The Ellington Century

by David Schiff

  Two days after the premiere Ellington performed much of the music in the very different setting of the Monterey Jazz Festival. The entire concert (plus a new Christmas surprise performed by Lena Horne and Billy Strayhorn) came to New York's Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church on December 26, 1965, and two months later it was heard in England at Coventry Cathedral, where Britten's War Requiem had premiered three years before. In Music Is My Mistress Ellington proudly pointed to the nearly fifty performances of A Concert of Sacred Music heard around the world.

  SECOND SACRED CONCERT: FREEDOM

  New York's Episcopal Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, the birthplace of the Second Sacred Concert, overlooks the southern part of Harlem from Morningside Heights; its site is a sacred counterpart to Sugar Hill two miles to the north. The cathedral has also remained unfinished by choice. Its leaders decided that healing their community was more important than completing the building, which, if it were ever finished, would be the largest Gothic cathedral in the world. Ellington may well have identified personally with the idea of the never-to-be-completed project, a symbol of human imperfection and constant striving. The cathedral would be the site of Ellington's funeral service on May 27, 1974.

  In Music Is My Mistress Ellington wrote that the Second Sacred Concert was “the most important thing I have ever done,” a claim not to be taken lightly. First performed on January 18, 1968, the work derived its special character from three seemingly unrelated elements. Like My People, much of it seems designed for the edification of children, and Ellington gave an important role to a children's chorus, in this case the choirs of St. Hilda's and St. Hugh's School, an Episcopal private school a few blocks from the cathedral. There were children's voices in the first concert, but here their voices imbued much of the music with a disarming (or disconcerting) innocence, most notably in the spoken episode where a young boy retold the story of the fall from the unusual point of view of the apple:

  I was swinging.

  Ripening in peace and quiet,

  And who do you think came crawling down that limb?

  That little old serpent.

  Your first reaction may be that this is the kind of school performance you tolerate only if your own kid is onstage, if then; but, as we will see, the naïveté served a larger goal.

  The second new element was Alice Babs, the Swedish soprano who first performed with Ellington in Stockholm in February 1963. Babs was the Ellington singer in excelsis; her voice combined the classical quality Ellington admired in Kay Davis with a range that matched the stratospherics of Cat Anderson's trumpet; she could also read Ellington's unpredictable melodies at sight. “Heaven,” the most enduring tune from the Second Sacred Concert, and the wordless “T.G.T.T.” (Too Good to Title) took full advantage of all of Babs's musical strengths.

  The third shaping element of the Second Sacred Concert hovered over it in absentia. After a long illness Billy Strayhorn had died, on May 31, 1967. He was already ill when Ellington was writing the theme for the first concert, and Ellington had consulted with Strayhorn: “On the telephone I told him about the concert and that I wanted him to write something, ‘Introduction, ending, quick transitions,’ I said. ‘The title is the first four words of the Bible—“In the Beginning God.”’ He had not heard my theme, but what he sent to California started on the same note as mine (F natural) and ended on the same note as mine (A a tenth higher). Out of six notes representing the six syllables of the four words, only two notes were different.”17

  Ellington read a eulogy at Strayhorn's funeral, and for the Second Sacred Concert he would recite part of it to illustrate freedom, the overarching theme of the entire program, which somehow unified the contrasting elements of naïveté, transcendence, and commemoration. (Ellington printed the entire text in Music Is My Mistress, though not in the same order heard on the recording.) The seemingly impossible thematic triangulation produced a score even more varied in style than the first concert. As Harvey Cohen writes, “The Second Sacred Concert itself was a study in musical freedom, with wildly varying transitions within compositions and influences from jazz, gospel, the black spirituals, classical choral music, Latin music, show tunes and more.”18

