The Guide to Classic Recorded Jazz (21 page)

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Authors: Tom Piazza

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BOOK: The Guide to Classic Recorded Jazz
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Page 50
Christian can also be heard, playing acoustic guitar, on one of the most interesting small-group jazz dates of the time (1941); available on
The Complete Edmond Hall/James P. Johnson/Sidney De Paris/Vic Dickenson Blue Note Sessions
(Mosaic MR6-109), the session teams Christian with Edmond Hall, one of jazz's finest clarinetists, bassist Israel Crosby (who set the groove on Teddy Wilson's "Blues in C Sharp Minor"), and boogie-woogie piano player Meade Lux Lewis playing not piano but the delicate-toned celeste. The unorthodox instrumentation and lack of drums made this a unique date; "Edmond Hall Blues" and "Profoundly Blue" have a mellow mood unlike almost anything else in jazz (the closest thing might be "Pagin' the Devil" by the Kansas City Six), but "Jammin' in Four'' and "Celestial Express" swing as hard as anything you've ever heard. The rest of this six-record set is also excellent, by the way.
Clarinetist Artie Shaw was Goodman's biggest direct competition as a bandleader; a brilliant instrumentalist and a maverick type of personality, he was willing to try anything he thought would sound good. In 1940 he formed a jazz small group to supplement his sometimes very commercial big-band performances; it was his answer, in effect, to the Goodman sextet, and he called it the Gramercy Five (named for a New York City telephone exchange). The group's total output is available on
The Complete Gramercy Five Sessions
(RCA/Bluebird 7637-2-RB). Actually, it was two groups; the eight sides recorded in 1940 feature Billy Butterfield on trumpet and Johnny Guarnieri (who was a member, intermittently, of Goodman's sextet as well) on, believe it or not, harpsichord. The 1945 sides feature Roy Eldridge on trumpet and modernist Dodo Marmarosa on piano. Some of this music is, as you might guess, very unusual sounding.
All of these recordings reflect the growing understanding of, and fascination with, the soloist. As four-four time got evened out, soloists were able to be ever more subtle in their approach to phrasing, and players like Christian, Lester Young, and Roy Eldridge began to construct longer phrases in which the notes of the solo of an earlier style would show up as the accented notes in a long melodic line. The most forward-looking leaders were trying to strike a balance between the demands of the soloist and the need to have an ensemble cohesion, as well as a formal aspect to the music, based on more than just solos. The public and musicians alike were more and more interested in what soloists were saying, but one genius had worked out a way to incorporate that interest into an ensemble fabric and formal design that would constitute perhaps the greatest achievement in jazz for the next thirty years. His name, of course, was Duke Ellington.
 
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Duke Ellington, Part 2
Just as he had with the New Orleans and early big-band traditions a decade earlier, in the mid-1930s and 1940s Duke Ellington used all the conventions of the swing big band to create a music that was steeped in the idiom, functioned the same way as swing music was supposed to function (i.e., as dance music), yet also stood apart from and above all other contemporary work, both in formal interest and in mastery of the tone colors and rhythmic flexibility available to an orchestrator for typical big-band instrumentation. Ellington recorded so much great music during this period, with so much variety, that it is hard to believe. Sadly, at present there is no collection from Columbia of Ellington's work of the mid-1930s (for an example of the kind of thing that is presently languishing in the vaults, listen to "Lazy Rhapsody" on
The 1930s: Big Bands
[Columbia CK 40651]). The end of the decade, however, has been well documented by a couple of collections.
The most readily available one is
Duke Ellington: Braggin' in Brass - The Immortal 1938 Year
(Portrait R2K 44395), a two-CD compendium of items that shows Ellington's range at the time, extending his understanding of riff pieces, mood pieces, song form, and instrumental sonority. We also watch Ellington's band members evolving into a repertory company of instantly identifiable voices, and we get a number of pieces designed to feature one or another of them, such as "Slap Happy," for baritonist Harry Carney, "Boy Meets Horn," a famous feature for cornetist Rex Stewart, and "Blue Light," presented in two takes, a showcase for Barney Bigard's clarinet.
Tunes like "Steppin' into Swing Society," "Hip Chic," and "Buffet Flat" seem initially to be conventional swing-era pieces, designed for dancing, but even these have unusual orchestrations and formal devices that create a unity that was not found in the conventional dance-band orchestrations of the time. "Steppin'," for example, sounds at first as if it is going to be a typical swing-era performance based on simple riffs. It begins with an ordinary-enough riff from the saxophones, which lasts eight bars. The saxophones are then accompanied by muted trumpets for another eight bars. Then the saxophones drop out, and the muted trumpets take over with their own mysterious riff for eight bars, after which the trombones surreptitiously creep in behind them for another eight bars, before taking over on the next eight bars, and so on. In other words, one section after another ''steps in" to the picture, easing out the previous section; Ellington pulls all this together at the end by an ingenious dovetailing of the sections, culminating in a simple statement of the first theme. This kind of witty and brilliant formal play is found throughout the 1938 sides.
 
