Improvisation as Composition: Fixity of Form and Collaborative Composition in Duke Ellington's Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue

Abstract

Since the beginning of Duke Ellington's career as composer and leader of his own jazz orchestra in the 1920s, a common critical theme has been the comparison with European art music composers such as Delius and Debussy. Assertions such as Constant Lambert's 1934 statement that Duke Ellington set a “standard by which we may judge … highbrow composers” focused on the complex compositional devices in his output. Rather than restate these oft-cited judgements of Ellington's compositional style, this paper examines the intersection between the classical and jazz styles by analyzing typically improvised sections of Ellington's output.

Consideration of the development of a baritone saxophone solo, improvised material in the interlude, and the role of Ellington's piano in three recordings of his 1937 Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue (from 1937, 1953 and 1956) indicate the establishment of fixed solos in the Ellington Orchestra's repertoire. The degree of composition implied by this warrants further thought. Through analysis of Ellington's original sketches for the piece, close study of these recordings, and engagement with contemporary criticism and later scholarly sources (in particular the writings of Bruno Nettl) I evaluate the implications of the predetermination suggested by the treatment of improvisation by Ellington and his band members over this period.

Notes

¹Duke Ellington, “Certainly It's Music!” in The Duke Ellington Reader, ed. Mark Tucker (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 246–248. Ellington qualified his statement by explaining: “That I owe a debt to the classical composers is not to be denied but it is the same debt that many composers, for generations, have owed to Brahms, Beethoven, Debussy and others of their calibre. They have furnished us with wholesome musical patterns in our minds and have given us a definite basis from which to judge all music, regardless of its origin.” Ibid., 247.

²Although earlier works such as “Rockin' in Rhythm” (1931)—in rondo form—borrowed from classical formal techniques, only the 1940s larger-scale works were performed in classical venues. Examples of these works include Black, Brown and Beige (1943), The Perfume Suite (1944), Deep South Suite (1946), Liberian Suite (1947) and The Tattooed Bride (1948)—all of which were composed for performances at the traditionally classical venue Carnegie Hall.

³Mervyn Cooke explains the history of, and reasons for, examining jazz music through a classical critical lens. He argues that, rather than being simply a correct or an incorrect method of evaluation, the overlap and symbiosis of the two styles deserves investigation. He also suggests that much of the recent rejection of classical values in jazz criticism may be attributed to the use of outdated nineteenth-century criteria: “Part of the inappropriateness of applying a classical analytical approach to jazz arises from the fact that romanticised notions of musical structure are unhelpful when considering much twentieth-century music (in any idiom). There is no point in relating Ellington's work to nineteenth-century ideas of thematic unity, when he owed a much more significant debt to twentieth-century composers whose work was mostly rooted in entirely different organisational principles.” Cooke, “Jazz among the Classics, and the Case of Duke Ellington,” in The Cambridge Companion to Jazz, edited by Mervyn Cooke and David Horn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 160.

⁴Tony Whyton further explains this critical tradition in his recent study Jazz Icons: Heroes, Myths and the Jazz Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 127–152.

⁵These transcriptions are drawn from three clearly labelled sources: Ellington's original manuscript to Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue (now held in the Smithsonian Institution), a transcription of the entire 1937 recording by London-based session saxophonist and musical director of Ellington repertoire bands Echoes of Ellington and Deluxe 9:20 Peter Long, and my own transcriptions of solo lines.

⁶Constant Lambert, “The Spirit of Jazz,” in Lambert, Constant, Music Ho! A Study of Music in Decline (London: Faber and Faber, 1934), 215.

⁷Mark Tucker, “Cotton Club Bandleader (1927–1932),” in Tucker, ed., 29.

⁸Trumpeter Bubber Miley had been with the group since 1923, and as Richard O. Boyer wrote in 1944, “stamped his character on the band, by means of the growl of his trumpet and his gutbucket technique.” “The Hot Bach – 1,” in Tucker, ed., 240.

