The Ellington Century

by David Schiff

  Perhaps like Ellington's own emotional recovery, the music sounds less straightforward than the simple sequence he described. We can understand “Reminiscing” better if we note how drastically Ellington restricted himself here, and then ask why he chose these particular constraints. The first three parts avoid the forms found in Ellington's earlier music such as blues or the AABA form, and they present no stylistic contact with the spiritual, or even with prayer, although later in life Ellington described his mother's broad-minded piety: “She was mainly interested in knowing and understanding about God, and she painted the most wonderful word pictures of God. Every Sunday she took me to at least two churches, usually to the Nineteenth Street Baptist, the church of her family, and to John Wesley A.M.E. Zion, my father's family church. It was never made clear to me that they were of different denominations, and to her, I'm sure, it did not matter. They both preached God, Jesus Christ, and that was the most important thing.”9 The blues would have been inappropriate for a woman of Daisy Ellington's religious devotion and middle-class background; her father had been a captain in the District of Columbia police. The absence of music suggesting a spiritual or hymn indicates that “Reminiscing in Tempo” was intended less as a eulogy for the dead than as a celebration of a life along lines that Ellington made explicit many years later in My People:

  The men before them worked hard and sang loud

  About the beautiful women in this family of mine.10

  Excluding the forms of blues or hymn, the remaining option would have been the popular song. Here, too, Ellington's refusal was based on his mother's upright character. While Daisy Kennedy Ellington might have been termed a “Black Beauty” or a “Sophisticated Lady,” her son chose not to portray her within the idioms used for Cotton Club dancers. He would not eulogize his mother within the thirty-two-bar framework of a commercial tune.

  Soon after the recording appeared, however, the English critic Leonard Hibbs astutely pointed out that side four approximated the AABABA form of an expanded popular song and sounded complete in itself. Hibbs came up with an imaginative program for the earlier parts of the piece. According to him, they represented Ellington's compositional process, his search for a tune that was “just out of reach”: “He can't nail it down. It's there but it won't take shape.”11 Hibbs's account is a sympathetic way of hearing the piece, but it fails to describe the thematic material accurately, although in passing it makes the lovely suggestion that the music has something to do with “proper clothing.”12

  Ellington began the portrait of his mother and her proper clothes with three ideas presented contrapuntally: a four-note “dirge” motive moving in parallel fifths in the bass; a two-note motto, a rising minor third repeated gently on the trumpet (which names the subject of the music either as Daisy or mother or mama); and a figure in lightly swung eighth notes on the piano (which could represent her proper clothes adorned with the strands of pearls that set off her face in the Music Is My Mistress photograph).

  Critics undervalued “Reminiscing” by following only the main tune, an eight-bar idea that occurs fifteen times in the piece, without noticing the subtle variations Ellington rings on it, and its evolving relation to contrasting material. In between the rondo-like returns of the main tune Ellington inserted three different kinds of phrases, one that sounds like a B or bridge and usually comes between statements of the main theme, another that is a closing phrase built on a transformation of the four-note dirge theme, and, most intensely, a phrase in which the two-note Daisy theme is heard as a sequence of rising half steps in rhythmic augmentation, four times as slow as the original statement. This third idea, heard only twice, stands out from the rest of the work as a powerfully rendered acknowledgment of grief, but the essence of the music, its portrait of a great lady, appears in the varied, reorchestrated restatements of the eight-bar idea, which allow each member of the band to pay Ellington's mother a personal tribute. The eighth-note “strands of pearls” motive embellishes these melodic restatements either as a counterpoint or response, enriching the melody both horizontally and vertically. The pearls in the photograph and in the music proclaim Daisy's regal bearing, as would befit the mother of a duke.

