A note on terminology: In the interests of continuity between quotations and the main text, I have used the term "Negro" throughout this article. I would not have made this choice were there not many instances of Ellington himself using this term, and instances too of members of the jazz community in recent years using this term (notably Stanley Crouch and Wynton Marsalis). Needless to say, I approach Ellington and his music with the deepest respect, and any terminology is employed with the full force of that respect.
The biography is, in essence, both the most objective and subjective of books. The New Oxford American Dictionary defines "biography" as simply "an account of someone's life written by someone else"; as such, it sounds quite objective indeed. The facts, the figures, all merely recorded by another hand. Literary photographs, as it were, showing exactly what happened and when. But the Greek roots of the word "biography" give more insight into the purpose of these accounts: bios, meaning life, and graphia, meaning writing: "life-writing."
"Life-writing" is certainly what biographer and jazz historian James Lincoln Collier does in Duke Ellington, published in 1987. Throughout the book, which is, as all jazz biographies must be, an examination of both the man and the music, Collier emphasizes Ellington's power not as a musician or a composer, but merely as a strong "character":
He lacked the melodic inventiveness of a Bix Beiderbecke, a Johnny Hodges; many of his most famous melodies were supplied to him by members of his band. His sense of larger form, of musical architecture, was notoriously weak; the most persistent criticism of his longer works, where lack of form would be most noticeable, was that they were "rambling" and "incoherent." And... he did not have the exquisite rhythmic sense of a Louis Armstrong, a Benny Goodman, a Lester Young, that makes even the simplest and most direct of melodies swing..... How can this be? How can a man with no easily discernible gift produce a body of music so important?
The answer lies in his character. Ellington carved his creations not so much with raw talent, as did the Armstrongs and Charlie Parkers, but with the chisel of his character. [1]
There are several flaws in this argument, but the most important and most glaring are Collier's slights against Ellington's compositional talents.
Music criticism is, of course, subjective, and any writer can dislike an Ellington composition. But Collier does more than dislike Ellington's works; he denies them completely on a foundation of musical prejudice and snobbery. As will be explored later, there is myriad evidence to overpower this critical, and faux-objective and authoritative, injustice.
Collier's criticisms of Ellington's composition peak in the chapter dealing with Ellington's writing and performance of Black, Brown and Beige. Besides basing his critiques of the technical aspects of the work on a flawed foundation, Collier also seeks, over a timeline of about a decade, to diminish the impact of the work's ties to black history, which are the lifeblood and momentum of the piece. By so doing, Collier not only denies the power of one of jazz's greatest composers, but also denies that composer's most socially progressive piece of music its place in the evolution of jazz as an overtly black and powerful art form.
---
The problem is that Collier seems interested neither in examining the context of Ellington's prior involvement with black history and music about that history, nor in challenging the opinions of Black, Brown and Beige voiced by critics in 1943, when the piece was premiered at Carnegie Hall. Collier leads up to the Carnegie Hall concert by touching on Ellington's relationship to black history and his intentions to write a piece dealing with the history of the African in America, but his two-tiered approach to that relationship is deeply flawed. He starts by examining Ellington's stated connections in composing music connected to the experiences and history of the American Negro, but seems more interested in refuting than analyzing those statements. Collier then passes quickly over the efforts at creating a socially progressive work that led up to Ellington's breakthrough at Carnegie Hall.
