Louis armstrong west end blues analysis

CHAPTER 23

Music in America: Jazz and Beyond

As we have observed a number of times in this book, in the nineteenth century a rift opened between popular music and the music we now call classical. Nowhere has this rift been more apparent than in the United States of America, the most populist of all nations.

“Popular” and “classical” are fuzzy terms, however; think of the popularity of the Three Tenors, singing opera excerpts in stadiums around the world; think how broad the application of classical and the related classic can be, from the “classical antiquity” of Greece and Rome to “classic rock.” For music in America, the terms “cultivated” and “vernacular” have proven to be more illuminating. To cultivate means to nurture, as microorganisms are cultivated in a petri dish in a laboratory, or orchids in a greenhouse. Vernacular, on the other hand, refers to one’s native language. Cultivated music, then, is music that has been brought to this country and consciously developed, fostered at concerts, and taught in con­ servatories. Vernacular music is music we sing and hear as naturally as we speak our native tongue.

There is a bitter twist to this terminology as applied to American music. The word vernacular comes from the Latin word vernaculus, which is itself de­ rived from verna: and “verna” meant a family slave. The heritage of African American music was and is central to the story of American music.

1 Early American Music: An Overviev^ Long before European settlers and African slaves arrived here. Native Ameri­ cans had their own musical styles. (We touched on one of these in discussing sacred chant; see page 75.) As Native Americans were pushed farther and far­ ther west, however, their music played little role in the development of Euro­ pean American and African American music.

The history of music among the early European settlers and their descen­ dants is not a rich one. The Puritans disapproved of music; they thought it was frivolous, except for its supporting role in religion. In Puritan church services, rhyming versions of the psalms were sung like hymns, but when the words of the psalms were printed in the Bay Psalm Book of 1640—the first book ever printed in North America — the music was not included, because just a few tunes, known to everyone, were used for all 150 psalms. In succeeding years.

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much of the energy of early American musicians was devoted to the composi­ tion of new psalm and hymn tunes, and to the teaching and improvement of church singing.

William Billings (1746-1800) of Boston is often mentioned as our first composer. He wrote hymns and fuguing tunes, which are simple anthems based on hymns, with a little counterpoint. (An anthem is a choral piece in the ver­ nacular for use in Protestant services.) When sung with spirit, fuguing tunes sound enthusiastic, rough, and gutsy.

Billings’s more secular-minded contemporaries enjoyed the Classical music of the era. Benjamin Franklin, who tried his hand at most everything, also tried composing. But without well-established musical institutions, there was not much support for native composers outside the church. The problem in those years is hardly that of distinguishing between cultivated and vernacular music. The problem is finding written music to listen to and talk about at all.

• Vivaldi's concertos in parts • Bach's songs 2nd

collection • Handel's Coronation

anthems • Heck's art of playing the

harpsichord • Hayden's [sic] cantatas ...

In 1783 Thomas Jefferson’s music library contained these and a hundred other items.

The Cultivated Tradition

As cities grew, first on the East coast and then farther west, more and concerts appeared, and with them faithful concertgoers. One such was a York lawyer and civic leader named George Templeton Strong, who left a and-a-half-million-word diary discussing (among other things) all the phonies, oratorios, and organ music he heard, in unending enthusiastic detail.’^ By the mid-1800s, all our major cities had their concert halls and opera organizations and amateur choral societies. The 1860s saw the foundation of our first conservatories of music, in Boston, Cincinnati, and elsewhere.

Americans eagerly bought tickets to hear traveling celebrities from Europe, and skilled native composers and performers began to appear. The first American musicians to gain worldwide reputations were the immigrant German composer Anthony Philip Heinrich (1781-1861), a quirky early Romantic, and the Louisiana piano virtuoso Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-1869).

On the whole, however, Americans were content to look to Italy for opera and to Germany for instrumental music. That the cultivated tradition in American music was essentially German in orientation is not sur­ prising. Ever since the time of Mozart and Beethoven, German music had achieved wonders and had earned enormous prestige all over Europe. The mid-nineteenth-century immigration from Germany brought us many musicians who labored for the cause of music in this country. We can hardly blame them for their German bias.

more New four- sym-

*Bits of Strong’s diary are cited on pages 232 and 234. “Cultivated” music in America; a scene from Philadelphia society of the 1890s, The Concert Singer, by Thomas Eakins.

CHAPTER 23 Music in America: Jazz and Beyond 393

A concert at New York’s Castle Garden in 1850, in a print issued by Currier &c Ives. Their hand-colored lithographs are famous for vividly illustrating nineteenth-century America.

There were significant native composers at the end of the nineteenth century: John Knowles Paine, Arthur Eoote, and Henry Chadwick of the so-called Boston School, and Edward MacDowell of New York. They wrote symphonies, piano miniatures, and so on, in a competent but conservative German Romantic style. Time has not been kind to their work, despite recent efforts to revive it.

The music of Amy Beach (1867-1944), in particular, has stirred interest in recent years. Active as both a composer and a pianist, she made her debut with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at the age of seventeen. “Mrs. H. H. A. Beach” (as she always signed her works) contributed to many established genres, such as the piano concerto, the piano quintet, and the symphony. Her Gaelic Symphony of 1896 was the first symphonic work ever composed by an American woman.

The emergence of Charles Ives in the midst of this conserva­ tive tradition seems like a miracle of music history (see page 349). Yet Ives profited more than he sometimes cared to admit from the grounding in European concert music he received from his Ger­ man-trained professor, Horatio Parker.