  Ellington's complicated marital and extramarital history suggests that no woman ever really replaced Daisy in his affections, but his devotion to her memory did not inhibit his musical portrayals of erotic themes. His next two extended works with romantic subjects, “The Blue Belles of Harlem” and the Perfume Suite, involved significant collaboration with Billy Strayhorn. The Perfume Suite premiered at the Carnegie Hall concert on December 19, 1944. Ellington signaled the collaborative effort obliquely with what may have sounded like a papal locution: “In the Perfume Suite our aim was not so much to try to interpret the mood…implied by the label on the commercial projects, but more so to try to capture the character usually taken on by a woman who wears different brands of perfume—or rather different blends of perfume…. We divided them into four categories: Love, Violence, Naiveté and Sophistication.”13 The first movement, first titled “Sonata” and later “Balcony Serenade,” was in fact Strayhorn's reworking of material he had written for other purposes; the second, a vocal number called “Strange Feeling,” was also mainly by Strayhorn, though Ellington scored the instrumental chorus. Ellington composed the third movement, “Dancers in Love,” and performed it as a piano solo (with bass). The final movement, “Coloratura,” showcased the upper register screech trumpet of Cat Anderson, who had just joined the band. It is an Ellington work completed by Strayhorn in the handoff method the two composers had established in “Jack the Bear.” As Walter van de Leur notes, the Perfume Suite became the model for later extended, multimovement pieces “consisting of a mix of (retitled) old and new compositions by Ellington and Strayhorn, unified by a programmatic title and explanatory remarks.”

  The Perfume Suite overturned racial and sexual stereotypes through unexpected and disturbing juxtapositions of mood. “Balcony Serenade” sounds like a continuation of Strayhorn's “Sugar Hill Penthouse” from Beige; its lush reed choir voicing is as Glenn Miller-ish as its title. Strayhorn's music won the praise of Miller's arrangers Bill Finnegan and Billy May, as well as Ralph Burns, composer of “Early Autumn,” a Woody Herman hit—all masters of slow, cheek-to-cheek compositions. Just when the mainly white Carnegie audience may have been lulled into comfort, however, Al Hibbler appeared to sing “Strange Feeling” in an impassioned, almost operatic baritone perfectly suited to the song's scary intensity:

  This strange feeling is seeping through my blood.

  This strange feeling is sleeping cuddled up

  Somewhere inside me…

  The instrumental chorus, scored by Ellington, combined jungle, modernistic, and psycho styles. It's almost an American Wozzeck; the closest parallel is “Lonely Room,” the creepy, revelatory (and usually omitted) monologue by the pathological Jud Fry in Oklahoma!

  The third movement, “Dancers in Love,” subtitled “Stomp for Beginners,” sustains the Wozzeck mania with a twelve-tone melody but is otherwise a delicious tribute to James P. Johnson. The music returns to normalcy but moves north of Central Park. Again, the easygoing nature of this movement is a setup for even greater eccentricity. “Coloratura” sounds like an operatic cadenza transcribed for trumpet, an idea made famous by Roy Eldridge in his recording of “Rockin’ Chair.” Here, though, the cadenza neither precedes nor follows a melody; it's a pure diva moment. Anderson's trumpet sounds like an upward extension of Hibbler's voice, transforming Hibbler's masculine baritone into an image of feminine star power. However it was written, the Perfume Suite turned black into white and male into female, and, in under twelve minutes, it presented the full spectrum of love, from tenderness to obsession.

  SUCH SWEET THUNDER: OTHELLO REDUX

  Theseus: We will, fair Queen, up to the mountain's top

  And mark the musical confusion

  Of hounds and echo in conjunction.

  Hippolyta: I was w
ith 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.

  —A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act IV, Scene I

  Throughout his career Ellington challenged the dehumanizing stereotypes of black male sexuality by living up to the nickname he had earned when he was fourteen, when his friend Edgar McEntree dubbed him “Duke.” “I think he felt that in order for me to be eligible for his constant companionship I should have a title,” Ellington recalled modestly in Music Is My Mistress.14 It's hard to find a photograph where he appears less than regal; even in a portrait from 1906 he looks like the heir apparent. In live performance he was better dressed and better spoken and infinitely cooler than anyone else in the room—even, to judge by the photos, the British royal family. Paul Whiteman looked more like the bridegroom on a wedding cake than the King of Jazz, and Benny Goodman, King of Swing, cut a less regal figure than a haberdasher. Ellington seemed to the manor born. In later years, when his face took on its aristocratic world-weary mask, people attending an Ellington performance felt privileged to be granted an audience by visiting royalty. Of course it was an act, but no more so than the similarly grand personae created by Leopold Stokowski or Leonard Bernstein. We're talking, after all, about show business.

