The Ellington Century (22 page)

Gershwin pushed the diatonic/chromatic split even farther in “Liza” (1929) and “Boy What Love Has Done to Me” (1930). The title of the second song speaks for itself, but “Liza” is a more complex cocktail. It appeared in “Show Girl,” a short-lived “Dixieland” extravaganza dreamed up by Flo Ziegfeld that featured both the Ellington Orchestra (playing its own music) and a ballet based on Gershwin's
An American in Paris.
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“Liza” was Gershwin's response to Ziegfeld's request for a “minstrel number in the second act with one hundred beautiful girls seated on steps that cover the entire stage.”
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The gimmick was that just as Ruby Keller was about to begin the song, Al Jolson, her new husband, would leap out of the audience to serenade her and sing the song himself.
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The song had to be black, white, and blackface all at the same time. To code this racial mélange, Gershwin used three scales. The first phrase (“Liza, Liza, skies are gray”) pits a minstrel-style pentatonic melody against a rising chromatic bass line. Both lines turn diatonic in the second half of the phrase (“But if you'll smile on me / All the clouds'll roll away”). The white-note music mirrors the Kernesque sweetness alluded to in the lyrics; it also allows Keeler and Jolson to sing in their own white voices.

Once we see how the harmonic language of the Great American Song-book encoded race and sex, we can hear the chromaticism of Ellington's melodies as more than a stylistic refinement. Brandishing its chromaticism rather than hiding it in the bass line, the melody of “Prelude to a Kiss” exposed the code and spoke the unspeakable. The melody made the erotic audible. Consciousness of the codes also shed light on the subversive strategy behind Ellington's own mythology, such as the story of composing “In a Sentimental Mood”: “That was written very spontaneously. One playing—zhwoop!—just like that. The occasion was in Durham, North Carolina…. It was a rather gay party with the exception of two girls and one fellow…. So I had two chicks, one on each side of me, and I said ‘Just listen to this. You girls are too good friends to let anything like this come between you,' And this is what I played for them. I played it and I remembered it, and then I put it down.”
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It's a lovely story, but a cunning one as well. “In a Sentimental Mood” is one of the most sophisticated songs Ellington wrote, even more than “Prelude to a Kiss.” It also takes direct aim at Gershwin, lifting its first seven notes from “Someone to Watch Over Me,” then exposing the
squareness of Gershwin's song through a masterful deployment of two Gershwin devices, the chromatic bass and the passing allusion to the blues, a single A
that tints the entire melody. Where Gershwin had built his melody by repeating the same rhythm in a descending melodic sequence (longing to see/I know that he/'s waiting for me), Ellington's tune curls unpredictably, arpeggiating up a ninth when you least expect it. Compared to the Gershwin, it sounds improvised whether or not it actually was. (The performance to hear is by John Coltrane.) Dave Brubeck's nearly as spontaneous-sounding homage, “The Duke,” begins with the melodic inversion of “In a Sentimental Mood,” a technique usually associated with serialism rather than jazz.

The great popular tunes, particularly the ballads, conveyed the contradictory tenets of urban life: sexual liberation versus “family values,” freedom versus anomie, enlightened sophistication versus abiding prejudice. The closer we look at the songs, the more their craft appears as ways of registering social friction through musical and verbal frissons, dissonances, and uncertainties that, while rarely rising to political protest, absolve them from the Adornian charge of mindless escapism. Their full complexity, though, demanded new styles of performance that would replace literal reproduction with looser reinterpretation. They needed, as we will see, to be sung with a blues voice, as blues.

“
DAY DREAM”: SINGING THE BLUES, BLUEING THE SONG

Musically, not legally, who owns a melody? If you listen to three tenors—yes,
those
three tenors—sing, say, “Nessun dorma,” each version will contain the same pitches and pretty much the same rhythms. Even the sounds of their voices will differ only enough so that an experienced opera lover could tell them apart. Puccini still calls almost all the shots. By contrast, when you hear Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday sing the “St. Louis Blues,” their pitches, rhythms, and even some of the words differ sharply from the printed sheet music. W. C. Handy may have received royalties, but both singers felt free to remake his song in their own images. And if you listen to Sarah Vaughan stretch the last phrase of “My Funny Valentine” into infinity, there will be no question of who owns
that
melody. Unlike concert audiences, listeners to jazz and popular music expect performers to style a song distinctively. Historically, though, the contrast of composers' and performers' prerogatives has not always been so clear-cut. On recordings of Broadway musicals
from the 1920s, singers like Gertrude Lawrence perform great Gershwin tunes with (to our ears) a genteel literalism; much of the music termed “jazz” in the 1920s was played as written from mass-produced stock arrangements.
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Opera singers in the baroque and bel canto eras added ornaments and embellishments to arias; concerto soloists were similarly expected to improvise cadenzas.

