 1931–1973, microfilm roll 8.

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observing a Senegalese musician playing a kora.67 While these references to “pseudo African music” sound like the Ellington of 1941 who said that his musical depictions of Africa were of necessity “imaginary,” Ellington soon dropped the qualifying “pseudo” in related subsequent statements, as is shown below. I have found no evidence to suggest that Ellington ever left the Dakar area while in Senegal, but perhaps he saw from his airplane an actual African jungle of the sort that he had long referred to in his music. If he carried any simplistic preconceptions about African daily life, art, and culture, they would have been dispelled by the range of experiences to be had at the festival. As Judith Jamison, member of the participating Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, recalled years later, being in Senegal was her “first realization that Tarzan wasn’t it. I said, ‘Oh, that’s what’s going on in Africa!’”68 One of Ellington’s trombonists, George “Buster” Cooper, remembered a feeling of familiarity as he encountered in Senegal both Africans and individuals from the African diaspora: When I came back [from Dakar], I told my wife, I said, I can see the customs [among African Americans] different because mothers [seen in Dakar] carry their babies on their hip, just like they do, like, here in my home town, right here, you now, right now, you understand what I’m saying? . . . I mean, [it was] as if I was back in the States . . . and I saw [in Dakar] all the same customs that I was raised up with . . . Just like the black women [in Dakar], instead of raking the backyard, because there’s no grass back there, you know like that, but they would sweep ’em, and I’d see my mother do the same thing [in?] the house back yard . . . [I]t was the same customs.69

The Ellington band’s Sunday, 3 April, performance at the U.S. embassy and Monday, 4 April, performance at the Th´eaˆ tre Daniel Sorano were reviewed by Ebongu´e Soell´e for the newspaper Dakar-Matin. This account was translated into English by the Foreign Service of the U.S. government: Since his arrival at the First World Festival of Negro Arts Duke Ellington and his orchestra have gone from one triumph to another. Last Sunday during a reception that the United States Ambassador and Mrs. Mercer Cook gave in his honor, he succeeded in making the VIPs lose their seriousness.

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“The Master Watches,” Jet, 21 April 1966, 32. Photo by Moneta Sleet Jr. Suki John, “Millennial Triumph: Jamison to Receive Kennedy Center Honor During Ailey Company’s New York Season,” Dance Magazine, December 1999, 45. Thanks to Karen Hildebrand of Dance Magazine for faxing me this article. George “Buster” Cooper, telephone interview with the author, 5 August 2010.

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Every foot was tapping the floor rhythmically and the servant and the doorman were executing the same movements as the diplomat and the university graduate. The fiery trumpets of Duke Ellington had just broken down the social barriers once again. But that was only the beginning. On Monday the Daniel Sorano National Theater was full to bursting. Men, women, children, old people, all those for whom jazz is a friend, a confidant, a consoler, Duke Ellington brought each one what he was expecting, that is to say, what he himself had received . . . Without ever losing sight of the African origins of jazz, Ellington inserts into this art imaginative harmonies and European rhythms, merging the most disparate elements into a new folkloric form.

Note here that despite Ellington having often characterized his music as “African,” when this African reviewer specifically mentions Ellington’s rhythms, he notably calls them European, not African. In an audio interview conducted in Dakar, Ellington discussed distinctions in rhythmic complexity between his music and that of some of the African music he was encountering at the festival: My idea of Africa is this big, fat dream that I have, you know. You look way out in space and you imagine this, that, and the other, and you put it down on paper, and it comes out with complicated rhythms, and when you look at your complicated rhythms, and you compare it with some of the complicated rhythms of the original Africans, and then you say, “My little complicated rhythm is nothing,” you know. [Laughs.] It’s not nearly as complex, and it’s – but, you know, “keep trying.”70

North American filmmaker William Greaves was in Dakar to document the festival for the United States Information Agency. His film, The First World Festival of Negro Arts, is the best readily available video source for us to imagine the breadth of cultural and intellectual experiences available to Ellington.71 The documentary includes several scenes with Ellington onscreen. One segment shows Ellington, poet Langston Hughes, and actress Marpesa Dawn viewing and discussing art at an exhibition, with a performance of Ellington’s “El Viti” dubbed in on the soundtrack. This performance was quite possibly recorded by Greaves at the festival. The music continues – unsynchronized, as in much of the film – under a few clips of the Ellington band performing in front of a large audience during the daytime at the stadium. Some of these clips are repeated to 70

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Unknown interviewer, “Duke Ellington: Ses impressions sur le festival (extraits).” Recorded 1 April, 1966. Institut national de l’audiovisuel (France), item PHD86071237. The First World Festival of Negro Arts, directed by William Greaves, William Greaves Productions, 2004. See www.williamgreaves.com/catalog.htm (accessed 28 November 2014).

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lengthen the sequence. While Cat Anderson is heard on the soundtrack, he and drummer Sam Woodyard are seen briefly. Woodyard is playing a fast ride pattern that does not match the soundtrack’s slow tempo; a reaction shot shows a few audience members clapping their hands at a pace that also does not match the soundtrack. In addition, Ellington and bassist John Lamb are seen from behind in a short segment that is looped to make it last longer.72 Greaves’s motion picture camera was not the only one present during the Ellington performance at Dakar stadium. Film from the same concert also appears in a 1974 special program by the Italian television show, Adesso Musica, in an episode titled “Recordo di Duke Ellington.”73 Here, a passage of “Sophisticated Lady” is heard first, although again the video images do not match the music soundtrack. When the band plays “The Opener,” however, at times the performance images and sound do match, and at other times there appear to be near matches between filmed performances and the music heard. It is apparent that this segment (“The Opener”) is the same performance discussed above during which, in Greaves’s film, Sam Woodyard is playing a fast ride pattern. At one point, one can see a motion picture camera behind Woodyard that has the same point of view as Greaves’s shot and that may well be Greaves’s (or his crew’s) camera. The sometimes-distant, sometimes-close, synchronization between image and sound gives the impression that someone went to great lengths to try to reconcile the music with the passages being played on screen (something that Greaves did not do in his Ellington band sequence). Further, unsynchronized, film from this outdoor concert is also possessed by the Institut national de l’audiovisuel in France.74 One other video has surfaced of Ellington and his band performing at the stadium, this time at night and dated 7 April 1966.75 As found on the Internet, it consists of Ellington introducing his routine medley of hits, followed by the medley’s fanfare, a solo piano passage, and then a partial version of “Satin Doll” (the first part of that medley). Ellington’s suit jacket 72

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Greaves may have had additional, unused, Ellington audio from the festival, but two attempts to contact him were not answered. Greaves died on 25 August 2014. See Mel Watkins, “William Greaves, a Documentarian and Pioneering Journalist, Dies at 87,” New York Times, 26 August 2014, at www.nytimes.com/2014/08/27/arts/william-greaves-a-documentarian-andpioneering-journalist-dies-at-87.html?˙r=0 (accessed 21 September 2014). Grazie to Francesco Martinelli for sending a digitized copy of this television program to me. Merci to Pascal Rozat for supplying this information. The footage is from a television program titled La Semaine, date of broadcast unknown. Personal communication, 17 October 2014. “Duke Ellington au festival du Dakar,” www.ina.fr/video/CAF97016560/ duke-ellington-au-festival-de-dakar-video.html (accessed 23 September 2014)

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is different from the other film footage, and the event is clearly shown to be at night. Unique among the three film sources discussed here, the sound an image are well-synchronized. Unfortunately, Ellington’s comments to the audience do not include any references to being in Africa. It is not clear how many times, and when, Ellington and his band played at the festival. The official festival program (published before the festival) lists one concert at the theater (4 April at 21:00) and two performances at the stadium (5 April at both 16:00 and 21:00). (Note that 4 April does not match the date of the Europe 1 radio broadcast, and 5 April does not match the film of the evening stadium concert discussed above.) Ellington reported (see below) that they played six times: twice at Th´eaˆ tre Daniel Sorano, twice at the stadium, and twice at the U.S. Embassy. (The official program naturally did not list private performances at the embassy.) The French public radio service Office de Radiodiffusion-T´el´evision Franc¸aise (ORTF) recorded a 9 April Ellington indoor concert (also not listed in the festival program) at the Th´eaˆ tre Daniel Sorano.76 This concert could be the additional theater appearance that Ellington spoke of. The ORTF recording that the author has heard begins with a medley consisting of Black and Tan Fantasy, Creole Love Call, and The Mooche. All three featured some degree of plunger-mute trumpet playing, and the last piece of course had definitely been played at the Harlem Cotton Club, once again linking Ellington’s “imaginary” jungle music with the real Africa. (As usual, Ellington’s spoken introduction to this medley does not mention any connection to the Cotton Club or what others called jungle music.) “El Viti,” mentioned above, was also played. Later in the concert, Ellington chose “La Plus Belle Africaine,” which in subsequent performances he customarily announced had been written in anticipation of the band’s trip to Africa. However, on the Dakar recording, Ellington merely says “Our next number is ‘La Plus Belle Africaine.’” On this concert recording, in fact, Ellington is not heard making any references to the festival or to Africa. There is no adjustment of his usual presentation practices for the new context of this Africa-based festival. The only audible adaptations that Ellington makes to his francophone audience come when he says “Merci beaucoup” after “Dancers in Love” and declares several

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“Concert de Duke Ellington au Festival des arts africains.” Recorded 9 April 1966. Broadcast date is unknown. Institut national de l’audiovisuel (France), item PHF06041584. A slightly edited version of this concert (that begins with a partial version of Take the “A” Train and an introduction by Ellington) was later broadcast over Europe 1 radio.

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times (as he often did) “Je vous aime a` la folie.” (Also, someone exclaims “Oui!” after Johnny Hodges is mentioned by Ellington after “Dancers in Love.”) What repertoire the orchestra played at the other five Dakar appearances is unknown. Usually when Ellington played more than one concert in a particular city, he varied his program. Upon his arrival in Dakar, Ellington was asked by an interviewer if he would play a “special program for the festival” and said, “Well, no; what we play is – we will probably play programs which will cover some of our early things as far back as 1927 and [192]8, and some of the things of the Thirties, some of the things of the Forties, some of the Fifties, and some of the Sixty-six. And [will] probably be mixed in with some of the longer works.” He also mentions the likelihood that they will play a medley of his hit songs.77 Apart from “La Plus Belle Africaine,” Ellington and the band theoretically could have played any of his other 1960–6 pieces with at least a titular African connection (such as “Cong-go,” “Springtime in Africa,” “Birdie Jungle,” “Money Jungle,” “La Fleurette Africaine,” “Afro-Bossa,” “After Bird Jungle,” “Jungle Triangle,” “Jungle Kitty,” and “Virgin Jungle”), but of these only “Afro-Bossa” was regularly played in public, so that composition is really the only likely candidate from this group of additional African-titled pieces that he might have played during his Senegal visit. The 5 April stadium concert gave Ellington his second documented opportunity to play with an African percussionist. Senegalese percussionist Gana M’bow was photographed sitting in and playing what looks like a conga drum while Ellington holds a microphone close (Figure 8.2). (M’bow had already sat in with and been recorded with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers in Paris in 1959.78 ) The others in the Dakar concert photo are Sam Woodyard (on a standard drum kit) and bassist John Lamb. This encounter has not been previously reported in Ellington literature. Unfortunately, I have found no report of what music was played with M’bow. That Ellington was deeply moved by the cultural, artistic, and historical aspects of the festival is clear in the three-page “Dakar Journal, 1966” entry in his memoir, Music Is My Mistress. After describing the scope of the festival, Ellington wrote “And every night, on the balcony

77 78

Unknown interviewer, “Duke Ellington, Arriv´ee a` Dakar,” PHD86071237. Art Blakey, Art Blakey et les Jazz Messengers au Club St Germain 1958, BMG (France) ND 74897, 2006 compact disc. Recorded 21 December 1959. Percussionists M’bow and Kenny Clarke sit in on several pieces.

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Figure 8.2 The Ellington orchestra with Senegalese percussionist Gana M’bow in Dakar, April 1966. Ruth Ellington Collection, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

of the ninth floor of the Engar Hotel, I sit and listen to the sea singing her songs of the historic past on the island from which the slaves were shipped.” After more colorful scene-setting, he comments that “After writing African music for thirty-five years, here I am at last in Africa!”79 Thirty-five years was probably just an approximate number, but he also could have been recalling that something in his music or consciousness changed around 1931. For example, 1931 was the year he ended his long Cotton Club residency and thereby stopped writing for the club’s jungle routines. In his memoir comments, Ellington does not discuss the festival itself at length, and half of his “Dakar Journal” is taken up with an Ellington parable about jazz. A Senegalese artist, Papa Ibra Tall, had asked Ellington to explain jazz. Of course, Ellington had avoided calling his music “jazz” for many years, but he obliged Tall. In his highly imagistic description, jazz is a tree “whose branches reach out in all directions.” Its blossoms and fruit are highly varied, “but as we study it more deeply, we find that its very

79

Ellington, Mistress, 337.

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blue-blooded roots are permanently married to, and firmly ensconced in, the very rich black earth of beautiful Black Africa.”80

What Did Ellington Mean by “African Music”? Upon his return to the United States, Ellington gave several interviews in which he discussed his African trip. In one, Ellington made a statement similar to the one that he later included in his memoir: “I’ve been playing and writing African music for thirty-five years, and when I got to Africa, I knew it and they knew it. Everyone loved it. I played ‘La Plus Belle Africaine’ and they all broke loose – singing, clapping – not just the little people, even the diplomats!”81 Note that Ellington no longer called it pseudo-African music, as he had upon his arrival in Senegal. What did Ellington mean by “African music”? As early as the 1920s, he had proposed to Fletcher Henderson that they call their music “Negro music” and not jazz.82 In the 1930s and 1940s, he spoke repeatedly of playing “Negro music.”83 In a 1941 interview, Ellington was asked: “Then you believe the Negro’s contribution to music can be traced back to the culture of African people?” To this query, he replied: “Yes and no. Occasionally a strain breaks through that sounds primitive. But Negro music is American. It developed out of the life of the people here in this country.”84 If Negro music is American, why did Ellington later assert that he played African music, and that he had done this for so many years? Senghor used the term n´egritude to express a commonality among those of African descent. In this spirit, although he did not state it in subsequent interviews or in his memoir, likely Ellington was so impressed by the breadth of African diasporic artistic expression as seen and heard at the festival that he concluded that his music was indeed within that 80 81

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Ibid., 338–9. Ellington as quoted in Sister Mary Felice (a.k.a. Beverly Lacayo), “An Interview with the Duke,” Africa, Summer 1966, 24. The publication (a quarterly magazine by the White Sisters out of Piscataway, NJ) lists Felice in a photo caption (Beverly Lacayo of Tallahassee, Fla.). Her religious name within the White Sisters religious order was Sister Mary Felice. See Nat Hentoff, “Final Chorus,” Jazz Times, May 1999, http://jazztimes.com/articles/ 20717-duke-ellington-s-mission (accessed 22 August 2009). Hentoff notes that Ellington “also told me of how, in the 1920s, he had said to Fletcher Henderson, ‘Why don’t we drop the word, “jazz,” and call what we’re doing, “Negro music.” Then there won’t be any confusion.’” See, for example, “Duke Ellington Defends His Music,” Sunday Post, July 1933, n.p., in Tucker, Reader, 81. John Pittman, “The Duke Will Stay on Top!,” no source, n. p., reprinted in Tucker, Reader, 150–1.

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broad spectrum, and could be called African music. As we have already seen, he said while in Dakar that “jazz [is] an African export” and “the foundation of all the music that is being heard today at such a popular level is . . . African, or Negro.”85 In another post-Africa article, Ellington told critic Leonard Feather, It was a magnificent experience. Dinner with President and Mrs. Senghor. Senegal Africans demonstrating exotic instruments. Poets and painters and folklorists from South Africa and the Carribbean [sic]. We played six shows in five days: two at a theater, two in a big sport stadium, and two at the U.S. Embassy, where we had the pleasure of a reunion with Mr. and Mrs. Mercer Cook.86

Mercer Cook, a childhood friend of Ellington’s, was the son of composer and Ellington mentor Will Marion Cook. Ellington notably named his son after Mercer Cook, and Mercer Ellington, who was at the time playing trumpet in his father’s band, was also quoted in this article: “Sam Woodyard, our drummer, was a big hit. He’s spent a lot of time studying African rhythms, so the natives got a big kick out of hearing their own licks come back home.”87 What Woodyard had previously gleaned from African musicians directly or from musical recordings is unknown to this author. What demonstrable musical effect – if any – did Ellington’s participation in the Premier Festival Mondial des Arts N`egres have on him? As seen above, he began to present himself as a composer of African, not Negro, music. But beyond this observation, there is a lack of demonstrable or audible effect upon him and/or his music. As is well known, Ellington had for years written music that was inspired by people and places. It is also well known that he sometimes claimed various inspirations for pieces that were in fact composed before his actual exposure to, or just independently of, his stated inspirations. But it is striking that after his visit to Senegal (and for the next eight years of his life), Ellington never claimed that any of his post-Senegal compositions were inspired by his trip to that country. For comparison, let us take Ellington’s 1963 State Department trip that included travels to numerous Middle East countries as well as India and Pakistan. Ellington predicted soon after this tour: “I hope much of all this 85

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Unknown interviewer, “Duke Ellington, Arriv´ee a` Dakar.” Recorded 1 April 1966. Institut national de l’audiovisuel (France), item PHD86071223. Leonard Feather, “Jazzing It Up: Duke Ellington Keeps on Bettering His Music,” The Washington Post, 29 May 1966, G8. Ibid.

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will go into music . . . I think I have to be careful not to be influenced too strongly by the music we heard . . . I would rather give a reflection of the trip itself . . . You let it roll around, undergo a chemical change, and then seep out on paper.”88 The eventual product of these musings, of course, was his Far East Suite, which by the time of its final album form in 1967 also included a piece (“Ad Lib On Nippon”) inspired by his subsequent 1964 tour of Japan. Typical of Ellington, not all of the pieces in this suite were actually influenced by the experiences of these trips; for example, “Depk” was composed prior to the 1963 tour.89 (Another example of this sort can be seen in Billy Strayhorn’s previously composed “Elf,” which Ellington appropriated for the suite and retitled “Isfahan.”90 ) The titles of the suite’s movements for the most part refer to the State Department and Japan tours, and in the album’s original liner notes, Ellington has an evocative programmatic story or description for each, whether or not the given movement was written before or after these tours. This is not to say that Ellington’s only options were to compose music reflecting his musical or cultural experiences while in Dakar. As he told an interviewer at the festival: “I sit enchanted up there on the ninth floor [of his hotel] and look at the sea, sometimes all night, waiting for these different blues to change. You know it has a million blues out here. You gotta get up there and just watch ’em, you know, hour after [hour] . . . As the moon moves in and out from behind those clouds, you get different blues, you know, and these various blued things are wonderful.”91 The composer of “Transblucency,” “Azure,” and other blue-hued pieces also had more abstract, imagistic experiences to artistically inspire him in Dakar. Why did Ellington not write any explicitly Senegal-inspired pieces, or at least claim that one or more of his subsequent compositions were inspired by his clearly meaningful experiences at the Dakar festival? Certainly, he had some high-priority projects to take care of upon his return from Africa. This work included finally recording his and Strayhorn’s Far East Suite, and creating his Second Sacred Concert. Nevertheless, having finished those projects, he went on to complete a number of suites that were inspired to one degree or another by places he had visited (such as the New Orleans Suite, the Goutelas Suite, and the UWIS Suite).

88 89 90 91

Duke Ellington, “Orientations: Adventures in the Mid-East,” Music Journal, March 1964, 35. Ibid., 36. Ellington speaks of the piece using its tentative title, “The Dancing Girls.” Hajdu, Lush, 234. Unknown interviewer, “Duke Ellington, Arriv´ee a` Dakar,” PHD86071223.