Music in the Vernacular

We might well count the psalms and hymns mentioned above as vernacular music, for in colonial days everybody who could carry a tune sang them at church and in the home, and later they were widely sung at revival meetings and the like. Nineteenth-century Amy Beach

394 UNIT V The Twentieth Century and Beyond

Hymn singing at home in Revolutionary times, an en­ graving by Paul Revere; the music is by William Billings.

America was also rich in secular popular music. Our two most famous com­ posers wrote timeless tunes and ever-popular marches, respectively: Stephen Collins Foster (1826-1864) and John Philip Sousa (1854-1932).

Foster, it is sad to say, led a dispiriting life. Even in those days, song writing was closely tied to the music business; Foster was dependent on Christie’s Min­ strels, the leading traveling theater troupe of the time. They had exclusive rights to his songs and helped popularize them — so much so that some of them soon achieved the status of folk songs. But Foster had a hard time making ends meet. Flis marriage broke up. He turned to drink and died at the age of thirty-eight.

John Philip Sousa, son of Spanish and German immigrant parents, was a Marine Corps bandmaster who later formed a wildly successful touring band of his own. All Americans know his master­ piece The Stars and Stripes Forever (even if they don’t all know its name). Leonard Bern­ stein once said that his greatest regret as a musician was that he hadn’t composed that march.

African American Music

Foster excelled in sentimental ballads, such as “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair” and “Beautiful Dreamer.” But his most notable songs have to do with the black slaves of his time. There are sentimental “plantation songs” such as “Swanee River” (“The Old Folks at Home”) and “Old Black Joe,” and comic min­ strel songs such as “Oh, Susanna!” and “Camp-

Original illustration accompanying a song by Stephen Foster (1862).

CHAPTER 23 Music in America: Jazz and Beyond 395

town Races.” The minstrel show, performed by white actors in blackface, was very popular at mid-century; it consisted of comedy routines, “Ethiopian” songs, dances, and solos on the banjo (an instrument with African roots). Though today this kind of entertainment strikes us as an ugly parody of black speech and character, it was also an acknowledgment of the vitality of the slaves’ music. From at least the time of Foster, African American music has had a profound effect on the music of America at large.

What was the slaves’ music like? This is hard to say, for there were no de­ voted folk-song collectors to write it down. Nevertheless, by studying some­ what later black American music and comparing it with today’s African music, scholars have been able to show how much the slaves preserved of their native musical traditions.

For example, a musical procedure known as call and response is common in West Africa. Phrases sung by a leader — a soloist — are answered or echoed again and again by a chorus. This procedure is preserved in black American church music, when the congregation answers the preacher’s “call,” as well as in spirituals, work songs, and “field hollers,” by which the slaves tried to lighten their labors. It is also an important feature in blues and in jazz, as we shall see.

Spiritual is a term for a religious folk song that came into being outside an established church (white or black). Moving “Negro spirituals,” such as “Nobody Knows the Trouble Eve Seen,” “Go Down, Moses,” and others, were the first black American music to gain the admiration of the white world. After Emanci­ pation, black colleges formed touring choirs. To be sure, spirituals in their concert versions were considerably removed from folk music.

The music of African Americans got a powerful boost from the first major European composer to spend time in America, Antonin Dvorak. This highly respected Bohemian musician, head of New York’s National Conservatory of Music (ancestor of the Juilliard School) in the 1890s, announced his special admiration for spirituals, advised his American colleagues to make use of them in their concert music, and showed the way himself. He incorporated the essence of spirituals so skillfully in his ever-popular Symphony No. 9, From the New World, that one of his own tunes was later adapted to made-up “folk song” words, “Goin’ Home.” This is the first of several examples we shall see of the conscious effort to narrow the gap between America’s vernacular and cultivated styles.

2 Jazz: The First Fifty Years But if Dvorak and his contemporaries could have been whisked for a moment into the twenty-first century, they would have been astonished to see and hear what actually happened. With little help from the cultivated tradition, a strictly vernacular type of music had emerged from African American communities. It was called — at first contemptuously—jazz. Erom the most modest beginnings, this music developed prodigiously. It produced a whole series of new musical styles, performers of the greatest artistry, and composers of genius.

Jazz developed into America’s most distinctive — many would say greatest—contribution to the arts worldwide. And if our time-travelers were to find it hard to believe their ears, there would be something else to amaze them. All this music was actually preserved — preserved on acetate discs by means of a revolutionary new technology, sound recording. These discs have mostly deteriorated by now, but many have been remastered on CDs.

^^ The singing was accom­

panied by a certain ecstasy of motion, clapping of hands, tossing of heads, which would continue without cessation for about half an hour. One would lead off In a kind of recitative style, others joining in the chorus."

A former slave recalls call-and- response singing, 1881

!Vi I 1^’ Go-in’ home, . . .

396 UNIT V The Twentieth Century and Beyond

Negro spirituals were first popularized after the Civil War by groups like the Fisk Singers. In 1871, this group of former slaves toured to raise funds for Fisk, one of the earliest African American colleges.

Jazz is a style that grew up among black musicians around 1910 and has since gone through a series of extraordinary developments. It is not so much a kind of music—the music it is based on usually consists of popular songs, blues, or abstract chord-series called “changes” — but a special, highly charged way of performing that music.

The first crucial feature of this performance style is improvisation. When jazz musicians play a song, they do not stick to a written score or duplicate the way they have heard it before. Instead they fancifully elaborate around a song. They add ornaments and newly contrived interludes, called breaks. In effect, they are always making up variations on the tunes they are using—variations sometimes of such complexity that the original song almost disappears.

