The Ellington Century (24 page)

“C Jam Blues” reduces the melodic content to a single interval, the perfect fourth. In “Misterioso” Monk similarly wrote a blues exclusively in sixths that amble up and down in nonstop, nonswinging even eighth notes. The sixths also outline a four-note rising-falling melodic motive ( D-E
-F-E
) that appears in subtle variations. These mutant restatements gain in intensity in the last four bars until the pattern finally breaks with five ascending notes in a row ending on the flat seven. The final sixth, C and A
over a B
bass, is the only syncopation (and only enriched harmony) in a piece whose mystery resides in the way it implies a jazz feel with rhythms and a groove that should produce only a geometric squareness. In twelve bars Monk lays out a conceptual parable about the most basic aspects of the blues.

If Monk ran with Ellington's minimalist side, Billy Strayhorn took his complexities up a notch or ten. As early as “Day Dream,” written in 1939 while he was living in Ellington's apartment and studying his scores,
³⁰
Strayhorn expanded the chromatic boundaries of the newly minted “Prelude to a Kiss” with an opening phrase that outlined an augmented octave and ended with an augmented triad and a bridge that used eleven of the twelve tones. The weird intervals nevertheless sound effortlessly romantic.

Listeners to NPR know the first eight notes of Strayhorn's “Rain Check” from the “All Things Considered” theme; they are also buried inside The Beatles' “I Will.” It's not easy to write a tune that sounds like common property. What you can't hear in these near quotations is the way Strayhorn planted the seeds for the whole melody with a two-chord introductory fanfare. Where Ellington composed through montagelike contrast, Strayhorn constructed pieces through similarity, generating new-sounding episodes from unexpected aspects of an opening premise. In form the melody of “Rain Check” is not the expected AABA, with its sharp contrast of two ideas, but instead ABAC, the theatrical form rarely used in jazz heads, a double statement with different outcomes. The B phrase begins as if it were just repeating the opening (making us expect an AABA), then modulates surprisingly up a major third from F to A. The structure seems at once comfortably familiar and intriguingly eccentric; it forms a harmonic loop that a soloist will want to traverse over and over.

When I hear “U.M.M.G.” (1954) I get the impression that Strayhorn had been listening to Cole Porter's “All of You” (which had just debuted in
Silk Stockings)
and Brahms's Second Piano Concerto (specifically the consoling cello solo that opens the slow movement) and decided he could improve on both. The title refers to the Upper Manhattan Medical Group (run by Strayhorn's friend and Ellington's personal physician, Dr. Arthur Logan), but unlike Strayhorn's terminal medical ballad “Blood Count” (1967)—which, as Walter van de Leur writes, “conjures the devastating consequences of Strayhorn's progressing cancer”—“U.M.M.G.” is an uptempo celebration of life.
³¹
Like “All of You,” “U.M.M.G.” hovers between major and minor, but at a riskier tonal altitude. Every stressed note in the melody sits “high in the chord,” to use the language of bebop. The very first note, B is an eleventh over an already dissonant F half-diminished seventh chord (a.k.a. the
Tristan
chord). The B
resolves briefly then bounces up to a C
, heard as the minor ninth over a B
seventh chord. The first half of the opening phrase moves in small intervals like the Brahms theme, but its second half rockets upward in thirds from a low A
to a high E When the phrase repeats (the song is an AABA) it shoots even higher to a G
, so that the melody spans almost two octaves. While the bridge seems to relax the tension with a surprising move to F major in its first four bars, it ratchets up the tension with a sequence that transposes the pitches up a half step to a piercing climax on a D
perched dissonantly atop an E