The Ellington Century (40 page)

Ellington suffered political misfortunes as well. In the early 1950s he was caught up in two public political disputes that showed how times were changing. Throughout the 1940s Ellington had aligned himself with the leftist Popular Front, and the 1943 Carnegie Hall concert had been a benefit for Russian War Relief. After the war ended, however, any pro-Russian sympathies became suspect. When the
Daily Worker
claimed that Ellington had signed the Soviet-sponsored Stockholm Peace Petition, he wrote a statement for
The New Leader
, an anticommunist social democratic weekly, under the title “No Red Songs for Me,” published September 30, 1950. In it, Ellington stated, “The only communism I know of is that of Jesus Christ.”

Ellington's guarded political stance placed him out of sync with the emerging civil rights movement. In the fall of 1951 Ellington's band toured as part of The Big Show of ‘51, which also featured Sarah Vaughan and Nat King Cole. The NAACP picketed their appearances at segregated theaters in Richmond, Virginia, and in Atlanta. The black press seized on several statements attributed to Ellington that seemed to oppose the protest: blacks were “not ready” for integration; protest “is for the Negro at the bottom. It isn't doing the Negro who's got something any good.”
¹⁹
However Ellington's words may have been misconstrued, it would take him a few years to mend fences with the movement. In the early 1960s he was honored by the Urban League, the NAACP, and the Congress of Racial Equality.

Well before these honors, though, Ellington was able to rekindle the politically ambitious side of his music because of a fundamental change in the way jazz was marketed. In the 1950s jazz was no longer the
popular music of white or black audiences it had been in the swing era. Rock and roll and rhythm and blues took its place, particularly with younger listeners. The jazz scene now migrated to college campuses and destination festivals like those at Newport, Rhode Island, and Monterey, California. The new venues combined classy locales with high art ambitions; George Wein, one of the founders of the Newport Festival, predicted that it would be to jazz what Salzburg is to Mozart and Bayreuth is to Wagner.
²⁰
In a sense the festival settings, captured in the aptly arty documentary film
Jazz on a Summer's Day
, replaced racial segregation with economic segregation, but they also offered jazz a safe haven well suited to the sophisticated music of the Ellington Orchestra and the refashioned Basie band of “April in Paris” and “Shiny Stockings.” Both bands had moved far from their swing-era styles. While critics bewailed Ellington's decline and noted the departure of such signature players as Cootie Williams and Sonny Greer, Ellington modernized his sound with the significant arrivals of Paul Gonsalves, Clark Terry, Louie Bellson, and Sam Woodyard. Johnny Hodges also returned to the band in 1956 after a five-year hiatus, and at the beginning of that year Ellington lured Billy Strayhorn back to the fold after a brief parting of the ways. Strayhorn told a friend, “I talked to Edward. He would like me to be more
engaged
again. He asked
me
what sort of project I would like.”
²¹

The updated Ellington sound arrived, like a comet, in the unlikely guise of a nineteen-year-old composition, “Diminuendo in Blue and Crescendo in Blue,” first recorded in 1937. The two sections were originally connected by an Ellington piano solo, but as early as 1951 Paul Gonsalves took over the moment with what became known as the “wailing interval.” The live recording from the Newport festival remains one of the most soul-stirring moments in jazz history. John Fass Morton astutely notes that the performance broke down the stylistic barrier between jazz and rhythm and blues: Gonsalves played a honking R&B sax.
²²
The performance made a subtler point as well: it demonstrated that Ellington's music transcended the pigeonhole periodization of so-called jazz history. “Diminuendo and Crescendo” was not a relic of the swing era; it was the most contemporary-sounding piece of the festival.

The explosive appearance of the new Ellington at Newport on July 7, 1956, came to be associated with a photograph that appeared on the live recording. George Avakian described the historical moment in Paul Gonsalves's twenty-seven-chorus solo in “Diminuendo and Crescendo
in Blue”: “At about his seventh chorus, the tension, which had been building both onstage and in the audience since Duke kicked off the piece, suddenly broke. A platinum-blond girl in a black dress began dancing in one of the boxes (the last place you'd expect that at Newport!) and a moment later somebody else started in another part of the audience. Large sections of the crowd had already been on their feet; now their cheering was doubled and redoubled as the interreacting stimulus of a rocking performance and crowd response heightened the excitement.”
²³
The blond in question was, as John Fass Morton discovered, Elaine Anderson, whose life as a dancer, starlet, and jazz enthusiast had prepared her for her iconic close-up. Symbolically, though, we might name her Desdemona.

