Cultural Amnesia (31 page)

DUKE ELLINGTON

Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington was born in Washington, D.C., in 1899. His musical
training was a compound of piano lessons and an early exposure to the heady cocktail of church music and burlesque theatre. His career as an orchestral leader began when he organized small
bands for parties. His first professional band, the Washingtonians, had only half a dozen players when it reached New York in 1923. At the Cotton Club in Harlem, the size of his band
increased to ten players or more, on its way to the later standard aggregate of sixteen—the full Ellington orchestra (usually billed as the Famous Orchestra) was usually no bigger than
that. But it could create its own world, and the truest statement ever made about Ellington’s supremacy was that his orchestra was his instrument. There was not only an Ellington era,
there were Ellington eras, of which perhaps the most fruitful was the period of the 1940–1941 band, when every sideman was a star. After making initial contact through his Newport Jazz
Festival LP of 1956, my own appreciation of Ellington started with the recorded works of that pre-war (pre-war for America) flowering in the early 1940s, and in the following set of notes I
try to reflect how, when I later ranged backwards and forwards in his
work, I started always from that sure base. Beginners now, I think, would do best to start there too,
so as to be never in doubt that they are dealing with a genius. When he died, he took with him a secret that no other modern composer, whether in jazz or in more formal music, has ever quite
recaptured—the secret of combining other people’s individual creativity into a larger vision. The best comparison, perhaps, is with Diaghilev. A prophet honoured in his own
country—partly because of Richard Nixon, who invited him to the White House and played the piano beside him—Ellington died in 1974.

Jitterbugs are always above you.

—DUKE ELLINGTON, QUOTED
IN
Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya
, EDITED BY NAT HENTOFF AND NAT SHAPIRO

E
LLINGTON
LOVED THE
dancers, and he was appalled by the very thought that jazz might “develop” to the point where they could no longer dance to it. When he said “jitterbugs are
always above you” he wasn’t really complaining. They might have kept him awake, but he wanted them to be there. He was recalling the sights and sounds of New York life that he got
into “Harlem Airshaft,” one of his three-minute symphonies from the early 1940s. If he had put the sounds in literally, one of his most richly textured numbers would have been just a
piece of literal-minded programme music like Strauss’s
Sinfonia Domestica
. But Ellington put them in creatively, as a concrete transference from his
power of noticing to his power of imagining. Ellington was always a noticer, and in the early 1940s he had already noticed what was happening to the art-form that he had helped to invent. He put
his doubts and fears into a single funny line. “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.” Characteristically he set the line to music, and it swung superbly. But
under the exultation there is foreboding. Ellington could see the writing on the wall, in musical notation. His seemingly flippant remark goes to the heart of a long crisis in the arts in the
twentieth century, and whether or not the crisis was a birth pang is still in dispute.

For Ellington it was a death knell. The art-form he had done so much to enrich depended, in his view, on its
entertainment value. But for the next generation of musicians the art-form depended on sounding like art, with entertaiment a secondary consideration at best, and at worst a cowardly concession
to be avoided. In a few short years, the most talented of the new jazz musicians succeeded in proving that they were deadly serious. Where there had been ease and joy, now there was difficulty
and desperation. Scholars of jazz who take a developmental view would like to call the hiatus a transition, but the word the bebop literati used at the time was all too accurate: it was a
revolution. The
ancien régime
was kept as a foundation only in the sense that it was pounded into the earth. Thousands of paired examples could be
adduced to make the difference audible. A simple case is the contrast between Ben Webster and John Coltrane in their respective heydays. As a sideman for Ellington, Webster played short solos on
some of the three-minute-miracle records made by the 1940–1941 band. It was the most star-studded yet best-integrated ensemble Ellington had in his whole career. Every soloist was
encouraged to give it everything he had in a brief space, with no room for cliché or even repetition: riffs were discouraged in favour of a legato flow which, though improvised at the
time, could have been written down afterwards and shown not a single stutter. Musicians of the calibre of Johnny Hodges, Cootie Williams and Rex Stewart customarily packed more into their
allotted few seconds than they later deployed in a whole evening when they were leading their own orchestras. But nobody packed more in than Webster. When I first heard him in action with
Ellington I thought he left even Coleman Hawkins sounding tentative. Webster’s solo on “Cottontail” was my favourite. After a few hearings I could hum and grunt every note of
it, and fifty-five years later that line of notes is still in my brain like the sonic equivalent of a neon sign on a nightclub with a long name, and I can even remember the exact texture of his
tone, substantial and burred like Sean Connery snoring. The name Ben Webster got into my head beside the other Webster, the one who was much possessed by death. Ben Webster, I thought, was much
possessed by Melody’s incestuous love affair with her brother Rhythm. As an adjective, “Websterian” took on a new, modern meaning, with modernism taken in the sense of the age
of drama happening again, in a new form
and in our time, but with all the primordial vitality of the poetic emerging from the savage. From Ben Webster’s recorded works
of that period, and especially when he was with Ellington, there was not a bar that I could forget. To remember it was effortless. To be remembered was what it demanded. As Lester Young was for
Count Basie, Ben Webster was for Ellington: the sideman in whose tone the orchestra’s entire texture was concentrated and projected.

