The Ellington Century Read online

  The political daring and musical synthesis of Such Sweet Thunder were not isolated phenomena. In the post-McCarthy years both jazz and the Bard blossomed in the hothouse setting of summer festivals. The late Renaissance provided an elegant cover for timely political provocation. Joseph Papp first brought free Shakespeare to Central Park in the summer of ′57. Five months after the New York premiere of Such Sweet Thunder, the musical West Side Story opened on Broadway. Two months after that, Agon, with music by Stravinsky and choreography by Balanchine, premiered at the City Center (twelve blocks north of Town Hall). Like the Ellington/Strayhorn suite, West Side Story retold a Shakespearean story of ill-fated interethnic love with intercultural music that drew on jazz and Latin rhythms. Agon, like Such Sweet Thunder a suite of twelve short movements, featured at its core an erotic pas de deux danced by the white Diana Adams and the black Arthur Mitchell. Stravinsky based the music on French court dances from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries found in De Lauze's Apologie de la danse— dances that would not be out of place in a production of Othello or Romeo and Juliet.

  Risky cultural criticism required teamwork. Such Sweet Thunder, West Side Story, and Agon were collaborative creations: Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, Stephen Sondheim, Arthur Laurents, and Harold Prince (along with orchestrators Sid Ramin and Irwin Kostal) resituated Romeo and Juliet. Agon, written at the suggestion of Lincoln Kirstein, was Stravinsky's first twelve-tone ballet score and a posthumous collaboration. Stravinsky had attended a performance of Schoenberg's Serenade op. 24 conducted by his assistant, Robert Craft, on April 14, 1952. The coda of the Agon “Pas de deux,” a duet for mandolin and harp, is a deep bow to the Serenade's nervously twanging mandolin and guitar. The “Pas de deux” crossed previously sacrosanct musical boundaries, juxtaposing a quotation from Webern's Variations for Orchestra, op. 30 with a recollection of the “Sacrificial Dance” from the Rite of Spring. Stravinsky was breaching the stylistic wall that had separated the music of Paris and Vienna throughout the previous half century. But much of Agon also suggests that Stravinsky was listening to recent jazz: the middle section of the Bransle Double evokes the cool West Coast style of the time. (In his next work, Threni, Stravinsky would co-opt Shorty Rogers's trademark flügelhorn.) Balanchine's choreography embodied the musical mélange as visual jazz. The critic Edwin Denby wrote that one of the male dancers displayed the timing of a “New York Latin in a leather jacket.”1

  At the same historical moment, a jazz suite, a Broadway show, and a classical ballet took on the hot-button issue of racial integration through similar strategies of stylistic synthesis and juxtaposition and transhistorical, cross-cultural conversation. These works also challenged the era's official culture of sexual repression, although the musical's gay subtext (“Somewhere”) remained unnoticed for years, at least outside of Christopher Street and West Hollywood. Billy Strayhorn's “Up and Down and Up and Down (I Will Lead Them Up and Down),” the most original movement in Such Sweet Thunder, also dealt covertly with sexual difference; we can hear it as a self-portrait, Strayhorn as Puck, to set beside Ellington's self-depiction as Othello in the opening track. Boy love drives the plot of A Midsummer Night's Dream:

  The king doth keep his revels here to-night:

  Take heed the queen come not within his sight;

  For Oberon is passing fell and wrath,

  Because that she as her attendant hath

  A lovely boy, stolen from an Indian king;

  She never had so sweet a changeling;

  And jealous Oberon would have the child

  Knight of his train, to trace the forests wild.

  Strayhorn's self-portrait as the impish fairy Puck suavely symbolized multiple aspects of his life. He was openly gay, and at the same time he was often an invisible instigator of musical spells; he usually remained in New York while the band toured, phoning in musical fixes as needed. A classically trained musical wunderkind, sixteen years younger than Ellington, Strayhorn could compose songs that sounded completely Ellingtonian (like “Day Dream”) or create music whose advanced harmonies and structure were uniquely his own. “Up and Down” is a virtuosic display of nearly atonal contrapuntal juggling pairs of players impersonating the disoriented lovers of Shakespeare's dream.