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Although his not explicitly using (or claiming to use) his experiences in Senegal as musical inspiration was uncharacteristic behavior for Ellington, that does not mean that he was not artistically affected by this visit. Perhaps Ellington wanted to compose material toward a Dakar-inspired suite but never emerged with enough material, and – because the experience was so meaningful to him – chose not to adapt some previously composed or otherwise unrelated pieces to flesh out a Senegal suite. Of course, in the end, Ellington the artist had to choose which concepts and projects were most appealing to him.

Later Evocations of the “Jungle Garden” Returning to the survey of Ellington compositional titles for even passing connections to Africa, we see that, post-Senegal, Ellington wrote only a few pieces whose titles refer to Africa. These include the individual pieces “Tippy-Toeing through the Jungle Garden” and “Afrique,” plus the suites The Afro-Eurasian Eclipse and the Togo Brava Suite (a.k.a. the Togo BravaBrava Togo Suite). As recorded in 1970, “Tippy-Toeing through the Jungle Garden” is a 12measure blues played in unison by wind instruments over a swing beat.92 Ellington does not play on the recording, although he at times conducted the group. Musically, it includes no references to Ellington’s jungle music style or to Western African music during the slave trade. “Afrique” has an unusual history in that it was inserted into two Ellington suites, The Afro-Eurasian Eclipse, and the Togo Brava Suite (both 1971 studio recordings). A complete telling of this number’s complicated relationship to these two suites is beyond the scope of this chapter, but some details are relevant here.93 In at least one unissued live recording of the piece (from 18 September 1970), the composition is announced as “Deep Forest.”94 There are three issued studio recordings, however, and these will be discussed here. 92

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Duke Ellington, The Intimacy of the Blues, Original Jazz Classics OJCCD-624–2, 1986, compact disc. For more details, see Stefano Zenni, “The Aesthetics of Duke Ellington’s Suites: The Case of ‘Togo Brava,’” Black Music Research Journal 21 (Spring 2001): 12–19. Another title for the piece, “Teak Forest,” is thought to be a mis-hearing of Ellington’s announcement calling the piece “Deep Forest” on a concert tape from this date. See “Part 4, Timner-Hoefsmit Q&A, New Desor Corrections, DEMS 20–22,” The International DEMS Bulletin 1 (December 2001–March 2002), 20, http://depanorama.net/dems/01dems3d.htm (accessed 5 October 2009).

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The first two versions of “Afrique” to be recorded95 feature trap drummer Rufus Jones using mallets on his tom-toms, a detail that on its surface suggests a link to Ellington’s Cotton Club-era jungle music. But Jones’s repeated rhythm pattern (dotted quarter – dotted quarter –quarter) does not really relate to either Ellington’s jungle music or Western African drumming (meaning, in specific, the drum music Ellington was likely exposed to in Dakar, some of which can be heard on the soundtrack of William Greaves’s film of the Dakar festival). Ellington nevertheless said that Jones excelled in “African, jungle, and oriental pieces”96 and perhaps in Ellington’s mind, mallets on tom-toms conveyed a generic exotic quality. At any rate, authenticity was not Ellington’s real concern in “Afrique.” That these two versions lack any musical resemblance to Western African music is not surprising because Jones was not in Senegal with the band, and because Ellington did not write out parts for his drummers. A stronger resemblance to Ellington’s jungle music comes in the use in “Afrique” of wah-wah trombones and minor tonality. The second of these versions was released to the public after Ellington’s death as part of The Afro-Eurasian Eclipse, and was the only movement of the suite whose title clearly referred to Africa. Although the suite’s name covers a lot of geography, Ellington’s habitual in-concert verbal introduction only referred to the “Orient” and Australia, not Africa. The third version of “Afrique” to be recorded was included as one of seven movements assembled on a reel of tape that was prepared around 1971 for release and labeled “Togo Brava Master.”97 (The recordings were not in fact issued until 2001.) As Ellington wrote in his memoir, “In 1967 the Republic of Togoland released a set of four postage stamps dedicated to the twentieth anniversary of UNESCO. Each stamp bore the likeness of a musician, the four chosen being Bach, Beethoven, Debussy, and myself – a rare honor, indeed, to be in such company! Our humble suite was just a token of gratitude and appreciation.”98 Although Ellington never visited Togo, his suite was dedicated to that country. Ellington performed portions of the Togo Brava Suite in concert, and one live recording that includes four movements has been commercially 95

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The first version, from 9 July 1970, can be heard on Duke Ellington, New York, New York, Storyville 1018402, 2008, compact disc; and the second version, from 17 February 1971, can be heard on Duke Ellington, The Afro-Eurasian Eclipse, Fantasy OJCCD 645-2, 1991, compact disc. Quoted by Stanley Dance, in the liner note to Ellington, Afro-Eurasian Eclipse. Recorded on 28 June 1971, this performance can be heard on Duke Ellington, Togo Brava Suite, Storyville STCD 8323, 2001, compact disc. Ellington, Mistress, 204.

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issued.99 On this release, after performing “Soul Soothing Beach,” he announces: That, ladies and gentlemen, was the first movement of four movements of a suite, and that particular movement represented a hundred miles of beautiful, silver sand beach with a southern exposure facing the Equator on the western bulge of Africa. A beautiful little country titled Togoland. Togo Brava-Brava Togo is the title of the suite.

Ellington is correct in how he situates the Republic of Togo, although the nation does not literally have 100 miles of coastline. Senegal does, though, and there is a chance that Ellington was fondly remembering the beach at Dakar. (In William Greaves’s documentary of the festival in Dakar, author Langston Hughes is actually seen walking on that beach.) If the lilting beat and gently stated melody of “Soul Soothing Beach” resemble anything heard at the festival, it might be music like the reflective kora and balafon duet “Improvisation pour une fˆete” heard on the vinyl record Premier festival mondial des arts n`egres issued after the festival.100 It is, of course, not known whether Ellington heard similar music in Dakar. The closest to “Soul Soothing Beach” heard on the soundtrack of Greaves’s film is the steel drum (or steel pan) band L’Orchestre de Trinidad et Tobago. (Instead of music from their countries, they are heard ˆ playing a lilting arrangement of the Brazilian composer Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “Garota de Ipanema”/“The Girl from Ipanema”!) In the title “Soul Soothing Beach,” and in Ellington’s verbal description of 100 miles of coastline, this piece’s potential connection with Ellington’s experiences in Dakar is only slight. Lastly, in the above-discussed live recording of Togo Brava Suite selections, Ellington follows his description of “Soul Soothing Beach” with the statement: “And now, into the jungle.” The first section that follows, “Amour, Amour,” does not resemble Ellington’s jungle music melodically, harmonically (12-bar blues in B-flat and D), or rhythmically (a swing beat with the bass in “two” and then “four”). But the final section, “Right On Togo,” brings a bluesy melody in B minor over a prominent drum part featuring what sounds like the thick end of the drumsticks on tom-toms. The basic 4/4 is suspended briefly by a section with a 3/4 feel. If we have gone “into the jungle,” it is the “imaginary” jungle of Ellington’s mind. 99 100

Togo Brava Suite, Blue Note 30082, 1994, compact disc. Premier festival mondial des arts n`egres, Philips (France) R77.486L, n.d., LP. “Improvisation Pour Une Fˆete” is credited to S. Sissoko (kora) and M. Foca (balafon balante).

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The Second African Trip In Autumn 1973, about six months before Ellington’s death, he and his band embarked on their last international tour, focused on England and Europe with a brief side trip to Africa. The major event on the tour calendar was the premiere of his Third Sacred Concert on 24 October in Westminster Abbey in London. From 20 to 23 November, Ellington and the band played five engagements in Ethiopia. Surviving programs at the Smithsonian’s Duke Ellington Collection document four events, all in Addis Ababa: a “command performance” with Emperor Haile Selassie in his personal box seat on 20 November (20:30); two conventional concerts on 21 (21:00) and 22 November (16:30); and a “gala dinner dance” at the Hilton Hotel later on the evening of 22 November. Several sources list an additional 20 November concert in the city of Asmara (then in a contested part of Ethiopia, which is now part of Eritrea). 101 If these references are accurate, this event most likely would have taken place earlier in the day than the command performance. As Ellington trombonist Vince Prudente recalled: He [Selassie] had the band over to his castle. It was really great, man. We all met informally, and he gave us all a gold coin . . . a little bit bigger than a quarter, commemorating his inauguration when he first became emperor. And Duke got a great big one [the Star of Ethiopia medal; also known as the Medal of Honor] that . . . they put around his neck.102

A photo of the event shows Selassie and Ellington toasting with drinks in their hands; Ellington has the star-shaped medal around his neck.103 In early 1974, Ellington recalled the band’s time in Addis Ababa: Then we went on and we were presented to His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie, the emperor of Ethiopia. And, uh, I got this gorgeous gold medal, you know? And all the cats in the band they got a medium-size gold medal . . . And I think the most unique thing of the whole show was that His Majesty had us welcomed at the airport at Addis Ababa by a lion. A real, living, ever-lovin’, living lion

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Stratemann, Day, 663, and Vail, Diary, Part 2, 444. Vincent Prudente, telephone interview with the author, 19 July 2010. The Crown Council of Ethiopia, “Ethiopian Emperor’s Grandson Honors African Americans,” 12 September 2007, www.ethiopiancrown.org/press.htm (accessed 26 June 2010). Photo is uncredited.

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Figure 8.3 Duke Ellington welcomed at the airport in Addis Ababa by Emperor Haile Selassie’s pet lion, Mecuria, in 1974. Courtesy of Art Baron. Photographer

unknown.

[Figure 8.3.] . . . The lion’s name is Mecuria. [begins spelling] M, E, [pause; speaks the title again] Mecuria.104

On the autumn 1973 tour, Ellington had been featuring in concert a new piece that has been variously referred to as “Mecuria, the Lion” (as it was released on CD), “Metcuria the Lion,” and simply “Metcuria.”105 It is not clear that the piece initially had any title, but author and Ellington friend Patricia Willard asked several musicians who were on the tour (trumpeter Barrie Lee Hall, Jr., trombonist Art Baron, and drummer Quentin “Rocky” White) how the title was pronounced, and the responses varied.106 104

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Interview recorded Washington, D.C., 10 February 1974. Duke Ellington Music Society, audio cassette CA-2. Ellington, Centennial Edition, disc 24. Patricia Willard, liner note in booklet to Ellington, Centennial Edition, 116. The musicians’ phonetic answers varied from “Mekuria” to “Mekuyah” to “Muhcuria.” Willard writes that Ellington called for the piece by saying “Me KOO.”

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Barrie Lee Hall, Jr., remembered the piece: There was this number we had been playing awhile before we got to Africa. Duke was making the thing up as he went along. When we played it, he gave us a chord but it seemed like the older guys already knew the tune. I remember hearing the guys playing it and just put my own parts in. There wasn’t any written music. He would start off playing this really pretty thing like he would with “Single Petal of a Rose” – something melancholy like that and then he’s [sic] have Rocky play something and we’re playing weird chords. That was the piece. After the royal treatment we received from Haile Selassie, this piece that had been developing acquired a name and its own little story. Show biz.107

Indeed, Ellington loved “show biz” and illusion. As encountered with other aforementioned program pieces, “Mecuria, the Lion” was begun before the Ethiopian trip but was eventually named for Selassie’s lion that greeted Ellington and the band when they arrived in Ethiopia. This is probably Ellington’s last composition with an African connection in its title and backstory, but its compositional connection to Africa, Ethiopia, and even that lion is not strong. On this trip, some of the band members attended a performance by the Orchestra Ethiopia, an ensemble that featured folk instruments and performers from various regions of Ethiopia. Ellington trombonist Art Baron believes (but is not positive) that Ellington came to the latter part of this performance.108 But Ellington certainly did encounter the Berklee School of Music-educated Ethiopian vibraphonist/keyboardist, Mulatu Astatke (sometimes spelled as Astatk´e or Astatq´e). When the Ellington band played at the Addis Ababa Hilton on 22 November 1973, Astatke brought a piece that he had arranged for jazz big band, and Ellington’s orchestra read through the number that night. Astatke later recalled this encounter: “We were due to play an evening concert so I discussed with him if he would consider playing one of my arrangements. I wrote an arrangement of ‘Dewel’ [more properly D`ew`el, meaning “Bell”] for his band, a different version which included some beautiful voicings on the horns.”109 One African musical concept that Ellington and his band encountered in “D`ew`el” is that the piece is based on a five-note scale that could be spelled C–E–F–G–B (C) or F–G–B–C–E (F). Baron recalls how difficult it was for him and some of the other Ellington musicians to correctly 107 109

108 Art Baron, telephone interview with the author, 23 July 2010. Ibid. Jeff Weiss, “A Conversation with Mulatu Astatke: On Heliocentrics, Ethio-Jazz and Ellington,” www.laweekly.com/music/a-conversation-with-mulatu-astatke-on-heliocentrics-ethio-jazzand-ellington-2402578 (accessed 14 January 2017).

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sight-read a piece with such an unfamiliar key signature that includes both F and E (this combination does not occur in common-practice Western music).110 At some point, probably at a different engagement, Ellington musicians Art Baron, Barrie Lee Hall, Jr., Johnny Coles, and Harold Minerve sat in with Astatke’s own band; Baron said that Ellington might have been present for this event.111 Figure 8.4 is a photo of the Hilton Hotel event which shows Astatke standing behind the piano while drummer Rocky White studies a drum part (bassist Joe Benjamin is also holding sheet music). Ellington is bearing an Ethiopian krar (a lyre). In 2006, Astatke recalled the encounter: “I’ll never forget Duke’s reaction. He listened attentively and said: ‘Mulatu, your music has such a nice sound. I didn’t expect something like that from an African. Excellent work.’”112 I believe that Ellington meant that he was surprised that Astatke was so conversant with the instruments and idiom of jazz (as opposed to being surprised that an African could literally write music with a “nice sound”).113 Astatke and Ellington had quite a bit of contact during this brief visit. According to Astatke, I was assigned by the Embassy to be Ellington’s escort while he was in Addis. We both stayed at the Hilton in Addis and, whatever he needs or wants to know about Ethiopia, I was his guide. I had always admired him as an arranger, composer and bandleader. During my music studies, I had analyzed his work in detail. During his visit, I showed him some of the cultural musical instruments, which he found really interesting. Some of our cultural musical players jammed with Ellington’s guys – we went to the U.S. Information Centre in Addis and played together. I then took him to the King’s palace and he was given a medal by Emperor Heile [Haile] Selassie. It was a big ceremony.114

As a “student of Negro history,” Ellington of course knew some of the history of Ethiopia and Selassie. (Moreover, in 1941, Ellington had notably 110

111 112

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Baron telephone interview. Baron describes this sight-reading problem as taking place at a different event with Astatke; nevertheless, the piece “D`ew`el” does employ this key signature (in concert key). Art Baron, telephone interview with the author, 9 December 2014. Ben Shalev, “A Second Round of Glory,” Haaretz.com, 20 June 2006, www.haaretz.com/ israel-news/culture/leisure/a-second-round-of-glory-1.190886 (accessed 14 January 2017). In 2009, Astatke donated an arrangement of “D`ew`el” for four horns and rhythm section to the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. John Hasse, “Lecturing in Ethiopia and Kenya,” http://johnedwardhasse.blogspot.com/ (accessed 20 September 2010). Hasse is Curator, Division of Culture and the Arts, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. Weiss, “A Conversation.”

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Figure 8.4 The Ellington Orchestra at the Addis Ababa Hilton Hotel on 22 November 1973, with Ethiopian vibraphonist/keyboardist, Mulatu Astatke, standing behind the piano while drummer Rocky White studies a drum part (bassist Joe Benjamin is also holding sheet music). Duke Ellington is holding an Ethiopian krar (a lyre). This photograph can be found at various places on the Internet, all uncredited. The author found this image at www.columbia.edu/∼jnt21/Ethiomusic.html in 2010, and the weblink no longer functions

been part of a Rex Stewart-led recording session whose selections included Stewart’s “Menelik – the Lion of Judah,” a reference either to Ethiopia’s 1889–1913 emperor Menelik II or Haile Selassie, who was also sometimes called the Lion of Judah.) With this likely historical awareness, Ellington’s meeting the emperor was probably very significant to him. And if Ellington in his youth had attended the aforementioned pageant The Star of Ethiopia, being in Ethiopia and receiving the Star of Ethiopia medal would have been experiences that had been a long time coming. Immediately after their time in Ethiopia, Ellington and his orchestra traveled to Lusaka, Zambia. This trip probably occurred on 23 November

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1973. One source reports that there were concerts in Lusaka on 23–4 November.115 Art Baron recalls playing one concert in Lusaka’s Mulungushi Hall, but he also remembers playing in the city of Nbara, Zambia, so it is possible that the band only played once in Lusaka. At some point in Zambia, drummer Rocky White played with some of the country’s percussionists. Baron recalled that it understandably took a moment for the musicians to adjust to one another’s musical concepts. He continued, “it was a new experience for Rocky, playing with the indigenous instruments. It was a beautiful exchange for all, and I felt that the music had come full circle.”116 Occurring so late in his life (and after he had completed his memoir), it appears that Ellington was not quoted in print expressing his reaction to traveling to Ethiopia and to meeting Selassie. In telephone interviews with this author, several Ellington musicians who were in the band at the time – Baron, Hall, and Prudente – could not recall Ellington expressing anything specific to them about what the trips to Ethiopia and Zambia meant to him. At the time, Ellington was ill with cancer and of course he had less energy to interact with his band. When asked if Ellington emphasized any part of his repertoire or made any adjustments to his presentations because he was playing for an African audience, Baron remembered playing at least one section of the Toga Brava Suite and possibly “La Plus Belle Africaine” in Ethiopia and/or Zambia. He also recalled one aspect of the band’s show that was not changed for an African audience. Ellington sometimes featured Harold Minerve soloing on alto saxophone, flute, and piccolo on a piece variously called “In Triplicate,” “In Duplicate,” or “Quadruped.” After they had played the piece, Ellington would lengthen his spoken credits by thanking Minerve for each of his instruments, one at a time. After the third announcement (“And the piccolo solo was by Harold Minerve”), Baron remembered that Minerve would come out from behind his music stand and thank Ellington by bowing with outstretched arms and loudly proclaiming in a pseudoAfrican language “‘Hooglama, Hooglamangabia’ as well as the well-known ‘ungawa.’”117 Judging from a video performance of the number,118 Ellington played along minimally, gesturing a bit and making a few sounds. According to Baron, “We were, like, wondering when we went to Africa if

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Vail, Diary, Part 2, 445. Art Baron, telephone interviews with the author, 23 July 2010 and 9 December 2014. Email from Art Baron to the author, 23 July 2010. Spelling and capitalization as in the original. Video provided via email from Barrie Lee Hall, Jr., 7 August 2010.