  Two of Ellington's tone parallels celebrate fellow black entertainers Bert Williams and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, who had also cast off the demeaning trappings of minstrelsy. A third, “Menelik, The Lion of Judah,” paid tribute (perhaps ironically) to Haile Selassie, emperor of Ethiopia and an African opponent of European aggression.15 Ellington's ultimate tone parable of the vulnerable romance of black star and white audience—and, by extension, of Africa and America—demanded an even more extended framework and also a more global stage—the Shakespearean stage of the Globe itself.

  Such Sweet Thunder, a suite in twelve movements composed by Ellington and Strayhorn for the Shakespearean Festival in Stratford, Ontario, premiered at a Music for Moderns concert titled “Twelve-tone to Ellingtonia,” at New York's Town Hall on April 28, 1957, a day before Ellington's fifty-eighth birthday. (At Town Hall Ellington humorously called the final piece “Cop Out” because it was a placeholder for the yet-to-be-written finale; “Cop Out” was a minor blues that the band had recorded a month earlier and also a Gonsalves vehicle.) The band played the suite again at Stratford on September 5, 1957, with “Circle of Fourths” as a conclusion, as it is on the recording.16 Later Music for Moderns concerts that season paired the Modern Jazz Quartet with Virgil Thomson, Mahalia Jackson with Martial Singher, and Chico Hamilton with Carlos Surinach. At Town Hall Kurt Weill's early, astringent Violin Concerto op. 12, played by Anahid Ajemian and members of the New York Philharmonic under Dmitri Mitropoulos, served as curtain raiser. Weill's music was having a posthumous boom thanks to the revival of The Threepenny Opera, but his concerto gave only a foretaste of the jazz-influenced Weill; Ross Parmenter, the New York Times critic, found the new Ellington/Strayhorn work far more persuasive and “thoroughly winning.”

  Ellington was on a roll. The premiere came less than a year after the band's triumphant “rebirth” at the Newport Jazz Festival on July 8, 1956. Ellington soon appeared on the cover of Time (August 19, 1956) and won a new contract with Columbia Records. On March 15, 1957, he appeared, with his sister Ruth and son Mercer, on Edward R. Morrow's Person to Person. His musical-theater fantasy of jazz history, A Drum Is a Woman, aired during the United States Steel Hour on CBS a week after the Such Sweet Thunder premiere; Ellington, who was fond of anagrams and verbal inversions, personified jazz as Madame Zajj. Six weeks later the band recorded The Duke Ellington Songbook with Ella Fitzgerald; Ellington's popular tunes, just a small part of his oeuvre, now took their rightful place along with the songs of Gershwin, Kern, Porter, Berlin, Arlen, and Rodgers in Ella's canon-defining albums on Verve records. Still later that summer the band would play the Ravinia Festival in Chicago, the summer home of the Chicago Symphony, then in its Fritz Reiner heyday. Surrounded by honors from the white cultural world, Ellington had good reason to liken himself to the original black superstar: Othello.

  Although the phrase “I never heard so musical a discord, such sweet thunder” came from A Midsummer Night's Dream, Ellington 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.”17 Many of the instrumental parts, however, bear the title “Cleo.” Somewhere along the line the music had changed genders while retaining an African setting and protagonist. The plots of both Othello and Antony and Cleopatra involved a high-stakes romance between European and African lovers. In Music Is My Mistress, Ellington wrote that “When Nobody Was Looking” from the Deep South Suite of 1946 “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.” A decade later Ellington, shielded by the Bard, presented a bolder representation of interracial sex, which was still illegal in many American states both North and South. (The Supreme Court would not declare antimiscegenation laws unconstitutional until 1967; sixteen states still had such laws at the time.)

