The Ellington Century (14 page)

As composer and performer Johnson cultivated a broad stylistic range that extended from contemporary Broadway songs like Gershwin's “Liza” and Cole Porter's “What Is This Thing Called Love?” back through W. C. Handy and Scott Joplin and their predecessors (as in “The Dream,” a New Orleans Spanish-tinged piece said to date from 1890), to the much older spiritual themes that occur in his extended 1927 composition
Yamekraw.
His performances of older pieces help set his own innovations in perspective. “Carolina Shout” is not just faster than, say, “Maple Leaf Rag,” but it is also far more virtuosic (its performance restricted to a stride elite), aggressive and self-consciously modernistic. Its formal design dramatizes a changing balance of power between continuo and clave patterns. The striding left hand starts off from a comfortably bouncing “one-and-two-and” oompah then shifts to a less symmetrical but still decorous 3 + 3 + 2. The diatonic Bachlike harmonies similarly convey a sense of a nostalgically idealized past. When the first shout (C) arrives, the rhythm tilts decisively in the clave direction with both hands playing off the beat in interlocked “syncopated” figures. By the second part of the piece (DED), asymmetry becomes the norm as the right hand smashes a dissonant cluster
between the already irregular left-hand beat. The climactic E phrase transfers this smash to the left hand, where it sounds like a whole trombone section. And in the coda modernist ninth-chord harmonies announce the final triumph of clave rhythm, which finally takes its Afro-Caribbean form of 3 + 3 + 2 at twice the speed heard in the A section of the left hand.

We can think of “Carolina Shout” as the link between the ring shout and the shout chorus, which would become a convention of big band compositions in the 1930s. You can hear this device develop in the evolving rearrangements of “King Porter Stomp” as recorded by the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra between 1928 and 1933.
³²
Henderson turned Morton's stomp into a call-and-response shout between brass and reed choirs; Gunther Schuller claimed that this “would become the single most influential ensemble idea in the entire Swing Era.”
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By the early ′30s this idea took off, especially in the super-high tempo “killer dillers,” where, however, the device of the shout chorus often lost contact with its older religious origins, and also its connections to the multiple-strain form of ragtime. The more modern-sounding numbers were modeled not on old quadrilles but on hit tunes: “Toby” is built on “Sweet Sue Just You” (by Will Harris and Victor Young), and the even more advanced “Moten Swing” covers (barely) “You, You're Driving Me Crazy” (Walter Donaldson), both popularized by Bing Crosby, while Henderson's enormously influential “Wrappin' It Up” follows the ABAC design of many Broadway songs. These appropriations of the “sweet” repertory kept the shout alive. The pop-oriented format, with the “bridge” kicking up the harmonic tension, heightened its celebratory power.

“Run Old Jeremiah”

“Carolina Shout” linked jazz to its roots in an earlier African American music and its African antecedents: before there was swing, before there was jazz or even ragtime, there was the shout, or ring shout, first described in 1799 by a traveler to New Orleans who saw “vast number of slaves…dancing in large rings.”
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Joseph F. Watson, in his book
Methodist Error
in 1819, reported that following a camp meeting Negroes would accompany their singing with audible footsteps and thigh slaps.
³⁵
Another observer (Robert Todd) reported “great billows of sound from the tornado of praise” and “leaping, shuffling and dancing, after the order of David before the ark when his wife thought he was
crazy,” an image recaptured in Ellington's
Second Sacred Concert.
An account from 1867 notes the practice of dancing in a circle: “Old and young, men and women…all stand up in the middle of the floor, and when the ‘sperchil' [spiritual] is struck up, begin first walking and by-and-by shuffling round, one after the other, in a ring.”
³⁶
Only in Place Congo in New Orleans did observers note the presence of drums, which were banned elsewhere.

There is scant recorded evidence of the ring shout, but two ear-opening examples are easy to find on the web: “Knee Bone,” sung by Joe Armstrong and group, and, with a couple of caveats,
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“Run Old Jeremiah,” recorded in Jennings, Louisiana, by John and Alan Lomax in 1934 and conveniently accessible on the web.
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Both of these recordings demonstrate the call-and-response format central to African American music, and they both have complexly woven rhythmic fabrics. On “Knee Bone” you hear two clapped rhythms: a
tresillo
clave pattern plus a steady backbeat that combine to form the rhythmic figure heard at the opening of Charles Mingus's epic and Ellingtonian composition
Black Saint and the Sinner Lady.
“Run Old Jeremiah” begins with the instruction “You got to run,” then later jumps on a train:

One mornin'

Before the evening

Sun was goin' down (× 3)

Behind them western hills. (× 3)

Old number 12

Comin' down the track. (× 3)

See that black smoke.

