Ellington's Lens as Motive Mediating: Improvising Voices in the Far East Suite

Abstract

Inspired by an Ellington quote about the influence of his Orchestra's 1963 tour on the composition of the Far East Suite, this article examines the inherently subjective process of translation between musical systems and between musical performances and discursive representations thereof. The two case studies—Anthony Brown's 1999 recording of a re-orchestrated Far East Suite with the Asian American Orchestra; and the “Far East Revisited Project,” an ongoing collaboration featuring the Tony Overwater Trio and the Calefax Reed Quintet—illustrate how Ellington's ideas about transcultural interaction relate not just to musical collaboration but also to the socio-cultural contexts in which musical performance is situated.

Ellington's quote includes references to the binary of reflection and refraction, implying a lens metaphor through which I suggest these processes of translation can be discussed. Coupled with the instruments and media used in the case studies, this lens metaphor highlights the importance of technology in mediating both musical and discursive performance. Attention to these mediations requires a shift in research tactics, rooted in specific case studies in which the complex interrelationship between musical performances and their mediating discourses, cultures and technologies, is spun out using multiple methodological perspectives receptive to collaboration and re-interpretation.

Inasmuch as Ellington's Far East Suite was composed over time and its individual movements varied and altered, this article calls for a wider scholarly acknowledgement and sensitivity to the ways in which music, musicians, and cultures develop over time and how continuing performances can map new (sometimes disjunct) associations onto the histories of individuals and their music. As such, the article closes positing this lens metaphor as a technology for jazz scholarship, which promotes and acknowledges the subjectivity of the researcher, the importance of context, and an emergent, improvisational stance that embraces the creative aspects of performing jazz studies research.

Notes

¹Quoted in Harvey G. Cohen, “Improvising Across the Lines: Duke Ellington's America” (PhD Dissertation: University of Maryland, College Park, 2002), 918.

²Among the sensory allusions Ellington makes in the quote are “drink it all in … hearing Indian music, of seeing your instruments, of touching them.” ibid., emphasis added.

³I chose to title the article with this creative tension in mind. The word “motive” should be read simultaneously as both a noun (“a recurrent musical idea”) and as an adjective (“causing, or tending toward, motion”). So, “mediating motive” implies “the recurrent idea of mediating acts,” while “motive mediating” suggests “acts of mediating as potentially/constantly fluid and changing.” Similarly, “improvising voices” refers both to “the voices that are improvising” and “the act of improvising (others') voices.” Throughout the article, I have attempted to highlight how these four phrases continually perform with and against one another, both in the case studies and my analysis of them.

⁴Readers will find discographical information, as well as website addresses which contain portions of all the performances discussed. Rather than direct the listening of the reader to particular passages via notated transcription and recording time markers, I encourage the reader to listen to each recording considering the discursive lenses discussed in the article.

⁵Edward Green, “‘It Don't Mean a Thing if It Ain't Got That Grundgestalt!’—Ellington from a Motivic Perspective.” Jazz Perspectives 2/2 (July 2008), 215–249.

⁶This is not to say that more research of this kind is not warranted. It is, however outside the scope of the present article, which focuses on the discourses around the sounds, rather than the sounds themselves.

⁷Ibid., 243.

⁸Ibid., 224.

⁹Michael Titlestad, Making the Changes: Jazz in South African Literature and Reportage (Pretoria: University of South Africa Press, 2004), 157.

¹⁰Titlestad, 64. Although beyond the scope of this article, this concept—what Michel Foucault called the “author function”—is discussed at length in other sources. See Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” In Josué V. Harari, ed., Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980 [1969]), 141–160; and Alessandro Duranti, Linguistic Anthropology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 334.

¹¹For this interpretive etymology, I consulted Lewis and Short's Latin Dictionary. The definitions are published in the dictionary, while my interpretations of the definitions are from my exegesis of the quotations provided as exemplars of historical usage and of other Roman authors. E.A. Andrews, A Latin Dictionary Founded on Andrews' Edition of Freund's Latin Dictionary. Revised, Enlarged, and in Great Part Rewritten by Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975 [1897]).

¹²The noun form of frangere, fractiō, is used both in the Vulgate (the Latin bible) to describe the breaking of bread, and in mathematics as the word for “fraction.” These two usages suggest a decidedly less violent act, even, in the case of breaking bread, a positive connotation of measuring out for inclusive means, as in a public dole of food.

¹³And so, again, rather than adopting a fixed, denotative meaning of “reflection,” I wish to maintain a more open stance, allowing the reader to consider an arranged, complex definition based on connotative applications.

