Vanity of Vanities...

The forthcoming conference Ellington 2020 is being organised by Anna Celenza of Georgetown University.Professor Celenza has contributed much to the academic study of Duke Ellington's music. I have reposted here an article accompanying an exhibition she curated associated with Ellington's appearances in musicals on stage and screen. The original source of the article by Leon Robbin Gallery may be found here.

Duke Ellington on Stage and Screen

Leon Robbin Gallery

February 14, 2017

August 15, 2017

Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington (1899–1974) was one of the most prominent musical figures of the 20th century. His music was often defined as “jazz,” but he sought to create a body of music “beyond category.” In fact, he preferred to be called simply an “American” composer. The breadth of Ellington’s output was astounding. In addition to writing hundreds of jazz standards, including “Mood Indigo” and “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” he served as the leader of America’s most stellar big band for nearly a half century and composed numerous film scores, musicals and large-scale orchestrated works. Even more importantly, he was one of the most prominent public figures in American history.

Born and raised in Washington, DC, Ellington moved to New York in 1923, where he soon gained national prominence as the featured performer of Harlem’s famous Cotton Club. In 1920s New York, Ellington was drawn to the socially-conscious, artistic flowering commonly referred to as the Harlem Renaissance. He was especially drawn to the work of Langston Hughes, who in his 1926 essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” described jazz as “one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America: the eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul – the tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a white world.” Ellington took this statement to heart when, in the 1930s, he made his way to Hollywood. This exhibition focuses on some of Ellington’s earliest experiences as a composer for stage and screen, and his desire to serve as an artist promoting “the inherent expressions of Negro life in America.”

Original manuscripts, photographs and ephemera in this exhibition are selected from the Arthur Johnston Papers (GTM 091217); the Martin J. Quigley Papers (GTM GAMMS142); and The Leon Robbin Collection of Music Manuscripts and Letters of Composers in the Booth Family Center for Special Collections.

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In 1945 Ellington copyrighted as “composer” his musical setting of the opening verse to “Heart of Harlem,” a poem by Langston Hughes. Ellington and Hughes first met during the height of the Harlem Renaissance – the mid-to-late 1920s – when the Duke Ellington Orchestra was in residence at the Cotton Club. Hughes was a great fan of Ellington’s music, and Ellington aspired to channel the racial uplift he found in Hughes’s writings. In 1936, the pair began work on a musical titled Cock o’ the World, but unfortunately, this project was never completed. “Heart of Harlem” was their only collaboration.

*This holograph of Ellington’s score was Hughes’s personal copy. The changes to the text, made sometime after the song’s publication, are in Hughes’s hand. 

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Duke Ellington and His Orchestra were featured in a variety of short films and feature-length motion pictures in the 1930s. Belle of the Nineties was one of the most successful films from this era. The film was based on a story written by Mae West titled “It Ain’t No Sin.” West also served as the film’s leading lady, and while negotiating with Paramount, she insisted that Duke Ellington and His Orchestra be hired to accompany her on several key musical numbers in the film. In Belle of the Nineties, West plays the role of Ruby Carter, the featured singer in a New Orleans venue called The Sensation Club. The Ellington Orchestra accompanies her during performances of several Arthur Johnston/Sam Coslow songs in the film – most notably “My Old Flame” and “Troubled Water.”

West was a loyal fan of Duke Ellington and his music, and it was thanks to her influence that he was contracted to perform in both Belle of the Nineties and Murder at the Vanities – two Paramount films shot simultaneously in Los Angeles during the summer of 1934.

*Promotional materials describing the musical numbers composed by Arthur Johnston and Sam Coslow for Belle of the Nineties.

*Publicity photo of Mae West. Never shy about her sensuality, West’s character in Belle of the Nineties claims: “It is better to be looked over than to be overlooked."

*Paramount Pictures publicity materials for Belle of the Nineties. West’s original title for the film, It Ain’t No Sin, was changed due to the censors’ demands for a less provocative title.

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Murder at the Vanities is a musical murder mystery that takes place in a Broadway theater called the Vanities. Duke Ellington and His Orchestra were hired to perform a key scene in the film, originally titled “Ebony Rhapsody,” featuring music composed by Arthur Johnston with lyrics by Sam Coslow. When Ellington was contracted to appear in this film, director Mitchell Leisen assured him that he and his orchestra would be represented in an elegant and respectful manner.

*Typescript of the original script for “Ebony Rhapsody.”