  Strayhorn's special relationship with the band may have given him a certain Puck-like objectivity. When, at the end of “Up and Down,” Strayhorn asks Clark Terry to intone Puck's line “Lord, what fools these mortals be,” these mortals might be heterosexuals or fellow homosexuals or fellow musicians. Strayhorn's sexual theme was both literarily astute and politically daring. We may recall how scandalous it seemed back in the ′50s for Robert Lowell to devote a stanza of his 1956 confessional poem “Skunk Hour” to a “fairy decorator” who is considering marriage, the “cure” for inversion prescribed by the conformist psychotherapy of the era. Years before Stonewall the integration of straight and gay sensibilities, so hard for America even to contemplate at the time, was an essential part of the Ellington Orchestra's musical language.

  Integration: I begin this book with Such Sweet Thunder because it represents a shared cultural space either ignored or dismissed by purists of all stripes. Purism, sorting alleged sheep from imaginary goats, can seduce with an appearance of rigor, but it can also mask snobbery or even racism. Historians on both the jazz and the classical sides who divide twentieth-century music before, say, 1970 into “separate but equal” musical territories perpetuate, consciously or not, hackneyed musical judgments that are racial stereotypes. These prejudices include the supposed opposition of commercial popularity and artistic integrity, difficulty and accessibility, intellectual control and spontaneity. Forty years after Ellington was denied a Pulitzer Prize, music journalists still keep alive this form of segregation by covering either classical music or jazz; classical critics cross this line only when a jazz figure seems to be doing something that can be described in classical terms, or, more recently, to profess their admiration for the artier rock bands. The picture of an unbridgeable high/low, art/entertainment, or black/ white divide persists—this despite ample evidence to the contrary. At its premiere, for instance, Such Sweet Thunder shared the program with Kurt Weill's Violin Concerto, played by Anahid Ajemian, conducted by Dmitri Mitropoulos.

  An alternative view of twentieth-century music can emerge once we think of musicians not as warring clans or isolated monads but as collaborators in the shared cultural project foreseen by Debussy, the invention of a music that reflected the new technical and social realities of the time. This project consumed the talents of composers and performers, urban tunesmiths and lone outcasts, popular entertainers and obscure eccentrics, reactionaries and conservatives, progressives and radicals, critics and listeners. What we term “modern” or “modernistic” music was an evolving series of hypotheses, experiments, and reevaluations. Irving Berlin's “Putting on the Ritz” is as much of a rhythmic experiment as the “Monoritmica” from Berg's Lulu or Dizzy Gillespie's “Things to Come.” If we measure the success of experiments in terms of their broad impact, the collected solos of Louis Armstrong become the mother lode of the century's rhythmic research. And, although some musicians worked only in a particular milieu, many others crossed stylistic and social lines all the time. From James Reese Europe to Wynton Marsalis, jazz musicians have challenged the idea that their music is inherently “low,” and the list of classical composers who appropriated ideas from jazz would include just about every major European and American figure. James P. Johnson, master of the stride piano and composer of the Charleston, also wrote two piano concertos, a symphony, and two operas. George Gershwin asked Alban Berg to autograph his copy of the Lyric Suite. Schoenberg praised Gershwin's music and imitated its sound in his Theme and Variations for band. Charlie Parker quoted Le sacre du printemps whenever he spotted Stravinsky in the audience. Leonard Bernstein jammed (once) with Miles Davis. Frank Zappa worshipped the music of Edgard Varèse; Vladimir Horowitz admired and envied Art Tatum's technical p
rowess. Stravinsky lifted a few bars from “Goosey Gander” when he wrote his Ebony Concerto for Woody Herman, and, according to Mercer Ellington, was a regular visitor to the Cotton Club. And Ellington shared the stage with Mitropoulos—who knew?