The 1950s also witnessed a boom in Shakespeare festivals. The Stratford (Ontario) Shakespeare Festival, directed by Tyrone Guthrie, began in 1953. Joseph Papp founded the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1954, and the American Shakespeare Festival opened in Stratford, Connecticut, in 1955. In the United States the Bard served as an antidote to anticommunist cultural pressures. Joseph Papp, once a Communist Party member, first hatched the idea of presenting Shakespeare without an admission charge in 1953; his plans evolved into Shakespeare in the Park while he was tailed by the FBI and ordered to testify before HUAC. When Papp was subpoenaed by the HUAC in 1958 he was asked whether he injected Communist philosophy into his Shakespeare productions. Papp responded, “Sir, the plays we do are Shakespeare's plays. Shakespeare said: ‘To thine own self be true,' and various other lines from Shakespeare can hardly be said to be ‘subversive' or of ‘influencing minds.' I cannot control the writings of Shakespeare. He wrote five hundred years ago. I am in no position in any plays where I work to influence what the final product will be, except artistically and except in terms of my job as a producer.”
²⁴

By linking Shakespeare's uncontroversial standing and his own prerogatives as an artist Papp demonstrated the way Shakespeare could serve as a shield for political protest in the 1950s, whether at Shakespeare in the Park, or in
Such Sweet Thunder
or
West Side Story
. Without changing a word of the text Papp gave Shakespeare's plays a ripped-from-the-headlines buzz a decade before Jan Kott's book
Shakespeare Our Contemporary
appeared. He sought “blood-and guts actors” and ethnically diverse casts.
²⁵
His American actors spoke in their own voices rather than affecting British speech and worked in the visceral “Method” style familiar from the film performances of Marlon Brando
and James Dean. Among them were Roscoe Lee Browne, Colleen Dewhurst, James Earl Jones, and George C. Scott. They made Shakespeare sound as relevant to the 1950s as Clifford Odets had been to the ‘30s.

The time seemed ripe for celebrating the connection between jazz and the Bard. On his Omnibus show “The World of Jazz,” which aired on October 16, 1955, Leonard Bernstein (who shared Papp's left-wing background) demonstrated that the blues was a poetic form by singing a blues to lines from
Macbeth:

I will not be afraid of death and bane

Till Birnam forest come to Dunsinane.

Less than a fortnight after its Newport “rebirth” the Ellington Orchestra played two concerts for the Shakespearean Festival in Stratford, Ontario, along with Dave Brubeck, the Modern Jazz Quartet, and the Art Tatum Trio. According to David Hajdu's detailed account the festival had hoped for a major new work from Ellington, but not surprisingly he arrived with the same program he had played at Newport. After the Stratford performances two members of the festival staff, Louis Applebaum and Barbara Reed, asked Ellington to compose something unusual and Shakespearean for Stratford. Ellington proposed the suite form, and, according to Hajdu, “Strayhorn took it on excitedly, glowing to his friends about having an Ellington Orchestra project geared especially to him.” Strayhorn's knowledge of the Bard had already earned him the nickname “Shakespeare.”
²⁶

Both Ellington and Strayhorn brushed up their Shakespeare (as Cole Porter had recently advised in
Kiss Me, Kate)
, but their calendar was full of other projects, particularly
A Drum Is a Woman
, a fanciful jazz history conceived for television. Two of Strayhorn's movements, “The Star-Crossed Lovers” and “Half the Fun,” were retitled versions of preexisting songs (“Pretty Girl” and “Lately”). Ellington's “Circle of Fourths” had already been recorded (on January 29, 1957) without any Shakespearean connection. Ellington composed “Sonnet to Hank Cinq” between sets at Birdland, where the band played from April 18 to May 1. The band recorded the new suite for Columbia in three sessions before the Town Hall premiere on Sunday, April 28:

April 15: “Sonnet for Caesar,” “Sonnet in Search of a Moor,” “Madness in Great Ones,” “Sonnet for Sister Kate”

April 24: “Up and Down, Up and Down,” “Such Sweet Thunder,” “Lady Mac”

May 3: “The Star-Crossed Lovers,” “Madness in Great Ones,” “Sonnet to Hank Cinq,” “The Telecasters,” “Circle of Fourths,” “Half the Fun”

