The Ellington Century (6 page)

“
Ko-Ko
”:
THE COLOR BLACK

Shades of blue make up one half of Ellington's color spectrum; variants of black, from café au lait to ebony, form their complement. The breathy but warm sound of the New Orleans clarinet, with Bechet as the foundation amplified by Bigard and Hodges, signified blue. The dark growl of Miley's trumpet, Nanton's trombone, and Carney's baritone sax, all derived from the sound of Joe Oliver's cornet, connoted black. Ellington uses both blue and black timbres in music that belongs, in form and gesture, to the genre of the blues, though often the black pieces state the blues harmonic progression in the minor mode. Ellington's
noir
style (branded—some say by George Gershwin—as “Jungle Music” at the Cotton Club) portrayed characters who are more African than American, representing the resilience and strength that existed before slavery and that survived beyond it. The black-to-tan spectrum also represented two momentous events in the African American experience, the traumatic Middle Passage from Africa to America and the Great Migration from the rural South to the urban North. Ellington sounded this theme in the 1920s with “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo” and “Black and Tan Fantasy,” in the ′30s with “The Saddest Tale,” “Echoes of Harlem” and “Menilek,” and in the ′50s with “Such Sweet Thunder.” Throughout his career he referred to an operatic presentation of the theme, called
Boola
, “which tells the story of the Negro in America.”
²⁹
In 1941 Ellington told Almena Davis, an interviewer for a black newspaper, the California
Eagle
, that he had “practically finished a full-length opera based on the history of the American Negro, and is readying a synopsis of it to submit to a prospective producer.”
³⁰
The opera never appeared, but, according to Barry Ulanov, Ellington drew two of his most important works of the 1940s, “Ko-Ko” and
Black, Brown and Beige
, from the operatic sketches.
³¹
Both works reflect Ellington's political engagement, which reached a peak of militancy in the early 1940s, when the United States entered a war against racism without addressing racism on the home front. Because of its scale and ambition,
Black, Brown and Beige
will receive its own chapter, but here “Ko-Ko” can exemplify the color black, with all its resonances, very well on its own.

Ellington recorded “Ko-Ko” for the first time on March 6, 1940, at the first Victor recording session of what has come to be known as the Blanton-Webster Band because of the revivifying arrivals of Jimmy Blanton on bass and Ben Webster on tenor sax. The session also produced “Jack the Bear” and “Morning Glory.”
³²

In form, “Ko-Ko” is eight blues choruses in e
minor (the blackest possible key, at the furthest remove from the white harmony of C major) preceded by an eight-bar intro. Each chorus is in call-and-response format:

Intro. Baritone sax (Carney) answered by trombones (eight bars)

  1. Bass trombone (Tizol) answered by saxes

  2. Saxes answered by plunger-muted trombone (Nanton) assisted by muted brass

  3. Same as 2 but with higher-pitched trombone responses

  4. Saxes answered by muted brass and piano

  5. Trumpets answered by saxes and trombones

  6. Brass answered by solo bass

  7. Shout chorus; brass (and clarinet) answered by saxes

  8. Eight bars same as chorus 1; four-bar coda

Almost every chorus begins with the Beethovenian rhythmic figure:

³³

This motive is pounded out first on the tom-toms, then intoned by the baritone sax; in the first chorus it becomes a four-note melodic figure in the valve trombone. It provides the rhythm for the saxophone, trumpet, and trombone calls in choruses three through six. Thematic urgency mirrors the massive, dense coloration of the score. Except for the piano, the only solo voices heard are dark and deep: tom-tom, baritone sax, bass trombone, muted trombone, string bass. Higher-pitched colors appear as doubled melodies or as chords that become increasingly dissonant sounding as the piece progresses, reaching a peak with the first chord of the shout chorus, an E
minor eleventh chord made up of all the black notes on the piano. Even at the beginning, though, the parallel triads in the trombones have a modernistic sting, an aspect of the piece pushed further in the jabbing chords and wailing whole-tone scales of the piano.

While “Blue Light” emphasized the contrasting timbres of individual players, “Ko-Ko” draws its color from massed instrumental groupings. It treats saxes, trumpets, and trombones as if each section were a single voice and gradually fuses these three elements together in the sixth chorus with three increasingly dissonant fanfarelike chords. In the technical terms of the European tradition, Ellington scored “Ko-Ko” in a
tutti
style, exploiting the massed timbral possibilities of the entire ensemble. This approach to the orchestra, like the rhythmic motto, reminds the listener of the heroic side of Beethoven, the Third, Fifth, Seventh, and Ninth symphonies. To continue the Beethoven analogy, we might say that the sound of “Ko-Ko” is a Promethean theft, a defiant transfer of the image of heroism from white to black. Ellington composed “Ko-Ko” in 1939. Its heroic coloring anticipates some of the most important classical works of the war years that made similarly symbolic use of Beethoven's rhythms, in particular Schoenberg's
Ode to Napoleon
(1942) and Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements (1945). Precociously postcolonial with a vengeance, “Ko-Ko” reclaimed and rewrote the primitivism of early modern classical music and the tom-tom-grooved “jungle” numbers that white audiences demanded from black entertainers, using the most esteemed devices of European art music as emblems of African American integrity, pride, and power.
³⁴

