The Ellington Century (4 page)

Some jazz musicians, like Louis Armstrong and Lester Young, were born into the blues environment, while others, like Ellington and Cole-man Hawkins, had to acquire the idiom consciously. The ease with which blues traveled and the very possibility that musicians from widely different backgrounds could master it suggests that blues was just part of a more widespread African American musical inheritance, and also that it was a transportable, itinerant music built for travel, whether on a train, or through the media of radio and recording. It was a kind of music that was everywhere, if you knew where to listen. As Ellington wrote, “I went on studying, of course, but I could also hear people whistling, and I got all the Negro music that way. You can't learn that in any school.”
¹³

The blues, stylized verse in song, is both a poetic idiom and a distinctive musical sound. Blues singing, as ethnomusicologist Jeff Todd Titon observed, employed a particular kind of vocal production: “The tone quality of early downhome blues singing largely resulted from the way the singer enunciated his words. Singing with an open throat, he relaxed his lips and mouth and kept his tongue loose, low, and toward the back of his mouth. This position favored certain kinds of vowels and consonants and made it somewhat difficult to produce others.”
¹⁴
Titon noted that blues singers employ nasal, rasping sounds not used in their ordinary speaking voices, effects that can be traced to the “heterogeneous sound ideal” or “timbral mosaic” of African music.
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In the blues, speech and song mix; in instrumental blues, the instrument always has a vocal quality: “the nasal, foggy, hoarse texture that delivered the elisions, hums, growls, blue notes and falsetto, and the percussive oral effects of their ancestors.”
¹⁶
In his classic study
Stomping the Blues
Albert Murray uses the terms
blues
and
jazz
interchangeably, but the blues encompasses many musical idioms beyond the usual boundaries of jazz. Buddy Bolden, often cited as the musician who brought the streams of ragtime and blues together, as well as the secular and the sacred, and the spoken and sung elements in African American music, played “with a moan in his cornet that went all through you, just like you were in church or something…made a spiritual feeling go through you. He had a cup, a special cup, that made that cornet moan like a Baptist preacher.”
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Bolden's playing also took its timbre from the streets, from the sounds of itinerant ragmen playing long tin horns, party instruments that produced blues sounds later imitated on the trumpet.
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The translation of blues from voice to instrument therefore was not an artistic elevation of a folk form into an art genre, but rather a complex process of interweaving many oral and aural traditions to pass on a body of experience and wisdom—folk songs without words.

Within the realm of jazz the blues retains its poetic and timbral character, but it also serves as the basis of instrumental improvisation. When jazz musicians play the blues, they conceptualize the form in terms of a twelve-bar phrase structure, or “chorus,” divided into three four-bar phrases, following the stanza form. They create melodic lines using the pitches of a “blues scale,” which is usually understood to include major and minor versions of the third, seventh, and sometimes fifth degrees of the scale, and they follow a standard harmonic pattern, such as (one chord per measure):

I-IV7-I-I7

IV-iv-I-VI

ii-V-I-I

Because all blues restate the same harmonic and poetic patterns over and over again, they are all genetically related, though perhaps at different removes. These degrees of separation might be termed stylizations; we might, accordingly, listen to “Blue Light” the way we hear Chopin's mazurkas. But that would extract them from the intertextual continuum of their own culture, in which, as we have seen, different genres mingled easily. To see how “Blue Light” dialogues with other kinds of blues we can listen to it alongside a vocal blues recorded by Jimmy Rushing and Count Basie, and an instrumental blues by Sidney Bechet.

Though Ellington's band never included a real blues singer like Basie's Jimmy Rushing (as we will see, Ellington often preferred more classical-sounding singers), it is still instructive to compare “Blue Light” to “Blues in the Dark,” an equally atmospheric number recorded by the Count Basie Orchestra with Rushing in January 1938. Around that time, the influential jazz critic and promoter John Hammond championed Basie's blues-based jazz against what he perceived as Ellington's betrayal of the idiom: Ellington, Hammond wrote in 1943, “has introduced complex harmonies solely for effect and has experimented with material farther and farther away from dance music.”
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Ellington and Basie knew better, and these two examples of the blues reveal similar elements. The similarities, though, are surprising. Rushing's “hot” voice sounds like Brown's “sweet” trombone: they both seem to rise out of the soil like a mighty oak. By contrast, Bigard's clarinet and Buck Clayton's muted trumpet dart and spin like a pair of dragonflies. The lyrics Rushing sings might provide a subtext for “Blue Light”:

Kind treatment make me love you, be mean and you'll drive me away.

Kind treatment make me love you, be mean and you'll drive me away.

You gonna long for me baby, one of these long rainy days.

Did you ever dream lucky baby, and wake up cold in hand?

Did you ever dream lucky baby, and wake up cold in hand?

You didn't have a dollar, somebody had your woman.

Basie frames three choruses of blues in E
(two for Rushing, one for Basie) with a c minor blues in growling “jungle” style recalling Ellington's “Black and Tan Fantasy.” The two pieces and the two titled bandleaders seem to be conversing; listening to them side by side reveals
that the blues is a form of dialogue both internally and intertextually. Basie's southwestern country style and Ellington's urbane Harlem idiom are dialects of the same language.

We can also hear “Blue Light” as a conversation with Sidney Bechet; Ellington called Bechet the “epitome of jazz,”
²⁰
and both Barney Bigard and Johnny Hodges were Bechet disciples. Bechet's “Blue Horizon,” which received canonic status on the Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz, perfectly illustrates the central role that tone color plays in shaping blues as dialogue, even within an instrumental solo. Bechet recorded “Blue Horizon” in December 1944 with a quintet of distinguished New Orleans musicians: Wilbur de Paris, trumpet; Vic Dickenson, trombone; Manzie Johnson, drums; Pops Foster, bass; and Art Hodes, piano. Although his preferred instrument was the soprano sax, Bechet played clarinet here, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say he constructed an entire piece out of the particular timbral qualities of the clarinet, much as Stravinsky had done in 1920 in his
Three Pieces for Solo Clarinet
, written either after hearing Bechet play (possible but not certain) or after reading his friend Ernest Ansermet's ecstatic praise of Bechet as “the first of his race to have composed perfectly formed blues.”
²¹
In constructing “Blue Horizon,” a six-chorus blues in E
which uses only the pitches of an E
blues scale (E
major plus a lowered third, G
and a lowered seventh, D
), Bechet contrasted the three distinct registers of the clarinet. He spread an extended melodic line over a range of three octaves (from the E
below middle C to the E
two octaves and a third above middle C). The low (called “chalumeau”), middle, and upper (clarion) ranges of the clarinet sound almost like different instruments. Bechet placed each chorus within one or two of these ranges: