The Ellington Century (58 page)

To amplify Giddins's appreciation of the concerts and to answer his objection, let's look at each of the concerts to see what Ellington preached and how.
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FIRST CONCERT OF SACRED MUSIC: IN THE BEGINNING GOD

Perhaps, like a medieval craftsman, intent on offering God only his best work, Ellington built the first sacred concert, entitled
A Concert of Sacred Music
, on well-tested material from
Black, Brown and Beige, New World A-Comin'
, and
My People:
“Come Sunday” (in both instrumental and vocal versions), “Montage,” “Will You Be There?” “99%,” “Ain't But the One,” “Heritage,” “New World A-Comin'” (performed as an extended piano solo), and “David Danced.” In the case of
New World
, Ellington conferred sacred status on the music retroactively. In the program he wrote that the work “is really the anticipation of a very distant future place on land, at sea, or in the sky where there will be no war, no greed, no nonbelievers, and no categorization … where love is unconditional and no pronoun is good enough for God.”
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The new material was a gospel song, “Tell Me It's the Truth” (sung by Esther Marrow), and an extended multisection concert piece titled “In the Beginning God” for jazz vocalist John Hendricks (of Lambert, Hendricks and Ross), the Ellington band, and the Herman McCoy Choir, and a gospel-style setting of the Lord's Prayer, again by Marrow. To classical listeners Ellington here appeared to take on a subject already given musical form by Haydn in
The Creation
, by Schoenberg in the
Genesis Prelude
, and, most recently, by Stravinsky in
The Flood
(1962)—but the music might be better heard as his retort to “It Ain't Necessarily So.” It began with a six-note motive, the musical equivalent of the divine tetragrammaton in Hebrew; Ellington also placed this motive at the very opening of his memoir,
Music Is My Mistress.
The six notes stand for the six opening syllables of Genesis, “In the beginning God,” but when the lyrics are sung they swerve away from the Bible:

In the beginning God.

No heaven,

No earth,

No nothin'.

As he had done in
Harlem
, Ellington used a recurring motive to announce and reiterate his theme, with or without actual words; it is even “spoken” by the drums.

Rather than being a depiction of chaos and creation akin to those offered by classical composers, “In the Beginning God” is an extended meditation on the first principles, God and the Bible, from which all else flows. The sections of the piece are as follows:

Piano introduction hinting at the six-note theme (e
minor).

Slow, out-of-time statement of theme on the baritone sax (Harry Carney), repeated and extended in tempo.

Clarinet solo (Jimmy Hamilton) ushered in by a harsh dissonance that, to my ears, evokes the words “the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” Clarinet continues the theme in a moderate tempo. Clarinet cadenza.

Singer intones the opening words (b
minor).

Hendricks sings the motto over a swung accompaniment then begins an Ellingtonian rap: “No mountains, no valleys/No main streets, no back alleys …”

Hendricks again intones the opening melody slowly, ending on a climactic high F.

Swung music returns with a solo for Paul Gonsalves over which the choir reels off the titles of the books of the Old Testament.

A fanfare followed by a trumpet solo (Cat Anderson) that gradually moves to the highest possible note (I think this solo announces the incarnation of Christ).

Piano interlude.

Over a soft drumroll and piano punctuations the choir declaims the titles of the books of the New Testament.

An extended drum solo (Louis Bellson) initiated by the six-note theme played on the cymbals.

Choral restatement of the opening motive. Final chord combines notes of the e
minor and D
major scales.