The second key feature of jazz is a special rhythmic style involving highly developed syncopation.

Jazz Syncopation Syncopation occurs when some of the accents in music are moved away from the main beats, the beats that are normally accented (see page 14). For example, in 2/2 meter, instead of the normal ONE two ONE two, the accent can be dis­ placed from beat 1 to beat 2 — one TWO one TWO. This is called a “back beat” in jazz parlance.

Some syncopation occurs in all Western music. In jazz, there is much more of it. Syncopation becomes a regular principle, so much so that we can speak

CHAPTER 23 Music in America: Jazz and Beyond 397

of at least two rhythmic “levels” in a jazz piece. One rhythmic level is a simple one — the rhythm section of percussion (drums, cymbals), piano, string bass, and sometimes other instruments, emphasizes the meter forcefully, and con­ tinuously. A second, more complex rhythmic level is produced by the melody instruments — trumpet, clarinet, trombone, piano, and the saxophones that were so brilliantly developed in jazz. They play a constantly syncopating music that always cuts across the rhythm section.

In addition, jazz developed syncopation of a more subtle kind, sometimes called beat syncopation. Derived from African drumming (see page 404), this technique can also be traced in earlier black American music. In beat synco­ pation, accents are moved just a fraction of a beat ahead of the metrical points. When this happens in just the right way, the music is said to “swing.”

The Blues

The blues is a special category of black folk song whose subject is loneliness, trouble, and depression of every shade. Indeed, the blues is more than song, more than music: It is an essential expression of the African American experience. Though gloom and dejection are at the heart of the blues, not infrequently blues lyrics also convey humor, banter, and especially hope and resilience.

Emerging around 1900, the blues was a major influence on early jazz — and has remained a major force in American music ever since.

A blues melody consists typically of stanzas made up of three four-measure phrases (“twelve-bar blues”), repeated again and again as the blues singer develops a thought by improvising more stanzas. The words for each stanza are just two lines long, rhyming, with the first line repeated. Each line is sung to one of the three phrases of the twelve-bar pattern. Here are stanzas 1 and 4 of “If You Ever Been Down” Blues:

STANZA 1 a If you ever been down, you know just how I feel, a If you ever been down, you know just how I feel, b Like a tramp on the railroad ain’t got a decent meal.

STANZA 4 a Yes, one thing, papa, I’ve decided to do, a Oh pretty daddy. I’ve decided to do, b I’m going to find another papa, then I can’t use you.

Composed blues — for example, W. C. Handy’s famous “St. Louis Blues” — can be more complicated than this one, but the aab poetic scheme is basic for the blues.

Blues melodies (and the bass lines and harmonies under blues melodies) provided jazz musicians with powerfully emotional patterns for improvisa­ tion. But more than that, blues also provided jazz with a sonorous model. Jazz instrumental playing has an astonishing vocal quality, as though in imitation of the blues. The trumpet, saxophone, and trombone sound infinitely more flexible and “human” played in jazz style than when played in military band or symphonic style. Jazz instruments seem to have absorbed the vibrant accents of black singing. (This is another feature that jazz passed on to rock music, where the electric guitar is the instrument that powerfully imitates the voice.)

Our example of blues singing is as authentic as it gets, by one of the legendary women who dominated the early blues recordings. Sippie Wallace (1898-1986) — her name is said to derive from a childhood lisp—was equally known for gospel singing and the blues. African American gospel music — ecstatic choral singing in evangelical church services, with high-flying sopranos over the background rhythms of the congregation—grew up at the same time as the blues and ragtime.

I'd like to think that when I sing a song, I can let you know all about the heartbreak, struggle, lies, and kicks in the ass I've gotten over the years for being black and everything else, without actually say­ ing a word about it."

Blues, gospel, and soul singer Bay Charles, 1970

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SIPPIE WALLACE (1898-1986) “If You Ever Been Doivn” Blues (1927) (Composed by G. W. Thomas)

Sippie Wallace is not as renowned as Mamie Smith, Ma Rainey, or the great Bessie Smith, but she poured her heart out with the best of them in response to the eternal themes of the blues:

STANZA 2 I’m a real good woman but my man don’t treat me right. He takes all my money and stays out all night.

STANZA 3 I’m down today but I won’t be down always, ’Cause the sun’s going to shine in my back door some day.

Wallace accompanies herself on the piano. The recording adds two jazz musi­ cians, but she would have sung just about the same way if she had been per­ forming alone. One of the musicians is the outstanding genius of early jazz, Louis Armstrong.

After a brief instrumental introduction, Wallace sings two blues stanzas from the piano bench. The instruments play short breaks in between her lines—the trumpet (Armstrong) in stanza 1, the clarinet (the little-known Artie Starks) in stanza 2. Sympathetic respondents to her “call,” they deepen the melancholy of her song and nuance it:

))) LISTEN THOMAS “If You Ever Been Down” Blues 0:10 Stanza 1 0:45 Stanza 2 1:19 Trumpet 1:51 Stanza 3 2:24 Stanza 4

Perhaps the essential sound of jazz is Louis Arm­ strong improvising the breaks in the blues sung by [famous blues-singer] Bessie Smith.... In the break we have the origin of the instrument imitating the voice, the very soil in which jazz grows."

Composer Leonard Bernstein, Simple break jQrrc TRUMPET

If you ev - er been down you know_ just how I feel_______________ If you ev-er . . .

