The Ellington Century (12 page)

One evening, when I had already advanced to playing the
kidi
, the “one” disappeared right in the middle of a song—or, rather, I sensed with gut-wrenching horror that it had never been there in the first place. There was no regular harmonic rhythm to simplify the welter of drumbeats that surrounded me. I could no longer feel the handbell rhythm, either in
or
. I had no idea where to play my pattern. For a very long couple of minutes I was, like Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole, in rhythmic freefall.
¹⁵

Immediately hearing that I was in trouble (and that I was screwing up the performance), Alfred came over and began to beat my correct drum figure on my shoulders. Suddenly the overall pattern was again clear. Later, disabused of any notion that I had a natural affinity for Ewe music, I asked him how he heard the connection between the different rhythms without a sense of “one.” His answer took me by surprise: “I hear it all as a single melody.” While I was perceiving discrete
patterns (cross-rhythms, polyrhythms) and keeping separate track of rhythm and pitch, he was hearing the whole cloth: not incidentally, the Ewe people are equally famed for their music and their textiles. The ethnomusicologist John Miller Chernoff terms this “single melody” a “cross-rhythmic fabric”;
¹⁶
in this music the drums, rattle, hands, feet, and voices are threads woven together—and so are rhythm and pitch, pitch and speech: the carefully tuned pitches of the drums link the music to the Ewe language, which is tonal.
¹⁷
Each separate element interweaves with the uneven, asymmetric, odd-numbered beats of the handbell by filling in spaces between beats. This interlocking of multiple patterns gives the music its particular dynamic drive, as Chernoff says, and also serves its communal function. There are no listeners here; anyone who is clapping or stepping (correctly) becomes part of the musical tapestry.

The many rhythmic idioms of African diasporic music (including Caribbean and North and South American styles) all negotiated different balances between their European and West African inheritances. In the United States, where dancing and drumming by slaves were banned, the clave pattern wore a variety of disguises; it became a rhythmic trickster. In ragtime, for instance, clave hides out in the right hand, which sounds West African, while the left hand usually marches along European-style. Yet while African American musicians found ever-new ways to keep the African element alive in their music, the impact of European harmony was not simply repressive. The complex patterns of West African rhythm had been kept in place by a hierarchic order; the role of master drummer was passed on from generation to generation within particular families, and only the master drummer could improvise. Regularly repeated slow patterns of harmonic rhythm simplified the complex West African rhythmic tapestry and so in a way democratized them, allowing for more widespread improvisation and innovation. At the same time, though, the Africanization of European-based popular tunes in jazz composition and improvisation endowed them with a quality of communal celebration; jazz performance reenacted the moment of liberation, the passage from bondage to freedom. Swing, as Albert Murray reminds us, celebrates and affirms that moment. If you doubt his words just listen, to start, to “Daybreak Express.”

DIGGING FOR SWING

Classically trained musicians are taught to hear the historical foundations of their repertory; they learn the importance of hearing the Bach
and Beethoven in Brahms, the Brahms in Schoenberg. A similar consciousness can illuminate African American music as well. For a historical perspective on the inner workings of “Cotton Tail,” let's move from a kind of phenomenology to an informal kind of “primary source” history, pursuing two hints in the music: the legacy of the ring shout and the hidden presence of “Tiger Rag.” We'll proceed archaeologically in roughly reverse chronology, from “Tiger Rag,” to “Carolina Shout,” to the shout “Run Old Jeremiah”—there's a lot to dig.

“Tiger Rag”

I-got-rhy-thm; hold-that-ti-ger: “Tiger Rag” is where the Gershwins got rhythm—or at least
that
rhythm. The origins, authorship, and even the identity of “Tiger Rag” are a little shady. At his 1938 Library of Congress sessions Jelly Roll Morton demonstrated how he had created it from “an old quadrille” consisting of an introduction, a waltz, a “mazooka,” and “a two-four time,” and he also took credit for the title. Black and white bands in New Orleans played “Tiger Rag” under various names, but it first reached a wide public with the 1918 recording by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band (ODJB), whose leader, Nick LaRocca, copyrighted it. The sheet music bears only a vague relation to what the ODJB recorded, let alone what later performers considered “Tiger Rag.”
¹⁸
For one thing, it lacks the “Hold-that-ti-ger” hook. But their recording, a much more impressive performance than the primitive “Livery Stable Blues” that launched them (and jazz) to international fame the previous year, imprinted that hook, with its memorable downward trombone slide, on jazz history. In August 1922, the Friars Society Orchestra, soon to be renamed the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, recorded their version of “Tiger Rag,” reducing the opening three strains to a mere introduction, playing the Tiger hook almost exactly as ODJB had, but then adding two hot choruses based on the hook, one for clarinetist Leon Roppolo (“considered the best white clarinetist in New Orleans”),
¹⁹
the second a New Orleans-style free-for-all. “Tiger Rag” now consisted of some kind of vamp to set up multiple repetitions of the thirty-two-bar “trio”—the tail had become the body.
²⁰
The length of the “trio,” moreover, made it a perfect platform for extended solos. By December 1927 “Tiger Rag,” now a mere platform and renamed “Hotter than That,” supported one of the most astonishing series of solos in jazz to that time: Louis Armstrong both playing and scat singing with Johnny Dodds on clarinet, Lonnie Johnson on guitar, and Kid Ory on
trombone.
²¹
While Dodds and Ory worked within a rhythmic framework clearly related to ragtime, Armstrong and Johnson, improvising simultaneously in
and
(as Schuller describes it), pushed beyond the furthest frontiers of swing.