Authentic Synthetic Hybrid

he [Minerve] would do that. And he did it, straight ahead, like we were anywhere else.”119

Conclusion As seen earlier, in 1966 Ellington called his idea of Africa “this big, fat dream that I have, you know. You look way out in space and you imagine this, that, and the other.” At the end of his life, Ellington’s musical concept of Africa was just that: his unique musical concept of Africa. Although in 1974 it was a more informed concept than it had been in the 1920s, in other ways it was not so different from what it was in 1928 when he composed The Mooche for the Cotton Club. It was a conception of Africa derived largely from Ellington’s imagination. Although he praised Max Roach’s playing on “Fleurette Africaine” as “authentic,” authenticity was not really important to Ellington, whether he was writing for the Cotton Club or for the Republic of Togo, as has been established several times across this chapter. At a 20 November 1958 Parisian concert at the Salle Pleyel, Ellington introduced the Juan Tizol/Duke Ellington composition Caravan in this manner: “And now, [pause] a little authentic maraca, cha-cha-cha, rumba; [an] authentic synthetic hybrid. [On the video, Ellington points to his drummer.] Sam Woodyard. The jungle. The jungle.”120 The phrase “authentic synthetic hybrid” neatly describes Ellington’s concepts of authenticity and his own “African music.” In a similarly ironic vein, Ellington once wrote “To be a great bull-shitter is great, but to be a great bull-shitter and wear a diffusing veneer over the bull shit is the ultimate.”121 Ellington loved to signify. He was no folkloric trickster figure; he was an actual trickster (among many other things), and he reveled in that role. We should not take too literally his 1966 claim to have been “writing African music for thirty-five years,”122 noting that he had earlier said 119

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Baron telephone interview. An audio version of this routine can be heard after the performance of “In Duplicate” on Duke Ellington in Sweden, Caprice CAP 21599, 2003, compact disc. Barrie Lee Hall remembered that Minerve sometimes instead proclaimed “Ala! [like Allah] Ala! Alabama!” Barrie Lee Hall, telephone interview with the author, 7 August 2010. Duke Ellington et son Orchestre, dir. Claude Loursais (1958), viewable online at http:// boutique.ina.fr/video/CPF86644455/duke-ellington-et-son-orchestre.fr.html? exampleSessionId=1259034226868&exampleUserLabel=Your%20Name (accessed 23 November 2009). 122 Ellington, Mistress, 337. Ruth Ellington Collection, Series 6, box 7, folder 2.

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“Negro music is American. It developed out of the life of the people here in this country.”123 But having encountered the wide scope of music and arts from around the globe at the 1966 Premier festival mondial des arts n`egres, Ellington likely saw his own music as part of a larger African diasporic whole. Given Ellington’s own statement that “Painting a picture, or having a story to go with what you were going to play was of vital importance in those days,”124 it is not surprising that he sometimes concocted “a story to go with what you were going to play” when it came to the mythic Africa and its jungle. In 1941, he acknowledged that if he attempted to write music evocative of West Africa, it would be “mostly imaginary, because no one today knows what African Negro music was like in the days of the early slave traders.”125 During all periods of his career, before and after his first-hand experiences with African music and culture, Ellington indeed wrote (using his words) “imaginary” “authentic synthetic hybrid” “pseudo-African music.” Which is certainly authentic Ellington music. 123

124

John Pittman, “The Duke Will Stay on Top!,” no source, n.p., reprinted in Tucker, Reader, 150–1. 125 Frankenstein, “‘Hot Is Something,” in Tucker, “Genesis,” 75. Ellington, Mistress, 47.

9

“The Mother of All Albums”: Revisiting Ellington’s A Drum Is a Woman john wriggle

According to an anecdote related by Columbia Records producer Irving Townsend, Duke Ellington pitched the idea for his “musical allegory,” A Drum Is a Woman, immediately before appearing on stage at the July 1956 Newport Jazz Festival:1 “Did you know,” [Duke] asked me, “that a drum is a woman?” . . . “Is that the first album?” I asked . . . “Man, that’s not only the first album, that’s the mother of all albums. That’s the story of Madam Zajj.” . . . “Madam Zajj,” he stretched the words. “She was always a lady, you know, but she was also a drum.” “Do we have a deal?” I asked as he turned toward the stage. “Record companies don’t like me,” Duke warned. “Are you sure you won’t get fired?” I assured him I wouldn’t. “See you in New York next week,” he called, disappearing through the tent flap.2

In hindsight, the drama of the proposition matches that of the moment, as 1956 was shaping up to be one of the most consequential periods in Ellington’s life. Across this year, the composer-arranger Billy Strayhorn returned to the Ellington organization in a newly expanded role3 ; media giant Columbia Records negotiated a new contract with Ellington, returning the bandleader to a platform of extensive product distribution and mainstream marketing4 ; the success of the orchestra’s Newport appearance (and the ensuing At Newport album) catapulted the bandleader back into critical favor5 ; and a Time magazine cover story published in August 1

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Portions of this chapter were presented at the annual conference of the American Musicological Society, November 2010, Indianapolis. Irving Townsend, “Ellington in Private,” Atlantic Monthly, May 1975, 79. An account of Strayhorn’s return is offered in Hajdu, Lush, 145–6. See “Ellington Rejoins Columbia,” Oakland Tribune, 2 September 1956, on file at the Institute of Jazz Studies (“IJS”), Rutgers University, Newark. A review of Ellington’s Newport performance is provided by Leonard Feather in “Newport Festival: Saturday,” Down Beat, 8 August 1956, 18. An account of the Newport concert recording is offered in John Morton, Backstory in Blue: Ellington at Newport ’56 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 201–10.

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sealed Ellington’s sudden return to top-tier commercial status.6 But there was another pivotal development, with implications just as far-reaching as the factors cited above. Arguably fulfilling the clich´e of landmark career achievements, Ellington’s tackling of A Drum Is a Woman would represent nothing less than a summation of prior accomplishments and a herald of those to come. In its dual roles as a testimony to Ellington’s early career and his postwar stature in American music, the February 1957 album release of A Drum Is a Woman can be seen as something of a personal reaffirmation.7 Despite the critical acclaim and commercial success of At Newport (released September 1956) and the subsequent return to instrumental suite-form design in Such Sweet Thunder (released around September 1957), it is A Drum Is a Woman that may stand as the primary catalyst in the resurrection of Ellington’s creative energies following his nostalgic retreats of the earlier 1950s.8 Both the Drum album, recorded over September to December 1956, and the ensuing CBS U.S. Steel Hour 8 May 1957 telecast, allowed Ellington to explore, establish, and celebrate his own place in jazz history on (more or less) his own terms, thereby freeing the Ducal ego to devote itself to another two decades of expansive creativity. At the same time, Drum represents a bold step forward, as Ellington devotes the entire 12inch album to music newly composed by Strayhorn and himself. Through a return to the stage revue format – an entertainment tradition that had played a major role in both writers’ musical development, as well as the early celebrity of Ellington – the team posits a strategy of building a “concept album” work around the 12-inch LP format. This new mediaspecific conceptual framework subsequently marks most all the keystone accomplishments of Ellington’s later recording career.9 Townsend was not alone in his assessment of Drum as one of Ellington’s “most self-revealing works,” particularly because Drum openly invites

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“Mood Indigo and Beyond,” Time, 20 August 1956, 54–6, 58, 60, 63. The album release month is cited in “Col, U.S. Steel and BBDO Beating Drums for Duke’s ‘Drum Is a Woman’ TV’er,” Variety, 24 April 1957, 43. While Ellington was very active during the early 1950s, all of his Columbia, Capitol, and Bethlehem LP recordings released during 1950–5 include at least one (if not multiple) compositions dating prior to World War II. Biographers have typically presented this period of Ellington’s career under chapter headings like “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be,” “Playing for Time,” “Decline and Fall,” or “Nadir.” Nicholson, Reminiscing, 256; Hasse, Beyond, 303; James Lincoln Collier, Duke Ellington (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 255; and Cohen, America, 271. Regarding Drum and the emergence of Ellington’s “concept album” aesthetic, see Hasse, Beyond, 333.

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examination of Ellington’s personality and biography to a degree that few of his other creations suggest or demand.10 Due to its length, dual media releases, diversity of music, and rich programmatic concerns, this combination album/telecast/composition has likewise contributed to several important and longstanding themes of Ellington criticism, including that of an Ellingtonian tragic flaw of artistic “ambition.”11 As commonly applied to Ellington’s compositional skills, this scourge of ambition emerges in complaints of Drum’s “lack of continuity” or “incongruous and disjointed” long-form design.12 The multimedia expanse of the Drum project, comprising an extended “tone parallel” of the African American experience and the history of jazz, and culminating in the maestro’s first network television feature, promised a challenge under any circumstances. Additional elements of beatnik-jive poetry, modern dance choreography, misogynous humor, experimental color television technology, and the pioneering prime-time television broadcast of an all-black cast to a still largely segregated audience only raised the potential for controversy. The high media profile of Drum also offered music critics a prime opportunity to tout allegiances to post-Swing era conceptions of jazz authenticity: efforts to define the art form through idealizations of instrumental improvisation and starving-artist economic purity. Even the positive review of Drum by jazz critic (and former Ellington publicist) Leonard Feather made sure to chastise “the non-jazz direction of some of the music.”13 Peter Gammond faulted Drum’s very inclusion of spoken or sung words, “as testified by the almost universal banality of opera libretti.”14 Edward Towler not only condemned the “travesty” of Drum’s “commercial considerations” as opposed to those of “genuine experiment,” but also invoked another prevalent Ellingtonian theme – that of the bandleader’s perpetual fall from grace – in citing a lack of the musical qualities “that one

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Townsend, “Ellington in Private,” 80. Jack Tracy provided a similar assessment of Drum soon after its release, calling it “a revealing self-portrait of Duke Ellington.” Jack Tracy, “Jazz Records: Duke Ellington, ‘A Drum Is a Woman,’” Down Beat, 2 May 1957, 25–6. A Time magazine review, for example, pegged the Drum telecast as both Ellington’s “most ambitious project in years” and “pretentious.” “Television and Radio: Review,” Time, 20 May 1957, 95. Leonard Feather, “Two Thumps on ‘A Drum’: Thumps Up,” Down Beat, 27 June 1957, 18; Edward Towler, “Reflections on Hearing ‘A Drum Is a Woman,’” Jazz Monthly, September 1957, 30. Feather, “Two Thumps,” 18. Drum never even had a chance in Down Beat’s companion review by Barry Ulanov, who admitted: “I don’t know what precisely we expected, but it wasn’t this.” Barry Ulanov, “Two Thumps on ‘A Drum’: Thumps Down,” Down Beat, 27 June 1957, 18. Peter Gammond, Duke Ellington: His Life and Music (London: Phoenix House, 1958), 134.

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associates with Ellington’s earlier works.”15 Following decades of charges of this project being “dated,” “pedestrian,” “na¨ıve,” or a “catastrophe,” video of the Drum telecast has yet to be commercially released, while the album remains rarely reissued and lies in the shadow of Ellington’s more canonical suite albums and extended compositions.16 This oversight likely stems from the very characteristics that make Drum so representative of Ellington’s legacy; an examination of Drum’s social and musical context offers insight into what Townsend identified as “probably [the] least understood of all Ellington’s major recordings.”17 In addition to the Columbia LP and CBS telecast, the legacy of the Drum project includes an assortment of manuscript music, preparatory notes, and draft scripts. These artifacts include: handwritten notes by Ellington, appearing to date from the summer and fall of 1956 (hereafter “handwritten notes”); typewritten notes with additional handwritten edits by Ellington, appearing to date from the same period (hereafter “typewritten notes”); a typewritten script including extensive passages of narration and a sort of futuristic-beatnik “mechanical birdie” character not included in the final telecast or any other scripts or notes, presumably a CBS draft dating to early 1957 (hereafter “rejected script”); and a typewritten revised script that essentially reflects the final telecast production, labeled “adapted for television by Will Lorin,” and dated 12 April 1957 (hereafter “telecast script”). There is also a typed draft script for Drum labeled “Bertelsmann Fernseh-Produktion,” which refers to a West German television production company formed around 1960. Despite this latter script’s title page credit “by Duke Ellington,” Ellington’s precise relationship to this document (hereafter “West German script”) is unclear.18

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Towler, “Reflections,” 30. The cited criticisms of Drum include Van de Leur, Something, 134; Collier, Duke, 285; Stratemann, Day, 376; and John S. Wilson, “Jazz: Ellington,” New York Times, 13 October 1957, 132. Irving Townsend, “When Duke Records,” in Tucker, Reader, 320. “A Drum Is a Woman,” Duke Ellington Collection, Series 1 (music), boxes 105 and 106, and Series 4 (scripts and notes), box 1. Drum manuscripts are also held in the Billy Strayhorn Collection (in the possession of the Strayhorn estate); see Van de Leur, Something, 212–13. Some handwritten notes for Drum are written on stationery from Chicago’s Sherman Hotel; while attempting to date such artifacts based on band itineraries is conjectural at best, Ellington was in Chicago during the first week of September 1956. See Wilhelm Ernst Timner, Ellingtonia: The Recorded Music of Duke Ellington and His Sidemen (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 2007), 649. Based on the evidence of its narrative sequence and its frequent phonetic inaccuracies, the West German script appears to comprise an aural transcription of the album along with staging notes that incorporate some elements of the telecast. Notably, the latter include a suggested “52nd Street Ballet” sequence that was not included in the album. A

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“Still Gaudy” Narrated by Ellington, A Drum Is a Woman depicts the history of jazz music as embodied by the alluring “Madame Zajj,” who also takes the form of a talking drum as it/she is transmitted to “Carribee Joe,” the embodiment of African and African American musicians in different historical epochs and geographic locations.19 Described by Feather as a “jazz-tinged operacum-ballet,” the program’s narrative locales, musical numbers, and solo features are outlined in Table 9.1.20 There is a long and significant body of jazz criticism and commentary that has characterized the programmatic theater medium as an embodiment of commercial entertainment ideals antithetical to conceptions of “authentic” jazz or the work of a “true” composer.21 In a 1959 interview, Ellington responds to similar charges in his commentary on the reception of Drum: “when you combine [jazz] with voices, and you make a fanfare like Madame Zajj coming out of the flying saucer, well [critics] don’t think this is jazz.”22 By contrast, Graham Lock’s suggestion that

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possible timeframe for the West German script is offered by a January 1961 interview in Paris, where Ellington apparently refers to A Drum Is a Woman in the future tense. See Hajdu, Lush, 157–8. The spelling of “jazz” in reverse as “Zajj” represents a favorite game of Ellington’s; both Ellington and Strayhorn exercised name reversals with titles like “Snibor” (“Rob[b]ins,” a reference to one of Strayhorn’s favorite jazz radio programs), “Amad” (“Dama,” a reference to Damascus), and “Oclupaca” (“Acapulco”). Leonard Feather, “Ella Meets the Duke,” Playboy, November 1957, 72. There were two different pressings of the A Drum Is a Woman CL 951 album released in early 1957. The first was a quickly cancelled version with some tracks erroneously duplicated and omitted, and with different narration edits than those used in the second issue. See Benny Aasland, Lars Ulrich Hill, and Ove Wilson, “The Same Woman – But Different!,” Duke Ellington Music Society, February 2003, 18. See also Sjef Hoefsmit, “Undubbed Tracks from A Drum Is a Woman,” Duke Ellington Music Society, March 2004, 14. Descriptions of the A Drum Is a Woman album throughout refer to the European CD reissue of the second LP issue, Duke Ellington, A Drum Is a Woman, Jazz Track 933, 2008, compact disc. Descriptions of the telecast refer to Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, “Duke Ellington’s A Drum Is a Woman,” U.S. Steel Hour, CBS, 8 May 1957, VHS copy of Kinescope dub held in the Paley Center for Media, New York. For example, Gunther Schuller finds it necessary to ask “how did Ellington, at first a musician with a decided leaning toward ‘show music,’ develop into one of America’s foremost composers?” in Gunther Schuller, Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development (1968; reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 339. See also Hsio Wen Shih’s assertion that “the show-bands . . . had no wide influence [in jazz]” in “The Spread of Jazz and the Big Bands,” in Jazz: New Perspectives on the History of Jazz by Twelve of the World’s Foremost Jazz Critics and Scholars, ed. Nat Hentoff and Albert McCarthy (1959; reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1975): 181–2. Duke Ellington, interview by Charles Melville, as quoted in Steve Voce, “Quoth the Duke,” Jazz Journal International, March 1959, 3.

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Table 9.1 A Drum Is a Woman album and telecast sequences Columbia CL 951 [vsn. 2] (rec. Sept.–Dec. 1956)∗

CBS U.S. Steel Hour (8 May 1957)∗∗

Part 1 “A Drum Is a Woman Part 1”

Act I

Africa “Rhythm Pum Te Dum”

Barbados Narration + vocals, drums “What Else Can You Do with a Drum?”

[Africa?] Drum solo “A Drum Is a Woman Part 1” [mm. 1–10] Narration (offscreen) + drums Solo/Ensemble dance: Camero solo Orchestra and clarinet segue Duo/Ensemble dance: Camero solo “A Drum Is a Woman Part 1” [mm. 1–15] Orchestra woodwind segue (“Carabe Background”) Barbados “A Drum Is a Woman Part 1” [piano intro only] Narration (onscreen) + drums “Rhythm Pum Te Dum” [percussion intro only] “What Else Can You Do with a Drum?”: 8-bar intro repeated

Part 2 New Orleans Narration/“New Orleans (Sunrise)” “New Orleans (Mardi Gras)” Narration/“Hey, Buddy Bolden” “Carribee Joe Part 1” Narration/“Congo Square (Silence, Matumbe, Mme Zajj Entrance)” Narration/“New Orleans (Sunrise)”

New Orleans Narration (onscreen) + drums “New Orleans (Sunrise)” “New Orleans (Mardi Gras)” Ensemble dance/“Hey, Buddy Bolden” Solo dance/“Carribee Joe Part 1” Act II “A Drum Is a Woman Part 1” [mm. 24–43] Narration (offscreen) Ensemble dance/“Congo Square (Silence, Matumbe)”: “Matumbe” extended [8 bars drums + mm. 43–51; 8 bars drums + mm. 19–24; drums + mm. 1–18?]; omits Gonsalves “Mme Zajj Entrance” solo

Part 3 [Chicago?] “A Drum Is a Woman Part 2” “You Better Know It”

Chicago Narration (onscreen) + drums “Madame Zajj” “A Drum Is a Woman Part 2” [mm. 1–16] “You Better Know It”

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Table 9.1 (cont.) The World Narration/“Madame Zajj” The Moon Narration “Ballet of the Flying Saucers”

Part 4 Dream Sequence & New York City Narration + harp Narration/“Zajj’s Dream” Narration “Rhumbop” Narration + piano/“Carribee Joe Part 2”

New York City Narration (onscreen) + piano Ensemble dance/“Rhumbop” [combo]: Terry solo “Zajj’s Dream” [fanfare only] “Rhumbop (Chorus)”: Gonsalves, Terry solo “Rhumbop”: omits Terry solo Orchestra segue (“Carabae Joe Ext Z”) Act III “A Drum Is a Woman Part 2” [mm. 33–41]; omits second portion of Hodges solo

[Dream Sequence] Narration (onscreen) Duo dance/“Pomegranate”: Bailey vocal Orchestra segue “Carribee Joe (Part 2)” [mm. 15–23] The Moon Narration (onscreen) + chimes Ensemble dance “Ballet of the Flying Saucers” Narration (onscreen)

Finale “Finale”

∗

Finale “A Drum Is a Woman Part 1” [complete] “You Better Know It” [instrumental]: Ellington solo; omits Bailey vocal

See CL 951 for personnel and solo features; Nat Hentoff cites the additional participation of Louie Bellson on percussion (“The Duke,” Down Beat, 26 December 1956, 12). ∗∗ Solo features are the same as the album except as noted. Performances not represented in the album are in italics. All of Ellington’s narration, backed by Candido Camero’s conga (not bongo) drum accompaniment, is performed live. Some of the telecast performances of previously recorded arrangements (such as “Zajj’s Dream” [fanfare] and “Pomegranate” [a.k.a. “On Credit”]) also include additional accompaniment by Camero. Other live orchestra performances include four brief segues, all versions of “Rhumbop,” the finale performances of “A Drum Is a Woman Part 1” and “You Better Know It,” and possibly Clark Terry’s “Madame Zajj” solo (the bass accompaniment is absent or inaudible). Marks on surviving orchestra parts suggest that the last edited extension of “Congo Square (Matumbe)” – material not heard on the album – stems from the original album recording session. Bracketed measure numbers of edited album arrangements reflect (as closely as possible) presentation scores created at a later date, for lack of a more consistent source.

