The History of Jazz (24 page)

With “The Stampede,” recorded shortly after Armstrong’s departure from the band, this more insistent style of ensemble work is already noticeable. The textures behind the soloists are no longer passive harmonic cushions, but extroverted lines that propel the improvisation with incisive counterrhythms. “The Henderson Stomp,” from November 1926, finds Redman experimenting with the structures of Harlem stride—the performance features Fats Waller on piano, who also apparently wrote the composition (although it was copyrighted by Henderson)—and tapping the inherently percussive and orchestral qualities of that idiom. By the time of “Tozo,” recorded in January 1927, Redman’s style is almost fully formed: the written parts, with their assured command of polyrhythms and instrumental textures, are as compelling as the solos. With “The Whiteman Stomp,” from May 1927, Redman even delves into the avant-garde, crafting a highly eccentric orchestration in which fragments of musical shrapnel take flight unpredictably, coalescing into an odd type of jazz, one built on disjunction and entropy. That same year, half a world away, physicist Werner Heisenberg was articulating his famous uncertainty principle, the foundation for quantum physics. Here Redman shows his allegiance to the same zeitgeist, espousing a jagged, pointillistic style in which all continuities are called into question. This piece, commissioned by Paul Whiteman, cannot be called a success. But it is a masterful failure, sounding like the jazz of some alternative universe, while demonstrating the extraordinary command of his medium that Redman had developed over the previous four years.

This period also marks the close of Redman’s formal ties with the Henderson band. In 1927, he became musical director of McKinney’s Cotton Pickers, an association that continued for the next several years. Although his new group lacked the extraordinary cadre of soloists that had distinguished the Henderson ensemble, it featured two outstanding arrangers in Redman and John Nesbitt. Redman also figured prominently as a saxophone soloist and singer with the band. He left to form his own group in 1931, but during an era marked by a proliferation of big bands, this unit never succeeded in rising above the level of a second-tier ensemble—although it made numerous recordings and broadcasts and stayed together until 1941. Another group that drew heavily on the same personnel, the Chocolate Dandies, was never a working band, but left behind a handful of exciting recordings that marry Redman’s arrangements with outstanding solo contributions from Coleman Hawkins, Benny Carter, Fats Waller, and others. These several settings allowed Redman to put together a body of work that firmly established him as a preeminent jazz orchestrator and innovator during the years preceding World War II. In the following two decades, Redman may not have remained at the cutting edge of the jazz world; nonetheless his charts continued to grace the bandstands of many important leaders, ranging from Count Basie to Pearl Bailey. His recorded output was negligible in his last years, but he continued to compose, and left behind a number of extended pieces at his death in 1964 that have yet to be performed in public.

Benny Carter, some seven years younger than Redman, followed a similar career path, one that included affiliations—sometimes overlapping with Redman’s but more often following his departure—with Fletcher Henderson, McKinney’s Cotton Pickers, and the Chocolate Dandies. And, like Redman, Carter eventually gravitated toward leading his own band. Talented, progressive, eager to learn and assimilate new techniques, Carter represented the best of the new generation of arrangers who were coming into their own at the close of the 1920s. Yet Carter’s versatility as an instrumentalist has often served only to obscure his substantial contributions as an orchestrator and composer. This precocious young talent, born in New York on August 8, 1907, appeared to possess a telling knack for mastering each and every instrument in the band. Along with Johnny Hodges, Carter was a key figure in developing the alto saxophone as a major jazz voice, and his finest solos on that instrument are as accomplished and musical as any of the era. But Carter’s expertise also extended to the brass section. Hear, for example, his trumpet work on “Once upon a Time” from 1933 or his assurance in trading fours on trumpet against Coleman Hawkins’s tenor on “Pardon Me Pretty Baby” from 1937. Nor is that all. The previous year, on “You Understand,” Carter fills in as pianist, while other recordings find him singing, playing the clarinet, tenor sax, trombone, or soprano sax. This dazzling array of onstage skills goes a long way toward explaining why Carter’s behind-the-scenes efforts as an arranger often escaped the attention of all but the most knowledgeable jazz fans.