*Letter to Arthur Johnston from E. Lloyd Sheldon, producer of Murder at the Vanities, dated May 4, 1934. The film underwent extensive editing before its release, which required last-minute music additions supplied by Johnston and Coslow.

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The Ellington scene in Murder at the Vanities begins with Franz Liszt performing his Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 alone at a piano. The stage resets to a performance of the same work by an all-white symphony orchestra. As the orchestra plays, Ellington and his musicians deftly insert themselves within the ensemble, adding jazz licks between phrases until the white conductor and his musicians depart in frustration. Liszt’s music is then transformed into the “Ebony Rhapsody,” which brings great pleasure to the young women, black and white, who appear on stage and dance with great abandon. Ellington is presented as the triumphant composer/ performer of the modern era. The scene ends abruptly when the original white conductor returns with a prop machine gun and mows down everyone on stage with a barrage of bullets.

*Murder at the Vanities poster (1934)

*Promotional photo for Murder at the Vanities featuring composer Arthur Johnston and the chorus girls from “Ebony Rhapsody.”

*Two image stills from the “Ebony Rhapsody” scene: the first showing Duke Ellington as the triumphant composer/performer, the second showing the frustrated conductor Homer Boothby (played by Charles Middleton).

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Murder at The Vanities was the last film to be released before the Motion Picture Production Code went into effect in 1934. This Code was originally created by Martin J. Quigley (editor of Motion Picture Herald) and Father Daniel A. Lord, a Jesuit priest. The primary purpose of the Code was to create a set of moral guidelines for the film industry that prevented a movie from “lowering the moral standards of those who see it.” In an effort to break the Production Code’s rule against showing “Rape,” the film’s director and producer retitled Duke Ellington’s scene “The Rape of the Rhapsody.” In the final version of the film, viewers see a “program” for this scene before the action takes place. This program describes the symphony orchestra’s performance as “The Rhapsody,” the Duke Ellington Orchestra’s performance as “The Rape” and the conductor’s return with a machine gun as “The Revenge.” In short, “Ebony Rhapsody” was transformed into a metaphorical lynching.

*Three pages from the original Motion Picture Production Code written by Martin Quigley and Daniel A. Lord, S.J.

*Image still from Murder at the Vanities showing the “program” for Duke Ellington’s scene.

The “Rape of the Rhapsody” scene in Murder at the Vanities (1934) featuring Duke Ellington and His Orchestra

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Ellington was deeply angered by the way his scene in Murder at the Vanities was edited. And he demanded that Paramount Pictures make restitution (see the discussion of Symphony in Black below). But Ellington did not blame Arthur Johnston. Several weeks after the film’s release, Ellington sent Johnston a custom-made Christmas card that he had designed himself. As the royalties statement from 1935 reveals, Johnston continued to receive payments for his music, even after screenings of Murder at the Vanities ended. 

*1935 Royalties Statement issued to Arthur Johnston.

*Christmas card from Duke Ellington to Arthur Johnston postmarked December 11, 1934.

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Duke Ellington was very mindful of his public image, and after the debacle of Murder at the Vanities, he demanded that Paramount fund a short film that would effectively reinstate the image of Ellington as a socially-conscious American composer. The result was a nine-and-a-half minute musical shorttitled Symphony in Black: A Rhapsody of Negro Life. Filmed in December 1934/January 1935 at Paramount’s east coast studio on Long Island, NY, Symphony in Black presents four vignettes of contemporary life in the African American community: The Laborers (blue color workers), A Triangle (love and heartbreak), Hymn of Sorrows (religious practices and death) and Harlem Rhythm (nightclub entertainment).  The entire film is pantomime, with music composed by Ellington supplying the emotional background to the imagery on screen. Among many highlights, the film features the screen debut of Billie Holiday, who sings a variation of “Saddest Tale” in the second part of the film.

Symphony in Black was released in September 1935, and shortly thereafter was awarded an Oscar for “Best Musical Short Subject.”

*Three image stills from Symphony in Black: A Rhapsody of Negro Life (1935).