¹⁴The concept of “The Ellington Effect” was coined by Billy Strayhorn who describes it in a 1952 article in Downbeat. The article is included in Mark Tucker's edited volume, The Duke Ellington Reader (New York, Oxford University Press, 1993), 269–270. Lest Strayhorn's relatively quiet role in this paper invite critique, I wish to emphasize that his compositional—and pianistic—contributions to the tour and the FES are just as integral as every other individual in the collaborative process of composition to which Ellington strove, and in the discursive meanings the Suite has accrued over time—a fact to which Walter van de Leur alludes. See Walter van de Leur, Something to Live For: The Music of Billy Strayhorn (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 167.

¹⁵“When the Duke Ellington orchestra visited Iraq, the United States was already deeply implicated in the unfolding events in Iraq and the region. … With surprising frequency, the State Department sent jazz musicians to tense situations in countries and regions that have been neglected by historians[.]” Penny Von Eschen, “Enduring Public Diplomacy,” American Quarterly 57/2 (June 2005), 339. For an excellent overview of the politics surrounding the tour, see Harvey G. Cohen, Duke Ellington's America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 411–441.

¹⁶Neil Tesser, Booklet notes to Far East Suite (RCA/Bluebird 7640-2-RB, 1997), Compact disc.

¹⁷John Edward Hasse, Beyond Category: the Life and Genius of Duke Ellington (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), 387.

¹⁸Penny M. Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 145.

¹⁹See Alfred Appel, Jr., Jazz Modernism: from Ellington and Armstrong to Matisse and Joyce (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002).

²¹Anne Rasmussen, “Bilateral Negotiations in Bimusicality: Insiders, Outsiders, and the ‘Real Version’ in Middle Eastern Music Performance,” in Performing Ethnomusicology: Teaching and Representation in World Music Ensembles, edited by Ted Solis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 225.

²⁰Kevin Gaines, “Duke Ellington, Black, Brown and Beige, and the Cultural Politics of Race,” in Ron Radano and Philip Bohlman, eds., Music and the Racial Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 587.

²²Gaines, 589. This point is reinforced by Ellington's original title for the FES—Impressions of the Middle East.

²⁵Von Eschen 2004, 146. Her use of the word “exotica” introduces to this article an important trope that characterizes discussions of the FES. In a more detailed discussion below, I outline how the perceptions of sound as “exotic” can be more indicative of the perceiver than the perceived. Unpacking such associations requires careful attention to the social and cultural contexts in which “the sounds themselves” occur.

²³Von Eschen 2004, 146.

²⁴See Von Eschen 2005, 342.

²⁶Von Eschen 2004, 147. See also, Cohen 2010, 411–441.

²⁷Quoted in Von Eschen 2004, 144–145. Again, notice the multi-sensory allusions in Ellington's text.

²⁸For example, see Francesco Adinolfi, “Exoticism,” in John Shepard, ed., Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World, volume 1: Media, Industry and Society (New York, Continuum, 2003), 221.

²⁹Tim Taylor, Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 209.

³⁰See Alan Stanbridge, “A Question of Standards: ‘My Funny Valentine’ and Musical Intertextuality,” Popular Music History 1/1 (2004), 105.

³¹Ibid., 91.

³²Ibid., 85.

³³Anthony Brown, telephone interview with author, February 5, 2010.

³⁴Ibid.

³⁵Anthony Brown, “Far East Suite: Director's Notes.” http://www.anthonybrown.org/

cd_far_east_dnotes.html (accessed March 27, 2010).

³⁶The recording is published as Anthony Brown and the Asian American Orchestra, (Anthony Brown's Asian American Orchestra Presents Ellington-Strayhorn's) Far East Suite (Asian Improv Records B00004DTMB, 1999), Compact disc. Excerpts of the recording can be heard on Anthony Brown's website: http://www.anthonybrown.org/cd_far_east.html.

³⁷Brown, telephone interview with author, February 5, 2010. ibid., email communication with author, April 12, 2010.

³⁸Acácio Tadeu de Camargo Piedade, “Brazilian Jazz and Friction of Musicalities,” in Jazz Planet, edited by E. Taylor Atkins (Jackson, MS: Univ. of Mississippi Press, 2003), 41–58.

³⁹Brown, telephone interview with author, February 5, 2010.

