The Ellington Century (39 page)

Soon after the recording appeared, however, the English critic Leonard Hibbs astutely pointed out that side four approximated the AABABA form of an expanded popular song and sounded complete in itself. Hibbs came up with an imaginative program for the earlier parts of the piece. According to him, they represented Ellington's compositional process, his search for a tune that was “just out of reach”: “He can't nail it down. It's there but it won't take shape.”
¹¹
Hibbs's account is a sympathetic way of hearing the piece, but it fails to describe the thematic material accurately, although in passing it makes the lovely suggestion that the music has something to do with “proper clothing.”
¹²

Ellington began the portrait of his mother and her proper clothes with three ideas presented contrapuntally: a four-note “dirge” motive moving in parallel fifths in the bass; a two-note motto, a rising minor
third repeated gently on the trumpet (which names the subject of the music either as Daisy or mother or mama); and a figure in lightly swung eighth notes on the piano (which could represent her proper clothes adorned with the strands of pearls that set off her face in the
Music Is My Mistress
photograph).

Critics undervalued “Reminiscing” by following only the main tune, an eight-bar idea that occurs fifteen times in the piece, without noticing the subtle variations Ellington rings on it, and its evolving relation to contrasting material. In between the rondo-like returns of the main tune Ellington inserted three different kinds of phrases, one that sounds like a B or bridge and usually comes between statements of the main theme, another that is a closing phrase built on a transformation of the four-note dirge theme, and, most intensely, a phrase in which the two-note Daisy theme is heard as a sequence of rising half steps in rhythmic augmentation, four times as slow as the original statement. This third idea, heard only twice, stands out from the rest of the work as a powerfully rendered acknowledgment of grief, but the essence of the music, its portrait of a great lady, appears in the varied, reorchestrated restatements of the eight-bar idea, which allow each member of the band to pay Ellington's mother a personal tribute. The eighth-note “strands of pearls” motive embellishes these melodic restatements either as a counterpoint or response, enriching the melody both horizontally and vertically. The pearls in the photograph and in the music proclaim Daisy's regal bearing, as would befit the mother of a duke.

Ellington's complicated marital and extramarital history suggests that no woman ever really replaced Daisy in his affections, but his devotion to her memory did not inhibit his musical portrayals of erotic themes. His next two extended works with romantic subjects, “The Blue Belles of Harlem” and the
Perfume Suite
, involved significant collaboration with Billy Strayhorn. The
Perfume Suite
premiered at the Carnegie Hall concert on December 19, 1944. Ellington signaled the collaborative effort obliquely with what may have sounded like a papal locution: “In the Perfume Suite our aim was not so much to try to interpret the mood…implied by the label on the commercial projects, but more so to try to capture the character usually taken on by a woman who wears different brands of perfume—or rather different blends of perfume…. We divided them into four categories: Love, Violence, Naiveté and Sophistication.”
¹³
The first movement, first titled “Sonata” and later “Balcony Serenade,” was in fact Strayhorn's reworking of material he had written for other purposes; the second, a vocal number
called “Strange Feeling,” was also mainly by Strayhorn, though Ellington scored the instrumental chorus. Ellington composed the third movement, “Dancers in Love,” and performed it as a piano solo (with bass). The final movement, “Coloratura,” showcased the upper register screech trumpet of Cat Anderson, who had just joined the band. It is an Ellington work completed by Strayhorn in the handoff method the two composers had established in “Jack the Bear.” As Walter van de Leur notes, the
Perfume Suite
became the model for later extended, multimovement pieces “consisting of a mix of (retitled) old and new compositions by Ellington and Strayhorn, unified by a programmatic title and explanatory remarks.”

The
Perfume Suite
overturned racial and sexual stereotypes through unexpected and disturbing juxtapositions of mood. “Balcony Serenade” sounds like a continuation of Strayhorn's “Sugar Hill Penthouse” from
Beige;
its lush reed choir voicing is as Glenn Miller-ish as its title. Strayhorn's music won the praise of Miller's arrangers Bill Finnegan and Billy May, as well as Ralph Burns, composer of “Early Autumn,” a Woody Herman hit—all masters of slow, cheek-to-cheek compositions. Just when the mainly white Carnegie audience may have been lulled into comfort, however, Al Hibbler appeared to sing “Strange Feeling” in an impassioned, almost operatic baritone perfectly suited to the song's scary intensity:

This strange feeling is seeping through my blood.