Symphony in Black: A Rhapsody of Negro Life (1935)

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After the success of Symphony in Black, Ellington composed numerous other large-scale works that engaged with the topic of African American history. Undoubtedly, his most famous work in this vein was Black, Brown and Beige, a multi-movement concert work that was premiered at Carnegie Hall in 1943. Less well known, but equally important, was Jump for Joy, an all-black musical revue that premiered on July 10, 1941 at the Mayan Theater in Los Angeles. The show ran for 122 sold-out performances over the course of three months. Ellington tried to bring it to Broadway, but its black pride message was considered too controversial for New York audiences. Ellington explained that his goal in composing the work was to “take Uncle Tom out of the theater and say things that would make the audience think.” By rejecting the negative stereotypes of African Americans so often portrayed in the media, Jump for Joychallenged the myth of black inferiority and offered instead an unabashed celebration of African American culture. Comprising approximately thirty songs and sketches (the script was edited continuously), Jump for Joy presented audiences with a work that instilled racial pride. As Ellington explained years later, Jump for Joy was his “contribution to the Civil Rights cause… It was the hippest thing we ever did.”

*Promotional poster for Jump for Joy.

*Duke Ellington’s original typescript outline for Jump for Joy.

Podcast: Jump for Joy: Duke Ellington’s Celebratory Musical

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*Interior pages for Duke Ellington’s typescript outline for Jump for Joy.

*Autograph manuscript of two pages from the working manuscript in piano score for Duke Ellington’s Jump for Joy (1941). The orchestration is suggested by the juxtaposition of the parts with the names of Ellington band members noted at the beginning of the first page.

*An excerpt from a later, more developed version of the score for Jump for Joy (1941). This section is from the end of the musical.

Acknowledgments: 

Exhibition curated by:

Anna H. Celenza, Thomas E. Caesteker Professor of Music, Georgetown University
Gaelle Pierre-Louis (SFS'2017)

Sources:

Faith Berry, Langston Hughes: Before and Beyond Harlem (Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill, 1983).

Harvey Cohen, Duke Ellington’s America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

Edward Green, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Duke Ellington (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

Theodore R. Hudson, “Duke Ellington’s Literary Sources,” American Music 9/1 (Spring 1991): 20-42.

Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” The Nation (June 23, 1926).

Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, Volume 1: 1902-1941: I, Too, Sing America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

Klaus Stratemann, Duke Ellington Day by Day and Film by Film (Copenhagen: JazzMedia ApS, 1992).

Perdido and found...

The following rare film was posted recently to Youtube.  It shows Ellington taking the assembled players through Perdido.

Ellington experts from across the world pooled their resources in order to identify the musicians, the time and the place.

The line-up of the Orchestra at that time was...

Shorty Baker, Dave Burns, Al Killian, Ray Nance, Nelson Williams, tp; Lawrence Brown, Tyree Glenn, Quentin Jackson, tb; Jimmy Hamilton, cl, ts; Johnny Hodges, as; Russell Procope, as, cl; Alva "Bo" McCain, Charlie Rouse, ts; Harry Carney, bs; Wendell Marshall, b; Sonny Greer, dms; Al Hibbler, Odessa "Chubby" Kemp, Kay Davis, vcl. The trumpeter wearing a beret is possibly Ernie Royal. Billy Staryhorn is also present.

The film was probably shot on 7 April at  La Ferme d’Auteuil in the Paris suburbs and shown on 12 April, according to evidence from this document... 

At that time, Ellington had just begun his European tour and the orchestra appeared in Paris at the Palais de Chaillot on 12 April. Here is a page of programme notes from the concert:

And here is another image of the Parisian garden party from the shoot for Le Jazz Hot.

This is the video...

... and from the same period, the Universal international 'short', Salute to Duke Ellington...


(With thanks to Philippe Baudoin, Agostino Marzoli, David Palmquist, Brian Priestley and Patricia Willard)

The good old days are tomorrow

Browsing through a recent acquisition, a copy of the pamphlet Duke Ellington on Film by Dr. Klaus Stratemann which was issued at the International Duke Ellington Conference in Oldham in 1985 and which became the basis for Dr Stratemann's tome Duke Ellington: Day by Day and Film by Film, I noticed a reference to a short film made in 1972 called The Good Old Days Are Tomorrow.

For Ellington, who was a fugitive from thoughts of ill health and mortality, who recognised he was always in competition with his artistic endeavours of the past and for whom his favourite composition was always "the next one", I understood the significance of the title immediately. I would love to see the film. It was made as a result of Ellington's residency at the University of Wisconsin in the summer of 1972. From Ken Vail's Duke's Diary...

I have contacted UWIS in the past re: their recordings of this event but have turned up little so far. Courtesy of Youtube, however, and Jazz Video Guy, we do get to see what I'm sure is part of the film, a sublime, transcendent performance of Happy Reunion, Duke at the piano and on tenor, Paul Gonsalves.

