by David Schiff
Because Ellington did not recycle the fanfare theme in Brown and Beige its very absence in those movements poses a question: if it is missing, what has taken its place? Progress seems inseparable from loss. The tripartite structures of Black and Brown figure this conundrum in contrasting historical patterns. Black is structured in clear Hegelian terms: thesis (“Work Song”), antithesis (“Come Sunday”), and synthesis (“Light”). With “West Indian Dance” and “Emancipation Celebration”, Brown at first seems even more concretely historical and clearly chronological in structure, but with the concluding section, “The Blues”, it counteracts its own sense of progression with a palindromic structure that defies history. Heard in sequence Black and Brown thus appear as a large thesis and antithesis of spiritual and blues, setting up a possible synthesis in Beige. Ellington reinforced these patterns through a contrast of high and low instruments and gender. Black builds its dialectic on a timbral contrast of Joe Nanton's growling “jungle-style” trombone, the leading role in “Work Song”, and Johnny Hodges's sophisticated or “dicty” alto sax solo (or aria) in “Come Sunday”. This contrast intensifies with the entry of a woman's voice in “The Blues”, which genders Brown as a female counterpart to Black. (On the 1965 recording, though, “The Blues” was sung by a man, and “Come Sunday” was played down an octave by Harry Carney.)
Given its historical subject, Black, Brown and Beige required an idiom that differed from ordinary jazz because jazz itself was part of the history it was writing. Earlier analyses have used terms from European music like “thematic development” and “recapitulation” as if they carried no cultural baggage, but the only overt contact the music makes with Europe is a passing two-degrees-of-separation allusion in “Come Sunday” to “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”, which Dvoák had appropriated in his “New World” Symphony and which Ellington neatly takes back long before the quotation by reabsorbing it into a whole family of related motives that fill the collagelike structure of “Work Song”.
To differentiate the music of the distant past from contemporary jazz, “Work Song” avoids the usual phrase structures of jazz, the thirty-two-bar AABA structure of the pop tune, or the twelve-bar structure of the blues. Ellington also withheld his trademark chromaticism, which would have carried an anachronistically modernistic flavor. Black figures the pre-European past through diatonic melodies (with the exception of a single blues-scale motive) and static harmonies, rarely straying from E, major for the first two thirds of the movement. Apart from the fanfare theme, the other melodic material seems to come and go almost haphazardly, but at the climactic moment of the movement, Joe Nanton's solo in C major against the “grunts” of the orchestra (a moment that Ellington brought to the audience's attention in his introductory remarks), the music suddenly attains a sense of unity.
The first four notes of Nanton's tune, C-E-G-A, reveal the genetic connection between the other melodic ideas. I'll label the main motives of “Work Song” as:
1. Fanfare
2. Riding on a Blue Note
3. Blues Riff
4. Jump for Joy
5. Sax Section Work Song
6. Epiphany Motive
7. Ain't That Good News
The melodic “gene” appears in all of these motives except for the Fanfare. If we invert the melodic figure C-E-G-A we get E-C-A-G, a melodic motive (reminiscent of “Swing Low”) that appears throughout (transposed, in E, to the pitches G-E,-C-B) and which Ellington had previously used at the very opening of “Riding on a Blue Note”. Once we hear the relation of these two figures, its connection to the “Work Song” melody played by the saxes becomes clear, and with a little more attention we can also hear the motive embedded and embellished in the nine-note blueslike riff that also floats up periodically in the movement. The four-note “germ” also functions as a harmony; in the Sax Section Work Song every chord in the five-part voicing states the pitches G- E-C-Bk.