This strange feeling is sleeping cuddled up

Somewhere inside me…

The instrumental chorus, scored by Ellington, combined jungle, modernistic, and psycho styles. It's almost an American
Wozzeck;
the closest parallel is “Lonely Room,” the creepy, revelatory (and usually omitted) monologue by the pathological Jud Fry in
Oklahoma!

The third movement, “Dancers in Love,” subtitled “Stomp for Beginners,” sustains the
Wozzeck
mania with a twelve-tone melody but is otherwise a delicious tribute to James P. Johnson. The music returns to normalcy but moves north of Central Park. Again, the easygoing nature of this movement is a setup for even greater eccentricity. “Coloratura” sounds like an operatic cadenza transcribed for trumpet, an idea made famous by Roy Eldridge in his recording of “Rockin' Chair.” Here, though, the cadenza neither precedes nor follows a melody; it's a pure diva moment. Anderson's trumpet sounds like an upward extension of Hibbler's voice, transforming Hibbler's masculine baritone
into an image of feminine star power. However it was written, the
Perfume Suite
turned black into white and male into female, and, in under twelve minutes, it presented the full spectrum of love, from tenderness to obsession.

SUCH SWEET THUNDER:
OTHELLO REDUX

Theseus: We will, fair Queen, up to the mountain's top
And mark the musical confusion
Of hounds and echo in conjunction.
Hippolyta: I was with Hercules and Cadmus once
When in a wood of Crete they bay'd the bear
With hounds of Sparta. Never did I hear
Such gallant chiding; for besides the groves,
The skies, the fountains, every region near
Seem'd all one mutual cry. I never heard
So musical a discord, such sweet thunder.

—A Midsummer Night's Dream
, Act IV, Scene I

Throughout his career Ellington challenged the dehumanizing stereotypes of black male sexuality by living up to the nickname he had earned when he was fourteen, when his friend Edgar McEntree dubbed him “Duke.” “I think he felt that in order for me to be eligible for his constant companionship I should have a title,” Ellington recalled modestly in
Music Is My Mistress
.
¹⁴
It's hard to find a photograph where he appears less than regal; even in a portrait from 1906 he looks like the heir apparent. In live performance he was better dressed and better spoken and infinitely cooler than anyone else in the room—even, to judge by the photos, the British royal family. Paul Whiteman looked more like the bridegroom on a wedding cake than the King of Jazz, and Benny Goodman, King of Swing, cut a less regal figure than a haberdasher. Ellington seemed to the manor born. In later years, when his face took on its aristocratic world-weary mask, people attending an Ellington performance felt privileged to be granted an audience by visiting royalty. Of course it was an act, but no more so than the similarly grand personae created by Leopold Stokowski or Leonard Bernstein. We're talking, after all, about show business.

Two of Ellington's tone parallels celebrate fellow black entertainers Bert Williams and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, who had also cast off the demeaning trappings of minstrelsy. A third, “Menelik, The Lion of Judah,” paid tribute (perhaps ironically) to Haile Selassie, emperor of Ethiopia and an African opponent of European aggression.
¹⁵
Ellington's
ultimate tone parable of the vulnerable romance of black star and white audience—and, by extension, of Africa and America—demanded an even more extended framework and also a more global stage—the Shakespearean stage of the Globe itself.

Such Sweet Thunder
, a suite in twelve movements composed by Ellington and Strayhorn for the Shakespearean Festival in Stratford, Ontario, premiered at a Music for Moderns concert titled “Twelve-tone to Ellingtonia,” at New York's Town Hall on April 28, 1957, a day before Ellington's fifty-eighth birthday. (At Town Hall Ellington humorously called the final piece “Cop Out” because it was a placeholder for the yet-to-be-written finale; “Cop Out” was a minor blues that the band had recorded a month earlier and also a Gonsalves vehicle.) The band played the suite again at Stratford on September 5, 1957, with “Circle of Fourths” as a conclusion, as it is on the recording.
¹⁶
Later Music for Moderns concerts that season paired the Modern Jazz Quartet with Virgil Thomson, Mahalia Jackson with Martial Singher, and Chico Hamilton with Carlos Surinach. At Town Hall Kurt Weill's early, astringent Violin Concerto op. 12, played by Anahid Ajemian and members of the New York Philharmonic under Dmitri Mitropoulos, served as curtain raiser. Weill's music was having a posthumous boom thanks to the revival of
The Threepenny Opera
, but his concerto gave only a foretaste of the jazz-influenced Weill; Ross Parmenter, the
New York Times
critic, found the new Ellington/Strayhorn work far more persuasive and “thoroughly winning.”

