Duke Ellington (1899-1974) was always pushing against conventions and limits. Ostensibly a dance band leader, he created an enormous, innovative, and nonpareil body of compositions and recordings that still hold wonders for the listener. He treated his band’s rehearsals as a musical laboratory, experimenting with new harmonies, timbres, and instrumental voicings. Like a magisterial chef, he alchemized his ingredients—the signature styles of his musicians—into a whole that was greater than the sum of its parts.
Ellington hated being pigeon-holed as strictly a jazz musician. He was, in fact, sui generis, or in his phrase, “beyond category.” Over his astonishingly productive fifty-year career leading the Duke Ellington Orchestra, he composed songs, short instrumentals, multi-movement suites, scores for ballets and motion pictures, and Broadway-bound musicals. He was mostly known as a miniaturist for his three-minute evergreens such as Mood Indigo, Sophisticated Lady, and Satin Doll. But his lesser-known, large-scale works provided him the canvasses to tell bigger stories, inspired by, among other topics, African American history, his overseas travels, and his reverence for God.
Through his career run such themes as a drive to be the best, to create a unique sound, and to break out of musical categories; a deep respect for his heritage; and, increasingly, a faith in the Divine.
How fitting that Maestro Gil-Ordóñez has chosen to honor Ellington, during his 125th birth anniversary year, in his home town. Ellington spent the first formative third of his life in Washington, returned many times to perform and receive honors. And since 1988, his vast archive—including 100,000 pages of unpublished music that he and Billy Strayhorn composed for the Ellington orchestra—proudly reside at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.
Ellington was known for experimentation. Maestro Gil-Ordonez has made the PostClassical Ensemble into a highly respected and adventurous ensemble, bringing one fresh concept after another to Washington audiences.
In January 1943, Ellington made his much-publicized debut at Carnegie Hall, enlarging his place in the soundscape beyond ballrooms, night clubs, and theater stages, and launching his reputation as a serious concert artist. The highlight of that evening was his 44-minute magnum opus Black, Brown, and Beige: A Tone Parallel to the History of the Negro in America. Black, Brown, and Beige evidenced the composer’s profound pride in African American history and his intent to express “an authentic record of my race written by a member of it.” In fact, Ellington’s entire career can be seen as a drive for racial respect and equal rights.
The title Black, Brown and Beige suggests a historical progression not of skin colors but, metaphorically, of the increasing integration of people of African descent and their culture into American society. In this work, Ellington was recounting a saga, a heavily programmatic piece which is more meaningful and moving if you know the story: despite cruel and degrading treatment at the hands of some whites, the people in this narrative hold on to their faith and find life’s joys along with self-esteem. Ellington tells a story that is troubling powerful, and hopeful, of a people forgiving, affirming, and without bitterness. Covering considerable historical and emotional ground, Black, Brown and Beige is, by turns, painful, angry, patriotic, wistful, mournful, celebratory, brooding, ironic, bemused, reverential, assertive, and proud.
Conductor Maurice Peress approached Ellington about making Black, Brown, and Beige available to symphonic audiences, Ellington agreed and encouraged him to compose his own ending. Peress’s arrangement for symphonic orchestra compacts the forty-five-minute piece into eighteen minutes, in three sections. The first challenge Peress figured he would face is how to handle improvisation in the original, but he found that there was actually very little that is extemporized. Peress left most of the brass parts intact but transferred saxophone lines to strings, woodwinds, or French horns.
Black, representing the early history of Black people in America, opens with a tom-tom evoking African drumming and features a repeating seven-note motif known as “The Work Song,” which becomes a leitmotif. Brownopens with one of Ellington’s most ravishing melodies, the devotional “Come Sunday,” which sounds at four points in the movement, and returns after the three-minute mark as the ending. In Beige, Harlemites are enjoying themselves, and yet “The Work Song” returns as a reminder that hard labor was still a fact of life for many African Americans.
The Queen’s Suite, dedicated to Queen Elizabeth II, was recorded in 1959 at Ellington’s expense, and pressed in a single copy, which Ellington sent to Buckingham Palace. Only after his death was the piece released to the public. Unusually the work has virtually no improvisation. Undoubtedly the highlight (and the movement Ellington performed most often) is the reflectiveA Single Petal of a Rose, scored for piano supported only by bowed bass, and played rubato. Ellington said A Single Petal “represented wonder.” Its arpeggiated melody is one of his loveliest and most luscious; this singular piece is another that of his that defies categorization. Tonight, it’s played by Ellington Carthan and principal cellist Benjamin Capps.
