The History of Jazz (40 page)

This enforced hiatus and the dramatic turnover in the band did little to stem Ellington’s ambitions. His attention increasingly turned to longer works in a jazz vein. Undeterred by the failure of his show
Jump for Joy
, which had been staged for eleven weeks in Los Angeles in 1941, Ellington pushed on with his most daring composition to date,
Black, Brown and Beige
. For over a decade Ellington had talked about his desire to write an extended work that would serve as a musical depiction of African American history. The scope of this project constantly shifted: at one point it was to be a symphony, at another an opera or musical. The end result was none of these. Instead Ellington put together a three-part work, lasting three-quarters of an hour, and scored for jazz band and voice. Given Ellington’s stature, this alone would have been a major event in the music world. But his choice of Carnegie Hall for a venue—this was his debut performance in the venerable auditorium—only added to the notoriety surrounding
Black, Brown and Beige
. In the eyes of some, Ellington was doing more than writing an extended work; he was challenging the bastions of serious music.

The critical response to the piece was far from receptive. Paul Bowles, writing in the
New York Herald Tribune
, not only chastised the composer, but made pronouncements about the “proper” scope of jazz. “The whole attempt to fuse jazz as a form with art music should be discouraged”
¹²
—a judgment with the ominous ring of the plantation owner denouncing his “uppity” slaves. But even listeners who might have been more sympathetic, such as John Hammond, lamented that Duke was “deserting jazz.” In truth,
Black, Brown and Beige
was an impressive work, despite minor imperfections. The first movement includes some of the most sophisticated examples of thematic development Ellington would ever write, along with one of his strongest melodies (“Come Sunday”) presented in an impassioned saxophone statement by Johnny Hodges. The highlight of the second movement is the unexpected entry of a vocal part, built on an unusual pyramid form of lyric:

The blues
The blues ain’t
The blues ain’t nothin’
The blues ain’t nothin’ but a cold, gray day …

This section was followed, in the Carnegie Hall performance, by an outstanding tenor solo by Ben Webster. The third movement,
Beige
, is a less structured sequence of disparate themes, each representing Ellington’s musical evocation of a specific aspect of African American history or culture. The insertion of a waltz interlude was noteworthy at the time, given the rarity of this meter in jazz settings, but
Beige
as a whole is less cohesive than
Black
and
Brown
. In its entirety,
Black, Brown and Beige
represented a major step forward for Ellington, his boldest attempt to address the demands of longer forms. It suffered, if anything, from an abundance of riches: too much thematic material, too many shifts in tempo, too many moods. Yet, for all its excesses,
Black, Brown and Beige
remains a career milestone for Ellington and deserves consideration as the most important extended work in the history of jazz music.

With encouragement, Ellington might have pushed further in the directions outlined by this massive composition. Instead the mixed reactions of the critics gave him pause. Over the next month he performed the work two more times, then put it on the shelf, never again playing it in its original form. Ellington would continue to debut extended works at Carnegie Hall concerts during the 1940s, but none were as ambitious as
Black, Brown and Beige
. In “New World A’ Coming,” premiered at Carnegie Hall on December 11, 1943, Ellington offered a more controlled single-movement work, less jazz oriented, and with overtones of nineteenth-century classical music. With
The Perfume Suite
, which made its debut the following year, Ellington (with Strayhorn’s participation evident) constructed a longer work out of a sequence of “movements,” which were essentially unrelated musical vignettes. Ellington employed the same approach, which allowed him to rely on his skills as a miniaturist, with
The Deep South Suite
from 1946 and
The Liberian Suite
from 1947. During the remainder of his career, this formula would remain Ellington’s preferred method of dealing with the challenges of extended form. Over the next quarter of a century, Ellington would compose numerous longer works, but the more thematically probing style of
Black, Brown and Beige
would rarely surface.

