The Ellington Century

by David Schiff

  Bartók, by most accounts, was as humble as Schoenberg was mega-lomaniacal (one graphologist interpreted Schoenberg's handwriting as the work of someone who thought he was the emperor of China).18 In many ways they pursued similarly grandiose ambitions of musical renewal. Bartók's quest, which the Second Quartet reflects in mid-course, was perhaps more visionary even than Schoenberg's. Bartók reanimated musical diversity in an idiom that allowed different styles (and even different species) to interact rather than flattening them into an all-encompassing unity. Small wonder, then, that when opportunity knocked he was ready to compose his Contrasts for Benny Goodman.

  PART TWO

  Entr'acte: “Sepia Panorama”

  I am just getting a chance to work out some of my own ideas of Negro music. I stick to that. We as a race have a good deal to pay our way with in a white world. The tragedy is that so few records have been kept of the Negro music of the past. Is has to be pieced together so slowly. But it pleases me to have a chance to work at it.

  —Duke Ellington

  Timbre, rhythm, melody, and harmony are means to an end. Composers, like poets, novelists and filmmakers, have a story to tell, though most prefer just to say it with music. Duke Ellington, however, spelled out the terms of his expressive project throughout his career and summed it up with the title of his radio theme “Sepia Panorama.” As early as 1930 he announced his intention to compose a suite that would be “an authentic record of my race written by a member of it.”1 Mark Tucker traced the source of this project back to the historical pageants of Ellington's childhood in Washington, D.C. In 1911 the Howard Theater put on a production called “The Evolution of the Negro in Picture, Song, and Story,” divided in four parts: Overture, Night of Slavery—Sorrow Songs, Dawn of Freedom, and Day of Opportunity.2 The format looks forward to Black, Brown and Beige, but in works like the Perfume Suite and Night Creature Ellington took his music far beyond the model of a civics lesson. Keeping his eyes on the prize, Ellington never allowed his works to become generically didactic; although he often appeared at left-leaning events, he marched to his own political beat and told his story in his own way and on his own far-reaching terms. With more than a little help from the members of his orchestra, he contained multitudes. His music evoked a panorama of people, places, and moods, and, while focusing on African American experiences, it also addressed a broad American and international audience.

  Ellington's phrase written by a member of it indicates the urgency of his project. Whether for base or noble reasons, in minstrel shows or Uncle Tom's Cabin, the history and experience of African Americans had been scripted by whites. In the 1920s Broadway was ablaze with secondhand accounts of black experience by Eugene O'Neill (The Emperor Jones) and DuBose and Dorothy Heyward, whose Porgy was destined, just a few years after Ellington's statement, to become the most enduring and problematic picture of African American life in the musical theater.

  The institutions and habits of American racism thwarted the musical careers of Ellington's African American predecessors, especially Will Marion Cook and James P. Johnson. The stereotypes of the minstrel show still poisoned entertainment; puritanism, high-minded sacralization, and, most of all, segregation contaminated education. For Ellington to realize his ambitions he would have to redefine pleasure and uplift and everything in between.

  Scholars and critics have found it easier to cite Ellington's many statements about his project than to describe how it actually took shape in music that defies the norms of jazz and classical idioms. At times Ellington himself muddied the waters; some works, like the opera Boola, which promised to fulfill his most ambitious goals, never appeared. Others, most notably Black, Brown and Beige, had a confusingly protean performance history, never settling down to one finished form.3 Ellington's nonstop gig-filled schedule made his determination to take on large historical and cultural issues all the more heroic, if not quixotic; usually he found time to compose only after a show, between 3A.M.and 7A.M.4 Even when writing the extended pieces that were meant to bear the burden of his expressive goals he composed on the fly, phoning in music for musical theater and movie projects from the road and leaving elements large and small to his musical alter ego Billy Strayhorn and Tom Whaley, the band's copyist.5 While Leonard Bernstein could take a yearlong sabbatical from his reign at the New York Philharmonic to compose the eighteen-minute Chichester Psalms, Ellington spent little time away from the band. He never applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship and never received any awards equivalent to a “genius” grant.