Retrospective revelation, giving sense to musical events after they have happened, is a subtle effect of musical storytelling that is very difficult to pull off. There are precedents in such classical works as the first movement of the “Eroica” Symphony, Chopin's Ballades, Sibelius's Fifth Symphony, and also Sousa's “Stars and Stripes Forever”. In a different way, though, this effect also appears in great jazz solos, beginning as early as Joe Oliver's solo in “Dipper Mouth Blues”. Ellington's narrative strategy in Black resembles both of these precedents. As with Sibelius's “Swan Theme”, Nanton's melody (and the harmonic move from E to C that it announces) is not a logical development but a lightning bolt that suddenly clarifies the musical meaning. Ellington set the epiphanic moment up through a succession of solos that articulate the large formal divisions of the movement, and which tell its story in terms of the idiosyncratic blues timbres and inflections of his players. The music clearly contrasts the personal styles of these solos with the more communal ensemble passages for sax, trumpet, and trombone choirs. Once we hear the importance of the solo voices, the many short phrases of the movement coalesce into a simpler large-scale design.24 Using the bar numbers from Maurice Peress's version of the score, I would divide the movement as follows:
Part 1: mm. 1-62 (binary, divided at m. 27, with a coda at m. 57)
Part 2: mm. 63-114 (Harry Carney baritone sax solo)
Transition: mm. 115-26 (Harold Baker trumpet solo)
Part 3: 127-79 (Joe Nanton solo beginning at m. 139)
Climax and coda: 180-210 (Nanton solo in C major, followed by brass section amplification in D major and reaffirmation, at m. 204, through counterpoint of Nanton and fanfare motive in saxes)
Transition to “Come Sunday” 211-16
Further simplifying this plan, we might think of the movement as an extended aria (from the opera “Boola”), almost like a Verdian cabaletta, with an introduction, a first solo section, a recitative-like transition, a second solo section, and a triumphant conclusion. We can hear the single solo voice of this aria articulated by three instrumentalists: Carney, Baker, and Nanton. If we lean on the poem they may be said to represent three phases of Boola's consciousness: his recollections of the black past, his union with Voola, and his realization that the work song could be “used as a weapon…/ To slash the ties of bondage!” And if we hear the music in these terms we may hear the introductory section as a picture of the communal African past that is severed traumatically with the whiplash dissonances at bar 57, perhaps the remnant, reduced to a single image of pain, of sections Ellington had intended to write to describe the slave ship and slave market.
Black: “Come Sunday”
Just as the audience was getting a grip on “Work Song” it segued into “Come Sunday”. In his introductory remarks Ellington briefly referred to the section as a spiritual that was closely related to the work song; he must have known that further words were not necessary because he had two winning cards up his sleeve, a great tune and Johnny Hodges, whose solo voice had not yet been heard. The structure of “Come Sunday” mirrors that of “Work Song” in two respects: it places its defining theme last, and it unfolds with three solo instrumental voices, Juan Tizol's valve trombone, Ray Nance's violin, and finally Hodges's alto sax. The melodic presentation reverses the usual jazz or symphonic practice of exposition followed by development. Here, instead, the theme is heard first in fragmented form and then finds its true shape.
Ellington chose to write his own spiritual rather than quote from a well-known and revered repertory of “sorrow songs”. Surprisingly, he created a hybrid of spiritual and pop tune, following the AABA form of Tin Pan Alley, which is not characteristic of the spiritual literature. With a deceptively plain-style diatonic melodic line over rich harmonies, the tune has resonances of both “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” and “Summertime”. (To hear the first, sing the words “motherless child” and then “Sunday O Come” or “Please look down and” to Ellington's melody. To hear the second, play the progression F9-E9.) Its AABA design, moreover, suggests an i
ronic parallel to “Old Man River”, which Ellington had already mocked with his “Old Man Blues”, part of which will appear at the end of “Light.”
Writing “Come Sunday” in a hybrid style, Ellington lifted its spirituality out of the chronological frame; he would bring the theme back at the end of Beige as an emblem of Harlem's living piety, not as a vestige of the past. Before its full statement, though, he used instrumental colors to convey the story line of the poem, where Boola sits outside the master's church:
The music was soothing and sweet…
Even from the outside looking in.
He longed to enter and be a part
Of this silv'ry tongued
Ding! Dong! Ding! Dong!