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the aesthetic of Drum “was actually a potent affirmation of ‘nearly everything’ that [Ellington] had stood for” highlights the potential folly in such subjectively purist criticism.23 Lock’s view resonates with the reflectivetestimonial and creative-renewal arguments proposed here, but is perhaps overstated. Drum does not require qualification as a “hybrid,” “allegory,” or even “riposte,” though it may indeed be all these things; nor need it be enigmatically “difficult to categorize.”24 It is quite clearly a revue, a stage genre that Ellington had a long history of involvement with, and a genre that was foundational for a long and venerable tradition of black American entertainment. This genre recognition does not diminish Drum’s individuality, invention, or significance, but it is important in addressing its content and design. John Howland traces the development of urban black entertainment genres combining music and theater that emerged during the early twentieth century. Among their purposefully mixed entertainment offerings, stage revues comprising song, dance, and comedy acts out of the vaudeville tradition also often invoked a “glorified” entertainment aesthetic incorporating music arranging techniques that emphasized variety and contrast through juxtaposed and mixed tropes of “high” and “low” culture.25 These dramatic presentations typically referenced cultural oppositions of white and black, classical and vernacular, or urban and rural identities. In an examination of works created by Ellington and other Harlem composers, Howland identifies four primary elements comprising the period’s black stage revue productions: “(1) Africa-Dixie-Harlem program topics; (2) symphonic jazz intermixtures of ‘elevated’ and ‘black’ musical tropes; (3) the design of ‘production’-style arrangements; and (4) jazz ‘rhapsody’themed production numbers.”26 If Swing-era “52nd Street” is allowed to stand in for Jazz Age Harlem, no further exceptions are required in placing A Drum Is a Woman squarely within this formula. Parallels in geographic program are offered in Drum’s 23

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Graham Lock, Blutopia: Visions of the Future and Revisions of the Past in the Work of Sun Ra, Duke Ellington, and Anthony Braxton (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 140. Lock expands upon Peter Gammond’s assertion that Drum is “a summary of all that Ellington stands for”; see Peter Gammond, Duke Ellington: His Life and Music (London: Phoenix House, 1958), 137. Lock, Blutopia, 139–40. Lock responds to Edward Towler’s criticisms of Drum; see Towler, “Reflections,” 31. Howland, Uptown, 102–10. Other discussions of “variety and contrast” relating to modes of popular music arranging during the 1920s include Jeffrey Magee, The Uncrowned King of Swing: Fletcher Henderson and Big Band Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 39–71, 195. Howland, Uptown, 118.

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Africa-Caribbean-New Orleans-New York narrative. Black vernacular elements of the “New Orleans” sequence – including Russell Procope’s blues clarinet solo, Ray Nance’s plunger-muted trumpet, and Clark Terry’s trumpet “half-valve” technique – contrast against “elevated” European classical signifiers of Margaret Tynes’s operatic soprano voice and Betty Glamann’s harp.27 The telecast’s visual imagery of naked, mute jungle “Joe” likewise serves as foil to that of the tuxedoed, erudite Ellington. Music arranging devices such as the verse-patter introduction, vamp coda, and vaudevillian cymbal-sting tag of “You Better Know It” pastiche (if not parody) the Broadway “production”-style idiom. As discussed later, the “Ballet of the Flying Saucers” number invokes an episodic formal structure referencing the “rhapsodic” (loosely read, “European concert music”) aesthetics of symphonic jazz. Ellington presents the history of American popular music and his own career not only through Drum’s narrative and music, but through the medium of the presentation itself. Despite a general acceptance of Ellington’s compositional voice having emerged through his work accompanying stage shows, there have been attempts to portray certain Ellington works as tainted by “show” music aesthetics.28 Vocal performances are a particularly frequent target in charges of theatricality;29 perhaps not incidentally, such projects typically allow for the participation of women, another foil to the traditionally male-dominated jazz ideal. Although aversions to stage aesthetics have led some to label Drum as “pompous,” it might be countered that Ellington recognized the value of pomposity as a dramatic device executed through an arsenal of musical tools (including fanfares, vamp codas, segues, and reprises) developed over decades of work in stage shows designed for 27

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Procope and Terry’s features within the “New Orleans” sequence are also Drum’s only performances referencing the 12-bar blues form. For example, Gunther Schuller criticizes some of Ellington’s early Cotton Club-era efforts as “slick trying-to-be-modern show music”; Barry Ulanov condemns elements of Ellington’s 1944 Carnegie Hall concert as representing a “glorified stage show,” suggesting that programmatic works like Black, Brown and Beige could be “far more successful . . . without Duke’s relentless [narrative] programming between selections”; Edward Towler faults portions of Drum which he believes assume “all the proportions of those extravaganzas so familiar to the Hollywood ‘musical’”; Walter van de Leur dismisses Drum as “a mixed bag of quasi-Caribbean numbers and showy theater music”; and Harvey Cohen describes Drum as “a slick show-biz production.” Schuller, Early, 330, see also 339–40; Barry Ulanov, “Ellington’s Carnegie Hall Concert a Glorified Stage Show,” Metronome, January 1944, 8; Towler, “Reflections,” 31; Van de Leur, Something, 134; Cohen, America, 330, emphasis added in all five citations. For instance, Strayhorn biographer David Hajdu, who generally praises Drum, nonetheless believes that its musical “high points are the least [narrative] referential instrumental selections.” Hajdu, Lush, 159, emphasis added. For an example of criticism regarding the vocal content of Ellington’s later works, see Collier, Duke, 293–5.

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broad popular audiences.30 The titling of Drum’s “Flying Saucers” number as a “ballet,” referencing highbrow European art, certainly acknowledges some understanding of American middlebrow aesthetics.31 Backed by “symphonic” bell and harp scoring, the telecast’s “Flying Saucers” ensemble dance sequence stands as unapologetically pompous as any of Gene Kelly’s popularly successful modern dance sequences for his MGM films (e.g., the 1951 American in Paris or 1952 Singin’ in the Rain). Such strategies were as familiar to Ellington as they were effective. A relevant precedent for the Drum telecast’s “Pomegranate” duo dance sequence can be found in the film accompanying Strayhorn’s 1941 arrangement of “Flamingo” (a popular hit for Ellington and his “singing cowboy” crooner, Herb Jeffries), which featured interpretive ballet choreography performed by Drum’s “Joe” dancer Talley Beatty.32 Co-writer Billy Strayhorn’s career-long involvement in theater, including a brief period as a stage show producer, represents another critical factor in Drum’s construction. His own theatrical endeavors notably involved prior work with both Beatty and Orson Welles (whose connection to Drum is discussed later).33 Strayhorn’s later claim that Drum represented his and Ellington’s “closest ever” collaboration implies a measure of personal pride in the artistic significance of the resulting work, if not the degree of its success.34 Despite this, and in spite of a growing number of studies devoted to Strayhorn’s music, his specific contributions to Drum – which include at least half of the project’s orchestrations – remain an area ripe for investigation.35 30 31

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The description of Drum as “pompous” is offered in Stratemann, Day, 376. The West German script is more explicit, specifying the insertion of “an important piece of ballet.” West German script, 44, emphasis added. The “Flamingo” soundie has been issued on Duke Ellington [and] Lionel Hampton, Idem IDVD 1023NT, 2003, DVD. Beatty’s dance partner in “Flamingo” was Janet Collins, a cousin of Drum dancer Carmen de Lavallade. See Patricia Willard, “Dance: The Unsung Element of Ellingtonia,” The Antioch Review 57 (Summer 1999): 405. Regarding Strayhorn’s theater collaborations, see Hajdu, Lush, 107–37. Van de Leur, Something, 134. See also Nicholson, Reminiscing, 312. Arranging credits for most of Drum’s component pieces are listed in Van de Leur, Something, 212–13. In addition to Van de Leur’s listing of Strayhorn manuscript scores, the Duke Ellington Collection holds Strayhorn manuscripts reflecting the telecast segue “Carabe Background,” the piano introduction to “A Drum Is a Woman Part 2,” and a lead sheet and sketch of the introduction to “You Better Know It”; Ellington manuscripts in the Duke Ellington Collection include material for “A Drum Is a Woman Part 1,” “New Orleans (Sunrise)” [Early Morning], “New Orleans (Mardi Gras)” [New Orleanna], “Hey, Buddy Bolden,” “Congo Square (Silence),” telecast versions of “Rhumbop,” the beginning and ending of “Carribee Joe Part 2,” and the telecast segue “Carabae Joe Ext Z.” Drum orchestra parts held in the Duke Ellington Collection also reflect the contributions of Ellington music copyists Tom Whaley and John Sanders.

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John Franceschina prefaces his study of Ellington’s stage works by suggesting that “those who find Ellington’s theatre compositions inferior to Duke’s band work can now have firm evidence of the importance of his maintaining control over his material.”36 Drum, however, offers some complications regarding the issue of authorial control. One of the first issues confronting any examination of this project is the reconciliation of the telecast presentation with the album; while the two productions are generally parallel in musical and narrative content, there are also significant differences. Moreover, it is difficult to pinpoint exactly when the Drum telecast’s visual production concerns became a determinant factor in Ellington’s planning.37 Ellington appears to have maintained a large degree of control over the sequence and content of the original album, including extensive editing and overdubs.38 Any critical notions of Ellington’s authorial control over the development and production of the telecast presentation are more dubious. Some alterations had to have been expected. For example, the division of the telecast into three “acts,” as opposed to the four “parts” of the album, likely reflects a convenience for scheduled advertising breaks rather than any conscious restructuring of narrative. Evidence of the rejected script suggests that Ellington may have enjoyed a genuine power of approval regarding the telecast content. However, some degree of trepidation peeks from behind Ellington’s statement that “we’re pulling the whole record apart and putting it back together for TV . . . I do not have any previous notions about my music and I don’t regret having to tear it up even though I think it is the best thing I’ve ever done.”39 Claims that Drum was “the biggest, the most advertised, and the most pretentious show of its kind ever attempted on a commercial or otherwise sponsored show” may tend toward hyperbole, but the telecast was heavily promoted.40 One of the first multimedia packages of its kind, CBS 36

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John Franceschina, Duke Ellington’s Music for the Theatre (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001), 10. Examination of Drum is precluded from Franceschina’s study, apparently on grounds of the production’s presentation on television. Ibid., 204n10. Hajdu proposes that the telecast project was initiated when Theatre Guild administrator Lawrence Langer “approached Ellington.” Hajdu, Lush, 157. Exactly when this initial contact took place is unclear; to date, I have located no publicity mentioning the Drum telecast prior to February 1957. Ellington later claimed that he made the record “so maybe someone would want to do it on TV.” “TV–Radio: ‘Crazy Little Story,’” Newsweek, 6 May 1957, 66. The exact combination of takes and edits used in Drum remains unclear; see Timner, Ellingtonia, 171–5. William Ewald, “Duke Ellington Invades TV Drama Hour Soon,” News-Herald [Del Rio, Texas], 2 May 1957, on file at the IJS. Izzy Rowe, “One Dug Duke, Another Didn’t,” Pittsburgh Courier, 18 May 1957, 23.

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carefully tracked its promotional efforts and critical responses. The network cited a production cost of $80,000, including the development of a 45-rpm “promotional recording” that was sent to 300 television and radio stations, 200 public relations contacts, and 6,500 U.S. Steel customers; copies of a promotional LP album were additionally sent to 150 “key TV critics.”41 In the weeks leading up to the broadcast, telephone interviews with Ellington were scheduled with reviewers nationwide. Over eighty television and radio stations were tracked to document their number of on-air announcements; local newspaper advertisements and record dealer tie-ins were also documented. The latter efforts included at least one competition where contestants were invited to submit “letters telling why a drum is like a woman”; the first prize was a set of bongo drums.42 But the respectable budget and “hefty ad campaign” would not guarantee commercial success.43 While Drum’s Nielson-tracked audience of 14.2 percent of American television households may sound enviable for jazz or musical theater efforts today, David Hajdu suggests that these numbers “fizzled” by comparison to other U.S. Steel productions.44 A week before the telecast, Ellington had vowed that “what happens with this TV show will make several decisions for us.”45 Whether by his own decision, or the directive of network producers, Ellington would not present another complete “extended” work on American television, theatrical or otherwise, until the 1965 Concert of Sacred Music (an event broadcast over public television, not a commercial network).46

“As Far Back as Way Back Goes” Although most contemporary media reviews of Drum were mixed at worst – indeed, some (mostly non-jazz) critics gave rave reviews – anything less than the unbridled success of At Newport was bound to be disappointing.47 From the vantage point of a half century later, perhaps 41

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“U.S. Steel Hour Advertising and Promotion, A Drum Is a Woman,” Duke Ellington Collection, Series 4, box 1. See also “Col, U.S. Steel and BBDO”; Timner, Ellingtonia, 376. 43 “Col., U.S. Steel and BBDO.” “U.S. Steel Hour Advertising.” The Nielson rating share accounted for approximately 5.2 million screens. Hajdu, Lush, 163. “TV–Radio: ‘Crazy Little Story.’” The Sacred Concert, as filmed by KQED of San Francisco, has been issued in full on Duke Ellington, Love You Madly/A Concert of Sacred Music, Eagle Eye Media EE39100–9, 2005, DVD. This comparison was explicit for New York Times critic and radio deejay John S. Wilson, who felt that the “promise” of Newport “seemed to turn to ashes” with the “debacle” of Drum. Wilson, “Jazz: Ellington.” By contrast, according to Paul Sampson, the Drum album

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one of the most difficult-to-grasp critical complaints against the production is that of its “complicated” story line or “elusive” allegory.48 But Drum’s historical narrative carries its own circuitous legacy. Among the varied synopses Ellington had previously offered for his long-planned “tone parallel” depiction of an “everyman” African American experience – a never fully realized, career-long project idea that was first mentioned in the 1930s and whose themes were partially manifest in works such as Black, Brown and Beige (hereafter “BB&B”) and the unproduced and incomplete opera Boola – is one conception that strongly foreshadows the storyline of Drum. In a 1942 issue of Variety magazine, Ellington describes a jazz symphony: “the first movement will show the origin of Negro music, with an African tom-tom beat as a background; the second will show the development of early American jazz; the third present day swing, and then a futuristic finale, all four parts tied together with the beat of the original tom-tom.”49 Although published in near parallel to the completion of BB&B (and, indeed, this statement equally suggests several key narrative themes in the subsequent program of BB&B), the narrative described in Variety might tie more closely to a film project that Ellington and the film/theater director Orson Welles had planned the previous year – a provenance teased in numerous accounts of the Drum project.50 Ellington had met Welles in Los Angeles during the summer 1941 run of Jump for Joy, a stage revue that featured Ellington as composer-bandleader, and notably included an overture titled “Evolution of Rhythm.” This number presented a capsule history of jazz through a sequence depicting “a trio of native Africans (circa 1800),” a “quartette of Afro-Cuban drummers,” Ellington’s drummer Sonny Greer performing “a short drum concerto against the beat of the other drums,” and closing with “Ellington conducting his entire orchestra . . . with a hot rendition of one of the rhythm tunes from the show.”51

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represented “entertainment in the best sense of the word”; Paul Sampson, “In the Groove: Columbia Still Dispensing Gems of Jazz,” Washington Post, 7 April 1957, H11. Among other sources, a number of additional Drum reviews are on file at IJS, and in the Duke Ellington Collection, Series 10, box 2. See also Cohen, America, 333. Jack Gould, “TV Review: Jazz Fantasy, ‘A Drum Is a Woman,’ Staged,” New York Times, 9 May 1957, 48; Walter Hawver, “TV-Radio in Review: Duke Soared Too High; Cloud 9 Overpopulated,” Albany Knickerbocker, 9 May 1957, on file at IJS. “Ellington on Negro Music,” Variety, 9 December 1942, 37. See also Tucker, “Genesis,” 78n12. For example, see Irving Townsend, liner notes to A Drum Is a Woman, Columbia CL951, 1956, LP. “Tentative Outline of Jump for Joy; A Musical Revue,” Duke Ellington Collection, Series 4, box 6. In the Jump for Joy program reprinted in Ellington’s autobiography, the drum-feature

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According to Ellington, Welles was impressed by Jump for Joy and approached the bandleader soon after the show opened.52 The proposed Ellington-Welles production was to be one of four segments comprising Welles’s massive (and never completed) film project, It’s All True.53 Their “Story of Jazz” segment was slated to utilize Ellington as script advisor, composer, and conductor, and Welles planned to feature appearances by Louis Armstrong, Hazel Scott (in the role of Armstrong’s wife, pianist Lil Hardin), and potentially Ellington himself.54 A 1941 article briefly describes the film as “tracing the history of Jazz to the Negro, and featuring the life of Louis Armstrong, King of Trumpeteers.”55 Catherine Benamou’s study of the It’s All True project describes a draft script storyline following Armstrong “from a Mississippi riverboat to Chicago, New York, and Western Europe, all joined by Ellington’s original sound track.”56 Yet Townsend’s liner notes for Drum qualify the album’s connection to It’s All True, claiming that “little more than an outline had been prepared [for Welles], and this outline was dug out and completely revamped” for the project at hand.57 The basic storyline of Drum resurfaced again in Ellington’s foreword to Leonard Feather’s 1955 Encyclopedia of Jazz, where it is remarked that “rhythm” travels from Africa to America, stops in the West Indies, then takes “two courses.” One course travels to New Orleans and up the Mississippi River to Chicago “in the form of clarinets, trombones, and trumpets”;

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sequence appears to be included as part of the opening number, “Sun-Tanned Tenth of the Nation.” Ellington, Mistress, 178. Duke Ellington, foreword to Leonard Feather (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Jazz (New York: Horizon Press, 1955), 10. Filming for the Ellington–Welles production was scheduled for December 1941, but never initiated. See Catherine Benamou, It’s All True: Orson Welles’s Pan-American Odyssey (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 29. Ibid., 27–9. Although Welles’s plans for the film seem to have changed early in the production process, Ellington remained under contract with Mercury Productions from July 1941 through July 1942. Ibid., 325n25. Robert Stam offers observations on the broader musical conception behind It’s All True in “Orson Welles, Brazil, and the Power of Blackness,” in Perspectives on Orson Welles, ed. Morris Beja (New York: G. K. Hall, 1995), 237. John Pittman, “The Duke Will Stay on Top!,” in Tucker, Reader, 149. Benamou, It’s All True, 29. Townsend, liner notes. In his Time magazine feature, Ellington seems to minimize the connection between It’s All True and his upcoming Drum project, claiming that “I wrote a piece of music [for Welles] . . . just 28 bars. . . . And I lost it.” “Mood Indigo and Beyond,” 60. He also downplays the connection in his autobiography, explaining: “I’m not sure of the relationship . . . because a lot of time elapsed between Jump for Joy and A Drum Is a Woman.” Ellington, Mistress, 240. Nevertheless, both Ellington and his interviewers and chroniclers appear to have exploited every opportunity to cite the Welles connection in discussions of Drum.