In a 1933 interview with Hannen Swaffer quoted by Collier, Ellington outlines a composition that parallels the black experience:
I have gone back to the history of my race and tried to express it in rhythm. We used to have, in Africa, a "something" we have lost. One day we shall get it again. I am expressing in sound the old days in the jungle, the cruel journey across the sea and the despair of landing. And then the days of slavery. I trace the growth of a new spiritual quality and then the days of Harlem and the cities of the States. Then I try to go forward a thousand years. I seek to express the future when, emancipated and transformed, the Negro takes his place, a free being, among the peoples of the world." [2]
After quoting this passage, Collier writes: "How much of any of this came from Ellington, how much from [Ellington's manager Irving] Mills or Ned Williams, and how much Swaffer made up is moot." [3]
However, there is little reason to conclude that any of Ellington's statement was made up by anyone. Although Edward Morrow's 1935 interview with Ellington after the premier of George and Ira Gershwin's Porgy And Bess purposely skewed Ellington's answers to cast unintended aspersions on the Gershwins' work [4], similar instances are very rare. Furthermore, the slant of Morrow's interview was publicly challenged by Ellington at the time, while Swaffer's interview is corroborated by Ellington's statements on his music's connection to the Negro experience in contemporary interviews. This corroboration undermines Collier's presumptuous evidence for his conclusion: "The tone [of the interview] is hardly Ellington's, and it was unlike him, given his natural reserve and concern for keeping his feelings private, to give out so elaborate a statement about a matter important to him." [5]
A cursory glance at Ellington's interviews from 1930 to 1943, and the articles about him in that time, show more similarities to Ellington's account of connections to Negro history than to Collier's doubts about those connections. Articles and interviews in The Christian Science Monitor (1930) [6], the Cleveland News (1931) [7] and the New York Evening Graphic(1930), to name but three, all mention Ellington's ties to this history. And whether or not Ellington was in 1933 actually composing the historical work he describes (and Collier takes great pains to point out that he was not), the fact that the claim was also made in 1930 [8]should lend more weight to the intent than Collier is willing to concede.
But Collier is not ultimately concerned with Ellington's statements. He is concerned with placing Ellington and his work into the mold that he has fashioned for them, and Duke Ellington is often an exercise in fitting a square peg into a round hole, as with Collier's treatment of Ellington's first attempt at a socially conscious extended composition.
Collier, characteristically, attributes the conception of Jump For Joy, Ellington's "Negro revue," solely to songsmith Sid Kuller: "During the stay on the West Coast in the years of the recording ban, a Hollywood songwriter named Sid Kuller conceived of the idea of putting on a Negro revue that would, for once, not employ the stereotypes around which black entertatinment had always been built." [9] Collier describes Kuller as raising the funds for the show, as well as writing it with "some like-minded Hollywood talents." Duke's "major role" is conceded, but not dwelt upon; however, Collier does credit with revue as being one of "social significance," although he refuses to own the phrase himself (or credit the term to Ellington, where it originated, instead saying "as the phrase went" in a rather pejoritive tone).
John Edward Hasse presents a different account. Kuller and Ellington create the idea of Jump For Joy together: "A Negro musical... starring Duke Ellington," Kuller is quoted as saying ("[a]ccording to Mercer Ellington," Hasse notes) [10]. Whether or not this is factual, Hasse presents a different picture of Jump For Joy's significance:
Probably the first big-time musical to portray blacks in a non-stereotyped way,Jump For Joy was a source of great pride for African Americans.... Ellington got the comics to remove their usual burnt-cork makeup.... Among unanimous rave reviews, the Los Angeles Tribune, a black weekly, wrote, "In Jump For Joy, Uncle Tom is dead. God rest his bones." [11]
In fact, it appears that Ellington was both more involved in the creation and more invested in the performance of Jump For Joy than Collier admits. In an interview with reporter John Pittman in 1941, Ellington spoke about the musical:
"'Jump For Joy' provided quite a few problems. There was the first and greatest problem of trying to give an American audience entertainment without compromising the dignity of the Negro people. Needless to say, this is the problem every Negro artist faces. He runs afoul of offensive stereotypes, instilled in the American mind by whole centuries of ridicule and derogation. The American audience has been taught to expect a Negro on the stage to clown and 'Uncle Tom,' that is, to enact the role of a servile, yet lovable, inferior." [12]
Obviously, the subject matter was close to Ellington's heart; he describes himself as being "pretty hard at it" with regards to the composition of the musical. This interview is significant also because Pittman goes on to describe at length Ellington's musical connections to Negro history (exactly what Collier dismisses with the Swaffer interview) and reiterates the claim of Ellington's musical history of the Negro, made cosnsistently since 1930:
His "special job"is an opera. It is the story of the Negro people. It traces the history of this great nation [the Negro nation] from its beginnings here through chattel slavery, reconstruction, to the present. Ellington is still working on this opera.... As the recording machine played one of his most recent compositions... he talked about dissonance, "That's the Negro's life," he said. "Hear that chord!" - he set the needle back to replay the chord - "That's us." [13]
By distancing Ellington from his own statements on his music's connection to the black experience, supporting that distancing with wide generalizations and scant evidence, and misrepresenting and passing quickly over Ellington's pre-Black, Brown and Beige attempts at socially preogressive music, Collier denies Ellington his power not only as a composer, but also as a forerunner of the aggressively black jazz musicians of the 1960s, such as Archie Shepp and Max Roach.
