The Ellington Century (61 page)

5
. Schuller,
SE
, p. 129.

6
. As with many other works in the Ellington repertory, there is some debate about authorship, despite Ellington's unshared listing as composer on all published versions. Webster told Milt Hinton that he had composed the tune (Büchmann-Møller,
Someone to Watch over Me
, p. 69). Rex Stewart, in a lovingly limned portrait, wrote that Webster was its composer
and
arranger, and, somewhat contradicting that claim, “also wrote the now-famous saxophone section chorus” (Stewart,
Jazz Masters of the Thirties
, p. 129). Mercer Ellington, on the other hand, wrote that the chart sprang from a “device” of Webster's (Ellington and Dance,
Duke Ellington in Person
, p. 87).

7
. Büchmann-Møller,
Someone to Watch over Me
, p. 61.

8
. In later jazz the sectional sax solo has come to be called “supersax” after a Charlie Parker tribute band formed by Med Flory and Buddy Clark that debuted in 1972 featuring harmonized arrangements of Parker's solos.

9
. A score of the full composition as transcribed from the recording by David Berger is published by Jazz at Lincoln Center. Webster's solo is transcribed (somewhat differently) by Gunther Schuller in
SE
, pp. 582-83. An incomplete set of parts and detailed sketches for the shout chorus are in the Ellington Archive at the Smithsonian, but there is no complete manuscript score and parts. A superb Ellingtonian performance of “Cotton Tail” as a “head” followed by improvised solos appears on
Duke Ellington's Jazz Violin Session.
Two other
recordings of the six-chorus composition with Webster were made in Fargo, North Dakota, in November and at Carnegie Hall in January 1943, the latter at a much faster clip than the studio recording. Not by Ellington but not to be missed: the vocalized version of the 1940 recording by Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross.

10
. Oliver,
Blues Fell This Morning
, p. 66.

11
. See Schuller,
SE
, p. 128.

12
. Sublette,
Cuba and Its Music
, p. 80.

13
. You can find extensive descriptions of African rhythms in Jones,
Studies in African Music;
Chernoff,
African Rhythm and African Sensibility;
Floyd,
Black Music in the Harlem Renaissance;
Arom;
African Polyphony and Polyrhythm;
and Floyd,
Composing the Music of Africa
, as well as clear accounts of the relation between African and Cuban rhythms in Fernandez,
From Afro-Cuban Rhythms to Latin Jazz;
and Sublette,
Cuba and Its Music.
See also Wilson, “The Significance of the Relationship between Afro-American and West African Music”; and Agawu, “The Invention of ‘African Rhythm.'” Many listeners today will be familiar with the minimalist appropriation of West African rhythms found in such Steve Reich pieces as
Drumming
and
Music for Eighteen Musicians.
There are now many recordings of traditional Ewe music, but for a Caribbean perspective I recommend the CD released as
Our Man in Havana
, produced originally by Mongo Santamaría in the 1950s, which presents rural Cuban music very close to its African origins and also to modern Cuban popular music.

14
. A classic statement of this misunderstanding appears in Richard Waterman's “‘Hot' Rhythm in Negro Music.”

15
. I wonder if a similar experience of temporal terror underlies the phase-shift pieces of Steve Reich, such as
Clapping Music
, which start in phase, go out, and gradually come back, something that might happen in West African music if you got totally lost and tried, step by step, to find your way back.

16
. Chernoff,
African Rhythm and African Sensibility
, p. 51.

17
. Malcolm Floyd,
Composing the Music of Africa
, p. 58.

18
. The sheet music is reprinted in Jasen, ed.,
“For Me and My Gal” and Other Favorite Song Hits, 1915-1917.

19
. Schuller,
EJ
, 186.

20
. The resilient “bones” of the four-phrase structure are still evident in the most famous “Tiger Rag” descendant, Jerry Herman's “Hello Dolly!”

21
. Schuller,
EJ
, p. 111.

22
. Tucker, ed.,
DER
, p. 36.

23
. Ellington's repeated use of “Tiger Rag” was noted in 1970 by Martin Williams in
The Jazz Tradition.

24
. Tucker, ed.,
DER
, p. 111.