Bandleaders, however, took notice almost from the start. Joining Henderson at roughly the same time that Redman departed, the twenty-two-year-old Carter soon found that his writing skills were urgently needed by his new employer. Carter has described how, lacking formal training in orchestration, he learned on the job by analyzing and imitating stock arrangements. “You get down on your knees and study each part,” he explained, “and then you start writing the lead trumpet first and the lead saxophone first—which, of course, is the hard way. It was quite some time that I did that before I knew what a score was.”
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Yet Carter had soon not only assimilated the primitive techniques used in 1920s stock arranging, but also began building on the jazz scoring techniques of Bill Challis, Don Redman, Archie Bleyer, and others. As early as his 1930 arrangement of “Keep a Song in Your Soul,” Carter revealed a knack for scoring syncopated section work to rival Redman’s, and his block chord writing for four saxophones in “Symphony in Riffs,” “Lonesome Nights,” and “Devil’s Holiday” from 1933 foreshadowed a signature sound of the Swing Era.

Carter always retained an instinctive feel for the lyrical possibilities of jazz, in both his compositions and his playing. This sentimental Schubertian strain, more than anything else, stands as the defining element in Carter’s musical personality, and goes a long way toward explaining the lasting appeal of his work. Carter has sometimes cited Bill Challis and Frank Trumbauer as key influences, yet one suspects that his early listening not only encompassed jazz-oriented work but extended to the sweet band music of the day. Certainly Carter’s own writing displayed, almost from the start, a fascination with pretty sounds, soft nuances, and ruminative melodies. In a steady stream of works from the mid-1930s—“Dream Lullaby,” “Nightfall,” “Lonesome Nights,” “Just a Mood,” “Lazy Afternoon,” “Once upon a Time”—Carter offered listeners a reflective style of jazz program music, one that contrasted strikingly with the heated swing sound that was on the brink of sweeping the nation. Only one of his compositions from this period, “When Lights Are Low,” has become established as a widely played jazz standard, but his body of work from the mid-1930s onward is a rich compendium of ingenious melodies. And singable ones as well. Unlike Duke Ellington, the other great ballad composer of the period, Carter’s melodic writing was almost always well suited for the human voice. Even an Ellington masterpiece such as “Sophisticated Lady” remains essentially an instrumental number, employing intervallic gymnastics in the bridge that would defy all but the most determined crooner. Carter’s genius, in contrast, lay in crafting horn lines that implicitly retained their connectedness to the vocal art.

This singing quality to Carter’s work is also the key to understanding his contributions as a soloist. A lazy elegance marks his finest work, whether on trumpet or saxophone. In his 1940 Chocolate Dandies session, he matches up with Coleman Hawkins and Roy Eldridge in a magisterial front line, but breaks the cardinal rule of improvising by starting with climactic energy then slowly bringing down the temperature until he is gliding softly over the chords in characteristic Carter fashion. Even earlier, on “Nightfall” (1936), Carter showed—on the tenor sax, in this instance—how to play Hawkins’s own instrument in a cool, lithe manner; usually Lester Young is credited with this contribution to the evolution of the tenor, but “Nightfall” was recorded a half-year before Young’s own debut session. This distilled approach became especially prominent in the postwar period, when Carter resisted the dominant Parker alto sound. On his 1961 recording of “The Midnight Sun Will Never Set,” he displays a boplike fluidity, but retains a relaxed sense of phrasing and his deeply personal, sweet—at times almost overripe—tone. Equally noteworthy, however, is the rigorously logical development of Carter’s improvisations. In the 1950s Sonny Rollins would be lauded for showing the virtues of “thematic improvisation,” for using his saxophone to dissect, analyze, and develop melodic material, much as a classical composer might attempt in the context of sonata form. Yet Carter’s work from two decades earlier evinces a comparable mastery of thematic development. Even as an improviser, he thought like a composer.

After disbanding his orchestra in 1946, Carter worked for a period with Norman Granz’s various Jazz at the Philharmonic ensembles, and supplemented his income with miscellaneous projects and recordings, some jazz oriented but others showing his fluency in a range of commercial idioms. By the mid-1950s, Carter’s performances had taken a back seat to his work as an arranger, primarily for many of the leading singers of the day, including Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, and Ray Charles. In his mid-sixties, at the brink of what might otherwise be his retirement years, Carter resurfaced as an instrumentalist. The last major figure of his generation to remain active in jazz, Carter increasingly garnered accolades, honorary degrees, commissions, and awards—somehow both fitting and ironic given the modest and soft-spoken demeanor with which he had always viewed his own work. Despite his self-effacing comments, Carter put to excellent use the opportunities that this second wind in his career provided, and he stayed active into the new millennium—at his death in 2003, obituaries boasted that this artist had made recordings during nine different decades.

