The Ellington Century (50 page)

Look, now, is this not the same golden sun

Which fired your brain along the calm Euphrates?

And smiled upon your seeking, searching sorties

As you followed the course of the Ganges?

echo Langston Hughes's poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.

I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.

Hughes's poem had appeared in
The Crisis
in 1921, and in the 1930s Hughes and Ellington had discussed a collaboration that would have featured Paul Robeson as a “wandering Negro minstrel.”
²⁰
Hughes also contributed lyrics to
Jump for Joy.
(The poet also introduced Ellington to the young Ralph Ellison.)

The “Black” section of Ellington's poem traces Boola's story from African childhood to the horrors of the Middle Passage and the slave market and then charts his discovery of the Christian religion and, with it, the light emanating from the Bible, his recognition “as early as 1652” of the call for freedom:

Boola's spirit rising from the dusty fields.

Heroes…strong and firm…rising from the fray.

Chains breaking…Hopes rising…Boola fighting

For or with anybody…for FREEDOM!

In the section titled “Brown” Ellington turns the focus from Boola to specific figures in African American history: Crispus Attucks, Barzillai Lew, the Fontages Legion of Free Haitians, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, the black soldiers who fought on San Juan Hill. Moving suddenly inward from this historical panorama, the section concludes with the words Ellington set in “The Blues”. In the final part of the poem, “Beige”, Boola disappears altogether and the poetic style changes. Its first section echoes Vachel Lindsay's “Congo”, the clichéd jungle world of “Hot Harlem”, but then the poem shifts to the uplifting idiom of James Weldon Johnson, cursing the false view of Harlem with the stern tones of a biblical prophet:

Who draped those basement dens

With silk, but knaves and robbers

And their ilk?

Who came to prostitute your art

And gave you pennies

For your part…

And ill-repute?

Who took your hunger

And your pain

Outraged your honor

For their gain?

Ellington's script often reads more like a radio narrative than polished poetry, but its counterpoint of subjective states and historical facts recalls other American literature of the time, the cinematic effects of Hart Crane and John Dos Passos, the blues poems of Langston Hughes, and the folk sermons of James Weldon Johnson. The opening of “The Blues”

The Blues…

The Blues ain't

The Blues ain't nothin'

The Blues ain't nothin' but a cold grey day…

even recalls T. S. Eliot's “Ash Wednesday”

Because I do not hope to turn again

Because I do not hope

Because I do not hope to turn…

But perhaps Langston Hughes, with whom Ellington had planned to collaborate in the 1930s, had set down the clearest challenge to write
Black, Brown and Beige
in his poem “Note on Commercial Theatre”, published in
The Crisis
in 1940. White culture, both high and low, Hughes decried, had stolen the blues and rearranged it according to its own purposes, “mixed 'em up with symphonies…so they don't sound like me”. Hughes predicted, though, that someone would reclaim the blues “and write about me—black and beautiful—and sing about me.”

Boola, the “me” of Ellington's poem, stood for the entirety of black experience. It is hard to imagine how he could have appeared in a conventional opera. In his “tone parallel” Ellington would deploy a counterpoint of soloists and instrumental choirs to weave together the poem's strands of history lesson and personal story.
Black, Brown and Beige
, as we will see, can be heard as a new kind of opera, an opera conceived mainly for instrumental voices.

While Ellington's poetic scenario retold African American history, it also contained ideologically sensitive elements that may have clashed
with the varying political agendas of a Popular Front audience like the one assembled at Carnegie Hall. After spelling out the horrors of enslavement, Ellington emphasized the nobility of work:

Boola put down his heavy load and gazed about.

He's been looking at this tree-swept land

Reclaimed by steady swinging of his ringing axe

And was proud of what he saw there. Honest toil

Was not without reward. Had not this toil

Restored the steely muscles rippling

'Neath the black satin smoothness of his skin.

The poem stressed the African American role in building America— clearing its forests—but also portrayed slaves as a revolutionary proletariat whose work songs would be “used as a weapon…/ To slash the ties of bondage!” Those lines might have pleased the Communists in the audience, but with “Come Sunday” Ellington celebrated the redeeming role of Christianity. From the Bible, Boola learns:

Something to live for.