  Finding his extended compositions either pretentious or slapdash, critics like John Hammond and James Lincoln Collier cited Ellington's apparently casual attitude toward thematically important works like Jump for Joy or the Deep South Suite as a symptom of artistic failings, particularly in regard to large forms. Ellington's odd behavior (relative to some Platonic notion of how composers are supposed to behave) can serve as proof, however, of an integrity that was principled and tenacious. Ellington never composed “crossover” music. In pursuing his artistic project he sidestepped the available European genres of high seriousness: symphony, opera, oratorio. When a work like Harlem or Night Creature would involve an orchestra, he farmed out the orchestration (usually to the Juilliard-trained Luther Henderson) and made sure that the music that mattered was assigned to his own musicians.6Though it still maddens some critics, he never played the role of the isolated genius. For Ellington composition was collaborative and open-ended; his reluctance to terminate things (compositions or marriages), often described as a superstition, can also be taken as an aesthetic stance. Refusing to merge the idiom of jazz with the forms and ensembles of European concert music, he set himself on a different course from Gershwin or Copland or William Grant Still. From “Reminiscing in Tempo” onward his extended forms, both secular and sacred, were sui generis. Perhaps ironically, Ellington's quirkiness made him a kind of modernist; like Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Bartók, he believed that form was inextricable from content. European forms, however, were simply irrelevant, even inimical, to the experiences he strove to represent musically. The scope of ideas, images, and emotions of his music was panoramic, from political protest (“Jump for Joy”) to religious faith (“Heaven”), from the African past (“Ko-Ko”) to the American present (“The Air-Conditioned Jungle”), from Rio to Tokyo. We'll consider his project, and its relation to other twentieth-century music, under three rubrics: love, history, and God.

  CHAPTER 5

  “Warm Valley”: Love

  While driving along the south shore of the Columbia River east of Portland, Oregon, we had a good view of the mountains on the north shore. They had the most voluptuous contours, and to me they looked like a lot of women reclining up there. “Warm Valley” came directly from that experience.

  —Duke Ellington

  INTRO: LOOKING FOR LOVE IN ALL THE WRONG PLACES

  Though Ellington garnered prestige through concert performances, most of his gigs were at dance halls and nightclubs, where his music propelled couples, rocking in rhythm or gliding cheek to cheek, around the floor. Music can move us both physically and emotionally; this double power links it to love in multiple and mysterious ways. Musicians are sometimes asked to play “con amore,” but what does that mean? One answer, by way of example, would be “Warm Valley,” a slow instrumental ballad that Johnny Hodges intoned “con amore” to the delight of thousands of slow-dancing couples. Despite Ellington's charmingly risqué account of its inspiration, “Warm Valley” is not obviously descriptive of either geography or anatomy; instead of observing love from the outside, it turns listeners into lovers. Long before Nietzsche termed this phenomenon “Dionysian,” musicians recognized the erotic power of their art in the genres of the serenade and nocturne. Much of Ellington's oeuvre (like Mozart's or Chopin's) is music of the night, enveloping the listener in the sensuality of sound. When Johnny Hodges keened a melody with vibrato and rubato, hesitations, swells, and slides, his tone was like an intimate touch.
r />   Modernist classical music, by contrast, often served up sex on the rocks. When Tom Rakewell, the young protagonist of The Rake's Progress, heads down the road to perdition by losing his virginity at Mother Goose's brothel, librettists Auden and Kallman and composer Stravinsky give the scene all the erotic charge of a trip to the dentist; even the pretty chorus “Lanter-loo” sounds like Muzak piped in to anesthetize a painful but necessary procedure. Rakewell seems more turned on by the prospect of getting rich than getting laid. The libretto dwells more on his utopian delusions than on the kind of dalliances we might expect of a rake. If he ever has sex with his bearded wife, Baba the Turk, whom he marries in an existentialist acte gratuit, we never hear about it. Oddly enough in the century of Freud and Kinsey, a lot of twentieth-century music seems similarly antierotic; apparently Tristan und Isolde and La Bohème were hard acts to follow. As early as 1907, in his comic opera L'Heure espagnole, Ravel portrayed sex as just a normal part of a Spanish lunch hour, no agony, no ecstasy. It still looks like fun, though, which is more than can be said for the depictions of deranged romance in Pelléas, Salome, Lulu, Mahagonny, or Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. Or, for that matter, Madama Butterfly and Turandot.