Then Armstrong plays a solo section — an entire twelve-bar blues stanza. He does not play the blues melody note by note, but improvises around the melody and its bass. Armstrong has a wonderful way of speeding up the dragging blues rhythm, and his rich, almost vocal tone quality echoes and complements the singer’s bleak sound. The clarinet joins him; short as it may be, this is a real example of improvised jazz polyphony.

Wallace, too, joins in quietly during this instru­ mental chorus; she too, no doubt, was singing on im­ pulse. She then sings two more stanzas, with instrumental breaks as before.

It’s necessary to listen to this recording in a differ­ ent spirit from that in which we approach the other recordings of Western music accompanying this book. The scratchy sound on these old discs cannot be helped by digital remastering, and the music itself is not “composed,” of course. It lies somewhere in be­ tween true folk music and jazz, a fascinating juxtapo­ sition of the direct, powerful simplicity of Sippie Wallace and the artistry of Armstrong. With a little imagination, one can virtually hear history happening in this recording: Jazz is evolving from the blues.

Sippie Wallace

Wallace was also a pianist and songwriter, who usually sang her own compo­ sitions, and published a good many of them. Her long performing career began

CHAPTER 23 Music in America: Jazz and Beyond

Ragtime: Scott Joplin (1868-191'/)

Ragtime, a precursor of jazz, was a style of piano playing developed by black musicians playing in bars, dives, and brothels. The music resembled march music, but while the left hand played strictly on the beat, the right hand syncopated the rhythm in a crisp, cheerful way. “To rag” meant to play in a syncopated style; “ragging” evolved into jazz syncopation.

In the early 1900s, when phonographs were still new and most music in the home was played on the piano, ragtime became enormously popular throughout America by means of sheet music and piano rolls for mechanical (“player”) pianos. The term ragtime could also be applied to nonpiano music: witness the famous song “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” of 1911 by Irving Berlin.

Scott Joplin was the leading rag composer. Frustratingly little is known about his early life. The son of an ex-slave, he grew up in Texarkana and worked as a pianist and band musician in many Midwestern towns. “Maple Leaf Rag,” named after the Maple Leaf Club in Sedalia, Missouri, where Joplin played, was published in 1899. It quickly sold a mil­ lion copies. You can hear this famous rag on your Study Guide DVD; see also Listening Exercise 2 on page 15.

Joplin followed “Maple Leaf” with “The Entertainer” and many other rags. They stand out for an elegance that might not have been expected in this simple and commercial

12

genre. In “Solace: A Mexican Serenade” Joplin mixed rag­ time with Latin American dance styles in a work of nos­ talgic sophistication. He even published a small treatise on the playing of ragtime, warn­ ing those who would race through his pieces; “Never play ragtime fast at any time.” And to those who saw rag­ time as a style too lowbrow for their tastes, he wrote: “Synco­ pations are no indication of light or trashy music, and to shy (i.e., throw) bricks at ‘hateful ragtime’ no longer passes for musical culture.”

Joplin’s evident desire to break into cultivated musi­ cal circles was not realized. After he moved to New York in 1907 he gradually faded from the limelight. He wrote two operas, the second of which, Treemonisha, received a single unstaged, unsuccessful performance in 1915. His death in 1917 was noted by few.

There was a strong new surge of interest in ragtime in the 1960s. At last Treemonisha was fully staged and recorded. In 1975 Joplin was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize in composition.

at little churches in Houston and ended with a concert at Lincoln Center, the sprawling New York music facility that houses the New York Philharmonic Orchestra and the Metropolitan Opera.

New Orleans Jazz

Early jazz was local entertainment for black audiences, an informal, low- budget, and even a somewhat casual art. Small bands, usually of six to eight players, typically featured three melody instruments to do the “swinging” — trumpet, clarinet, and trombone. The rhythm section could include piano, banjo, string bass, or even tuba, along with drums and other percussion.

Early jazz players developed the art of collective improvisation, or “jamming.” They learned to improvise simultaneously, each developing the special resources of his instrument — bright melodic spurts for the trumpet, fast running pas­ sages from low register to high for the clarinet, forceful slides for the trom­ bone. They also acquired a sort of sixth sense for fitting in with the other improvisers. The nonimitative polyphony produced in this way is the hallmark of early jazz.

The first important center of jazz was New Orleans, home of the greatest early jazzman, Louis Armstrong, who played cornet and trumpet. Armstrong and his colleagues developed wonderfully imaginative and individual perform­ ance styles; aficionados can recognize any player after hearing just a few measures of a jazz record. With players of this quality, it is not surprising that solo sections soon became a regular feature in early jazz, along with collective improvisation.

400 UNIT V The Twentieth Century and Beyond

Louis Armstrong (1901-19J1)

Louis Armstrong was born into abject poverty in New Orleans. He learned to play the cornet in the Colored Waifs’ Home, where he had been placed as a juvenile

delinquent. Determined to become a musician, Arm­ strong played in seedy clubs and on riverboats, which were floating dance halls that traveled from town to town on the Mississippi every summer. Riverboats became a cradle of early jazz, importing it up the river from New Orleans to Kansas City and other centers.

Soon Armstrong was playing in the pioneering jazz bands led by King Oliver (see above) and Fletcher Hen­ derson. He rapidly emerged as a more exciting artist than any of his colleagues. His sophisticated, flowing rhythms, his imaginative breaks and variations, and the power and beauty of his trumpet tone — all these were unique at the time. A famous series of records he made in the 1920s, playing with small New Orleans-style bands, drew jazz to the serious attention of musicians all over the world.