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the other travels up the East Coast, favoring “strings.” Regarding the latter course, Ellington also cites the “great piano players . . . always on the East Coast,” including his personal mentors James P. Johnson and Willie “The Lion” Smith. This championing of the less-storied Eastern tradition might be read as an attempt by Ellington to reinforce his own position in jazz history, as he concludes that the Eastern and Western courses “converged in New York and blended together, and the offspring was jazz.”58 Handwritten notes for Drum again reference this two-course lineage, as Ellington writes that each branch “went a different way to meet again on another day,” with the Eastern branch traveling “from Cuba to New York.” Further editing of the Drum storyline, however, placed more emphasis on the familiar Western (or perhaps “Armstrong”) branch: aside from a violin solo by Ray Nance and the introduction of percussion instruments referencing the Afro-Cuban tradition in “Zajj’s Dream” (performances omitted from the telecast), Ellington’s aforementioned East Coast story of jazz receives little attention in his final Drum presentation. But initial attempts at representing a two-course storyline may be responsible for the arguably awkward twist in the Drum album narrative. Following a chronological presentation of jazz history from Africa to a futuristic “Ballet of the Flying Saucers,” the album’s storyline backtracks to Swing-era 52nd Street in New York, thereby squeezing in the Afro-Cuban references of “Zajj’s Dream” and “Rhumbop” before arriving at the apotheosis “Finale.”59 Motivation for this narrative development is not made entirely clear in Drum’s narration or liner notes; the dream device seems more convincingly incorporated through the visual capabilities of the telecast (which employed a cinematic “flashback” camera dissolve and smoke effect).60 In any case, the telecast production positions the “Flying Saucers” sequence after 52nd Street and “Rhumbop,” reorganizing the storyline into one single-course chronological narrative. A January 1957 article in Billboard suggested parallels between a newly expanding jazz LP market and the recent appearance of a string of influential, now-canonical jazz history books, such as Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff’s Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya (1955), Feather’s Encyclopedia of Jazz 58 59

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Duke Ellington, foreword to Feather, Encyclopedia, 12, emphasis added. The West German script specifies the 52nd Street setting for “Rhumbop” as “between 1930 and 1940.” West German script, 52. Townsend’s liner notes read: “in her [Madame Zajj’s] dream, she lures Carribee Joe to New York and tempts him with the neon of 52nd Street . . . But Joe’s trip to New York is only a dream, and Zajj is without him.”

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(1955), and Marshall Stearns’s The Story of Jazz (1956).61 In writing the foreword to Feather’s publication, Ellington was enjoying (albeit with his future career at stake) the inclusion of his own legacy in the rising field of jazz history. Ellington’s embodiment of “Joe” at the climax of the Drum telecast – he physically picks up the Zajj-drum, asking “whose pretty little drum are you?” – positions the maestro and his band on a plane with Buddy Bolden and mother Africa, all of which function as figurative jazz history concepts as much as explicitly documented events. But the nation-wide audience of the CBS telecast was not confined to history buffs, nightclubbing readers of Down Beat, or even music fans. For non-jazz-connoisseurs circa 1957, Drum’s shifting geographic and temporal locations or musical styles may well have been perplexing. As one reviewer confessed, the Drum telecast material “even stripped of its fanciful trappings, was for the jazz layman, at least, pretty heady stuff.”62 Drum’s identification of the (still) obscure Bolden, for example, is tersely explained in the album liner notes as “the legendary trumpeter,” while lyrics for the song “Hey, Buddy Bolden” describe the subject more as a pimp with “one woman on each arm” than as a musical influence on betterknown New Orleans jazz pioneers – a now mythological jazz-history story that is never even mentioned in Drum’s narration or synopses.63 A possible connection with Louis Armstrong, also unnamed, was less of a stretch: even audiences of limited jazz awareness may have been familiar with Armstrong’s film appearance in New Orleans (United Artists, 1947), or Time magazine’s coverage of his 1949 crowning as New Orleans’s “King of the Zulus.”64 But Armstrong fans might have been puzzled by “Hey, Buddy Bolden” trumpet soloist Clark Terry’s bebop-inflected chromaticism or subtle “St. Louis sound,” which was identified with a mellow timbre, straight tone, and (or) smooth articulation (traits shared with Terry’s St. Louis brethren Harold Baker and Miles Davis). Such prominent 61

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Bill Simon, “Jazz in ’56 Trades Esoteric for New Big Business Look,” Billboard, 19 January 1957, 1, 14, 28. Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff, Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya: The Story of Jazz and the Men Who Made It (New York: Rinehart and Company, 1955); Feather, Encyclopedia; and Marshall Stearns, The Story of Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956). Other jazz history publications appearing at this time include Andre Hodeir’s Jazz, Its Evolution and Essence (New York: Grove Press, 1956), and Hugues Panassi´e’s and Madeleine Gautier’s Guide to Jazz (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956). Also of interest to contemporary critics was the reissue of historical jazz recordings on LP. See, for instance, John Wilson, “Jazz Styles Revived,” New York Times, 23 September 1956, 138. Hawver, “Duke Soared.” Townsend, liner notes. Ellington’s depiction of Bolden seems to reflect descriptions compiled in Shapiro and Hentoff, Hear Me, 36–9. “Music: Louis the First,” Time, 21 February 1949, 52.

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stylistic differences were presumably recognized because of their perceived ambivalence to Armstrong’s ubiquitous influence.65 Following the script’s “you could hear him ’cross the river” imagery (and some plunger-muted responses from Ray Nance), the decision to highlight Terry’s intimate sound – additionally shaded with halve-valve technique – was certainly as atypical as it may have been hip.66 Ellington regularly made reference to the geographic origins of his sidemen, and might have noted that St. Louis lies across as well as up the river from New Orleans.67 While Ellington’s narration may presume a fair amount of knowledge regarding jazz styles and personalities, physical geography is also an issue. Curiously, the album fails to identify any geographic locale in relation to the song “You Better Know It.”68 The eventual Chicago cabaret setting of the telecast does reflect Ellington’s handwritten notes for the album, which had specified a Chicago sequence with the song “The Greatest There Is (He’s a Whiz)” (recorded, but cut from the project).69 It is unclear if the telecast’s subsequent specificity of Chicago for “You Better Know It” merely reflects a concern over returning to the original geographic trajectory of the storyline, or if Ellington was consciously attempting to generalize the narrative of the album, thereby abandoning the potential Armstrong biography parallels to accommodate a broader concept of the Great Migration – and Ellington’s own biography.70 Another ambiguity 65

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More generally, one contemporary commentator responded that they “didn’t dig the modern sounds [in Drum].” Evelyn Cunningham, “One Dug Duke, Another Didn’t,” Pittsburgh Courier, 18 May 1957, 23. Regarding conceptions of the “St. Louis sound,” see Alyn Shipton, A New History of Jazz, rev. ed. (New York: Continuum, 2007), 470–1. By contrast, Ellington’s bravura trumpeter Cat Anderson is heard under narration in the album’s preceding New Orleans Mardi Gras parade sequence. Eddie Lambert takes the assignment of Bolden to Terry a bit further, citing it as one of the “stinging asides” in “Hey, Buddy Bolden,” and something which he felt was specifically “fired in the direction of the clich´es of the American musical.” Eddie Lambert, Duke Ellington: A Listener’s Guide (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press and Institute of Jazz Studies, 1999), 192. While any suggestion that Terry himself was intended to represent Drum’s segue from New Orleans to Chicago is conjectural, Ellington was well aware of Terry’s St. Louis roots; see Ellington, Mistress, 229. One version of Terry’s recollections of Ellington convincing him to portray Bolden in Drum can be found in Terry’s interview with Susan Miller and Bob Rusch, Cadence 3 (November 1977), 4. Terry’s half-valve technique also represented the extension of an Ellington orchestra tradition established by trumpeter Rex Stewart during the 1930s and 1940s; the connection via Terry’s “Bolden” performance is noted in Tracy, “Jazz Records,” 26. The West German script suggests “You Better Know It” as transpiring in New Orleans. West German script, 35–6. See also Timner, Ellingtonia, 173. In addition to the original plans for the It’s All True project, Armstrong’s connection to Columbia Records during the mid-1950s – as well as his historic visit to the Gold Coast in the spring of 1956 – makes his name’s omission from Drum all the more notable. The trumpeter’s

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arises with the omission of “Rhythm Pum Te Dum’s” lyrics from the telecast, leaving the continent of Joe’s jungle origins unidentified.

“Jungle Gyration with Bop Animation” Drum’s rarified status as Civil Rights-era mass media inevitably placed it under a political magnifying glass. Although Norman Weinstein cites the poetic power of the “imaginative image” to justify the Drum album script’s “elliptical and occasionally cryptic nature,” the visual imagery of the telecast appears to have suggested a greater (if perhaps unintended) degree of realism for the audience.71 Scantily attired in pseudo-loincloth or feathers, images of Joe and Madame Zajj – whose initial costume recalls that of 1920s Cotton Club chorus dancers – were accused of invoking offensive tropes on African Americans and primitivism.72 Even as some commentators celebrated the all-black presentation as a political coup, a New York Times reviewer complained of the telecast’s “regrettably stereotyped roles,” and a writer for the Pittsburgh Courier charged that the program’s “display of sex, love, and flesh was a ‘jungle minstrel’ that will set back integration another 25 years.”73 Elsewhere, Ellington’s narration of rhyming “jive” poetry was suggested to reinforce beatnik “finger-snapping” caricatures of urban black culture.74 By extension, the script’s reference to the “King of the Zulus” – a figure under renewed attack in the 1950s black press for its parallels to blackface minstrelsy – takes an interesting twist in the

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portrayal in the Civil Rights-era black press as an “Uncle Tom” may have also prompted the narrative focus on Bolden; then again, Armstrong’s relationship with Columbia had recently terminated under sour conditions (in fact, almost simultaneous with Ellington’s 1956 Newport triumph). Regarding criticism of Armstrong by Ellington and Strayhorn, the black press, the African tour, and the Columbia dispute, see Ricky Riccardi, What a Wonderful World: The Magic of Louis Armstrong’s Later Years (New York: Pantheon, 2011), xviii, 58–61, 125–32, 134–5. Norman Weinstein, A Night in Tunisia: Imaginings of Africa in Jazz (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1992), 44–5. Pertinent examples of 1920s Cotton Club–style floorshow costumes are documented in Ellington’s 1929 RKO short film, Black and Tan (RKO, 1929). As of this writing, Life magazine photos of a rehearsal for the telecast production of A Drum Is a Woman can be accessed through Google Images, http://images.google.com/images?q=drum+is+a+woman&q=source %3Alife, accessed 16 September 2015. Gould, “TV Review: Jazz Fantasy”; “What Courier Readers Think: George F. Brown Called ‘Fearless,’” Pittsburgh Courier, 31 August 1957, 5. See Dan Burley, “Back Door Stuff: The Way the Ball Bounces,” New York Amsterdam News, 18 May 1957, 13. Ellington later parodied finger-snapping hipsters in his own onstage monologues; for example, see the 1965 performance of “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be” included in Duke Ellington, Love You Madly, Eagle Eye Media EE39100–9, 2005, DVD.

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telecast as Ray Nance wears a harlequin mask instead of face paint.75 But if Drum’s references to primitivism, “jive,” or the “King of the Zulus” might be read to represent an ironic commentary on racist stereotypes, they were not consistently received as such when viewed on prime-time television. In comparison to the above controversial elements, the Drum telecast’s Barbados sequence drew less attention with its “colonial” costumes of tattered short-pants and straw hats, each of which were extensions of the 1950s American pop-calypso vogue.76 Drum’s inclusion of calypso music is notable within Ellington’s vision of jazz history; Weinstein praises Ellington’s celebration of Caribbean heritage within the album’s African American narrative, discussing the context of early twentieth-century Garveyite black nationalism.77 But aside from fulfilling the West Indies/Caribbean element of Drum’s storyline, the decision to use calypso music was – in 1956 – a commercial no-brainer. While calypso had made inroads into the American popular market since the 1930s, and had been incorporated by jazz performers through the 1940s (e.g., Louis Jordan’s 1948 “Run Joe”), the May 1956 RCA Victor release of Harry Belafonte’s Calypso album ignited a national phenomenon.78 Calypso remained in Billboard’s topten best selling bracket for a full year, spawning scores of imitators and calypso invasions into almost every entertainment medium (e.g., Bel-Air’s 1957 film Bop Girl Goes Calypso).79 With the idiom stripped of its traditionally subversive political content, the American popular music industry’s take on calypso during this period offers discomforting parallels with preceding Tin Pan Alley commercial song formulas. Many attempts to follow Belafonte’s success feature not only folk-like melodies and call-and-response patterns, but a stylized 75

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See George E. Pitts, “Around the Theatrical World: Ridiculous ‘King Zulu’ Still Mars Mardi Gras!,” Pittsburgh Courier, 16 March 1957, 22. For other examples of “calypso” attire, see Nat Cole’s performance of “Calypso Blues” in the film Rhythm and Blues Revue (Studio Films, 1955), or former Ellington vocalist Herb Jeffries’s film Calypso Joe (Allied Artists, 1957). The guitar carried by West Indian Joe in the Drum telecast is also part of this imagery; the instrument is not actually heard in any of the production’s music. Weinstein, Night in Tunisia, 39–42. Regarding calypso’s early emergences in the U.S. market, see Michael Eldridge, “There Goes the Transnational Neighborhood: Calypso Buys a Bungalo,” Callaloo 25 (Spring 2002): 620–38. Belafonte’s Calypso album (RCA LPM-1248, 1956, LP) remained on Billboard’s top ten lists through May 1957. See “Music Popularity Charts: Best Selling Pop Albums,” Billboard, 27 May 1957, 31. Descriptions of the Belafonte-inspired calypso “epidemic” include John S. Wilson, “Belafonte and Others in Calypso Variety,” New York Times, 5 May 1957, 145; see also “Belafonte ‘da Beeg’ Man in Calypso,” Pittsburgh Courier, 16 February 1957, 22.

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formula of West Indian (or, in cruder forms, simply broken-English) dialect and buffoonish depictions of Caribbean blacks.80 Not surprisingly, certain comedic calypso tropes (such as the protagonist getting retributively “hit on de head” with a kitchen item) played well with mainstream audiences, offering updated vehicles for more traditional modes of racebased condescension.81 Vocalist Ozzie Bailey’s Trinidadian ancestry may have been a factor in his joining the Ellington band upon commencement of the Drum recording sessions in September 1956.82 Bailey performed his featured numbers from this work (“You Better Know It” and the calypso “What Else Can You Do with a Drum?”) throughout his four-year association with the orchestra.83 Although Strayhorn and Bailey forego the linguistic affectations of other pop-calypso recordings of the 1950s, “What Else” clearly cashes in on this idiom’s other hallmark traits – and brilliantly so, delivering a beautiful call-and-response passage pairing Bailey’s wordless vocals with Quentin Jackson’s plunger-muted trombone. Strayhorn’s arrangement presents a pared-down ensemble from the orchestra, loosely recalling the “combo” texture of BB&B’s “West Indian Dance.”84 The rhythmically intuitive lyrics also provide some of the project’s clearest examples of sexist posturing: Joe’s alibi sought behind the line “it isn’t civilized to beat women . . . but . . . tell me what else can you do with a drum?” perhaps softens his later admonition “I’ll surely have to spank you” (delivered in “You Better Know It”).85

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For different examples of 1950s calypso accents, see the film Calypso Heat Wave (Columbia, 1957), or Robert Mitchum’s 1957 LP Calypso – Is Like So . . . (Capitol T853). Period criticism of calypso “imposters” is offered in “Folk Singer Says People of Trinidad Prefer United States Musicians,” Atlanta Daily World, 20 September 1957, 3. Although Belafonte himself focused on less potentially offensive numbers like “The Banana Boat Song” (a.k.a. “Day-O”) to appease his calypso fans in later decades, he arguably never fully extricated his career from the marketing formula that made him a household name. One reviewer charged that a 1993 Belafonte performance “filled with images of island inhabitants happily harvesting sugar cane . . . played to a 1950s vision of exotic island living that now seems badly out of place.” Danyel Smith, “Belafonte, Bringing Back Himself and the Memories,” New York Times, 11 September 1993, 13. Belafonte offers a response to similar criticism in his autobiography; see Harry Belafonte with Michael Schnayerson, My Song: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 2011), 164–5. “Duke to Present 2 New Vocalists on TV Show,” Baltimore Afro-American, 4 May 1957, 7. A live performance of “You Better Know It” has been issued on Duke Ellington, Live in ’58, Jazz Icons 2.119001, 2007, DVD. For a discussion of “West Indian Dance” from BB&B, see Brian Priestley and Alan Cohen, “Black, Brown and Beige,” in Tucker, Reader, 196–7. As Hajdu suggests, the “attempted” joke of the “What Else” lyrics makes the more subtle misogyny of other period pop songs sound almost “feminist.” Hajdu, Lush, 159.

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“Zajj Was a Lady” The visions of women presented throughout Drum alternate between erotic kissing, caressing, and more menacing drum-metaphor imagery (e.g., “now I am beat and blue for Joe”). Lynn Spigel suggests that complaints of misogyny in the Drum telecast “may well have belied white discomfort with the program’s erotic display of black sexuality on screen.”86 It is true that the telecast script is markedly less leering than that of the album; Ellington had to have been aware that narration like the album’s “Congo Square” sequence, including its dubious connotation of “childlike” faces attached to “not childlike” bodies, was unlikely to be permitted in a network telecast.87 Ellington’s album script had already been primmed from earlier handwritten and typewritten notes, which remarked: A beautiful black woman grinds herself to the center of the clearing – a breath-taking sight – this gorgeous woman – only half-clothed – here you see the most voluptuous thing alive – breasts ripe to the bursting – little waistline and the buttocks of a horse – grinding and looking straight up to the moon and hips grinding so gracefully and slowly it seems impossible. This is the beginning of a native sex dance – it gradually accelerates as does everybody’s pulse . . . to frenzy – all night long ’til finally exhaustion.

Drum’s female characterizations are not easily dismissed through what some commentators have described as the script’s “dated” quality.88 In a publicity interview leading up to the telecast, Ellington explained his Drum Is a Woman metaphor: “you know how it is . . . a musician will say to his woman – ‘here’s $2, baby, go on down to the tavern or the movies and leave me alone for a while with the drum.’ And so we say a drum is a woman – it kind of takes the place of her.”89 But this illustration of a musician’s relationship with their instrument of trade does not fully account for Drum’s “male gaze” aesthetic, or even the coy entendre of lyrics like “Carribee Joe, slept with the jungle and her sounds in the night, he knew her to her delight.”90 Ellington’s drum/woman imagery is also a vehicle for expounding a macho bravado, elevating the male musician to 86

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88 90

Lynn Spigel, TV by Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 55. Regarding the Drum telecast script alterations, Ellington noted: “You don’t have to tell them a woman is squirming if they can see it right there on the screen.” “TV–Radio: ‘Crazy Little Story.’” 89 Ewald, “Duke Ellington Invades.” Hasse, Beyond, 362. Theories surrounding the “male gaze” prevalent in Hollywood entertainment aesthetics are advanced by Laura Mulvey in “Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema,” in Visual and Other

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an insider’s club of superiority – a theme only enhanced by Columbia’s decision to depict a female’s backside on the Drum album cover.91 This formulaic positioning of white “come hither” women reflected a prevalent LP-era record industry strategy to attract male record buyers – and to mainstream non-white musicians – through sexual fetishes advanced by Hollywood and a middle-class bachelor consumer lifestyle.92 Ellington himself rarely shied away from discussing sex publicly; his attempts to present his views through humor might be read to reflect a desired association with bohemian concepts of a sexually liberated cultural elite.93 In his embodiment of one of the allegorical “Joes,” alongside the “walking phallic symbol” imagery of Bolden with his “woman on each arm,” Ellington certainly appears to position himself (as, apparently, numerous female fans did) in such a category.94 Ellington also references the female gender in informing his audience that “though her past was shady, Zajj was a lady. They dressed her in woodwinds and strings”; handwritten notes ask more succinctly, “was the baby of ill repute?” The concept of making “a lady” out of the low art of vernacular jazz, a metaphor popularized by symphonic jazz bandleader Paul Whiteman, has persisted through much of jazz history.95 Contributions to Drum’s glorified entertainment aesthetic in the form of soprano Tynes

91

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93

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95

Pleasures (London: Macmillan, 1989), 25. Thanks to Lewis Porter for suggesting this connection. Regarding other “drum as woman” metaphors in jazz, see Ingrid Monson, Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 64–6, 223n24. Poet Jayne Cortez’s response to Ellington’s metaphor is discussed in Tony Bolden and Jayne Cortez, “All the Birds Sing Bass: The Revolutionary Blues of Jayne Cortez,” African American Review 35 (Spring 2001): 66–7. See also Lock, Blutopia, 262n91. Regarding Drum and other female-figure album covers of the mid-1950s, see Milton Bracker, “Bare Essentials of LP Album Covers,” New York Times, 17 March 1957, M9. John Howland has discussed this midcentury “vinyl vixen” album cover vogue in “Jazz With Strings: Between Jazz and the Great American Songbook,” in Jazz/Not Jazz: The Music and Its Boundaries, ed. David Ake, Charles Hiroshi Garrett, and Daniel Goldmark (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 142. For example, see Duke Ellington, “Sex Is No Sin,” reprinted in Nicholson, Reminiscing, 297. Regarding connections between jazz, sex, and “the American concept of the bohemian nonconformist,” see Ingrid Monson, “The Problem with White Hipness: Race, Gender, and Cultural Conceptions in Jazz Historical Discourse,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 48 (Autumn 1995): 404. Regarding instances of “walking phallic symbol” imagery in jazz history, see Monson, “Problem.” Ellington’s son Mercer appropriates the name “Madame Zajj” as “a pseudonymous composite for several ladies in Pop’s later life” in his own Ellington biography. See Mercer Ellington, Duke Ellington in Person (New York: Da Capo Press, 1978), 125–7. As the Drum album was being completed, Ellington cited Whiteman in a discussion of the word “jazz,” noting that “first it was ‘disgraceful’; then Paul Whiteman made a ‘lady’ of it.” Duke Ellington, as quoted in Nat Hentoff, “The Duke,” Down Beat, 26 December 1956, 25.

