The Ellington Century (2 page)

I went to college on the G.I. Bill to study composition, and we studied every composer and every system of arranging and writing—Berlioz, Strauss, Schoenberg, and so forth. I was then to learn that there was this link between Schoenberg and Ellington. They'd lived apart, never been associated with each other, were practically ignorant of each other's works, yet there was an absolute parallel.

—Mercer Ellington

The century of aeroplanes has a right to a music of its own.

—Claude Debussy

 

 

 

Let's begin medias res fashion, midway through that up-in-the-air century, on April 28, 1957, a day before Duke Ellington's fifty-eighth birthday, when
Such Sweet Thunder
premiered at New York's Town Hall.

With its brash, brassy, backbeat-driven opening, “Such Sweet Thunder,” the title track of the twelve-movement suite by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, drops us off at the vibrant center of twentieth-century music, the intersection of high art and popular entertainment: African, American, and European traditions, improvised performance, and rigorous composition. A “Shakespeherean” blues, with echoes of the “Habanera” from Bizet's
Carmen
and Fats Domino's 1956 recording of “Blueberry Hill,” it draws on jazz, rock, and Latin rhythms all the while retelling the story of Othello, the Moor of Venice, and Desdemona, the original satin doll, and, as Ellington always told the
audience, all the fun they must have had. Just over three minutes long, “Such Sweet Thunder” amplifies the text and subtexts of Shakespeare's most intimate tragedy and also mirrors its own historical moment, the untranquilized ′50s already squirming from the hormones of pubescent boomers and the as-yet-unenforced consequences of
Brown v. Board of Education.
High time for Othello to tell the story his way.

Like most of Ellington's music, “Such Sweet Thunder” is compact: six blues choruses (each twelve bars long) in G (flickering between major and minor) at a moderate tempo with a four-bar transition (composed by Billy Strayhorn) inserted to create a more fearful asymmetry (or, in live performances, a louder outro). The music, commanding your attention from its first notes, is taut, concise, compressed, logical. At every point you hear two or more different ideas juxtaposed (form) or superimposed (counterpoint). Each chorus builds on an element from the previous one, moving the plot forward with dramatic inevitability. It's a well-wrought urn—with an attitude.

On the third or fourth hearing, as the terse deployment of musical symbols becomes clear, you may begin to discern bits of the story. Like the play, the music contrasts exteriors and interiors, public piazzas and private boudoirs, power and vulnerability. It hides its most intimate utterance, the shadowy, erotic fifth chorus, beneath a mask of deceptive bravado. In the first chorus the Moor's reputation precedes his entrance, as often happens with tragic heroes; the swaggering brass snarls, “Don't mess with this Moor!” With his blaring entrance in the second chorus Othello, like Ellington at the Cotton Club, flaunts his primitive, jungle nature (“Rude am I in my speech”) both to intimidate his white patrons and to satisfy their prejudices. (Desdemona's father, you'll recall, says that “against all rules of nature” she fell “in love with what she fear'd to look on.”) The groove may sound primitive, but the reversed habanera rhythm (long short / short long) suggests a self-conscious irony. The sax section discords of the third chorus, reminiscent of the fierce harmonies of Ellington's 1940 masterpiece “Ko-Ko,” show that the idea of the “primitive” is in the mind of the beholder; to borrow Alfred Appel Jr.'s useful phrase, that's “jazz modernism.” And then, in the fourth chorus, the “jungle” speaks, but gently. Ray Nance's assuredly nonchalant trumpet solo, the one slot in the design left open for improvisation, must be one of Othello's wondrous tales:

Of the Cannibals, that each other eat;

The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads

Do grow beneath their shoulders.

That's quite a prelude to a kiss, yet it is still an audience-conscious public performance, an erotic shtick. Then Strayhorn's well-coiled rude interlude suddenly explodes; could it be a display of Desdemona's “downright violence and scorn of fortune”? So much for blushing white femininity; it takes two to habanera. In the fifth chorus swagger gives way to shadowy
tendresse.
When the reprised second chorus returns the action to the harsh light of the public sphere, we may visualize the two levels of the music, the hootch in the treble and cootch in the bass, as our two leading characters, both of them free of the categories that would define them. At least for a while. (For much, much more on
Such Sweet Thunder
, see chapter 5.)