Now put “Cottontail” aside, take a couple of decades to regain your breath, and listen to
John Coltrane subjecting some helpless standard to ritual murder. I won’t waste time trying to be funny about John Coltrane, because Philip Larkin has already done it, lavishing all his
comic invention on the task of conveying his authentic rage. (For those who have never read Larkin’s
All What Jazz
, incidentally, the references to
Coltrane are the ideal way in to the burning centre of Larkin’s critical vision.) There is nothing to be gained by trying to evoke the full, face-freezing, gut-churning hideosity of all the
things Coltrane does that Webster doesn’t. But there might be some value in pointing out what Coltrane doesn’t do that Webster does. Coltrane’s instrument is likewise a tenor
sax, but there the resemblance ends. In fact it is only recognizable as a tenor because it can’t be a bass or a soprano: it has a tenor’s range, but nothing of the voice that Hawkins
discovered for it and Webster focused and deepened. There is not a phrase that asks to be remembered except as a lesion to the inner ear, and the only purpose of the repetitions is to prove that
what might have been charitably dismissed as an accident was actually meant. Shapelessness and incoherence are treated as ideals. Above all, and beyond all, there is no end to it. There is no
reason except imminent death for the cacophonous parade to stop, a fact which steadily confirms the listener’s impression that there was no reason for it to start. In other words, there is
no real momentum, only velocity. The impressiveness of the feat depends entirely on the air it conveys that the perpetrator has devoted his life to making this discovery: supreme mastery of
technique has led him to this charmless demonstration of what he can do that nobody else can. The likelihood that nobody else would want to is not considered. It wouldn’t have been true,
either: nothing is more quickly copied than virtuosity, and Coltrane had a hundred clones. They didn’t swing either.

Here made manifest is the difference between the authoritarian and the authoritative.
Coltrane made listening compulsory, and you had to judge him serious because he was nothing else. Webster made listening irresistible. But such enchantment was bound to be suspect for a new
generation that was determined not to be patronized. The alleged progession from mainstream to modern jazz, with bebop as the intermediary, had a political component as well an aesthetic one, and
it was the political component that made it impossible to argue against at the time, and makes it difficult even now. The aesthetic component was standard for all the arts in the twentieth
century: one after another they tried to move beyond mere enjoyment as a criterion, a move which put a premium on technique, turned technique into subject matter, and eventually made professional
expertise a requirement not just for participation but even for appreciation. (In architecture, the turning point came with Le Corbusier: laymen who questioned his plans for rebuilding Paris by
destroying it were told by other architects that they were incompetent to assess his genius.) The political component, however, was unique to jazz. It had to do with black dignity, a cause well
worth making sacrifices for. Unfortunately the joy of the music was one of the sacrifices. Dignity saw enjoyment as its enemy.

Swing was the essence of the enjoyment. In the late thirties the word “swing” was appropriated to a category
of big band jazz, which later became the music of the American war effort, and thus went on to conquer the world: in Japan, the first bobby-soxers appeared so soon after the surrender that they
might as well have been dropped from the B-29s. But swing had always been a staple component of jazz in any category, because jazz began as dance music, and without a detectable beat the dancers
would have been stymied. It need hardly be added that without a detectable beat there can be no variations on it: for syncopation to exist, there must first be a regular pulse. No matter how
complex, subtle and allusive it became, jazz had always contained that energizing simplicity. Unfortunately bebop had the technical means to eliminate it. The highly sophisticated
instrumentalists of the rhythm section were encouraged to display their melodic invention: in the hurtling fast numbers, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie played showers of notes that
deliberately suffocated any rhythmic pulse, while the rhythm instruments that might have contained the cascades within
a palpable tempo were instead intent on claiming equal
status by implying the beat instead of stating it. All the implications rarely added up to the explicit. The word “departure” was often heard in approval: everyone in the band
departed as far as possible from a predictable measure. (In classic jazz, there had never been anything metronomic about the predictable—syncopation took care of that—but the
compulsive innovators thought the essential expendable, as a brain grown too self-conscious might become bored with the regularity of its own heartbeat.) The result of the abandonment of a basic
linear propulsion was a breakneck impetus with no real excitement. Only in the slow numbers could the listener tell if the instrumentalists were in command of anything except their technique. The
upbeat stuff was a business simultaneously frantic and arid, a desert preening itself as a sandstorm; so it was no wonder that Ellington, a cool customer full of the authentic juice, thought it a
fraud.