The Ellington Century (57 page)

The papers of American composers can be found in the Library of Congress, in the New York Public Library, or at the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel, Switzerland—all places where I have worked and been spoiled rotten by superb librarians and their support staff. The Ellington Collection, though, has a particular importance, which I would like to discuss briefly in terms of the future rather than the past. Unlike the music of Copland or Carter, very little of Ellington's music was published. Many of the arrangements that are commercially available today were created without the benefit of the written materials now in the archive but were instead transcribed, painstakingly to be sure, from the
recordings, especially in the pioneering efforts of David Berger. These arrangements, though, were educated guesses. Unfortunately, the lack of published scores fueled rumors that Ellington lacked the techniques of a trained composer, a slander developed at great length in James Lincoln Collier's mean-spirited biography. The Ellington Collection disproves this libel with mountains of manuscript in Ellington's distinctive hand (easy, most of the time, to distinguish from the writing of Strayhorn and Ellington's copyist, Tom Whaley). More than documenting Ellington's compositional process, the materials are essential for understanding the artistry of jazz orchestra composition as well as the working methods of its creators and performers.

To view this collection is an awesome privilege. While a researcher on, say, Mahler would use archives of sketches as a supplement to the published scores, the Ellington collection is currently the only place where you can see the music on the page as the members of his orchestra saw it, and in the precise form that Ellington composed it. Every day I spent there presented more revelations than I could assimilate. I remember in particular a day when I asked for the boxes containing the
New Orleans Suite
, one of Ellington's last works. Written in 1970, the suite once again figured the past with musical portraits of Sidney Bechet, Louis Armstrong, Wellman Braud, and Mahalia Jackson—the New Orleans roots of his New York music. My favorite movement, and the one that has become a jazz standard, is “The Second Line”, which commemorates a New Orleans social institution that endures even today.

The
New Orleans Suite
seems like the fitting completion of Ellington's historical project, which took a different turn after
Harlem
, a turn from political history to musical history signaled by the radically whimsical historical deconstruction of
A Drum Is a Woman.
Beginning in the late 1950s Ellington pursued a number of projects that would redefine his place in jazz history. Now that he no longer had to prove the distinctiveness of his own approach it was time to reaffirm the values it shared even with artists whom jazz critics had positioned as Ellington's adversaries. The first steps in this new direction were the collaborations with Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Coleman Hawkins, and John Coltrane. Hawkins's performance of “Mood Indigo” and Coltrane's version of “In a Sentimental Mood” demonstrated how these works resonated with a far larger repertory than even that of the Ellington Orchestra; both soloists imbued Ellington's music with their own very recognizable styles, and each song took on a new life. We
can detect a similar refashioning of jazz history in the two albums that recalled the music of the big band era and, in a very different way, in the suites based on Tchaikovsky's
Nutcracker
and Grieg's
Peer Gynt.
In both instances Ellington was reopening a dialogue that defied the boundaries of jazz history. Even more ambitious were such encounters with world music as the
Far East Suite
and the
Latin American Suite
, which took jazz beyond America's geographical and cultural borders. Far from novelty exercises in exoticism, these works demonstrated in musical terms the ties in African American history to the Ganges, the Euphrates, and the Caribbean that Ellington had celebrated in the script for
Black, Brown and Beige.
Having pushed the boundaries of jazz outward in so many directions, Ellington now returned, in 1970, to honor its birthplace, New Orleans.

In researching the
New Orleans Suite
I carefully worked my way, one folder at a time, through the materials, many of them the originals professionally copied in India ink. Each part was identified by the name of the player, not the instrument, and many of them included the players' own comments and doodles. When I opened folder 5 of box 242, though, I came upon the holy grail, Ellington's sketches for “The Second Line”, written, as was his habit, very distinctly in pencil with full indications of all the harmonic voicings. Often these pencil sketches show signs that they were written on the road; they may appear on the back of another piece of music and are often full of arrows that reorder the phrases between different pages. With familiarity, though, it becomes clear that Ellington and Strayhorn both worked in a systematic way that allowed Tom Whaley to extract parts from a score set out on four or five staves. The sketches look casual, but in fact they are complete (with the provision that neither Ellington nor Strayhorn wrote out a drum part and rarely indicated much about the piano part, which, of course, they would be playing). In the middle of sketches for different phrases I found Ellington's first entry for the great tune that serves as its refrain, a defiant melody that seems to capture the essential spirit of jazz. My hands began to tremble. I felt like I was witnessing the moment when the notes first hit the page. For a second Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington seemed to be looking over my shoulder, pointing to his sassy tune with pride.