The conformity of classical music stems from the power of the printed score as a legal restraint and an aesthetic one, a power asserted by music publishers in the nineteenth century, put into copyright law early in the twentieth, and turned into an aesthetic cause by performers and scholars. Even before Toscanini proclaimed that his performances were
come scritto
, classical music was getting hooked on literalism. The score was the music. In the face of such textual power the performer's room for interpretation has grown ever narrower.

Popular singing, by contrast, gradually became ever freer in execution. Exactly how this happened is a complicated story involving many different styles of vocal performance and changing technology,
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but it certainly had a lot to do with the two great waves of blues popularity, first as sheet music in 1914 and then as recordings in 1920. Today we take the link between blues and popular music for granted, but they would have seemed inimical a century ago, and not just racially. Popular songs were designed for mechanical reproduction as sheet music or piano rolls, and they were carefully branded with hooks or novelty subject matter to differentiate themselves from competing projects. Developed in an oral culture, the blues, by contrast, put a premium on the individual singer's bardlike ability to embellish within a common musical and poetic vocabulary. The essence of blues was elaborated repetition, both within a blues stanza where a single line would be sung twice with different inflections, and between songs that shared structure and subject matter. Publication placed the blues at a crossroads. Would the blues now be performed as written, like most popular songs? Actually, there were fairly literal blues performances, at least to judge by Eva Taylor's recording of Joe Oliver's “West End Blues,” which sounds demurely text-bound compared to the famous recording by Louis Armstrong.
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The blues began to transform the performance style of popular music through recordings by less restrained “blueswomen,” including Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith. Mamie Smith (one of many unrelated blues-singing Smiths) launched the craze with her intensely wailed rendition of Perry Bradford's “Crazy Blues,” which sold seventy-five thousand
copies within four weeks of its release in October 1920.
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Anyone who owned a copy of the sheet music would have seen at once that Bradford's song was not being sung
come scritto.
The blueswomen certainly employed forms of embellishment and ornamentation not found in popular song performance of the time judging by the few recordings we have of musicals in the 1920s, not on Broadway, where operetta-style singing mingled with cabaret-style
Sprechstimme
and the minstrel show “mammyisms” of Al Jolson. For conservative listeners, even in the realm of popular music the sounds of blues vocalism were repellant. When Louis Armstrong appeared in London in 1932,
Melody Maker
dismissed his singing of popular tunes like “Them There Eyes” or “When You're Smiling” as “savage growling.”
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Today these performances sound like classics of coloratura, the fine art of melodic elaboration.

We can hear contrasting versions of blues coloratura in three wonderful performances of “St. Louis Blues,” the famous January 14, 1925, Bessie Smith recording with Louis Armstrong on cornet and Fred Longshaw on reed organ; Billie Holiday's recording from October 15, 1940, with the Benny Carter Orchestra; and a lesser-known recording from February 9, 1932, by Bing Crosby with the Ellington Orchestra. It's not surprising that Bessie Smith's recording, with its harmonium accompaniment, slow tempo, and trumpet obbligato has become a sacred text in jazz history; it has the weight of a Bach aria. In her first phrase (“I hate to see that evening sun go down”), Smith called attention to the way she sings each note by compressing the notes of the melody, following its four-note motto, within the range of a minor third, between the tonic E
and G
. We might categorize her embellishments as introductory, a slide to the main pitch; concluding, a fall from the main pitch; or internal, a wavering of the pitch within the note, particularly noticeable on the many G
s, especially on the word “sun.” There are also notes that are sung almost
parlando
, and others that are sung straight and trumpetlike, matching Armstrong's tone. In the second phrase (“Feelin' tomorrow like I feel today”), she used the two syllables of “mor-row,” which take the place in the melody of the one syllable “see,” to color the pitch F instead of G
. In relation to her singing, the term “blue note” has to be applied to a whole family of ornaments that she applied to different steps of the scale, not just the third.