Musics of The World and Ellington's 'Suites' 43865499
Musics of The World and Ellington's 'Suites' 43865499
Musics of The World and Ellington's 'Suites' 43865499
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to The Musical Quarterly
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Tourist Point of View? Musics of the
World and Ellington's Suites
Travis A. Jackson
Up until the late 1980s, the critical and scholarly consensus on Duke
Ellington was largely that the composer's best work appeared before 1942.
In the time spanning Ellington's arrival in New York in 1923 and reaching
a putative apex approximately nineteen years later, two periods are the
basis of that consensus: the years Ellington spent developing his style at
the Cotton Club in Harlem in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and the
period from roughly 1940 to 1942 when the ensemble designated the
"Blanton- Webster Band" - named for bassist Jimmy Blanton and tenor
saxophonist Ben Webster - made a celebrated series of recordings for
Victor, recordings that also featured early contributions from composer
and arranger Billy Strayhorn. In the notes for the 1986 reissue of those
recordings, Mark Tucker wrote that they "represent the creative peak of a
developmental process that had begun over 20 years earlier. The pieces
they contain impress us today with their variety, imagination, and craft,
also with their maturity of conception."1 Those recordings and their pred-
ecessors also led Gunther Schuller to write, following Ellington's death in
1974, that the temporal constraints of the then-dominant commercial dis-
tribution medium, the 10-inch, 78-rpm disc, rather than being a hin-
drance, played an important role in making Ellington one of the United
States' greatest composers: "He took this restriction and turned it into a
virtue. He became the master in our time of the small form, the miniature,
the vignette, the cameo portrait. What Chopin's nocturnes and ballades
are to mid-nineteenth-century European music, Ellington's 'Mood Indigo'
and 'Cotton Tail' are to mid-twentieth-century Afro- American music."2
Schuller's praise here is measured, to be clear, for he aligns Ellington with
a nineteenth-century composer not generally recognized for skill in long-
form composition - arguably the sine qua non for classical composition in
that century - and his phrasing condemns by omission the various
"extended works" composed by Ellington, beginning in the 1930s and
appearing with greater regularity after 1943. 3
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514 The Musical Quarterly
Despite sporadic praise for works like Harlem (1951), Such Sweet
Thunder (1957), or The Far East Suite (1966), commentators on
Ellington's longer pieces generally follow the contours traced in the recep-
tion of Black, Brown and Beige (1943), his first-large scale piece. Many of
BBB' s contemporary critics - who heard it only once, at its Carnegie Hall
premiere on Saturday, 23 January 1943 - felt that, lasting nearly fifty
minutes, it was simply too long. Some of them doubtless shared the
opinion of Paul Bowles, who wrote in the New York Herald-Tribune two
days later that the composition "contained enough bright ideas for several
short pieces," but that overall it was "formless and meaningless." On the
assumption that Ellington aspired to be a classical composer or that
European composers had created the only viable models for long-form
compositions, Bowles further argued, "The whole attempt to fuse jazz as a
form with art music should be discouraged. The two exist at such different
distance from the listener's faculties of comprehension that he cannot get
them both clearly into focus at the same time."4 Similarly, looking back at
Ellington's complete corpus of extended works from the vantage of the
late 1980s, Schuller averred with some regret that Ellington had never
developed the necessary skills for creating longer pieces:
On a small scale, his melodic and harmonic invention, as well as his use of
instrumental color, were often as brilliant as ever. But, as mentioned,
larger forms do require that thematic material be developed - in some way
or other. And here Ellington's lack of technique and formal skills hindered
him. He was content to repeat thematic material, mostly with only the
scantest of variations (or indeed none) , too frequently relying on endless
pedal points, on rambling piano interludes filled in by himself, and more
often than not simply breaking off arbitrarily, turning to entirely different
unrelated material. ... At best, themes and ideas simply succeeded each
other; rarely did one have that sense of inevitability which marks great art.5
The problem, as Schuller saw it, resulted partly from Ellington's experien-
ces "providing music for . . . tableaux and 'production numbers'" at the
Cotton Club. And, according to Schuller, because Ellington later worked
so frequently with tone poems or rhapsodic forms, "both relatively free-
structured forms to begin with and primarily determined by extra-musical
considerations (visual, literary, historical)," he was never able "to free
himself from the apparent need for musical pictorialism."6 That is, rather
than developing a musical style that might operate effectively independ-
ent of programmatic concerns or suggestive titles - like so-called absolute
music - Ellington relied on narratives to lend his longer pieces coherence.