  Such Sweet Thunder revived the political themes Ellington had pursued in Jump for Joy, Black, Brown and Beige, New World A-Comin', Deep South Suite, Liberian Suite, and Harlem. The time gap between Harlem and Such Sweet Thunder, however, reflects a double crisis of the postwar years: the implosion of the market for big band music and the anticommunist crusades of the House Un-American Activities Committee and Senator McCarthy. In the November 5, 1952, issue of Down-Beat Leonard Feather claimed that the only functioning bands left were Ellington's, Woody Herman's, Count Basie's, and Stan Kenton's. The economics and demographics of music were changing, though critics were at a loss to explain how or why. The narrowed field of competition meant that the Ellington band was kept busy, though many of its gigs took place in provincial movie theaters and dance halls. Even in concert halls, however, some critics detected a precipitous decline and fall in musical relevance. After the Ellington band played the Civic Auditorium in Portland, Oregon, in March 1952, a review in Down-Beat by Ted Hallock dismissed Ellington impertinently as a “gross old man,” speculated that Ellington was not the composer he claimed to be, and concluded that “if Ellington is Shakespeare, then I am beginning to wonder if there isn't a Roger Bacon somewhere in the woodpile.”18 Apparently even the leading jazz publication of the time had no problem insinuating the “N” word into its columns—but Hallock may unwittingly have planted the seed of Such Sweet Thunder. Although the magazine's readers, including Charles Mingus, protested Hallock's review, Ellington's humiliating decline seemed to continue. In the summer of 1955 the Ellington Orchestra was featured along with dancing waters, ice snow, water snow, and fireworks at the “Aquashow” at Flushing Meadow Park, and for most of the months surrounding that gig the calendar was empty. The most popular recording of the summer was “Rock Around the Clock” with Bill Haley and the Comets. On “race” labels the biggest hits were Fats Domino's “Ain't That a Shame” and Little Richard's “Tutti Frutti.” Big band music seemed dead.

  Ellington suffered political misfortunes as well. In the early 1950s he was caught up in two public political disputes that showed how times were changing. Throughout the 1940s Ellington had aligned himself with the leftist Popular Front, and the 1943 Carnegie Hall concert had been a benefit for Russian War Relief. After the war ended, however, any pro-Russian sympathies became suspect. When the Daily Worker c
laimed that Ellington had signed the Soviet-sponsored Stockholm Peace Petition, he wrote a statement for The New Leader, an anticommunist social democratic weekly, under the title “No Red Songs for Me,” published September 30, 1950. In it, Ellington stated, “The only communism I know of is that of Jesus Christ.”

  Ellington's guarded political stance placed him out of sync with the emerging civil rights movement. In the fall of 1951 Ellington's band toured as part of The Big Show of ‘51, which also featured Sarah Vaughan and Nat King Cole. The NAACP picketed their appearances at segregated theaters in Richmond, Virginia, and in Atlanta. The black press seized on several statements attributed to Ellington that seemed to oppose the protest: blacks were “not ready” for integration; protest “is for the Negro at the bottom. It isn't doing the Negro who's got something any good.”19 However Ellington's words may have been misconstrued, it would take him a few years to mend fences with the movement. In the early 1960s he was honored by the Urban League, the NAACP, and the Congress of Racial Equality.

  Well before these honors, though, Ellington was able to rekindle the politically ambitious side of his music because of a fundamental change in the way jazz was marketed. In the 1950s jazz was no longer the popular music of white or black audiences it had been in the swing era. Rock and roll and rhythm and blues took its place, particularly with younger listeners. The jazz scene now migrated to college campuses and destination festivals like those at Newport, Rhode Island, and Monterey, California. The new venues combined classy locales with high art ambitions; George Wein, one of the founders of the Newport Festival, predicted that it would be to jazz what Salzburg is to Mozart and Bayreuth is to Wagner.20 In a sense the festival settings, captured in the aptly arty documentary film Jazz on a Summer's Day, replaced racial segregation with economic segregation, but they also offered jazz a safe haven well suited to the sophisticated music of the Ellington Orchestra and the refashioned Basie band of “April in Paris” and “Shiny Stockings.” Both bands had moved far from their swing-era styles. While critics bewailed Ellington's decline and noted the departure of such signature players as Cootie Williams and Sonny Greer, Ellington modernized his sound with the significant arrivals of Paul Gonsalves, Clark Terry, Louie Bellson, and Sam Woodyard. Johnny Hodges also returned to the band in 1956 after a five-year hiatus, and at the beginning of that year Ellington lured Billy Strayhorn back to the fold after a brief parting of the ways. Strayhorn told a friend, “I talked to Edward. He would like me to be more engaged again. He asked me what sort of project I would like.”21