The Ellington Century (27 page)

Wynton Kelly (four choruses). Kelly's solo emphasizes the blues roots of the head. Its opening bars announce the gospel-tinged style of “hard bop funky regression” it could be played on a Hammond B3, and, gospel-style, it builds to a climactic shout chorus that emphasizes the defining notes of the blues scale, flat third, flat fifth, and flat seventh. Kelly, however, constantly keeps the melodic identity of the head in the foreground even as he leads it into his own stylistic territory. He ornaments the two-note G-F motive with neighbor tones and passing tones and dramatizes the half-step motive of the closing four bars through rhythmic displacement. Kelly also subtly honors the modal concept of the piece. When he first comes to the A
7 chord he plays a B
arpeggio over it, turning the tonic triad into a Lydian mode upper extension. In his second
chorus he uses a similar Lydian harmony over the E
7 chord and follows up this modernistic touch with an aptly Parkeresque flourish. Kelly's trump card, however, is what classical musicians call a “rocket” figure, a rising arpeggio, first heard here as an upbeat to the last phrase of the first chorus. It recurs in varied form four times more, pushing the spirit of the solo ever higher toward its climactic shout.

Miles Davis (six choruses). With Davis's entrance the style suddenly swerves from Ray Charles to Erik Satie. He plays short
Gymnopédie-esque
phrases, moving in small intervals that are punctuated with spacious rests. This would simply sound tentative if the pitches were not so carefully chosen to invoke the head. Davis emphasizes the two dissonant pitches of the opening chordal motive, G and C, stretching out the melodic resolution of the G to F over eight bars. Where Kelly brought out the chromatic tension of the last four bars, Davis seems at first to bury it in a chantlike oscillation that ends in a bop-harmony rocket, the first sign of tension beneath the calm surface. Gradually Davis turns Kelly's strategy inside out so that by his last chorus, with its apogee on a high D
, he is just as down home as his pianist.

John Coltrane (six choruses). Shifting the emotional balance from passive to active, Coltrane launches his solo with three upward flourishes, each time cresting on the high C, the dissonant element in the second chord of the head motive. This gesture announces a tone of ecstatic celebration magnified through all six choruses. The majority of Coltrane's phrases are two-bar arabesques describing a convex melodic curve or its concave inversion. These long phrases are the temporal equivalent of Coltrane's huge sound; both make his solo the center of gravity of the whole track. Coltrane sets off most of his melodic flights with a rest, springing off the downbeat as if it were a diving board. This mannerism serves to shape the whole solo when its final chorus begins assertively right on the beat. His repeated high B
s here resolve the high Cs that opened the solo.

Julian “Cannonball” Adderley (five choruses). Where Coltrane's solo was monumental, Adderley's is sly and sinuous. Unpredictable in the length and character of his phrases, Adderley pulls the music back toward classic free-associational bebop with fluent Parker licks and intertextual stylistic allusions.
³⁸
Adderley underscores the sense of unrestricted freedom by eliding most of his phrases over the bar lines, anticipating chord changes or building a melodic curve around them rather than rebounding off a new harmony. He saves his most virtuosic passagework for the furious close, which
nevertheless highlights the pitches E
, D
, and D, which imparted a tritonic sting to the cadence of the head.

Paul Chambers (two choruses). Less a solo than a necessary transition back to the mood of the head after such a far-flung journey, Chambers's two choruses reinstate two structural pillars, the simple blues progression and the call-and-response phrase format, through a simple dialogue of walking bass quarter notes and ornamental guitarlike triplet eighths.

Each of these supermelodies shapes thematic, stylistic, expressive, tonal, and rhythmic ideas. Why not just call them melodies? I think they are best thought of as melodies raised to a higher power. They all refer in some way to the original head, so that they are reflective rather than merely assertive, lunar rather than solar. Because they build on an existing structure, though, they are also much less repetitive; the head established its identity by stating the two-note motive five times; none of the solos repeats a single phrase.

Borrowing the terminology of Roland Barthes, we might say that a tune is “readerly” while a supermelody is “writerly.” A tune presents a powerfully compelling statement, while a supermelody mirrors our own strategies for grasping and interpreting that statement. Supermelodies enact listening as spontaneous composition; ruminating in ever-widening circles, they are interpretations caught in the act of becoming texts.

OUTRO: A FEW SIMPLE SONGS

We might divide successful twentieth-century classical melodies between simple songs (like “a Simple Song” from Leonard Bernstein's
Mass)
and cosmic melodies, not excluding the possibility that the simple can also be cosmic and vice versa. (Ellington proves both points with his simple song “Come Sunday” and his cosmic melody “Heaven.”) The simplifying side of twentieth-century classical music fell into obscurity in the midcentury narrative of ever-increasing complexity. In the past twenty years, though, performers and scholars have shown more respect for the melodic gifts of composers like Prokofiev and Barber and have also paid more attention to the ideology-based simplifications of Hanns Eisler and his American disciples Aaron Copland and Mark Blitzstein, but there is still a tendency to frame any melodic simplicity as retrogressive or commercial. Two of the most powerful musical responses to the Second
World War demonstrate the expressive power of a good, simple tune: Kurt Weill's “Und was bekam des Soldaten Weib?” (words by Brecht) and Francis Poulenc's “C” (words by Louis Aragon). The songs are in the cabaret styles, of, respectively, pre-Hitler Berlin and wartime Paris. The Weill song harkens back to “Surabaya Johnny” and even further back to Schumann's “Die beiden Grenadiere,” while stylistically Poulenc's is just a few steps away from “Autumn Leaves” (or “Les feuilles mortes,” music by Joseph Kosma, words by Jacques Prévert, first recorded in 1945).

The Brecht/Weill song, a catalogue of the booty a German soldier has sent his wife from the plundered capitals of Prague, Oslo, Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris, and Bucharest, is strophic, with a repeated three-phrase AAB section in b minor followed by a concluding restatement of A in the major that reports her final gift, a widow's veil sent from the Russian front. The tune follows the Tin Pan Alley principles of melodic writing in terms of range, repetition, and catchiness, but its phrases extend beyond the expected eight bars to a discomfortingly odd eleven, with a subtle alienation effect. The A phrases contain a rising question phrase, harmonized with just two chords, b minor and a bluesy G7, followed by a falling answer where the accented notes of the melody form clichéd appoggiatura dissonances against sentimental secondary dominant harmonies the soldier's wife might have heard on the radio. The final stanza forecasts a Russian victory (the song was probably written in 1943) and celebrates the soldier's death with an ironic turn to major. The grimly reassuring harmony suggests that the widow arrived at the soldier's funeral decked out in all her ill-gotten gifts.