The Ellington Century (29 page)

You wouldn't need to know any of this if jazz performance were simply a question of playing the sheet music as written. Jazz theory books label playing the tune in a way that even resembles the sheet music as “cocktail piano,” a tentative first step toward actual jazz performance. The way a jazz pianist interprets the song, however, depends on whether
it is a solo performance or, as is more usual, the pianist is accompanied by bass and drums. In either case the pianist is expected to recast the music while preserving its basic structure, introducing further substitutions and different arrangements of the notes in the chord, or what jazz musicians refer to as “voicing.” Chord voicings receive considerable attention in jazz piano textbooks because they will give an interpretation a personal sound, and also because of the relation of the piano to the bass. In order to keep out of the bassist's way, the pianist's left hand usually stays around middle C and avoids playing the root note of the harmony. When a jazz chart asks for a G7 chord the pianist's left hand therefore may play the pitches F, A, B, and E, but not the G. This takes both physical and mental practice.

“
GOODBYE PORK PIE HAT
”
: HARMONY IN BLUE

While jazz musicians absorbed the “universal” harmony of European tonality they also inflected and enriched that idiom by applying it to the blues. Based on scales and tunings not found in European music, the blues, sung with guitar accompaniment in its rural folk style, presented a particular challenge for the pianist who could not bend pitches, an essential aspect of blues performance. Pianists had to find ways to square the blues style with the well-tempered tuning of the piano and also with the habitual harmonic patterns and voice leading of classical keyboard harmony. The blue note, especially the blue third, was part of a tonal idiom that the piano could not reproduce but could only simulate by using harmonies from the major or minor modes.

The clash of blues melody and piano harmony proved to be highly productive. Boogie-woogie piano styles emulated the blues guitar by using chords that were as much rhythm as harmony. This direction led to rhythm and blues and rock. The jazz piano tradition that came out of ragtime, Jelly Roll Morton and the Harlem stride pianists, James P. Johnson, Willy “The Lion” Smith, and Luckey Roberts was more engaged with what were known as “modernistic harmonies”: ninth chords, parallel motion, chromaticism. Stride piano, the stylistic foundation for both Ellington and Basie, reached its most sophisticated form in the virtuosic extravaganzas of Art Tatum. In the late 1920s Earl Hines perfected an alternative, more melodic approach, often called a trumpet style, to jazz piano playing; in the 1930s Teddy Wilson extended Hines's style. Billy Strayhorn synthesized his distinctive harmonic style from Tatum and Wilson. Since the 1940s jazz piano has developed
dialectically between styles that extended harmonic modernism (Lennie Tristano, John Lewis, Bill Evans) and those that pulled back to the blues (Horace Silver, Wynton Kelly); both tendencies, however, are usually present in jazz harmony.

The persistent interplay between modernism and blues suggests that they were perhaps more related than opposed. There is much evidence to suggest that certain practices of European modern harmony, including added notes, polymodality, and polytonality, began as responses to jazz (or its predecessor, ragtime) rather than the other way around. This may be less a question of precedence than of parallel development. Like Bartók and Stravinsky, rag and jazz pianists were inventing an urbane harmonic style out of pretonal rural melodic material. The relation of rural and urban styles in both jazz and classical music is less a matter of replication than representation. Works like Stravinsky's
Pribaoutki
(1918) and Bartók's
Improvisations on Hungarian Peasant Songs
(1920) translated the nonclassical aspects of peasant music into jarring dissonances: double-inflection chords combining major and minor thirds, bitonality, and tone clusters. All these devices appeared as well when Stravinsky first imitated jazz in his
Ragtime
(1918) and
Piano Rag
(1919), harmonically gritty scores miles away from Joplin. Dissonance served as an emblem of the “primitive”; discords ironically represented the triads and seventh chords of Stravinsky's models. Jazz composers, by contrast, represented urban experience, the new African American milieu created by the Great Migration out of the South, with sophisticated-sounding harmonies that signaled modernity. Ellington built early works like “Black and Tan Fantasy,” “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo” and “The Mooche” out of this contrast. In both European music and jazz the modern appeared as an atavism of the primitive. “The Mooche” was simultaneously modernistic music and jungle music. The European modernists were trying to bypass bourgeois values. Ellington was subverting the South.

The harmonic changes of the blues served to indicate its AAB poetic phrase structure by marking the caesura within a line and the end of a line:

I hate to see      de evening sun go down

Harmonic change also aided rereading of the first line when it was repeated:

Hate to see      de evening sun go down

and the completion of the thought:

Cause my baby      he done lef dis town.

In the 1914 sheet music W. C. Handy harmonized this phrase (in G major) using only chords built on I, IV, and V:

G7 C7 G7 /

C6 C7 G /

D7 / G /

This harmonization simulated the blues third in several different ways. Handy used a grace note A# to color the B
in the G major or seventh chords. The blue third appears as a B
in the C7 chord, but also in the D7 chord where it sounds like an augmented fifth. If you listen to Bessie Smith you will hear that she also treated the added A in the C6 chord as a blue note. In a sense the pitches that Handy notated as B, A#, and B
were stand-ins for a blue third that the piano cannot play. The frequent harmonic reinterpretation of those pitches gave them something of a blue quality.

Ellington employed an even simpler harmony in the opening of “Black and Tan Fantasy” (credited to Ellington and Bubber Miley). The first strain of the piece is a minor blues, and until its third four-bar phrase it only uses triadic harmony (in B
minor): b
minor (i) and e
minor (iv). A seventh chord only appears with the V7, which is decorated with the one moment of fancy harmony, a G
7 neighbor chord. The sparseness of the harmony reflects the melody, which is not a blues and does not contain blue notes but is a church hymn, “The Holy City.”
¹
The piece combines two “down-home” sounds by superimposing a sacred melody on a secular phrase pattern. In the next phrase, however, it jumps to a different world, entering B
major by way of a G
ninth chord. The richer harmony hinted at in passing now blossoms. This contrasting phrase presents a series of modernistic markers: a minor seventh chord, a dominant seventh with augmented fifth, a cross rhythm of
against the
, and an eight-chord circle of fifths progression packed into two bars with the right hand moving in parallel tritones. The piece reconfigures its stylistic opposition in its two most famous phrases: Bubber Miley's plunger-muted blues chorus, primitivism made modern through interjections of augmented-fifth seventh chords, and the closing quotation of Chopin's Funeral March. The music juggles “dicty” and down-home, North and South.