Ellington was on a roll. The premiere came less than a year after the band's triumphant “rebirth” at the Newport Jazz Festival on July 8, 1956. Ellington soon appeared on the cover of
Time
(August 19, 1956) and won a new contract with Columbia Records. On March 15, 1957, he appeared, with his sister Ruth and son Mercer, on Edward R. Morrow's
Person to Person
. His musical-theater fantasy of jazz history, A
Drum Is a Woman
, aired during the United States Steel Hour on CBS a week after the
Such Sweet Thunder
premiere; Ellington, who was fond of anagrams and verbal inversions, personified jazz as Madame Zajj. Six weeks later the band recorded
The Duke Ellington Songbook
with Ella Fitzgerald; Ellington's popular tunes, just a small part of his oeuvre, now took their rightful place along with the songs of Gershwin, Kern, Porter, Berlin, Arlen, and Rodgers in Ella's canon-defining albums on Verve records. Still later that summer the band would play the Ravinia Festival in Chicago, the summer home of the Chicago Symphony, then in its Fritz Reiner heyday. Surrounded by honors from the
white cultural world, Ellington had good reason to liken himself to the original black superstar: Othello.

Although the phrase “I never heard so musical a discord, such sweet thunder” came from
A Midsummer Night's Dream
, Ellington described the title movement of the suite as “the sweet and singing, very convincing story Othello told Desdemona. It must have been the most because when her father complained and tried to have the marriage annulled, the Duke of Venice said that if Othello had said this to his daughter, she would have gone for it too.”
¹⁷
Many of the instrumental parts, however, bear the title “Cleo.” Somewhere along the line the music had changed genders while retaining an African setting and protagonist. The plots of both
Othello
and
Antony and Cleopatra
involved a high-stakes romance between European and African lovers. In
Music Is My Mistress
, Ellington wrote that “When Nobody Was Looking” from the
Deep South Suite
of 1946 “illustrated the theory that, when nobody was looking, many people of different extractions are able to get along together.” He described the movement as a parable about a puppy and a flower following their “natural tendencies.” A decade later Ellington, shielded by the Bard, presented a bolder representation of interracial sex, which was still illegal in many American states both North and South. (The Supreme Court would not declare antimiscegenation laws unconstitutional until 1967; sixteen states still had such laws at the time.)

Such Sweet Thunder
revived the political themes Ellington had pursued in
Jump for Joy, Black, Brown and Beige, New World A-Comin', Deep South Suite, Liberian Suite, and Harlem
. The time gap between
Harlem
and
Such Sweet Thunder
, however, reflects a double crisis of the postwar years: the implosion of the market for big band music and the anticommunist crusades of the House Un-American Activities Committee and Senator McCarthy. In the November 5, 1952, issue of
Down-Beat
Leonard Feather claimed that the only functioning bands left were Ellington's, Woody Herman's, Count Basie's, and Stan Kenton's. The economics and demographics of music were changing, though critics were at a loss to explain how or why. The narrowed field of competition meant that the Ellington band was kept busy, though many of its gigs took place in provincial movie theaters and dance halls. Even in concert halls, however, some critics detected a precipitous decline and fall in musical relevance. After the Ellington band played the Civic Auditorium in Portland, Oregon, in March 1952, a review in
Down-Beat
by Ted Hallock dismissed Ellington impertinently as a “gross old man,” speculated that Ellington was not the composer he claimed to be,
and concluded that “if Ellington is Shakespeare, then I am beginning to wonder if there isn't a Roger Bacon somewhere in the woodpile.”
¹⁸
Apparently even the leading jazz publication of the time had no problem insinuating the “N” word into its columns—but Hallock may unwittingly have planted the seed of
Such Sweet Thunder
. Although the magazine's readers, including Charles Mingus, protested Hallock's review, Ellington's humiliating decline seemed to continue. In the summer of 1955 the Ellington Orchestra was featured along with dancing waters, ice snow, water snow, and fireworks at the “Aquashow” at Flushing Meadow Park, and for most of the months surrounding that gig the calendar was empty. The most popular recording of the summer was “Rock Around the Clock” with Bill Haley and the Comets. On “race” labels the biggest hits were Fats Domino's “Ain't That a Shame” and Little Richard's “Tutti Frutti.” Big band music seemed dead.