And so, in 1957, the year of Little Rock, and Governor Faubus, and high-finned, Dagmar-bumpered V-8s, Edward K. Ellington and William Strayhorn launched their Shakespeare suite, originally intended for the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario, with a blazing and sensual blues/fanfare, a celebratory tone parallel to the ultimate deed of integration that Jim Crow, still well entrenched south of the Canadian border, was designed to prevent, intimidate, and punish with horrific violence.

The political daring and musical synthesis of
Such Sweet Thunder
were not isolated phenomena. In the post-McCarthy years both jazz and the Bard blossomed in the hothouse setting of summer festivals. The late Renaissance provided an elegant cover for timely political provocation. Joseph Papp first brought free Shakespeare to Central Park in the summer of ′57. Five months after the New York premiere of
Such Sweet Thunder
, the musical
West Side Story
opened on Broadway. Two months after that,
Agon
, with music by Stravinsky and choreography by Balanchine, premiered at the City Center (twelve blocks north of Town Hall). Like the Ellington/Strayhorn suite,
West Side Story
retold a Shakespearean story of ill-fated interethnic love with intercultural music that drew on jazz and Latin rhythms.
Agon
, like
Such Sweet Thunder
a suite of twelve short movements, featured at its core an erotic pas de deux danced by the white Diana Adams and the black Arthur Mitchell. Stravinsky based the music on French court dances from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries found in De Lauze's
Apologie de la danse—
dances that would not be out of place in a production of
Othello
or
Romeo and Juliet.

Risky cultural criticism required teamwork.
Such Sweet Thunder, West Side Story
, and
Agon
were collaborative creations: Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, Stephen Sondheim, Arthur Laurents, and Harold Prince (along with orchestrators Sid Ramin and Irwin Kostal)
resituated
Romeo and Juliet. Agon
, written at the suggestion of Lincoln Kirstein, was Stravinsky's first twelve-tone ballet score and a posthumous collaboration. Stravinsky had attended a performance of Schoenberg's Serenade op. 24 conducted by his assistant, Robert Craft, on April 14, 1952. The coda of the
Agon
“Pas de deux,” a duet for mandolin and harp, is a deep bow to the Serenade's nervously twanging mandolin and guitar. The “Pas de deux” crossed previously sacrosanct musical boundaries, juxtaposing a quotation from Webern's Variations for Orchestra, op. 30 with a recollection of the “Sacrificial Dance” from the
Rite of Spring.
Stravinsky was breaching the stylistic wall that had separated the music of Paris and Vienna throughout the previous half century. But much of
Agon
also suggests that Stravinsky was listening to recent jazz: the middle section of the Bransle Double evokes the cool West Coast style of the time. (In his next work,
Threni
, Stravinsky would co-opt Shorty Rogers's trademark flügelhorn.) Balanchine's choreography embodied the musical mélange as visual jazz. The critic Edwin Denby wrote that one of the male dancers displayed the timing of a “New York Latin in a leather jacket.”
¹

At the same historical moment, a jazz suite, a Broadway show, and a classical ballet took on the hot-button issue of racial integration through similar strategies of stylistic synthesis and juxtaposition and transhistorical, cross-cultural conversation. These works also challenged the era's official culture of sexual repression, although the musical's gay subtext (“Somewhere”) remained unnoticed for years, at least outside of Christopher Street and West Hollywood. Billy Strayhorn's “Up and Down and Up and Down (I Will Lead Them Up and Down),” the most original movement in
Such Sweet Thunder
, also dealt covertly with sexual difference; we can hear it as a self-portrait, Strayhorn as Puck, to set beside Ellington's self-depiction as Othello in the opening track. Boy love drives the plot of
A Midsummer Night's Dream:

The king doth keep his revels here to-night:

Take heed the queen come not within his sight;

For Oberon is passing fell and wrath,

Because that she as her attendant hath

A lovely boy, stolen from an Indian king;

She never had so sweet a changeling;

And jealous Oberon would have the child

Knight of his train, to trace the forests wild.

