The standard biographical approach in which the subject is born, did remarkable things, then died gets upended by Jack Chambers’s new Duke Ellington book. Titled A Tone Parallel to Duke Ellington, it satisfies that promise by looking at the man in terms of his music. Acknowledging Ellington’s own preference for terming much of what he did as “beyond category,” the book nevertheless proposes a number of categories that become lenses through which particular pieces of music are studied, revealing, in many cases, fascinating aspects of the man. If it sounds hifalutin’, fear not. Chambers makes it a very accessible journey.
Eleven chapters plot the journey, offering a remarkable variety of topics. Take “Forty-Eight Years with the Duke on Trains.” It serves the dual purpose of acknowledging Ellington’s love of that mode of travel (his most frequent use of which “coincided with the golden age of rail travel in the United States,” as Chambers notes) and the many effective songs he wrote that captured an essence of rail travel. Of course, the best-known, “Take the ‘A’ Train,” was written by Ellington collaborator Billy Strayhorn, and it’s a subway song, if you want to get technical, but the Ellington-written catalogue includes the beginner effort “Choo Choo (Gotta Hurry Home),” from 1924, just after he arrived in New York; “Lightnin’” from 1932; “Happy-Go-Lucky Local” (1946); and the dazzling “Daybreak Express” (1932). About the last-named, Chambers writes:
The impression of the motion of the train, the clack of the iron wheels on the rails, the hoot of the whistle—no detail is missing, no nuance is overlooked. And yet, for all its spot-on imitation of a vehicle in motion, the composition is completely musical, a complex of musical effects arranged with almost unimaginable precision on an exemplary bedrock of swing rhythm, technical virtuosity, and ensemble precision.
We are thus introduced to Ellington’s remarkable ability to capture natural and mechanized sounds using only the palette of his orchestra’s instruments, and to invest those compositions with a simultaneous emotional weight.
Ellington’s romance with trains took on an aspect of necessity when he eventually relented about touring in the Deep South. To avoid the humiliation of being denied rooms and meals, he hired Pullman cars in which the band could travel and, parked on a siding in each destination city, live.
“Echoes of Harlem,” the chapter which opens the book, gets the necessary early biography out of the way even as it offers a look at the genesis of many of the numbers that would cement his fame, such as “Black and Tan Fantasy” and “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo,” but especially those intended to portray the exciting area of upper Manhattan in which he was living and working—“Jungle Nights in Harlem,” “Drop Me Off at Harlem,” and “Echoes of Harlem” among them. Even after this area was no longer central to his life—or, indeed, showing the creative spirit of its most formative decade—Ellington wrote nostalgic numbers like “Harlem Air Shaft” (1940) and “A Tone Parallel to Harlem” (1951). Again, we’re treated to a look at Ellington’s creative process as it applied to emotionally laden places in his life, a phenomenon we’ll revisit later in the book as Ellington’s peregrinations take him much further afield.
Skipping ahead to Chapter Six, “The Lotus Eaters,” we have a singular departure. The focus is on others—two others, specifically: Billy Strayhorn and Johnny Hodges, and the remarkable symbiosis they developed. The title comes from Strayhorn’s “Ballade for Very Tired and Very Sad Lotus Eaters,” which he recorded with Hodges in 1956, alongside an Ellington-free group of Ellingtonians. Chambers lauds the cut as “a hitherto unheard impressionistic dream sequence in which Hodges’s incomparably sensuous alto saxophone glides over Strayhorn’s incomparably lush harmonies in a kind of late-night absinthe haze.”
Purplish prose notwithstanding, Chambers notes that the recording (of a song never to be re-visited by the artists involved) “is a showpiece, albeit a minor one, for the Strayhorn/Hodges alliance.”
That alliance defines this chapter, an example of the magic that can and did occur in the Ellington orbit. The bios of the two (quite temperamentally different) artists remind us of an inscrutable nature that they shared—both of them, like Ellington, offering whatever essence they wished to share through their music. “Warm Valley” kicked off this collaboration in 1940, especially as performed (twice!) at the famous Fargo concert. “Day Dream” and “Passion Flower” furthered this showcase for Strayhorn via Hodges. There were subsequent, less-successful efforts until “A Flower Is a Lovesome Thing” in 1947 and “Lotus Blossom,” developed from 1947 through 1956. The glum-looking Hodges was known for his sensuous tone; it can be conjectured that, like Duke himself, Hodges bottled it up in life and let it out only through music.
Ellington’s relationship with lyrics was uneven, to say the least. Those he wrote himself could come off as pretentious juvenalia; those affixed to his memorable tunes by lesser scribes invite us to ignore the cringeworthy moments. But there’s no question that the best of his songs put them solidly in the Great American Songbook. The chapter “Ellington’s Music with Words” includes a lengthy look at Ivie Anderson, the best of his band singers, who made her name with “It Don’t Mean a Thing” in 1932 and went on to make a breathtaking recording of “I Got It Bad (and That Ain’t Good)”; she was succeeded by Joya Sherrill, who put her stamp on “I’m Beginning to See the Light.” Chambers identifies “Solitude” as another Ellington classic, although the vocal recording he prefers (with good reason) is by Billie Holiday. Capping this chapter is a look at the collaboration between Ellington and Mahalia Jackson for the 1958 album “Come Sunday,” for which Jackson sang the title song with the band. But Duke also persuaded her to record an almost-a cappella take, with just a few chords from piano behind her, an emotionally wrenching version that didn’t see the light until a 1999 CD reissue.
