The Ellington Century Read online

  ROTH FAMILY FOUNDATION

  Music in America Imprint

  Michael P. Roth and Sukey Garcetti have endowed this imprint to honor the memory of their parents, Julia and Harry Roth, whose deep love of music they wish to share with others.

  The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Constance and William Withey Endowment Fund for History and Music of the UC Press Foundation.

  The publisher also gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution to this book provided by the Manfred Bukofzer Endowment of the American Musicological Society.

  The Ellington Century

  David Schiff

  UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

  Berkeley • Los Angeles • London

  Passages from the Duke Ellington poem discussed in chapter 6 courtesy of the Estate of Mercer K. Ellington and its executor, Paul M. Ellington.

  University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

  University of California Press

  Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

  University of California Press, Ltd.

  London, England

  © 2012 by The Regents of the University of California

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Schiff, David.

  The Ellington century / David Schiff.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-520-24587-7 (cloth : alk. paper)

  1. Jazz—History and criticism. 2. Jazz—Analysis,

  appreciation. 3. Ellington, Duke, 1899-1974—

  Criticism and interpretation. 4. Music—20th century—

  History and criticism. I. Title.

  ML3506.S287 2012

  780.9′04—dc23 2011034123

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Rolland Enviro100, a 100 percent postconsumer fiber paper that is FSC certified, deinked, processed chlorine-free, and manufactured with renewable biogas energy. It is acid-free and EcoLogo certified.

  To Judy

  Contents

  Preface

  Acknowledgments

  PART ONE

  Overture: Such Sweet Thunder

  1. “Blue Light”: Color

  2. “Cotton Tail”: Rhythm

  3. “Prelude to a Kiss”: Melody

  4. “Satin Doll”: Harmony

  PART TWO

  Entr'acte: “Sepia Panorama”

  5. “Warm Valley”: Love

  6. Black, Brown and Beige: History

  7. “Heaven”: God

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Preface

  As a composer I spend the better part of my life happily adrift with only the haziest idea of what I'm doing. Composing veers from the directionless to the inevitable (calm sea to prosperous voyage) so suddenly that both phases seem beyond my control. Writing about music, for me, is most enjoyable when it feels similarly unwilled and when, like Columbus, I end up in a different place from the one I thought I was trying to reach. For better or worse, that is what happened many times in the course of writing this book.

  The initial impulse for The Ellington Century sprang from my love for Duke Ellington's music (a devotion that began in high school when, browsing through the record store bins between Miles Davis and Maynard Ferguson, I came upon the LPs At His Very Best and Daybreak Express and which later was magnified by the pioneering research of Gunther Schuller and Mark Tucker) and my consequent dissatisfaction with most histories of twentieth-century music. Ellington's name rarely appeared in these accounts, and when it did he figured as an anomaly, a composer in a genre defined by improvisation, a “serious” popular musician who, unlike George Gershwin, never crossed over to the forms of the concert hall or opera house, a successful song writer who worked far from the commercial machinery of Tin Pan Alley and who never composed a hit Broadway musical. Music history conceived as separate stories about classical music, musical theater, and popular song placed Ellington's music on the periphery, somehow extraneous despite its undeniable appeal. With every rehearing, though, I came to feel that this music belonged at the center of a cross-categorical story that had yet to be written.

  The distance that my own view of things had drifted from mainstream opinion became clear when, on the eve of the millennium, the New York Times asked me to write a retrospective article on the passing century. I opened my article by asserting that Ravel, Bartók, and Ellington were universally acknowledged as the three greatest composers of the century. Apparently finding my claim perversely idiosyncratic, an editor at the Times advised me to drop that opening and recenter the piece on Stravinsky and Schoenberg or Webern and Cage. I realize now that my initial lead, consigned until now to the Times' trash basket, was both provocative and overoptimistic (and idiosyncratic, though hardly perverse), but making a short list of “greats” taught me a lot about my own sensibility. Today the Ravel/Bartók/Ellington trinity stands even higher in my critical estimation, but I realize that I came to value Ravel and Bartók by first absorbing Debussy and Stravinsky; I listened to their music, particularly La Mer and Agon, so much in my early years that now I simply take their influence for granted. (Just so you know how strange I was: in high school I used to walk around singing the twelve-tone “Surge, aquilo” aria from Stravinsky's Canticum Sacrum, and I would play through whole acts from Pelléas in my head from memory. No wonder I wasn't popular.) A decade of round-the-clock Mahler a little later on left a similar indelible mark, as did an intense Zappa phase (which, regrettably, never surfaces in this book). Before I began to listen to Ellington, I had steeped myself in the three M's: Mingus, Monk, and Miles; I was fortunate to hear all three perform live many times, and I think I've gone through seven copies—LPs, tapes, and CDs—of Kind of Blue. All these musicians shaped my musical proclivities before the age of twenty. Over the years my taste in music has expanded widely and unpredictably, though I still have plenty of blind spots, as my students will be happy to tell you.