Yet as Gunther Schuller has rightly pointed out, “before we judge Ellington too harshly, we might do well to remember that the whole question of large forms in jazz has not been entirely satisfactorily answered by anyone else.”
¹³
A decade after
Black,
Brown and Beige
, the introduction of the long-playing record was heralded as the breakthrough that would liberate jazz from the constraints imposed by 78 rpm records. Once jazz artists were no longer limited by the enforced three-minute duration of a 78, an era of extended jazz composition would blossom—or so it seemed at the time. But the ensuing decades made clear that more than technological problems needed to be solved to effect such a liberation. Why is this so? Schuller points to the challenge of integrating improvisation and composition. Certainly this is an issue. But even more pressing is the question—usually unacknowledged in jazz circles—of what a suitable compositional structure for longer jazz works might look like. In fact, there are only four options. On the one hand, jazz composers can borrow the forms of classical music, creating “jazz operas,” “jazz fugues,” “jazz sonatas,” and the like. Second, jazz composers can continue to use the short forms—twelve-bar blues, thirty-two-bar forms—and simply play them for a long time or string them together in suites. Third, longer works can be created that are essentially formless, or very lax in imposing formal constraints, as with Ellington’s many suites. Finally, jazz composers can invent their own compositional structures—not a jazz sonata, but an alternative to sonata form (or fugue, rondo, etc.) for the jazz idiom, whatever that might be. The last option is clearly the most difficult, probably the most promising, and certainly the one least explored to date—not surprisingly so, given the limited concern with (and, at times, antagonism against) formalism that predominates in the jazz world. When commentators lament Ellington’s reliance on essentially formless “suites” in his later years, it is not because of their lack of quality—far from it—but because Ellington seemed to be shirking the larger task at hand. More than any other jazz composer of the twentieth century, he possessed the vision, ambition, and genius necessary to create these new structures.

Did Ellington fail in this regard? Not really. At a certain point, he simply decided to direct his energies elsewhere. At times, his most daring musical visions would emerge in brief sketches, as in the four-and-a-half-minute rendition of “The Clothed Woman” from his 1947 Carnegie Hall concert, with its hints of atonality mixed in with elements of stride and blues. The integration of vocal and instrumental lines in “Transblucency,” the use of counterpoint on “Fugueaditti” (which also served as part of the longer
Tonal Group
), the canonic interplay and daring reharmonization from the band’s 1945 remaking of “Mood Indigo”: these too showed Ellington’s interest in expanding his musical vocabulary. As the last piece made clear, the reworking of old material often gave rise to some of Duke’s most inspired moments. Five years later, Ellington created a fifteen-minute version of “Mood Indigo” for one of his first long-playing records, and the resulting sixteen choruses of variations on this theme must rank as one of the band’s greatest, if often overlooked, longer works. This may well have been the closest Ellington ever came to creating an African American equivalent of Bach’s
Goldberg Variations
or Beethoven’s
Diabelli Variations
.

And the hits continued as well. Even during the recording ban, Ellington continued to enjoy success as a composer of popular songs. Two of Ellington’s instrumental numbers were given a makeover, with the addition of lyrics and a new name, and made into hits. “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” based on “Never No Lament,” reached the top of the R&B chart in a version by the Ink Spots and spurred Victor to rerelease Ellington’s own version, which also sold well. A simplified version of “Concerto for Cootie” enjoyed popularity when rechristened as “Do Nothin’ till You Hear from Me.” In addition to building his reputation as a songwriter and concert hall composer, Ellington managed somehow to deal with the many other demands on him: the demands of the road, the demands of leading a big band, the demands of celebrity, the demands imposed by commercial interests in the music industry—these continuing for the rest of his life. Time was always in short supply. (“Even the unscheduled work,” Billy Strayhorn once quipped, “is behind schedule.”
¹⁴
) In this context, the marvel is that Ellington succeeded so well on so many different fronts.

The 1950s proved to be a challenging decade for Ellington. The sudden departure of Johnny Hodges, Lawrence Brown, and Sonny Greer in 1951 stands out as the most devastating loss in the history of the band. Ellington regrouped by arranging for the return of Juan Tizol from his gig with Harry James, along with Tizol’s cohorts in that band, drummer Louis Bellson and alto saxophonist Willie Smith. The jazz press dubbed the move the “Great James Robbery,” but the take on this heist was questionable. There were, clearly, some benefits—Bellson proved to be generally superior to Greer in driving the band on uptempo charts—but the departure of Hodges left Duke with a gap that simply could not be filled, by Smith (for all his virtues) or anyone else. Hodges would return in 1955, but Ellington never fully adjusted to his absence in the interim. Much of the slack was taken up by saxophonist Paul Gonsalves, whose arrival in 1950 provided Ellington with his strongest tenor soloist of the post-Webster decades. The addition of trumpeter Clark Terry in the following year, however, was clearly a major coup for Duke.