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Also not to be missed here are stunning displays of ensemble virtuosity, like the title cut, and fine readings of Ellington popular tunes, like "I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart" and "Prelude to a Kiss." Unfortunately, the set is a fairly careless production, lacking a personnel listing for the band, although soloists are listed, and Nat Hentoff's liner notes aren't much help in understanding the music. The same exact program can be found on the first of four two-LP sets still available from the Smithsonian -
Duke Ellington 1938
(Smithsonian Collection R003), with very good liner notes by composer and conductor Gunther Schuller, author of two recommended studies of jazz,
Early Jazz
and
The Swing Era
; the other Smithsonian sets,
Duke Ellington 1939
(R010),
1940
(R013), and
1941
(R027), are impossible to recommend highly enough. All have liner notes that help you hear more in the music, adding the all-important aspect of the intellect (which was ever present in Ellington's work) to the easily available emotional component of the music, which requires no explication.
The Smithsonian's 1939 set contains material that supports the same kinds of remarks I've made about the 1938 sides; Ellington continues to extend and refine the essential aspects of the swing big-band style in tunes like "Old King Dooji" and "Solid Old Man"; but listen to the way in which, in ''Dooji," the initial two-note phrase the saxophones play is echoed, twisted, and reharmonized throughout the piece. Ellington would use this kind of motivic development throughout his career, one of the most notable examples being his extended piece "A Tone Parallel to Harlem" (available on both
Ellington Uptown
[Columbia CK 40836] and
The Great Paris Concert
[Atlantic 304-2]), in which the initial two-note trumpet pronunciation of the word "Harlem" is the figure in the carpet for the entire composition, showing up in numberless guises.
But something new was also beginning to happen in 1939; listen to the ensemble blend on "Way Low," for example. Ellington's grasp of how to combine instruments from different sections of the band to create unique sonorities (which he had explored to startling effect on "Mood Indigo") was getting more and more sophisticated. By this time, Billy Strayhorn, a classically trained pianist, orchestrator, and lyricist who was to be Ellington's musical alter ego for the rest of Strayhorn's life (he died in 1967), had joined the band, and it is possible that Ellington was stretching out even farther because he had someone new, and of a higher level than ever, to strut his stuff for. Listen, too, to the wild chords on "Bouncing Buoyancy," Ellington's satire on the boogie-woogie craze that was sweeping the country.
Late in the year, another important element of the band fell into place with the arrival of bassist Jimmy Blanton. Blanton's sound and technique, the clarity of his sound, and the logic of his note choices gave the band a new kind of rhythmic life. But even more than that, he was able to play solos that were as
 
