by David Schiff
The incantation must be so percussion oriented that it disposes the listeners to bump and bounce, to slow grind and steady shuffle, to grind, hop, jump, kick, rock, roll, shout, stomp and otherwise wing the blues away.
—Albert Murray
What good is melody?
—Irving Mills, lyrics to “Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)”—also attributed to Bubber Miley
In the early years of the twentieth century the tempo of life sped up sharply, as if someone had suddenly stepped on a global gas pedal. Urban life seemed faster, noisier, less predictable. The hopped-up pace felt exhilarating and dizzying: “Everything around man jumps, dances, gallops in a movement out of phase with his own.”1 Even before the century turned its musical soundtrack crackled with a new rhythm. Scott Joplin's “Maple Leaf Rag,” published in 1899, the year of Duke Ellington's birth, quickly became a worldwide sensation. Ragtime was not just another form of exoticism in an era that cultivated the exotic; Europeans (wowed by the performances of the touring Sousa band) and Americans alike embraced ragtime as the emblem of their accelerating everyday lives: “We make love to ragtime and we die to it.”2 Like the first Wright Brothers' plane, however, ragtime was just the lift-off phase of ever-faster existence; in a few decades people would move at the speed of sound and communicate at the speed of light. And they would dance: every increment of speed set bodies in new kinds of motion, from rag to rap. The eighteenth century danced the minuet, the nineteenth waltzed, but in the twentieth each decade branded itself with a dance rhythm: the one-step, the fox-trot, the Charleston, the Lindy, the mambo, the twist, disco, salsa—all of them African American in origin.
Between the two world wars jazz musicians imbued the new dance rhythms with an equally new quality called swing. Where ragtime had mirrored the nervous jolts and jostle of the city streets, swing, disseminated at lightning speed through radio, celebrated the freedoms that accelerated motion brought to daily life, freedoms made visible in the sleekly urbane dancing of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and the gravity-defying acrobatics of the Nicholas Brothers. Today the term swing sounds geriatric (swing dance classes for senior citizens); we have to remind ourselves that swing was as radical a concept for music as relativity was for physics.
Swing remains oddly ineffable. Even in the twenty-first century it still eludes the grasp of most classically trained musicians. And of the dictionary as well. Even a well-honed definition seems to beg a few questions: “A sensation of pull and momentum found in jazz. It appears to result partly from the push and pull between layers of syncopated rhythms and the constant underlying beat.”3 More than the sum of technical devices (such as syncopation and “swung” eighths), more than a particular stylistic phase of jazz, swing, ultimately, is an ethical ideal, a temporal image of liberation, or, as Albert Murray says, “purification and celebration/affirmation.”4
Swing first appeared as an extraordinary quality of solo playing, heard mainly in short “breaks.” Instrumentalists, arrangers, and composers quickly learned ways to insinuate swing into performances by big bands as well as soloists. A handful of much-anthologized moments usually serves to chart its development: Jelly Roll Morton's swung performance of “Maple Leaf Rag,” Louis Armstrong's 1924 solos (in “Go 'Long Mule” or “Copenhagen”) in the relatively unswinging Fletcher Henderson band, the 1932 recording of “Moten Swing,” in which every member of the Bennie Moten Orchestra captures the quality.
While in the view of many jazz historians, the Ellington band, for all its formal and expressive distinction, was rarely in the forefront of rhythmic propulsion, jazz critics single out “Cotton Tail” as an acme of swing, a groundbreaking rhythmic achievement that “changed the face of jazz.”5 In “Cotton Tail” rhythm plays a formal role comparable to its function in Beethoven's symphonies.
“COTTON TAIL”
Did you ever hear that story about that rabbit in the briar patch? And they caught him and some shit what he was doing wrong. They said, “We'll fix you—we're going to throw you in the briar patch.” And the rabbit, “Oh, mister, please, please, don't throw me in there.” Yes! They threw him in there and he said, “You can all kiss my ass. That's where I wanted to be all the time!” Then he cut out, ya know. Well, that's the way it is.