But coping with bandstand turnover was only a small part of Ellington’s challenge during this period. At least that could be managed, more or less. The changing musical tastes of the American public was another factor entirely. By 1950, the big band was effectively dead as a major force in American popular music. In the years following World War II, a number of social and economic factors conspired to force the big bands slowly, but inexorably, out of existence. A tax on dance venues, later repealed, may have been the first wedge separating jazz musicians from their mass audience. In the postwar years, the cost of promoting swing music further escalated as the price of transportation, wages, and hotel rooms rose steadily. An increasingly foreboding reputation for jazz as a music for serious listeners only, a legacy of the beboppers, clearly dates from this period as well. In time, the spread of television not only encouraged people to stay at home but distracted the public’s attention from radio, which had provided free advertising for jazz music in the previous two decades. But swing music itself was also partly to blame, its vital core enervated by the formulaic gestures of the name bands and the soundalike sameness of the second-tier groups. The public’s taste was now shifting to pop singers, such as Frank Sinatra, and soon would embrace the transgressive sounds of rock and roll. Perhaps no single factor was pivotal in killing the big band, but the cumulative impact was enormous. In December 1946, no fewer than eight major swing orchestras disbanded—including those of Goodman, James, Dorsey, and Teagarden. By the close of the decade, only a few surviving units continued to work with any regularity. And in later years, a number of the most prominent exponents of swing were so-called ghost bands—a fitting label for these semimoribund ensembles, boasting the names of now-departed leaders with perhaps only a few holdovers in the orchestra from the glory days. These emblematic ensembles on life support continued to regurgitate the hits of earlier years without even a pretense of novelty or innovation.

The leaders who continued to program new big band music now struggled as never before. The story of Count Basie during these postwar years offers a telling example. Dance hall and hotel engagements steadily declined for his band, forcing Basie into smaller clubs such as Bop City and the Royal Roost. Sales of his recordings for the Victor label were poor, and quality suffered as the label sought desperately for gimmicks to revive the band’s popularity. Basie was finally forced to disband in early 1950. His agent of long standing, Willard Alexander, went so far as to issue a statement to the press acknowledging that the Basie big band had been “destroyed as a box office attraction.” The Count was left to front a decimated sextet. A less committed bandleader might have given up, but Basie fought back. He soon expanded to a septet, when veteran guitarist Freddie Green unilaterally decided that the band couldn’t get by without him. (“He just came in on his own,” Basie described Green’s return. “One night we were playing somewhere in midtown, and I came to work and there he was with his guitar and everything … he’s been right there ever since.”
¹⁵
) When important gigs came up, Basie would add extra players. Slowly he reestablished his big band on an ongoing basis, rebuilding his core of soloists along the way. The so-called New Testament band, described in greater detail in
chapter 6
, may not have eclipsed listeners’ memories of Lester Young and Herschel Evans—who could?—but nonetheless it made a major contribution to the Basie legacy.

Ellington’s history during the decade of the 1950s followed a similar course. At one point, his stature had fallen so low that a writer in
Downbeat
urged Duke to retire from bandleading. This was extreme, even given
Downbeat
’s tabloidlike penchant at the time for stirring controversy, yet few could deny that the first half of the 1950s represented a low point in the history of the Ellington band. Ellington was increasingly content to rely on pieces from earlier decades. Only one substantial extended composition was written and recorded during these years, the fourteen-minute tone poem “Harlem,” but it is a masterpiece by almost any measure. And with his 1953 recordings of “Satin Doll,” Ellington showed himself still capable of writing a radio airplay hit (although this would be his last). Perhaps the most refreshing development of the later Ellington was his higher profile as a pianist and combo performer. His 1953 piano record for Capitol is a major statement for Ellington as both a player and composer (“Reflections in D” and “Melancholia”). In the following years, Ellington would make several other albums in this vein with positive results. His occasional collaborations with leading players of the younger generation—Charles Mingus, Max Roach, John Coltrane—also produced some of his most creative moments as small-combo pianist.