The Ellington Century Read Online Free PDF

(Trombone melody composed by Lawrence Brown.)
    Chorus 4: Piano solo.
    Borrowing Schoenberg's term, we might term “Blue Light” a klangfarbenmelodie blues, a formal expansion of the color synthesis of “Mood Indigo.” Each chorus presents a different kind of blue: the smoky middle range of Bigard's clarinet, the “indigo” scoring of the trio, the vibrato-rich warmth of Brown's trombone (set in relief by a low reed trio in the background), and Ellington's restrained pianism (with a brief homage, to my ear, to Earl Hines). Each timbre evokes a different aspect of the blues. Ellington's brief intro sounds urbane and modernistic; his first chord replicates exactly (if not intentionally) the opening harmony of Berg's Piano Sonata op. 1. Bigard's solo, by contrast, is roots music, straight out of New Orleans and Sidney Bechet. The trio, more muted and rhythmically steady, choralelike, than in “Mood Indigo,” also has the ghostly gaslight sonority Ellington had used in his “Mystery Song” in 1931. Brown's solo, by contrast, feels fully embodied, like a warm embrace. In 1933 Spike Hughes had complained that Brown's sophisticated sound was out of place in “Duke's essentially direct and simple music,” 9 thereby underestimating both musicians, but Brown's lyricism here illustrates how Ellington could paint a jazz panorama (from Bechet to Tommy Dorsey) even within such a small framework. Ellington's closing solo chorus begins with the dissonant major-minor chord he habitually used to signify “the blues,” momentarily muses on a fragment from Earl Hines's solo in “West End Blues,” then turns out the lights.
    â€œBLUE LIGHT” AS BLUES
    A meticulously balanced tone-color composition, “Blue Light” is also a blues, although not in a way that devotees of, say, B. B. King might recognize. The term “blues” itself appears in bewilderingly various ways; it is used narrowly, to denote a chord progression, or grandly, as in Albert Murray's Stomping the Blues , to characterize an entire culture. Historically, the blues emerged after the Civil War from the sorrow songs of the antebellum period. 10 As much a poetic as a musical genre, it has its own verse form, syntax, vocabulary, imagery, and subject matter:
    When a woman gets the blues she hangs her head and cries,
    When a woman gets the blues she hangs her head and cries,
    But when a man gets the blues, he grabs a train and flies. 11
    We can parse this blues stanza as follows:
    Form: a thought stated, repeated, completed (surprisingly)
    Syntax: lines broken midway by a caesura, and at the end by a comma; these breaks usually filled with a guitar response
    Imagery: Love, tears, the railway
    Subject: Suffering and escape from suffering
    Most recorded blues consist of five or six stanzas that tell a story, though usually more as a sequence of images rather than a linear narrative. Jazz musicians refer to these stanza structures as choruses.
    Often blind or lame, and so excluded from manual labor, early blues performers, or “blues men,” sang to their own guitar accompaniment. At once outsiders and shamanic representatives of the community, they sang about themselves, and about everyone. Within African American culture the blues formed part of a larger musical landscape that included work songs, religious songs, and ragtime. These genres denoted class and region, the sacred and profane. Until around 1900 the blues was heard only in the Deep South, and in Mississippi and Louisiana in particular. Growing up in Washington, D.C., Ellington did not hear the blues until he encountered Sidney Bechet: “I shall never forget the first time I heard him play, at the Howard Theatre in Washington around 1921. I had never heard anything like it. It was a completely new sound.” 12
    Some jazz musicians, like Louis Armstrong and Lester Young, were born into the blues environment, while others, like