---
By 1941, the claim of a Negro "opera" was closer to the truth than in 1930 or 1933. Black, Brown and Beige, Ellington's "tone parallel" to the black experience, debuted at Carnegie Hall in 1943. There is some disagreement in the jazz community about the piece. As Brian Priestley and Alan Cohen write:
[It] has been described as a significant work, a work unique in the history of jazz composition and unique in the output of Duke Ellington. But, despite the lip service paid to it, it is not a well-known work.
The reason for this familiarity is clearly stated in Barry Ulanov's description of its premiere. "One listening, most people felt, was not enough. Unfortunately, only a privileged few were ever to hear the complete work again... When most of the New York critics were so severe in their reviews of Black, Brown and Beige, [Ellington] quickly accepted their criticism. He broke the work into a series of excerpts of less than half the length of the original..."
As well as distorting our impression of the music, this has had the effect of silencing discussion on all sorts of questions.... For example, how closely does the inspiration of the composition - the history of the American Negro - relate to the atual detail of the music? [14]
Tellingly, Collier bases his impressions of the suite on, and often echoes, those very severe reviews that were themselves written after only one hearing. The one review that had the advantage of repeated listenings is cleverly discounted. "The reviews were uniformly negative," writes Bowles, citing Paul Bowles, Henry Simon, and, uncited, "[r]eviews from the rest of the papers" as condemning Black, Brown and Beige as "going nowhere," "formless and meaningless," "recurrent cliches," "self-conscious." [15] What Collier fails to mention is that Bowles was a classical critic and that Simon "thought that the work 'showed better than any of the shorter pieces, how well and how far Mr. Ellington has emancipated himself from the straightjacket of jazz formulas. He has taken a serious theme and treated it with dignity, feeling and good humor.'" [16]
Much of Collier's condescension towards Ellington's extended works, and reluctance to admit when a pet critic goes against the grain, stems from a misguided idea of professionalism and academia in music. Of Ellington's connections to the study of black history, his writes: "Ellington had made a point of doing some reading in black history, although probably not anything approaching an elaborate study, for which he hardly had the time." [17] According to John Edward Hasse, however, "[Ellington] owned 800 books on black history, and had underlined passages about Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner." [18] As Collier's statement has no accompanying note or source, it is unclear where he developed his assumption that Ellington's study of the history of the Negro was "probably not anything approaching an elaborate study." But some insight into that puzzle may be given by Francis Davis. In the postscript to an essay on Ellington, Davis writes of Collier:
Dismissing the Sacred Concerts, Collier notes that although "Duke's fans and the loyal jazz press always found good things to say about [them]... I have not been able to find support for this position among professional music critics" (italics mine). It takes a few readings to realize that Collier is referring to the hacks who review classical music for daily newspapers, all jazz critics presumably being well-meaning amateurs who are sometimes lucky enough to be paid for their opinions. [19]