See that old engineer.

See that engineer. (× 2)

Tol' that old fireman

Ring his ol' bell

With his hand.

Rung his engine bell. (× 2)

The lyrics and the rising rhythmic excitement anticipate Ellington's “Daybreak Express.” Both celebrate the escape from bondage.
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If we hear these recordings only as documents of primitive styles from which jazz evolved, we forget that many jazz musicians considered the shouts of their ancestors as a sacred repertory whose memory they attempted to evoke and honor in their own compositions and performances. Dancing in a ring was, as Samuel Floyd writes, “a symbol of
community, solidarity, affirmation and catharsis.”
⁴⁰
The quality that would be called swing was a lifeline to the past for people repeatedly robbed of their ancestry by the mechanisms of slavery and racism. Shout also linked jazz and religion, as Willie “The Lion” Smith explained, “Shouts are stride piano—when James P. and Fats and I would get a romp-down shout going, that was playing rocky, just like the Baptist people sing. You don't just play a chord to that—you got to move it and the piano-players do the same thing in the churches, and there's ragtime in the preaching. Want to see a ring shout? Go out to the Convent Avenue Baptist Church any Sunday.”
⁴¹

POST-DIG

We have dug down from “Cotton Tail” to “Run Old Jeremiah.” Now we can come up for air and give “Cotton Tail” another hearing. The rhythmic language of “Cotton Tail,” call it swing, exists:

• “in the moment,” the product of minutely coordinated muscular action by fifteen performing musicians.

• as a structure, imagined and implemented by composer(s).

• as a strategy of cultural negotiation and as a reanimator of historical memory.

All that in three minutes! This may seem like a heavy burden to place on a “foxtrot” (as the original record label identified it), but any work of music that commands relistening multitasks in analogous ways. The historical echoes of shout in jazz are as powerful as the reverberations of plainchant in the canon of European art music from Léonin to Messiaen. Rhythm is at once an occurrence in time, a representation of temporal experience, and an agent of historical retrospection and revaluation. As listeners we hear rhythm more acutely, and as performers we articulate rhythm more evocatively, when we consider its full representational scope.

CUBIST RHYTHM

Jazz is a different fraternity altogether, a wholly different kind of music making. It has nothing to do with composed music and when it seeks to be influenced by contemporary music it isn't jazz and it isn't good.…The point of interest is instrumental virtuosity, instrumental personality, not melody, not harmony and certainly
not rhythm. Rhythm doesn't exist really because no rhythmic proportion or relaxation exists. Instead of rhythm there is “beat.” The players beat all the time merely to keep up and know which side of the beat they are on.

—Igor Stravinsky

Stravinsky did evince preoccupation with jazz music. He talked about it. He wrote a series of compositions with titles referring to “ragtime,” but no evidence of the preoccupation appears in the actual music, honestly examined, honestly listened to. That preoccupation was purely verbal.

—Gene Krupa

A jazz influence, in blanket terms can be found throughout my music.

—Igor Stravinsky

Certainly, it is not impossible to see immediately the kinship between Slav and African, and how one must inevitably pass to the other; and how the utmost end of one development is not unsympathetic to the other.

—George Antheil

Stravinsky used to come by and sit and listen to the band from time to time in the Cotton Club days. They got to know each other pretty well.

—Mercer Ellington

Classical composers at the turn of the twentieth century cohabited the newly sped-up world, and their music, too, began to mirror modern urban life. The jittery traffic jam scherzos in Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony (1906) and Second Quartet (1907) and Ives's
Central Park in the Dark
(1906) are perhaps the first examples of the new city music; even at this early date, Ives employed ragtime as an emblem of modernity. Although books about twentieth-century music often bemoan the moribund state of rhythm at the end of the nineteenth century, European concert music was technically well equipped to represent the quickened pulse of modernity. Any score by Mahler, Strauss, or Debussy reveals rhythmic idioms rich in subtlety and nuance; many otherwise progressive composers of the twentieth century felt little need to go beyond the sophisticated rhythmic practices of these masters, which included poly-rhythms, changing meters, irregular phrase lengths, and a performance style in which tempo and pulse were in a continuous, expressive state of flux. All of these subtleties of composition (which Schoenberg summed up in the phrase “musical prose”) and performance, moreover, were easily represented by musical notation.