Something to work for.

Something to hope for.

Something to sing about.

Something to SHOUT about.

That something, the “kindly light” of Scripture, is the message of freedom. Yet even though he affirmed Christian values, Ellington's faith was nonsectarian. In his eulogy for Billy Strayhorn Ellington would expound his creed in terms of freedom: “freedom from hate, unconditionally; freedom from self-pity (even throughout all the pain and bad news); freedom from fear of possibly doing something that might help another more than it might help himself; and freedom from the kind of pride that could make a man feel he was better than his brother or neighbor.”
²¹
For Ellington the central message of Christianity was justice for all in this world rather than salvation in a world to come.

Despite its generally hostile critical reception, the lack of a well-engineered recording of the original score, and the even more glaring lack of a critical edition of the music, there is a large literature on
Black, Brown and Beige
.
²²
These writings pursue three topics: critical evaluation, musical structure, and, to a lesser extent, ideological content. Putting aside evaluation for the moment, I would suggest that the form is only understandable in terms of the content; the genre of “tone parallel” was not a marketing device but a considered strategy for giving
African American experience musical form. The content of the music, however, is not necessarily the same as the content of the poem; the two artifacts are complements, not duplicates. Large sections of the poem, particularly the celebration of black heroes in “Brown”, never found their way into the music, but the quirkiness of the poem often points to unnoticed expressive and ideological twists in the music. Instead of using the poem as a simple pony for the music, I want to look at the way the music itself writes history. This exploration will combine musical analysis and interpretive reading.

Before proceeding, though, let's stop and ask how
any
music writes history. Coupling music and history may first bring to mind works like the “1812 Overture” that use sound effects and musical quotations to set the scene and identify the opposing sides. These devices are powerful: just a few notes of
La Marseillaise
tell us who is fighting. There are a couple of moments in
Black, Brown and Beige
that employ historically resonant “source” sounds in a similar way. The chimes Sonny Greer played at the beginning of “Come Sunday” immediately moved the musical action from the cotton fields to a church.

But music can also represent history, the past as interpreted by the present, without specific allusions, and it can shape history in its own way; indeed, sometimes it writes history so transparently that we barely notice. As an example as far from the “1812 Overture” as possible, consider Irving Berlin's 1914 song “Play a Simple Melody”. Actually it is two songs that can be sung separately or together, a trick Berlin repeated later in his career with “You're Just in Love”. The two songs of “Play a Simple Melody” figure the past and present in their music and words:

Singer 1:

Won't you play some simple melody?

Like my mother sang to me…

Singer 2:

Musical demons

set my honey a-screaming.

Won't you play me some rag?

The words and music for the first singer evoke the Victorian parlor; the second singer, moving twice as quickly, summons up ragtime syncopations and contemporary urban slang. Berlin's song indulges in nostalgia, then sabotages it, then weds it to its opposite contrapuntally.
The song shows us how the past and present are different—one smooth, the other choppy—but also how they denote interwoven, interdependent feelings of rootedness and spontaneity. In its own miniature way the song forecasts the complex historical metaphors of neoclassicism, especially in the way it uses jazz as an image of the present.

Writing history, music can also link the past to the future, and with a good dose of irony, as in the Beatles' “When I'm Sixty-Four.”

When I get older

Losing my hair

Many years from now…

Connecting 1927 to 1967 to 2007, the song evoked the style of the English music hall to represent the music of forty years in the future, when the surviving Fab Four, shorn of their defining mops, would attain geezer status and turn into their fathers. It deftly illustrated the weight of the past and anxieties about the future with music that spoke powerfully of the present.