25
. The solos are listed by Stanley Dance in the liner notes for
The Okeh Ellington.

26
. Schuller, for instance, termed it “ephemeral”
(SE
, p. 483).

27
. Schuller,
EJ
, p. 346.

28
. Hasse,
Beyond Category
, p. 55.

29
. Quoted in notes by John Szwed to
Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings.

30
. Jones, “Blues People,” p. 108.

31
. Floyd,
The Power of Black Music
, p. 110.

32
. See Magee,
The Uncrowned King of Swing.
p. 131.

33
. Schuller,
EJ
, p. 268

34
. Southern,
MBA
, p. 135.

35
. Ibid., p. 99.

36
. Ibid., p. 160

37
. The caveats are raised by Wayne Shirley (in his 1978 introduction to the reissue of
Afro-American Spirituals, Work Songs, and Ballads)
, so they are serious. Shirley pointed out Lomax's way of manufacturing an air of primitive authenticity in his field recordings and noted that the performance of “Run, Old Jeremiah” on
Afro-American Spirituals, Work Songs, and Ballads
, while a ring shout, the style with the clearest connections to African practice, traces no straight line from Africa to this 1934 recording: the Louisiana community heard here had only “recently reintroduced the ring-shout as a means of attracting” a younger, dance-oriented generation to the church.

38
. See
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d75759/
.

39
. For an extended theoretical discussion of shout, see Samuel A. Floyd Jr., “Ring Shout, Signifyin(g), and Jazz Analysis,” in Walser, ed.,
Keeping Time.

40
. Ibid., p. 21.

41
. Blesh and Janis,
They All Played Ragtime
, p. 188.

42
. Copland,
The New Music
, p. 66. See also my chapter, “Copland and the Jazz Boys,” in Dickinson, ed.,
Copland Connotations.

43
. See rehearsal number 86 in the coda of
Apollo
, rehearsal number 92 in the boogie-woogie Pas d'action of
Orpheus
, and bars 352-64 of
Agon.

44
. Laki,
Bartók and His World
, p. 52.

45
. The idea that Bartók's music springs from binary oppositions was first proposed by Erno Lendvai. Although recent scholarship has questioned many of Lendvai's claims, particularly that Bartók employed Golden Section proportions systematically, they often reconfigure the dialectics outlined by Lendvai rather than rejecting them. Botstein's restatement is typical. See also Kárpáti,
Bartók's Chamber Music
, p. 213.

46
. The ethnomusicologist Timothy Rice claims that 3 + 3 + 2 meter does not exist in Bulgarian music and that therefore two of the six studies from
Mikrokosmos
were really meant to “capture the syncopated rhythms of American popular music and jazz” (Antokoletz, Fischer, and Suchoff, eds.,
Bartók Perspectives
, p. 198). In klezmer music, however, the pattern is common and is called either “Freylechs” or “Bulgar.” Bartók, moreover, uses the 3 + 3 + 2 rhythm in a folklike style that does not sound like jazz or klezmer in
Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta.
Bartók had used 3 + 3 + 2 patterns in pieces based on Romanian folk music as early as the popular
Romanian Dances
of 1915.

47
. See Tirro,
Jazz: A History
, p. 336.

48
. Ulanov,
Duke Ellington
, p. 231.

49
. Taruskin,
Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions
, p. 1357.

50
. See Van den Toorn,
The Music of Igor Stravinsky
, pp. 99-100.

51
. Jones,
Studies in African Music
, vol. 2, p. 71.

52
. Taruskin,
Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions
, 1306-7. Taruskin confuses matters, though, by anachronistically comparing Stravinsky's ragtimes with Joplin's. The dotted rhythms in the
Histoire
“Ragtime” and the 1918
Ragtime for Eleven Instruments
show that Stravinsky was keeping up with more advanced evolutions of the form; both works are really fox-trots (a dance rage launched by Vernon and Irene Castle and their musical director James Reese Europe in 1914) rather than rags, though the confusion of nomenclature persisted for some time on both sides of the Atlantic. Stravinsky cubisticly rearranged the elements of the fox-trot just as he would with many other historical styles.

53
. The pairing is analyzed in Crawford,
American Musical Landscape.