At the opening of the original “Come Sunday” Ellington superimposed the chimes (a timbral metamorphosis of the opening drumbeats) over an organlike chorale played by the brass, and echoed by the saxes, that hints at the melody to come. The melody next appears solemnly intoned on the valve trombone, the “whitest” instrument in Ellington's orchestra; a brief interjection by the alto sax (Otto Hardwick) may represent Boola's commentary on its alien sound. After the trombone solo concludes with a bit of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”, the sax section seems to recall some of its “Work Song” music. The harsh labors of the workweek return, but time has a new organization, measured from Sunday to Sunday. In the next section Ray Nance plays an expressive obbligato over the trombone tune. The counterpoint may represent the group of slaves worshipping outside the church and their dawning recognition of the liberating content of Scripture, its call for justice:
“A false balance is abomination to the Lord;
But a just weight is his delight…”
“When pride cometh, then cometh shame,
But with the lowly is wisdom.”
“The integrity of the upright shall guide them:
But the perverseness of transgressors
Shall destroy them.”
The distant promise of liberation, though, appears only in a short passage of “train effect” music at the close of the violin solo; in spirituals the train signified the network of escape known as the Underground Railroad. And then Hodges steps out and finally plays the entire melody to the bare accompaniment of guitar and bass. The poem presents this climactic performance, the keystone of the trilogy's arch, as both a religious and musical calling:
God was good, but in his infinite wisdom
Would allow one blessing at a time….
He touched Boola's heart
And gave those golden sounds a lilt…
A depth…that no one else could duplicate.
He nudged the whites
And said to them: “LISTEN!”
The programmatic storytelling that sets up Hodges's solo allows the tune to expand its expressive domain to include the secular and the sacred. It is at once a ballad, a prayer, and a protest.
Black: “Light”
In the last parts of the poetic script for “Black” Ellington pursued the idea that the development of black music paralleled the evolving consciousness of the cause of freedom. Boola discovers that his songs placated his master but also could manipulate him:
It is not true…that all his songs
Were songs of sorrow. Tantalizingly
His humor slyly touched upon
His master's gullibility.
“Yassa, boss!” Simple, wasn't it?
This story, though, is not immediately apparent in the music of “Light” that brings Black to a close, yet more than the previous sections, “Light” shapes a musical narrative through the devices of thematic recall, embellishment, and superimposition and constantly weaves together melodic ideas from the previous two sections. It achieves this new synthesis by building on a platform of repeated phrase structures; in other words, it fuses work song and spiritual through the medium of jazz.25 Finally endowing the music with both the physiognomy and drive of his three-minute compositions, Ellington was also cryptically rewriting jazz history, backdating its origins by a century.
Expanding on the thematic superimpositions Ellington deployed in “Harlem Air Shaft”, “Light” is a virtuosic display of contrapuntal ars combinatoria. A detailed outline is needed to map out the polyphony:
Introduction (mm. 1-16): Beginning with a solo trumpet cadenza by Rex Stewart, which serves as a transition from “Come Sunday”, this section restates the Riding on a Blue Note and Blues Riff ideas from “Work Song” and ends with an allusion to the bridge of “Come Sunday.”
First chorus (mm. 17-56): A forty-bar AABBA in B that begins with the shout chorus from Riding on a Blue Note. In the first A the trumpet superimposes the Fanfare motive from “Work Song”. In the second A it superimposes the sax section Work Song theme. In the first B a reprise of the trombone section's Jump for Joy theme takes the place of the piano solo bridge heard in Riding on a Blue Note. The second B combines a shout in the trumpets, riffs based on the bridge of “Come Sunday” in the saxes, and statements of the Fanfare motive and the Blues Riff motive in the trombones. The final A is a harmonized unison shout chorus for all three choirs. On the last bar the bass enters with the Riding on a Blue Note motive.
Second chorus (mm. 57-77): Bass solo, ABA, but with a harmonic twist. The bass continues its solo with four bars by quoting four bars from Nanton's solo in “Work Song” that recall the spiritual “Good News” the next four bars uses the Blues Riff motive to modulate to A. The equivalent of a bridge consists of a four-bar variant of the Blues Riff in A followed by a restatement of the Sax Section Work Song in C major, the key of Nanton's “Work Song” Epiphany. A shortened, four-bar A returns the music to B by way of the Blues Riff.
