The Ellington Century (51 page)

Because Ellington did not recycle the fanfare theme in
Brown
and
Beige
its very absence in those movements poses a question: if it is missing, what has taken its place? Progress seems inseparable from loss. The tripartite structures of
Black
and
Brown
figure this conundrum in contrasting historical patterns.
Black
is structured in clear Hegelian terms: thesis (“Work Song”), antithesis (“Come Sunday”), and synthesis (“Light”). With “West Indian Dance” and “Emancipation Celebration”,
Brown
at first seems even more concretely historical and clearly chronological in structure, but with the concluding section, “The Blues”, it counteracts its own sense of progression with a palindromic structure that defies history. Heard in sequence
Black
and
Brown
thus appear as a large thesis and antithesis of spiritual and blues, setting up a possible synthesis in
Beige.
Ellington reinforced these patterns through a contrast of high and low instruments and gender. Black builds its dialectic on a timbral contrast of Joe Nanton's growling “jungle-style” trombone, the leading role in “Work Song”, and Johnny Hodges's sophisticated or “dicty” alto sax solo (or aria) in “Come Sunday”. This contrast intensifies with the entry of a woman's voice in “The Blues”, which genders
Brown
as a female counterpart to
Black.
(On the 1965 recording, though, “The Blues” was sung by a man, and “Come Sunday” was played down an octave by Harry Carney.)

Given its historical subject,
Black, Brown and Beige
required an idiom that differed from ordinary jazz because jazz itself was part of the history it was writing. Earlier analyses have used terms from European music like “thematic development” and “recapitulation” as if they carried no cultural baggage, but the only overt contact the music makes with Europe is a passing two-degrees-of-separation allusion in “Come Sunday” to “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”, which Dvo
ák had appropriated in his “New World” Symphony and which Ellington neatly takes back long before the quotation by reabsorbing it into a whole family of related motives that fill the collagelike structure of “Work Song”.

To differentiate the music of the distant past from contemporary jazz, “Work Song” avoids the usual phrase structures of jazz, the thirty-two-bar AABA structure of the pop tune, or the twelve-bar structure of the blues. Ellington also withheld his trademark chromaticism, which would have carried an anachronistically modernistic flavor.
Black
figures the pre-European past through diatonic melodies (with the exception of a single blues-scale motive) and static harmonies, rarely straying from E, major for the first two thirds of the movement. Apart from the fanfare theme, the other melodic material seems to come and go almost haphazardly, but at the climactic moment of the movement, Joe Nanton's solo in C major against the “grunts” of the orchestra (a moment that Ellington brought to the audience's attention in his introductory remarks), the music suddenly attains a sense of unity.

The first four notes of Nanton's tune, C-E-G-A, reveal the genetic connection between the other melodic ideas. I'll label the main motives of “Work Song” as:

  1. Fanfare

  2. Riding on a Blue Note

  3. Blues Riff

  4. Jump for Joy

  5. Sax Section Work Song

  6. Epiphany Motive

  7. Ain't That Good News

The melodic “gene” appears in all of these motives except for the Fanfare. If we invert the melodic figure C-E-G-A we get E-C-A-G, a melodic motive (reminiscent of “Swing Low”) that appears throughout (transposed, in E
, to the pitches G-E
,-C-B
) and which Ellington had previously used at the very opening of “Riding on a Blue Note”. Once
we hear the relation of these two figures, its connection to the “Work Song” melody played by the saxes becomes clear, and with a little more attention we can also hear the motive embedded and embellished in the nine-note blueslike riff that also floats up periodically in the movement. The four-note “germ” also functions as a harmony; in the Sax Section Work Song every chord in the five-part voicing states the pitches G- E
-C-B
k.

Retrospective revelation, giving sense to musical events after they have happened, is a subtle effect of musical storytelling that is very difficult to pull off. There are precedents in such classical works as the first movement of the “Eroica” Symphony, Chopin's
Ballades
, Sibelius's Fifth Symphony, and also Sousa's “Stars and Stripes Forever”. In a different way, though, this effect also appears in great jazz solos, beginning as early as Joe Oliver's solo in “Dipper Mouth Blues”. Ellington's narrative strategy in
Black
resembles both of these precedents. As with Sibelius's “Swan Theme”, Nanton's melody (and the harmonic move from E
to C that it announces) is not a logical development but a lightning bolt that suddenly clarifies the musical meaning. Ellington set the epiphanic moment up through a succession of solos that articulate the large formal divisions of the movement, and which tell its story in terms of the idiosyncratic blues timbres and inflections of his players. The music clearly contrasts the personal styles of these solos with the more communal ensemble passages for sax, trumpet, and trombone choirs. Once we hear the importance of the solo voices, the many short phrases of the movement coalesce into a simpler large-scale design.
²⁴
Using the bar numbers from Maurice Peress's version of the score, I would divide the movement as follows:

Part 1: mm. 1-62 (binary, divided at m. 27, with a coda at m. 57)

Part 2: mm. 63-114 (Harry Carney baritone sax solo)

Transition: mm. 115-26 (Harold Baker trumpet solo)

Part 3: 127-79 (Joe Nanton solo beginning at m. 139)

Climax and coda: 180-210 (Nanton solo in C major, followed by brass section amplification in D
major and reaffirmation, at m. 204, through counterpoint of Nanton and fanfare motive in saxes)

Transition to “Come Sunday” 211-16

Further simplifying this plan, we might think of the movement as an extended aria (from the opera “Boola”), almost like a Verdian cabaletta, with an introduction, a first solo section, a recitative-like transition,
a second solo section, and a triumphant conclusion. We can hear the single solo voice of this aria articulated by three instrumentalists: Carney, Baker, and Nanton. If we lean on the poem they may be said to represent three phases of Boola's consciousness: his recollections of the black past, his union with Voola, and his realization that the work song could be “used as a weapon…/ To slash the ties of bondage!” And if we hear the music in these terms we may hear the introductory section as a picture of the communal African past that is severed traumatically with the whiplash dissonances at bar 57, perhaps the remnant, reduced to a single image of pain, of sections Ellington had intended to write to describe the slave ship and slave market.