CHAPTER 3
THE 1930S: An “ACCUMULATION of PERSONALITIES”
Decentralized Collaboration
ELLINGTON’S WORK AS A COMPOSER has been compared with auteur directors of movies—figures like Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, and Alfred Hitchcock—who enlist the help of secondary collaborators to fulfill their vision. Sometimes Ellington did indeed work like that, but he never felt bound to any single approach. Indeed, one of the stunning developments during the 1930s was his ability to work in so many different ways. I will argue that his most fruitful method actually resembles a movie-making model that is much less centralized. The differences between that and the model of the auteur director highlight a lot about what has been falsely claimed and misunderstood about Ellington, and they also point to what was extraordinary.
There is no better demonstration of the decentralized model than the 1939 version of The Wizard of Oz. Louis B. Mayer, cofounder of MGM, hired ten screenwriters working more or less sequentially to turn the original book by L. Frank Baum into a movie script. Song lyricist Yip Harburg took a turn working over the script, too. He rewrote dialogues in rhyme as a clever way to lead into songs and integrate them into the story. He and composer Harold Arlen agreed that a ballad for Dorothy should be the central musical event. By any standard, they succeeded with Over the Rainbow. They delivered their songs to a team of musicians who arranged them and composed the rest of the music for the film. All of these musical layers contributed as much continuity and expression as the script did.
It was the job of four different directors, working one after the other, to take the script, songs, set designs, and actors who were handed to them and make a movie. The role of the director was limited. “I don’t remember him ever saying, ‘Don’t do that,’ or ‘Don’t do this,’ or ‘Try to do this,’” explained Margaret Hamilton, the wicked witch of the west, about Victor Fleming, the director who received screen credit. The film’s producer, Mervyn LeRoy, and his assistant were in charge of everything that the ten screenwriters, four directors, two songwriters, and cast of actors created. Yet Louis B. Mayer could step in and override anything, as he tried to do when he ordered Over the Rainbow cut from the picture (intense persuasion won him over). The system was designed for robust distribution of creative control through a vast list of credited and uncredited participants. The producer hired the best professionals he could and let them go about their work. It was a sprawling mess of creative action, reaction, rejection, revision, and extension.
With Ellington things were often similar. There are many indications of a decentralized process with a producer-like figure having the final say, rather than a top-down process where everyone follows Ellington’s vision. We’ve talked about the Miley method, Ellington’s reliance on composed solos from his sidemen as the basis for new pieces. Other pieces were built more simply around solos that were improvised. Gunther Schuller felicitously described, in some of Ellington’s arrangements from the early 1930s, the “generous parade of uniquely individual voices.” Smart foregrounding of superb talent surfaces in pieces like Drop Me Off in Harlem and Bundle of Blues, both from 1933.
More hidden were the recipes for shaping arrangements, where, according to many reports, collaboration was normal. Ellington was in charge, but an egalitarian spirit was in place. In the early years, remembered alto saxophonist Otto Hardwick, “We would have an arrangement, but if there was something you felt you wanted to put in it, you were free to do it, privileged to make suggestions, just spontaneously burst out with it . . .”
That same atmosphere continued into the 1930s. “Everyone made suggestions,” explained Cootie Williams. “It was a family thing.”
And it remained strong even under the pressures of making a record. “For instance when you go into a recording studio, you might have an arrangement all made, yet it’ll probably be changed,” said Harry Carney. “Guys come up with ideas of injecting something. That still goes on.”
“Everybody pitches in—all the time,” interjected Johnny Hodges in the same interview. “Somebody might have ideas to make it a little better.”
Wellman Braud described how Hodges and Bigard were good at “filling the holes,” the classic responsibility of a clarinetist from New Orleans. “All bands at that time [early 1930s] were most ear bands,” explained Lawrence Brown. “Whatever you heard you’d pick up a place to fit in, a part to fit in. Whatever you heard was missing that’s where you were.” The musicians rarely claimed ownership of their contributions to an arrangement. Unlike the fast-moving small print at the end of a movie, there was no room on a phonograph disc to acknowledge all of this.
Sheik of Araby (May 1932) was a surprisingly effective recording of an old standard, with trombonist Lawrence Brown making his first mark with Ellington. Brown had spent many months in Los Angeles playing behind Louis Armstrong, and this solo proves that he was paying attention. Hodges, who offers a stunning solo on soprano sax on the same record, said that Sidney Bechet “taught” the Ellington band this arrangement for Sheik of Araby. “He played that for us, and Tizol put it down,” which is to say that Bechet demonstrated his ideas, the band learned them, and Juan Tizol notated the results.
A 1933 article in Metronome magazine described a back and forth process for making an arrangement: first through the sections of the band; then into notation; then back to Ellington’s apartment for tinkering; and finally a return to the musicians the next day for further commentary, adjustments, and improvements. At the end the arrangement was memorized. The process typically began without notation and ended there, but included notation along the way. A 1944 New Yorker article reported something similar and credited the role of Tizol once again.
3.1 Lawrence Brown, 1933
Tizol, the classically trained trombonist from Puerto Rico, was known as the “extractor.” The term carried several meanings. It could mean notating ideas worked out collectively in performance, or it could mean notating individual parts. How much Tizol edited and arranged while he did this will never be answered. Tizol was modest and self-deprecating, and he downplayed his ability to create arrangements. Nevertheless, he composed some of the band’s greatest hits, had facility with musical notation far superior to anyone else, and was a marvelous trombone player. His strong musicality and high standards must have quietly shaped the whole process.
“Extended” Compositions
Ellington was more like an auteur director of a movie in what he called his “extended” compositions. These pieces lean toward art music for the concert hall—their connections to jazz, dance, and popular music are often thin or nonexistent. The first one was Creole Rhapsody (1931). Later came Reminiscing in Tempo (1935), Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue (1937), Black, Brown and Beige (1943), and many more. For the extended pieces Ellington tends to script a more or less complete vision, conceived for specific musicians who have the ability to bring out his ideas, much like a movie director imagines his concept being brought to life by specific actors.
The extended pieces have been frequently written about, even though they rarely rank in the top tier of Ellington’s recorded legacy. It is a lot easier to write about all the biographical and cultural issues surrounding them than it is to write about what makes Bubber Miley’s trumpet playing so magnificent. We will see precisely the same phenomenon with the Beatles: Lennon’s conceptually provocative but musically simple songs are much easier to talk about than McCartney’s musically rich songs.
The idea of composing an extended piece came from Irving Mills. It is easy to get Mills’s logic: Ellington, the great composer, should write longer pieces, just like other great composers. This would be an excellent way to enhance his status. Creole Rhapsody was a modest step in that direction. The first recording, from January 1931, lasts a little more than six minutes; a revised version from June lasts around eight minutes. After you played the first part on side one, you flipped the disc over and played the second part. A sign of the success of Mills’s strategy was an invitation from composer Percy Grainger for Ellington to visit a composition seminar at New York University; the Ellington Orchestra played Creole Rhapsody there in the fall of 1932. Paul Whiteman’s orchestra performed the piece at Carnegie Hall three months later. This was the kind of thing Mercer Ellington was thinking of when he described Mills adding increasing veneers of sophistication to Ellington’s music.
The connection to Whiteman followed indirectly from connections to Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, which Whiteman had famously premiered in 1924. But Creole Rhapsody is no Rhapsody in Blue. There are two main problems. First, the melodic themes are not of the highest quality, and second, the handling of longer form leaves much to be desired. Both problems turn up regularly in Ellington’s extended pieces.