  The first sketch for this book attempted a revisionist history of a short “Ellington century” from 1899 to 1974, but I soon realized that I was not a historian either by training or by temperament; the book would be a composer's view, not a historian's (though, reader be warned, my previous life as a student of English literature has also left its mark). I also consciously decided not to build the project on a foundation of gripes. I wanted to talk about the music I liked, not quibble with Adorno or Boulez. The music I liked included works from genres that are usually treated separately, and unequally. I hoped to punch some holes in the walls between them, but I gradually came to appreciate the full force of Ellington's dictum: “It's all music.” The old categories of high and low, elite and vernacular, even of European and American and black and white, misrepresented a shared worldwide project: imagining and creating music that illuminated the unprecedented conditions of modern life.

  One day, after I had mapped out a chronological outline of the century with some flashy chapter headings, an alternative approach suddenly came to mind and defined the task at hand. Instead of doing battle with history I would write a nonhistory. Instead of organizing the book chronologically I would talk about music in term
s of color, rhythm, melody, and harmony. Instead of trying to cover all the important music of the century in textbook fashion, I would just talk about particular works that illuminated these facets of musical expression, to which I later added three areas of musical representation: love, history, and God. For each of these areas I found it easy to identify music by Ellington that exemplified expressive and technical pursuits shared with many other composers. An Ellington century then took shape (relatively) effortlessly.

  That was where I started; where did I end up? Nothing in my prospectus implied a method, much less the kind of theoretical apparatus that scholars are expected to announce in advance these days. I knew what I wanted to do, but I had no idea how I would achieve my goal— and that's where writing this book became like composing. I allowed myself to be disorderly and intuitive, as if I were improvising on the keyboard or singing in the shower. I read all sorts of books and articles, stories and poems, some of them very far afield from my intended topics. And I listened: all the time, and all over the musical map. The more intently I listened, the more time I spent alone with the music, the happier I became. At some point I realized that my own pleasure would give the book its method. I listened and I wrote and then I listened some more. Instead of writing history I composed a disorderly and highly personal bundle of love letters to my favorite works of music—sprinkled with occasional lovers' quarrels.

  Throughout all my labors on this book, the vast legacy of the Ellington Orchestra sustained and animated my efforts. In the past, when I have finished writing an article or teaching a class about a composer, I have sometimes felt the need for a change of scenery and have given the music a short (or occasionally even permanent) vacation, but, despite all the time I have put into researching and writing this book, I can't imagine a day in my life without the joyous revelations of the Ellington (and Co.) playlist.

  Acknowledgments

  Writing this book has increased my appreciation of a vast number of wise and supportive colleagues, friends, and institutions. My first thanks go to Reed College for awarding me an essential yearlong sabbatical leave, and also for encouraging my work and stimulating my mind for over thirty years. My Reed colleagues Virginia Hancock (proofreader par excellence), Mark Burford, Jacqueline Dirks, Roger Porter, and Pancho Savery offered helpful advice and, even better, asked me hard questions. Jim Holmes and Erin Conor in the Reed Library helped me track down material and document it.

  My second institutional thanks goes to the wonderful staff at the Archive Center of the Smithsonian Museum of American History, always knowledgeable and generous in sharing their treasures. Particular thanks go to Reuben Jackson, who told me that I handled original documents like a musician; I think it was intended as a compliment.

  I have been very fortunate to be able to discuss the book with a group of eminent and erudite musicians, including Marty Ehrlich, Anthony Coleman, David Taylor, Larry Karush, David Berger, John Schott, Peter Kogan, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, and Hollis Taylor. I have also benefited greatly from suggestions made by scholars such as Carol Oja, Anne Shreffler, Judith Tick, Geoffrey Block, John Howland, Benjamin Piekut, Anna Celenza, and John Wriggle. And I was guided and aided immeasurably by Mary Francis, Suzanne Knott, Sharron Wood, and Eric Schmidt at the University of California Press.

  This book also depends upon a much wider group of teachers, friends, and family who inspired and shaped my musical calling. Some of them have been dead for a long time, but I feel their influence every day: Ralph Friedman, my first maestro at Roosevelt Elementary School; Cantor Lawrence Avery, my sweet-singing gateway to Jewish music; my piano teachers Kenneth Wentworth, James Wimer (my own private Boulanger), Helen Kasin, Harry Coleman, and William Daghlian; Maestro Dr. Richard Karp, the first conductor to acknowledge that I was a composer; friends and teachers at Columbia University, including N. J. Garrett, Jack Beeson, Nicholas England, Alfred Ladzekpo, and Richard Goodman; Irwin Stahl (my own private Schoenberg); friends and teachers at Cambridge University, including Roger Smalley, Tim Souster, Penny Souster, Hugh Macdonald, Peter Britton, Simon Emmerson, and John Street; my teachers at the Manhattan School of Music, Ludmila Ulehla, John Corigliano, and Ursula Mamlok; my composition teacher at Juilliard, Elliott Carter; and my main maestros, James DePreist, Amy Kaiser, Kenneth Kiesler, George Manahan, David Zinman, and Gerard Schwarz.