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Example 9.1A “A Drum Is a Woman Part 2 (Drums Rab)” (1:31ff.)

and harpist Glamann, who were each imported from outside the masculine domain of the Ellington orchestra, likewise fulfill this symphonic jazz trope through an instrument and voice type that arguably represent the most feminine qualities of the European classical symphonic tradition.96 Tynes’s performance in Drum’s opening number serves as an immediate announcement of feminine-classical presence within the masculine-jazz ethos of the production. The Drum score itself might be interpreted to reinforce a gendered discourse through its various contrasting orchestral textures.97 For instance, in “A Drum Is a Woman Part 2,” saxophonist Johnny Hodges grittily 96

97

The West German script further specifies “strings of a harp, plucked by the hands of a woman.” West German script, 46. Handwritten notes for an unused passage of narration also specify a flute solo. While the expansive topic of Ellington–Strayhorn gender relationships is beyond the scope of this study, it is worth noting that Drum is also the context in which Irving Townsend provided his infamous description of Strayhorn’s music as expressing “the feminine side of Ellington.” Townsend, “Ellington in Private,” 80.

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Example 9.1B “Ballet of the Flying Saucers,” interlude (1:58ff.)

responds to a densely voiced (with plenty of part doublings and a halfstep rub in the lower voices), blues-inflected – almost Hollywood “crime jazz” – swing ensemble scoring conjuring a sultry Madame Zajj fatale of the “male gaze” (Example 9.1A).98 This texture is starkly contrasted by the rhythm-section-less rubato tempo and airy harp arpeggios backing Hodges’s delicately ethereal interludes in “Flying Saucers” (Example 9.1B). Hodges later cited Drum as among his favorite Ellington albums, perhaps in appreciation of the score’s effective support of his emotive range.99

“The Rhythm Is Rhapsodic” Debuted by Whiteman in 1924, George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue is an oft-cited precedent for later “concert-style dance-band arrangements” 98

99

The following notated examples and charts reflect a combination of sources, including surviving orchestra parts, score sketches, and presentation scores held in the Duke Ellington Collection, as well as the author’s own audio transcriptions. Johnny Hodges, interview by Henry Whiston, Jazz Journal International, January 1966, 9.

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Table 9.2 “Ballet of the Flying Saucers,” formal outline “Movement”

Measures

Tempo

Meter

Key

1 (Interlude) 2 (Interlude) 3

1–45 46–9 50–66 67–70 71–120 (open drum solo) 121–8

208 bpm rubato 104 bpm rubato 288 bpm

4/4

G

3/4

A-flat

4/4

A-flat

written by Ellington and others.100 The work’s “episodic” compositional form has been both celebrated and ridiculed as an attempt to introduce European concert music devices into the realm of American popular music.101 This formal strategy highlights musical variations in melodic theme, tempo, key, and meter, and was embraced by stage show arrangers in the creation of extended production sequences requiring controlled pacing and “spectacular” climaxes reinforcing visual choreography.102 Drum’s “Ballet of the Flying Saucers” directly references the floorshow entertainment tradition in its episodic production-style construction. The number also notably features symphonic instrumentation (harp and bells), as well as a trap drum solo that recalls the aforementioned “concerto” specifications of the “Evolution of Rhythm” overture in Jump for Joy.103 The three “movements” of the “Ballet” reflect shifts in meter, key, and tempo; the fast–slow–fast sequence offers another parallel to the European concerto format, with Sam Woodyard’s climactic solo even serving as a spectacular “cadenza” (see Table 9.2). Critics’ hopes of finding an all-encompassing compositional structure in Drum should have been assuaged by recognition of its revue format. Yet, in addition to the reprises of “Drum Is a Woman” and “Carribee Joe” (the juxtaposition of the two themes in the album’s “Finale” stands 100 101

102

103

See Howland, Uptown, 66. Regarding the reception of Rhapsody in Blue, see Carol Oja, Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 319. On the work’s episodic form and its relation to subsequent interwar concert works in symphonic jazz and the big band idiom, including works by Ellington, see Howland, Uptown. See ibid., 117–18. For an example of the rhapsodic-episodic production number arranging tradition, see the “Harlem Is Harmony” nightclub sequence closing the 1938 film The Duke Is Tops (Million Dollar Productions; the film does not involve Ellington). Eddie Lambert describes the “Flying Saucers” drum solo as “reminding us of Sonny Greer and the Cotton Club all those many years ago.” Lambert, Duke Ellington, 193.

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Example 9.2 “Finale” (0:01ff.)

as one of the most explicit motivic-based constructions of Ellington or Strayhorn’s career; see Example 9.2), there is an array of musical motives and gestures tying Drum’s component pieces together. These include the trombones’ alternating fourth and tritone intervals heard in the album’s opening number, details that are mimicked in later pieces by clarinet-led woodwinds (Example 9.3). Similarly, orchestral settings of an off-beat long–short rhythmic figure recur in multiple numbers (Example 9.4); see also the penultimate measure of Example 9.1A), as do variations of a descending blues-scale-based melodic phrase (Example 9.5). Clark Terry’s “Madame Zajj” solo is played over a “Sweet Georgia Brown”-like chord progression that previews the harmonic structure of “Rhumbop”; his distinctive halve-valve technique featured in “Hey, Buddy Bolden” reappears in the coda of “You Better Know It.” Example 9.3 A (left): “A Drum Is a Woman Part 1” (1:45ff.) B (center): “Carribee Joe Part 1” (2:13ff.) C (right): “Congo Square (Mme Zajj Entrance)” (3:21ff.)

Cohesion also emerges in the integration of music and storyline, as Ellington’s own biography is recalled in Drum’s repeated “jungle” references. Ellington’s role in American culture as a mediator of black music for white audiences (especially in segregated venues like the Cotton Club) often required him to frame racially based conceptions of exoticism and “primitive” sounds. His skill in doing so not only afforded him commercial

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Example 9.4A “Congo Square (Matumbe)” (2:00ff.)

Example 9.4B “Rhumbop” (0:06ff.)

Example 9.5A “Carribee Joe Part 1” (1:49ff.)

Example 9.5B “Congo Square (Matumbe)” (0:28ff.)

Example 9.5C “Ballet of the Flying Saucers” (1:40ff.)

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Example 9.6 “Congo Square (Matumbe)” (1:15ff.)

success, but – perhaps ironically – also established some of the most influential aesthetic strategies of jazz still in use today. The bandleader’s famed jungle sound of growling plunger-muted brass is traditionally reinforced by additional “exotic” effects including rhythm section ostinato patterns, long melodic lines emphasizing held notes, and “ominous” minor key or “distant” whole-tone-scale tonalities. The album’s “Rhythm Pum Te Dum” number introduces this formula early in the Drum program. And “Matumbe,” arranged by Strayhorn and featuring a “Mooche”-like clarinet trio passage, efficiently distills Ellington’s iconic jungle aesthetic during the “Congo Square” sequence (Example 9.6). There are also notable similarities between the orchestration textures of Drum and Ellington’s 1947 Liberian Suite. Precedents for the scoring of Ray Nance’s held-note plunger-muted brass wails against ensemble quarternote punches in “Carribee Joe,” the staggered-entrance descending motive opening “Congo Square (Silence),” and passages of contrary-motion sectional scoring in “Carribee Joe,” “What Else,” and “Hey, Buddy Bolden” (a common theatrical orchestration device, but distinctive nonetheless) can

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all found in the opening to Liberian’s “Dance No. 1.”104 Perhaps similarities in programmatic imagery suggested the borrowings: according to Ellington, “Dance No. 1” depicted “the perspective of a chieftain who lives way out in the [African] provinces . . . calling his tribe together.”105 Imagery of “calling” permeates Drum’s narrative and musical performances, whether Zajj calling jungle Joe, Bolden calling his “flock,” or Zajj’s arrival at “the TV antennae of the highest skyscraper” – the latter example possibly an allusion to transmission of the Drum telecast itself. The use of Liberian Suite in a 1952 Lester Horton Dance Theater production may have also inspired a return to these proven choreography-friendly musical gestures.106 During the “Rhumbop” sequence, Ellington explains that Madame Zajj eyes a palm tree decoration on the nightclub wall, triggering her dream of Carribee Joe and a flashback to the opening jungle locale for a duo dance with Joe (“Pomegranate”) under a palm tree. The jungle palm tree is a recurring visual image of the telecast production, providing a thematic link between the different temporal and geographic settings of the storyline. Possibly the suggestion of choreographer Paul Godkin, this image is even retained in futuristic form as the Dr. Seuss-like centerpiece of “Ballet of the Flying Saucers.”107 The New York nightclub d´ecor of “Rhumbop” offers additional Ellingtonian readings in recalling the famed interior designs of the Broadway Cotton Club (the Manhattan venue moved to Broadway and 48th in 1936), which featured a fresco depicting “The Evolution of Swing” through scenes like “Jungle Jive” and “Congo Conga” – the latter comprising a duo of black male and female figures under a palm tree.108 Indeed, one Amsterdam News columnist’s suggestion 104

105

106

107

108

Ellington’s 1947 recording of the Liberian Suite is available on the CD reissue of Duke Ellington, Ellington Uptown, Columbia CK 87066, 2004, compact disc. The opening of the main title from Ellington’s 1959 film soundtrack for Anatomy of a Murder arguably features similar textures as well. Duke Ellington, Anatomy of a Murder, Columbia CK 65569, 1999, compact disc. Duke Ellington, “Liberian Suite,” correspondence from Patricia Willard, Lester Horton Dance Theater Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress. “Lester Horton’s Dance Theater Choreo ’52” [program], Lester Horton Dance Theater Collection. The Lester Horton production of Liberian Suite included not only Drum’s “Madame Zajj” dancer Carmen de Lavallade but also production assistant Alvin Ailey, who appears as the traffic cop character in the Drum telecast. See Willard, “Dance,” 409. Regarding Godkin’s role in Drum, see Hajdu, Lush, 162. The futuristic tree may have been constructed by artist Judith Brown, who created some of the other metal sculpture work for the production. See “Metal Craftsman Welds Ornaments,” New York Times, 8 June 1957, 22. Photos of artist Julian Harrison’s Cotton Club interiors are included in a program for the club’s 1939 “World’s Fair” production. Other swing-era New York nightclub venues also featured jungle or tropical imagery, including the Caf´e Zanzibar, Hurricane Club (“Tahiti on Broadway”), and Ubangi Club. For an account of the Ubangi Club d´ecor, see Clyde Bernhardt

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that the Drum telecast recalled “the old Cotton Club and [Caf´e] Zanzibar nights” and “should be in a major club on Broadway” is almost redundant, given the production’s fairly explicit recreation of just such a setting.109

“As Far Out as Far Out Goes” In a posthumously published article dated to late 1957, Ellington cites Drum’s “Flying Saucers” number in the company of the science-fiction and technology tropes of Sputnik and the Egyptian pyramids. Criticizing HUAC, segregationists, and the FBI (among others), Ellington draws parallels between the creativity of American Negroes, the slaves of the Pharoahs, and Russian scientists building space vehicles through a musical metaphor of “the Man with the Different Sound.”110 Although his allegorical connections are occasionally shrouded by a biting sarcasm, Ellington’s closing statement is clearly serious: “So, this is my view of the race for space. We’ll never get it until we Americans, collectively and individually, get us a new sound. A new sound of harmony, brotherly love, common respect and consideration for the dignity and freedom of men.”111 Whether simply taking license on his recent “Flying Saucers” title or revealing a conscious link to technology and science fiction through the agency of what might be described as “Afrofuturism,” Drum was not Ellington’s first foray into an allegorical future.112 The final movement of a tone parallel Ellington envisioned in 1933 had reportedly included “a look into the future . . . probably a hundred years from now . . . an apotheosis aiming to put the negro in a more comfortable place among the people of the world and a return to something he lost when he became a slave.”113 The titles of other late-1950s Ellington “space” albums or compositions (e.g., The Cosmic Scene and “Blues in Orbit”), in the absence of explicit

109 110 111 112

113

with Sheldon Harris, I Remember: Eighty Years of Black Entertainment, Big Bands, and the Blues (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), 162–3. Burley, “Back Door.” Ellington had also performed at the Caf´e Zanzibar on multiple occasions. Duke Ellington, “The Race for Space,” in Tucker, Reader, 293–6. Ellington, “Race for Space,” 296. For a discussion of Afrofuturism in relation to historical tropes (including the Egyptian pyramids and the Cold War space race), see George E. Lewis, “After Afrofuturism,” foreword to the Journal of the Society for American Music 2 (May 2008): 139–53. Barry Ulanov, Duke Ellington (New York: Creative Age Press, 1946), 155.

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programmatic narratives, arguably reflect their context in space-raceAmerica more narrowly than Drum’s (then) fictive moon travel and flying saucers. Allusions to technology also emerge in “Rhumbop” via “hip precision tropical nuclear jive-time fission,” though perhaps the context here is more “modern” than futurist. The syncopated consonant syllables of the lyrics to “Rhumbop” reinforce the piece’s angular, chromatic bebop melody, and recall the bebop vocalese tradition in their improvisationlike intricacy. Candido Camero’s hand drums likewise offer a nod to Dizzy Gillespie’s Afro-Cuban bebop aesthetic, as well as maintaining Drum’s thematic ties to “the beat of the original tom-tom.”114 Discographers have noted musical relationships between “Rhumbop” and the Liberian Suite’s “Dance No. 2,” both of which feature Jimmy Hamilton’s adroit clarinet and a harmonic progression similar to “Sweet Georgia Brown.”115 Guthrie Ramsey has examined bebop’s aesthetic of “virtuoso solo improvisations” and “elaborate harmonic and melodic revisions of Tin Pan Alley songs,” and perceived parallels with “modernist” conceptions including urban industrialization.116 Perhaps Ellington invokes similar associations in his assignment of “Dance No. 2” to represent “the chieftain and his people at the [1947 Liberian Centennial] Exposition. They witness the modern machinery, and wonder at the marvels of modern technology.”117 “Rhumbop’s” climactic pre-reprise-finale position within Drum’s program is musically convincing, if chronologically ambivalent. A possible argument against the storyline “backtrack” scenario offered earlier is that, absent the visual choreography of “Flying Saucer,” the audio-centric “Rhumbop” simply offers greater potential as the revue-slot “spectacular”

114

115

116

117

A discussion of Afro-Cuban music, bebop, and concepts of modernism is offered in David Garc´ıa, “‘We Both Speak African’: A Dialogic Study of Afro-Cuban Jazz,” Journal of the Society for American Music 5 (May 2011): 215–19. “Rhumbop” is described as “a derivative of [Liberian Suite] ‘Dance #2/Trebop’” in Timner, Ellingtonia, 171. The musical connection is valid but loose: while both pieces appear to have been co-composed by Ellington and Hamilton, and while both feature a similar harmonic structure and tempo, only brief fragments of the melodic material from “Trebop” – mostly within Hamilton’s own solo phrasing – are reminiscent of “Rhumbop,” and none of it is identical for the duration of a complete phrase. Another Drum “derivation” includes the use of a phrase from “(A Tune in) A-flat Minor,” recorded by Ellington in August 1956; possibly a Clark Terry contribution, this half-valve trumpet phrase reappears in “Hey, Buddy Bolden” (as well as a later piece titled “Bluer”). Guthrie P. Ramsey, Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 107. Regarding bebop as an invocation of modernism, see ibid., 96–108. Ellington, “Liberian Suite.”

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in the album sequence. Such an assignment might be read to reinforce Ellington’s emerging suite-form aesthetic, emphasizing pacing over program. In ensuing projects like Such Sweet Thunder, programmatic titles could be swapped or reconceived in order to compliment the overall musical structure of an album or suite. The intrinsic malleability of the segmented revue format offered Ellington practical and effective solutions for presenting extended forms, and may have also better accommodated his hectic recording and travel schedules. Ellington would increasingly take advantage of the suite-suggestive characteristics inherent in the LP format, allowing an album sequence to suggest its own implicit relationships across its varied content.118

Conclusion: “Now Let Me Tell You a Story” Leonard Bernstein’s 1956 album What Is Jazz? (which opens with Ellington’s theme song, “Take the ‘A’ Train”) proposes “to investigate jazz, not through the usual historical approach of ‘up the river from New Orleans,’ etcetera . . . [but] to find out, once and for all, what it is that sets it apart from all other music.”119 A series of performance demonstrations in historical sequence follows – proceeding from Africa to New Orleans, and essentially “up the river” to Tin Pan Alley – including discussion of blue notes, syncopation, and manipulations of tone color. Ellington’s Drum also tells us about the “innards” of jazz, but through the eyes, ears, and imagination of one (or more) of its primary participants. In telling his own story his own way, with all its theatrical pomposity, sexist imagery, and jive poetry, Ellington’s version of jazz history provides what is arguably absent in What Is Jazz?: a convincing passion and enthusiasm for the power and history of the music. Some of the negative reactions to Drum’s musical or narrative efforts are valid. While the album and telecast scripts are often clever in their musical and sexual entendre, audiences may find their brand of wit demanding of either knowledge or patience. Ellington was at a formative young age when he first observed that “when you were playing piano, there was always a 118

119

Another popular example is The Far East Suite, where the effective finale of the album (“Ad Lib on Nippon”) was not originally envisioned as part of the “suite” per se. Duke Ellington, The Far East Suite, BMG Bluebird 7640–2, 1988, compact disc. See also Stefano Zenni, “The Aesthetics of Duke Ellington’s Suites: The Case of ‘Togo Brava,’” Black Music Research Journal 21 (Spring 2001): 12–23. Leonard Bernstein, What Is Jazz, Omnibus Series, Columbia CL 919, 1956, LP.