The first problem, to put it bluntly, has to do with the fact that the themes of Creole Rhapsody came exclusively from Ellington himself, not from the hit makers in his band. The second comes from trying to do something for which he had no preparation. Mastery of short forms does not automatically convert to mastery of longer ones. Classical composers invest considerable time learning how to craft longer pieces. Working with teachers, they study the masterpieces and learn how to hold interest, how to transition from one section to another, and how to make the material hang together. “It would be a pity if Ellington started to produce rambling, pseudo-highbrow fantasies,” wrote the British composer Constant Lambert in response to Creole Rhapsody. Similar sentiments have been articulated by others. Lambert was a huge admirer of Ellington’s shorter recordings. He called him the “first jazz composer of distinction,” and he cited the standard-length Hot and Bothered and Mood Indigo as examples of Ellington’s best.
Reminiscing in Tempo (1935) is stronger than Creole Rhapsody, though it, too, is hardly a composition upon which to build a legacy. Ellington wrote the piece after his mother’s untimely death “in a soliloquizing mood,” as he later reflected. The piece exists in different versions. The original recording followed the double-sided plan times two: now there are two discs, four sides, four parts to a single piece. These discs were twelve inch, the typical size for classical music, rather than ten inch, the size usually reserved for popular music. (This distinction was still current in 1963, when Ringo Starr quipped to George Martin that the classically trained producer was “very twelve inch.”) The thirteen-minute Reminiscing is organized around a moody set of chromatically shifting chords, just the kind of thing Ellington liked to experiment with at his piano. Sometimes the chords are heard in slithering arpeggiations and sometimes they shift in blocks, coolly in the background, behind the main theme. Various thematic episodes enter and then return to the interesting harmonies. The lack of tight musical direction paints a meandering atmosphere that can be felt as pensive.
Schuller was impressed by how Ellington, in Reminiscing in Tempo, targeted specific players and how this orientation is integrated with his larger vision for the piece. He doesn’t just write for trombone, trumpet, and alto sax, he writes for Lawrence Brown, Arthur Whetsol, and Johnny Hodges. Ellington loved to talk about writing “to the musician.”
“Aren’t there marked similarities between you and Bach?” an admirer asked him in 1944.
“Well, Bach and myself both write with individual performers in mind,” was his response.
The elite image Ellington and Mills were striving for could not be summed up better than in statements like this. Ellington wrote for his musicians just like Bach did. That formula took what was so special about the band’s collaboration and turned it into prestige for Ellington. This is the view R. D. Darrell articulated in 1932, when he credited Ellington as the composer of the great melodies that were actually created by Bubber Miley. But it was not true in that case and it was not true in countless other cases, where Bigard or Williams or Tizol or some other musician created the compelling melodies that outsiders heard as Ellington’s. Reminiscing in Tempo, on the other hand, appears to have come from Ellington alone. There is no doubt that the players bring a lot to sustain interest and help the piece along.
Perhaps the most successful of the 1930s extended pieces was Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue, another double-sider, about seven minutes long. This piece works so well because it circumvents both of the problems that tend to mar the extended pieces. The title signals the unusual formal plan. Part one, Diminuendo, gradually declines in volume, and part two, Crescendo, gradually increases. This was a clever response to the artifice of distributing a single piece over two sides of a record with a complete break in the middle: part one gets softer and softer until it fades into nothing and side one comes to an end; then part two starts softly and grows in volume. The listener’s flip of the record and the resulting moment of silence becomes part of the performance. The other formal solution is to organize most of the piece through repeated blues choruses, one after the other. The risk here is redundancy, but that is taken care of partly by the diminuendo and the crescendo, partly by effective modulations, and partly by movement from complexity to simplicity (in Diminuendo), then simplicity to complexity (in Crescendo). The problem of how to organize a seven-minute piece is deftly solved, though this sui generis solution could not be repeated.
Stylistically, the piece has much more jazz than either Creole Rhapsody or Reminiscing in Tempo, and this also works to its benefit. Vigorous riffs keep driving ahead, with rapid call and response, both staples of the Swing Era though spiked here with an edgy, dissonant ferocity. It is easy to imagine this piece evolving within the band—indeed, it is hard to imagine any other way. Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue is thus a blend of Ellington as auteur director and Ellington as a less controlling collaborator. In a candid moment he described the process:
We had a recording date scheduled for the next morning and in our usual custom we intended to work up an original composition . . . After two hours of musical battling at the studios the next morning we knew we really had something. Another hour at this sort of thing and we finally had our “blues in rhythm.” One disc side we named “Blues Crescendo” and the other, “Blues Diminuendo” . . . Each member of the band feels and knows that it is his orchestra and regards the achievements of the band as his achievements and his success. This communal spirit is typified in our method of composition . . . the name “Duke Ellington” is synonymous with “The Duke Ellington Orchestra.”
The alignment with blues invited the musicians to do what they did best. Two decades later that invitation gave rise to one of the most celebrated performances in jazz history. In the 1950s, Ellington reached back to revive the piece as a vehicle for tenor sax soloist Paul Gonsalves, who was alloted an expansive stretch to improvise during the interlude between Diminuendo and Crescendo; this became known as the “wailing interval.” At the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival the piece turned into something like a giant ring shout for the seven thousand mostly white, middle-class, youthful audience. Ellington urged on his tenor sax soloist, “sic-ing that stuff on just as if it’s all happening somewhere in a tobacco shed or a corn likker joint,” as Albert Murray put it. Gonsalves produced twenty-seven wailing choruses. No one moved in a circle, though a “platinum-blonde girl in a black dress began dancing in one of the boxes,” fervently synchronized with the enraptured saxophone. The crowd took to its feet and roared. All of this was the rousing lead-in to Crescendo. It is not too much to say that this moment revived Ellington’s career. A cover story in Time magazine appeared in August and an LP called Ellington at Newport—which remains Ellington’s best-selling LP—was issued in the fall.
What distinguished Ellington, then, was his flexibility in collaborative relationships. Sometimes he built arrangements around his musicians’ solos; sometimes he used the voicings and instrumental colors that his sidemen came up with and sometimes he used those musicians to test out his own ideas; sometimes he watched a group arrangement get tossed around until it gelled; sometimes he was simply the doctor, as Wellman Braud put it, who edited and improved. Sometimes he was like a movie producer, sometimes like an auteur director. Always he was an eager collaborator, smart about finding the best way for himself to get involved. It was not a question of ego, since he got all of the credit no matter what. Since he was also good at coming up with titles after the fact, it can seem like he had the guiding conception all along, but this was rarely how things worked.
It all took an immense amount of work and superb discipline on the level of reading people and their music, as well as staying power, to see through an evolving piece in every detail to its finish. The idea that Ellington was lazy, as some authors have asserted, is simply ridiculous.
Collaboration was everywhere, yet his public image as a genius who did it all by himself just got firmer and firmer. From the nineteenth century there was a strong tradition of classical composers using folklike melodies to invoke national identities (or “races,” in casual parlance) in their compositions. This legacy became a way to strengthen Ellington’s status as a great composer. Ordinary folk songs were the key to expressing a nation’s soul. Franz Liszt, for example, wrote a set of piano pieces he called Hungarian Rhapsodies that included folk songs from western Hungary, where he was born. Tchaikovsky in Russia, Grieg in Norway, Sibelius in Finland, Vaughan Williams in England, the list goes on and on. Composers might use actual folk songs but it was even better if they composed folklike material themselves. Virtually all of the Western nations had the opportunity to hear their collective souls articulated in this way.