⁹ Gunther Schuller, “Jazz,” in Musings: The Musical Worlds of Gunther Schuller (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 12.

¹²Martin Williams, “Form Beyond Form,” The Jazz Tradition (1970, revised 1983, 1993), reprinted in Tucker, ed., 404.

¹⁰Plantation revues were a popular exported (commonly to Britain and France) entertainment genre, in which black singers and dancers presented exaggerated and caricatured presentations of life in the Deep South, accompanied by jazz-inflected music, on the musical stage. The European success of plantation revues in the 1920s and '30s is discussed in greater detail by Catherine Parsonage in The Evolution of Jazz in Britain, 1880–1935 (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2005), 163–190.

¹¹Ralph Ellison, “Homage to Duke Ellington on His Birthday” (1969), in Tucker, ed., 396.

¹⁴R. D. Darrell, Phonograph Monthly Review (1927), in Tucker, ed., 33–34.

¹⁵R. D. Darrell, “Black Beauty,” disques (1932), in Tucker, ed., 57–65.

¹³Ron Welburn, “Duke Ellington's Music: The Catalyst for a True Jazz Criticism,” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, 17 (1986): 111–122.

¹⁶Darrell, “Black Beauty.” 59. In a recent interview, British bebop saxophonist Dave O'Higgins highlighted the fact that all jazz musicians have an intuitive side and a schooled side. He emphasized the importance of combining these two elements of one's ability musically. Dave O'Higgins (freelance saxophonist and jazz educator), in discussion with the author, February 2010. O'Higgins' promotion of the dual musical personality of jazz musicians is testament to the profound and lasting effect these two sides of Ellington's music had on the genre.

¹⁷Darrell, “Black Beauty,” 61. Darrell's analysis follows the model of classical music criticism, in which the named composer is hailed as a hero figure. “Duke Ellington, a young Negro pianist, composer, and orchestra leader, gifted with a seemingly inexhaustible well of melodic invention, possessor of a keenly developed craftmanship in composition and orchestration” (59).

¹⁸Janet M. Levy, “Covert and Casual Values in Recent Writings About Music,” Journal of Musicology 5 (1987): 9.

¹⁹Aaron Copland, “Scores and Records,” (1938), in Tucker, ed., 130.

²²Krin Gabbard, Jammin' at the Margins: Jazz and the American Cinema (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 168.

²⁰One possible reason for this differing reception of jazz in Europe is the lack of ingrained negative racial stereotypes about the performers, in the absence of an indigenous black population. This phenomenon is discussed in several recent chapters, for example Michael Pickering “‘A Jet Ornament to Society’: Black Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” in Black Music in Britain ed. Paul Oliver (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1990), 16–33; and Hilary Moore, “‘Dreams of Our Mothers’ Ebony Eyes': 1980s Black Britain,” Inside British Jazz: Crossing Borders of Race, Nation and Class (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 98–127.

²¹Parsonage gives extensive background to the rhythm club phenomenon in The Evolution of British Jazz. Also see Katherine Williams (née Lewis), “Racism and Chauvinism in British Jazz, 1935–1954” (Masters' diss., University of Nottingham, 2008).

²³Lambert, 213.

²⁴Paul Lopes, The Rise of a Jazz Art World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

²⁷Leonard Feather [a rebuttal of Hammond] (1943), in Tucker, ed., 170.

²⁵Irving Kolodin, “Notes on the Program (1943)”, in Tucker, ed., 162.

²⁶John Hammond, “Is the Duke Deserting Jazz?,” (1943), in Tucker, ed., 171–185.

²⁸Ellington chose to eliminate the word “jazz” from his vocabulary when describing his works after 1943. Duke Ellington, Music is My Mistress (New York: Doubleday, 1973). Graham Locke also discusses Ellington's attitude towards the term “jazz” in Blutopia: Visions of the Future and revisions of the Past in the Work of Sun Ra, Duke Ellington, and Anthony Braxton (Durham and London: Duke University Press 2004 [1999]), 125–132.