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fleet and coherent as horn solos, radically expanding the potential role for the bass in any jazz ensemble. In "Tootin' through the Roof," Blanton's sound swells behind the band, heating things up, and in two duets between Ellington and Blanton, "Blues" and "Plucked Again,'' you can hear Blanton's technique, taste, swing, and ideas in sharp relief. He was to be featured extensively with the full band very soon thereafter.
Sepia Panorama
As good as the 1939 sides are, they are only a warm-up for the stunning series of recordings Ellington made for Victor beginning the next year. The presence of Strayhorn, the advent of Blanton, and the arrival of a new member of the saxophone section, tenorist Ben Webster, created a critical mass of new possibilities that pushed Ellington into an even higher creative orbit.
Duke Ellington: The Blanton-Webster Band
(RCA/Bluebird 5659-2-RB) presents all of Ellington's big-band commercial recordings for Victor made from 1940 until 1942 and is certainly one of the essential sets of jazz music. There is far too much on this three-CD set to go into here; an entire book could be written on these recordings alone. But a number of remarks are in order.
For one, Ellington seemed to be able to do anything he wanted at this point with the sound of his orchestra. Partly this had to do with the addition of Webster to the saxophone section. A group of five rather than four reeds gave more possibility for body, especially at the bottom end of the reeds' range, and a wider range of harmonic extension. The kinds of textural richness that Ellington was getting on pieces like "Jack the Bear" (a Blanton feature as well) and, especially, "Ko-Ko," in which the brass and reed voices mix, at the end, like layers of paint applied with a palette knife, were, and are, the kind of thing that inspires awe in other arrangers and orchestrators.
Along with the increased command of instrumental sonority comes a greater range, depth, and precision of emotional rendering. Ellington, as has been observed numerous times, always had something in mind that he wanted to convey - a mood, a picture, a moment - and this is what makes his work more than a collection of brilliant technical devices. Here, in 1940, we find the greatest resources ever arrayed in jazz at the service of a breathtaking human grandeur and sensitivity. "Dusk," for example, is shot through with unusual and exquisite writing for all the sections (such as the organlike reed chords behind Rex Stewart's cornet solo, which hark back to the foghorn chords on "Immigration Blues" on
Duke Ellington and His Orchestra - The Brunswick Era, Volume 1 (1926-1929)
[Decca/MCA MCAD-42325]), which creates a mood that is indescribable. Another performance of this stripe is Ellington's classic of erotic geography, "Warm Valley."
 
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Ellington's piano is right up front as a part of the ensemble, commenting, shaping, paraphrasing, and echoing the band's parts and providing its own motivic thread through the pieces, as it does on both "Dusk" and "All Too Soon," on which material from his piano introduction is echoed periodically throughout the piece, usually functioning as a reminder of some earlier mood. Ellington truly thought as an orchestrator when he was playing piano, as did Count Basie.
Ellington continued to use one section to comment on what another section was saying, not just in typical swing-era riff-counterpoint fashion but as competing personalities that undercut, egg on, or italicize what another section or soloist is saying. He had done this for a long time, but he was raising the technique to new heights, as on "Conga Brava," in which muted trumpets seem to mock Juan Tizol's decorous opening melody statement. Another factor in the ascendant as the year went on was the writing of Billy Strayhorn, who produced mood pieces like the beautiful "Chelsea Bridge" as well as more up-tempo compositions with characteristic Ellingtonian richness of form, such as "Raincheck" and "Johnny Come Lately," which uses some of the same kinds of unusual intervals as earlier Ellington items like "Old King Dooji.''
The number of compositions here that came to be regarded as Ellington classics is staggering. Others that can't go unmentioned include the up-tempo Ben Webster feature on "Cottontail," in which Webster gallops through the "I Got Rhythm" changes, giving way to some fantastic shout choruses from reeds and brass at the end. "Across the Track Blues," at first glance a string of solos on a relaxed, medium-tempo blues, becomes something more in the perfect, tasteful subtlety of the background and the sheer simplicity of the routine. "Across the Track Blues" seems to refer back, musically, to the 1929 "Saturday Night Function," available on
Early Ellington 1927-1934
(RCA/Bluebird 6852-2-RB), which, with its brooding mood and serial solos from clarinet, cornet, and trombone over simple backgrounds, transcended the form in much the same way.
"Harlem Airshaft" is another masterwork, a swinging dance tune with fantastic reed writing and a use of riffs and breaks that seems to telescope the entire jazz tradition. Ellington continues a series of portraits of black show business figures, which already included tributes to dancer Florence Mills ("Black Beauty") and stride pianist Willie "The Lion" Smith ("Portrait of The Lion"), with "A Portrait of Bert Williams" and "Bojangles (A Portrait of Bill Robinson)." "Main Stem" is an apocalyptic riff-based tune that builds up a momentum that must have occasioned many a heroic moment on the dance floors of the time. And there is also the original recording of the band's theme, "Take the 'A' Train," by Billy Strayhorn, with its solo by trumpeter Ray Nance, the

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