It seemed natural to think of Ellington as doing the same thing for the African American race. His goal, as he explained to the Christian Science Monitor in 1935, was to “make new, unadulterated music expressing the character and moods of the Negro.” This was part of the recipe that made him, in the words of Constant Lambert (1934), “the first jazz composer of distinction, and the first Negro composer of distinction.” Lambert also made explicit his assumptions about the racial dynamics entwined in that assessment. Jazz recordings, he explained, typically represented the work of many people, with more than one composer, more than one soloist, and so on. “Usually the Negro element is confined to the actual arabesques of the execution,” he bluntly insisted. In other words, African Americans were good at performing but not creating, at least not usually. This was not a peculiar idea of Lambert’s but a widespread racial stereotype.
Lambert even put a creative powerhouse like Louis Armstrong under this umbrella. It is “the greatest mistake to class Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington together as similar exponents of Negro music,” he wrote. “The one is a trumpet player, the other a genuine composer.” In other words, Armstrong was a typical African American musician, just like the ones who performed Ellington’s compositions, their creative contributions limited to ornamenting someone else’s ideas. I have argued elsewhere that we should think of Armstrong as one of the greatest composers of melody in the history of American music. Lambert’s purpose was to elevate Ellington above all others, composing great music all himself.
Lambert is frequently cited for his early recognition of Ellington’s achievement, but this layer of prejudice is always omitted, even though it is essential to his analysis. A potent and fatal dose of racism was deeply embedded in the foundational discourse on Ellington as a composer. Miley, Bigard, Williams, Tizol, Hodges, and all the other collaborators didn’t stand a chance. Meaningful collaboration wasn’t even a possibility since Ellington was one of a kind. He was not just exceptional as a jazz composer, he was exceptional among his race.
This false and unjust analysis is infused with considerable irony. The entire performer-centered tradition of musical creativity that flowed from the ring shout arose as a way of compensating for the fact that the rewards of copyright were simply not available to slave musicians. Instead those musicians could “rag the tune,” which meant adding their own creativity to received melodies. This paradigm continued into the Jim Crow era, when early jazz in New Orleans ran with the possibilities and largely accepted the limitations, the rewards of copyright not becoming easily available until the migration North. In New Orleans and before it was better to embody the creativity, to make it part of how you performed, as a group or individually, to win cutting contests in dance halls and street parades and become a celebrated local hero.
The phonograph allowed Ellington to document an arrangement that was built around not just a folklike melody but all of the performer-centered creativity that went with it, a powerful move unavailable to Sibelius, Vaughan Williams, and all the others, who were limited to what could be captured in writing. Not only that, he could co-opt the whole thing under his own name. The irony is that performer-centered creativity had flourished as a way to deal with limitations imposed on African American musicians from a racist society. Now it was being subsumed into the ideology of a great composer who used it to express the “character and moods” of the entire race. This required reducing the performer-creators to mere executors of the genius’s great ideas. Ellington and Mills could never have pulled off this hoax all by themselves. They needed a powerful ideology and a long lineage of willing writers to assist them, and they got it.
The Swing Era
The Swing Era, as it is known, is one of the most glorious periods in the history of American music. As a social phenomenon it began around 1935, when white dance bands such as Benny Goodman’s reached nationwide fame playing up-tempo jazz. But there was never any doubt about where Goodman got his inspiration: it was from African American jazz musicians; New Orleanians like Johnny Dodds, Jimmie Noone, and Louis Armstrong whom he heard growing up in Chicago; and arrangers like Fletcher Henderson, Don Redman, and Duke Ellington. Swing emerged from these lineages as the music was adapted by white jazz bands and appreciated by young white audiences.
The causal relationship between swing and the Great Depression was only partly a matter of happy music as an antidote to desperate times. Musicians were willing to work for low wages, which fostered an elaborate hierarchy of employment and commerce, something like baseball with its multiple levels of minor leagues feeding into the majors. Leaders worked their way up, and so did sidemen, soloists, and arrangers. Intense competition raised quality all around. The successful bands traveled, and good ideas quickly spread around. In 1935, when Goodman broke through, swing popularity was more a response to the growing hopefulness of the New Deal than to the despair of the Depression. Young people exploded with the energy of dance and music, and the phenomenon kept going for more than a decade. As in the 1920s before and the 1950s after, black dance moves swept the nation. High school and college students were the largest group of fans, and “hot clubs” formed on campuses. “Every aspect of my life and that of my friends revolved around big bands, jazz, dancing, jitterbugging, in my formative teens,” remembered a white working-class fan from Massachusetts. Jazz had never before and would never again reach these levels of popularity.
Ellington secured some location gigs, but nothing as long as his stay at the Cotton Club (1927–1931). His band racked up thousands of miles on the road, an exhausting way of life. Someone came up with the idea of renting two Pullman cars and a baggage car that the band could hook up to trains. That made it easier to avoid the irritations and threats of racism by circumventing the need to find places to sleep and eat. Ellington had his own roomette. He loved the plush accommodations, the easy mix between privacy and hanging out with the others, the food, and the relaxing flow of scenery.
In February 1932 the band recorded a prescient anthem for the entire swing phenomenon, It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing). Hodges is again superb on alto sax, and this was the first Ellington recording for singer Ivie Anderson, who would continue with the band through 1942. Ellington explained that the catchy title was something Bubber Miley used to walk around saying. We have seen from the genesis of East St. Louis Toodle-O how Miley related to language musically. In the case of It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing), the words match the musical setting so perfectly that we might imagine Miley singing this phrase—he didn’t just speak it—which would make this another Miley-Ellington collaboration. Also effective is the doo-wha riff in the brasses, set up in dialogue with Anderson’s vocal, the literal answer to her insistence that life is meaningless without musical verve. Anderson’s growling scat is a salute to Louis Armstrong.
A few days later they recorded another vocal tribute to Armstrong with the old standard, Dinah. Here Sonny Greer lamely imitates Armstrong’s elegant way of moving between words and scat, from tune to improvised invention, now in sync with the foundational rhythms and now radically out of phase. The best way to hear the Ellington Dinah is simply as comedic parody—and there were many such parodies of Armstrong’s distinctive voice during these years. Armstrong’s own recording of Dinah (1930) helped establish his breathtakingly fresh modernity, based on the bluesy vernacular he had learned when he was growing up, then developed in the decade after he left New Orleans. Not only was his new style stunningly modern, it was also feverishly popular: it has been claimed that he sold more records in 1931 than anyone, regardless of genre.
Ellington was aiming for that same rare blend. This was one of the challenges facing him as the Swing Era unfolded: how to continue to be both modern and popular, two ideals that do not automatically fit together. Modern meant original, sophisticated, and advanced, while popularity depended on being instantly likeable to a broad slice of the population. The key for Armstrong was his voice. He was still the leading trumpet soloist in jazz, but then as now, vocals were the primary path to commercial success.
In most bands singers like Anderson were marginal, brought out only for a few numbers during a dance or concert. They were usually women, and instrumentalists condescendingly called them “canaries.” Some of them—Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, to take the two most famous examples—transcended these limitations. Anderson was a strong asset, but, as we have already seen, the main problem for Ellington in creating hit songs was his limited ability as a composer of melody. One possibility was to mix modern touches into a song, as he does effectively in It Don’t Mean a Thing. Anderson’s conventional and accessible singing contrasts with an imposing interlude of jarring and effective chord progressions. Armstrong had created a one-of-a-kind synthesis of modern and popular; most others found it easier to blend the two sequentially.