Also in 1959, Ellington was commissioned to write his first score for a major motion picture. As had happened so often in Hollywood, jazz was again liked with crime, for this was a murder mystery set in a small town on the upper peninsula of Michigan. Anatomy of a Murder starred Jimmy Stewart as the prosecuting attorney, Ben Gazzara as the accused murderer, and Lee Remick as his wife. It’s a first-rate courtroom drama.
Ellington had a small acting role, his first in thirty years, as “Pie Eye,” a piano player who got to speak four sentences—a total of 15 words. In addition, he “ghosted” at the piano for Jimmy Stewart. The soundtrack was performed by the full Ellington orchestra, a small group from within the band, and Ellington as solo pianist. His music was edited considerably to fit the requirements of the movie, but the Ellington-Strayhorn score is a classic. That year, the Columbia Records soundtrack album earned three Grammy Awards.
The movements Almost Cried and Grace Valse, composed by Ellington, were adapted for the PostClassical Ensemble by master arranger Scott Silbert. Almost Cried refers to a scene in the movie when Lee Remick, lonely and living in a trailer, invites in the lawyer played by James Stewart but he declines and says goodnight to a keenly disappointed Remick. The trumpet solo in the original is given to English horn. Grace Valse, aptly-named, falls into the category of jazz waltzes, a small repertory that includes Fats Waller’s Jitterbug Waltz and Bill Evans’s Waltz for Debby. Silbert’s arrangement keeps Ellington’s melody and harmony and modifies the tonal colors. As in tenor saxophonist Stan Getz’s celebrated album Focus, Silbert improvises, also on tenor sax, above the strings.
In his seventies, Ellington continued to take every challenge, tackle every interesting musical problem he could. In 1970, the American Ballet Theater commissioned a 44-minute ballet Ellington called The River, which was choreographed by Alvin Ailey and premiered at the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center on June 25. The River sings of flowing water—as in the Mississippi River—in thirteen short movements. Ellington’s son Mercer explained “By 1970, Ellington’s mind was much more on spiritual values, so he turned the whole thing into a kind of religious allegory that dealt with the cycle of birth and rebirth.” Combining ballet with modern dance, The River became one of Ailey’s most revered works and his troupe has continued to perform it well into the 21st century.
In his memoir, Ellington wrote that “The River starts as The Spring, which is like a newborn baby. He’s in his cradle. . .spouting, spinning, wiggling, gurgling, making faces, reaching for his nipple or bottle, turning, tossing, and tinkling all over the place.” In the swaggering Meander, Ellington said, the baby is “rolling around from one side to the other. . . up and down, back and forth.” The Giggling Rapids “races and runs and dances and skips and trips all over the backyard.” Lively and fetching, Rapids is another jazz waltz, at a brisker tempo than Grace Valse. The Lake, wrote Ellington, “is beautiful and serene.” Village Virgins, with its stately passages for horns, brings the suite to its end.
In the 1930s and early 1940s, when Ellington’s band had grown to include sixteen musicians, he encouraged members of his band to make recordings under their names with six or seven of their bandmates. Ellington never gave up interest in making small-group recordings, which led to the LP Happy Reunion, recorded in 1957 but not released until 1985. The highlight is the slow, spare, haunting plaint Where’s the Music?, suffused with the spirit of a down-home church. Scored originally for just four lead instruments (plus piano, bass, and drums), the emphasis here is on varied densities and interweaving melodic lines. In the original recording, clarinetist Jimmy Hamilton and alto saxophonist Johnny Hodges keened the melody, Jimmy Hamilton and trumpeter Clark Terry called and responded to one another, and Ellington punctuated more wails with percussive piano clusters. As Stanley Dance aptly observed in the album notes, “There’s no performance quite like this one in the whole canon of Ellington’s music.”
Maestro Gil-Ordóñez has chosen to end his concert with an exclamation point, namely, from 1936, the singular Caravan.
Most of Ellington’s music is highly personal—it’s based on a memory, mood, or image. Caravan paints an intriguing picture of some distant and exotic place. With its sinuous melody, Caravan stands as an outstanding example of Ellington’s musical exoticism. The main theme was written by valve trombonist Juan Tizol, who came to the US from Puerto Rico and introduced Latin rhythms to Ellington’s repertory. The piece blends rhumba rhythm with melodic references to North Africa.
Caravan became a hit and has stood the test of time. Today, it ranks as the most recorded piece composed or co-composed by Ellington, with nearly 2,000 recordings in the jazz tradition. In crafting an arrangement of this famous jazz standard for the PostClassical Ensemble, Scott Silbert says, “I’m using Ellington’s recipe but changing the ingredients.” The melody—stated originally valve trombone—is given here to oboe and flute. Conguero Felix Contreras, heard frequently on NPR as host of the program Alt-Latino, plays two cadenzas and a solo.
