Mutes and men
I’m belatedly getting around to reading a piece by Claudia Roth Pierpont in the May 17, 2010 issue of the New Yorker, titled “Black, Brown, and Beige: Duke Ellington’s Music and Race in America” (for now, available here).
It’s a solid introduction to the work and significance of a composer and bandleader whose viable creative career stretched across an incredible six decades, from the 1920s right up through his death in 1974. Pierpont is reviewing what sounds like an interesting book by Harvey G. Cohen, Duke Ellington’s America (University of Chicago Press, 2010 — definitely going on my to do list). And if there’s nothing particularly groundbreaking in her article for anyone who’s already waist-deep in Ellingtoniana, Pierpont makes a number of compelling points that I’m finding helpful in thinking through the stakes involved in Ellington’s early compositional work, and that of his improvising peers (such as James “Bubber” Miley), and in developments in 1920s jazz in general.
Composition and Improvisation
Pierpont writes of Ellington first bringing his D.C. band to the Big Apple in the years after the Great War, and the challenges of making themselves heard in a very different city:
As new arrivals, they had practiced the sweet, straight, “under conversation” music that had been in demand at the Washington society dances where the original group members started out, but they had quickly discovered that this sound was all wrong for New York. Not brazen enough, not rhythmically driving; not Negro enough; not jazz.
Pushed by the city, pushed by their manager, Irving Mills, and of course pushed by Ellington’s own ambition, the band began to focus on developing their own particular style and (more importantly) writing and recording primarily Ellington’s own compositions.
I like that phrase, “under conversation” music, as a way of describing what was expected of the dance bands out of which at least the New York jazz style emerged, whether you were the well-established Paul Whiteman or a new arrival like Ellington. And it strikes me that at the heart of both strains of innovation in jazz’s development through the 1920s is a simple (or not so simple) insistence on being heard. In other words: of moving jazz out of its simple role as functional background music for audiences there to do something else, and moving jazz musicians out of their service role as the musical equivalent of busboys and hatcheck girls.
This insistence drove the push toward improvisatorial competence and artistry that we associate with Louis Armstrong’s arrival on the New York scene in 1924. But this insistence also drove the push toward what in the 1920s was called “symphonic jazz”: that strain of development toward more complex arrangements and through-composed pieces for concert (as opposed to club) venues that we normally think of as the mortal enemy of improvisation — a cautionary tale of the road not taken, the pseudo-intellectual (or sometimes simply “white”) ground against which an emerging emphasis on greater freedom in improvisation had to figure itself. Yet, as Ellington’s work demonstrates — and Ellington famously described his orchestra, and its improvisers, as his instrument — developments in composition and in improvisation, in the right hands, were complementary rather than opposed modes. Both the move toward improvisation and the move toward symphonic arrangement were moves toward demanding that listeners stop their conversations and pay attention to this work as the work of professionals.
Composition/Improvisation as Explanation
Pierpont writes:
The number that caught Irving Mills’s attention at the Kentucky Club one night, as he recalled, was “Black and Tan Fantasy,” a three-minute musical drama jointly credited to Ellington and [trumpeter and plunger mute innovator James "Bubber"] Miley. It isn’t difficult to figure our which of the authors did what, as a throbbingly mournful blues gives way to a refined society tune — rough and smooth, black and tan, Miley and Ellington — or as Miley’s solos rise to a hectoring beauty that finds ease and release in the band’s response. The trumpeter’s manipulation of a simple rubber plunger cup over the bell of his horn makes for some irresistibly antic sounds [...], but the piece delivers an unexpected emotional punch: a concluding riff from Chopin’s “Funeral March” is willfully absurd yet seems to seal the trumpet’s urgent message. (“I like great big ole tears,” Ellington said, teasingly, about audience reactions.) The over-all effect is at once mocking and chilling, like a funeral cortege with skeletons dancing behind.
The song was made the centerpiece of a short 1929 film by the same name directed by white avant-gardist Dudley Murphy (in 1924, a collaborator with Fernand Leger on the now canonical excercize in cinematic abstraction, Ballet Mechanique). In the clip below, you can see Arthur Whetsol filling in where Bubber Miley (by then out of the band) would have been. Note the film’s emphasis on both the Whetsol and Ellington character’s as composers at work.