Ellington naturally gravitated toward instrumental music, where he had first made his mark. The years 1932–1936 witnessed a series of stunning achievements, mostly sitting on the modern side of the equation rather than the popular. Lazy Rhapsody, Blue Harlem, Blue Ramble, and Slippery Horn (all 1932) are full of sparkling details and imaginative ideas. Jimmie Lunceford’s band, a main rival to Ellington during this period, was also producing thrilling arrangements packed with one splendid invention after another. For the Lunceford recording Flaming Reeds and Screaming Brass (1933), the arranger writes to match the virtuosity of the musicians but without lapsing into flashiness for its own sake. Lunceford’s Jazznocracy and White Heat (1934) are equally compelling in ensemble brilliance and arranging ingenuity. All of these performances sound like the players have invited the arranger to have fun with what they might be able to do; then the players respond to the arrangement with more inspiration of their own.
Ellington’s greatest achievement along these lines was Daybreak Express (1933). His love of trains, the sense of moving forward without a care in the world, everything under control, shines through in this piece. Part of the magic comes from how he uses strain form to keep boosting the energy of the train. The sections move ahead with a sense of destinational purpose. In this regard Daybreak Express is like Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue: each piece demonstrates a unique approach to form that could not be repeated. In the introduction the train accelerates gradually as the chords rise one slight half step after another. Then come the fabulous whistles (CD 0:22). In the next section the train sounds like it is still accelerating as Bigard’s clarinet wails high (0:47); the impression is not due to an increase in tempo but rather to continuing harmonic tension. Finally things even out as the train reaches a plateau that launches an energetic theme in four-part harmony from the saxophone section (1:18). The theme is full of standard ragtime syncopations, smoothly performed, an elegant Pullman car cruising through the beautiful countryside on frictionless wheels that are moving very fast. A sudden modulation then pops out (1:45) to give the impression of yet another acceleration. The velvet saxophones yield to an elaborate mosaic of call and response that seems to involve the entire orchestra. All the time the rhythm section keeps chugging along without missing a note. Inside the dazzling layers you can hear the doo-wha riff from It Don’t Mean a Thing, some references to Tiger Rag (which provided background chords), high-note trumpet playing in the style of Armstrong, and vigorous doses of call and response. The final slowdown into the station is brief but imaginatively equal to the initial pullout.
Though it ranks very high in the Ellington portfolio, Daybreak Express may not be the greatest Ellington train piece. It would be tough to put it either ahead or behind Billy Strayhorn’s Take the “A” Train, Ellington’s theme song for many years. But in terms of a match between compositional vision and targeted virtuosity of the musicians, Daybreak Express has a place in the top echelon of jazz, on a par with pieces like Charles Mingus’s Haitian Fight Song and John Coltrane’s Love Supreme. Here is Ellington the auteur director at his very finest.
Yet in the Swing Era songs claimed the biggest financial rewards, just as they always have and always will in popular music. Dance bands had to offer at least a few current hits. You could make an instrumental arrangement of a popular tune, or you could have a vocalist step out and sing. If you had too much—too much of a mediocre tune in a single arrangement or too many mediocre tunes in your repertoire—you risked being thought too “commercial,” a simplistic but deadly word that echoes through the decades and into modern-day criticism. If you had too little, your bottom line was jeopardized. It was easy for purists to forget that there were two sides to commercialism. It was not just a matter of pandering to the lowest common denominator but also one of positive artistic inspiration. After all, a good popular song has its own qualities of beauty that come through any arrangement. Those qualities inevitably had impact, even on jazz that positioned itself on the noncommercial end of the spectrum.
Ellington arranged and recorded plenty of popular tunes, and he also tried to produce originals. From the early 1930s his four biggest hits were Mood Indigo (1930), Sophisticated Lady (1933), (In My) Solitude (1934), and In a Sentimental Mood (1935). All of them were conceived as instrumental numbers and then adapted with lyrics to make songs. Musically, none of them feels too popish or commercial (though the lyrics, added by hired professionals, are a different matter), and Ellington’s elite reputation remained intact.
We have already looked at the collective generation of Mood Indigo and Sophisticated Lady. Notably, Cootie Williams said that Ellington composed Solitude by himself. The piece is harmonically driven, like The Mystery Song from a few years earlier, which makes this claim easy to believe. The melody is very simple but effectively moves through nonchord tones with a firm shape, supported by a rich flow of harmonies. The song version of Solitude has been recorded countless times, making it the most successful of any composition that can securely be credited to Ellington alone.
Trumpeter Rex Stewart called In a Sentimental Mood a “communal effort.” Otto Hardwick, who plays lead at the beginning of the original 1934 recording, composed the well-defined and engaging main section of the melody. (Rarely acknowledged is the likelihood that Hardwick also contributed the main idea for Prelude to a Kiss, a huge hit in 1938.) We have already seen Ellington’s fondness for inventing stories about how he created pieces, and In a Sentimental Mood was one of his more colorful efforts. These stories had three purposes. First, they advanced the image of Ellington’s deep well of intuitive inspiration, implying no need for help from anybody else. Second, they gave the public something to imagine about an instrumental piece, making it easier to relate to. And third, they were an offering to journalists and musicologists to repeat and thus guarantee that the two main points stayed in circulation.
The stories are so entertaining that writers have been happy to oblige. They know better, and they usually hedge a bit, but still they repeat the stories as if they might be true. For In a Sentimental Mood, Ellington claimed that he offered the piece spontaneously at a late-night social event in the North Carolina Mutual Building in Durham, North Carolina, after a dance. Two women were arguing with each other, so Ellington invented the lovely melody as a way to pacify them. Ellington’s actual contribution to the song was probably limited to the harmonies of the main section, chromatic and effective, and the conventional bridge as a routine point of contrast.
One of Ellington’s main rivals as an arranger in the mid-1930s was Sy Oliver, who worked for Lunceford. Many of Oliver’s arrangements inspire superb performances from Lunceford’s musicians to produce some of the greatest mid-decade swing. Oliver’s playful arrangement of Mood Indigo, for example, is a sterling transformation of Ellington’s more weighty arrangement of the material Bigard brought from New Orleans. Oliver’s harmonic daring and the high standards of musicianship in the Lunceford band allowed them to match Ellington in modernity and sophistication.
Oliver liked to do one thing that Ellington usually did not do: he was fond of blending novelty, modernity, and swing. Sometimes the results are a little too cute, but at its best this approach reaches a winsome and cosmopolitan humor that is not easy to attain in instrumental music. Organ Grinder’s Swing (1936) is the most famous example and one of the great treasures of the period. The humor comes from the manipulation of the simple street song through swing sophistication, strong blues, imaginative instrumental colors, modulation, and a good sense of drama achieved through dynamics.
When Ellington did aim for novelty the results were, inevitably, classier. We could think about the series of “concerto” pieces recorded beginning in 1936 in this way. A concerto is a type of piece from the classical world written for soloist and group. In 1936, Ellington recorded four pieces with the word “concerto” in the title, each for a different musician in his band: Echoes of Harlem (Cootie’s Concerto), Clarinet Lament (Barney’s Concerto), Yearning for Love (Lawrence’s Concerto), and Trumpet in Spades (Rex’s Concerto). Here was a new three-minute way to catch high-brow credentials.
Trumpet in Spades (Rex’s Concerto) is designed for Rex Stewart, who had been with the band since 1934. The cadenza-like displays of rapid playing instantly recall virtuoso figures typical of classical concertos, but the quality here is very weak. In 1937, Stewart developed a technique known as “half valve.” This was yet another way to get quirky vocal effects from the instrument, a fresh alternative to the full-throated freak playing of Oliver, Miley, Nanton, and Williams. Like those players, Stewart’s technical control helped him establish his own creative voice, which Ellington then incorporated into the band. Boy Meets Horn (1938) puts the half-valve technique front and center. It was followed by the lovely Morning Glory in 1940. Discs for both give co-composing credit to Ellington and Stewart.