On a jingling jolly...

To the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire yesterday where Michele Corcella was working with students on arranging for big band with particular reference to Ellington’s  New Orleans Suite. It is Michele's transcription of same which will be performed by the Conservatoire's Ellington Orchestra this coming Monday evening.

The hour and a half seminar was fascinating. We learnt that Ellington's own method of notating his compositions was unique and understood by his copyist Tom Whaley (pictured above, looking on while Ellington and Strayhorn confer) to whom fell the task of writing out the parts for the expensive gentlemen of the orchestra. he was copyist for Ellington only. Arranging and composing companion Billy Strayhorn had to write out his work for the members of the Orchestra himself.

The reactions of the students was illuminating. In response to the opening of Portrait of Louis Armstrong, one student said "There's so much going on," which, in a nutshell, is one of the chief attractions of Ellington's music. Another student was concerned to place the recording in a timeline, finding the opening piano solo reminiscent of Thelonious Monk. "1970" was the reply, :Ellington was 71." The students were obviously amazed that a septuagenarian could produce such fecundity.

Michele Corcella is visiting in part because of the performance of his transcriptions of the suite this coming Monday. he will introduce the performance.

For those of us unable to attend, here is a little background to the genesis of these compositions. Tom Reney has presented Jazz à la Mode on New England Public Radio since 1984. His article, Duke Ellington and George Wein: Civilizing New Orleans may be found here.

And here is the podcast...

Thanks for the Beautiful Midlands...

The Royal Birmingham Conservatoire's Ellington Orchestra under the direction of Jeremy Price will be performing The New Orleans Suite on Monday, 28 October, 2019.

The RBC's website reads:

The New Orleans Suite, originally commissioned for the 1970 New Orleans Jazz Festival is work which has great significance for Ellingtonians, as lead alto star Johnny Hodges died shortly after the first recording session; the band having to record the second session without him. This work also provides proof of the calibre of Ellington’s creative output in his later years, confounding critics who thought he had perhaps become formulaic since the collaborative years with Billy Strayhorn. 

Scores and parts researched and edited from the original manuscript by Michele Corcella.

Tickets may be purchased here.

A second performance is also scheduled for Monday, 25 November. 

Posterity without Pedestals

From The Wall Street Journal...

Posterity without Pedestals

By 

Larry Blumenfeld

Oct. 11, 2019 6:16 pm ET

In 1999 the great pianist, bandleader and composer Duke Ellington would have been 100. As editor of a jazz magazine at the time, I marked the occasion with an essay by Don Byron, a clarinetist whose music to that point had included both his own bold original compositions and faithful readings of early Ellington works. Mr. Byron wrote of “reveling in” and “dreading” the Ellington centennial. The source of his dread? “A truckload of roasted corn heading for a concert hall near you,” as he put it; Ellington as “our own American Beethoven, ” proof of jazz’s legitimacy among great arts. Such canonization, he worried, would ensure that “the Ellington I know and love will probably never come to light.” His Ellington had a sense of “ugly beauty” and made a brilliant career of “sneaking in the outest stuff he could think of and, mysteriously, making people like it”—like the “skronked-out interlude that precedes Harry Carney’s baritone saxophone solo on ‘Jack the Bear.’ ” Mr. Byron wanted to remind readers that Ellington “was a true subversive. We need to hear him, not put him on a pedestal.”

Duke Ellington doesn’t show up until more than halfway through Ted Gioia’s “Music: A Subversive History”; Mr. Gioia has millennia to cover here, and besides, as the author of 11 books, including “The History of Jazz,” he has already written in illuminating depth about Ellington. But the author’s concise appreciation here aligns well with Mr. Byron’s. Ellington, Mr. Gioia writes, recognized early that “the peculiar path of jazz to respectability required it to maintain its own core values, holding onto the blues, syncopation, hot solos, and all the other calling cards of its craft.”

MUSIC: A SUBVERSIVE HISTORY

By Ted Gioia 

Basic, 514 pages, $35

Ellington is among the large cast of subversives in Mr. Gioia’s sweeping study, from Olympian figures such as J.S. Bach to “the least well-known innovators in the history of music,” the enslaved courtesan artists of the Medieval Islamic world known as qiyan. For Mr. Gioia, Bach—whose bold music disturbed austere Lutherans enough that the composer had to write a defense to Leipzig’s city council in 1730—is “a striking case study in how prickly dissidents in the history of classical music get transformed into conformist establishment figures by posterity.” Likewise, Europe’s first acclaimed troubadour, William IX, Duke of Aquitaine, helped Western music throw off “the chains of clerical interference . . . to express the most intimate thoughts and feelings” through “secular song in the vernacular language.” Yet this was merely fulfilling aspirations first voiced centuries earlier by songs of the qiyan.

