The Ellington Century (41 page)

The music of the suite and Ellington's sparse comments about it nevertheless implied a bold political statement, a demonstration, by way of the Bard, of black power, a phrase first used in 1954 as the title of Richard Wright's nonfiction book about the emergence of Africa from colonialism. By composing a Shakespearean work for a Canadian festival Ellington was placing questions of black identity outside American history and geography, taking his case to the court of world opinion. The suite equated the idiom of jazz with the language of Shakespeare through the syllable-to-syllable equivalence of the four sonnets, and through an overarching theme of music as seductive communication in the stories Othello tells Desdemona or the trumpeted version of Puck's “Lord, what fools these mortals be.” (Through some glitch, Clark Terry's statement does not appear on the remastered release of the recording.) The suite also declared its equal standing with the Shakespearean canon by favoring composition over improvisation. Like a Shakespeare play, or like a symphony,
Such Sweet Thunder
is a text to be performed
come scritto
. Ellington made the comparison explicit in his program note for the Stratford premiere: “Anyone who listens to a beautifully performed symphony for the first time gains something from it. The next time he hears it, he gains more; when he hears the symphony for the hundredth time, he is benefited to the hundredth power. So it is with Shakespeare. The spectator can't get it all the first time; repeated viewings multiply the satisfaction. There is a perfect parallel with jazz, where repeated listening makes for enjoyment.”
³⁰

Once they had leveled the playing field with the Bard (and Beethoven), Ellington and Strayhorn foregrounded black sexuality in the characters of Othello and Cleopatra, but also in Lady Macbeth, Henry V (alias Hank Cinq), “Sister” Kate, Puck, and Hamlet, all of whom speak in
the language of the blues. The title track and “Half the Fun” portray cross-race relationships, but not as a pas de deux. The music speaks to the white Other, not for it. The two Othello movements address Desdemona but do not represent her except as the implied listener; the title “Half the Fun” and Strayhorn's exotically static music indicate that the movement portrays Cleopatra but not Antony. The two movements share a habanera rhythm, which, thanks to
Carmen
, serves as a musical metaphor for difference and sexuality, but Ellington and Stray-horn have reversed the usual hierarchy of difference, reversing roles, with two African characters telling their stories to silent, passive European partners. Black speaking to white, Africa speaking to Europe, jazz speaking to Shakespeare, the music presents half of the story—the half we haven't heard before.

All but three of the movements are monologues, soliloquies. “The Star-Crossed Lovers,” of course, gives us a dialogue, though with casting that reminds us that Shakespeare's company, like the Ellington band, was all-male; in the liner notes Ellington says that Hodges's alto sax is Juliet and Gonsalves's tenor is Romeo (though I don't hear this in the music). “Up and Down, Up and Down” superimposes Puck's monologue on a babbling counterpoint of romantic confusion. The third exception to the rule, “The Telecasters,” may be an in-joke. Ellington said that the movement combined characters from two plays, the witches from
Macbeth
and Iago, portrayed by a trombone trio and Harry Carney, respectively. The witches, however, sound more like passing car horns, and Iago's tune is surprisingly lacking in any hint of malevolence, though his phrases are separated by suggestive silences. In addition to anchoring the band's sound with his baritone sax, Carney served as Ellington's driver; the rest of the band took the bus. I hear the movement as a double portrait of Ellington (Othello) and Carney (Iago) in transit between gigs, Carney at the wheel, Ellington in the passenger seat, composing in silence.
³¹

Such Sweet Thunder
demands close scrutiny. Let's examine it movement by movement.

“
Such Sweet Thunder
”

A blues in a Phrygian-tinted G, the title track wavers between minor and major. There are six choruses with a four-bar shout chorus (by Strayhorn) inserted between choruses three and four:

Chorus 1: The bass instruments lay down an altered habanera rhythm spiked by backbeats on the drums and R&B-style triplets on the piano. In the even-numbered bars the long-short rhythm of the habanera reverses to short-long, prolonging the already provocative A
s.

Chorus 2: The three muted trumpets superimpose a wa-wa-ed, chromatic chord-melody on a restatement of Chorus 1.

Chorus 3: Saxes enter in a riff chorus in dissonant five-note harmonies over a walking bass.

Chorus 4: A call-and-response alternation of saxes and improvised trumpet solo by Nance. In the last two bars the trombones reprise the opening habanera figure.

Shout insert: Four bars tutti,
fortissimo
. (This may have been intended by Strayhorn as a conclusion, then inserted as a climactic interlude instead.)

Chorus 5: A composed legato trombone solo played against a swung version of the habanera rhythm in the saxes, all
pianissimo
. The last two bars quietly reprise the habanera idea, harmonized and played by the reeds.

Chorus 6: Repeat of Chorus 2, plus a fatal low F on the piano.