Clarinet Lament (Barney’s Concerto), co-credited to Ellington and Bigard, shows off the Creole clarinetist with classical-like flourishes blended with an abundance of blues. As with Trumpet in Spades, the classical touches are the weakest parts of the piece. The harmonic foundation for the main part of the piece is borrowed from Basin Street Blues, and at times Clarinet Lament almost sounds like an arrangement of that famous tune. Discs for Echoes of Harlem (Cootie’s Concerto) show co-credit to Ellington and Williams in early pressings but not later (“Duke got his name on the label,” explained Williams. “I didn’t mind”). Echoes of Harlem may be the best of the four concertos from 1936, with superb melodic invention from Williams. As with so many Ellington recordings, subtle details in the accompaniment enrich everything.
Meanwhile Johnny Hodges continued to produce. Ellington did not craft a concerto for him, but Jeep’s Blues (Jeep was one of Hodges’s nicknames) was a jukebox hit in 1938. The disc co-credits Ellington and Hodges; the latter was undoubtedly responsible for the splendid tune. Like Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue, Jeep’s Blues found powerful renewal at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1956. The later performance moves at a more majestic tempo than the original, and it is more firmly framed as a vehicle for Hodges. Today it is better known than the version from 1938.
Left uncredited were Hodges’s vital contributions to the songs I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart (1938), Never No Lament (1940), and Don’t Get Around Much Anymore (1942). I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart was another big seller that quickly generated an attractive revenue stream for its copyright holders—Mills, Ellington, and lyricist Henry Nemo—through many cover versions. Don’t Get Around Much Anymore, based on another melodic hook from Hodges, also enjoyed great success. Among its many covers is one by Paul McCartney (1987), who cleverly arranged it as a retrospective rocker. All of these songs were initially conceived as instrumental numbers, and in their initial recordings the band is so good performing them that they should take first place in any assessment.
Hodges brought exquisite passion to any melody he was assigned to play, improvised first-rate blues and hot solos, and crafted melodic hooks that became hits. He was central to the Swing Era success of the Ellington collective. “Corner after corner there were jukeboxes, and you could go forty blocks up Harlem and never stop hearing Johnny Hodges,” recalled publicist Helen Oakley.
Ellington’s small-group spinoffs from the late 1930s—Rex Stewart and His Fifty-Second Street Stompers, Barney Bigard and His Jazzopaters, Cootie Williams and His Rug Cutters, Johnny Hodges and His Orchestra, and Ivie Anderson and Her Boys from Dixie—are very much part of the period. Other bands were following this model, too. Recordings like these were cheap to make and they satisfied the hungry market. The performances tend to be less fancy in arrangement with plenty of great solos, showing a more informal side of the Ellington band. Writers sometimes frame them as a chance for the leader to make trial runs on new material, but they were also a strategic, late 1930s extension of the Ellington ecosystem: they gave his collaborators a chance to put their creativity on a record with their names prominently displayed. Some of them rank among the finest jewels in the Ellington discography.
Swing was also fruitful for Juan Tizol, the composer, extractor, and trombone virtuoso from Puerto Rico. Tizol developed a specialty in so-called Latin jazz. Ellington has received high praise for this side of the band’s portfolio, but there is no doubt that Tizol was the central figure.
Tizol himself did not use the term “Latin jazz” but instead talked about his “Spanish melodies.” The first recorded by Ellington was Porto Rican Chaos (1935); the title was soon changed to Moonlight Fiesta. The traditional clave rhythm prominent throughout the Caribbean and Sub-Saharan Africa is immediately recognizable. Next came the celebrated Caravan (1936). The first recording of Caravan, made by Barney Bigard’s Jazzopators, does not use the clave rhythm as a foundation but instead features a vigorous riff accompaniment. The entire basis for the success of Caravan is there in this 1936 recording—the effective combination of the haunting melody, its skillful harmonization, and the driving riff. The disc names only Tizol as composer, so we may assume that it represents something close to his original vision for the piece. Ellington apparently composed the place-holding bridge and he probably came up with the title.
When Ellington changed the title of Porto Rican Chaos to Moonlight Fiesta, he was aiming to stimulate the listener’s imagination. The title Porto Rican Chaos belongs to the same tradition of 1920s dance pieces as Black Bottom Stomp and East St. Louis Toodle-O. The title Moonlight Fiesta is less dance oriented and more evocative, along the lines of Mood Indigo. The title Caravan points toward the Middle East. It frames Tizol’s most successful piece—by measure of number of covers it may be the most successful piece ever associated with Ellington—with a tease of exoticism.
Tizol biographer Basilio Serrano notes how easy it was for Tizol’s Spanish melodies to include a Middle Eastern flavor, and he suggests that the medieval history of the Iberian Peninsula, with cultural connections to northern Africa and the Middle East, is audible here. After the initial 1936 recording, subsequent recordings from the Ellington Orchestra pile on big wet splashes of exoticism, with more emphasis on the harmonic minor scale, odd dissonance from the piano, a gong from Burma, clave, and unusual scoring. When a piece becomes this successful, follow-ups will be expected, and Tizol delivered. In the next few years he moved between compositions that were partly Latin and partly exotic in this Middle Eastern way. These include the important piece Bakiff (1941), which paved the way for The Far East Suite album (1963–1964) by Ellington and Strayhorn, just as Caravan paved the way for Dizzy Gillespie’s A Night in Tunisia.
The unassuming Tizol was quietly extraordinary. He may have been the only musician in the world who had this global set of sensibilities—Latin jazz with African-derived grooves, European classical technique at a high level, Spanish-Middle Eastern flavor, and jazz phrasing. He brought to that breadth of musical experience an exceptional skill set of performance, arrangement, and composition. His contributions were singular, but he largely remained in the shadows.
Perdido (also known as Tizol’s Stomp) is another quasi-Latin standby, second in popularity to Caravan among Tizol’s compositions. Tizol composed it on a train on the way to New Orleans. He said it was his response to the sound of the word itself, which is the name of a street in the neighborhood Louis Armstrong grew up in. Perdido is a riff-based tune very much in the New Orleans tradition (Canal Street Blues, Muskrat Ramble). Ellington’s orchestra recorded it in 1941, and it did not take long before “every orchestra began to play my number,” as Tizol proudly reflected. As with Caravan, lyrics were later added to turn it into a song, causing not just Ellington’s name but also a lyricist’s name to be added to the credits. “[Duke] took credit for everything I did,” Tizol said.
Tizol’s compositional talent blossomed further in 1938, which turned out to be a rich year for him in slow-tempo ballads. Have a Heart, with lyrics added later to turn it into Lost in Meditation, is a lovely ballad that ranks with the very best. Pyramid is another first-rate composition, and so is Gypsy Without a Song, which became one of Tizol’s personal favorites from his own portfolio. The late 1930s were challenging for Ellington, but Tizol was coming up with fantastic material. Ellington’s name got attached to all of these tunes as co-composer, though it is not clear what, if anything, he had to do with them. Together with Tizol and others in the orchestra he probably worked on details of the arrangements. But one might assume that Tizol’s compositions were typically more complete than those from other sidemen.