Mm. 77-119: This section contains a thirteen-bar phrase that sounds like a condensed AA, followed by a four-bar reinterpretation of the Fanfare motive by the trumpet section in counterpoint to an augmentation of “Swing Low” in the saxes. The AA begins by superimposing the Good News motive in the saxes on Riding on a Blue Note in the trombones. In the first B phrase the sax section recalls the bridge of “Come Sunday”. The second bridge phrase brings in the solo trombone (Lawrence Brown) against a new sax riff. In the extended ten-bar A that follows, Brown recalls the melody of “Come Sunday” against “Riding on a Blue Note” in the saxes.
Transition (mm. 120-25): The music suddenly broadens.
First coda (mm. 126-165): A series of climactic superimpositions of the motives of “Work Song” and “Come Sunday” beginning in B then modulating to C with a faux final cadence in the saxes.
Second coda (mm. 166 to end): Suddenly the music starts up again at a faster tempo and in A, with a three-way superimposition: the Riding on a Blue Note motive in the saxes, Nanton's Epiphany in the trumpets, and the Fanfare in the trombones.
Much of this section is driven by repeated trumpet notes, alternatingly muted and open, that recall a figure from “Old Man Blues.”26 Just as that earlier piece inverted “Old Man River” into a celebratory shout, this second coda blows the blues away and serves as an apt summary of the path Black has traveled (in around twenty minutes) from enslavement to enlightenment.
“Light” celebrates freedom and jazz at the same time. In backdating jazz, Ellington also backdates freedom; the understanding of liberation precedes emancipation. Freedom, the music says, was not something bestowed on blacks by whites. It is the rightful claim of all humanity as proven by Scripture:
The master carried his fear with him…
Clutched to his bosom, into the haven of love.
Boola sang his way into the gallery of the church,
He could sing…yes…
But he couldn't sit with the worshippers
Of the Christ who said: “Peace on earth
To men of good will”. Boola sat upstairs,
In the “Crow's Nest” they called it.
Did they not realize he was above them…
Closer to that Heaven they were shouting about?
The idea that freedom i
s a counterpoint of faith and justice may sound awkward in words, but it translates powerfully into a musical texture. Ellington's polyphony sounds improvised but had to be calculated in advance; it's not an effect a composer can leave to chance. At the same time, though, the constant interplay of allusions recalls the techniques of scat singing.
Brown: “West Indian Dance”, “Emancipation Celebration”, “The Blues”
If we briefly allow ourselves to think of Black, Brown and Beige as a kind of symphony, Brown combines scherzo and slow movement;27 like Mahler's Second and Third, it has two scherzos, “West Indian Dance” and “Emancipation Celebration”. Heard in operatic terms, it feels like two ballets followed by a substantial aria, a fine second act. Unlike the complexly interwoven parts of Black, Brown presents itself as three freestanding vignettes, with no thematic exchange between sections. We therefore need to interpret them in terms of contrast rather than continuity, and the contrasts are provocative. Generically Caribbean rather than specifically Haitian, “West Indian Dance”, originally prefaced by a brief snatch of Revolutionary War fife and drum sounds and post-faced with fragments of “Old Folks at Home” and “Yankee Doodle”, expands the African American story beyond the United States, placing it within the larger story of the African diaspora. Coming before the “Emancipation Celebration”, it makes the jubilant mood of “Emancipation” feel provincial, of one place and one time. Ellington told the audience that the “Emancipation Celebration” illustrated “two sides of a story”, the hopes of the younger generation and the exhaustion of “a small group of old people who had earned the right to sit down and rest on somebody's property and of course their song was a very plaintive but tragic one”. The music, however, hardly sounds tragic and is only vaguely plaintive; it feels like a catchy swing number. Listening to the live recording, I sense that the warm applause that followed this section may have expressed a sense of relief that Ellington was finally playing the kind of music the audience had come to hear; Ellington's little parable about young and old may really have been a well-masked critique of a public who just wanted to hear the same old songs. Or it could allude to the contrasting political ideas of DuBois and Washington.