²⁹Ellington's ability to compose within the limitations of this format is also praised by Lambert. “Ellington's best works are written in what may be called ten-inch record form, and he is perhaps the only composer to raise this insignificant disc to the dignity of a definite genre. Into this three and a half minutes he compresses the utmost.” Lambert, 215.

³⁰Gunther Schuller, The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz, 1930–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 90.

³¹Cooke concurs with this description, writing in 2002: “When jazz is pre-composed the results need not sound unspontaneous: the big bands of the swing era and since have been characterised by complex textures designed to sound like massed improvisations, with head arrangements often transmitted and refined by experimentation and oral communication rather than by written charts.” “Jazz among the Classics,” 154.

³²Mark Tucker, Ellington: The Early Years (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 134. Berlin explains: “It can be noted that this rhythmic pattern usually repeats the same three notes in either an ascending or a descending line, and that the pattern is most often produced four times. This is not syncopation, for there is no displacement of the normal metric accents. Within the three-note motif, however, the accent continually shifts; when the motif is presented four times, each presentation is in a new metric context.” Edward A. Berlin, Ragtime: A Musical and Cultural History (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1980), 131.

³³Jeffrey Magee characterizes Fletcher Henderson's arranging style thus: “The ingredients included many, if not consistently all, of the following: 1. A thirty-two-bar AABA popular-song structure based on an existing song or a new piece modelled on such a song. 2. Five or six choruses of that structure, in three distinct parts: (a) first chorus stating the melody. (b) an expandable series of interior choruses featuring improvised solos over sectional riffs, and (c) one (and sometimes two) ‘out’ choruses featuring the whole ensemble playing a new riff, sometimes presented in call-and-response style.” Magee, The Uncrowned King of Swing: Fletcher Henderson and Big Band Jazz (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 173.

³⁴ Duke Ellington and His Famous Orchestra, Brunswick: 8004, 1937, 78 rpm; reissued as Duke Ellington et Son Orchestre, Duke Ellington: 1937 (Vol. 2), The Chronological Classics No. 687, 1993, compact disc. Due to recording limitations of the time, the piece is recorded as two separate tracks on this issue.

³⁵Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), 77.

³⁷Schuller, The Swing Era, 91.

³⁸Wolfram Knauer, “‘Simulated Improvisation’ in Duke Ellington's Black, Brown and Beige,” The Black Perspective in Music 18 (1990): 22.

³⁹Cooke, 162. Cooke's analysis of the development of musical material is enlightening, save for his inaccurate description of “fourteen-bar phrases.” Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue is based around a chromaticized twelve-bar blues sequence.

⁴⁰Lambert, 213.

³⁶Lambert, 215.

⁴¹Harry Carney website, New Musical Express. <http://www.nme.com/artists/harry-carney>.

⁴²Bruno Nettl, “Thoughts on Improvisation; A Comparative Approach”, Musical Quarterly 50 (1974): 6.

⁴³Knauer, 21.

⁴⁴Peter Long, in discussion with the author, October 2009.

⁴⁵ Duke Ellington: The 1953 Pasadena Concert, GNP/Crescendo 9045, 1988, LP; reissued as Duke Ellington: The 1953 Pasadena Concert, GNP/Crescendo 9045, 2005, compact disc.

⁴⁶ Ellington at Newport, Columbia Records CC934, 1956, LP; reissued as Ellington at Newport (complete) Columbia/Legacy C2K 64932, 1999, compact disc.

⁴⁷Knauer has located a similar instance of Carney reproducing and embellishing a pre-composed solo in “Work Song” from Black, Brown and Beige. Knauer, 26.

⁴⁸Katz, 80.

⁵⁰ Ibid.

⁵¹Roger Pryor Dodge, “Bubber,” (1940), in Tucker, ed., 457.

