The Ellington Century (30 page)

A challenge for many jazz musicians in the 1920s was to reinterpret the blues through modernism rather than in opposition to it. A strikingly modernized blues appears in “Sloppy Joe,” a rarely discussed but fascinating Ellington work from 1929 (co-credited to Barney Bigard). This piece sounds like a response (either as homage or parody) to the famous recording of “West End Blues” with Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines that had appeared the year before. It follows a similar format of solos, including a chorus of scat singing by Sonny Greer. But the highlight is Ellington's piano solo; it illustrates what Hines had to teach him. Ellington alternated bars in stride piano style with modernistic measures using five-note harmonies in parallel motion with the right hand voiced in fourths. These modern-sounding chords slide into the blues harmony from a third above or below. In the second phrase, Ellington used the logic of the harmonic sequence to repeat a bar on the expected IV chord down a step to a ninth chord on the flat third, outside the key but bluer than blue. In two final Hines-isms he implied a double-time feel for a trumpet-style piano arabesque and, for his final cadence, jumped (rather than slid) between two modern-voiced chords with the right hand stacking fourths and the left hand in an open seventh. Ellington could have played this solo twenty years later without it sounding in any way dated.

The blues progression found in “The St. Louis Blues” has survived for almost a century. It could be elaborated with ever more complicated chords, as in Art Tatum's versions of “Aunt Hagar's Blues”
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or it could be fitted out with many substitute chords, as in Charlie Parker's “Blues for Alice,” where the harmony changes twice per bar; or it could be further simplified, as in Miles Davis's “All Blues.” As an example of a later blues, at once rooted in tradition and exploratory, let's examine “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat,” Charles Mingus's elegy for Lester Young first recorded in 1959.

When you first look at the lead sheet, the chord structure looks bewildering.
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Traveling far from the three-chord blues, Mingus used nine different chords. The names of the chords and the notation of the melody also seem bizarre. The first chord is an E
7 with an augmented ninth, the second a B dominant thirteenth, which would not appear to be in the key of E
. Actually, though, it is a chord also heard in “Black and Tan Fantasy,” the lowered VI chord, borrowed from E
minor, but when “Goodbye” continues with chords of E and A we start to run out of enharmonic fixes, and we have to begin invoking the idea of the tritone substitution. Mingus further confused things through the phrase
structure, which sounds like 4 + 3 + 5 rather than the expected three phrases of four bars. All this fancy harmony, though, served a purpose very similar to the harmonic changes in “St. Louis Blues.” They constantly reinflect the blue third, the pitch G
which appears in every bar. I'll tabulate the ways the pitch appears in each chord:

E 7	augmented ninth
B9	fifth
E major 9	third
D 9 sus	fourth (sus)
A minor 7	seventh
F minor 7 flat 5	minor ninth
B 7 sharp 5	sharp fifth
C1 3	sharp eleventh
A7	thirteenth

If you sing the pitch G
against each of the chords you will naturally find yourself adjusting the intonation in response to the varying degrees of tension between the root of the chord and the position of the G
and you will hear how Mingus's melody is a sustained keening wail on E
and G