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ABSTRACT
Caravan is a popular jazz standard that is recorded frequently. The first recording of Caravan by Barney Bigard and his Jazzopators from December 19, 1936, credits Juan Tizol as the sole composer. However later recordings give credit to both Duke Ellington and Tizol as the composers and his manager, Irving Mills, as the lyricist. Because Ellington and Mills commonly used the band members’ ideas and compositions, it is perhaps easy to assume that the conception of Caravan follows a similar narrative. Despite Tizol’s insistence on compositional independence, trumpeter Rex Stewart contends that Caravan’s melody “evolved from another tune, Alabamy Home,” which is credited to Ellington. And indeed Alabamy Home and Caravan are quite similar in melody, harmony, and exotic affect. Inconsistent information in Stewart’s account and the fact that the first recording of Caravan was made three months before the Gotham Stompers had recorded Alabamy Home initially complicate Stewart’s assertion. However, a trombone part from the Ellington archive at the Smithsonian Institution for Alabamy Home, dated between 1926 and 1928, indicates that Alabamy Home was written first. I suggest that Tizol refined the exoticism of Alabamy Home, originally devised for the Cotton Club, to create Caravan, the most famous of his self-proclaimed “Spanish melodies.” I trace the back-and-forth musical exchange between Caravan and Alabamy Home through four manuscripts and five recordings dated between 1926 and 1937. By doing so, I explore the irregular case of these two pieces connected by their shared melody, harmony, and affect, but with differing levels of success in the Duke Ellington songbook.
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Notes
1 Juan Tizol and Rose Tizol, Interview by Patricia Willard, November 1978, transcript, The Jazz Oral History Project, Rutgers University, Newark, NJ.
2 Burton W. Peretti, “Oral Histories of Jazz Musicians: The NEA Transcripts as Texts in Context,” in Jazz Among the Discourses, ed. Krin Gabbard (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 117.
3 Ibid., 120.
4 Ted Gioia, The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire (New York: Oxford University Press), 58.
5 The role of collaborators in Ellington’s compositional process is a topic that is still negotiated in scholarship due to previously held beliefs that Ellington was a compositional genius. Band members often received credit through their contributions during the performance of an almost-finished product or through the distinctiveness of their sounds and personalities for Ellington’s own compositional process. Recent work by Brothers suggests a re-evaluation of the view that the band members acted as passive influences to support a view that they were active participants and collaborators. The band members reported supplying finished or almost-finished compositions in return for payment.
Borrowing from older pieces or manuscripts is also common to the Ellington compositional process, such as in the case of one of Ellington’s early ragtime pieces appearing in Black, Brown and Beige. There are also some cases in later works, such as the suites, of Ellington and Strayhorn borrowing older motives. In these cases, however, Ellington is borrowing from himself. Tizol’s participation in Alabamy Home and Caravan complicates the cohesiveness of the common mechanisms of collaboration and borrowing outlined above. It is also misleading to try to describe Caravan as a contrafact due to the similarities in melody and its finding in a previous manuscript as an obbligato melody. The case’s singularity would suggest that it is exceptional. Comparing it to other moments of borrowing or collaboration in the Ellington orchestra might be misleading without the presence of other similar cases. If other cases are known, it could certainly change our understanding of Ellington’s compositional practices.
Thomas Brothers, Help! The Beatles, Duke Ellington, and the Magic of Collaboration (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2018), 51–2.
Travis Jackson, “Tourist Point of View? Musics of the World and Ellington’s Suites,” The Musical Quarterly 96, no. 4 (2013): 527.
Kimberly Hannon Teal, “Highlighting Collaboration in the Music History Classroom through the Duke Ellington Orchestra,” Jazz Education in Research and Practice 2, no.1 (2021): 7.
Terry Teachout, Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington (New York: Gotham Books, 2013), 110–6.
Mark Tucker, “The Genesis of Black, Brown and Beige,” Black Music Research Journal 13, no. 2 (1993): 146.
6 James Lincoln Collier, Duke Ellington (New York: Oxford University Press), 67–8.
Although the argument could be made that Mills contributed lyrics for the sheet music publication of Caravan, if he indeed wrote them, and therefore warranted credit, that argument in light of Caravan’s success without the lyrics and Tizol’s lack of fair payment suggest that Mills inequitably benefited from Tizol’s work. In the words of Collier, Mills frequently “cheated” Ellington by putting his name on songs.
7 Juan Tizol and Rose Tizol, Interview by Patricia Willard, November 1978, transcript, The Jazz Oral History Project, Rutgers University, Newark, NJ.
8 Rex Stewart, Boy Meets Horn (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1991), 189.
9 Steven Lasker, Liner Notes for The Complete 1932–1940 Brunswick, Columbia and Master Recordings of Duke Ellington and His Famous Orchestra Sony Music, 2010, 11 compact discs.
10 All of the manuscripts mentioned are in the Duke Ellington Collection of the Smithsonian Institution in Series #1, Box 11, Folders 16–17.
11 Melodies and harmonies come from the first recordings from 1936 and 1937, except for Caravan’s bridge, which is used in Ellington’s big band recording from 1937. The bridge which is included in , composed by Ellington as indicated by Tizol in an interview housed at the Institute of Jazz Studies, is used as an instrumental section in the first full band recording of Caravan in 1937 in order to transition back to the last chorus of the melody played by Harry Carney after solos over the A section by Barney Bigard and Cootie Williams. While Alabamy Home uses an AB form and has a harmonic rhythm twice as fast, Caravan uses an AAB form. Therefore, I reduced the harmonic rhythm of Caravan by half for a more accurate comparison. Later arrangements of Alabamy Home and Caravan are in F minor; it is not clear why the copyrighted piano edition of Alabamy Home published by Mills Music in 1937 is in E minor. The first arrangement housed at the Smithsonian Institution is in Bb minor, but the second arrangement is in F minor, which remains consistent with future arrangements of both Alabamy Home and Caravan. The piano sheet music editions, as explained by Mills, were transcribed by hired help from the recordings and later arranged for the piano and voice.