⁵²John Howland, Ellington Uptown: Duke Ellington, James P. Johnson, and the Birth of Concert Jazz (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2009), 264,

⁴⁹Long.

⁵⁵ Ibid., 108.

⁵³Long comments that: “one of the many reasons why Ellington was such a genius was his ability to edit … [his music is] highly structured, but only because he was able to do that [edit] on the spot.” Long.

⁵⁴Walter van de Leur, Something to Live For: The Music of Billy Strayhorn (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 35.

⁵⁶Howland, 252.

⁵⁷The 1937 recording was played at quarter-note = 164, while the two versions from the 1950s were played at half-note = 120.

⁵⁸“Comping” is a term used by jazz musicians to refer to pianists playing chords to outline the harmonic progression, using no fixed rhythmic pattern.

⁵⁹George Avakian, original LP liner notes to Ellington at Newport, 1956.

⁶⁰For example, Ellington's own opinions on improvisation were well-documented: “There are still a few die-hards who believe … [that] there is such a thing as unadulterated improvisation without any preparation or anticipation. It is my firm belief that there has never been anybody who has blown even two bars worth listening to who didn't have some idea about what he was going to play, before he started. If you just ramble through the scales or play around the chords, that's nothing more than musical exercise. Improvisation really consists of picking out a device here, and connecting it with a device there; changing the rhythm here, and pausing there; there has to be some thought preceding each phrase, otherwise it is meaningless.” Ellington, “The Future of Jazz” (1958), in Ken Rattenbury, Duke Ellington, Jazz Composer (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 14.

⁶¹Ellington's use of his own improvisation to link sections of contrasting material was not a new device. Max Harrison wrote unfavourably about the use of the device in Ellington's large-scale 1931 composition Creole Rhapsody: “Creole Rhapsody is at its weakest when Ellington, having got stuck, throws in bridging piano solos, almost literally to make ends meet.” “Some Reflections on Ellington's Longer Works,” reprinted in Tucker, ed., 388.

⁶²Under Gunther Schuller's formulation, the “first stream” classical and the “second stream” of jazz were combined equally into a “third stream.” Works in this style, such as Rolf Liebermann's Concerto for Jazz Band and Symphony Orchestra, and John Dankworth and Mátyás Seiber's Improvisations for Jazz Band and Symphony Orchestra, often featured sections in a contrasting musical style to link passages played by each ensemble. Schuller himself also actively composed in the Third Stream style. Gunther Schuller, “And perhaps the Twain Shall Meet,” New York Times, 15 November 1959. It is important to consider that, while Third Stream appeared to be an ideal solution to the implicit cultural hierarchy of classical music and jazz, the terminology and music involved was loaded with ideological pitfalls. For example, even by designating the two genres to be combined the “first” and “second” streams, Schuller was promoting a value judgement that defied the equal fusion to which he aspired.

⁶³Howland, 7.

⁶⁴Howland also offers a working definition of the term “jazz composition” for musicians in the late 1930s:

“‘jazz composition’ was defined specifically through sophisticated big band arrangements that balanced written scores and detailed orchestration with room for improvisation contributions; which relied upon a performing collective of individual musical voices and which embraced African American musical aesthetics” (179).

⁶⁵Mark Katz offers an alternative reason for this phenomenon, suggesting that the limitations of the three-minute record technology impinged upon musicians' improvisational creativity. “If a musician were to play several solo choruses in a live performance, it is unlikely that all the solos would have been fixed. In other words, the longer the performance and the more solos played, the more the performers were apt to improvise. The corollary is that a shorter performance with fewer solos made improvisation less likely. Knowing that time was short and aware of the permanence of recordings, performers and their bandleaders would want not only to choose their best work to commit to shellac but also to ensure that all solos stayed within a prescribed time.” Katz, 76.

⁶⁶Nicholas Cook, “Making Music Together, or Improvisation and Its Others,” Music, Performance, Meaning: Selected Essays (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2007), 335.