  The repeated successful performances of the first concert must have emboldened Ellington both musically and spiritually in preparing the second. In the original program notes he described himself as “a messenger boy, one who tries to bring messages to people, not people who have never heard of God, but those who were more or less raised with the guidance of the Church.” All the music on the recording of the Second Sacred Concert was newly composed, although the actual performance also included a reprise of “99%.” Much of the music was also far more secular sounding than the first concert. “Almighty God” and “Don't Get Down on Your Knees to Pray until You Have Forgiven Everyone” were the only gospel-style numbers on the program. “The Shepherd (Who Watches over the Night Flock),” intended as a portrait of John Gensel of St. Peter's Lutheran Church, who was known as the “pastor of New York's jazz community,” featured a growling blues performance by Cootie Williams. “Something about Believing” reminded Giddins and others of the hackwork of “Broadway tunesmiths,”19 but its easygoing pop language masks a typically Ellingtonian harmonic complexity. Its simple melodic line, moreover, might be considered an identifying element of Ellington's Mozartian late style; similar tunes would proliferate in the Third Sacred Concert.

  On first hearing the Second Sacred Concert can sound like a bewildering (but tuneful) miscellany; its unity and form only become clear with repeated listening. To better understand it we need to consider its overall plan rather than just ticking off its long list of styles. Ellington framed the concert with two statements of Psalm 150 (slightly amended). The first is instrumental, once again giving Harry Carney the job of establishing a musical foundation, while the second is sung by the entire company as a finale. We might say that the concert is a journey that gradually readies the audience for the words of praise implied by the opening music. Psalm 150, “Praise God with the sound of the trumpet,/Praise God with the psaltery and harp,” has long been a favorite of composers; Stravinsky set it in the third movement of his Symphony of Psalms. Ellington, however, building on the idea of “David Danced,” added movement to the instruments of praise: “Praise God and Dance, Dance, Dance, Dance, Dance, Dance.”

  Within this framework of praise the concert traces the gradual maturing of religious understanding from childlike wonder to the more adult values of compassion and forgiveness. This growth in spiritual and moral understanding subliminally parallels the unfolding history of the Bible. The second movement, “Supreme Being,” retells the opening chapters of Genesis in a recitation by the children's chorus framed by passages of modernistic music for the band. The instrumental music seems to develop ideas from the opening of “In the Beginning God” but is much more sustained and dissonant. It sounds like a cross between “Later,” from the Controversial Suite (though without any suggestion of parody), and Billy Strayhorn's “Dirge.” The sophistication of the instrumental music makes for a sharp contrast with the wide-eyed recitation of the story of creation and the fall by the children. The second instrumental statement, however, metamorphoses from dissonance to the comforting sounds of a slow gospel chorale; the scoring gives the band the sound of an organ. This dramatic transformation suggests that the children's words have taught the band how to pray: “And a child shall lead them…”

  As he had done in the first concert, Ellington confounded expectations with unexpected stylistic juxtapositions. With “Heaven,” which follows right on the heels of “Supreme Being,” the voice of Alice Babs changed the tone of the conversation, or launched a new one, for “Heaven” has its own dialectical structure. There are three choruses: in the first, an out-of-tempo recitative-like statement by Babs (and Ellington) pictures the sublime through an angular melody full of dissonant leaps; the second lays down a slow groove and softens the angles so that the melody becomes a quin
tessential Johnny Hodges ballad; and the third time around Babs returns as the groove becomes a celebratory bossa nova. In the cadenzalike outro Babs ascends to a heavenly high D. As in “Supreme Being” Ellington used stylistic contrast to create an upward spiraling spiritual conversation in which contrasting voices seem to inspire one another to higher awareness and higher joy. We expect to find this kind of religious drama in Bach's cantatas, but it takes a little careful listening, and a change in our habitual ways of listening to jazz, to see that Ellington's sacred music achieves a comparable goal of enlightenment and uplift in his own idiom.

  The next three numbers, “Something about Believing,” “Almighty God,” and “The Shepherd,” present different styles of prayer in contrasting voices: a pop tune for the chorus, a gospel-pulsed prayer for Alice Babs's coloratura soprano and Russell Procope's throaty New Orleans-style clarinet, and, for Cootie Williams, a bluesy instrumental “tone parallel” that sounds like a slowed-down, stretched-out version of “Moanin'” with a hint of “St. James Infirmary.” “Something” begins with a jolt as Ellington enters on an electric keyboard instead of his customary acoustic grand piano; each of these numbers has a sound that defines its scene, from the “cool” world of “Something” to the smoky after-midnight world of Pastor Gensel's congregation of “night people.” If these three prayers are responses to Genesis, they also pave the way to Exodus, the advent of freedom.

