The Ellington Century Read Online Free PDF Page A

for specific players rather than instruments. The musicians of the band formed a spectrum of strongly characterized timbre styles: Miley's aggressively rough sound contrasted with Arthur Whetsol's almost humming introversion; the liquid croon of Johnny Hodges's alto played against the rude honk of Harry Carney's baritone. Within a few years the trombone section of Nanton, Lawrence Brown, and Juan Tizol produced three completely different timbres: raspy, smooth, Latin.
    Early on Ellington saw that the new mechanisms for amplification and recording could enhance coloristic explorations. Long before the advent of recording “production,” let alone of electronic music, Ellington revealed his genius for technologically enabled sound synthesis in “Mood Indigo,” first recorded on October 17, 1930, but written especially for the “microphonic transmission” of a radio broadcast. 4 In a radio interview in 1962 Ellington recalled the radical role played by the microphone as a lucky accident: “When we made ‘Black and Tan Fantasy’…[we used] the plunger mute in the trumpet and in the trombone in that duet and always got a ‘mike’ sound.…They hadn't conquered this yet, and they messed up a lot of masters because every time they'd get the mike they'd throw it out.” For the recording sessionof “Mood Indigo” in 1930 “the aim was to employ these instruments in such a way, at such a distance, that the mike tone would set itself in definite pitch—so that it wouldn't spoil the recording. Lucky again, it happened.” 5
    To signify the deepest “blue” in “Mood Indigo” Ellington scored the opening melody in a choralelike texture for three players: Whetsol (trumpet), Barney Bigard (clarinet) and Nanton (muted trombone). He painted his mood with the three instrumental colors found in New Orleans jazz but arranged them counterintuitively with the trumpet on top, the trombone a third below it, in its highest register, and the clarinet an octave and a fourth lower than the trombone, an acoustic gap labeled an “error” in the conservatories that Ellington, fortunately, never attended. 6 The apparently upside-down scoring demonstrates Ellington's astute command of the acoustical properties of each instrument and of the individual styles of each performer, the haunting, hollow quality Bigard brought to the clarinet's low register, Whetsol's plaintive lyricism, Nanton's insidiously sliding speechlike inflections. It shows his prophetic instinct for technology as well: together the three sounds blend into a whisper that would be undetectable without amplification. No wonder that Billy Strayhorn dubbed such timbral magic “the Ellington effect.”
    â€œBLUE LIGHT”
    A slow, intimate blues recorded in 1938, “Blue Light” demonstrates how Ellington used tone color to shape mood and form. From its first meditative, bell-like chords on the piano, it suggests the indigo atmosphere of the last set in some nearly deserted nightclub; just one couple remains on the dance floor, perhaps with nowhere else to go, clinging to each other in the blue-tinted, smoke-filled air. “Blue Light” is that rare kind of music that evokes a specific time of day, temperature, and atmospheric condition. “The most neglected and least known of Ellington's masterpieces,” 7 “Blue Light” was recorded twice on December 22, 1938, by an eight-man subgroup of the Ellington Orchestra: Bigard, clarinet; Carney, clarinet (?); Wallace Jones, trumpet (?); Brown, trombone; Fred Guy, guitar; Billy Taylor, bass; Sonny Greer, drums; and Ellington, piano. 8 Here's an outline of the form:
    Intro: Piano solo four bars.
    Chorus 1: twelve-bar blues. Clarinet solo with piano fills.
    Chorus 2: twelve-bar blues. Trio for muted trumpet, muted trombone, and clarinet with piano fills.
    Chorus 3: twelve-bar blues. Trombone solo with reed accompaniment.