In the 1930s the popularity of jazz led to a great deal of commercialization, and to the cheapening and stereo­ typing that always seem to result from this process. Armstrong went right along, while often contributing moments of breathtaking beauty to records that were “listenable virtually only when Louis is playing,” accord­ ing to one jazz critic of the time. Armstrong became a

nationally loved star, familiar from his appearances in nearly twenty movies. The State Department sponsored him on so many international tours that people called him “Ambassador Satch” (“Satchmo,” his nickname, was de­ rived from “satchel-mouth”).

However, the more successful Armstrong became in the world of popular music, the more he drifted away from true jazz, to the distress of jazz enthusiasts. His last hit record was Hello, Dolly!, the title song of a 1964 Broadway musical; in this number he sang (with his famous raspy delivery) more than he played the trumpet.

Encore: Listen to “West End Blues,” “Heebie Jeebies,” “Hotter than That,” “St. Louis Blues” (with Bessie Smith).

Jazz in the early 1920s: Louis Armstrong (center) in his first important band, Joe (“King”) Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band. Oliver is to Armstrong’s left. The pianist, Lil Hardin — also a band­ leader and songwriter — later married Armstrong and is credited with directing his early career.

CHAPTER 23 Music in America: Jazz and Beyond 401

Recording technology was already crucial in the dissemination of jazz. As popular records in those days were all just three minutes long, the jazz that has survived from that era is all slimmed down into three-minute segments. (If not for this, Sippie Wallace and Louis Armstrong would have given us many more blues stanzas.) Originally issued on labels that appealed to black audiences — coldly categorized as “race records” by the music business — Armstrong’s discs of the late 1920s and 1930s not only attracted white listeners, hut also excited the admiration of a new breed of jazz musicologists and critics.

Swing

Around 1930, jazz gained significantly in popularity, thanks in part to Arm­ strong’s recordings. With popularity came changes, not all of them to the good. Jazz now had to reach bigger audiences in ballrooms and roadhouses. This meant big bands, with ten to twenty-five players — and such large numbers required carefully written out arrangements of the songs played. Improvisa­ tion, which was really the rationale behind jazz, was necessarily limited under these conditions.

However, big-band jazz — called swing — compensated for some of its lost spontaneity by variety of tone color and instrumental effects. A novel style of band orchestration was developed, based on the contrast between brass (trumpets

Swing in the late 1930s: one of the most famous of the “big bands” (Glenn Miller) —brass to the left, reeds to the right. Miller’s sideman Bobby Hackett (cornet) was one of many white musicians inspired by Louis Armstrong.

402 UNIT V The Twentieth Century and Beyond

and trombones) and “reed” (mainly saxophone) groups. Soloists cut in and out of the full-band sounds. Jazz “arrangers,” who arranged current songs for the bands, treated this style with the greatest technical ingenuity and verve; they deserve the name of composers. Sometimes they contrived to allow for some improvisation within their arrangements.

With popularity, too, came white musicians and managers, who moved in on what had previously been a relatively small black operation. Not only were black jazz musicians marginalized in the mass market, but their art was watered down to suit the growing audience. The big swing bands that were commercial successes were white, and their leaders — Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw—were household names in the 1930s and 1940s. But the best of the big bands were black: those led by Count Basie (1904-1984), Jimmie Lunceford (1902-1947), Chick Webb (1909-1939), and Duke Ellington.

DUKE ELLINGTON “Conga Brava” (1940)

The tune used in “Conga Brava” was written by Ellington together with his Puerto Rican sideman Juan Tizol. (A conga is a dance of Afro-Cuban origin, named after the conga drum.) In it, the characteristic beat of Latin

American music is appropriated by jazz — a mild tit-for-tat on behalf of a musical style that had given up much more to the nonblack world.

Only the beginning of this unusual tune — the a a section of the a a b form — has a Latin beat. Played by trombonist Tizol, the first a is presented with a minimal and mysterious accompaniment; but after this ends with a fancy clarinet break, the second a includes brilliant interjections from the muted brass (an Ellington specialty). Erom now on things change rapidly. The brass choir plays b, with a speedy low clarinet cutting in. The rhythm section switches from a Latin beat to a typical jazz back-beat duple meter. The music begins to swing hard, as the trumpets remove their mutes.

The second appearance of the tune is a dazzling free improvisation by tenor sax player Ben Webster. He sounds genuinely spontaneous; he probably never again improvised around this melody in just this way. After he has gone through a and a, the muted brass come in again with a lively variation of b.

Webster has strayed far from the tune, so it is good to hear the third ap­ pearance of the tune in its original form (more or less), now on the reed choir (saxophones). This time the brilliant interpolations are by sideman Rex Stewart on trumpet. And this time, after a single a, there comes an extraordi­ nary brass-choir version of b, with wildly syncopated rhythms. The coordina­ tion of the brass instruments is breathtaking, and the sheer verve of their variation makes this the high point of the composition.

At the piano, Duke gives a quiet signal for this brass episode before it starts; he also plays a single, hardly audible note in the middle of the episode, as though to remind us who is in charge. The piece ends as it started, with the tune played by Tizol, but it fades halfway through.

How strange to be back to the rather still and mournful conga melody, with its Latin beat! The listener to “Conga Brava” can end up feeling a bit mystified. All that exhilarating jazz activity that blew up so suddenly and has now been cut off—was it some kind of dream? Only a master of musical form like Ellington could make you think of such questions after a mere three minutes of music.

))) LISTEN ELLINGTON “Conga Brava” 0:04 a a Trombone 0:45 b Brass and

alto sax 0:59 a a Sax 1:39 b Muted brass 1:46 a Reed choir

(with trumpet) 2:07 b' Brass choir 2:32 a Trombone

My band is my instrument."