The weight of that encounter suggested to me that the Ellington Archive may be only in its formative, provisional state. The entire collection, so much of which is in pencil, needs to be put in digital form, safe from the wear and tear it now receives on a daily basis, and at the
same time made more accessible. (As an example, today you can access most of the Copland holdings in the Library of Congress through the Internet.) Critical and performing editions need to be carefully prepared from the materials, an effort that would at least equal those that have gone into the great scholarly monuments of European music. Since the Smithsonian already has a branch institution in New York City (the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum), I can imagine a time when the collection might be housed in its own building, an Ellington Institute, located, with all due respect for his birthplace, on the heights of Sugar Hill. Ellington may have been born in D.C., but his music is inseparable from Harlem.

We commit fewer musical sins in church.

—Igor Stravinsky

It has been said once that a man, who could not play the organ or any of the other instruments of the symphony, accompanied his worship by juggling. He was not the world's best juggler but it was the one thing he did best. And so it was accepted by God.

—Duke Ellington

 

 

 

INTRO: AIN'T BUT THE ONE

When I first envisioned closing this book with a chapter on religious music (a.k.a. the “God chapter”), I thought that I would examine Ellington's three Concerts of Sacred Music, which premiered in 1965, 1968, and 1973, in the context of other spiritual works of the time. There's no shortage of impressive sacred music from that era: John Coltrane's
A Love Supreme
, Mary Lou Williams's
Mass for Peace
, Messiaen's
Et Exspecto Resurrectionem Mortuorum
, Britten's
War Requiem
, Stravinsky's
Requiem Canticles
, and Leonard Bernstein's
Mass
are just the beginning of a long list. Many of these works—intense, disquieting, pious, questioning, epic, modest, ritualistic, theatrical—reflect the transformations of religious thought and practice brought about by Vatican II, the civil rights movement, and the Vietnam War. These transformative historical events, however, would have overshadowed the attention I wanted to draw to the special character of Ellington's sacred concerts. They are far less appreciated, even in the jazz world,
than many of the musical works listed above. Most classical listeners, I have found, don't even know they exist—and don't know what they are missing. Fulfilling many of Ellington's lifelong expressive projects, the three Concerts of Sacred Music exemplify an Ellingtonian “late style” that brought his music to its rightful home, the church.

As Janna Tull Steed has written, the three Concerts of Sacred Music are best characterized as a continuously evolving work in progress.
¹
Only the Second Sacred Concert shares no significant material with other works. Ellington did not treat any of the concerts as a finished composition; the many performances that the band gave of them varied enormously in content and the order of numbers.
²
I would suggest, though, that all the concerts were emanations, extensions, and developments of
Black, Brown and Beige
and that there were really five sacred concerts.

By my count the first Concert of Sacred Music was not a concert proper but a recording. In 1958 Ellington released an album titled
Black, Brown and Beige
that differed substantially from the original suite. Ellington omitted all of
Brown
, replaced
Beige
with a setting of the 23rd Psalm, and added a vocal version of “Come Sunday,” which was heard for the first time with lyrics. The ostensible reason for these changes was the presence of the great gospel singer Mahalia Jackson. For Jackson, as for many others in the black community, gospel and blues were inimical, and Ellington showed his respect for that view here. In doing so, though, he reshaped the earlier musical representation of African American history away from the complex interplay of work song, spiritual, blues, and jazz found in the original suite and toward a picture of ascending faith. The music and its story now found their goal in the church, not in a Sugar Hill penthouse.