But words weren’t always necessary, as fans of the 1927 “Creole Love Call” can attest. Adelaide Hall provided the vocalise that’s since been regarded as essential to the haunting song, and Kay Davis took up its challenge for a 1944 Carnegie Hall concert. The chapter “Wordless Articulation” names other examples, including an unexpected entry by Rosemary Clooney on the title song of her album “Blue Rose,” recorded with Ellington and His Orchestra in 1956.
One of the missions of this book is to look at the less-celebrated aspects of Ellington’s career, which unfortunately means just about anything he did beyond the 1940s, as he developed into a more ambitious composer even while keeping his band going while others packed it in. (And on that topic, Chambers makes some references to the Ellington Medley that became a staple of his performances throughout the later years of his relentless touring, speculating that Duke hung onto it as a kind of safe haven, guaranteed to please most of the fans. In fact, it was a shrewd move that brought in extra royalty payments in order to finance this expensive band.)
“Accidental Suites: Duke Ellington’s Hollywood Scores” looks at Duke’s four film scores, the most successful of which were written for “Anatomy of a Murder” and “Paris Blues”—reminding us that a movie had to be a success in order for the score to gain popularity.
“Ellington in the Global Village” examines the journeys that took Ellington to what he called “the other side of the world” in the 1960s. Ten weeks in the near- and middle-east caused him to write, when he returned, “The look of the natural country is so unlike ours and the very contours of the earth seem to be different. The smell, the vastness, the birds, and the exotic beauty of all these countries make a great impression.”
He put this impression into his “Far East Suite,” but, far from borrowing eastern scales or trying to imitate those exotic sounds, he instead melded it into a work that, like so many of his later, extended works, expands upon his jazz vocabulary. Likewise, his 1966 trip to the Negro Arts Festival in Senegal and subsequent stops in the Orient inspired 1971’s “Afro-Eurasian Eclipse” and “Togo Brava Suite.”
Ellington’s most ambitious, least-understood suite was probably 1957’s “Such Sweet Thunder,” inspired by visits to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival and sending him and Strayhorn through the complete plays and sonnets of Shakespeare as well as ancillary material in order to craft a twelve-movement work celebrating the spirit of those works. The chapter “Diamonds in a Glittering Heap” examines the work in enough detail to demonstrate that, like the best works in the classical-music canon, this one rewards study.
A shade of melancholy sets in over the book’s last two chapters. “A Final Masterpiece, Reluctantly” is the story of a 1970 commission for the American Ballet Theatre that Alvin Ailey would choreograph. At this point, Ellington was on the road as compulsively as ever and tending to devote more time to the one-nighters than to the large-scale commissions he never could refuse. “The River” became a frustrating deadline-buster, never fully completed, existing in three different versions—solo piano, jazz band, and symphony orchestra—but the orchestral version has carried Ellington’s name into the classical-music halls where he deserves a presence.
Despite Ailey’s frustration, he never stopped praising Ellington. “He wrote with the orchestra—the orchestra was his instrument,” said Ailey. “He composed in the recording studio; his band was his Stradivarius.”
Chambers believes that Ellington could have earned a solid perch among the composer greats had he not fragmented his schedule so much in later years, and speculates that poor critical reception to some of Ellington’s earliest extended pieces (like “Reminiscing in Tempo” in 1935) planted seeds of discouragement. And John Hammond, commended elsewhere in this issue for the jazz recordings he produced for the Vanguard label, was a particular antagonist, resenting the fact that Duke saw no need to heed his intrusive suggestions and publishing bitchy attacks on the bandleader.
The book finishes with an imaginative construction of a formal concert featuring both orchestra and band, featuring some of Ellington’s finest later works, but I’m already sold on Duke’s immortal greatness and so, I suspect, are you. So I’m finishing by going back to Chambers’s Chapter Three: “The Piano Player.”
He lauds Ellington’s 1953 Capitol album “Piano Reflections,” and I couldn’t agree more. Because I found a copy of it early in my Ellington-discovery period, I wasn’t aware of how rarely Duke featured himself solo at the keyboard. Chambers escorts us through an appreciation of those recordings, which include “Piano in the Foreground,” recorded for Columbia in 1961, and, a year later, the unexpected “Money Jungle,” with Max Roach and Charlie Mingus. And there was a handful of solo recitals, many of them recorded, documented in the chapter. Chambers suggests that when he was at the piano, the otherwise elusive Ellington revealed more about his inner world than came through anywhere else. And you need no more proof of that than to listen to the unplanned “Lotus Blossom,” captured during a memorial-album session for Billy Strayhorn in 1967.
A Tone Parallel to Duke Ellington
by Jack Chambers
University Press of Mississippi
www.upress.state.ms.us
Hardcover: 274 pages; $110.00
ISBN: 9781496855701
Paperback: 274 pages; $30.00
ISBN: 978149685574
B.A. Nilsson is a freelance writer and actor who lives in rural New York. His interest in vintage jazz long predates his marriage to a Paul Whiteman relative, and greatly helped in winning her affections.