Othello
is a play about race (“an old black ram is tupping your white ewe”) and about being and seeming. Othello seals his doom early by believing in the self-evident facts of his existence: “My parts, my title and my perfect soul, / Shall manifest me rightly.” Iago acts out the opposite principle: “I am not what I am.” Othello's tragic pride stems from a failure to understand that his noble character is as much a product of eloquence as is Iago's malignant fabrications; Othello's military and amatory success depends on the power of his discourse. When he says “Rude am I in my speech,” he is deploying a classical tool of rhetoric,
humilitas
. Unlike Oedipus, Othello also falls because of racism. To the Venetians he is a hero one moment and a “black ram” the next. As a minority of one, he is particularly vulnerable to Iago, his white “manager”; they interlock in a fatal codependence:

Iago:
I humbly do beseech you of your pardon, For too much loving you.

Othello:
I am bound to thee forever.

Ellington's career depended on his own silken eloquence and on services rendered by a number of rough Iagos, but “Such Sweet Thunder” tells a different tale, a swerve signaled, as Brent Hayes Edwards points out, by the title, which links the music “with an entirely different moment from a different play.”
³²
Tragedy only enters with the last note, a concise fate-motive. The music inverts the play's poisonous hatred and instead limns Othello's “constant, noble, loving nature,” which inspires Desdemona's fierce love (“That I did love the Moor, to live with him, / My downright violence, and score of fortunes, / May trumpet to the world”) and Iago's equally fierce strangelove.

Shakespeare portrayed Othello in five acts; Ellington needed just six twelve-bar blues choruses. Each chorus gives us a significant part of the picture. Chorus one figures Othello's proud stride exotic background. Previsioning Isaac Hayes's funk groove for “Shaft,” Othello's rhythmic theme adds a kick of swagger to the usual habanera rhythm, but its connotations, like those of the other “topics” that Ellington employs, should not be reduced to a caption. Besides refashioning Othello in the image of Joe Louis or Sugar Ray Robinson, the rhythm reminds us of the meter of Shakespearean verse, thereby equating the temporal structures of the two art forms. Chorus two, with its echoes of jungle music, reveals the African inflections of Othello's voice with alternating G major and g minor chords. The chorus sounds the trumpets that Desdemona, defying difference, will echo in her proclamation of love. The sudden change of gait (from gutbucket habanera to walking bass) and timbre (from brass to reeds) in chorus three moves us from the public theater of the Venetian council chamber (act 1, scene 3) toward the private bedchamber (act 5, scene 2), a scenic jump cut that compresses the story almost as compactly as the three words “such sweet thunder.” The music now reveals the man behind the public mask. Much as Ellington was “Duke” to the public, “Edward” to friends and family, Othello's thunderous and sweet aspects may be the two sides of celebrity, or they may also refer to W. E. B. DuBois's famous definition of African American double consciousness, or “twoness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings.” Othello's strivings, though interrupted by the inserted shout phrase, do not sound disjunct. Ellington may be questioning DuBois's formulation, or affirming it by portraying an integral non-American African.

The central choruses present two aspects of Othello's private side, divided by a brief flare-up. Perhaps Ray Nance's seductive talking blues
solo in chorus four is the Ellington/Othello known to a few intimates, while the almost whispered trombone solo of chorus five is the man known only to himself. Chorus six places the hero back on stage: The Moor of Venice, the Duke of Ellington.

“
Sonnet for Caesar
”

The first of the four sonnets is also the furthest from usual notions of jazz; its groove suggests a military dirge, a suggestion evocatively filled out by Sam Woodyard's percussion. Sketches indicate that Ellington first composed a tentative melody that established the rules for translating the sonnet form into music; each melodic phrase of two bars contains ten notes, the equivalent of the syllables in a line of iambic pentameter. The structure also mirrors the sonnet form:

Introduction: Four bars of piano, four bars of trombone chorale with drums.

Octave (two quatrains): Two statements of an eight-bar harmonic structure (articulated by chords in the trombones). The tonality hovers somewhere between D
Lydian and B
Dorian over a drone on B
and F throughout. The clarinet melody is different in each quatrain, but the saxophones punctuate the ending of each line with a three-note “comma.”

Sextet (one quatrain and one couplet): In the first eight bars the texture thins to two lines (clarinet and sax), with sparse entries of the bass offering only a hint of harmonic framework. The trombones return for the couplet, suggesting at first a harmony of e
minor. The second line of the couplet does not “rhyme” with the first but offers a surprising, discomforting contrast. The first couplet phrase is the melodic peak and harmonically the most conventionally structured progression of the work, but the second phrase clouds the certainty of the first with melodic chromaticism. The final cadence on a D
chord in second inversion leaves us hanging.