Ellington never hid his religious feelings. He wore a gold cross around his neck at all times, he traveled with a well-thumbed Bible (his “little brown book,” to quote the Strayhorn song), and he carefully annotated copies of
Forward Day by Day
, a spiritual guide published by the Episcopal church.
³
Yet Ellington's turn to the realm of gospel music in the late 1950s also reflected contemporary developments in black music and politics. Moving beyond church gospel music began to reinvigorate the wider cultural climate. In 1957 and 1958 Mahalia Jackson appeared at the Newport Jazz Festival. That same year Art Blakey's recording of Bobby Timmons's tune “Moanin'” became an anthem for a jazz style that earned the awkward name “funky hard bop regression” from its emphasis on both blues and gospel. The sound of gospel music was soon
popularized in Charles Mingus's “Saturday Night Prayer Meeting” and Horace Silver's “Sister Sadie.” Critics pegged hard bop as a black reaction to the cool West Coast jazz of Jimmy Giuffre and Chet Baker, but, more than another perennial attempt to take jazz back from popular white imitators, hard bop mirrored a profound change within black culture that allowed artists to travel across the previously impermeable barrier between sacred and profane styles. Gospel singing, as performed by the Clara Ward Singers or James Cleveland, had become increasingly blues inflected; Sam Cooke and Ray Charles took the gospel style over into the realm of popular music. In 1961 Ellington's friend Langston Hughes brought gospel music successfully to Broadway with the show
Black Nativity.
With the formation of Dr. Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957, religious leaders had become the spearhead for the movement; musical developments quickly followed the new political alignment. In the civil rights struggle spirituals were reborn as freedom songs. At the March on Washington on August 28, 1963, the day Dr. King delivered his “I have a dream” speech, Mahalia Jackson sang, “I've been ‘buked and I've been scorned.” Five years earlier, though, when she recorded “Come Sunday” with its new lyrics, politics were already interlaced with theology:

Lord, dear Lord above,

God Almighty, God of Love,

Please look down and see my people through.

Ellington's next protosacred concert, in 1963, was
My People
, not a concert but a musical theater “spectacular” that was performed twice a day at the Century of Negro Progress Exposition in Chicago from August 16 to September 2, 1963, at the five-thousand-seat Arie Crown Theater. The exhibition celebrated the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation and was also exactly contemporary with the March on Washington, which demanded that the promise of emancipation finally be implemented.
My People
, which Ellington dedicated to Dr. King, remade
Black, Brown and Beige
as multimedia music theater; in addition to composing the music, Ellington directed, arranged the choreography, and even helped paint the set.
⁴
My People
could be termed Ellington's
Gesamtkunstwerk.

Although Ellington downplayed the political aspect of the show, saying that the message was insinuated “here and there,”
⁵
it amplified the political themes from the earlier versions of
Black, Brown and Beige
, most importantly the interdependence of faith and freedom.
⁶
The show
opened as if in church with three new gospel-style numbers, “Ain't But the One,” “Will You Be There?” and “99%,” sung by the Irving Bunton Singers and Jimmy McPhail. The Christian message of these songs might have seemed surprising in the context of a nonreligious exhibition, and even more surprising at an event associated with a jazz musician, not a gospel musician or a religious leader. These songs, however, would have appeared narrowly doctrinaire only to listeners unfamiliar with the coded language of the spirituals, which gave salvation a double meaning, celestial and terrestrial. The oneness of God testified to the oneness of mankind; the question “Will You Be There?” demanded a full commitment (“99% won't do”) to political struggle as well as to the demands of Scripture. The gospel tunes set down a political agenda in a language its audience would have understood.
⁷
Following these numbers Ellington reprised the vocal version of “Come Sunday” (now performed by McPhail) but then transformed it into a new up-tempo number, “David Danced,” for the choir and the tap dancing of Bunny Briggs. Here the walls separating church and theater came tumbling down. The music hinted at the familiar spiritual melody about Joshua that would appear later in the show to honor Dr. King, explicitly: “King Fit the Battle of Alabam.'”

With the song “My Mother, My Father” (a.k.a. “Heritage”), Ellington took another unexpected turn, charming the audience with a pop-style autobiographical ballad/hymn that might have seemed self-indulgent without its clear political dimension:

My mother—the greatest—and the prettiest.

My father—just handsome—but the wittiest.

Ellington later told an interviewer that this was “everybody's song”;
⁸
it celebrated love and origins just before “black is beautiful” became a slogan. Ellington underscored the politics, or at least reinsinuated them, by following the song with “Montage,” a retitled version of “Light,” the original third section of
Black.
The new title drew attention to the cinematic scope of the music, its depiction of an entire people on the verge of freedom. At many performances Ellington literally climbed up on a soapbox as an orator to make that message explicit: “My people—singing—dancing—praying—thinking about freedom.” Now, as he had done at Carnegie Hall, Ellington acclaimed the contribution African Americans had made as workers: “Cotton—sugar—indigo—iron—coal—peanuts—steel—the railroad—you name it. The foundation of the United States rests on the sweat of my people.”

