Duke (38 page)

Three weeks later, on March 6, Ellington and the band returned to Chicago for their first Victor session. First up was “You, You Darlin’,” a dull pop tune sung by Herb Jeffries. Then came “Jack the Bear,” a previously unrecorded Ellington instrumental that Billy Strayhorn had rewritten to feature Jimmie Blanton. As if to proclaim to the world that all bets were off, Blanton launched “Jack the Bear” by stepping out in front of the band and tossing off a lighter-than-air eight-bar solo. Because his style long ago became the lingua franca of jazz bass playing, the impact that this solo had on those who first heard it seven decades ago is no longer possible for contemporary listeners to fully appreciate, but its swinging vitality remains as listenable today as it was in 1940. The mosaic-like structure of “Jack the Bear” is all of a piece with Ellington’s recent recordings, as are the familiar voices of his soloists. (Best of all is Tricky Sam Nanton, who uses his plunger in such a way as to create the impression that we are hearing not one but two trombonists, both of whom have sex on their minds.) Yet something has clearly happened, and it goes well beyond the fact that Victor’s engineers were now recording the band with a you-are-there immediacy that is missing from its Columbia sides. Was it nothing more than Blanton’s galvanizing presence in the rhythm section? Or was Ellington responding in a new way to what he was hearing on the bandstand?

The answer came when the band turned to his latest composition, a seven-chorus minor-key blues called “Ko-Ko.” From the curt trombone riff that sets the piece in motion to the spiraling bitonal crescendo that brings it to a charging close, “Ko-Ko” is the greatest of Ellington’s three-minute masterpieces, an exercise in motivic development as taut as
Reminiscing in Tempo
is shapeless. Except for a dirt-plain two-chorus solo by Nanton and three bass breaks by Blanton, “Ko-Ko” is the composer’s show all the way, most spectacularly in the fourth chorus, in which he flings a double handful of dissonant piano chords and arpeggios across a series of call-and-response exchanges by the band. Though he had experimented with minor-key orchestral mayhem in 1938 with “Old King Dooji,” “Ko-Ko” is something else again, a relentless procession of musical events that contains not a wasted gesture. Every bar surges inexorably toward the final catastrophe, after which no response is possible but awed silence.

When the band played “Ko-Ko” at Carnegie Hall in 1943, Ellington informed the audience that it was “a little descriptive scene of the days that inspired jazz. I think it was in New Orleans, in a place called Congo Square where the slaves used to gather and do native and sensuous dances, religious dances.” (It was typical of him to yoke the latter two qualities.) Not long afterward he told Barry Ulanov that the piece was “an excerpt from the incomplete score for Duke’s opera,
Boola
.” The history of
Boola
is one of the many unsolved mysteries of Ellington’s life. Having announced in 1938 that he had finished writing his first opera, he started making explicit references to
Boola
in 1940: “I felt long ago there was need for expressing more of the American Negro’s true feeling. So I wrote
Boola
in operatic form. It’s orchestrated and ready for production—probably in New York.” By 1941 he was claiming to have spent nine years working on it. But while Ellington did write part of a scenario for
Boola,
no musical manuscript material definitively related to the work has survived, making it impossible to know whether or not this statement was anything more than another of his musical castles in the air. Not that it really matters, for “Ko-Ko” is complete in itself, an unremitting assault on the senses in which he at once sums up and moves beyond all of his compositional achievements to date. Even if he had never written anything else, “Ko-Ko” alone would have earned him a permanent place in the annals of twentieth-century music.

Therein lay the miracle: “Jack the Bear” and “Ko-Ko,” far from being isolated events, ushered in a flood tide of new work that continued without crest for week after week. Nine days later came “Concerto for Cootie,” a sequel to “Echoes of Harlem.” In May the band cut “Bojangles,” “Cotton Tail,” “Dusk,” “Never No Lament,” and “A Portrait of Bert Williams,” followed by “Harlem Air-Shaft,” “All Too Soon,” “Rumpus in Richmond,” and “Sepia Panorama” in July, “In a Mellotone” in September, and “Across the Track Blues” and “Warm Valley” in October. By now Ellington had become so prolific that he would soon hire a full-time copyist, Tom Whaley, to help Juan Tizol keep up with the job of extracting parts from his scores for the men in the band to play.