Strayhorn's self-portrait as the impish fairy Puck suavely symbolized multiple aspects of his life. He was openly gay, and at the same time he
was often an invisible instigator of musical spells; he usually remained in New York while the band toured, phoning in musical fixes as needed. A classically trained musical wunderkind, sixteen years younger than Ellington, Strayhorn could compose songs that sounded completely Ellingtonian (like “Day Dream”) or create music whose advanced harmonies and structure were uniquely his own. “Up and Down” is a virtuosic display of nearly atonal contrapuntal juggling pairs of players impersonating the disoriented lovers of Shakespeare's dream.

Strayhorn's special relationship with the band may have given him a certain Puck-like objectivity. When, at the end of “Up and Down,” Strayhorn asks Clark Terry to intone Puck's line “Lord, what fools these mortals be,” these mortals might be heterosexuals or fellow homosexuals or fellow musicians. Strayhorn's sexual theme was both literarily astute and politically daring. We may recall how scandalous it seemed back in the ′50s for Robert Lowell to devote a stanza of his 1956 confessional poem “Skunk Hour” to a “fairy decorator” who is considering marriage, the “cure” for inversion prescribed by the conformist psychotherapy of the era. Years before Stonewall the integration of straight and gay sensibilities, so hard for America even to contemplate at the time, was an essential part of the Ellington Orchestra's musical language.

Integration: I begin this book with
Such Sweet Thunder
because it represents a shared cultural space either ignored or dismissed by purists of all stripes. Purism, sorting alleged sheep from imaginary goats, can seduce with an appearance of rigor, but it can also mask snobbery or even racism. Historians on both the jazz and the classical sides who divide twentieth-century music before, say, 1970 into “separate but equal” musical territories perpetuate, consciously or not, hackneyed musical judgments that are racial stereotypes. These prejudices include the supposed opposition of commercial popularity and artistic integrity, difficulty and accessibility, intellectual control and spontaneity. Forty years after Ellington was denied a Pulitzer Prize, music journalists still keep alive this form of segregation by covering either classical music or jazz; classical critics cross this line only when a jazz figure seems to be doing something that can be described in classical terms, or, more recently, to profess their admiration for the artier rock bands. The picture of an unbridgeable high/low, art/entertainment, or black/ white divide persists—this despite ample evidence to the contrary. At its premiere, for instance,
Such Sweet Thunder
shared the program with Kurt Weill's Violin Concerto, played by Anahid Ajemian, conducted by Dmitri Mitropoulos.

An alternative view of twentieth-century music can emerge once we think of musicians not as warring clans or isolated monads but as collaborators in the shared cultural project foreseen by Debussy, the invention of a music that reflected the new technical and social realities of the time. This project consumed the talents of composers and performers, urban tunesmiths and lone outcasts, popular entertainers and obscure eccentrics, reactionaries and conservatives, progressives and radicals, critics and listeners. What we term “modern” or “modernistic” music was an evolving series of hypotheses, experiments, and reevaluations. Irving Berlin's “Putting on the Ritz” is as much of a rhythmic experiment as the “Monoritmica” from Berg's
Lulu
or Dizzy Gillespie's “Things to Come.” If we measure the success of experiments in terms of their broad impact, the collected solos of Louis Armstrong become the mother lode of the century's rhythmic research. And, although some musicians worked only in a particular milieu, many others crossed stylistic and social lines all the time. From James Reese Europe to Wynton Marsalis, jazz musicians have challenged the idea that their music is inherently “low,” and the list of classical composers who appropriated ideas from jazz would include just about every major European and American figure. James P. Johnson, master of the stride piano and composer of the Charleston, also wrote two piano concertos, a symphony, and two operas. George Gershwin asked Alban Berg to autograph his copy of the
Lyric Suite.
Schoenberg praised Gershwin's music and imitated its sound in his Theme and Variations for band. Charlie Parker quoted
Le sacre du printemps
whenever he spotted Stravinsky in the audience. Leonard Bernstein jammed (once) with Miles Davis. Frank Zappa worshipped the music of Edgard Varèse; Vladimir Horowitz admired and envied Art Tatum's technical prowess. Stravinsky lifted a few bars from “Goosey Gander” when he wrote his
Ebony Concerto
for Woody Herman, and, according to Mercer Ellington, was a regular visitor to the Cotton Club. And Ellington shared the stage with Mitropoulos—who knew?