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pretty girl standing down at the bass clef end.”120 His apparent need to remind us of this lesson for the duration of his life highlights longstanding and deeply rooted notions of sex and roles of gender in jazz: troubling characteristics of the music’s history that champions of “America’s classical music” still struggle with today. Yet the fact that Drum so shamelessly frames themes of “jungle” primitivism, cultural ownership, commercialization, and urban modernity in a hallucinatory melange of music and eroticism may also be the work’s most profound statement. As an expansive presentation of historical and biographical themes that Ellington felt were important to him – and, by extension, to African American art, and American culture at large – Drum remains an astounding artifact to be reckoned with. With the national telecast of Drum, Ellington appears to finally reassure himself of – indeed, proclaim – his role as an “elder statesman” of jazz, subject to different rules of reception and criticism than other figures of lesser pedigree. Not surprisingly, some of his critics seem to have been a bit slower in picking up on this emerging role – or perhaps they considered themselves to have already accepted the phenomenon, before even Ellington himself did. By 1956, the bandleader’s journey from the Cotton Club “jungle” to the “company of kings” was the stuff of legend. But Drum demonstrates that Ellington had also developed the artistic voice and commercial power necessary to craft his own image as he saw fit, no longer relying on critics and historians to write his epithet for him. His following romantic, political, and spiritual projects, ranging from The Queen’s Suite to My People to The River, could be undertaken with reasonable assurance that the resulting product – whether success or failure – would command respect on a level beyond financial earnings or initial critical reception.121 And even though Drum was not a blockbuster hit with jazz critics and audiences, Ellington and Strayhorn saw enough potential in the project’s LP-length revue/suite format to regularly return to the “concept album” strategy through the remainder of their careers. In Duke Ellington’s America, Harvey Cohen rightly lauds the Drum production as providing “a historical and cultural link between African, 120 121

Ellington, Mistress, 21–2. Ellington’s withholding of the 1959 The Queen’s Suite recording from public distribution during his lifetime could certainly be read to indicate the maestro’s new-found comfort with his sense of historical place; see Stanley Dance, liner notes to The Ellington Suites, Pablo OJCD 446–2, 1990, compact disc. The political context of My People is examined in Cohen, America, 378–407. A discussion of The River and other Ellington works used for ballet is included in Franceschina, Duke, 161–9.

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African American, and Latin American peoples,” and representing a “pioneering” approach to the new technology of television, much as Ellington had done in the recording and radio media.122 Yet Cohen still concludes that “aside from [generating hundreds of articles], the career impact on Ellington from the [Drum TV] special was limited.”123 The tendency to overlook or minimize Drum’s personal and public significance for Ellington during 1956–7 reflects a broad legacy of wishful thinking shared by numerous (mostly jazz) critics who apparently felt as Cohen: that “the music on [the album] A Drum Is a Woman, not Ellington and Strayhorn’s best by a long shot, was too explicitly tied to the visuals to artistically succeed.”124 It is a revealing reflection of jazz historiography that so many commentators have either dismissed or failed to acknowledge the work – with or without “the visuals” – as a revue out of the Harlem stage entertainment tradition. To preclude Drum from Ellington’s major accomplishments for being theater music is to ignore a central component of Ellington’s career, and American art. A Drum Is a Woman stands as a lushly ambitious demonstration of a performance medium that Ellington himself helped to mold, and which served as the vehicle for many of his most influential creations. 122

Cohen, America, 330.

123

Ibid., 333.

124

Ibid., emphasis added.

Index

3 Gymnop´edies (Satie), 153 42nd Street (film), 16, 17 100 Men and a Girl (film), 43 Ad Lib on Nippon, 148, 149, 150, 152, 253, 296 Adams, Diana, 182, 183 Addis Ababa, 257, 258, 259, 261 Adorno, Theodor, 33, 46, 47, 195 Afrique, 242, 254, 255 Afro-Bossa, 238, 241, 249 Afro-Eurasian Eclipse, The, 254, 255 After Bird Jungle, 238, 249 Agate, James, 231 Agon (Stravinsky), 182, 183, 189 Ailey, Alvin, 245, 293 Air Conditioned Jungle, 231 Ajemian, Anahid, 185 Albright, Daniel, 24 Alexander, Karen, 15 All My Loving (Beatles), 218, 219 Altman, Rick, 27 Amad, 149 American in Paris (Gershwin), 62, 274 American Lullaby, 73 Amour, Amour, 256 Anatomy of a Murder (film), 138, 173, 293 Anderson, Cat, 98, 187, 188, 247, 281 Anderson, Ivie, 79 Antony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare), 188 Appalachian Spring (Copeland), 195 Applebaum, Louis, 185 Arlen, Harold, 73 Armstrong, Louis, 1, 25, 29, 30, 32, 50, 76, 80, 116, 117, 145, 163, 164, 220, 278, 279, 280, 281, 282 Ashcroft, Peggy, 186 Astaire, Fred, 15, 22, 40 Astatke, Mulatu, 259, 260, 261 Atkins, Ronald, 103, 105 Avakian, George, 32, 38, 211, 212, 217, 218 Azure, 253 B Sharp Blues, 137 Baby, When You Ain’t There, 85

Bach, Johann Sebastian, 40, 45, 46, 56, 58, 67, 68, 69, 72, 109, 166, 195, 255 Back to Back, 220 Bailey, Bill, 79 Bailey, Ozzie, 284 Bailey, Pearl, 89 Baker, Harold, 280 Balanchine, George, 182, 183 Baldwin, James, 196 Ballad for Americans, 29 Ballet m´echanique (film), 24 Ballet of the Flying Saucers, 215, 271, 273, 279, 288, 289, 291, 293, 294, 295 Band Call, 141 Band Wagon, The (film), 15 Baraka, Amiri, 75 Barnet, Charlie, 164 Baron, Art, 258, 259, 260, 262 Basie, Count, 94, 96, 117, 178, 220 Beach Boys, 216 Beatles, 216, 218, 219 Beatty, Talley, 274 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 47, 67, 68, 69, 140, 189, 255 Beiderbecke, Bix, 32 Belafonte, Harry, 283, 284 Bell, Aaron, 145, 220 Bellerby, Vic, 94, 103, 104 Bellson, Louie, 212, 213, 271 Benamou, Catherine, 278 Benjamin, Joe, 260, 261 Benjamin, Walter, 34 Berio, Luciano, 166 Berkeley, Busby, 25, 27, 28, 29 Berlin, Irving, 50 Bernstein, Leonard, 48, 179, 182, 184, 189, 296 Berry, Chuck, 221 Bigard, Barney, 117, 168, 169 Birdie Jungle, 238, 249 Bizet, Georges, 189 Black and Tan (film), 1, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 28, 38, 62, 86, 204

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300

Index

Black and Tan Fantasy (composition), 18, 19, 20, 23, 98, 116, 201, 202, 210, 228, 229, 235, 248 Black Beauty, 19, 21, 51, 58, 85, 111, 112, 113, 114, 120, 123 Black, Brown and Beige, xix, xx, 9, 11, 12, 36, 37, 48, 61, 62, 67, 73, 125, 126, 179, 180, 181, 189, 196, 197, 202, 210, 230, 232, 234, 235, 240, 241, 242, 273, 277, 284 Blakey, Art, 249 Blanton, Jimmy, 119, 120, 121, 122, 136 Blitzstein, Marc, 182, 185 Blondell, Joan, 28 Blood of Jesus (film), 25 Blowin’ in the Wind (Dylan), 218 Blue Belles of Harlem, 116, 125, 126, 129, 135 Blue Ramble, 85 Blue Serge, 123 Blues in Orbit, 143, 294 Boas, Franz, 233 Bogle, Donald, 14 Bogues, Anthony, 3 Bolden, Buddy, 215, 280 Bop Girl Goes Calypso (film), 283 Boyer, Richard O., 234 Brahms, Johannes, 46, 68, 166 Brando, Marlon, 184 Britten, Benjamin, 100 Broadway Melody of 1940 (film), 22 Brown, Earle, 166 Brown, Lawrence, 26, 131, 145, 149, 169, 171 Brown, Louis, 110 Browne, Roscoe Lee, 184 Brubeck, Dave, 185 Bruckner, Anton, 51, 166, 202 Bundle of Blues (film), 1, 23 Burns, Ken, 198 C Jam Blues, 123 Cabin in the Sky (film), 1, 23, 25 Cage, John, 166 Calloway, Cab, 76 Calypso, 283 Camero, Candido, 270, 271, 295 Cameron, Basil, 56, 58 Caravan, 90, 98, 130, 210, 263 Carmen (Bizet), 189 Carmen Jones (film), 15, 189 Carnegie Hall, 32, 36, 38, 48, 62, 68, 69, 73, 94, 98, 108, 125, 126, 129, 130, 131, 133, 136, 179, 180, 181, 210, 235, 273 Carney, Harry, 92, 96, 134, 145, 147, 187

Carolina Shout, 111 Carribee Joe, 270, 289, 290, 291, 292 Carter, Benny, 88 Carter, Elliott, 45 Cashmere Cutie, 162 Celly, Al, 90 Cera, Stephen, 71 Chandler, Raymond, 199 Change Is Gonna Come, A (Cooke), 6 Chant of the Weed, 136 Chappelle, Dave, 30 Charles, Ray, 216 Charleston (Johnson), 121 Chevalier, Maurice, 64, 204 Chevan, David, 163 Chopin, Fr´ederic, 19, 23, 161, 166 Circle of Fourths, 188 City of Glass, 215 Clansman, The (Dixon), 4 Clarke, Kenny, 249 Clementine, 123 Clothed Woman, The, 133, 134, 135, 136, 146, 150 Cocktails for Two, 214 Cohen, Harvey, 70, 71, 73, 186, 195, 233, 297, 298 Cold War, xix, 178, 183, 206 Cole, Nat King, 178 Coles, Johnny, 260 Collier, James Lincoln, 178, 197 Coltrane, John, 124, 145, 220 Come Easter, 101 Come Sunday, 104, 181 Concord Sonata (Ives), 195 Confrey, Zez, 52 Cong-go, 235, 238, 249 Congo Square, 215, 270, 271, 285, 290, 291, 292 Connor, Edgar, 21 Controversial Suite, 213 Cook, Mercer, 245, 252 Cook, Nicholas, 158, 171 Cook, Will Marion, 111, 226, 252 Cooke, Sam, 6 Cooper, George “Buster,” 245 Copland, Aaron, 51, 54, 179, 195 Corelli, Arcangelo, 166 Cosmic Scene, The, 294 Cotton Club, 22, 23, 50, 55, 57, 64, 77, 116, 204, 224, 226, 227, 228, 229, 231, 232, 242, 248, 250, 255, 263, 282, 290, 293, 294, 297

Index

Cotton Club Stomp, The, 22 Cotton Club, The (film), 1 Cottontail, 120 Countee Cullen, 67 Creole Love Call, 85, 98, 203, 248 Creole Rhapsody, 38, 53, 55, 56, 59, 60, 62, 63, 64, 93, 116, 117, 202, 210, 215 Crombie, Tony, 90 Cultural Front. See Popular Front Dafora, Asadata, 239 Dakar, 237, 242, 244, 245, 246, 247, 248, 249, 250, 252, 253, 254, 255, 256 Damrosch, Walter, 47, 69 Dance No. 1 (Liberian Suite), 293 Dance No. 2 (Liberian Suite), 295 Dance, Stanley, 95, 96, 99, 211, 212 Dancers In Love, 129, 130, 162, 248 Dandridge, Dorothy, 189 Dankworth, John, 98 Darrell, R.D., 18, 19, 20, 51, 52, 54, 57, 58, 59, 61, 62, 64, 68, 69 Davis, Kay, 89, 131 Davis, Miles, 1, 120, 136, 280 Davison, Harold, 92 Dawn, Marpesa, 246 Day Dream, 147, 162 Daybreak Express, 205 Dean, James, 184 Debussy, Claude, xvii, 51, 60, 68, 137, 138, 255 Deep Forest, 254 Deep South Suite, xix, 108, 131, 132, 133, 137, 139, 179, 187, 189 Delius, Frederick, xvii, 51, 54, 56, 58, 60 Denby, Edwin, 182, 183 Denning, Michael, 28, 29, 182 Depk, 148, 253 DeVeaux, Scott, 162, 165, 166, 167, 170 D`ew`el (Astatke), 259, 260 Dewhurst, Colleen, 184 Dexter, Dave Jr., 35 Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue, 62, 96, 116, 117, 142, 218 Dinerstein, Joel, 200, 205 Dishman, Les, 110 Dixon, Thomas, 4 Dodge, Roger Pryor, 49, 50, 52, 61, 62, 64, 66 Domino, Fats, 188 Dowland, John, 188 Drum Is a Woman, A, xx, 93, 181, 186, 215, 235, 265–98

Du Bois, W. E. B., 4, 6, 9, 10, 11, 180, 192, 226, 233, 234 Duberman, Martin, 180 Dubin, Al, 28 Dudley, Bessie, 79 Duke Ellington and John Coltrane, 220 Duke Ellington Panorama, A, 36 Duke Ellington Songbook, The, 186 Duke Ellington, The Pianist, 147 Duke Plays Ellington, The, 139 Duke Steps Out, The, 21 Duke, Vernon, 73 Duval, Lawrence, 83 Dvoˇra´ k, Anton´ın, 97 Dyer, Richard, 13 Dylan, Bob, 218 East St. Louis Toodle-O, 116, 202, 214, 228, 235 Ebony Rhapsody, 48, 62, 74 Echoes of the Jungle, 231 Edwards, Brent Hayes, 190 El Gato, 98 El Viti, 246, 248 Elgar, Edward, 51, 97 Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Duke Ellington Songbook, 93 Ellington ’65, 218 Ellington ’66, 218, 219, 220 Ellington at Newport, 93, 142, 198, 217, 218, 265, 266, 276 Ellington Uptown, i, 20, 211, 215 Ellington, Duke Africa, xviii, 12, 23, 67, 224–64, 269, 272, 273, 278, 279, 280, 296, 297 African American music traditions, 67, 68, 225, 226, 234, 269 civil rights, xx, 179, 180, 181, 205, 206, 282 composer, xix, 57–70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 78, 93, 157–76, 267, 269 composition, 38, 49, 51, 53, 54 critical reception, xv–xvi, 49, 76 entertainment, xvi, 78, 93 extended form, xviii, xx, 36, 38, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 68, 70, 72, 73, 74, 93, 103, 116, 125, 126, 137, 170, 173, 179, 189, 196, 202, 203, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 215, 267, 268, 276, 296 film, 1–31 jungle style, 20, 55, 57, 60, 86, 191, 197, 224, 225, 227, 228, 229, 230, 231, 235, 236, 239, 242, 248, 254, 255, 292

301

302

Index

Ellington, Duke (cont.) LP (long-playing recording) as a medium, Ellington and, xix, 197–223, 239, 266, 268, 286, 296, 297 pianist, xviii, 108–56 public persona, xvi, xvii, 1, 2, 27, 31, 33, 36, 38, 47, 51, 53, 57, 59, 61, 62, 63, 64, 74 publicity, xvii, 38, 57, 77, 204, 265, 276 race, xvii, xx, 1, 2, 13, 23, 27, 30, 88, 190, 199, 204, 205 tone parallels, 67, 179, 186, 215, 267 United Kingdom, xvii–xviii, 76–107 Ellington, Mercer, 63, 123, 164, 167, 168, 186, 252, 286 Ellington, Ruth, 186, 234 Ellingtonia (album), 34, 35, 38, 74, 165 Ellison, Ralph, 30, 196 Emperor Jones, The (film), 24 Epic of the Sudan (Es-Sadi), 233 Ethiopia, 3, 224, 225, 226, 232, 233, 243, 257, 258, 259, 260, 261, 262 Evans, Bill, 141 Evans, Gil, 119, 136, 137 Evolution of Rhythm, 289 Evolution of the Negro in Picture, Song and Story, The, 226, 232 Fallon, Jack, 90 Far East Suite, 145, 148, 152, 197, 219, 223, 253, 296 Farrakhan, Louis, 3 Farrington, Holly, 199 Feather, Leonard, 93, 252, 267, 269, 278, 279, 280 Feldman, Morton, 166 Felix, Brian, 218 Ferneyhough, Brian, 166 Fiedler, Arthur, 212 Fielding, Harold, 91 Fifty-Second Street Theme (Monk), 140 First World Festival of Negro Arts, The (film), 245, 246 Fitzgerald, Ella, 93, 103, 104, 186, 243 Flaming Youth, 22 Flamingo, 214, 274 Fleurette Africaine, La, 238, 239, 249, 263 Footlight Parade (film), 29 Franceschina, John, 275 Francis, Harry, 92 Gabbard, Krin, 1, 21, 23, 25 Gammond, Peter, 267, 272

Garbo, Greta, 2 Garland, Red, 119 Garrison, Jimmy, 220 Garvey, Marcus, 283 Genius Hits the Road, The (album) (Charles), 217 Gershwin, George, 46, 47, 48, 50, 51, 55, 59, 60, 62, 64, 69, 70, 73, 120, 228, 288 Ghana, 225, 235, 236, 243 Giddins, Gary, 162, 165, 166, 167, 170, 198, 212 Gillespie, Dizzy, 112, 120, 295 Gillman, Susan, 4, 11 Girl from Ipanema, The (Jobim), 256 Glamann, Betty, 273, 287 Glassberg, David, 8 Gleason, Ralph, 108, 212 Glenn, Tyree, 235 Godkin, Paul, 293 Goffin, Robert, 66 Gold Diggers of 1933 (film), 27 Gonsalves, Paul, 95, 96, 118, 143, 145, 155, 187, 188, 193, 198, 218, 270, 271 Gottlieb, George, 16 Gould, Glenn, 30 Gould, Morton, 48 Goutelas Suite, 253 Graetinger, Bob, 215 Grainger, Percy, 56, 58, 59, 67, 69 Grant, Henry, 110 Granz, Norman, 93, 94 Greatest There Is (He’s a Whiz), The, 281 Greaves, William, 246, 247, 255, 256 Green, Edward, xv Greenberg, Clement, 34, 44, 46 Greenlee, George, 193 Greer, Sonny, 111, 228, 230, 232, 235, 238, 277, 289 Grieg, Edvard, 54 Grof´e, Ferde, 46, 47, 59, 73 Guthrie, Ramsey, 295 Guthrie, Tyrone, 183 Guthrie, Woody, 179 Hagen, Uta, 186 Haig, Al, 112 Hajdu, David, 185, 193, 273, 275, 276, 284 Half the Fun, 188, 189 Hall, Barrie Lee, Jr., 258, 259, 260, 262 Hall, Henry, 82 Hall Johnson Choir, 23 Hallelujah! (film), 24

Index

Hamilton, Jimmy, 98, 131, 149, 151, 152, 187, 193, 231, 295 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 187, 188 Hammerstein, Oscar II, 182, 189 Hammond, John, 65 Hampton, Justin, 9 Happy-Go-Lucky Local, 108, 132, 133, 136 Hardin, Lil, 163, 278 Hardwick, Otto, 171 Hasse, John, 225 Haup´e, 138 Hawkins, Coleman, 89, 96, 145, 220 Hayden, Melissa, 183 Heath, Edward, 101 Heath, Ted, 92 Heifetz, Jascha, 30 Heindorf, Ray, 28 Hellman, Lillian, 179 Henderson, Fletcher, 251 Henderson, Luther, 164 Hendrix, Jimi, 219 Henry, Pierre, 221 Hentoff, Nat, 240, 251, 271, 279 Hepburn, Audrey, 2 Herman, Woody, 178 Hey, Buddy Bolden, 270, 274, 280, 281, 290, 292, 295 Hi Fi Fo Fum, 98 Hibbler, Al, 235 Hi-Fi Ellington Uptown, xx, 211 Hindemith, Paul, 54, 179 Historically Speaking: The Duke, 214 Hodeir, Andr´e, 197 Hodges, Johnny, 92, 95, 98, 122, 145, 155, 171, 187, 188, 193, 219, 220, 249, 271, 287, 288 Hoefsmit, Sjef, 241 Homzy, Andrew, 165 Honeymoon Hotel, 29 Hopkins, Claude, 110 Horowitz, Joseph, 33, 44, 45 Hot and Bothered, 53, 55, 203 House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), 180, 184, 294 How High the Moon, 188 Howland, John, 12, 16, 20, 206, 212, 226, 272, 286 Hughes, Langston, 179, 246, 256 Hughes, Spike, 65, 77, 78, 79, 85, 86, 91 Hylton, Jack, 79, 81, 82, 83, 87, 88, 91 Hymn of Sorrow, 13, 24 I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, 214 I Don’t Know What Kind of Blues I Got, 123