  In their treatment of eros, popular and classical music in the twentieth century sent conflicting messages. While popular songs celebrated falling in love and dancing in the dark, modern operas charted the course of love as a sequence of pathologies from infatuation to suicide, death in childbirth, or insanity. Forged in the cauldron of fin de siècle Decadence, Salome, Mélisande, and Lulu were daughters of the Yellow 1890s. Pierrot and Petrouchka were its sons. Modernist operas and ballets figured sexuality through the thematics of decadence: hysteria, femmes fatales, castration anxiety, the battle of the sexes. Modern popular song, by contrast, took shape in jazz age America, which was also the era of Prohibition. Songs mirrored the national duplicity. They pictured sex in contrasting sweet and lowdown images of boy-meets-girl puppy love and torch song degradation. The binarisms of American popular song up to 1960 resemble the map of a typical racially zoned American city:

  Sweet

  Hot

  Puppy love

  Sex

  Middle class

  Lower class

  White

  Black

  Legit

  Illicit

  Public

  Private

  Times Square

  Harlem

  Above the waist

  Below the waist

  These contrasts mirrored larger anxieties about the erosion of Victorian values and white political dominance. Sexual liberation (“Let's do it!”) implied political liberation. Fear of either form of liberation could spawn anxious fantasies of inverted power, black over white. Americans, and Europeans as well, conflated jazz and sex, and imagined jazz as a black Dionysus, like the title character of Jonny Spielt Auf, or Crown and Sportin’ Life in Porgy and Bess. No wonder that Ellington, even in the racist décor of the Cotton Club, tried to detach his own music from the rubric of jazz and strove to construct a counternarrative free of Euro-American racial and sexual fixations. Those fixations, however, shaped musical modernism both high and low.

  In the USA love was not racially blind. Black artists who gained a presence in the national media, such as Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Paul Robeson, Ethel Waters, Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, Lena Horne, and Nat King Cole, faced particular racist restrictions, most obviously in the movies, where they were never allowed to appear in romantic situations. For all her glamour, Lena Horne was rarely granted an on-screen lover; in the one exception, Stormy Weather, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson looks old enough to be her father. Broadway, Hollywood, and the radio perpetuated the stereotypes of the mammy, the lazy serving man, and the “high yellow” prostitute. Black actors had to choose to accept work in shows like Green Pastures or Cabin in the Sky or St. Louis Woman that softened the stereotypes slightly, or turn down roles and end their film careers. After a decade of being forced to walk through movie sets like an isolated visiting royal, Horne called it quits and developed her artistry in the freer setting of cabaret, or listening to recordings with her best friend, Billy Strayhorn.

  “LOVE YOU MADLY”: THE DUKE'S MUSICAL LADIES

  I want to tell you what I think the sex act is. I think it is like a lovely piece of music, conceived quietly in the background of mutual affection and understanding, made possible by instincts which lean toward each other as naturally as the sunflower slowly turning its lovely face to the sun. I think it is an aria of the sex symphony, an aria which begins beautifully certain in its rightness, moves with that certainty to a distinct tempo of feeling, sings itself happily, steadily, working, working, to a screaming, bursting climax of indescribable beauty and rapture then throbs, spent and grateful in a rededication for the next movement of its perfection.