Improbably, given his non-New Orleans origins, “Tiger Rag” served as a pillar of Ellington's repertory through the late 1930s. Ellington first used “Tiger Rag” in 1928 as a harmonic framework in “Hot and Bothered,” which was praised by R. D. Darrell for its “fury and intensity”
²²
(it was paired with “The Mooche” on Okeh 8623).
²³
The English critic Constant Lambert famously lauded “Hot and Bothered” and its composer in more cultivated terms: “I know of nothing in Ravel so dexterous in treatment as the varied solos in the middle of the ebullient ‘Hot and Bothered' and nothing in Stravinsky more dynamic than the final section.”
²⁴
A “cultivated” observation, but not off the mark; the solos by Hodges, Whetsol, Miley, and Baby Cox (the latter two in a dueling duet), Bigard, Lonnie Johnson (guitar), and Hodges, again, are richly inventive, and the closing shout chorus has a cumulative rhythmic punch comparable to the ending of Stravinsky's
Pulcinella
.
²⁵
Lambert does not seem to have realized, though, that the solo sections were improvised (as is apparent by a comparison with the 1930 recording released on Velvetone with new solos by Hodges, Nanton, and, in particular, Freddy Jenkins). The harmonic changes of the final strain of “Tiger Rag” were as much a proving ground for supermelodic improvising in the 1920s as “How High the Moon” would become in the 1940s.

Before looking at Ellington's series of “Tiger Rag” pieces, however, let's pause, listen, and pay homage to the ne plus ultra of “Tiger Rag” interpreters: Art Tatum. Tatum recorded his definitive version of the piece in March 1933, eight months before Ellington recorded “Daybreak Express,” which it seems to foretell. He begins with an ultra-modernistic slow prelude and then demonstrates the extreme virtuosic possibilities of every piano style of the era. Tatum, to the displeasure of some critics,
²⁶
continued to play something very close to this version for the rest of his career, but what they seem to take for mere showing off is one of the greatest piano compositions of the century, an astonishing assertion of hope at the very depths of the Great Depression.

Like Tatum, Ellington appreciated from early on that “Tiger Rag” was built for strutting your stuff or, as he put it in 1938, “Braggin' in Brass.” In some ways Ellington's four variations on the theme form a continuous piece spread out over a decade:

“Hot and Bothered,” October 2, 1928

“Tiger Rag,” January 8, 1929

“Daybreak Express,” December 4, 1933

“Braggin' in Brass,” March 3, 1938

These “Tiger Rag” variants, all of them concert numbers designed for listening rather than dancing, reveal how Ellington expanded the solo swing of Armstrong into a composed ensemble rhythmic style. “Hot and Bothered,” as we saw before, frames a series of solos with a composed intro and final shout. On the 1930 recording of “Hot and Bothered” trumpeter Freddy Jenkins played a dazzlingly complicated figure that was either written out or was part of a well-established solo: in either case, Ellington would seize on it eight years later.

Ellington recorded “Tiger Rag,” under its own title, as his first extended work, filling two sides of a 78-rpm disc. Although this is mostly a series of solos (“a staggering array of non-gimmicky, highly individual solos”),
²⁷
there are two composed ensemble choruses, the first for the saxes and the second, at the beginning of side two, for the trumpets, which take direct aim at Gershwin's
Rhapsody in Blue;
the gesture announces a compositional cutting contest that Ellington would pursue the following year in his
Creole Rhapsody.
Both of the ensemble sections are in the “supersax” texture of a melody played in chords, and both make a section sound like a single improvising player. The closing shout chorus begins as a call-and-response but snowballs as saxes and trumpets bring back ideas from their ensemble phrases.