The Rest is Noise. Alex Ross
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happily spend month after month tinkering with his material, Ellington had a fundamentally collaborative temperament, and composition on the operatic scale defeated him. He did use his sketches in two extraordinary instrumental works, both of which mix jazz and classical devices. Ko-Ko, written in 1939, evokes the drum-and-dance ceremonies that slaves once performed on Sunday afternoons in New Orleans. Anticipating the postwar modal jazz of Miles Davis, it is derived almost entirely from an E-flat-minor Aeolian scale. A driving four-note figure echoes the Morse-code rhythm of the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth, as the Ellington scholar Ken Rattenbury points out. Ellington takes a long solo in the middle, dancing between thick Romantic harmonies and Debussyan whole-tone chords. The piece works up to a towering six-note dissonance that sets an F-flat dominant seventh against B-flat, not unlike the “Da-doo-da” chords in Porgy and Bess. But Ellington doesn’t use modernist harmony to connote conflict, crisis, and collapse. Instead, he makes it the deep background from which solos emerge and into which they disappear. It’s the way things are. In an interview, Ellington pointed out a discord in one of his latest compositions. “That’s the Negro’s life,” he said. “Hear that chord!” Ellington played it again. “That’s us. Dissonance is our way of life in America. We are something apart, yet an integral part.”
The other spin-off from Boola was the forty-five-minute swing symphony Black, Brown and Beige, first presented at a historic 1943 concert at Carnegie Hall that marked Ellington’s twentieth anniversary as a bandleader. On that night the future that Will Marion Cook had pictured on Lookout Mountain became real: a black composer conquered the haughtiest of concert stages.
The occasion is palpable in the music. The first movement, Black, begins with drums pounding out a slow, martial pattern. Trumpets and saxophones declaim the opening theme, “Work Song,” while a trio of trombones hold an E-flat-major triad in first inversion. It has a Richard Strauss quality to it—Thus Spake Boola. Yet the fanfare represents, in Ellington’s words, “not a song of great Joy—not a triumphant song—but a song of Burden—a song punctuated by the grunt of Heaving a pick or axe.” The drums might be tom-toms beating in the jungle, warning of invaders. Proud Africa is under threat from the white West. In keeping with symphonic procedure, Ellington presents a contrasting theme, “Come Sunday,” which, in the never-to-be Boola opera, would have depicted slaves congregating, listening, and humming outside the doors of a steepled church. The soaring hymnal melody, as played by Johnny Hodges, is one of Ellington’s finest inspirations, and words were later added for Mahalia Jackson to sing. Throughout Black, these two themes undergo rigorous variation (“Reverse your figures,” as Cook said). The remaining two movements have their lulls—Ellington finished the score in his usual rush, with an assist from Billy Strayhorn—but in the end the work outshines every symphonic jazz piece of the time.
The reception of Black, Brown and Beige exposed many of the same anxieties over the mixing of races and genres that had shadowed Porgy and Bess. Aesthetic policemen on both sides of the classical-jazz divide effectively united in casting doubt on this latest attempt at “hybridic fusion.” The composer, critic, and future novelist Paul Bowles, writing in the New York Herald Tribune, called Ellington’s piece “formless and meaningless … a gaudy potpourri of tutti dance passages and solo virtuoso work.” He concluded that “the whole attempt to fuse jazz as a form with art music should be discouraged.” The producer and critic John Hammond, speaking for jazz purists, complained that Ellington had deserted “hot” jazz and fallen under highbrow influence.
Disappointed by the criticism, Ellington nonetheless persisted in employing extended forms. He and Strayhorn later put together a masterpiece of a film score for Anatomy of a Murder and a commanding series of jazz suites. Such Sweet Thunder, a twelve-movement 1957 work, took its title from some lines in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and they nicely sum up Ellington’s aesthetic: “I never heard / So musical a discord, such sweet thunder.”
In the 1967 television documentary On the Road with Duke Ellington, the grand old man of jazz was asked why he still toured the country with his band. Sitting in the back of a limousine on the way to the next date, Ellington replied: “Anyone who writes music has got to hear his music … There used to be days years ago when people would come out of conservatory, after investing the greater part of their lives, maybe ten years, and many times more, and … mastered all the devices of the masters and they’ve written symphonies, concertos, rhapsodies, and never got to hear them.” When he said this, Ellington might have been thinking of Will Marion Cook, or of Will Vodery, or of the “ex-colored” composer Maurice Arnold, or of any of the other invisible men. Cook dreamed of a “black Beethoven”; Ellington carved out his own brand of eminence, redefining composition as a collective art. Carnegie Hall was a hoot, but he didn’t need it.
Once, when the critic Winthrop Sargeant expressed the hope that jazz composers might rise to classical eminence, the Duke issued a gently devastating riposte, saying, in essence, thanks but no thanks: “I was struck by Mr. Sargeant’s concluding statement, that given a chance to study, the Negro will soon turn from boogie woogie to Beethoven. Maybe so, but what a shame!”
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