Duke Ellington

CHAPTER 23 Music in America: Jazz and Beyond 403

Duke Ellington (i S^jf) - 1974)

Edward Kennedy Ellington was bom in Washington, D.C., son of a butler who occasionally worked at the White House. The young Ellington considered a career as an artist,

but he started playing the piano in jazz bands—ragtime was a major influence—and soon organized his own. He learned arranging too, and became an almost unique phenomenon: a major bandleader who was also its composer and its arranger

He was called “Duke” because of a certain aristocratic bearing—and he was fastidious about his music, too. Ellington held fast to his own high standards of innovation and stylishness. And although his band never “went com­ mercial,” it did as well as any black band could in the 1930s and 1940s. “Duke Ellington and His Famous Orchestra” were renowned as the backup to sumptuous revues put on at the Cotton Club, an upscale Harlem night spot that catered to white audiences. Their recordings from around 1930 to 1940 constitute Ellington’s major legacy.

After World War II, Ellington went his own imper­ turbable way, keeping his big band at a time when such organizations were regarded as jazz dinosaurs. He had experimented with long, symphonic-style jazz compo­ sitions as a young man, and now wrote more of these, as well as movie scores, a ballet, and an opera. The Ellington band, which had toured Europe twice in the 1930s, now toured all over the world, including the Soviet Union.

Ellington was finally recognized for what he was, just about America’s most eminent composer, and he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and other tributes. His last creative phase found him writing lengthy religious pieces, called Sacred Concerts, for the Ellington band with a Swedish soprano, Alice Babs, who was not really a jazz singer at all.

Ellington’s Sacred Con­ certs would have been im­ possible without Babs—but the same is true of his earlier, better-known music and the musicians of his early bands. These individual soloists, or sidemen, as they are called — among them Barney Bigard (clarinet), Cootie Williams (trumpet), Johnny Hodges (alto saxophone), and Juan Tizol, who is featured on valve trombone in “Conga Brava” (see opposite page) — were vital to Ellington’s art in a way singers or instru­ mentalists very rarely are in classical music. He molded his music so closely to their sometimes eccentric styles of playing that we can hardly conceive of his music without them.

Ellington’s sidemen can be regarded as co-composers of his music — or, better, as its material, like the songs and the blues that were transformed by Ellington’s magic.

Chief Works: Very many songs — one estimate is 2,000—and jazz arrangements ■ Large-scale jazz compositions, including Creole Fantasy and Black, Brown, and Beige ■ Musical come­ dies, ballets, an incomplete opera (Boola), and other stage music ■ Five film scores; Sacred Concerts

Encore: Listen to “Mood Indigo,” “Caravan,” “Take the ‘A’ Train,” “Ko-ko,” “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing),” “Sophisticated Lady.”

Jazzmen as listeners: Duke Ellington and (behind him to the right) Benny Goodman listen to Ella Eitzgerald, one of the greatest vocalists of the jazz era. Joining the group is famed composer of Broad­ way musicals Richard Rodgers (front far right). You can hear Fitzgerald sing “Who Cares?” on the Listen DVD. 14

404 UNIT V The Twentieth Century and Beyond

Global Perspectives 6

African Drumming

We said before that the syncopated rhythms of ragtime, blues, and jazz derived from traditional African music, particularly drumming. We don’t know enough about African or African American music in the nineteenth century to detail this connection in all its stages, but we can sur­ mise that the rhythmic complexities of modern jazz and today’s African drumming are connected in a history that reaches back centuries.

Listen now to our recording of a drum ensemble from Benin, a small West African nation situated be­

tween Ghana and Nigeria. The drummers play music used in the worship of ancestral spirits among the Yoruba people—one of a wide variety of religious and nonreligious uses of drumming in the region.

Syncopation and Polyrhythms

The rhythms of this music cannot be said to swing pre­ cisely in the manner of jazz, but they show a com­ plexity and vitality related to jazz rhythms and not found in the European classical music tradition through the nineteenth century.

These rhythms are related to what we have termed beat syncopation in jazz (see page 397). A single drum

A drumming club in another West African country, Ghana.

IP

GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES 6 African Drumming 405

lays down a basic, fast, four-plus-four pulse; each group of four feels like a beat, and two groups of four take about a second. (This quick pulse is heard all the way through the recording, except for three brief moments: This drummer speeds up momentarily at 1:09,1:46, and 2:33, with stunning, energizing effect, fitting six strokes into the space usually taken up by four.)

Against the main drum’s consistent pulse, the other drums play a variety of different rhythms. Some­ times they underscore the main drum’s even pulse, or even duplicate it. Often, however, they play off it with more complicated and varied rhythms, including ex­ tensive syncopation within the groups of four (or beats), and occasionally they boldly contradict it.

Such overlapping of varied patterns with the main pulse is essential in West African drumming. Since sev­ eral rhythmic formulas can be heard at once, it is sometimes called polyrhythm. From its polyrhythms the musical whole gains an extraordinary richness of rhythmic profile. And from the syncopations within the beat it derives its irresistible vitality (irresistible also to the ancestral spirits invoked).

A Closer Look To study this recording more closely, listen for a few clear polyrhythmic interactions:

7 One drummer aligns a regular syncopated formula against the main pulse, in this manner: PSSB3 BBSS BBSS BSBBS BSSB stXXx jlcsLJc JcI stXxiI — Main pulse

Listen for this four times in the recording, at 0:23-0:29, 0:50-0:53, 1:23-1:28, and 2:13-2:19.