  “It's Freedom” is the centerpiece of the Second Sacred Concert. Its first musical theme, Ellington wrote, “was suggested by an old lick of Willie ‘The Lion’ Smith, who helped us when we came to New York in 1923.” “It's Freedom” is a concert-within-a-concert, a series of episodes that include Ellington's own sermon:

  Two statements of an AABA tune in c minor: Freedom, Freedom, Freedom, Freedom

  Slow chorale in E major (ends on a half cadence)

  Keyboard solo on original tune

  Upbeat choral tune (Freedom, Freedom, Freedom's what you thought you heard) on harmonic structure of the chorale (E)

  Instrumental version of previous chorus with Johnny Hodges solo

  Repeat of chorale tune

  New chorale

  Sax solo leads to new jazz tune (“Freedom is sweet”) in F Recitation of the word freedom in twenty languages Ellington sermon (spoken)

  New chorale (in c minor) behind continuation of sermon, which speaks of Billy Strayhorn's understanding of freedom

  Reprise of opening chorus

  Like the biblical exodus, the attainment of freedom is both the end and the beginning of a story. Childhood has ended and messy maturity begins. After an intermission the music seemed to starts up anew with three wordless numbers, a solo piano meditation, a sizzling instrumental interlude, and “The Biggest and Busiest Intersection,” which featured a drum solo to represent the “fire and brimstone” of a “sermonette” rather than the thunder and lightning of the first concert. Then came “T.G.T.T” an ethereal floating vocalise for Alice Babs with Ellington on electric keyboard. Taken together, the three movements could represent a growth in consciousness, an awareness of the dangers and pleasures of the flesh, and the responsibilities of the spirit. They might also mark the passage from the Old to the New Testament. The message becomes explicit in “Don't Get Down on Your Knees to Pray until You Have Forgiven Everyone,” which was sung by Tony Watkins and reinforced in “Father Forgive,” which brings home, once again, the inseparable interdependence of faith and social justice:

  Father Forgive, Father Forgive

  The hatred which divides nation from nation,

  Race from race, class from class.

  The covetous desires of men and nations

  To possess that which is not their own.

  These words, sung in January 1968, would resonate with events that would soon follow in the momentous and tragic year. (Oddly, both tracks were dropped from the CD reissue.) If Ellington had now become “strenuously verbal,” as Gary Giddins wrote, the times demanded such a prophetic voice.20

  After these stern calls for justice, the concluding “Praise God and Dance,” launched with Alice Babs's repeated exhortations to praise God, combined the jubilation of the psalm with the prophetic vision of Isaiah in a blaze of C major affirmation comparable in spirit to the end of Mahler's “Resurrection” Symphony—imagine what Mahler would have done with Cat Anderson's high E. At the premiere, Stanley Dance reported in DownBeat, “two sets of dancers … surprised the audience by erupting down the center aisle. The first group, colorfully dressed and coached by Geoffrey Holder, moved with gestures symbolic of worship in the idiom of modern dance. The second, issuing from behind the band, was swinging all the way with steps and rhythms right out of the Savoy Ballroom.” Since Ellington had choreographed My People, it is quite likely that he also conceived and directed this final coup de théâtre.

  THIRD SACRED CONCERT: THE LORD'S PRAYER

  But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.

