The Ellington Century (5 page)

Chorus 1: chalumeau

Chorus 2: middle register

Chorus 3 chalumeau

Chorus 4: middle and chalumeau in call-and-response

Chorus 5: middle

Chorus 6: clarion

In each chorus Bechet returned to the low chalumeau register for the third phrase, which serves as a refrain, unifying the piece but also bringing it back home to the timbre that is closest to speech. We might
say that “Blue Horizon” is a
klangfarbenmelodie
for a single instrument, but its timbres differ from the classical clarinet sound, and that difference points to the particular way tone color functions in the blues. Bechet's clarinet does not sound like anyone else's. In the blues idiom the individual player's sound is far more important than an idealized notion of how an instrument should sound. Bechet's sound has a distinctive wide vibrato, but that is just one of its special sonorities. Bechet's lower register for instance, does not have the hollow, disembodied quality produced by classical clarinetists; it is a full, fat sound, almost like a trombone. Similarly the middle range is sweet, not pallid; the clarion register is trumpetlike, not shrill. Bechet also colored his sound with three ornaments, a slow downward slide, a more than usually pronounced vibrato, and a “blues” inflection, a flattening and bending of pitch that he reserves for the pitch G
. Each of these ornaments points to what we might term a “blues sound ideal” of varying the color within a note rather than sustaining a single timbre all the way through. In the blues the timbre changes as much within one note as from one note to the next; every tone sounds unpredictably alive.

Both polyvocal and polytimbral, Bechet's clarinet portrays a community of voices speaking and singing that are linked by a refrain that pulls their differences back to a common source. In “Blue Light” Ellington's piano plays a very similar function, responding, completing, and summarizing the other instruments. Both pieces seem formally self-contained yet open-ended. Blues stanzas roll on in an endless narrative; individual blues performances or compositions take up a story that has already begun and then pass it along to the next speaker.

THEME AND VARIATIONS: A BLUES GALLERY

Ellington reworked “Blue Light” over a decade, creating a variegated gallery of related nocturnes: “Subtle Lament,” “Dusk,” “Transblucency,” and “On a Turquoise Cloud.” Like Monet's series of haystack paintings, these works bathe identical subjects in changing light; heard back-to-back they might be termed “blues-as-process.” They demonstrate how small changes in instrumental combinations or in their ordering can transform musical signification. They also reveal the range of Ellington's creative process, from informal on-the-spot improvisation to contrapuntal construction. Rex Stewart wrote that Ellington might arrive at a recording session, listen to a run-through, and then call for changes, “perhaps starting with bar sixteen, playing eight bars, then
back to letter C, and when we got to letter E he'd call a halt. Then he'd sit at the piano and play something, have a consultation with Tom Whaley [the band's copyist], and some new music would be scored on the spot.”
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Ellington's sketches, preserved at the Smithsonian, show that the music was usually written out in detail before such impromptu reshuffling.

“Subtle Lament,” a moderate blues in G recorded on March 20, 1939, and again in the fall of 1940,
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sounds at first like an informal rearrangement of “Blue Light” with the “Mood Indigo” chorus placed right after a new piano and bass intro and rescored for four reed instruments.
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Following is a call-and-response chorus for piano (using material similar to the intro to “Blue Light”) and trombone trio, a solo chorus for Rex Stewart (cornet using half-valve muting) over a low reed background in place of Lawrence Brown's chorus but without his melody, a chorus for trombone trio, a chorus by Barney Bigard with brass and reed accompaniment, and a four-bar restatement of the “Mood Indigo” section as outro. Moving the furniture around, however, Ellington altered the structure and timbre. The “Mood Indigo” chorale now became the binding element. It appears three times: at the beginning and end, but also as a background to the Stewart and Bigard solos. As it increases in thematic importance, however, the chorale also sheds its mysterious coloration; it is now played within a single instrumental choir, not as a hybrid color. Ellington compensated for this loss by introducing a new timbral contrast of low trombone trio against the high reeds. The three trombones become the mysterious element through the blend of their sounds (Brown, Nanton, and Tizol had sharply contrasting styles of playing) and also through their unexpected Debussyan harmonies.

Heard as a nocturne, “Subtle Lament” seems to depict midnight rather than the 3
A.M.
of “Blue Light.” On May 28, 1940, moving the clock and the quality of light back by several hours, Ellington recorded “Dusk,” a considerable reworking of the elements in those two predecessors and of their template, “Mood Indigo.” Like “Mood Indigo,” “Dusk” is in B
and has a sixteen-bar AABA phrase structure that nevertheless sounds like a twelve-bar blues. It begins with a piano and bass intro very similar to “Subtle Lament.” The first chorus is a chromatic melody scored in the “Mood Indigo” voicing, with muted trumpet and muted trombone in thirds, with a clarinet an octave and a half below, and, like “Indigo,” with a ripe late romantic altered dominant ninth as its second chord. As in “Subtle Lament,” Rex Stewart has a solo chorus, and in the third chorus the low trombone trio counters
the high reed choir, but here the reeds sound like a tree full of birds chirping at sunset. The timbral heart of “Dusk,” the last phrase of the third chorus, however, is new and also carefully composed for the entire band.
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Here Ellington blended five reeds and six muted brass in darkly dissonant harmonies that nevertheless produce a luminous tone color. This example of the “Ellington effect” has inspired superlatives ever since it appeared: “I know of no other work for jazz orchestra that conveys such an impression of tranquility on the verge of tears.”
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Ellington, however, had even more changes to ring on his nocturnal theme in general, and on “Blue Light” in particular. On January 4, 1946, he premiered “Transblucency” (a.k.a. “Transbluency,” a.k.a. “A Blue Fog That You Can Almost See Through”) at Carnegie Hall. Essentially, “Transblucency” is an overt variant of “Blue Light,” significantly transposed upward from G to B
. Here, though, nonchalant improvisation evolved into a classical-sounding, contrapuntally strict composition. Ellington signaled the classical turn by rescoring the “Mood Indigo” trio, replacing the trumpet with a wordless soprano (Kay Davis).
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Davis's vocal purity would suit Rachmaninoff's famous “Vocalise.” The second chorus brings back Lawrence Brown's tune, even creamier and croonier than it was in “Blue Light” thanks to the upward transposition. Here, though, Ellington gives Brown's melody a Bach-like treatment.
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It serves as the cantus firmus for two choruses, the first a duet for soprano and clarinet (Jimmy Hamilton, whose classical tone blends perfectly with Davis's voice), the soprano intoning the cantus, the clarinet playing a new counterpoint; and the second with the cantus in the low reeds and brass with the soprano singing a new counterpoint. Sketches preserved in the Ellington Archive show how carefully Ellington planned the contrapuntal devices. Ellington's slightly frantic piano intro and outro have an impromptu air that contrasts tellingly with the work's contrapuntal and coloristic logic.

“On a Turquoise Cloud,” premiered at Carnegie Hall on December 27, 1947, might be termed an encore for “Transblucency.” It uses all the same elements (adding the color of the bass clarinet), but now they are employed in a delightfully informal fashion, transposed down to a mellow D
yet built on a new color, the floating timbre of Kay Davis's high A
s (and singular high B
). No longer a blues, somewhere between a pop tune and an opera aria, it is a siren song. The only further steps Ellington would make in this direction move upward to celestial realms: Mahalia Jackson's wordless humming after “The Twenty-Third Psalm” and Alice Babs's coloratura in “Heaven.”