Classical composers had the technical resources for rhythmic innovation; the challenge, for some, was to find a fresh new groove. Mahler and Strauss, for all their innovative energy, were still writing either waltzes or marches. As they had done in pursuit of new tone colors, composers looked to the edges of Europe for untapped raw material, to Spain, to Eastern Europe, and beyond them to Africa and the Far East. Many soon realized, however, that a new rhythm had already arrived—from America. Well before the 1913 premiere of
Le sacre du printemps
, Europeans were dancing the habanera, the tango, and the cakewalk. When Erik Satie needed to represent the most advanced sound of his time for
Parade
, the Satie/Cocteau/Picasso/Massine avant-garde sensation of 1917, he simply pasted in a bit of Irving Berlin's “That Mysterious Rag.”

While Satie appropriated African American rhythms, other composers, most notably Stravinsky, stylized them into what I'll call cubist rhythms. Much as cubist painters analyzed objects in terms of a few basic geometric shapes (cubes, spheres, cylinders, cones), Stravinsky, as cubist composer, constructed rhythms on the basis of twos and threes, relative durational or accentual values heard either horizontally, with changing meters, or vertically, as in the two-against-three cross-rhythm called hemiola; his
Symphonies of Wind Instruments
, composed in 1920, exploits these rhythmic proportions throughout. Just as cubist art quickly evolved from the emulation of Iberian and African “folk” sculpture to become a system for representing contemporary spatial discontinuity, cubist rhythm, though launched in
Le sacre
as an atavistic evocation of an imaginary Slavic past, seemed to capture the newly altered temporality of modern life. In music as in painting, the trinkets of imperialism morphed into emblems of European progress. European and European-American rhythmic innovations counted as “rhythmic research,” to use Virgil Thomson's phrase, while African American rhythms were figured as products of instinct. Even the jazz-loving, jazz-influenced Stravinsky would succumb to this unconscious mind/body racism when claiming that jazz lacked “rhythmic proportion or relaxation.” Through most of the century the imitators took credit for the original.

The cubist two-and-three rhythms heard in the music of Stravinsky, Bartók, and Copland strongly resembled the clave patterns of African and Afro-Cuban music, and the “Spanish-tinged” 3 + 3 + 2 of Jelly Roll Morton's music. The “modernism” of African
American rhythm had surfaced as a trope in European music as early as Debussy's “Golliwog,” which used “Under the Bamboo Tree,” written in 1902 by the African American composer Bob Cole, to mock the outdated romanticism of
Tristan.
The radicalizing potentials of African American music became even more apparent as soon as the music called jazz arrived in Europe in 1918 with James Reese Europe's Hellfighters Band and Will Marion Cook's Southern Syncopated Orchestra. Within a few years European modernists were traveling to Harlem to hear the real thing (their accounts often sound like Conradian voyages up the Congo) and composing foxtrots and shimmies fitted out with devices like polytonality and metric changes that conspicuously transformed the “real thing” into European art. Rather than go to school with jazz musicians, classical composers reduced the new idiom to a few devices that signaled modernity. Stravinsky's
Piano Rag Music
of 1920 is a Chaplinesque picture of modern times, mechanized, disjointed, oppressive, far from the jaunty celebratory spirit of James P. Johnson's 1915 “Carolina Shout.”

Adding insult to appropriation, some modernists used cubist ideas to explain jazz to the classical audience. In an essay that appeared in
Modern Music
in 1927, Aaron Copland claimed that the eight eighth-note pattern, 1-2-3 : 1-2-3 : 1-2 was “the molecule of jazz.” “The peculiar excitement they produce by clashing two definitely and regularly marked rhythms is unprecedented in occidental music. Its polyrhythm is the real contribution to jazz.”
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Though Copland's description (which he repeated with few changes throughout his life) fit the conspicuous syncopations of songs like “Fascinating Rhythm” and “Puttin' on the Ritz” or of Zez Confrey's novelty piano compositions like “Stumbling” much better than most of what we now call the jazz of the period, it shows how modernist composers conceptualized jazz rhythms reductively in order to appropriate them for their own purposes.