The Ellington Century (43 page)

“
Sonnet for Sister Kate
”

Quentin “Butter” Jackson “speaks” the final sonnet on his muted trombone accompanied by a sax trio and rolled cymbals. The title conflates Shakespeare's shrewish Katherine with the shimmying Sister Kate of A. J. Piron's song, which Ellington had echoed in “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo.” If Lady Macbeth had some ragtime in her, Kate speaks with a deep knowledge of the blues. Whatever words we may imagine for this sonnet, they are probably not those of Katherine's apology, which Cole Porter had set to music in
Kiss Me, Kate:

I am ashamed the women are so simple

To offer war where they should kneel for peace,

Or seek to rule, supremacy, and sway

When they are bound to serve, love and obey.

Ellington's sketch explicitly divides the piece into fourteen lines:

Introduction: Two bare phrases, hazily recalling the opening of “Such Sweet Thunder” on the piano, each with ten notes.

Octave: Eight ten- or eleven-note phrases over a choralelike harmonization wavering between C major and a minor in the saxes. The end of the octave is indicated by a repeated melodic couplet.

Quatrain: Four phrases in d minor.

Couplet: The highest note and the sassiest sound. Cadence (with four saxes) on an added sixth chord combining C major and a minor.

Outro: Piano.

The music sounds neither shrewish nor apologetic but more like an elegy for Joe Nanton, who made the “talking trombone” a signature sound for the band, and in particular the voice of its African heritage. In the eleventh phrase Jackson plays a figure with an echo of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” that Nanton played, in the same key, in
Black, Brown and Beige.
³⁵

“
The Star-Crossed Lovers
”

According to David Hajdu, Ellington suggested that Strayhorn base his Romeo and Juliet number on his song “Pretty Girl,” which Johnny Hodges had recorded a year earlier. Strayhorn was less than amused when he found himself sharing credit with Ellington in the published sheet music,
³⁶
though on the recording Ellington framed Strayhorn's song with two passionate cadenzas. The song is an AABA' in D
; on the recording it is played twice, with Gonsalves playing the melody on AA and Hodges returning for the rest. A brief chromatic interlude links the two iterations; the second statement is completely rescored with a prominent role for Carney in the bridge. The sensitively plush scoring throughout shows how Strayhorn served as a model for Gil Evans. The piece also exemplifies Strayhorn's harmonic and melodic finesse. It begins on a IV major 7 chord rather than the tonic, saving a more traditional harmonization for the last phrase. The harmony toys throughout with G
, the raised fourth degree. Strayhorn also creates his personal version of the blue note by raising a pitch rather than lowering it; the melody moves to A
and D
as if it were tightening up the pitches of
the D
scale to a greater intensity. Hodges explores every corner of the tune's writhing dissonances.

“
Madness in Great Ones
”

In a blindfold test you might guess that this was a Thelonious Monk tune arranged by Dizzy Gillespie (or perhaps Bob Graettinger). It portrays Hamlet as the father of the jazz avant-garde, and perhaps was written to remind the jazz world that Ellington was still the king of the cats. The piece sounds so unhinged that it is surprising to see how precisely Ellington sketched it. Contrasted with “Up and Down” it illustrates Ellington's collagelike approach to composition as opposed to Strayhorn's finely woven method. “Madness” seems to follow no logic but its own north by northwest lunacy. Ellington's sketch shows a sequence of carefully composed phrases that seem to get shuffled and reshuffled, with letter names and arrows added later on to indicate the final order of events. As in “Up and Down” a single conventional jazz phrase, played twice, serves to rein in the chaos, though here the chaos, Cat Anderson's manic raving, wins out.

“
Half the Fun
”

Although it is the penultimate movement of the suite, “Half the Fun” forms a bookend with “Such Sweet Thunder,” a portrait of Cleopatra (minus Antony) as counterpart to Othello. The double relation is shown by rhythmic similarity, a habanera slowed down to the tempo of a beguine, and harmonic polarity, an exoticized D
to balance the opening movement's modal G.

Like “Star-Crossed Lovers,” “Half the Fun” sprang from an older Strayhorn number, “Lately,” and somehow gained a collaborative credit.
³⁷
“Half the Fun” is the third avant-garde piece of the set; it predicts modal jazz in general and
The Far East Suite
in particular. There are no chord changes. The outer sections rest on a constant ostinato in D
(with a flatted sixth: D
, A, A
, G
); the middle section just moves the ostinato up a fourth to G
. The harmony, texture, and mood recall Debussy's Iberian pieces, especially “La Puerta del Vino” from the second book of preludes. In the central section we hear another side of Johnny Hodges, not far from free jazz; and in the transition back to the main section Strayhorn presents a chain of dissonant six-note chords heard beneath an inverted D
pedal. The star of the movement,
though, is Sam Woodyard, who covers the canvas in evocations of ancient evenings.