I Don’t Mind, 123 I Got Rhythm (Gershwin), 120, 139 I Like the Sunrise, 235 I Never Felt This Way Before, 120, 167–70, 173 I Want to Hold Your Hand (Beatles), 218 In a Mellotone, 119 In the Beginning God, 101 In Triplicate, 262 Isfahan, 162, 219, 253 Iverson, Ethan, 71, 72, 74 Ives, Charles, 195 Jack the Bear, 119, 120, 136, 214 Jackson, Mahalia, 181 Jackson, Quentin “Butter,” 187, 284 Jamal, Ahmad, 119, 120 Jameson, Frederic, 5, 7 Jamison, Judith, 245 Janet, 137 Jazz Messengers, 249 Jeep’s Blues, 98 Jeffries, Herb, 168, 170, 274, 283 Jenkins, Freddie, 165 Jenkins, Henry, 15, 16, 18 Jewell, Derek, 105 Jobim, Antonio Carlos, 256 Johnson, James P., 22, 50, 52, 111, 112, 114, 121, 140, 279 Johnson, Lyndon, 146 Jones, Elvin, 220 Jones, Hank, 112 Jones, Herbie, 165 Jones, James Earl, 184 Jones, Max, 91, 92, 99, 100, 101, 105 Jones, Rufus, 149, 255 Jones, Wallace, 168 Jordan, Louis, 283 Jump for Joy (musical), 24, 173, 179, 277, 278, 289 Jungle Blues, 231 Jungle Jamboree, 231 Jungle Kitty, 238, 249 Jungle Nights in Harlem, 51, 231 Jungle Triangle, 238, 249 Juniflip, 98 Just A-Settin’ and A-Rockin’, 123 Katz, Mark, 206 Keightley, Keir, 208, 210, 212 Kelly, Gene, 22, 274 Kenton, Stan, 92, 178, 215 Kentucky Club, 63 Kinda Dukish, 139, 140, 153

303

304

Index

King, Martin Luther, 6, 181 King Fit the Battle of Alabam, 181 Kitt, Eartha, 188 Ko-Ko, 120, 136, 214 Kostelanetz, Andre, 46, 47, 74, 212 Kott, Jan, 184 Kuebler, Annie, 174 La Nevada, 136 Lady Mac, 143, 187 Lamb, John, 149, 176, 247, 249 Lambert, Constant, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 61, 62, 64, 65, 67, 68, 69, 78, 79, 83, 281, 289 Lang, Eddie, 52 Lang, Fritz, 199 Lange, Dorthea, 29 Las Vegas Tango, 136 Lascelles, Gerald, 97, 101 Lately, 188 Lawrence, Carol, 183 Lazy Rhapsody, 85 Leavitt, Michael, 8 L´eger, Fernand, 24 Leur, Walter van de, xviii, xix, 138, 273 Levine, Lawrence, 44, 183 Liberian Suite, The, 213, 235, 238, 292, 293, 295 Lincoln, Abraham, 7 Liszt, Franz, 55, 62, 63, 73 Little Rootie Tootie, 133 Liza, 214 Lock, Graham, 196, 269 Logan, Arthur, 175 Lorin, Will, 268 Lots o’ Fingers, 116, 202 Louis, Joe, 191 Lovejoy, Alec, 21 Lowenthal, Leo, 33 LP (long-playing recording) as a medium, 172, 205–8, 216, 222, 279, 286 Lunceford, Jimmie, 164 Lynes, Russell, 34, 39, 42, 212 Lyttelton, Humphrey, 94, 97, 98 M’bow, Gana, 249, 250 Macbeth (Shakespeare), 183, 185, 187 Macdonald, Dwight, 34, 39, 40, 42, 44, 45, 46, 47, 63 Madness in Great Ones, 187, 188 Mahler, Gustav, 51, 202 Mailer, Norman, 27 Malcolm X, 196

Marche fun`ebre (Chopin), 19, 23 Marshall, Wendell, 213 Martin, David Stone, 38 Masterpieces by Ellington, 209, 211 Matumbe, 270, 271, 291, 292 McCarthy, Joseph, xix, 178 McDaniel, Hattie, 15 McFadden, William, 71 Mecuria, the Lion, 258, 259 Meditation, 152, 153 Melancholia, 137, 138, 139 Menand, Louis, 44, 45 Mendelssohn, Felix, 166, 192, 193 Menelik – the Lion of Judah (Stewart), 261 Metropolis (film), 199 Metzer, David, 20 middlebrow, xvi, xvii, 32–49, 52, 55–75, 208, 212, 214, 274 Middleton, Richard, 159 Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare), 177, 178, 186, 187, 192 Miles Ahead (album), 120 Miley, James, 19, 227, 228, 229 Milhaud, Darious, 54 Miller, Max, 79 Miller, Mitch, 202, 210 Mills, Irving, 1, 57, 59, 60, 61, 63, 64, 67, 71, 77, 78, 86, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 231 Minerve, Harold, 260, 262 Mingus, Charles, 145, 220, 238 Minnelli, Vincente, 25, 26 Mitchell, Arthur, 182, 183 Mitchell, Malcolm, 90 Mitropoulos, Dmitri, 185 Modern American Music (Willson), 73 Modern Jazz Quartet, 185 Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music (Charles), 216 Money Jungle, 220, 238, 249 Monk, Thelonious, 114, 120, 121, 122, 126, 133, 140, 156 Mooche, The, 85, 98, 213, 229, 236, 237, 248, 263, 292 Mood Indigo, 51, 55, 59, 68, 80, 81, 85, 102, 115, 127, 154, 203, 205, 210 Morgan, Lee, 219 Morning Air, 113, 135 Morrow, Edward R., 186 Morton, Ferdinand “Jelly Roll,” 48, 112, 164 Morton, John Fass, 217 Mos Def, 30 Mount Harissa, 148 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 45, 52, 60, 158

Index

Mr. J. B. Blues, 120, 121, 122, 123 Muddy Waters, 98, 221 Murder at the Vanities (film), 48, 62 Murphy, Dudley, 23 Muscle Shoals Blues, 114 Music Is My Mistress (book), 64, 98, 105, 174, 187, 199, 201, 203, 224, 226, 249 My Funny Valentine, 98 My Old Flame, 214 My People, xx, 181, 297 Nabokov, Nicholas, 179 Nance, Ray, 89, 91, 122, 123, 145, 187, 191, 192, 193, 273, 279, 281, 283, 292 Nanton, Joe “Tricky Sam,” 19, 87, 123, 166, 169, 171, 227, 228 Naremore, James, 25 Negro Nuances, 226, 232 Nelson, Stanley, 76, 78, 81, 82, 107 New Conversations, 141 New Orleans (film), 280 New Orleans Suite, 253 New Rhumba, 120 New World A-Comin’, xix, 126, 128, 129, 152, 179 New York Philharmonic, 59, 185 Nicholas brothers, 89 Nichols, Red, 35 Night Creature, 142 Nobody Was Looking, 108, 131, 132, 139, 187 Obama, Barack, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 15, 27, 30, 31 Odets, Clifford, 179, 184 Old Man Blues, 85 Old Man River (Kern), 12 Olivier, Lawrence, 188 Opener, The, 247 Original Dixieland Jazz Band, 80 Osgood, Henry, 50 Othello (Shakespeare), 178, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190–2, 196 Overture to a Jam Session, 162 Page, Patti, 178 Panassi´e, Hughes, 65, 66 Papp, Joseph, 183, 184, 188 Parker, Charlie, 112, 239 Perdido, 98, 123, 213 Perfume Suite, 129, 130, 162 Perry, Doc, 110 Pet Sounds (Beach Boys), 216 Peter, Paul, and Mary, 218 Pettiford, Oscar, 133, 136

Phillips, Woolf, 89 Piano Reflections, 137, 141 Pierrot Lunaire (Sch¨onberg), 160 Pink Floyd, 217 Plus Belle Africaine, La, xviii, 101, 224, 238, 241–2, 248, 249, 251, 262 Pollack, Jackson, 45 Pomegranate, 271, 274, 293 Popular Front, 13, 27, 179 Porgy and Bess (Gershwin), 196 Portrait of Ella Fitzgerald, 93 Portrait of The Lion, 146 Powell, Bud, 112 Powell, Eleanor, 22 Premiered by Ellington, 214 Pretty and the Wolf, 99 Pretty Girl, 187 Procope, Russell, 187, 193, 214, 273 Prouty, Kenneth, 75 Prudente, Vince, 257, 262 Queen Elizabeth II, 97, 98, 143 Queen’s Suite, 97, 143, 144, 297 Queenie Pie, 174 Rachmaninoff, Sergei, 97 Raglin, Junior, 136 Ramsey, Frederick Jr., 66 Randolph, A. Phillip, 180 Ransom, Reverdy C., 6, 7, 11 Rape of a Rhapsody, 62, 73 Ravel, Maurice, 51, 53, 54, 68, 137, 138 Real Jazz, The (book), 61, 66 Reed, Barbara, 185 Reflections in D, 137, 138, 139, 141 Reich, Howard, 72 Reigger, Wallingford, 56 Reiner, Fritz, 69, 186 Reinhardt, Max, 192 Remember My Forgotten Man, 28, 29 Reminiscing in Tempo, 62, 65, 170–1, 173, 202, 210 Retrospection, 137, 138, 139 Rhapsody in Blue (Gershwin), 55, 288 Rhapsody Jr., 62 Rhapsody of Negro Life (film), 1, 11 Rhodes, Cecil, 3 Rhumbop, 215, 271, 279, 290, 291, 293, 295 Rhythm Pum Te Dum, 235, 270, 282, 292 Rhyth-Mania (drama), 229 Right On Togo, 242, 256 Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai, 51, 68 River, The, 297

305

306

Index

Roach, Max, 145, 220, 238, 239, 240, 263 Robbins, Jack, 90 Robbins, Jerome, 183 Robeson, Paul, 12, 13, 29, 179, 180, 186 Robinson, Jackie, 180 Robinson, Sugar Ray, 191 Rock City Rock, 236 Rockin’ in Rhythm, 85, 139, 140 Rodgers, Richard, 182 Rodzinski, Artur, 69 Rogers, Ginger, 40 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare), 183, 187 Rooney, Mickey, 192 Ross, Alex, 47, 48, 62, 63 Rubin, Joan Shelley, 33, 44, 45 Rubinstein, Anton, 30 Run Joe, 283 Rushing, Jimmy, 98 Sacre du printemps, Le (Stravinsky), 22, 51 Sacred Concerts, xviii, xx, 76, 91, 100–5, 106, 181, 197 A Concert of Sacred Music, 100, 102, 152, 276 Second Sacred Concert, 253 Third Sacred Concert, 101, 154, 257 Sanders, John, 165, 170, 175, 187, 193 Sargeant, Winthrop, 69 Satie, Erik, 153 Satin Doll, 247 Schaap, Phil, 217, 218 Schaeffer, Pierre, 221 Schiff, David, 215 Schoenberg, Arnold, 160, 179, 182 Scholl, Warren, 52, 57 Schrecker, Ellen, 180 Schubert, Franz, 52, 60 Schuller, Gunther, 72, 197, 269, 273 Scott, George C., 184 Scott, Hazel, 278 Sears, Al, 172, 173 Second Hungarian Rhapsody (Liszt), 62 Second Portrait of The Lion, 146, 147 S´edor, L´eopold, 242, 243 Selassie, Haile, 3, 225, 257, 258, 259, 260, 261, 262 Seldes, Gilbert, 40, 50 Senegal, 224, 225, 237, 241, 242, 243, 244, 245, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253, 254, 255, 256 Senghor, 242, 243, 244, 251, 252 Sepia Panorama, 89, 120 Seuss, Dr., 293

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Beatles), 216 Shakespeare, William, xix, 45, 99, 177, 178, 181, 183, 184, 185, 188, 189, 190, 196, 215, 216 Shapiro, Nat, 279 Shaw, Artie, 66 Shepherd, The, 147, 148 Sherman Shuffle, 123 Shively, W. Phillips, 5 Shostakovich, Dmitri, 179 Show Boat (film), 12, 15 Show Girl (musical), 62 Sibelius, Jean, 51, 68 Side by Side, 220 Sidewinder (Morgan), 219 Silver, Horace, 148, 149 Sinatra, Frank, 217 Singin’ in the Rain (film), 274 Singin’ in the Rain (song), 22 Single Petal of a Rose, The, 143, 144, 259 Skin Deep, 212, 213 Smada, 162 Smith, Bessie, 50 Smith, Charles Edward, 66 Smith, Clara, 50 Smith, Pine Top, 35 Smith, Willie “The Lion,” 111, 113, 114, 133, 146, 279 Sneakaway, 113 Snowden, Elmer, 228, 229 Soda Fountain Rag, 110 Solitude, 68, 90, 124, 126, 210, 242 Sondheim, Stephen, 182 Song of the Cotton Field, 228 Sonnet for Caesar, 187 Sonnet for Sister Kate, 187 Sonnet in Search of a Moor, 143, 187, 216 Sonnet to Hank Cinq, 99, 187 Sophisticated Lady, 90, 210, 247 Soul Soothing Beach, 256 Springtime in Africa, 238, 249 Star of Ethiopia, The (drama), 9, 10, 11, 226, 233, 234, 257, 261 Star-Crossed Lovers, The, 138, 187, 188 Stardust, 214 Stearns, Marshall, 227, 280 Stewart, Milton, 162 Stewart, Rex, 169, 261, 281 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 166 Stokowski, Leopold, 43, 45, 56, 58, 69 Stomp for Beginners, 129

Index

Stormy Weather, 214 Stratemann, Klaus, 22 Strauss, Johann, 54, 55 Stravinsky, Igor, xvii, 22, 45, 51, 53, 54, 68, 179, 182, 189 Strayhorn, Billy, xix, xx, 108, 122, 129, 137, 138, 145, 155, 162, 164, 167, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 182, 185, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 195, 196, 209, 219, 221, 236, 237, 253, 265, 266, 269, 273, 274, 284, 287, 290, 292, 297, 298 Such Sweet Thunder, xix, xx, 93, 99, 138, 143, 177–96, 215, 216, 223, 266, 296 Sullivan, Arthur, 97 Sweet Georgia Brown, 290, 295 symphonic jazz, xvii, 41, 42, 43, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 53, 54, 55, 59, 62, 63, 65, 66, 202, 272, 273, 286, 289 Symphony in Black (film), xx, 1, 11, 12, 13, 14, 20, 24, 62 Takahashi, Yuji, 166 Take the “A” Train, 95, 98, 205, 213, 248, 296 Tall, Papa Ibra, 250 Taruskin, Richard, 159 Tatum, Art, 89, 140, 185 Taylor, Billy, 110, 119 Taylor, Cecil, 133, 136 Taylor, Deems, 69 Teachout, Terry, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 225 Telecasters, The, 187, 216 Tenderly, 98 Terry, Clark, 98, 187, 193, 271, 273, 280, 281, 290, 295 Theile, Bob, 220 Things Ain’t What They Used to Be, 26, 98 Thomas, Louis, 110 Thomson, Virgil, 45 Thornhill, Claude, 164 Three Little Words, 214 Tiger Rag, 38, 80 Tippy-Toeing through the Jungle Garden, 254 Tizol, Juan, 165, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 263 Togo Brava Suite, 254, 255, 256, 262 Tomkins, Les, 104 Tommy (The Who), 217 Tone Parallel to Harlem, xix, 103, 137, 179, 180, 213 Toscanini, Arturo, 33, 42, 43, 45, 47 Towler, Edward, 267, 273 Townsend, Irving, 216, 217, 265, 266, 268, 278, 287

Traill, Sinclair, 96, 98 Transblucency, 90, 131, 253 Tristano, Lennie, 222 Tucker, Mark, 9, 11, 12, 67, 123, 198, 199 Turner, Nat, 234 Tynes, Margaret, 273, 286, 287 Ulanov, Barry, 13, 267 U.S. Steel Hour (television program), 186, 215, 266, 270, 276 Unknown Session, 145 Up and Down, Up and Down (I Will Lead Them Up and Down), 187, 188, 189, 192, 194, 216 Uptown Downbeat, 117, 120, 121 UWIS Suite, 253 variety. See vaudeville vaudeville, 15, 16, 18, 20, 21, 23, 41, 62, 64, 77, 78–82, 83, 85, 86, 87, 89, 90, 91, 93, 101, 106, 116, 163, 226, 227, 272, 273 Vaughan Williams, Ralph, 97 Venuti, Joe, 52 Vesey, Denmark, 234 Vidor, King, 24 Virgin Jungle, 238, 249 Voce, Steve, 93 Wagner, Richard, 67 Waksman, Steve, 221 Walker, Alice, 196 Wall, The (Pink Floyd), 217 Waller, Thomas “Fats”, 89, 111, 114 Walton, William, 97 War Requiem (Britten), 100 Warm Valley, 122 Warren, Guy, 235, 236, 238, 239, 240 Warren, Harry, 28, 73 Washington, Fredi, 20, 21, 22, 23 Washingtonians, 229 Webern, Anton, 182 Webster, Ben, 120, 123, 169 Weill, Kurt, 54, 185, 186 Weinstein, Norman, 282, 283 Welles, Orson, 45, 183, 274, 277, 278 West End Blues, 116 West Indian Dance, 284 West Indian Pancake, 101 West Side Story (Bernstein), 182, 183, 184, 189 Whale, James, 12 Whaley, Tom, 164, 165, 170, 174, 176 What a Wonderful World (Armstrong), 29

307

308

Index

What Else, 270, 284, 292 What Is Jazz?, 296 Whetsol, Arthur, 20, 21 Whispering Tiger, 80 White, Quentin “Rocky,” 258, 260, 261, 262 Whiteman, Paul, 41, 46, 47, 49, 50, 51, 52, 55, 56, 58, 59, 60, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 73, 74, 125, 212, 228, 286, 288 Who Knows?, 137 Who, the, 217 Willard, Patricia, 258 William Morris Agency, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 68, 69, 204 Williams, Cootie, 87, 163, 169, 170, 171, 173 Williams, Mary Lou, 164 Williams, Ned, 57 Willson, Meredith, 73 Wilmer, Valerie, 103

Wilson, Derby, 79 Wilson, John S., 178, 276 Wood, Natalie, 183 Woode, Jimmy, 187 Woodman, Britt, 172, 187 Woodyard, Sam, 96, 145, 220, 236, 242, 247, 249, 252, 263, 289 Wriggle, John, 215 Wright, Richard, 188, 196 Yamekraw (film), 22, 24, 28 You Better Know It, 270, 271, 273, 281, 284, 290 Your Love Has Faded, 162 Zak, Albin, 202, 221 Zambia, 224, 225, 243, 261, 262 Ziegfeld, Florenz, 62, 64 Zolotow, Maurice, 234