  —Duke Ellington

  In order to demolish the toxic stereotypes of African American sexuality, Ellington created new images of black lovers. Ellington's erotic oeuvre appears in two genres: romantic ballads and evocatively titled portraits. “Black Beauty,” one of his first portraits, was both a great tune and a strong, if implicit, political statement. Ellington later called it a “Portrait of Florence Mills” to honor the internationally famous black singer and actress who died suddenly in 1927. The actress most associated with the song, however, was Fredi Washington, who played the female lead in Black and Tan, the only film where Ellington himself played a dramatic role, albeit of himself.1 The two-reel short, directed by Dudley Murphy for RKO in 1929, employed a startling range of period styles, including urban realism, art deco nightclub scenes, and a deeply shadowed expressionist funeral. Breaking with stereotypes, Washington and Ellington, and Arthur Whetsol as well, appear young, good-looking, talented, and utterly normal, perfect emblems of the Harlem Renaissance's New Negro.2 Together they conspire to promote Ellington's hot-off-the-piano masterpiece “Black and Tan Fantasy.” In a Harlem cabaret that appears both chic and sleazy, the character Fredi, named after Washington but modeled on Mills, dances to Ellington's music despite a heart condition. She falls fatally ill in the middle of her routine. When the white manager demands that the show go on and sends out a group of light-skinned Cotton Club beauties to continue her dance, Ellington orders the band to stop and rushes to her bedside. On her deathbed she asks to hear one last performance of “Black and Tan Fantasy.”

  For all its obvious contrivances the short film was nevertheless a culturally revolutionary depiction of Ellington as a black creative genius. Likewise, the film and the song “Black Beauty” presented “Fredi” as a glamorous, intelligent, strong-willed, and dignified black woman, the first in a long line of sophisticated ladies (and satin dolls).

  Ellington's first extended portrait of a lady was “Reminiscing in Tempo,” an elegy for his mother, Daisy Kennedy Ellington (known to the family as “Aunt Daisy”), who died in May 1935; Ellington wrote that “no one else but my sister Ruth had a mother as great and as beautiful as mine.”3 This work, twelve minutes of music spread over four record sides, elicited some of the harshest criticisms Ellington ever received. John Hammond called it “formless and shallow,”4 and the English critic Spike Hughes termed it “a rambling monstrosity that is dull as it is pretentious and meaningless.5 These objections may have stemmed from cultural discomfort about both form and content. While “Reminiscing” sounded nothing like classical music, it contained no hot solos, indeed little improvisation of any kind. Its style seemed far removed from Ellington's more familiar “jungle music” or the blues, or even from the spiritual, a genre Ellington had recently invoked for the “Hymn of Sorrow,” a dirge accompanying a baby's funeral in Symphony in Black, a short sequel to Black and Tan. By contrast, the singular musical idiom of “Reminiscing in Tempo” served notice that Ellington's mother was no mammy and no floozy, neither Aunt Jemima nor Bess; she was simply “the most beautiful mother in the world.”6

  “Reminiscing” has baffled e
ven sympathetic critics like A. J. Bishop and Gunther Schuller, who had the disadvantage of working from a single recording, without access to any written material. John How-land's recent analysis, making use of Ellington's sketches and parts in the Ellington Archive, outlines the work in two unequal parts, sides one through three of the original 78 rpm recording and side four. Howland concludes that side four, which sounds complete in itself, was composed first and served as “a template that was deconstructed to build Parts I-III.”7 He also locates the work's style provocatively within the framework of Paul Whiteman's genre of symphonic jazz. The music, however, lacks the modernistic markers characteristic of the symphonic jazz style and is devoid of the gushy buildups and climaxes typical of the crossover works of Gershwin and Grofé. If we need some classical parallel for its style we might say that “Reminiscing” feels more like Mahler in his ruminating Adagietto mode than Whiteman. It's non-mawkish Mahler, if such a thing is imaginable; a Mahlerish fox-trot. Ellington himself pointed out the ruminative character of the piece: “I wrote ‘Reminiscing in Tempo’ that year [of his mother's death]. It was one of my first ambitious things. It was written in a soliloquizing mood. My mother's death was the greatest shock. I didn't do anything but brood. The music is representative of that. It begins with pleasant thoughts. Then something awful gets you down. Then you snap out of it and it ends affirmatively.”8