⁴⁰To this suite and Ellington's compositional choices therein, Brown contrasts the compositional elements of the Latin American Suite, which include musicalities with which Ellington was more familiar, both because of geographic proximity and the influence of Latin American music on U.S. jazz. Brown, telephone interview with author, February 5, 2010. See also Peter Lavezzoli, The King of All, Sir Duke: Ellington and the Artistic Revolution (New York: Continuum, 2001), 129.

⁴¹Brown, telephone interview with author, March 1, 2009. At a later date, Brown added that this sensitivity was in part related to Ellington's repudiation of the term “jazz,” a critique of discursive conventions that essentialized and homogenized “jazz,” without proper attention to the many disparate, personalized practices and aesthetics contained within the rubric under which they were sometimes indiscriminately subsumed. Brown, telephone interview with author, February 5, 2010.

⁴²Brown, telephone interview with author, February 5, 2010. This approach to composition is indicative of how Ellington established new discursive spaces for his music and the Orchestra through challenging dominant tropes of musical and cultural categories.

⁴³Brown, telephone interview with author, February 5, 2010.

⁴⁴Anthony Brown, Liner Notes to Far East Suite (Asian Improv Records, B00004DTMB, 1999), http://www.anthonybrown.org/cd_far_east.html (accessed March 28, 2010).

⁴⁵Brown, telephone interview with author, February 5, 2010.

⁴⁶Pianist Jon Jang also added a pianistic performance style that suggests the Chinese hammered dulcimer (yang qin) on “Ad Lib on Nippon.” Brown, Liner Notes to Far East Suite (Asian Improv Records, B00004DTMB, 1999), http://www.anthonybrown.org/cd_far_east.html (accessed March 28, 2010).

⁴⁹Brown, telephone interview with author, February 5, 2010. This point is echoed in the philosophical statement of Fifth Stream Music, the non-profit organization that facilities the community outreach and educational programs of Brown and the AAO: “We believe jazz is uniquely situated to nurture a new musical idiom that draws on the varied cultural experiences and perspectives of 21st century America. As a creative process, jazz encourages the expression of individual voices—reflective of one's unique experiences—within a collaborative democratic dynamic.… As a multifaceted art form, jazz possesses the adaptive history and capacity to transform diverse influences into a unifying voice that speaks to contemporary realities and bridges cultural, religious, ethnic, and age differences.” Fifth Stream Music, “Our Philosophy,” http://www.fifthstreammusic.org/webpages/philosophy.htm (accessed March 28, 2010).

⁴⁷Brown, telephone interview with author, March 1, 2009.

⁴⁸Anthony Brown, “The Development of Modern Jazz Drumset Performance, 1940-1950,” (PhD Dissertation: University of California, Berkeley, 1997), 1.

⁵⁰William Minor, Jazz Journeys to Japan: the Heart Within (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 326. See also Don Heckman, “A Multicultural Exercise That's All Ellington,” Los Angeles Times (February 18, 2000), http://articles.latimes.com/2000/feb/18/entertainment/ca-65505 (accessed March 28, 2010).

⁵¹See Gary Fukushima, “Asian American Jazz: A Personal and Historical Retrospective,” (October 30, 2009), http://garyfukushima.net/?p=27 (accessed March 28, 2010); and Michael Dessen, “Asian Americans and Creative Music Legacies,” Critical Studies in Improvisation / Études critiques en improvisation, 1/3 (2006), http://www.criticalimprov.com/article/view/56 (accessed March 28, 2010).

⁵²Although Bill Shoemaker finds the AAO's recording praiseworthy, he still refers to it as a “distillation of Eastern music.” See Bill Shoemaker, “Jazz Reviews—Anthony Brown's Asian American Orchestra, Far East Suite,” Jazz Times (January/February 2000), http://jazztimes.com/articles/10831-far-east-suite-anthony-brown-s-asian-american-orchestra, (accessed March 28, 2010).

⁵³Iyer in Dessen.

⁵⁴Dessen.

⁵⁵Tony Overwater, e-mail message to author, March 3, 2009. The recording is published as: Tony Overwater Trio and Calefax Reed Quintet, Ellington Suites (Jazz in Motion Records, JIM 75219, 2005), Compact disc. Excerpts of the recording can be heard on the project's website: http://www.fareastrevisited.com. Additionally, several videos have been posted on the website youtube.com; the addresses are cited in footnotes below.

⁵⁶Tony Overwater, e-mail message to author, March 3, 2009.

⁵⁷Tony Overwater, e-mail message to author, March 3, 2009.

⁵⁸Tony Overwater, e-mail message to author, April 14, 2009.