7 Another drummer plays an even 3 + 3 pulse against the main 4 + 4, seeming to contradict its duple meter with a triple orientation. This occurs prominently twice, at 0:41-0:44 and again at 2:22-2:26.

7 One drummer in particular departs freely from the main pulse all the way through this recording. He is the soloist, so to speak, improvising against the more regular and predictable playing of his ensemble-mates. His drum is recognizable by its wooden, clickety-clack timbre and by the fact that it plays two distinct pitches (the higher pitch is more wooden-sounding than the lower).

One good way to listen for his distinctive, irregular syncopations is to clap along with the main pulse as you listen, once every four strokes. You will be clapping about twice a second. Then compare the regularity of your own clapping with the seemingly free fantasy of the clickety-clack drum.

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406 UNIT V The Twentieth Century and Beyond

3 Later Jazz After World War II the popularity of the big bands collapsed suddenly. They were too expensive to run; furthermore, styles in enter­ tainment had changed, and the smooth, high- powered band sound struck people as cold and slick. The mass market turned to rock’n’roll, itself the outcome of a vital new genre of African American music, rhythm and blues (see page 416). Even during the war, this collapse had been forecast by a revolutionary new movement within jazz called bebop.

Bebop

During the early 1940s, young black jazz musi­ cians found it harder to get work than white players in big bands. When they did get jobs, the setup discouraged free improvisation, the life and soul of jazz; the big bands seemed to have co-opted and distorted a style grown out of black experience. These musicians got together in small groups after work for jam sessions at clubs in Harlem. There they developed a new style that would later be called bebop. Contrast­ ing sharply with the big bands, the typical bebop combo (combination) was just trumpet and sax­ ophone, with a rhythm section including piano.

Bebop was a determined return to improv­ isation, then — but improvisation of a new technical virtuosity. “That horn ain’t supposed to sound that fast,” an elder musician is said to have complained to bebop sax­ ophonist Charlie Parker. In addition to unprecedented velocity, Parker and leading bebop trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie (1917-1993) cultivated hard, per­ cussive sounds and sharp, snap rhythms (one derivation of the term “bebop”).

Equally radical was the treatment of harmony in bebop. New Orleans jazz used simple, in fact naive, harmonies. The swing arrangers used much more sophisticated ones. Bebop musicians took these complex harmonies and im­ provised around them in a more and more “far out” fashion. In some stretches of their playing, even the tonality of the music was obscured. Bebop melodies grew truly fantastic; the chord changes became harder and harder to follow.

CHARLIE PARKER (1920-1955) and MILES DAVIS (1926-1991) “Out of Nowhere” (1948)

In a recording studio, Charlie Parker listens to a playback as the other musicians wait for his reaction. Will he approve this take of the num­ ber they are recording, or will they have to do another?

Playing bop is like play- iii; Scrabble with all the vowels missing,"

Duke Ellington, 1954

The life of Charlie (“Bird”) Parker, bebop’s greatest genius, reads like a modern-day version of a persistent Romantic myth — the myth of the artist who is driven by the demon of his creativity, finding fulfillment only in his art.

Parker was on drugs from the age of fifteen, and in later years could not control his immoderate drinking and eating. A legend in his own lifetime, Parker died

CHAPTER 23 Music in America: Jazz and Beyond 407

at the age of thirty-four after a suicide attempt and a period of hospitalization in a California mental institution.

“Out of Nowhere” is one of the many popular songs of the 1930s that were used as the basis for jazz, swing, and bebop singles. Our version of the number was recorded live in a New York nightclub, so it can give us an idea of what an improvised bebop number actually sounded like. Notice the informal opening — no arranged introduction as in Ellington’s “Conga Brava,” or even in the Wallace-Armstrong blues number. Parker plays the attractive song fairly “straight” to begin with, but he inserts a sudden skittering passage just before the A' section (the song is in A A' form). This is a preview of things to come.

The trumpet solo by Miles Davis has the characteristic tense, bright bebop sound, some very rapid passage work, and one or two piercing high notes. Then Parker’s improvisation shows his impressive powers of melodic development. He builds a whole series of phrases of different lengths, increasingly elaborate, that seem to leave the song behind in the dust — except that now and then he recalls ever so clearly a melodic turn from it (especially in A'). This is a Parker trademark: Again and again his solos strike this balance between fantastic elab­ oration and allusion back to a more modest starting point.

The irregular, almost discontinuous-sounding rests between Parker’s phrases have their own special fascination. You may recognize an Irish jig, named “The Kerry Dancers,” which seems to have popped into Parker’s head right in the middle of the solo, as the outgrowth of a short melody figure he had come to. He plays the jig at a dizzying rate for just a moment, before inventing some­ thing else; fantastically, it fits right in.

At the end of his solo the nightclub audience applauds, and the pianist plays his own improvised solo on the tune’s A section. The number ends with the A' section of “Out of Nowhere” played once again quite simply, except for new trumpet breaks and a new, comical ending.

))) LIS jYii PARKER “Out of Nowhere' 0:00 Tune A 0:24 A' 0:48 Trumpet A 1:12 A' 1:36 Sax A 2:00 A' 2:24 Piano A 2:49 Tune A' 3:11 Coda

Ja// alter In Ixip Melody, harmony, and tonality—these were the very elements in music that had been “emancipated” by Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and other avant-gardists in the early 1900s. With the bebop movement, the avant-garde finally came to jazz.