—Louis Armstrong
The Ellington Orchestra first recorded “Cotton Tail” in Hollywood on May 4, 1940. The recording features the tenor saxophonist Ben Webster, who had joined the band just five months earlier. Webster's unusually spacious two-chorus solo started out as an improvisation but became a fixed feature; in Ellington's music improvisation was often the road to composition. The solo became Webster's signature tune, but it would remain largely intact in later performances of “Cotton Tail,” when Paul Gonsalves occupied the solo tenor chair.6
Throughout his career Duke Ellington worked synergistically with the members of his band. The taut structural logic of “Cotton Tail” is characteristically Ellingtonian, clearly related, as we shall see, to older Ellington charts based on “Tiger Rag,” but its effortless drive (and many of its notes) depend on two musicians who had recently joined the band: Webster and bassist Jimmy Blanton. Some listeners might also detect the influence of composer/arranger/pianist Billy Strayhorn (who joined the band a year earlier and was already Ellington's alter ego) in the fierce dissonances of some of the brass chords.
Webster had worked with Ellington occasionally in 1935 and ′36 (he can be heard on recordings of “Truckin’” and “In a Jam”), but until his arrival in January 1940 the band had never had a regular tenor soloist to fill the gap between Johnny Hodges on alto and Harry Carney on baritone. Now there were five reed players: Barney Bigard played clarinet and, when needed, second, nonsoloing tenor, and Otto Hardwick was a nonsoloing alto. Since the Ellington book was conceived for a four-man reed section, Webster at first had to create his own parts; it would have made sense, therefore, for him to compose (or propose) an entire chorus in which the five saxophones would play an improvisatory-sounding group solo, at once harmony and melody.7 The reed section solo device descends from the clarinet trios in Don Redman's arrangements for Fletcher Henderson in the 1920s such as “The Stampede” of 1926 (and on Ellington's “The Mooche” of 1930) and in many Benny Carter charts in the 1930s (Webster had played with Carter).8
“Cotton Tail” exists both as a thirty-two-bar head to be followed by improvised choruses and as a six-chorus composition in which the head serves as a frame. You can find the head in most fake books, though often in the key of A rather than the B heard on Ellington's recordings.9 “Cotton Tail” as a composition, not just the head, consists of six choruses of “rhythm changes” in B a format that many bands of the time could have filled out without a written arrangement (as a head arrangement). However spontaneous it may sound it is not a head arrangement but a tightly compressed composition in which every note counts. Its phrase structure and scoring develop a dialogue of reeds and brass toward an escalating rhythmic and dynamic tension that reaches a high point in the “tutti” shout of the final chorus.
In jazz parlance “rhythm changes” denotes a thirty-two-bar harmonic pattern derived from Gershwin's “I Got Rhythm.” Throughout the 1930s jazz players appropriated the harmonic patterns of popular songs, transforming them into variants of the blues (the Moten band turned “Sweet Sue, That's You” into “Toby,” and the Lunceford Band transformed Gershwin's early tune “Do It Again” into “Swinging Uptown”). Ethel Merman put “I Got Rhythm” on the map in the 1930 Gershwin musical Girl Crazy; within a few years rhythm changes were second only to the twelve-bar blues pattern as the basis of jazz improvisation. Five years before “Cotton Tail” Ben Webster had recorded a very swinging rhythm changes chart, “Hotter than ‘ell,” by Horace Henderson with the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra. Virtually contemporary with “Cotton Tail” are such famous rhythm changes charts as the Basie band's “Lester Leaps In” and “Lunceford Special.” Pieces based on rhythm changes are, like the blues, a
series of isomorphic stanzas, but where a blues stanza (or chorus) contains three four-bar lines, AAB, a “rhythm” stanza has four eight-bar lines: AABA. (The template of rhythm changes does not use the final extended “Who could ask for anything more?” phrase of the Gershwin song.) In a blues the B serves to complete the thought:
I've got the choo-choo blues, had ’em all night and day.
I've got the choo-choo blues, had ’em all night and day.
'Cause the Panama Limited carried my man away.10
In rhythm changes the B,
Old man trouble,
I don't mind him.
You won't find him
Round my door
also called the “bridge” or “release,” sets up melodic contrast and harmonic tension resolved by the final A.