Others have matched or surpassed Carter’s longevity as a jazz performer, but few have written so many fine compositions so late in life. In 1987, Carter’s extended work
Central City Sketches
was given its premiere in a concert by the American Jazz Orchestra at Cooper Union; later that same year, Carter’s
Glasgow Suite
made its debut in Scotland; a 1990 commission by Lincoln Center resulted in “Good Vibes,” a work for two vibraphones and orchestra; a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts assisted in the performance and recording of two new suites in 1992,
Tales of the Rising Sun Suite
and
Harlem Renaissance Suite
. Almost eighty-five years old at the time these last pieces made their debut, Carter showed himself still capable of maintaining the high-quality standards he had set in previous decades. The melodic warmth and robust musicality of his early work are, if anything, heightened in these late vintages, but a sensitive channeling of elements drawn from modern jazz can also be heard, albeit in a manner that is never derivative. Somehow Carter reconciles progressivism with the aesthetic dictates and proclivities of the pre-bop tradition. If Carter were of a polemical bent, these later works might have taken on the overtones of a counterrevolution in jazz—an African American pre-Raphaelitism—one built on structure, balance, economy of means, and an aversion to the querulous and self-questioning tone.

For Carter, the jazz idiom provided a set of tools that he could use in setting a mood. Some might chafe at such a description. These days we are inclined to dismiss mood music as a lesser art, as an emaciated form of creativity. Yet, as Carter’s vast body of work attests, mood music is by no means equivalent to background music. As practiced by the best, the ability to establish an authentic emotional scenario, to create a sonic environment so compelling as to envelop the audience—this is not a simple or simpleminded task, but perhaps the most time-honored wellspring of art. The willing suspension of disbelief is what such submersion in the artistic vision was called in an earlier day.

Among his contemporaries, Carter was second only to Duke Ellington in this skill. But then again, no figure in jazz history could surpass Ellington in creating a completely satisfying and self-sufficient musical mood. And though it is increasingly fashionable to analyze Duke’s work in the jargon of academic musicology, the magic of his artistry cannot be reduced merely to a series of breakthroughs in orchestration or harmony. True, the techniques Ellington employed were impressive. But it was always the ends he achieved, not the means, that distinguished the Ellington band from the rest. This commitment to the mood—an unfashionable artistic pursuit in our postmodern age—eludes our grasp. Yet it draws us again and again to Duke’s recordings. And it is why, after listening to them, we inevitably reach for metaphors from other fields to describe Ellington’s spell: the painter of musical landscapes, the poet of jazz, the alchemist of the swing band. And as the consummate creator of these settings, Ellington the man was equally elusive. So skilled at putting on the mask of the momentary mood, the man underneath often remained— almost by necessity—hidden from view.

DUKE ELLINGTON’S EARLY CAREER

One of the quaint, if puzzling, eccentricities of jazz lay in its apparent obsession with titles of nobility and statesmanship. Bolden, Keppard, Oliver—all at one time were nicknamed “King,” while later leading or lesser lights came to be known, both by their fans and peers, as Duke, Count, Lady, Sir, Prince, and Baron. Before long a panglobal sensibility replaced these Eurocentric trappings, ushering in an era in which anything from President to Pharoah could serve as a suitable jazz alias.

Of all these figures, none lived up to the image of nobility better than Duke Ellington. Elegant, reserved without being stiff, articulate even in his evasions, well mannered to the point of ostentation, elitist despite his populist tendencies, always ready with a compliment, a high-flown phrase, or a measured response to deflect the most pointed inquiry—Edward Kennedy Ellington would have been a striking man even if he had never played a note of music. Yet these selfsame qualities, ones that make Ellington an admirable role model, pose problems for historians and biographers. This middle-class youth who made himself into a duke was equally a master at recrafting his biography to match the dimensions of his aspirations and keeping a close guard over his inner life. Probe as deeply as we can, he remains the “Duke,” the private man subsumed by the public persona.