  No single oeuvre spans the full cross-categorical range of mid-twentieth-century music better than the vast repertory of the Duke Ellington Orchestra, most of it composed by Ellington and Strayhorn. This rich body of music, written over nearly fifty years, includes enduring songs, instrumental “tone parallels,” jazz concertos, extended suites, ballet music, film music, and sacred music. Just consider this alphabetical list, far from complete, of Ellingtonian classics:

  Across the Track Blues

  All Too Soon

  Anatomy of a Murder

  Are You Sticking?

  Awful Sad

  Battle of Swing

  Birmingham Breakdown

  Black and Tan Fantasy

  Black Beauty

  Black, Brown and Beige

  Blood Count

  Blue Cellophane

  Blue Light

  Blue Serge

  The Blues I Love to Sing

  The Blues with a Feeling

  Bojangles

  Boy Meets Horn

  Braggin' in Brass

  C Jam Blues

  Chelsea Bridge

  Clarinet Lament

  Clothed Woman

  Concerto for Cootie

  Controversial Suite

  Cotton Tail

  Creole Love Call

  Creole Rhapsody

  Day Dream

  Daybreak Express

  Deep South Suite

  Delta Serenade

  Diminuendo in Blue and

  Crescendo in Blue

  Dusk

  East St. Louis Toodle-Oo

  Echoes of Harlem

  Echoes of the Jungle

  Far East Suite

  Giddybug Gallop

  Harlem Airshaft

  Hot and Bothered

  Immigration Blues

  In a Mellotone

  In a Sentimental Mood

  It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)

  It's Glory

  Jack the Bear

  Jubilee Stomp

  Jump for Joy

  Ko-Ko

  Liberian Suite

  Lotus Blossom

  Main Stem

  Merry Go Round

  Misty Morning

  The Mooche

  Mood Indigo

  Moon Mist

  The Mystery Song

  New Orleans Suite

  Night Creature

  The Nutcracker Suite

  Old Man Blues

  On a Turquoise Cloud

  Perfume Suite

  A Portrait of Bert Williams

  Prelude to a Kiss

  Queen's Suite

  Rain Check

  Reminiscing in Tempo

  Ring Dem Bells

  The River

  Rockin' in Rhythm

  Rocky Mountain Blues

  Rude Interlude

  Satin Doll

  Saturday Night Function

  Second Sacred Concert

  Sepia Panorama

  Showboat Shuffle

  Sloppy Joe

  Solitude

  Sophisticated Lady

  Such Sweet Thunder

  Suite Thursday

  Symphony in Black

  Take the A Train

  Tattooed Bride

  Tiger Rag (arr.)

  A Tone Parallel to Harlem

  U.M.M.G

  Warm Valley

  Washington Wabble

  Someday scholars will refer to these works by the equivalent of Köchel numbers. They bring together the popular and the serious, improvisation and composition, African rhythms and European harmonies in ways that, I would propose, can shed some unexpected light on the more category-bound, or similarly unbounded, music around them from Berg to Zappa. In the chapters that follow a single Ellingtonian work will lead into a broader exploration of different technical aspects of music, color, rhythm, melody, and harmony, and different realms, both profane and sacred, of musical representation.

  SEGUE: THE MUSIC OF SOUND

  The “century of aeroplanes” is a catchy rubric, but what would its music sound like? For some composers the answer was literal: it would sound like an airplane, as in George Antheil's Ballet mécanique, whose orchestra featured a giant propeller. But the airplane could also be a metaphor—for speed, freedom, anxiety, change. It suggested new harmonies, colors, rhythms. The airplane soared across boundaries and Maginot lines, connected once-distant places and cultures in a matter of hours.