Ellington was so busy turning out new pieces that he didn’t even take the time to write tenor-saxophone parts for the older numbers in the book. Instead he encouraged Ben Webster to improvise his own parts on the spot. Mercer Ellington found the process fascinating:

Every time Ben got up and played by ear, the whole gang jumped on him and said, “Hey, you’ve got my note!” So Ben decided he would get away from this and find a note nobody had. What was a four-part reed chorus in four-part harmony suddenly had five parts. . . . A semi-dissonant sound resulted from the five parts, because there was no written part for him. Ellington heard it, liked it, and learned how to apply it—another device for the orchestra.

It took time for the critics to catch up. “Not up to the Ellington standard,”
Down Beat
said of “Ko-Ko.” But even the dullest of dullards finally figured out that the records he cut in 1940 were setting a new standard, not just for him but for jazz in general, and today the recordings of what has come to be known as “the Blanton-Webster band” are generally thought to mark the summit of his compositional achievement. Long before his death, that view was enough of a commonplace for Ellington to find it oppressive. “I find I have all these other lifetimes to compete with,” he said. In time he found the competition so irksome that he relegated the Blanton-Webster years to a single sentence in
Music Is My Mistress:
“During this period—1940–41—we produced some very good music.” He had a point, for the band continued to play on a high level long after Blanton died, just as Ellington continued to write first-rate pieces. But never again would he do so with such consistency, nor would any of his later bands strike so perfect a balance of virtuosity and idiosyncrasy.

 • • • 

Given its deservedly high reputation, it is surprising that the music written by Ellington for the Blanton-Webster band should have been so similar in tone to the pieces he had been turning out since the midthirties. Even the musical genres in which he worked remained unchanged. He was still writing exotic jungle music like “Ko-Ko,” “sophisticated” instrumental ballads like “Warm Valley,” tender “Mood Indigo”–like night pieces like “Dusk,” keenly observed life studies like “Bojangles” and “A Portrait of Bert Williams,” miniature jazz “concerti” like “Concerto for Cootie,” irresistibly danceable medium-tempo riff tunes like “Never No Lament,” and near-themeless string-of-solos numbers like “Across the Track Blues.” Yet in all cases these compositions are more colorful and formally supple than their predecessors. The difference was that he now worked with the concentration and self-discipline that are the fruits of maturity alone. Each chart is stripped of superfluities, making its points as succinctly as possible, then driving them home just as the needle reaches the last groove.
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It was, in short, the mixture as before—only better.

In only one area was there no perceptible increase of mastery: Ellington still found it hard to write tunes. Only “All Too Soon” has anything like a hummable melody, and it is, as usual with him, so instrumental in quality as to be all but unsingable (though Mildred Bailey and Ella Fitzgerald would prove equal to the challenge). Just one of his 1940 compositions to hit the charts was “Concerto for Cootie,” which became a standard three years later under the title “Do Nothin’ Till You Hear from Me” after Bob Russell added a lyric—and, again as usual, the piece was an unacknowledged collaboration with a sideman. It was Cootie Williams from whom Ellington bought the main theme, a chromatic warm-up exercise that the trumpeter liked to play, a transaction so widely known that it got into Walter Winchell’s column. For his part, Williams remembered the deal with rue: “I stood on the bus—got down there on the steps of the bus from Boston to New York, begging him to buy this song for $25 . . . about the time we got to New York, he said, ‘Well, okay. I’ll buy it.’”
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But it was what Ellington did with the tunes he poached that brought them to lasting life, and the way in which he spun Williams’s snippet of melody into “Concerto for Cootie,” among the most formally unpredictable of his 1940 compositions, shows how he was freeing up the repeating-chorus and multiple-strain structures that had always dominated his work. He had been experimenting with these forms for years, but now he threw out the rule book altogether, writing pieces that sound straightforward on first hearing but prove on closer inspection to all but defy analysis. In “Harlem Air-Shaft,” seemingly unrelated musical episodes are shoved up against one another in the manner of a cubistic collage. “Harlem Air-Shaft” starts cold with three four-bar phrases, each set in a different key, then plunges headlong into a sequence of three thirty-two-bar choruses, each based on one of the four-bar phrases with which the piece opened. The second chorus contains three stop-time passages in which the rhythmic momentum is jerked to a halt, then restored to motion by Sonny Greer’s drum breaks. In the fourth and last chorus, the volume drops to a whisper and explodes seconds later into a shouting coda. It sounds almost as if Ellington had flung the pages of the manuscript in the air, then played them in the order that they fluttered to the floor.