A masterwork of compression, “Cotton Tail” consists of twenty-four (6 × 4) phrases, only three of which state the “head”. No two phrases are exactly the same. Following is a phrase-by-phrase outline. The personnel for the May 1940 recording were:
Reeds: Otto Hardwick and Johnny Hodges, alto sax; Barney
Bigard, tenor sax and clarinet; Ben Webster, tenor sax; Harry Carney, baritone sax
Brass: Cootie Williams, Wallace Jones, Rex Stewart, trumpets; Joe Nanton, Lawrence Brown, Juan Tizol, trombones
Rhythm: Duke Ellington, piano; Fred Guy, guitar; Jimmy Blanton, bass; Sonny Greer, drums
Chorus I: “Head” AA'BX
A: “Head” played in unison by one alto sax, baritone sax, plunger-muted trumpet (Williams), and trombone (Nanton)
A': “Head” with brass chords added
B: Reversed call-and-response between the five-sax choir and Williams's growled trumpet solo
X: A four-bar contrapuntal riff for reeds and brass taking the place of the expected eight-bar A
Chorus II: “Webster solo part I” AA'BA”
A: Webster and the rhythm section
A': Webster continues
B: Reverse call-and-response between clarinet + brass and Webster
A”: Webster continues solo, two bars of emphatic brass punctuation at the end
Chorus III: “Webster solo part II” XA'BA”
X: Webster and rhythm section. Eight bars outside the harmonic progression, using instead a single diminished seventh chord
A': Webster continues
B: Webster continues; six-note brass chords played on downbeats of every other bar
A”: Webster continues
Chorus IV: “Brass” AA'BX
A: A riff-style chordal melody for the brass section
A': Brass continues
B: Baritone sax solo
X: Piano solo
Chorus V: “Sax section” AA'BA”
A: Harmonized melody played by five saxes
A': Sax section continues
B: Sax section continues; melody here seems to allude to the Gershwin tune
A”: Sax section continues
Chorus VI: “Shout” AA'BA
A: Call-and-response between brass and sax choirs
A': Call-and-response extended (brass repeats, saxes vary)
B: Climactic phrase with reeds and brass together
A: Head
In the outline above, the letters attached to phrases refer to harmonic structure, not melody. Note that Ellington's head does not return after each bridge but only at the end of the entire piece. Melodic development takes the place of repetition, just as it does in Beethoven or Brahms. Or the blues.
At once circular (reiterating its phrase structure in the manner of the blues) and linear, “Cotton Tail” builds phrase by phrase, chorus by chorus, to the climactic “tutti” proclamation of VI B. Its form is subtly, systematically asymmetrical: the six choruses are grouped 1 + 2 + 3 (an expanding Fibonacci series that would have pleased Bartók). Three structural anomalies (X) elide the six choruses into a seamless, seismic whole. The last phrase of chorus one, four bars shorter than the expected eight, serves as a jump cut to Webster's entrance. The cropped phrasing tilts the entire structure; everything thereafter seems to arrive ahead of schedule.
Harmonically static, Webster's first solo phrase in chorus two seems to extend the previous stanza as well as beginning a new one. Its structural ambiguity turns Webster's double chorus solo into an asymmetrically subdivided single phrase, 40 + 24 (AABAXABA). The last phrase of chorus four similarly jettisons rhythm changes in favor of a blues oscillation on the piano that sets up the supersax supermelody of chorus five. Although Ellington's static, out-of-time solo comes two thirds of the way through the piece, it feels like its center, the eye of the storm. Form is also a manifestation of rhythm; these strategic formal asymmetries are slo-mo versions of faster off-kilter patterns.
Listening to “Cotton Tail” we can detect five different kinds of rhythm:
1. Pulse rhythm: bass, drums, piano
2. Melodic rhythm: beginning with the head
3. Soloistic (supermelodic) rhythm: first heard in Cootie Williams's plunger solo I B
4. Riff or shout rhythm: first heard emerging in the trombones in I A and A′
5. Harmonic rhythm: the regularly paced temporal exposition of rhythm changes
Each of these rhythms has its own physiognomy, speed, and ancestry. The steady stream of harmonic rhythm, the chord change that happens every two beats like clockwork, is European in origin. The unpredictably exploding shout rhythm, derived from the “ring shout,” has African roots. The steady pulse (234 beats per minute) heard nonstop in the bass and drums relates to two continents, the walking bass of European baroque basso continuo and the “metronome sense” of African drummers. Theorists of rhythm in both European and African music tell us that rhythm is layered, simultaneously horizontal and vertical. The rhythmic engine driving “Cotton Tail” onward and ever upward counterpoints rhythms and cultures.