  Finally, this book would not have been possible without the love, encouragement, and especially the patience of my family. My parents, Jack and Lillian Schiff, did not live to see it appear but steered me in the right direction. My children, Daniel and Jamie, struggled valiantly to make me appear cooler than I am. And, above all, my wife Judy gave me the life support that has allowed me to realize so many of my dreams.

  PART ONE

  Overture: Such Sweet Thunder

  I went to college on the G.I. Bill to study composition, and we studied every composer and every system of arranging and writing—Berlioz, Strauss, Schoenberg, and so forth. I was then to learn that there was this link between Schoenberg and Ellington. They'd lived apart, never been associated with each other, were practically ignorant of each other's works, yet there was an absolute parallel.

  —Mercer Ellington

  The century of aeroplanes has a right to a music of its own.

  —Claude Debussy

  Let's begin medias res fashion, midway through that up-in-the-air century, on April 28, 1957, a day before Duke Ellington's fifty-eighth birthday, when Such Sweet Thunder premiered at New York's Town Hall.

  With its brash, brassy, backbeat-driven opening, “Such Sweet Thunder,” the title track of the twelve-movement suite by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, drops us off at the vibrant center of twentieth-century music, the intersection of high art and popular entertainment: African, American, and European traditions, improvised performance, and rigorous composition. A “Shakespeherean” blues, with echoes of the “Habanera” from Bizet's Carmen and Fats Domino's 1956 recording of “Blueberry Hill,” it draws on jazz, rock, and Latin rhythms all the while retelling the story of Othello, the Moor of Venice, and Desdemona, the original satin doll, and, as Ellington always told the audience, all the fun they must have had. Just over three minutes long, “Such Sweet Thunder” amplifies the text and subtexts of Shakespeare's most intimate tragedy and also mirrors its own historical moment, the untranquilized ′50s already squirming from the hormones of pubescent boomers and the as-yet-unenforced consequences of Brown v. Board of Education. High time for Othello to tell the story his way.

  Like most of Ellington's music, “Such Sweet Thunder” is compact: six blues choruses (each twelve bars long) in G (flickering between major and minor) at a moderate tempo with a four-bar transition (composed by Billy Strayhorn) inserted to create a more fearful asymmetry (or, in live performances, a louder outro). The music, commanding your attention from its first notes, is taut, concise, compressed, logical. At every point you hear two or more different ideas juxtaposed (form) or superimposed (counterpoint). Each chorus builds on an element from the previous one, moving the plot forward with dramatic inevitability. It's a well-wrought urn—with an attitude.

  On the third or fourth hearing, as the terse deployment of musical symbols becomes clear, you may begin to discern bits of the story. Like the play, the music contrasts exteriors and interiors, public piazzas and private boudoirs, power and vulnerability. It hides its most intimate utterance, the shadowy, erotic fifth chorus, beneath a mask of deceptive bravado. In the first chorus the Moor's reputation precedes his entrance, as often happens with tragic heroes; the swaggering brass snarls, “Don't mess with this Moor!” With his blaring entrance in the second chorus Othello, like Ellington at the Cotton Club, flaunts his primitive, jungle nature (“Rude am I in my speech”) both to intimidate his white patrons and to satisfy their prejudices. (Desdemona's father, you'll recall, says that “against all rules of nature” she fell “in love with what she fear'd to look on.”) The groove may sound primitive, but the reversed habanera rhythm (lon
g short / short long) suggests a self-conscious irony. The sax section discords of the third chorus, reminiscent of the fierce harmonies of Ellington's 1940 masterpiece “Ko-Ko,” show that the idea of the “primitive” is in the mind of the beholder; to borrow Alfred Appel Jr.'s useful phrase, that's “jazz modernism.” And then, in the fourth chorus, the “jungle” speaks, but gently. Ray Nance's assuredly nonchalant trumpet solo, the one slot in the design left open for improvisation, must be one of Othello's wondrous tales:

  Of the Cannibals, that each other eat;

  The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads

  Do grow beneath their shoulders.

  That's quite a prelude to a kiss, yet it is still an audience-conscious public performance, an erotic shtick. Then Strayhorn's well-coiled rude interlude suddenly explodes; could it be a display of Desdemona's “downright violence and scorn of fortune”? So much for blushing white femininity; it takes two to habanera. In the fifth chorus swagger gives way to shadowy tendresse. When the reprised second chorus returns the action to the harsh light of the public sphere, we may visualize the two levels of the music, the hootch in the treble and cootch in the bass, as our two leading characters, both of them free of the categories that would define them. At least for a while. (For much, much more on Such Sweet Thunder, see chapter 5.)

  And so, in 1957, the year of Little Rock, and Governor Faubus, and high-finned, Dagmar-bumpered V-8s, Edward K. Ellington and William Strayhorn launched their Shakespeare suite, originally intended for the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario, with a blazing and sensual blues/fanfare, a celebratory tone parallel to the ultimate deed of integration that Jim Crow, still well entrenched south of the Canadian border, was designed to prevent, intimidate, and punish with horrific violence.