According to the producer, Irving Townsend, many of the movements were recorded under temporary titles (“Cleo,” “Ham,” “Puck”); Townsend claimed that he had found the title “Such Sweet Thunder” in
Bartlett's Quotations.
²⁷
Although the original recording credited the music to Ellington and Strayhorn, it did not make the authorship of individual movements clear. According to Walter van de Leur, only the title track was cowritten, and even that one only slightly; he attributes three bars (73–75) to Strayhorn. “Up and Down, Up and Down” was entirely Strayhorn's work, as were “The Star-Crossed Lovers” and “Half the Fun.” Van de Leur credits Ellington with the remaining eight movements, but material in the Ellington Archive indicates that Clark Terry's extended solo in “Lady Mac” may also have been written by Strayhorn. Ellington and Strayhorn did not hear the entire suite in order until the Town Hall performance.

Here are the movements with the Shakespearean parallels as given on the original liner notes:

  1. “Such Sweet Thunder” (
Othello
, though the words come from
A Midsummer Night's Dream
)

  2. “Sonnet for Caesar” (
Julius Caesar
)

  3. “Sonnet to Hank Cinq” (
Henry V
)

  4. “Lady Mac” (
Macbeth
)

  5. “Sonnet in Search of a Moor” (
Othello
again, but note the pun in the title)

  6. “The Telecasters” (the Witches from
Macbeth
meet Iago from
Othello
)

  7. “Up and Down, Up and Down (I Will Lead Them Up and Down),” originally titled “Puck” (
A Midsummer Night's Dream
)

  8. “Sonnet for Sister Kate” (
The Taming of the Shrew
)

  9. “The Star-Crossed Lovers” (
Romeo and Juliet
)

10. “Madness in Great Ones” (
Hamlet;
written comments in some of the parts imply that the band assumed that the piece was also a portrait of trumpeter Cat Anderson)

11. “Half the Fun” (
Antony and Cleopatra
)

12. “Circle of Fourths” (the four Shakespearean genres: tragedy, comedy, history, and sonnet)

However rushed its composition may have been,
Such Sweet Thunder
emerged as a richly varied yet coherent statement, at once a concept album and a showcase for the band.
²⁸
The suite astutely balanced genres and grooves. There are two contrasting solos for Hodges, three swinging numbers, a rockabilly waltz, three avant-garde compositions, and four sonnets, poems without words that follow the meter and structure of the Shakespearean sonnet: fourteen lines of ten syllables. (Critics have speculated without agreement about what particular sonnets Ellington might have had in mind.) The self-imposed rigor of these musical sonnets suggests an analogy to the strict formal constraints of the blues. The suite also gave virtually every member of the band a star turn. The soloists, by track, were

  1. Ray Nance, trumpet; John Sanders, trombone;

  2. Jimmy Hamilton, clarinet (in some of the parts this movement is titled “Hamson,” meaning “Hamilton sonnet”);

  3. Britt Woodman, trombone;

  4. Russell Procope, alto sax; Clark Terry, flügelhorn;

  5. Jimmy Woode, bass;

  6. Harry Carney, baritone sax;

  7. A concerto grosso
:
Jimmy Hamilton, clarinet; Ray Nance, violin; Russell Procope, alto sax; Paul Gonsalves, tenor sax; Johnny Hodges, alto sax; John Sanders, trombone; and, explicitly as Puck, Clark Terry;

  8. Quentin Jackson, trombone (he is often referred to in the score and parts by his nickname, “Butter”);

  9. Johnny Hodges, alto sax (Hodges's parts are often labeled “Rab,” short for his nickname, “Rabbit”);

10. Cat Anderson, trumpet;

11. Johnny Hodges, alto sax;

12. Paul Gonsalves, tenor sax.

Ellington's approach to Shakespeare was radically revisionist. Irving Townsend wrote that Ellington's summaries of the plays and characters were unlike any he had heard before.
²⁹
The misreadings were deliberate;
just as Papp was doing at Shakespeare in the Park, Ellington and Stray-horn presented a contemporary Shakespeare with no Elizabethan trappings. They made their stance clear in the very first bar when the trombones announce Othello's presence with a habanera-rock groove much closer to Fats Domino than John Dowland. Except for “The Star-Crossed Lovers,” a typical Hodges ballad, and “Circle of Fourths,” a romp based on the harmonic changes of “How High the Moon,” the movements were innovative even in relation to the Ellington and Stray-horn oeuvres. Strayhorn's “Up and Down, Up and Down” and Ellington's “Madness in Great Ones” pushed jazz far beyond its usual forms and harmonies, right to the brink of free jazz.