Tracking each rhythmic strand in isolation through the piece shows that each one tells its own story.
Pulse Rhythm
Bass (Jimmy Blanton) and drums (Sonny Greer), both improvising, lay down a carpet of steady beats, four to a bar. Unlike the walking bass lines in baroque music (the Prelude in B Minor from The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I, for instance), the inflection of the four beats changes often and unpredictably in both instruments; it's a springy carpet. Between one extreme of four evenly accented beats and the other of two heavy backbeats (one and two and), Greer also punches the fourth beat at times and ushers in the last phrase of chorus two with a four-note break that says “I Got Rhythm.” Similarly, Blanton varies the inflection by playing either two pairs of notes or four different notes in each bar. The double articulation of pulse by pitched and unpitched instruments, as rhythm and melody, makes the drums speak, the capability for which they were banned during the time of slavery.
Melodic Rhythm
From its first note the head melody bounces off the pulse far more often than it coincides with it; it falls on the downbeat in only three of its eight bars, all even-numbered, structurally weak. This pattern subtly alludes to the melody of “I Got Rhythm,” which similarly avoids the downbeats of strong bars and stresses them in the weak ones. Where the Gershwin song states the same rhythmic pattern three times, normalizing its African cross-rhythms and ending with the reassuring squareness of “Who could ask for anything more?” “Cotton Tail” slyly moves the “anything more” to its fourth bar and then skitters to its close with four over-the-bar-line syncopations.
The head is what musicologists term a “contrafact”—a new melody constructed on an older harmonic progression. The term emits an unfortunate odor of fraudulence that hides the sophisticated musical and cultural transactions at play. As a form of blues, jazz always sets new melodies atop a preexisting harmonic pattern. Contrafacts apply this strategy to popular tunes, but a distinction may be drawn between a contrafact that is a new popular tune, such as “Meet the Flintstones,” and jazz heads like “Moten Swing” (based on “You, You're Driving Me Crazy”) or Thelon
ious Monk's “In Walked Bud” (based on “Blue Skies”) or “Lester Leaps In,” Parker's “Anthropology” and “Moose the Mooche,” Sonny Rollins's “Oleo,” Monk's “Rhythm-a-ning,” and “Cotton Tail”—all based on “I Got Rhythm.” These heads do not replace one pop tune with another. Instead, they erect a jazz melody on the ruins, so to speak, of a pop tune, a more complicated and devious kind of melody in conspicuously contentious relation to its pop prototype. This kind of jazz melody reappropriates musical elements back from popular song, exposing a history that the song had relegated to amnesia. Which is the real contrafact?
The bounding melodic pattern of the head, repeatedly sidestepping the downbeat, is an eight-bar rhythmic palimpsest, a jazz rhythm built on a pop rhythm (I-got-rhy-thm) derived from a ragtime hook (Hold-that-tiger) that conjures up West African origins. You can hear Ellington as musical archaeologist at the opening of the “String Session” version of “Cotton Tail”; by emphasizing the oddly placed repetitions of the opening pitch within the melody, he makes it sound like an Afro-Cuban clave or West African handbell. One step higher in the scale than it should be and famously hopping off the downbeat, that first melody note sounds a radically African accent against the American pop tune scaffolding adumbrated by the bass in the absence of chords. That accent erupts more emphatically in the fifth bar when a flatted fifth, ricocheting off the beat, defines the melodic curve.
Supermelody
Jazz melody bounces off the beat; soloistic supermelody freewheels on the offbeats. Webster's two-chorus solo exemplifies supermelody here, darting and hovering beyond the already loosened rhythms of the head. Ellington frames Webster's improvised supermelodies with composed ones: Cootie Williams's plunger solo in I B,11 Harry Carney's solo in IV B, and then two “supersax” choruses that in effect turn the entire sax section into a single instrument.
Shout
Shout rhythm appears in bursting two- or three-note riffs throughout the piece, gradually emerging from a subservient supporting role (trombones, sneaking in at the end of I A and building in the following phrase) to lead the call-and-response (in I B, II B, and III B) to the epiphanic glory in VI B. In chorus four the trumpet section, taking up an idea they first announced in I X, builds a riff melody that climaxes in a shower of two-note shouts. Unlike the other rhythmic styles, shout rhythm is always played by instrumental choirs—as a community.