Duke Ellington as Composer: Two Pieces for Paul Whiteman

Abstract

Paul Whiteman commissioned two compositions from Duke Ellington: Blue Belles of Harlem (1938) for his Eighth Experiment in Modern Music, and Blutopia (1944) for the Contemporary Composers radio series on the Blue Network. These two works are among the earliest compositions that Ellington wrote for an ensemble other than his own, and thus offer insight into his compositional process.

Blue Belles of Harlem shows Ellington thinking on the level of the motif, building themes from smaller fragments and in some cases leaving the construction of the strain to the discretion of Whiteman's arranger Fred Van Eps. Several years later, Billy Strayhorn cast the work as a quasi-concerto for Ellington's piano, making significant changes to the realization of Ellington's sketchy original.

Blutopia is more fully realized, existing in two essentially finished versions: a short score for Whiteman, and a full arrangement for Ellington's own orchestra. Differences between Whiteman's and Ellington's versions are minimal, consisting mainly of minor re-arrangements of the sequence of main themes and the interpretation of the score in performance.

Both of these works confirm certain aspects of Ellington's compositional process, including the use of the three-strain “symphonic jazz” model as a structural framework and a tendency to take a collaborative approach to the finished work (including an avoidance of definitive introductions and codas).

Notes

¹John Franceschina, Duke Ellington's Music for the Theatre (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001), 8.

²Elmer Snowden recalls Henri Busse attempting to divine the secrets of Bubber Miley's mute technique at the Kentucky Club (Stanley Dance, The World of Swing [New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1974], 55); Ned Williams placed both Whiteman and Grofé at the Cotton Club where the pair admitted that they “couldn't steal even two bars of the amazing music” (Ned Williams, “Early Ellingtonia,” Down Beat [5 November 1952]; quoted in The Duke Ellington Reader, ed. Mark Tucker [New York: Oxford University Press, 1993], 272); Dave Peyton recalls seeing Whiteman request a particular song from Ellington for the purpose of receiving “musical information” (Dave Peyton, Chicago Defender, 27 August 1927; quoted in Tucker, 26).

³The other titles are: Black and Tan Fantasy, It Don't Mean a Thing, Sophisticated Lady (three arrangements), Solitude, In a Sentimental Mood, Echoes of Harlem, Caravan (two arrangements), I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart (two arrangements), Pyramid, and I Got It Bad. All are held at the Paul Whiteman Collection, Williams College, Williamstown, MA.

⁴Paul Whiteman and Mary Margaret McBride, Jazz (New York: J. H. Sears & Co., 1926; reprint, Arno Press, 1974), 117.

⁵“No Swing at Carnegie,” Boston Microphone, January 1939. This wording was a general press release and appeared many places.

⁶Interview with Manne Berggren, Swedish Radio, Stockholm, 29 April 1939, quoted in John Edward Hasse, Beyond Category: The Life and Genius of Duke Ellington (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), 198.

⁷“Say Jazz Will Live.” New York Times, 23 December 1923, XX4.

⁸Hugh C. Ernst, program notes for An Experiment in Modern Music, 12 February 1924.

⁹Gunnar Askland, “Interpretations in Jazz: A Conference with Duke Ellington,” Etude (March 1947): 134, 172, quoted in Tucker, 256–257.

¹⁰Duke Ellington, “The Race for Space,” TMs, Duke Ellington Collection, National Museum of American History.

¹¹Howard Taubman, “The ‘Duke’ Invades Carnegie Hall,” New York Times Magazine (17 January 1943), SM10.

¹²Tucker, 132.

¹³John Howland, Ellington Uptown: Duke Ellington, James P. Johnson, and the Birth of Concert Jazz (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 149–150, 157–159.

¹⁴Ibid., 251.

¹⁵The process is detailed in Howland, 2, 64–66, 150–157, and idem, “Between the Muses and the Masses: Symphonic Jazz, ‘Glorified’ Entertainment, and the Rise of the American Musical Middlebrow, 1920–1944” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 2002), Chapters 2–4.

¹⁶ Rhapsody Jr. and Bird of Paradise are described in detail in Howland, Ellington Uptown, 159–165.

¹⁷Whiteman and McBride, 243–244.

¹⁸Don Rayno, Paul Whiteman: Pioneer in American Music, vol. 1, 1890–1930 (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2003), 82.

¹⁹Wilder Hobson: “Introducing Duke Ellington,” Fortune (August 1933), 47–48, 90, 94, 95, quoted in Tucker, 97.

²⁰H. A. Overstreet: “Touching Tomorrow's Frontiers Is Duke Ellington's Music,” Metronome (October 1933), 31, 52, quoted in Tucker, 100–101.