Renewal
To have a career in popular music means learning how to deal with contradiction and compromise, and for African American musicians especially, this challenge has long been daunting. The possibility of reaching large white audiences, with tastes and expectations that are not necessarily the same as those of black audiences, perpetually beckons. Choices must be made. During the Swing Era, with its unprecedented audience base for jazz, climbing this ladder meant segregated white venues. “Our type of music wasn’t really for black people,” was how Cootie Williams saw things. “While we were on tour we were playing for white audiences. The rich, upper class of blacks would come but mostly we would be playing for whites.” Writers like Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray, the cream of the talented tenth, adored Ellington and wrote about his music with great eloquence, but they were hardly representative of African American society as a whole. There were sold out, “colored-only” dances on his tours, but these were a small part of the business plan. Ellington was hardly unusual in facing this dilemma, but since his artistic identity was centered on “authentic Negro music,” the tension must have been keenly felt.
The money was in chasing white audiences, yet more and more white bands were mastering up-tempo jazz so the competition was strong. Goodman was leading the way, and right behind were Jimmy Dorsey, Tommy Dorsey (who picked up Sy Oliver as arranger in 1939), Artie Shaw, Glenn Miller, and Woody Herman. They all became household names. So did Armstrong, Ellington, Calloway, Lunceford, Webb, and Basie, but not at the same level. More than a few of Ellington’s song hits sold much better when recorded by white bands than by his band.
One had to have a niche in such a large field of competition, especially given the structural disadvantages for African Americans. For Ellington this meant sophistication, modernity, and art. This inevitably gave rise to a second set of contradictions and compromises that he aimed to solve with an elusive blend of accessibility and sophistication, popularity and modernity, commercialism and art. A 1936 article from Variety surveyed the musical preferences of college students, with a correspondent from Dartmouth complaining how Ellington’s “weird chords have grown stale.” The student noted that Ellington’s was one of several African American bands “who fail to impress noticeably.”
Along with these challenges, Ellington was no longer receiving the same level of preferential treatment from Mills he had enjoyed during the early 1930s. Benny Goodman’s band performed a celebrated and lucrative swing concert at Carnegie Hall in January 1938, and it was prominently featured in the movie Hollywood Hotel. Ellington expected Mills to make similar things happen. When they didn’t, he decided, in early 1939, to hire new management. Ellington could measure success through sustained gigs at the new Cotton Club in midtown Manhattan, through Pullman cars and high-level touring, through a second whirlwind trip to Europe, and through a number of successful recordings. But at the height of the Swing Era there was still a sense that African American bands were second tier. A 1940 article in the trade magazine DownBeat summed up the imbalance with a less than subtle subtitle: “Negro Leaders Could Make More Money Running a Rib Joint.”
It is in this context that we should understand Ellington’s opinion, headlined in DownBeat, that “Swing Is Stagnant.” In four articles (February, April, May, and July, 1939), he made his case. “Nothing of importance, nothing new, nothing either original or creative has occurred in the swing field during the last few years,” he blasted. He blamed the problem on adolescent audiences, unqualified and uninformed critics, and commercialism (not necessarily in that order). Swing relied too much on formulaic arrangements with the same ideas repeated again and again. Exciting rhythm cannot stand on its own for very long but thrives when accompanied by imagination and expressive range, he explained.
He had high praise for William “Count” Basie, though. “Basie’s outstanding musical quality has been unpretentiousness . . . Undoubtedly the greatest rhythm section in the business, they are the greatest exponents of that emotional element of bouncing buoyancy, otherwise known as swing.” The Count Basie Orchestra was a primary force in the late 1930s, and Ellington, like every other bandleader, had to pay attention. Basie grew up in New Jersey but made a name for himself in Kansas City, Missouri, where by 1929 he had taken a position as pianist and arranger for Bennie Moten. In the early 1930s, while most of the country was in severe retraction, Kansas City thrived as a center for the cattle industry with a busy entertainment district. It magnetized musical talent from neighboring states to the south and west. By 1935, Basie was leading a band that included some of the best musicians from the entire region, including tenor saxophonist Lester Young. He took his all-star unit to New York City and in 1937 scored a hit record with One O’Clock Jump.
In 1938, with the help of on-location radio broadcasts from the Famous Door on Fifty-Second Street, Basie swept through the Swing Era like a prairie fire, a tremendous infusion of regional energy into the national scene. As Ellington implied, the music was rich but not complicated in a conceptual way. Basie was not aiming to inspire the listener to interpret his music and think about it as art. As Albert Murray put it, “Refining the basics that make blues music swing is the Basie trademark.”
The rhythm section in Basie’s band was based on a new approach to how the bass player (Walter Page), the piano player (Basie), the guitarist (Freddie Green), and the drummer (Jo Jones) all worked together to lay down the foundational groove for the band and dancers. These musicians took Kansas City’s regional practice to the highest level. The rhythm section was bluesy and driving, but it was also light and airy. On top of this came vigorous riffs, subtle and imaginative. On top of the riffs came soloists such as Young and Buck Clayton, each bluesy, driving, light, and airy in his own way. Young, Basie, and their colleagues infused their music with blues understatement. The Basie band flourished in 1938 as the newest, most modern thing around, and anyone interested in “authentic Negro music” could hardly ignore them.
The jam session, the jazz institution that most directly carried forward the communal focus of the ring shout, played a huge role in Kansas City. The scene reminded bass player Gene Ramey of church revival meetings, “where the preacher and the people are singing, and there’s happenings all around.” A regional, ear-playing tradition shaped the Basie band and invigorated jazz; it was similar to what the New Orleanians had done when they moved to Chicago in the early 1920s. Ellington channeled jam session ideas into meticulously managed compositions and arrangements; the Basie band did something similar, though with less intervention.
Riff-based arrangements were not new. There are many recordings from the 1930s that prominently feature riffs, including, most famously, the Fletcher Henderson band’s arrangements (1928, 1932, and 1933) of Jelly Roll Morton’s King Porter Stomp, which Goodman purchased and turned into his theme music (1935). Basie’s band did more riff arrangements and did them more imaginatively. Sidemen competed with one another good naturedly to toss off new riffs for trial runs. “We always had somebody in those sections who was a leader, who could start something and get those ensembles going,” explained Basie. “I mean while somebody would be soloing in the reed section, the brasses would have something going in the background, and the reed section would have something to go with that . . . And the thing about it that was so fantastic was this: Once those guys played something, they could damn near play it exactly the same the next night.”
In some of the greatest Basie recordings, riffs combine to form complex, interlocking structures, a sort of riff mosaic. The final few choruses of One O’Clock Jump, indebted to earlier achievements from Kansas City, put this kind of energy on the national map. Every Tub (1938), arranged by trombonist Eddie Durham, finds the rhythm section and soloists (and certainly the dancers) bouncing off the riff mosaics one after the other, each chorus freshly made. In Volcano (1939), one riff stays steady while others are added in successive blues choruses to create a layered and building effect. Five months later Ellington did something similar in his celebrated Ko-Ko.
How could Ellington be the most modern thing in jazz in 1927 and still keep that position a dozen years later? He succeeded during the Cotton Club era because he and Miley invented a fresh black modernity, delivered with compelling beauty. His solution in 1939 and early 1940 was to find a new compromise with swing. It was based on three important hires who immediately reinvigorated the band: Billy Strayhorn, Jimmie Blanton, and Ben Webster. The results were so spectacular that for many Ellington fans the 1940–1941 band produced the greatest music of Ellington’s entire career. Strayhorn stayed the longest and his impact was pervasive until his death in 1967 (see Chapter 4). Both Blanton and Webster were from the region that was responsible for the special qualities of the Basie band. They helped to instantly integrate Ellington with the current stylistic field.