  —Matthew 6:6

  The Third Sacred Concert premiered at Westminster Abbey on October 24, 1973, six months before Ellington's death and in the shadow of death and illness. Johnny Hodges had died in 1970; Dr. Arthur Logan, Ellington's personal physician and closest friend, would die (under suspicious circumstances) a month after the premiere. Ellington was already ill at the time of the premiere, although he did not allow his condition to become known and he did not let it interfere with the band's European tour (which included a performance of the Third Sacred Concert at the Basilica de Santa Maria del Mar in Barcelona) or his composing, especially his work on the comic opera Queenie Pie and the ballet Three Black Kings. Mercer Ellington described his father's condition as the premiere approached:

  It was then, for the first time, that I began to understand how gravely ill he was. He was terribly tired, and after a couple of hours of rehearsal he had to sit down or go back to the hotel. Flying the Atlantic at his age and going into rehearsal without much sleep required strength, but he knew that he always did his best work under pressure. He had a pace he was used to, a norm, that really set him working, and he gauged himself so that he would have that pace just prior to the performance, but I think for the first time in his life he knew he wasn't capable of it.21

  The recording of the Third Sacred Concert shows signs of Ellington's condition and of his band's weariness after flying in from Chicago two nights before the premiere (although Ellington's piano playing seems unimpaired). Like the first concert and unlike the second, the third reprised older compositions: “Tell Me It's the Truth,” “Praise God and Dance,” and “In the Beginning God.”22 The concert was recorded live, and Ellington was dissatisfied with much of it, so some sections were never released commercially. Despite these conditions, many critics have recognized the distinctive tone of the Third Sacred Concert, its move, as Janna Tull Steed wrote, “from preachment and toward prayer.”23

  Although the Third Sacred Concert was titled “The Majesty of God” on its recording, it might more accurately have been called “Meditations and Variations on the Lord's Prayer.” Ellington's opening piano solo is a wordless version of that prayer, anticipating the variations found in the extended movement “Every Man Prays in His Own Language.” Two new songs for Alice Babs (Ellington's “personified muse,” as Steed calls her) are more like mantras than conventional ballads or prayers. “My Love” and “Is God a Three-Letter Word for Love?” repeat the same phrases over and over, as if each repetition will yield a higher understanding. (The brief and very un-Handelian “Hallelujah,” based on rhythm changes, pursues a similar spiritual strategy, with a little sly humor, considering the regal setting.) Both songs have an inner calm that transfigures their pop tune formats, though listening to Ellington's interludes I have the sense that he was proud to produce, so late in the day, two more songs destined to become standards.

  “Every Man Pr
ays in His Own Language” intones the Lord's Prayer seven ways:

  1. Instrumental (Harold Ashby, tenor sax solo, fast tempo)

  2. A cappella choir (slow, in chorale style)

  3. Instrumental (reeds and cymbals, also in chorale style), with a choral “amen”

  4. Alice Babs unaccompanied singing in Swedish to her own melody

  5. Recorder solo played by trombonist Art Baron

  6. Alice Babs and the John Alldis Choir, vocalise

  7. Ellington's homily with choral background:

  In a raging storm

  When the captain gives the abandon ship alarm

  Are we sure that the ocean

  Has not taken a notion

  To demonstrate the Hundred-and-fiftieth Psalm?

  When a baby screams out after the doctor's first spank

  Are we certain that the baby is not trying to say “Thank God.”

  This easily could have been the last word, but Ellington needed to show Westminster Abbey his down-home gospel side with “Ain't Nobody Nowhere Nothin' Without God,” a catalogue of negations in the service of affirmation sung by Tony Watkins. The final number, “The Majesty of God,” feels like a threefold closing benediction (by Ellington, Carney, and Babs) framed by a modern-style processional, the kind of music you might hear as you walked out of a Broadway musical while the cast took curtain calls. This mellow, casual-sounding ending, so different from the time-stopping cadences of Stravinsky or from the ecstatic conclusions of the two earlier concerts, has its own theological significance, Ellington's equivalent to the exaltation of minutiae in Gerard Manley Hopkins's “Pied Beauty.” Like the earlier modestly scaled Hallelujah, the ordinary-sounding tune challenges the listener to find the majesty of God in ordinary things. Ceasing rather than arriving, circular rather than linear, the Third Sacred Concert does not progress in spiritual understanding; it just basks in its glory.