⁶¹“Project,” http://www.fareastrevisited.com/project.html (accessed March 28, 2010).

⁵⁹Tony Overwater, “India, Here We Come!” (March 3, 2009). http://www.fareastrevisited.com/blogs.html (accessed March 28, 2010).

⁶⁰The other members of the Overwater trio are Maarten Ornstein (tenor saxophone and clarinet) and Wim Kegel (drums). The Calefax Reed Quintet comprises Oliver Boekhoorn (oboe), Ivar Berix (clarinet), Raaf Hekkema (saxophone), Jelte Althuis (bass clarinet), and Alban Wesly (bassoon). Already completed tours include performances in Turkey (October 2008 and April 2009), China (November 2008), India (March 2009), and Amsterdam (Fall 2009 and Spring 2010). Future tour locations include Syria and Iran. http://www.fareastrevisited.com (accessed March 29, 2010).

⁶²The project website features a blog to which several group members have contributed, an online guestbook, as well as links to YouTube videos and social networking sites. I will discuss these media, in terms of collaborative performance and composition, below.

⁶³Ivar Berix, “Tourist Point of View,” (March 6, 2009). http://www.fareastrevisited.com/blogs.html (accessed March 28, 2010). Emphasis added.

⁶⁶Overwater, e-mail message to author, March 3, 2009.

⁶⁴I think this point is rather important because, as I will show below, Overwater is keenly aware of the politics of appropriation. Although he mainly discusses this in terms of the musicians whom the group meets while on tour, I think this sensitivity ought to be considered in light of the FER project's treatment of Ellington and the FES.

⁶⁵Tony Overwater, e-mail message to author, March 3, 2009.

⁶⁷Tony Overwater, “End of Tour,” (November 9, 2009) http://www.fareastrevisited.com/blogs.html (accessed March 28, 2010).

⁷²Overwater, e-mail message to author, January 31, 2010.

⁷³Overwater, e-mail message to author, March 3, 2009. Emphasis added.

⁷⁴“Alin,” Guest Book Entry (April 13, 2009), http://www.fareastrevisited.com/guestbook.html. (accessed March 28, 2010). Emphasis added. Taksim (taqsim) refers to instrumental improvisation in Turkish and Arabic musics: “a taksim has the dual purpose of allowing a moment of individual instrumental virtuosity within a group performance and of demonstrating the characteristic makam structure of the pieces to follow. Taksims by celebrated performers … were recorded and notated by commercial publishers during their own lifetime.” Kurt Reinhard, et al., “Turkey,” in Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/44912 (accessed March 28, 2010).

⁷⁵Divya Kumar, “Jazz Casts its Magic Spell,” The Hindu: Metro Plus Chennai (March 18, 2009) http://www.thehindu.com/mp/2009/03/18/stories/2009031850080800.htm (accessed March 28, 2010). Emphasis added. “Putting thalam” describes a way in which meter is counted in South Asian musics, either with cymbals or with the hands, in this case by an audience member: “The word derives from the Sanskrit tāla, meaning basically ‘palm of the hand,’ ‘clap,’ ‘metre,’ and so … denotes naturally the principal type of instrument used to maintain meter in traditional, religious and art musics.” Alastair Dick and Pribislav Pitoëff, “Tāl,” in Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/51771. (accessed March 28, 2010).

⁶⁸Overwater's group has recently changed their name to “Jungle Boldie.” According to Overwater, this change represents “time for new music, and a renewed collaboration and thus a new name which would represent the equal role of us three. More a collective than anything else.” Overwater continues describing “The name Jungle Boldie came up because our drummer found the Hindi word Jungalbundhi [sic] meaning equal musical interplay in Indian music. But both Maarten and I understood Jungle Boldie and thought that name was more fun and less pretentious. And later the words felt appropriate because jungle stands for fertile grounds, ever changing environment, a home, adventure. And Bold stood for being outspoken and fresh always looking for something new.” Tony Overwater, e-mail message to author, March 27, 2010. Overwater is describing his interpretation of the Hindustani performance practice of jugalbandhi, which describes “a co-ordinated music-making by a pair of main artistes” which is exceptional because of the necessarily empathetic relationship required of the performers. “Examining the contents of Hindustani music one realizes that all raga-music is concretized through presentations of grammatically correct and aesthetically relevant sequences. It therefore becomes necessary that successive phrasings of the two chief participants in a jugalband[h]i result into a coherent, total pattern. Two individual insights creating a single concentrated vision is, in itself, a joy!” Ashoke Da. Ranade, A Concise Dictionary of Hindustani Music (New Delhi: Promilla and Co., 2006), 43–44. Overwater's definition (“equal musical interplay”) is an interpretation of the actual term's meaning which is more closely translated as “twins tied together.” Jeffrey Grimes, e-mail message to author, March 28, 2010. As I state elsewhere, I believe Overwater to be sensitive to the socio-political ramifications of musical discourse, including to the group's adoption of the word “jungle,” a historically polemical and highly politicized term in the history of jazz discourses.