Ellington once described his band as “an accumulation of personalities, tonal devices.” As we have seen, the idea that the band’s diverse personalities were mere “tonal devices” that inspired the leader to write in idiosyncratic ways is more misleading than it is informing. In this case, as in many others, the three new tonal devices in 1940 were tremendous musicians whose creative labors account for some of the greatest accomplishments of the year.
Blanton (1918–1942) was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He died young, before he was interviewed extensively, so little is known of his life. During his few years with Ellington he was known to practice the string bass incessantly, a habit that must have begun as a child, inspired by his mother who was a professional musician. He studied violin, string bass, and music theory at Tennessee State University. In October 1939 several of Ellington’s musicians heard him playing at an after-hours place in St. Louis. They quickly fetched Ellington from his hotel room and he hired the twenty-year-old on the spot. He was featured in front of the band, dressed in a new white suit, the very next night. His teacher provided a list of symphonic bass players with whom Blanton could take refresher lessons while he toured with Ellington.
Blanton instantly strengthened the rhythm section. He had a rich and focused tone, a flawless ear, and, as Ellington put it, “those precision notes in the right places, so that we could float out on the great and adventurous sea of expectancy with his pulse and foundation behind us.” By the time the band got to Indianapolis Blanton was taking a solo in Sophisticated Lady. He could improvise as if one of the horn soloists at fast tempos. Ellington featured him in a series of recorded duets for piano bass (for example, Pitter Panther Patter, 1940) that established a new model for how to play a jazz solo on bass.
Jack the Bear (March 1940) was a delightful if modest feature for him. A favorite of Albert Murray’s, the recording begins with a playful mosaic of riffs, light and not too busy, to make a nice call and response between the band and Blanton. At the end, Blanton stretches out with a full sixteen-bar solo, increasingly highlighted as the others drop out. Improvised choruses and a section of call-and-response riffs from the horns fill out the performance. But even when he was not featured like this Blanton’s presence was huge. “His amazing talent sparked the entire band,” insisted Rex Stewart.
Blanton’s tragically short life ended on July 30, 1942, in California at a sanatorium for victims of tuberculosis. In his room, the only decoration was a photograph of his close friend and bandmate, Ben Webster.
Webster’s entry into Ellington’s band on January 22, 1940, was not the same sort of rescue from anonymity that Blanton’s was. He had already played with Ellington during 1935 and 1936, and after that he established himself as a soloist in bands led by Moten, Henderson, Calloway, Andy Kirk, and Benny Carter. This hire was a plum for Ellington. With Webster, Bigard (when he swapped out his clarinet for alto sax), Hodges, Hardwick, and Carney, Ellington could make claim to having the world’s greatest saxophone section.
Webster (1909–1973) was born and grew up in Kansas City where he soaked up the style. As a child he learned violin and piano, facilitated by the natural gift of perfect pitch. At age sixteen he was befriended by the great pianist and arranger Mary Lou Williams, then a precocious fifteen-year-old who worked with him on his piano skills. He attended Wilberforce University in Ohio, where he was a classmate of Horace Henderson, soon to be an arranger for his brother Fletcher. Back in Kansas City he got to know Basie, who coached him on piano some more. In Amarillo, Texas, he took sax lessons from Lester Young’s father. He was the same age as Lester Young and the two of them frequently practiced together in the summer of 1929. He was five years younger than Coleman Hawkins, whom he greatly admired. By 1930 he was playing with a touring band that moved through Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Kansas City, and the entire region.
Young and Hawkins were the leading tenor saxophonists of the late 1930s. At his best, Webster was in their league, and he was at his best with Ellington. Suddenly, Ellington had a tenor who could match the swing and drive of Blanton yet also had considerable flexibility. Perhaps Ellington also knew that Webster liked to compose. “Ben Webster is not only one of the greatest exponents of the tenor saxophone,” explained Rex Stewart, “but he is also a talented arranger, composer . . .” Webster’s stature as a soulful performer has overshadowed these abilities, but given his distinguished upbringing they are hardly surprising. His compositional ability contributed to two of the greatest Ellington pieces from the glorious year of 1940.
“A lot of guys didn’t know that In a Mellotone is Ben’s tune,” explained bass player and friend Milt Hinton, an impeccable source. He’s right: there is no disc credit for Webster, and his name is rarely mentioned in connection with this much-loved piece. It was one of the hits of 1940, and it has been covered many times. In a Mellotone is based on the chords for Rose Room (composed in 1917 by Art Hickman), which was the piece that the legendary guitarist Charlie Christian, from Oklahoma, improvised on for forty-five minutes when he auditioned for Benny Goodman in 1939 (the Goodman Sextet’s recording from October must provide a glimpse of what Christian played on that occasion). Rose Room was undoubtedly one of the pieces that were routinely used for jam sessions. That made it easy for Webster to compose a tune to go along with the chords, a common way of creating new pieces. Superb solos by Williams and Hodges add to the stunning success of the original recording of In a Mellotone from September 1940. As usual, there is no information about where the arranging details came from; they may have come from Webster, from Ellington, from the group, or from some informal combination. It has been assumed that Ellington arranged the call and response between the theme and the trombones, followed by the riveting dialogue between Williams and the saxophones.
As successful as In a Mellotone was, the first and most important tune that Webster gave to Ellington was something he had named “Shuckin’ and Stiffin’.” He offered this piece soon after joining in January. “I just wrote this tune and Duke is gonna record it,” he excitedly told Hinton. Ellington substituted Cotton Tail for Webster’s risqué title. Cotton Tail has been highly praised—Gunther Schuller gushed that it “changed the face of jazz”—but most of the credit has indefensibly gone to Ellington. It now seems clear that Webster contributed the main theme, two choruses of terrific improvisation, and an arranged chorus for the sax section. What is left are superb musicianship from the band and splendid arranging touches (either from Ellington or Strayhorn or both) that lifted Webster’s great material to the highest level.
Four months earlier, in September 1939, the Basie band had recorded Lester Leaps In, a display piece for Lester Young, Webster’s teenage friend and now a well-known soloist. A month after that Coleman Hawkins recorded his legendary version of Body and Soul, a stunning, three-minute, tour de force entirely dominated by Hawkins. It must have seemed natural to introduce Ellington’s new tenor saxophonist with a display piece of his own. And all the better that Webster had written the theme himself: Ellington could claim composer credit, and in exchange Webster would get his moment in the spotlight, the Ellington ecosystem holding strong. Just as In a Mellotone is based on the chords for Rose Room, Cotton Tail is based on a modified version of the chords for Gershwin’s I Got Rhythm, another standard of the jam sessions.
There is no introductory material for Cotton Tail, just an eruption of high energy from Blanton and Greer in support of Webster’s splendid theme, which emphasizes nonharmonic tones on the ninth, fourth, flatted fifth, and sixth degrees above the changing chords. This theme is very hip, a strut down Fifty-Second Street, the center of jazz modernism in 1940. It has been related to proto-bebop with prescient credit to Ellington, but it is much more likely that the connection to bebop here came from Webster, who had been making a study of Coleman Hawkins. Hawkins (and also Young, to a lesser extent) was experimenting with precisely this set of intervals to invent a new melodic idiom in solos like Body and Soul. Webster picked up the modern vocabulary and turned out a sharp melody. It is possible that Ellington (or more likely Strayhorn, who was also studying nascent bebop closely) edited and improved Webster’s theme. We will probably never know. All we know is that Ellington took credit for the whole thing.