12 Scott DeVeaux, The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 107.
13 Steven Lasker, Liner Notes for The Complete 1932–1940.
14 Tucker, Ellington: The Early Years, 194.
15 Richard Middleton, “Musical Belongings: Western Music and Its Lower-Other,” in Musical Belongings: Selected Essays, ed. Richard Middleton (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 2009), 129–30.
Richard Middleton recognized this as well, writing that “Ellington was easily capable of meeting the demand for fashionable Orientalism … and of transferring this exoticizing aesthetic to the strand in his own music known as his jungle style.”
16 Edward Kennedy Ellington, Music Is My Mistress (London: W.H. Allen, 1974), 91.
17 Tucker, Ellington, 110.
18 Lisa Barg, “National Voices/Modernist Histories: Race, Performance and Remembrance in American Music, 1927–1943” (PhD diss., State University of New York at Stony Brook, 2001), 122.
Jim Haskins, The Cotton Club (New York: Random House, 1977), 44.
Tucker, Ellington, 110.
Both Mark Tucker and Lisa Barg recognize the similarities of the décor and the performances between the Kentucky Club and the Cotton Club, citing that other clubs in New York City, such as the Plantation Café, the Club Alabam, and the Everglades, had plantation décors featuring performances in an imaginary Africa as well.
19 Research done by Ken Steiner at the Library of Congress, in the NBC log books: http://www.depanorama.net/dems/083.htm.
20 Kimberly Hannon Teal, “Beyond the Cotton Club: The Persistence of Duke Ellington’s Jungle Style,” Jazz Perspectives 6, nos. 1 and 2 (2012): 138.
21 Barg, “National Voices,” 97.
22 Abel Green, “First Cotton Club Review (1927),” in The Duke Ellington Reader, ed. Mark Tucker (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 32.
23 Archie Bell, “The Ellington Orchestra in Cleveland (1931),” in The Duke Ellington Reader, ed. Mark Tucker (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 53.
24 Haskins, The Cotton Club, 37.
25 Ibid., 57.
Haskins cites Ellington’s disappointment that his and the performers’ friends and families could not see them perform as the reason for this relaxation.
26 Teal, “Beyond the Cotton Club,” 123.
27 Ibid., 125–6.
28 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), 12–13.
29 Derek B. Scott, “Orientalism and Musical Style,” in Musical Style and Social Meaning: Selected Essays, ed. Derek B. Scott (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2010), 140.
Middleton, “Musical Belongings,” 120.
According to Middleton, the exchange of exotic signifiers could occur between any group considered “other” or “lower,” such as “peasants, primitives, exotics, women,” and “bohemians.”
30 Matthew Head, “Musicology on Safari: Orientalism and the Spectre of Postcolonial Theory,” Music Analysis 22, no. 1–2 (2003): 223.
Jonathan D. Bellman, “Musical Voyages and Their Baggage: Orientalism in Music and Critical Musicology,” Musical Quarterly 94 (2011): 431.
Focusing on the common aural signifiers of musical exoticism, however, has received criticism in musicological scholarship from Matthew Head. While recognizing the key role that generalization plays in Said’s original work, Head names the taxonomical practice of documenting these common signifiers as a part of “the safari mentality.” In his words, “any such reductive schema risks perpetuating precisely those historical European strategies of surveillance that bespeak an anxious vigilance over categories and boundaries when dealing with alterity.” Jonathan Bellman is critical of Head’s approach because of its tendency to make any scholarly reference to exoticism an additional act of othering or colonializing on behalf of the scholar. To him, Head’s criticism makes it nearly impossible for scholars to use Said’s ideas without fearing immediate dismissal of their argument.
31 Teal, “Beyond the Cotton Club,” 130.
32 Carl Woideck, “Authentic Synthetic Hybrid: Ellington’s Concepts of Africa and Its Music,” in Duke Ellington Studies, ed. John Howland (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 239.
Woideck tracks the use of tom-toms and gongs throughout Ellington’s entire career as a way to depict Africa.
33 John Storm Roberts, The Latin Tinge: The Impact of Latin American Music on the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 93.
34 Ralph P. Locke, Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 253.
35 Roberts, The Latin Tinge, 93.
36 Teal, “Beyond the Cotton Club,” 137–44.
37 Jackson, “Tourist Point of View?,” 522.
38 The other two manuscripts found at the Smithsonian are the unextracted and the extracted arrangement from the 1937 and 1938 recordings of Alabamy Home.
39 The Smithsonian Institution has the first and the second arrangement paper-clipped together. The key, type of paper, and content of these parts allowed me to separate them into two separate arrangements.
40 Ellington, Music Is My Mistress, 118.
41 Ibid., 121.
42 Helen Oakley Dance, Liner Notes for The Duke’s Men: Small Groups Volume 1 Cedar 46995, 1991, 2 compact discs.
43 Ibid.
44 Ibid.
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Hannah Krall
Hannah Krall is a doctoral candidate of musicology at Duke University. Her musical interests include improvisation and early jazz. She has a B.A. in Music from Cornell University and a M.A. in Musicology from Duke University. Her current research focuses on jazz clarinet playing in New Orleans and its exportation to cities outside of New Orleans.