Ellington composed music with color in order to write a “colored” music; throughout his career he defined his artistic project as giving musical expression to the experience of African Americans. Although much of his music evolved in the dubious “plantation” atmosphere of the segregated Cotton Club, Ellington's painterly titles were not floor show gimmicks; they directed listeners to the music's timbral essence. He told one interviewer that his orchestra played “unadulterated American Negro music,” not jazz or swing. Ellington was acutely conscious of art's responsibility to represent experience and of the inability of European forms of music and media to represent the particular experiences of his life. The forms of his music and the sounds of his orchestra presented an alternative system of representation based in sound, form, and social function on the blues. Altering a musical culture at a most basic level meant rewiring the way music was perceived and processed: Ellington's music asks us to see with our ears and hear with our eyes. This disruption of the habitual sensory pathways makes Ellington a “nationalist” in the way Bartók or Falla were, but it also makes him a quintessential modernist like Debussy and Schoenberg, who similarly sought to transform the experience of music by fusing sound and sight.

SEGUE: AFTERNOON OF THE XYLOPHONE

A few notes of music, a tapping, a faint hum: you girls, so warm and so silent,
dance the taste of the fruit you have known! Dance the orange.

—Rainer Maria Rilke

A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu: voyelles.…

—Rimbaud, “Voyelles”

These days every shoemaker's apprentice can orchestrate to perfection.

—Mahler to Alma on Puccini's
Tosca

Firstly, hanging from the ceiling, were Smyrna carpets with complex patterns picked out on a red background. Then on all four sides were door-curtains from Kerman and Syria, striped with green, yellow and vermilion. Coarser door-curtains from Kiarbekir, rough to the touch like a shepherd's cloak; and still more carpets which could be used as hangings, long carpets from Isphahan, Tehran, and Kermanshah, the wider carpets of Shumaka or Madras, strange flowerings of peonies and palms where the imagination was let loose in the garden of dreams. On the floor, which was strewn with thick fleeces, there were more carpets: in the center, an Agra, an astonishing piece with a wide, soft, blue border against a white background, on which were exquisitely imagined patterns in a blueish violet. After that, wonders were displayed on all sides.…Here were Turkey, Arabia, Persia and India: palaces had been emptied, mosques and bazaars ransacked.…Visions of the East hovered beneath the extravagance of this savage art amid the strong scent that this ancient wool had kept from lands of sun and vermin.

—Zola,
Au bonheurs des dames

Between 1905 and 1910 the spectrum of European music shifted from somber Victorian mauve to riotous fauve. The mournful hues of Brahms and Bruckner gave way to the extravagant glitter of Ravel's
Shéhérazade
, Strauss's
Salome
, Puccini's
Madama Butterfly
, Debussy's
Ibéria
, Mahler's
Das Lied von der Erde
, Stravinsky's
Firebird.
Shimmering orchestral effects, erotic subject matter, and exotic geographic settings mirrored looming issues of the fin de siécle: imperialism, orientalism, Decadence, Symbolism, the occult, the primitive, and what Elaine Showalter termed “sexual anarchy.” More than a matter of “sound for sound's sake,” the heightened intensity of timbre presaged changes in the way music represented ideas and feelings, changes, as well, in its social function.

These riotous new timbres heralded the musical onset of modernism (a.k.a. Symbolism or Decadence in fin de siècle parlance). Unlike romantic music, Symbolist music did not conjure up easily identifiable emotions. Instead it was evocative, evasive, even deliberately obscure. Treating human nature as an unfamiliar terrain, it placed the human subject
(you and me) within a complex web of sensory associations. The self became an Other.

By mimicking, however superficially, non-European musical styles (Chinese, Japanese, or Balinese), composers undermined the assumption that the ideas and emotions represented in European music were universal categories. European music, like Zola's department store, had already begun to trade in exotic colors (think of
Aida
and
Carmen
) without the composers realizing how such appropriation might transform the appropriators. The xylophone, a rogue instrument with Asian/African origins, can help track the fin de siècle shift of timbre and its unforeseen consequences. Long before its first clattering appearance in European concert music, in Saint-Saëns's
Danse macabre
of 1874, the xylophone assumed the role of a menacing outsider. Originating in Southeast Asia and developed in Africa, it reached Europe in the fifteenth century: “The earliest pictorial evidence of the xylophone is found in a woodcut from the collection
Totentanz
[
Dance of death
, 1511] by Holbein the Younger, depicting Death carrying the instrument hanging from a shoulder strap.”
³⁵
An alien, skeletal instrument played by itinerant musicians, the xylophone signified otherness; in the 1890s its dry, cackling tone propelled a broomstick-borne witch in
Hansel and Gretel
and gave a tinselly glitter to the countercultural street life of Montmartre in
La Bohème.