The Ellington Century (13 page)

In “Braggin' in Brass,” perhaps written in response to Benny Goodman's popular 1936 recording of “Bugle Call Rag,” Ellington elevated the supersax idea to even more virtuosic heights by rearranging Jenkins's “Hot and Bothered” solo for three perfectly synchronized trumpets; he kicked up this effect with what Schuller terms a “hocket-style” passage for the three trombones. In medieval music a hocket (the word means “hiccup”) was a melody whose notes were split into staccato shards between singers; here, the trombones sound more like three tuned drums in rapid-fire alternation. Both of these stunts blur the line between improvisation and composition. Ellington could play his orchestra with the same rhythmic abandon that Tatum brought to the piano because he was writing for players who could swing both on their own and together.

In the early 1930s sleek, superfast “killer dillers” like “Casa Loma Stomp” and “Chinatown” (Henderson), “White Heat” (Lunceford), and “Toby” (Moten) were all the rage; in retrospect, the genre was a bridge between hot jazz and swing. Ellington's response, “Daybreak Express,” turned “Tiger Rag” into a killer-diller tone poem, a shout exalted to a freedom ride. An ensemble piece from beginning to end, “Daybreak Express” has a more complicated structure than its “Tiger Rag”-based predecessors: the opening section, with its famous accelerating pulse in the brass, is conspicuously modernistic, with parallel harmonies over a bass ostinato and a real train whistle (perhaps mimicking the taxi horns in
An American in Paris
); its chugging mechanism heats up with the entry of a 3 + 3 + 2 clave figure in the brass. A blues-inflected call from Nanton (sounding like the train's porter) serves as a link to three “Tiger Rag” choruses, the first for saxes in A
the others in D
. This modulation opens up the tonal expanse of the piece, heightening the evocation of a transformative journey.

The sax chorus (part of which is transcribed in Gunther Schuller's
The Swing Era
, p. 63) is an intensified version of its counterpart in “Tiger Rag,” part I, with a repeated
cross-rhythm (a nine-note clave):

that recalls the repeated
figure (against a
meter)

in Armstrong's scat chorus in “Hotter Than That.”

The last two choruses are call-and-response shouts: the first, led by Cootie Williams's repeated high B
s (the added sixth of the harmony), proclaims the “Hold-that-ti-ger” motive jubilantly, like a battle anthem; the second phrase reverses the call-and-response with the saxes wailing on a minor third, suggestive of a church spiritual. The symbolic train simultaneously carries the music to the edge of the promised land and back home. Then someone slams on the brakes and Freddy Jenkins issues a sigh on his half-valved trumpet; freedom remains a “dream deferred.”

By the late 1930s “Tiger Rag,” along with just about any other rag, felt retro; its harmonies were old hat even when the sheet music appeared in 1917. It had also become wildly popular, in recordings by Benny Goodman, Bob Crosby, and Glenn Miller, as a frantic jitterbug novelty with conspicuous allusions to the ODJB recording that recalled
its “Dixieland” origins at a time when the revival of the older New Orleans style under the “Dixieland” rubric was just taking off. The ODJB echoes surrounded the piece with a suspect, magnolia-scented nostalgia for the Old South, which Ellington would later demolish in his
Deep South Suite.
It was time to retire “Tiger Rag.” Ellington had already embarked on a rivalry with Gershwin, so why not up the stakes by transferring the cultural resonances of “Tiger Rag” to a new foundation, Gershwin's signature tune, which had “Tiger Rag” in its musical DNA? Hold-that-ti-ger; I-got-rhy-thm. “Cotton Tail” leapt out of their dry bones.

“Carolina Shout”

“Carolina Shout,” arguably the most influential American piano composition of the twentieth century, showed the way to a musical future while at the same time capturing a fast-receding past. Ellington learned to play James P. Johnson's composition from the piano roll in 1920 and performed it for the composer, already the reigning monarch of Harlem stride piano, the following year.
²⁸
According to its composer, “Carolina Shout” re-created a lost world:

My mother was from Virginia and somewhere in her blood was an instinct for doing country and set dances—what were called “read [or ‘reel'] shoutings.” My “Carolina Shout” and Carolina Balmoral are real southern set or square dances.
²⁹

These Charleston people and the other Southerners had just come to New York. They were country people and they felt homesick. When they got tired of two-steps and schottisches (which they danced with a lot of spieling), they'd yell: “Let's go back home!”…“Let's do a set!”…or, “Now, put us in the alley!”
³⁰

Johnson evoked the old dances, “the squares and jubas danced to mouth harps, bones, Jew's harps, and other makeshift musical instruments of the core culture.”
³¹

Yet in reviving the past, Johnson was also creating a new music. I'm tempted to retype that as NEW MUSIC because the seminal rhythmic innovation “Carolina Shout” made it an American counterpart to Stravinsky's
Danse sacrale
(which twitches, reels, jerks, and stumbles but never swings). Just as every young classical composer in Europe circa 1920 felt obliged to come to terms with
Le sacre
, every aspiring jazz pianist in New York had to master Johnson's “test piece.” “Carolina Shout”
set the bar for Johnson's successors in stride piano royalty, Waller and Tatum, and it was also foundational for Ellington and Basie both as pianists and arrangers.

“Carolina Shout” exists in variant forms on piano rolls, recordings made from 1921 to 1944, and printed scores, but the similarities between the sources outweigh their differences. It consists of five sixteen-bar “strains” ABCDED (the same formal plan found in Sousa's “Liberty Bell,” a.k.a. the Monty Python theme) framed by an intro and a stunningly “modernistic” outro that suddenly reminds us that the music heard up to that point has been evoking an earlier era. Any of the strains might be repeated with varied ornamentation; on the 1921 recording James P. Johnson takes A and C twice; the wonderful Fats Waller recordings similarly move a lot of the furniture around without wrecking the room. Perhaps because of all the variorums most of the written analyses seem inaccurate: most hear four strains (the usual Joplin form) rather than five and detect one shout chorus, C, where I hear two, C and E, with E (the trio section of the second half of the piece) the climactic phrase. This second shout, with a strong family resemblance to the famous final phrase of Morton's “King Porter Stomp,” also recalls the ecstatic wail heard in the later parts of “Run Old Jeremiah” (see below).