Many new jazz styles followed after the bebop emancipation, from the 1950s to the present day. Jazz fans distinguish between cool jazz, free jazz, modal jazz, Afro-Cuban jazz, electric jazz, and even avant-garde jazz. Among the leaders in this diverse, exciting music were pianist Thelonious Monk (1917- 1982), trumpeter Miles Davis (1926-1991), keyboardist Sun Ra (1928- 1994), and saxophonists John Coltrane (1926-1967) and Ornette Coleman (b. 1930). They were the first to improvise really freely—that is, without a song or blues as a basis.

The synthesizer ha| changed everything, whether purist musicians like it or not. It's here to stay and yog can either be in it or out of it. I choose to be in it because the world has always bgen about change."

From Miles Davis's auto­ biography, 1989

MILES DAVIS (1926-1991) Bitches Brew (1969)

Trumpeter Miles Davis, one of the most innovative figures in the whole his­tory of jazz, started out playing with Charlie Parker and other bebop musi­ cians, as we heard in “Out of Nowhere.” Soon, however, he realized that his

own aptitude (or at least one of his main aptitudes) was for a more relaxed and tuneful kind of melody. Davis’s style went through many stages — from

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bebop to cool jazz to modal jazz and beyond — as he worked in various groups with a veritable who’s-who of modern jazz artists.

Bitches Brew, one of his biggest hits, was also one of his most original. A conscious (and controversial) attempt to blend jazz with rock, the album used a rhythm section with electric guitar, bass, and two electric keyboards in addition to regular jazz drums, acoustic bass, and augmented percussion. In­ stead of the traditional chord changes of jazz, this group produced repetitive, rocklike rhythms of the greatest variety and, often, delicacy. This backdrop provides an unlikely but also unforgettable setting for Davis’s haunting improvisations.

Our selection covers a solo from the title track of Bitches Brew. Before Davis begins, the electric piano and guitar pick out rhythmic patterns against a quiet jazz drum background; mostly the electric guitar has isolated single notes and the electric piano has syncopated, dissonant chords. From the beginning a rocklike ostinato sounds quietly on the electric bass guitar.

The trumpet solo starts with short patterns of relatively long notes, a Davis signature. The mood is meditative, almost melancholy: an evocation of the blues. The backdrop tapestry of sounds grows thicker. Soon Davis is employ­ ing more elaborate patterns — a string of repeated notes, scalelike passages up and down — but the effect is, in its own way, as repetitive as the backdrop. Then he explodes into a series of little snaps, a recollection of bebop. As the whole group drives harder and harder, we realize that Davis has now arrived at a wild, free ostinato in the high register. The solo sinks down again after a climactic high trumpet squeal, another Davis hallmark.

With jazz-rock or fusion, Davis and others reached out for vernacular roots in American music. Still, jazz after bebop is usually complex and often difficult to follow. Formerly America’s dominant form of truly popular music, today this music can really only be described as “popular” with loyal fans who crowd to jazz festivals from Newport, Rhode Island, to Monterey, California. These fans view with mixed emotions efforts by Washington’s Smithsonian

LISTEN DAVIS Bitches Brew (part) 0:00 0:42 1:04 2:41 3:20

Backdrop Dies down Trumpet solo Trumpet ostinato Climax

Cuban pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba, leading Miles Davis light of a new jazz generation.

CHAPTER 23 Music in America: Jazz and Beyond 409

Institution and New York’s Lincoln Center to cultivate jazz in a classical-concert format, led especially by the latest great jazz trumpet virtuoso, Wynton Marsalis (b. 1961), who is also a great entrepreneur and a great publicist. The life and soul of jazz is its spontaneity. Will spontaneity survive institutionalization and “classic” status?

4 The Influence of Jazz and Blues

Jazz continues to flower cumulatively, taking on and transforming the new without ever abandon­ ing the old. It is a fugue with a life of its own, end­ lessly recapitulating."

Time magazine, 1976

How was jazz first received in this country’s “cultivated” musical circles? Many longtime symphony and opera subscribers certainly hated it. They con­ sidered its saxophones and muted trumpets vulgar, its rhythms dangerously sexual and likely to corrupt their children. This reaction was strongly tinged with racism.

On the other hand, jazz was from the first an inspiration as well as a delight for less hidebound musicians, music students, and young composers. The 1920s was a confident era, and composers coming of age at that time promised a bright new day for American music. A vital, fresh musical idiom had emerged — the decade from 1920 to 1930 called itself the Jazz Age — and the idea of working jazz into concert music was both natural and exciting.

Jazz in the Concert Hall

We have already heard one example of this trend in Maurice Ravel’s blues- influenced Piano Concerto in G (see page 356). Ravel heard the new African American styles when they took Paris by storm in the 1920s, making that city the first jazz center outside the United States.

In America, the composer who most successfully carried off the fusion of jazz with concert-hall music was George Gershwin (1898-1937). Born in New York, Gershwin received a sketchy musical education. He quit school at sixteen to work as a song plugger, or music publisher’s agent, playing through the newest sheet music hits for potential customers and promoting them to singers and bandleaders. Soon he was writing his own songs, and he went on to compose some of the finest tunes of the 1920s — “Lady Be Good,” “Embraceable You,” “The Man I Love,” and dozens of others. He was an accomplished and original jazz pianist.

Harboring an ambition to enter the world of cultivated music, Gershwin electrified musical America with his Rhapsody in Blue of 1924. Billed as “An Experiment in Modern Music,” this fourteen-minute work for piano and orchestra was first performed by Paul Whiteman’s Orchestra, a sleek forerun­ ner of the 1930s big bands. This music is not true jazz, but is Gershwin’s trans­ lation of jazz into his own individual idiom, halfway between jazz and the concert hall’s concerto.