After the theme Webster begins his famous solo, two choruses lasting over a minute and occupying a third of the piece. The solo packs the power of Webster’s Kansas City tutorial. It is a worthy answer to Lester Leaps In and Body and Soul. Just as Ellington said about Basie, there is nothing pretentious here, just robust melody that builds nicely and is full of wonderful effects. Webster offers an impressive range of sax vocalizations, from breathy and suggestive near the beginning to shrieking at the high point. As critic Stanley Crouch put it, Webster was good at making “a chord as much an assemblage of colors as pitches.” The logic of the solo is enhanced by the transitional section between the two choruses, where Ellington and Blanton provide harmonic tension. The lively chorus for the saxophone section that follows was also composed by Webster.
Another Webster highlight from 1940 is the ballad All Too Soon. Here his contribution is a wonderful solo. Lawrence Brown’s muted solo is beautiful, too, and when Webster follows him with less reserve and more effusion the combined effect is marvelous. Someone (either Ellington or Strayhorn) had the cogent idea of distinguishing the two solos by modulating up a half step with a fresh riff in the accompaniment. The flexible Webster was studying not just Hawkins and Young (and Hilton Jefferson, another tenor as well) but also his sectionmate Johnny Hodges, a connection that is evident in his ballad solos.
The reliable Juan Tizol also made a vital contribution in 1940. Conga Brava started as his elegant melody. The rhythmic-harmonic groove that supports the theme is moody and instantly engaging, a strong part of the piece’s identity. Tizol’s melody is stylistically similar to Caravan, except that it has a length of ten bars. A ten-bar phrase is irregular, in terms of the stylistic norms of popular music and dance music, which rely on the predictability of four-bar subphrases that form eight-bar phrases that are then combined into thirty-two-bar choruses. The contrasting section following the main phrase (repeated) is seven bars. Ellington had experimented with irregular phrases before, in pieces like Creole Rhapsody. Here the technique is used in a more effortless way.
Webster has a long solo in Conga Brava that works well, though he seems a little uncertain about how to handle the ten-bar phrases. Building a piece in pastiche style out of contrasting strains—one theme after another, often with a single repetition, the procedure that dominated the ragtime era—was still Ellington’s preferred strategy in 1940. It made it easy to combine material from different people, in this case Tizol, Webster, and the work of the arrangers. The shifts of mood in Conga Brava can seem jarring, as we go from the lovely and mysterious atmosphere of the main theme to the mocking, brassy contrast of the seven-bar theme, then to Webster’s earthy saxophone. It helps that each section is so strong on its own. If any of the various parts of the piece were weaker, the quirky combination would not be quite so palatable.
Concerto for Cootie is one of the classics from the 1940 “miracle year,” as one biographer has described it. No piece captures Ellington’s public image of elegance and innovation better than this one. Though it is firmly associated with the leader, Concerto for Cootie was the product of a collaborative method, like most of the 1940 highlights.
R. D. Darrell wrote about the great Miley pieces around 1930 with the false assumption that Ellington was the sole creative force, reducing Miley to mere executer of the great composer’s melodic genius. Concerto for Cootie inspired equally influential commentary, and it has been equally one-sided. In 1954, André Hodeir, a composer and critic trained at the Conservatoire de Paris, devoted an entire book chapter to it. Never before had there been such close attention to details of an Ellington piece. Hodeir’s book was highly influential through the English translation, Jazz: Its Evolution and Essence (1956), which shaped the thinking of Gunther Schuller and Martin Williams, for example, two writers whose work still looms large in jazz criticism.
The title of Hodeir’s chapter—“A Masterpiece: Concerto for Cootie”—is revealing: masterpieces are written by isolated geniuses, not by collectives. Hodeir argues that the greatest thing about the piece is its unity, such as never could have come from improvising musicians, even an Armstrong or a Charlie Parker. It could come only from someone dedicated to composition “in the real sense of the word.” This sense of distinguishing “real” composition from “less real” composition does a lot of earnest but ham-fisted work in the discourse of prestige that surrounds Ellington.
Hodeir observed how well the piece had aged during the fourteen years since it was first recorded, and that impression still holds today. It sounds fresh and vital, not at all a dated piece of Swing Era ephemerality. What stands above all is the brilliant performance from Cootie Williams. Just as people today who first hear East St. Louis Toodle-O and Black and Tan Fantasy are stunned by the freshness and integrity of Bubber Miley’s playing, so does Cootie Williams’s playing here immediately capture the listener.
Here is another piece generated by the Miley method, with Williams creating a melody that was the starting point. As with Miley, what is critical is Williams’s conception of how to perform the melody. With virtuoso brilliance, each section features a different skill set. First he uses a mute, and he plays the theme with a saucy vibrato. In the next section he uses a tighter mute with less vibrato. Then comes the kind of freak music he first learned to play when he took over for Miley in 1929. To round off this first part of the piece (which we could describe as AABA), he returns to the tight mute of section one, now with only slight vibrato.
There follows an expansive middle section, with a new theme and a new key, and to deliver it Williams breaks into the fully open sound of his golden trumpet. It is a glowing, radiant moment. This section is also marked by pronounced bending of pitch. The new theme nicely contrasts with the more confined theme of the first section: one turns in on itself, the other expands, and the differences are beautifully complemented by the varied performing techniques. It is a bravura demonstration of jazz trumpet playing, variety of technique splendidly harnessed to expressive melodic invention. Concerto for Cootie and No One Else, might have been the title.
Like Cotton Tail and Conga Brava, some of the phrases in Concerto for Cootie fall in ten-bar lengths. We may assume that Ellington added this detail. The phrasing is irregular, with sprightly details of extension and retraction, and this becomes part of the dynamic texture. The unfolding dialogue between soloist and group is loaded with a snappy variety of crisp and engaging exchange, the orchestra following Williams’s lead like a deft jitterbugger. The responses harmonically turn the phrase in different directions, always hip and always tight. In classical music, dialogue between soloist and group is a fundamental feature of concerto form, and it is something for which Ellington, with expertise in the African American tradition of call and response, was well suited. Too much emphasis on the soloist in a concerto can make the group seem superfluous while the soloist strays into empty display. If the group is too rich, then the soloist feels hampered and diminished.
What remains to discuss from Concerto for Cootie is the first thing the listener hears—the stunning introduction. This passage gracefully puts the main theme in a slightly different emotional context—a classier context, we could say. That is due to its greater harmonic and contrapuntal complexity, all of it flowing by more rapidly and with greater richness relative to the main body of the piece. In the 1936 concertos Clarinet Lament (Barney’s Concerto) and Trumpet in Spades (Rex’s Concerto), Ellington scrambled to compose pseudo cadenzas as allusions to the classical tradition of concertos. The results were ineffective. For the introduction to Concerto for Cootie he didn’t have to scramble.
In the meantime, Ellington had hired someone who knew a lot about that world and could deliver it on demand. It now seems that the introduction was composed by Billy Strayhorn. It is a moment of grandeur, an instant atmosphere of expansive elegance, almost like a fanfare to the virtuoso display that will follow. This single stroke of majesty, understated in some ways, is completely appropriate to the occasion. It is very different from the simpler—and often unfocused—introductions Ellington himself routinely added to many pieces.
Strayhorn’s authorship of this phrase was not publicly suggested until 2002, thanks to intensive study of his music by musicologist Walter van de Leur. The question immediately arises: how else might Strayhorn have contributed to the miracle year of 1940, in ways that are not quite so obvious? The more one studies Strayhorn and the marvelous accomplishments of this period, the clearer the answer seems to be: Strayhorn’s contribution was as important as anyone’s. It may even be that he was the musician most responsible for the brilliant surge in quality that happily defines the swing renewal of the Ellington collective.