²¹Richard O. Boyer's profile of Ellington for The New Yorker in 1944 repeated this description of the band's working methods, while admitting “The band rarely works out an entire arrangement collectively” (“The Hot Bach—2,” The New Yorker [1 July 1944], reprinted in Tucker, 226). Ellington confirms this in his article “Swing Is My Beat!” New Advance (October 1944), 1, 14, reprinted in Tucker, 249.

²²Irving Townsend reported that “the final polishing of any Ellington arrangement is done as the band plays it, and Duke, to the bewilderment of people who have watched him record, writes and rehearses music in small segments, usually of eight measures” (Irving Townsend: “When Duke Records,” Just Jazz 4, eds. Sinclair Traill and the Hon. Gerald Lascelles (London: Souvenir Press, 1960), 16–21, reprinted in Tucker, 321–322).

²³Reported in Floyd G. Snelson, “Story of Duke Ellington's Rise to Kingship of Jazz Reads Like Fiction,” Pittsburgh Courier, 19 December 1931; quoted in Tucker, 54. Despite the Courier's assertion that these were “hot” players, all of the names listed were leaders of sweet bands.

²⁴Warren W. Scholl, “Duke Ellington—A Unique Personality,” Music Lovers' Guide 2, no. 6 (February 1934): 169; quoted in Tucker, 102.

²⁵Thomas A. DeLong, Paul Whiteman, King of Jazz (Piscataway, NJ: New Century, 1983), 150–151.

²⁶Albert D. Hughes, “Whiteman Names Scott As Gershwin Successor,” Christian Science Monitor, 15 September 1938, p. 9. By late December Morton Gould and Ferde Grofé had been added to what became a list of “possible” Gershwin successors.

²⁷“Concert and Opera Asides,” New York Times, 20 November 1938, p. 169. The same article also mentioned that Whiteman and Ellington had both been named to the National Advisory Board of the Hot Clubs of America.

²⁸DeLong, 226. Most of these had direct connections to Whiteman: Gross and Bargy were already pianists with the Whiteman orchestra, and Van Eps and Gould worked with him on the Chesterfield Presents radio program.

²⁹Robert A. Simon, “Musical Events,” The New Yorker, 7 January 1939.

³⁰Compare Howland, Ellington Uptown, Table 4.3e, 163.

³¹Walter van de Leur, Something to Live For: The Music of Billy Strayhorn (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 93. If this is the same as the ink presentation copy described below, it contains only Strain A plus a transition into Strain B, corresponding to mm. 5–48 of the Robbins piano score.

³²Duke Ellington Collection, Series 1, Box 51, Folder 12.

³³See also van de Leur, 107–109.

³⁴Duke Ellington Collection, Series 1, Box 51, Folder 13.

³⁵Duke Ellington Collection, Series 1, Box 51, Folder 12.

³⁶The Robbins piano version, in what must have been an editorial oversight, notates the first appearance of the former 3/4 measures as two 2/4 bars (mm. 25–26), and the second appearance (m. 30) as a single 4/4 measure.

³⁷The new material features a rising chromatic line, and uses the arpeggiated triplet figure of the original motif in inversion. Strayhorn unifies the entire strain by providing a countermelody prominently featuring falling chromatic triplets. See van de Leur, Chapter 4, for a detailed account of Strayhorn's technique.

³⁸This is reinforced in the piano arrangement by notating the first appearance as eighth notes and the second as dotted eighths and sixteenths.

³⁹This item is held in the Billy Strayhorn Collection and is not currently available to the public. A description of this sketch was provided by Alyce Claerbaut, acting president of Billy Strayhorn Songs, Inc., during a phone conversation with the author, 13 April 2010.

⁴⁰In the pencil sketch, as well as in some of the sidemen's parts, this empty measure is filled with a question mark.

⁴¹The sketch and most parts here are marked “Piano.”

⁴²Barry Ulanov, “Ellington's Carnegie Hall Concert a Glorified Stage Show,” Metronome (January 1944): 8, 48, reprinted in Tucker, 210–211.

⁴³John S. Wilson, “Ellington Offers A New Ensemble,” New York Times, 5 January 1962, 36.

⁴⁴Ken Vail, Duke's Diary. Part One: The Life of Duke Ellington 1927–1950 (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2002), 256–257.

⁴⁵This music was never notated; even the full score of the arrangement shows rests in all parts at this point. In recordings from 1944 to 1947, Jordan offered considerable variation in this break.

⁴⁶Van de Leur, 299n9. That riff, later used in Long Time Blues and Hey, Baby, forms the basis for Strain C in Blutopia.