That phrase - "the loyal jazz press" - is again invoked by Collier in discussing Black, Brown and Beige: "Only the loyal jazz press felt that the piece had much merit." That jazz press is embodied by Mike Levin, who used a recording of the Carnegie Hall concert to gain a more complete picture of the work, concluding, as Collier notes, "that it did have, after all, 'form and continuity.'" [20] But Collier is quick to add that "[m]ost people, then and since, have found it difficult to relate the music to the historical parallel given by Duke and, in general, could not see what the 'point' of the composition was." [21] But, as has been seen, this is not true. Most notably, there is Priestley and Cohen, who deal with this very issue in their introductory passage quoted above. They conclude, "[W]hat is finally most impressive about Black, Brown and Beige is the breadth of the conception [i.e., the inspiration] and, only secondarily, the immense and hard-won skill with which it was carried through." [22]
Collier flips this equation around. If "most people" have not seen the connections between the stated inspiration the finished work, than Collier is certainly not about to challenge "most people," a regrettable lapse pithily summarized by Davis above. But Collier ultimately goes one step further in slicing the music away from the message:
Part of the problem lay in Ellington's belief that the literary parallel would hold the music together. It was a problem that would dog all his extended pieces; he did not realize that a musical piece had to hold itself together in musical terms, separate from the program it was hitched to. Making matters worse, the literary parallel itself had no real forward thrust but comprised episodes [i.e., slavery, Reconstruction, Harlem] related only because they involved black people. [23]
That Collier can write this with, as it were, a straight face is astounding. For more than a decade, Ellington had outlined the narrative of Black, Brown and Beige, tying together each movement over and over again in interviews, through his own actions, and in previous musical explorations (such as Jump For Joy). Collier dismisses this context in his appraisal of Black, Brown and Beige, as well as ignoring previous examinations of the piece. To disallow Levin, the one critic who was basing his review on repeated hearings, is bad enough; but to make no mention of Priestly and Cohen's work, one which definitively traces the suite's musical unity and relationship to the "program," is heinous.
---
This is, of course, only one chapter out of an entire biography. Ellington lived for three-quarters of a century; surely one chapter cannot represent a biographer's approach to that life? Unfortunately, it can. Because of the pivotal nature of Black, Brown and Beige (as the composer's first major extended work, the first socially progressive piece to be successful, performed at Ellington's first Carnegie Hall concert) it necessarily holds more than a few strands of Ellington's life: his focus on the dignity of the jazz musician in general; the even more vital dignity of the black jazz musician; the importance of concerts over dances; etc. To reduce this work to mere two-dimensionality is to do the same to the man who wrote it. Collier's prejudices and oversights are inexcusable not only for a biographer but also for a music critic, one who must trust the composer and his ears over the need to look good in the face of a contradicting majority. In producing a book of such unashamed ignorance of musical intent and context, Collier has done the memory of Duke Ellington a disservice.
[1] James Lincoln Collier, Duke Ellington (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 4. [2]Ibid. [3] Ibid. [4] Howard Pollack, Gershwin: His Life And Writing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 167. [5] Collier, 216. [6] Mark Tucker, ed., The Duke Ellington Reader(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 43. [7] Tucker, 53. [8] Ibid., 45. [9] Collier, 211. [10] Hasse, 246. [11] Ibid., 248. [12] Tucker, 149. [13] Ibid., 150. [14] Ibid., 186. [15]Collier, 218. [16] A. H. Lawrence, Duke Ellington And His World: A Biography (London: Routledge, 2001), 319. [17] Ibid., 216. [18] John Edward Hasse, Beyond Category: The Life And Genius Of Duke Ellington (New York: Simon And Schuster, 1993), 254. [19] Francis Davis, Jazz And Its Discontents: A Francis Davis Reader (Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2004), 73. [20] Collier, 219. [21] Ibid. [22] Tucker, 203. [23] Collier, 221.
Comments