While Ellington had always had a knack for weaving together borrowed bits and pieces of melody into tunes as flowing as “Sophisticated Lady,” he now applied the same technique on a larger scale. “Sepia Panorama,” for example, is a symmetrical four-theme musical arch—ABCDDCBA—whose third section was lifted from an unfinished (and uncredited) Billy Strayhorn arrangement of “Tuxedo Junction,” a popular riff tune of the day. On paper the combination makes no sense, but Ellington was never afraid to let his ear make his decisions, and what should have been a musical muddle instead sounds impeccably right.

The middle section of “Sepia Panorama,” a pair of blues choruses improvised by Jimmie Blanton and Ben Webster, reminds us that the blues was one of Ellington’s most valued compositional devices. The word
device,
however, is the clue to understanding his arm’s-length approach to the blues. Twelve-bar blues choruses pop up in surprising places throughout his compositions of the forties. The middle section of “Jack the Bear,” for instance, consists of three blues choruses by Harry Carney, Tricky Sam Nanton, and the full ensemble, surrounded by a mosaic of disjunct thematic material. Yet it was rare for the band to record straight blues tunes, most of which were reserved for the small groups, above all the ones led by Johnny Hodges, whom Helen Oakley dubbed “Mister Blues.” When Ellington used the word
blue
in the title of a composition, it was like as not to be a nostalgic ballad (“Blue Tune,” “Blue Mood”) or an urbane swinger (“Riding on a Blue Note”). Most of the actual “blues” that he wrote, like “Battle of Swing” and “Subtle Lament,” are repeating-chorus pieces that employ the time-honored twelve-bar pattern but are not “bluesy” in the ordinary sense of the word. Of the nineteen new instrumental pieces by Ellington that were recorded by the full band in 1940, only two, “Ko-Ko” and “Across the Track Blues,” were twelve-bar blues.

Why was Ellington so reluctant (if that is the word) to embrace the blues? Because, like James P. Johnson, Fats Waller, and the other East Coast stride pianists of his generation, he had only a limited feel for the traditional blues idiom. In
Music Is My Mistress
he declared the blues to be not “a song of sorrow” but “a song of romantic failure,” which says much about his sensibility. Though he gradually evolved into a forceful and persuasive bluesman, most of his own “blues” solos of the thirties and forties are lacy, pastel-colored interludes that sound not funky but decorative. Understanding as he did the importance of the blues to jazz, he took care to bring natural blues players like Hodges and Nanton into the band, contrasting their earthiness with his suavity, just as he used the blues idiom as one of the myriad colors on his musical palette. But to listen to a piece like “Across the Track Blues” is to recall what Sergei Diaghilev said when he first heard Maurice Ravel’s
La Valse:
“Ravel, it’s a masterpiece, but it isn’t a ballet. It’s a
portrait
of a ballet, a painting of a ballet.” So, too, is “Across the Track Blues” (whose working title was “Pastel”) a portrait of the blues, one in which the unmediated emotions of the authentic bluesman are transformed into the musical counterpart of a color-field abstraction, then put in a handsome frame and hung in the Ellington Museum for the purpose of quiet contemplation.

It is Ellington’s command of instrumental color that sets his work apart from every other big-band composer of the Swing Era. The jungle-style plunger-mute playing that he had formerly used as a show-stopping device was now fully integrated into his brass writing, in which he repeatedly came up with sonic combinations so innovative that they defied accurate transcription by even the keenest of listeners. He treated his sidemen as “found objects” whose one-of-a-kind timbres he used like the painter he had been: “You write just for their abilities and natural tendencies and give them places where they do their best . . . Every musician has his favorite licks and you gotta write to them.” Billy Strayhorn spoke of how he had “often seen him exchange parts in the middle of a piece because the man and the part weren’t the same character.” This explains one of the peculiarities of Ellington’s career, which is that he was a major composer but not an influential one. Except for Strayhorn, Spike Hughes, and Charlie Barnet, a longtime Ellington enthusiast whose musical goal (in his words) was “to incorporate Duke Ellington’s harmonic approach and tone colors with Count Basie’s rhythmic drive,” none of Ellington’s contemporaries tried to sound like him.
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They played his songs and sang his praises, but that was as far as it went. Not only did they steer clear of literal imitation—which would have been impossible in any case—but they hardly ever tried to emulate his unique method of writing big-band music conceived for performance by specific players with highly individual timbres.