Mr. Gioia is fascinated by “outsiders and rebels” who too often “fall from view.” Above all, he’s focused on how “the institutions that preserve and propagate the inherited traditions of our musical culture” tended to “whitewash key elements of a four-thousand-year history of disruptors and insurgents creating musical revolutions.” The author aims to subvert our ideas about music history—essentially, Western classical tradition and its contemporary and popular offshoots—in part by removing its pedestals.

Though Mr. Gioia mostly adheres to common lineages—the links between the medieval period and the Renaissance, say, or the stream of African-American tradition from which flowed jazz, blues and rock—he challenges notions of progress based solely on aesthetic or stylistic innovation. “Infusions of energy” from the “disreputable songs” that “institutional power brokers” wish to exclude are, for Mr. Gioia, “the engine room of music history.” He characterizes music history as a cyclical power struggle with shifting battle lines. Some are obvious: between “highbrow and lowbrow sensibilities; between “the sacred and the vulgar”; between “the insider and the outsider.” Some reflect more complicated tensions: between a “feminine tradition” emphasizing “fertility, ecstasy, and magic” and a “masculine” one, celebrating “discipline, social order, powerful men, and group conformity”; between ideas about “music as a soothing lifestyle accessory” and “music as subversive force of change”; and between “music of order and discipline, aspiring to the perfection of mathematics and aligned with institutional prerogatives” and “music of intense feelings, frequently associated with magic or trance states, and resistant to control from above.”

Related to that last conflict, he identifies Pythagoras as “the most important person in the history of music,” whose innovation—a theory to “perhaps define and constrain musical sounds by the use of numbers and ratios”—has “done as much harm as good.” The harm was rendering “the pulse of music” little more than “a matter of counting,” and the forward motion of a performance mere calculation. “And that’s how matters remained until the African diaspora disrupted this complacent view in the twentieth century.” Mr. Gioia relates with sufficient emphasis how, in ragtime music, “the goal was to keep the rhythmic displacements coming, imparting a restless, off-kilter energy to music that no waltz or quadrille could match.” He even goes further, honoring the idea that such an approach represents a wholly different rhythmic conception, one of African descent. (Modern instructional books that impose bar lines on blues, he writes, distort “the very tradition they are trying to propagate.”) 

Mr. Gioia’s claim that “the main plot in the narrative of popular music” for more than a century now has been “the descendants of African slaves rewriting the rules of commercial songs in every decade” is hard to dispute. Yet that point is complicated by his repeated use of the term “underclass” in this context ( Miles Davis, for instance, did not grow up poor). His narrative is sometimes tone-deaf: “Even within the most racist communities,” he writes, “audiences gradually came to prefer the very population they oppressed as purveyors of musical entertainment.” 

Considering this book’s theme, it is curious that the author doesn’t mention the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, an organization founded more than a half-century ago in Chicago whose stalwarts (including saxophonist, composer and Pulitzer Prize-winner Henry Threadgill ) embody Mr. Gioia’s own ideas about subversive ideas that overturn pedagogies and earn acceptance on their own terms. And given Mr. Gioia’s expertise in jazz, I was disappointed that his account of that art form effectively ends in the 1980s, with a “quest for respectability” that “got confused with mimicry of the past.” The jazz scene has moved on in notable ways since then. 

Yet in other important respects, Mr. Gioia stays current. He connects Pythagorean theory (Western music’s “very first algorithm”) to the algorithms beneath our current music business, which leads to timely discussions of the “darker truth” that in recent decades “music technology started evolving faster than the musical styles themselves,” so that by now “the most powerful forces in music . . . view songs as mere content.” The author quotes Spotify’s 2015 annual report to shareholders: “We don’t sell music.” (He doesn’t need to utter the word “data.”) Mr. Gioia frames the historical significance of this situation, and its disenfranchising effect on both musicians and audiences. 

I may not be as confident as Ted Gioia that “a new era of disruption” in music is around the corner, one that “robots and artificial intelligence will prove incapable of stopping.” Yet I share his belief that music’s strange magic can still reshape our world.

—Mr. Blumenfeld has written regularly about jazz for the Journal since 2004.