⁴⁷Van de Leur, 299n9. This note may have indicated awareness on Ellington's part that the piece was for radio broadcast, where timing was a critical element. Although Van de Leur places this early version in the Duke Ellington Collection, it is in fact part of the Billy Strayhorn Collection and thus unavailable for study.

⁴⁸In a 1964 interview, trumpeter Clark Terry noted that Ellington “doesn't even like to write definitive endings to a piece. He'd often ask us to come up with ideas for closings, but when he'd settled on one of them, he'd keep fooling around with it. He always likes to make the end of a song sound as if it's still going somewhere.” Max Harrison, “Some Reflections on Ellington's Longer Works,” published as “Reflections on Some of Ellington's Longer Works” in A Jazz Retrospect (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1976), 121–128. Originally appeared in Jazz Monthly (January 1964), 12–16; newly revised by the author in 1991. Quoted in Tucker, 367-68.

⁴⁹Duke Ellington Collection, Series 1, Box 58, Folder 7. Walter van de Leur has confirmed that the musical content of this fair copy matches that of Ellington's sketch score.

⁵⁰The lack of a coda fits in with Clark Terry's recollection that Ellington avoided writing “definitive endings to a piece.” See Nat Hentoff, “This Cat Needs No Pulitzer Prize,” New York Times Magazine, 12 September 1965, reprinted in Tucker, 367.

⁵¹Duke Ellington Collection, Series 1, Box 58, Folder 5.

⁵² The Duke Ellington Carnegie Hall Concerts: December 1944, Prestige 2PCD-34073-2, 1991, compact disc (19 December 1944); Duke Ellington: The Treasury Shows, Vol. 1, D.E.T.S. 903 9001, 2000, compact disc (7 April 1945); Duke Ellington Live in 1947! At the Hollywood Bowl, Unique Jazz RKO 1033, 2000, compact disc (31 August 1947).

⁵³Thanks to Walter van de Leur for pointing this out.

⁵⁴Cat Anderson, Joe Nanton, Rex Stewart, Otto Hardwick, Junior Raglin, and Sonny Greer had all left the group between the recordings of 15 July 1945 and 19 April 1947.

⁵⁵Leonard Feather, notes for Duke Ellington and His Orchestra, Carnegie Hall, 19 December 1944. Duke Ellington Archives, Smithsonian National Museum of American History, Washington DC.

⁵⁶Description of broadcast recording of One Night Stand, Program #484; Blue Network origination, AFRS rebroadcast [database on-line]; available from http://radiogoldindex.com/cgi-local/p4.cgi?ArtistName=Ellington+and+His+Orchestra,+Duke&ArtistNumber=10225; Internet; accessed 17 April 2010.

⁵⁷Hugues Panassié, The Real Jazz (1942; rev. and enlarged edition, New York: A. S. Barnes, 1960), 198. The shift in attitude concerning “authenticity” in jazz is traced in Scott DeVeaux, “Constructing the Jazz Tradition: Jazz Historiography,” Black American Literature Forum 25 (Fall 1991): 525–560; see especially 528–530 and 535 on race and commercialism. Although Whiteman always acknowledged the crucial role of African Americans in the history of jazz, the persons he sought out as arrangers and singled out for praise—such as Fletcher Henderson, Don Redman, and William Grant Still—were thoroughly immersed in and comfortable with the common-practice European tradition.

⁵⁸John Hammond, “The Tragedy of Duke Ellington,” quoted in Tucker, 120.

⁵⁹John Hammond, “Is the Duke Deserting Jazz?” (1943), quoted in Tucker, 173.

⁶⁰Whiteman was not mentioned specifically in the program notes, but everyone surely knew that his Eighth Experiment in Modern American Music was scheduled for the same venue—Carnegie Hall—only two days later.

⁶¹James Dugan and John Hammond, “The Music Nobody Knows,” from program booklet to From Spirituals to Swing, concert presented at Carnegie Hall, 23 December 1938, reprinted in From Spirituals to Swing: The Legendary 1938 & 1939 Carnegie Hall Concerts Produced by John Hammond, Vanguard 169-71-2, 1999, compact disc.

⁶²The collaborative process is detailed in Van de Leur, Chapters 5 and 6.

⁶³Van de Leur, 92–93. Some sources also count Blue Belles of Harlem and Blutopia as suites, along with Reminiscing in Tempo and Diminuendo in Blue/Crescendo in Blue.

⁶⁴Gunther Schuller, The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz, 1930–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 114.

⁶⁵Ibid., 135.

⁶⁶Howland, Ellington Uptown, 153–154.

⁶⁷See van de Leur, Chapter 4, for a detailed account of this process.