⁶⁹Overwater describes the concert repertoire as “this organic piece of music that is inspired by the Suites from Ellington AND the countries we visit and the people we meet. For jazz music that happens more often (although also not that often) but for classical music it is unique. To have an ever-changing repertoire which is always adapting and interacting with the surroundings.” Overwater, e-mail message to author, January 31, 2010.

⁷⁰Tony Overwater, “End of Tour,” (November 9, 2009) http://www.fareastrevisited.com/

blogs.html (accessed March 28, 2010). One such example can be seen in the following video: Alban Wesly, “Far East Revisited in Guangzhou,” (November 7, 2008) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obOkeftvP2w (accessed March 28, 2010).

⁷¹Overwater, e-mail message to author, January 31, 2010.

⁷⁷Overwater, e-mail message to author, 14 April 2009.

⁷⁶In addition to the movies posted on YouTube and the FER website, Tony Overwater, Calefax Reed Quintet, and the FER have pages on MySpace and Facebook, all with hundreds of “friends” and message boards with comments from both the musicians and audience members.

⁷⁹Tony Overwater, “Holi Hyperabad,” (March 11, 2009) http://www.fareastrevisited.com/blogs.html (accessed on March 28, 2010). The band members' struggles with the moral implications of these contrasts were also evident in the video: of the four minutes and fifty-six seconds of the “Calefax in India” video, nearly two minutes is devoted to footage of these schoolchildren and those at another concert—playing ball, listening to music, learning and interacting with the musicians.

⁷⁸“Aaj Ki Raat” was arranged by Maarten Ornstein and recorded live at the FER project's Hyperabad concert. Alban Wesly, “Calefax in India – Far East Revisited,” (July 23, 2009) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pA8JmhV9CYc (accessed March 28, 2010).

⁸⁰Ien Ang, “Indonesia on My Mind: Diaspora, the Internet, and the Struggle for Hybridity,” in On Not Speaking Chinese: Living between Asia and the West (New York: Routledge, 2001), 74.

⁸¹Titlestad, 242. See also Peter Hollerbach, “(Re)voicing Tradition: Improvising Aesthetics and Identity on Local Jazz Scenes.” Popular Music 23/2 (2004), 155–171.

⁸²Stanbridge, 105.

⁸³Michael David Székely, “Thresholds: Jazz, Improvisation, Heterogeneity, and Politics in Postmodernity,” Jazz Perspectives 2/1 (May 2008), 41 and 49.

⁸⁴Ibid., 41.

⁸⁵Ibid., 45. Stanbridge adopts a similar stance when he advocates for “building an a posteriori understanding of postmodernism which, in contrast to the reductionism and determinism of a priori theorizing, is based on a detailed observation of contemporary cultural practice … [an] ‘ironic rethinking’ of the past is one that insists—by definition—on a contextualist reading of cultural texts.” Stanbridge, 85.

⁸⁶Jelte Althius, “Smooth Introduction,” (March 9, 2009) http://www.fareastrevisited.com/ blogs.html (accessed March 28, 2010).

⁸⁸Titlestad, 62.

⁸⁷Titlestad, 64.

⁸⁹Titlestad, 61.

⁹⁰See above, notes 7, 21, 82, 84, and 85.

⁹¹See note 1.

⁹²“Thus, contrary to the presumed ‘authoritativeness’ of much textualist scholarship, the advocates of a contextualist, historicist approach must note the sometimes conjectural nature of their conclusions, while continuing to acknowledge the often-profound insights to be gained from a detailed analysis of the symbiotic relationship of texts and contexts.” Stanbridge, 106.

⁹³I would like to thank all the collaborators who helped make this piece possible: most especially Professor Anthony Brown and Tony Overwater for their friendship, willingness to discuss their music, and enthusiastic support for this project; all the members of the Far East Revisited project; as well as Professors James Buhler and John Howland, Dr. David Hunter, Dr. Ryan McCormack, and Anna Reidy, as well as the article's editors and blind reviewers, for their incisive and instructive comments and suggestions.