Ellington's oration then segued into a reprise of The Blues from
Black, Brown and Beige
sung by Joya Sherrill. Just as he had earlier opened up the content of
Black
, Ellington followed his artful meditation on the blues with four short blues vignettes (“Workin' Blues,” “My Man Sends Me,” “Jail Blues,” and “Lovin' Lover”) that were as down-home as “The Blues” was not. Never before had Ellington made such an incursion into the rival stylistic domain of Count Basie; once again Ellington was pushing his own stylistic spectrum ever wider to encompass experiences and forms of expression that rarely before had shared the same theatrical space. Finally the show turned from insinuation to explicit statement with a calypso-groove freedom song, “King Fit the Battle of Alabam,'” that harshly recalled the misdeeds of Eugene “Bull” Connor, the commissioner of safety of Birmingham, Alabama, who had turned police dogs and fire hoses on black citizens earlier that year: “Little babies fit the battle of police dogs—mongrel police …/ And the dogs came growling—howling—growling.” Ellington could have ended on this note, but he had one more stylistic twist to play, the category-defying “What Color Is Virtue?” which sounds like a perfect Broadway vehicle for Lena Horne. The two contrasting final numbers gave a new face, or perhaps two new faces, to the militant ending of the original
Black, Brown and Beige.
The dizzying stylistic range of
My People
challenges its audience to be as proudly and unconditionally inclusive as its composer.

My People
was a version of the historical pageants of Ellington's childhood, updated musically and politically, but by its very nature—it was part of a temporary exposition—it was provisional. Too religious to run on Broadway, too full of the blues to be performed as a church service, its music imagined a hypothetical theatrical framework, at once sacred and profane, timely and eternal, that fused and transcended the usual ideas of entertainment, education, and worship. Only the largest sacred space, a cathedral, could possibly contain its vision, though perhaps it required the
idea
of a cathedral, the largest, most inclusive monument to God, more than the acoustic reality. As it happened, those spaces were also looking for new music to reinvigorate worship.
⁹
In 1962 the Reverend C. Julian Bartlett and the Reverend Jon S. Yaryan invited Ellington to compose music for the dedication of Grace Cathedral on San Francisco's Nob Hill, an invitation that led to the first Concert of Sacred Music on September 16, 1965. Eventually Ellington's Concerts of Sacred Music would rattle the gothic arches of
Grace Cathedral, the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York, and Westminster Abbey in London with amplified voices, blaring brass, and ricocheting drum solos, filling the vast spaces like a dense, pungent musical incense.
Time
magazine wrote that the devilish acoustics turned the music into an “impenetrable mass.” (On the other hand, Gary Giddins praised the music's “aural affinity for the cavernous architecture of great churches.”)
¹⁰
The physics may have been problematic but the metaphysics rang out loud and clear.

The three Concerts of Sacred Music shared certain features that pushed them in the opposite direction of the contemporary jazz masses of Ellington's friend Mary Lou Williams.
¹¹
Her religious music drew on traditional Catholic liturgy, though it also added contemporary commentary on their words. Even when the music rocks, Williams intended it for worship. The Ellington concerts, by contrast, were not masses, and, if we heed Ellington's exhortations, they also were not jazz; he asked that the four-letter “J” word not appear in any of the programs or publicity. They were concerts, not services; the only liturgical text Ellington set was the Lord's Prayer. Yet, as Janna Tull Steed notes, all three concerts were conceived for performance in sacred spaces that helped “define the meaning of these events and their impact on performers and audiences, too.”
¹²

The concerts would have been provocatively eclectic in their range of musical styles in any setting. The first concert featured two gospel singers, Esther Marrow (incorrectly listed as “Esther Merrill” in the program and much of the literature and later known as Queen Esther Marrow) and Jimmy McPhail, the jazz singer John Hendricks, and tap dancer Bunny Briggs.
¹³
The second featured the high soprano voice of the Swedish singer Alice Babs, a blues solo for Ellington's longtime trumpeter Cootie Williams, and a prominent role for an African American children's chorus (Les Jeunes Voix, directed by Roscoe Gill). As the criticism reveals, all three concerts contained something to please or ruffle the religious or nonreligious sensibilities of just about every listener. People who loved the intensity of “Come Sunday” were baffled by the Bacharach-like slickness of “Something about Believing” or the appropriately childlike Sunday school offerings of the children's choir. Even Gary Giddins, the first critic to sense the full scope of Ellington's achievement in these works, seemed to bridle at the “outright proselytizing” of the second concert, even though the texts were notably nonsectarian. All religious music is by its very nature preachy, but it is
often easier for outsiders to encounter musical spirituality either without words or in a foreign language. Ellington, however, was not satisfied with making things easy.