54
. Thomson and Kostelanetz,
A Virgil Thomson Reader
, p. 164.

55
. Ibid.

56
. See Oja,
Making Music Modern
, p. 143.

57
. Tick,
Ruth Crawford Seeger
, pp. 217-21.

58
. Nicholls,
American Experimental Music
, p. 55.

59
. The complex relation of the Cage avant-garde to jazz is explored in detail in Lewis,
A Power Stronger Than Itself.

60
. Tirro,
Jazz: A History
, p. 377.

61
. For Gunther Schuller's “out” genealogy, see “The Avant-Garde and Third Stream,” in his
Musings
, pp. 121-33.

62
. The movement is surveyed in the important studies Litweiler,
The Freedom Principle;
Jost,
Free Jazz;
Spellman,
Black Music;
and Lewis,
A Power Stronger Than Itself.

63
. Litweiler,
The Freedom Principle
, p. 75.

64
. Tucker, ed.,
DER
, p. 334.

3. “PRELUDE TO A KISS”: MELODY

Epigraph, p. 89: T. W. Adorno,
Introduction to the Sociology of Music
, p. 25.

1
. Stravinsky,
Poetics of Music.
p. 43.

2
. “Heart and Brain in Music,” in Schoenberg and Stein,
Style and Idea
, p. 69.

3
. Hamm,
Yesterdays
, pp. 285-86. For accounts of the rise of Tin Pan Alley see Hamm,
Yesterdays
, and Goldberg,
Tin Pan Alley
, still informative and fun to read despite its age. See also Hamm's commentaries in the three-volume
Irving Berlin's Early Songs
, published by MUSA.

4
. Hamm,
Yesterdays
, p. 290.

5
. Ibid., p. 294.

6
. In discussing Ellington's songs (and Strayhorn's), I will refer to the versions found in “The Great Music of Duke Ellington,” first published by Belwin Mills in 1985.

7
. Wilder and Maher,
American Popular Song
, p. 412.

8
. Ellington was listed as composer of two musicals and one opera, the 1946
Beggars' Holiday
, with lyrics by John Latouche, based, like
The Threepenny
Opera
, on
The Beggars' Opera.
According to Walter van de Leur, Billy Stray-horn did most of the composing, “occasionally conferring with Ellington over the telephone”
(Something to Live For
, p. 98). The musical
Pousse-café
, based on
The Blue Angel
, appeared briefly in 1966.
Queenie Pie
, an opera buffa, was produced only after Ellington's death. None of these shows had a successful run or produced enduring songs.

9
. Tucker,
Ellington: The Early Years
, chapter 8.

10
. Ibid., pp. 126-33.

11
. Reprinted in Nicholson,
Reminiscing in Tempo
, pp. 152-59.

12
. Giddins,
VJ
, p. 117.

13
. When I wrote my book on
Rhapsody in Blue
I noted that “Black Beauty” begins with the same harmonies as the opening piano solo in the Gershwin; it's even in the same key. I hadn't noticed, though, that “Swampy River,” which Ellington recorded at the same piano solo session as “Black Beauty,” began with an even more explicit allusion to
Rhapsody in Blue.
I also hadn't noticed that Gershwin returned the compliment, because the bridge of “I Got Rhythm,” written two years later, recalls the second strain of “Black Beauty.” Tipping his hat to Gershwin, Ellington flaunted his compositional and pianistic chops. Both pieces are complex multistrain piano compositions in the manner of James P. Johnson. But the main melody in “Black Beauty” is neither Gershwinesque nor Johnsonesque, and it does not display the creamy chromaticism of many Ellington tunes.

14
. Collier,
Duke Ellington
, p. 118.

15
. Wilder and Maher,
American Popular Song
, p. 414.

16
. For a more modern and much sexier vocal rendition, check out Sarah Vaughan's recording on the Smithsonian
Jazz Singers
collection. Johnny Hodges's exultant 1957 recording, with what sounds to me like a Strayhorn arrangement, appears on
Duke Ellington Indigos.

17
. Furia,
Ira Gershwin
, p. 72.

18
. Pollack,
George Gershwin
, p. 456.

19
. Furia,
Ira Gershwin
, p. 72.