  For other composers the new music would sound like sound itself, freed from its traditional burden of connotations and associations. The third of Schoenberg's Five Pieces for Orchestra, op. 16, originally titled “Farben” (Colors) and later retitled “Summer Morning by a Lake,” may be the earliest “sound” piece. It seems, at first hearing, to lack melody, rhythm, and harmony so that all that remains is tone color. If we ignore Schoenberg's later palliative attempt to associate the color with a time and place, we can enjoy a kind of categorical (and Cagean) vertigo as we ask ourselves how this “color” is any more musical than the random sounds in the room. Later examples of “sound” music, whether by Webern or Varèse or Xenakis, similarly push us against the imagined boundary between musical and nonmusical sounds, which calls into question the legitimacy of the border line. What forces determine the kinds of sound that will be admitted to the realm of music? What sounds and voices does the boundary line wall out?

  The third movement, Andante, of Ruth Crawford's String Quartet (1931) shows how the disorienting power of sound can allow a new, previously suppressed voice to emerge. Crawford highlighted the special character of this movement by surrounding it with contrapuntal movements made up of splattered, splintered, or polarized elements. In the Andante this broken discourse yields to a “complex veil of sound.”2 For most of the movement the four instruments knit a tight harmonic fabric based on half steps that slowly ascend in pitch. The individual swelling dynamics imbue this harmonic idea with a sense of breath and pulse, as if the sound itself were a living organism, a breathing body. As the four instruments blend in what Crawford termed a “heterophony of dynamics”3 they also articulate a melodic line that passes from one instrument to another, creating one voice out of many. The sound not only breathes, it sings. As Judith Tick explains, this effect was so novel that Crawford felt compelled to revise the score repeatedly; seven years after she started she inserted a three-bar episode in which the four instrumental lines suddenly come unglued and then just as suddenly fuse on two shrieking tone clusters. Is this the sound of tragic struggle or the birth pangs of a voice from within the female body?

  If the airplane defied gravity and redefined space, the new sound technologies—recording, radio, and sound-on-film—allowed music to defy and redefine time. It is only possible to contemplate Such Sweet Thunder fifty years after its creation because it was recorded; from the earliest days of his band Ellington understood the importance of broadcasting his music and of putting music on disc with the highest possible illusion of fidelity. Edison's 1877 invention (first used for music right around the beginning of the twentieth century) changed music economically and conceptually, far more so than “mechanical reproduction” impacted the visual arts. Unlike the unique visual artwork, with its defining “aura,” a work of music exists only as a reproduction; every performance is a reenactment of an idea. Ever since the invention of the reed flute and lyre in antiquity, musical machines—instruments—have reproduced the sound of the voice, or the sound of each other. Even as the development of a symphonic culture in the nineteenth century conferred an “aura” on a small group of works performed in concert halls and opera houses, these works were being re-created on the parlor piano, by amateur string quartets, by a band in the park, or by the organ grinder in the street. Listeners accepted re
cordings as music (not as some defective facsimile) almost from the beginning. Tone tests sponsored by the Edison Company between 1915 and 1926 challenged listeners to distinguish live and recorded sounds and proved, as Emily Thompson claims, that “the act of listening to reproduction was implicitly accepted as culturally equivalent to the act of listening to live performers.”4 A recording of an opera aria (Caruso was the biggest star of early recordings) conveyed that aria far more convincingly and conveniently than most amateur performances could. With the arrival of cheap record players during the First World War and radio broadcasts of music in the 1920s, almost anyone could reproduce a musical work at home.

  The first recordings, however primitive, were the first electronic music. The new sound technologies translated all music, regardless of origin, into electric impulses and then back to sound emanating from some kind of loudspeaker. Increasingly, the manipulation of sound, previously attainable only through intermediary performers or instruments, came to be seen as the essence of music. It makes sense, then, to begin our journey across the categorical boundaries of twentieth-century music with a discussion of timbre, the color of sound, and its connotations, the sounds of color.

  CHAPTER 1

  “Blue Light”: Color

  Ellington plays the piano 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.

  —Billy Strayhorn

  In modern orchestration clarity and definition of sonorous image are usually the goal. There exists, however, another kind of orchestral magic dependent on a certain ambiguity of effect. Not to be able to identify immediately how a particular color combination is arrived at adds to its attractiveness. I live to be intrigued by unusual sounds that force me to exclaim: Now I wonder how the composer does that?