Elsewhere, Pierpont describes the sounds Miley got out of his trumpet and plunger mute as “uncannily human.” But I might go a different direction. I’d suggest that what is so astounding about the sounds Miley makes (and Whetsol, and Cootie Williams after him) is that their newness — their modernism — springs in good part from not sounding like anything at all, other than a trumpet being manipulated with a rubber plunger cup.
Previously, such horn-and-mute effects in jazz recordings had been exploited primarily for their novelty, as in the Original Dixieland Jass/Jazz Band’s 1917′s breakthrough recording of the “Livery Stable Blues.” This piece — sometimes considered the first jazz recording — features Nick LaRocca’s whinnying cornet, and Eddie Edward’s growling trombone, playing the part of barnyard animals in the breaks. It’s skillful, and it’s funny, but it creates its own weirdness (as others before me have noted) in linking low-comic, primitivist, animalistic sounds produced by white musicians to a style of jazz associated with black New Orleans musicians. And while I’ve never been convinced that this is necessarily — or at least solely — what’s going on with the ODJB recordings, it does suggest the extra burden of representation under which composers/musicians like Ellington and Miley labored.
On this kind of burden, Pierpont quotes Ellington’s response to critics who questioned the logic of the NAACP in 1959 giving its highest award, the Spingarn Medal, to a bandleader who hadn’t been particularly outspoken about segregation: “They’ve not been listening to our music.” As Ellington asserted: “We have been talking for a long time about what it is to be black in this country.” Thus, Ellington makes an interesting case for what Gertrude Stein, in another context, called composition as explanation: that to compose (on paper, and on one’s horn) was to “talk about” something, and in particular, to talk about human beings being human in a specific historical and social context (“what it is to be black in this country”) — in this case, what it was like to be a black writer and performer in the U.S. during the days of Jim Crow.
Certainly white as well as black performing professionals — jazz musicians, vaudevillians, tent show evangelists — were subject to many of the same indignities of life on the road and in the crummy quarters in which such performers usually found themselves. And even in the swankiest of situations, performers were treated as hired help, not yet recognized as experts or professionals in what Martha Banta has called the “managerial ethos” increasingly reshaping the labor force and labor politics in other industries.
But there were dimensions of these indignities that we all know were impressed upon black composers and musicians even more heavily than on their non-black counterparts. Famously, the ultra-sharp and ultra-dignified Ellington experienced what must have been an especially grating form of segregation during his groundbreaking and career-making tenure at the Cotton Club, the mob-owned nightclub for which Ellington’s band played for the floor shows and for a network radio hookup, but which, despite (or due to) its location in Harlem, was off limits to non-performing African Americans. That is, without special dispensation, Ellington’s most immediate peers would have had trouble watching Ellington play. And touring often meant second-class status for the musicians themselves, especially in the South, where there was no escaping the soul-crushing work of answering basic questions that took on extra freight if you were black: where to eat, where to stop for a restroom break, where to stay overnight, which door to enter the club at which you might be performing that evening, how late would you be up performing after hours for a black audience not admitted to earlier shows.
I think this history is probably why Pierpont (and others) are at pains to emphasize the “human,” rather than “animal,” sound in Miley’s trumpet playing. And such efforts at recreating and representing the human experience in programmatic music are not entirely absent from Ellington’s work more broadly, which aimed at evoking everything from an old man doing a broken walk (in the “East St. Louis Toodle-oo,” another early composition with Miley), to the symphonic “Black, Brown, and Beige” (1943) with its attempt to crystallize African American historical experience, to any of the many “tone poems” and suites that Ellington wrote in the later half of his career.
But on “Black and Tan Fantasy,” Miley’s varied and touch-sensitive work with a repurposed rubber plunger on the bell of his horn sounds like nothing so much as someone working a repurposed rubber plunger on the bell of his horn, an objet trouve, making sounds that could only be made with that combination of technologies and materials. In other words, as listeners to this recording, we’re let into the process of playing, and we are able to hear (and, in our mind’s eye, see) a record of the work and note-by-note thought that went into the production of these particular noises. Miley’s novelty demands that we listeners listen, and that we hear/see a performer at work — an African American performer at work, an African American performer in 20th-century America at work — thinking.
