Live at The Village Avant-Garde...

I discovered two very interesting articles recently on composer/ pianist Anthony Coleman and his thoughts on Ellington's music. 

First of all, from observer.com, here is an extract from their piece twenty-one years ago, Take the 'A'Train Downtown for Ellington Centennial:

Dropping by the Mogador that evening, (saxophonist) Mr. Roy Nathanson declared: “Wynton Marsalis wants to see Ellington as the bulwark of the tradition. We want to see him as the bulwark of the nontradition.” Mr. Coleman happily compounds the heresy. “The Ellington band doesn’t swing like a regular jazz band,” he said. “It lopes, it drags, it feels like it’s in a time warp.” The pianist is nursing a private theory that what Duke really means by swing isn’t finger-snapping 4/4 time but a syncopated hemiola (the superimposition of one beat against another) that has its roots in ragtime. The clue-the musical Rosebud-is the “doo wah, doo wah” that follows the line, “it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.” “I’ve said too much,” Mr. Coleman muttered, looking momentarily dismayed, a future best-selling monograph gone up in smoke.

The finer points aside, it’s certainly true that Ellington, playing to the expectations of the white toffs and gangsters at the Cotton Club, patented a “jungle music” that had its own weird originality. Those early years set the tone. Ellington, the nominal king of jazz, played a music that was only part jazz, as everyone else understood the term, and part something of his own devising-a cocktail of African-American roots music, vaudeville and the European concert hall. Duke was the most unlikely of combinations: a bourgeois arriviste copping fancy Impressionist chords and a self-confident smoothie who knew that the old tricks-blues, gospel, rag, stride-were as good as anything the Old World could come up with.

Mr. Coleman has a downtown nose for kitsch, so at the Knit gig he plans to zero in on Ellington’s rock-influenced work from the 60’s, like Acht O’Clock Rock from the 1971 suite The Afro-Eurasian Eclipse . “Ellington was a very acquisitive person,” he said. “In the 20’s, he heard what was happening in New Orleans and Harlem. In the 60’s, he was watching a lot of TV and he heard rock on programs like Hawaii Five-O and The Ed Sullivan Show . Some of it’s pretty bad, but it’s touching.” 

While Mr. Coleman can make a theoretical case for Ellington’s importance to the current downtown scene (“he changed the border between improvisation and composition”), his connection to Duke is, at heart, personal. A precocious Brooklyn kid, he attached himself to the man and his band in the early 70’s “like a burr.” Forty years from now, he should have attained “Last Civil War Widow” status in all matters Ellingtonian.

... Mr. Coleman recalled that once, at a band rehearsal in Milwaukee, he had the rare privilege of hearing Duke curse. “He called [wayward tenorist] Paul Gonsalves an asshole,” he recalled. “Gonsalves was just so drunk and lost. The room froze. The next day, at a lecture Duke was giving, Paul showed up looking bleary, like he’d taken 10 showers. He interrupted the lecture and said, ‘Duke, I want to play Happy Reunion with you.’ It was very intense, very beautiful.” In 1974, Mr. Coleman saw Ellington for the last time. Terminally ill with lung cancer, Duke gave him the customary smile and four pecks on the cheek. “Ah, you’ve been staying away from me, baby,” he said.

The full article may be found here.

And there is an interview with Coleman by Michael Goldberg in the on-line magazine Bomb. Here is an extract...

MG
Tell me how you got into Duke.

AC 

When I was 12 years old—all this stuff happened when I was 12—around the corner, this architect, Al Henriques, had this enormous collection of Duke Ellington 78s, and I was friends with his kids. Al saw that I was very interested in the 1920s and ’30s, so he allowed me to take the 78s home to copy and they started taking over my life. I started to dream them! My first couple years of high school, while kids would be tripping and listening to the Grateful Dead, I’d be tripping in the Lincoln Center Library with headphones on. And there’s that moment in the Black and Tan Fantasy where “Tricky Sam” Nanton is playing trombone and meanwhile Barney Bigard, underneath the melody, is slowly crescendoing and at the same time glissing up a whole step—that was my psychedelic music. It was so psychedelic how he went from the background to the foreground and meanwhile the tone is slipping.

 Duke had this whole gestural language that stamps his music so strongly; it became my language. I wasn’t interested in writing notes; I was interested in having the whole surface be this growling, glissing thing. It wasn’t until much later that I heard composers coming more from the contemporary classical tradition that also had a constantly inflecting surface. That was the thing in Ellington that really got to me: it’s constantly throbbing; things don’t just sit there. Notes are not just notes; each one of them has this whole life and gesture. The dynamics of the sound blew me away! So that summer my parents asked what I wanted to do for my birthday. I told them I didn’t want anything, except to see Duke Ellington. We went to see the Ellington Band at the Rainbow Grill at the top of Rockefeller Center—

MG

 I saw him there too.

AC 

Did you? At this time?

MG

 Oh sure!

AC 

Johnny Hodges had only one more year to live so if I hadn’t gone then I would never have seen Hodges, I would’ve never seen Lawrence Brown. They were in the band for just one more year. I got Hodges’ autograph, which was very exciting. Then, for the next three or four years, I followed the Ellington Band constantly and tried to take apart the sounds—

MG

 You were playing jazz then too?

AC 

I started studying with Jaki Byard then and going to hear jazz five nights a week. I don’t know how I ever graduated high school. In the summer of 1972, Duke Ellington gave a seminar in Madison, Wisconsin. Every member of the band gave master classes and Ellington gave several. Around that time, I started writing a lot for the Jazz Big Band in school. I had this girlfriend who would come to rehearsals and she’d say, “You got all this Monk, Duke and Mingus stuff going on. But I hear some other things that I think would be good for you.” She was studying composition at Manhattan School of Music. She played me Bartok Quartets, which changed my life, and early Cage prepared piano music which changed my life too, and Ives symphonies. Then the world got confusing. The path got messy. It stayed messy. I was 16, so the path has been really messy for 35 years

Read the whole interview here.

And for a flavour of the music of Anthony Coleman,  from his album The Coming Great Millennium  with Roy Nathanson, here is Billy Strayhorn's UMMG.