Through a similar manipulation of styles Ellington would contrast the past and future more elaborately (and critically) in his
Controversial Suite
(1951). Signifying on the dispute that raged, at least in the pages of
DownBeat
, between preservationists (or “moldy figs”) and progressives, Ellington called the two movements of the
Controversial Suite
“Before My Time” and “Later”. They are usually heard simply as parodies of the popular Dixieland-revival style of Bob Crosby and the equally popular jazz modernism of Stan Kenton;
Controversial
appeared after Bob Graettinger's “Thermopylae” (but before his masterpiece “City of Glass”). In sending up these self-styled preservationists and sci-fi prophets, Ellington staked out the middle ground, the present, and yet the suite also demonstrated, with a gentle humor, how Ellington's music had been there and done that; his music already contained past, present, and future. Graettinger's brash dissonances owed a lot to “Diminuendo in Blue”, but Ellington had also anticipated the Dixieland revival in “Clarinet Lament”, a New Orleans-flavored concerto for Barney Bigard built on the changes of “Basin Street Blues”. Ellington's satire may have been aimed less at other musicians than at critics who claimed to discern the hidden shape of jazz history.

These examples illustrate some of the devices music uses to represent history: allusion, quotation, evocation, parody, prophecy, juxtaposition, superimposition, sequence. These devices enable music to write history not just by illustration and allusion but by formal process as
well. They give music the ability to articulate, criticize, or subvert the historical ideas and myths that shape its cultural milieu. They all play a role in
Black, Brown and Beige.

BLACK, BROWN AND BEIGE:
A READING

Let's begin by mapping out the large design. Ellington outlined the work in groups of three: there are three movements, and the first two of these are clearly divided into three parts each.
²³
Beige
also has a tripartite structure, but, as we will see, Ellington may have considered its 1943 form provisional; he never revived its original structure. All of these trinities relate to the implicit ambiguity of the title: Do the three shades represent a sequence of events or simultaneous states? Does the music tell a tale of assimilation, a progression from black to beige, or does it portray a synchronous spectrum? Or both? The title might simply be a description of the range of flesh tones in the Ellington Orchestra, or it might stand for the entire nonwhite population of the planet. To articulate the complex relations implied by his title, Ellington employed the resources of his orchestra and its distinctive timbral syntax. The Ellington Orchestra appeared as three choirs: reeds, trumpets and trombones with the rhythm section (drums, guitar, bass) serving as foundation, and the piano as a kind of presiding consciousness. The band also serves as the source of solo voices to create a dialogue between individuals and groups. Many parts of
Black, Brown and Beige
spotlighted his famous soloists as he had already done in his various “concertos”. Ellington carefully deployed the particular expressive styles of Harry Carney, Joe Nanton, Ray Nance, Rex Stewart, Johnny Hodges, Ben Webster, and Betty Roché, who had recently replaced Ivie Anderson. By juxtaposing solo playing and instrumental choirs Ellington gave
Black, Brown and Beige
the dramatic shape of an opera. The soloists portray the main characters, but, as in folk opera, the ensemble, the people, have the final say because they are the real subject.
Black, Brown and Beige
thereby fulfilled the purposes of Ellington's projected opera “Boola” and became his answer to
Porgy and Bess
as well as to
The Birth of a Nation.

Black:
“Work Song”

Summing up his larger project in a musical motto, Ellington began
Black
with a clarion drums and winds theme that we might call “Fanfare for
the Common Black Man”, a companion to (and perhaps a sly commentary on) Copland's contemporary fanfare. Ellington, however, had already composed similar motives to animate “Creole Rhapsody” and
Symphony in Black.
(Indeed, he used the opening phrase of
Symphony in Black
to launch the opening medley of the Carnegie concert.) While it functions mainly as a refrain, the
Black
motto was also built for variant usage. It counterpoints two separable ideas, the pounding “boom boom boom boom” of the drums and the nobly insistent summons to attention in the winds. In the course of “Work Song” and “Light” the motto appears as an eight-bar phrase over a choralelike harmonization in the trombones, and in melodic fragments as short as five notes that still retain its defining character. A three-note rhythmic encapsulation of the motto—quarter, quarter, half—links many of the movement's melodic ideas. Its two quarter note upbeats establish a recurrent rhythmic motive (not unlike the three upbeat eighth notes of Beethoven's Fifth) that gives
Black
a distinctive stride even in the face of many changes in tempo. The subtext of this rhythm becomes clearer when the trombones present it as a new theme that seems to set the words “Jump for Joy”.
Black
doesn't need a singer to sing.