Although all this material was new, we can hear how it continues the practice of earlier Ellington, particularly in its deployment of motivic unity to knit together a wide variety of tempos and solo voices, including, most theatrically (especially given the cathedral acoustics), the voice of the drums and cymbals. As usual, Ellington knew how to make
the most of each of his soloists. Carney's weighty tone established the work's foundation, Hamilton's ethereal, cool-sounding clarinet evoked a sense of intergalactic emptiness, and Anderson's screech trumpet literally scaled the heights. Ellington brought in Bellson especially for the occasion, knowing well his instinctive ability to stop the show. He told the drummer, “You are thunder and lightning,” and that was all that needed to be said.
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The knowing simplicity of late Ellington and Bellson's artistry turned one of the oldest clichés of jazz, the big, loud drum solo, into a cosmic event. Much of Bellson's solo feels more like an ecstatic aria than a percussive display. It sets the stage for further lyric utterances: two versions of “Come Sunday,” first the 1958 vocal version, sung by Marrow, and then the original, played, as it was in 1943, by Johnny Hodges (the two separated by the new setting of the Lord's Prayer), and then Ellington's solo performance of
New World A-Comin'
, which has a meditative intensity in its execution reminiscent in feeling if not in style to the last part, “Psalm,” of Coltrane's
A Love Supreme.
The only thing that could possibly top that solo would be the tap dancing of Bunny Briggs. As Gary Giddins wrote, Ellington had brought the Cotton Club into the cathedral, but it was a Cotton Club cleansed of its sins.

Two days after the premiere Ellington performed much of the music in the very different setting of the Monterey Jazz Festival. The entire concert (plus a new Christmas surprise performed by Lena Horne and Billy Strayhorn) came to New York's Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church on December 26, 1965, and two months later it was heard in England at Coventry Cathedral, where Britten's
War Requiem
had premiered three years before. In
Music Is My Mistress
Ellington proudly pointed to the nearly fifty performances of
A Concert of Sacred Music
heard around the world.

SECOND SACRED CONCERT
: FREEDOM

New York's Episcopal Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, the birthplace of the
Second Sacred Concert
, overlooks the southern part of Harlem from Morningside Heights; its site is a sacred counterpart to Sugar Hill two miles to the north. The cathedral has also remained unfinished by choice. Its leaders decided that healing their community was more important than completing the building, which, if it were ever finished, would be the largest Gothic cathedral in the world. Ellington may well have identified personally with the idea of the never-to-be-completed
project, a symbol of human imperfection and constant striving. The cathedral would be the site of Ellington's funeral service on May 27, 1974.

In
Music Is My Mistress
Ellington wrote that the
Second Sacred Concert
was “the most important thing I have ever done,” a claim not to be taken lightly. First performed on January 18, 1968, the work derived its special character from three seemingly unrelated elements. Like
My People
, much of it seems designed for the edification of children, and Ellington gave an important role to a children's chorus, in this case the choirs of St. Hilda's and St. Hugh's School, an Episcopal private school a few blocks from the cathedral. There were children's voices in the first concert, but here their voices imbued much of the music with a disarming (or disconcerting) innocence, most notably in the spoken episode where a young boy retold the story of the fall from the unusual point of view of the apple:

I was swinging.

Ripening in peace and quiet,

And who do you think came crawling down that limb?

That little old serpent.

Your first reaction may be that this is the kind of school performance you tolerate only if your own kid is onstage, if then; but, as we will see, the naïveté served a larger goal.

The second new element was Alice Babs, the Swedish soprano who first performed with Ellington in Stockholm in February 1963. Babs was the Ellington singer in excelsis; her voice combined the classical quality Ellington admired in Kay Davis with a range that matched the stratospherics of Cat Anderson's trumpet; she could also read Ellington's unpredictable melodies at sight. “Heaven,” the most enduring tune from the
Second Sacred Concert
, and the wordless “T.G.T.T.” (Too Good to Title) took full advantage of all of Babs's musical strengths.

The third shaping element of the
Second Sacred Concert
hovered over it in absentia. After a long illness Billy Strayhorn had died, on May 31, 1967. He was already ill when Ellington was writing the theme for the first concert, and Ellington had consulted with Strayhorn: “On the telephone I told him about the concert and that I wanted him to write something, ‘Introduction, ending, quick transitions,' I said. ‘The title is the first four words of the Bible—“In the Beginning God.”' He had not heard my theme, but what he sent to California started on the same note as mine (F natural) and ended on the same note as mine (A
a tenth
higher). Out of six notes representing the six syllables of the four words, only two notes were different.”
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