In the years since Schuller's assessment was published, a number of
writers have tried to reposition Ellington's suites, agreeing only that they
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Musics of the World and Ellington's Suites 515
have been poorly served by extant literature.7 In some cases, they have
argued that the analytic procedures and underlying assumptions of histori-
cal musicology and Western music theory need either to be modified or to
be jettisoned if Ellington's suites are to be appropriately analyzed. Edward
Green and Stefano Zenni, respectively, suggest modifications: the former
deploys the analytical conceit of the Grundgestalt , and the latter questions
how extensively pieces in the concert music canon exhibit the non-narra-
tive, inevitable coherence Ellington's pieces purportedly lack.8 Alongside
Zenni, but with a less specific music-analytic bent, the writers Graham
Lock, Kevin Gaines, George Burrows, and Harvey G. Cohen, among
others, recommend a jettisoning and a grounding of the composer's work
more firmly within the overlapping cultural, political, artistic, and intellec-
tual worlds of African Americans during the twentieth century.9 Like
music scholars Marcello Piras and Denise von Glahn and literature-
oriented scholars Theodore R. Hudson and Stephen M. Buhler, a third
group of writers comprises those who urge analysts to see Ellington's
pictorial and narrative conceits as the key to understanding the extended
works they accompany rather than as elements that symbolize the
composer's failure.10
Although my purpose in this essay is neither to evaluate those latter
strategies nor to adjudicate claims about Ellington's relative merits as a
composer of extended pieces, the questions that animate the strategies
and the claims recur in debates on the subset of Ellington's work that I
examine here: the suites he wrote, often with Billy Strayhorn, apparently
in response to his travels outside (and within) the United States from the
1950s until his death in 1973. Although these "travel suites," as Gary
Giddins terms them,11 are subject to the same kinds of criticisms as their
nontravel predecessors and contemporaries, they raise additional ques-
tions about how Ellington, Strayhorn, and the other members of the
ensemble confronted and were affected by the musics they heard and the
people they encountered - in Asia, the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa,
and Latin America. What effects did those encounters have on the work
that Ellington and Strayhorn produced? How might one characterize
Ellington and Strayhorn's ways of responding to and representing other
musical cultures? How do their representational strategies compare with
those of their contemporaries? And, ultimately, how might one best evalu-
ate and analyze those works?
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516 The Musical Quarterly
in style and approach from the historical and analytic to the polemic, from
the anecdotal to the meticulously detailed.12 The major facets of his life
and his compositional style have been so well documented that here it will
suffice to explore only a couple of elements of the latter, those that make
his compositions audibly distinctive across his fifty-year career. The first is
his ability to draw upon the skills and tonal personalities of - and write
specifically for - the members of his band. He called time and again on
the alto saxophone playing of Johnny Hodges, for example, whose breathy
portamento gave portions of "Come Sunday" (1943) and "Race" (1968),
for instance, a particular beauty and poignancy. Likewise, the low rumble
of Harry Carney's baritone saxophone is as indispensible an element in
the Ellington sound as the composer's harmonic sensibility, contributing
unmistakably to work in every phase of the composer's career - from "East
St. Louis Toodle-Oo" (1927) to "Ko-Ko" (1940), to "Tourist Point of
View" (1966). Likewise, Ellington repeatedly juxtaposed and combined
the tonal personalities of clarinetist and tenor saxophonist Jimmy
Hamilton and tenor saxophonist Paul Gonsalves during the 1950s and
1960s (as can be heard, for instance, in recorded and live versions of the
Juan Tizol composition "Perdido").13
The second, related element of the style of Ellington and longtime
collaborator Billy Strayhorn is their approach to timbre, tonality, harmony,
and form. Schuller, for example, observes that by the mid- 1930s,
Ellington had already moved beyond his contemporaries in terms of his
choice of sonorities and his voicings of chords - the "Ellington effect"
audible in the front-line trio on "Mood Indigo" (1930) - and had begun,
as early as 1926, to treat form and phrase lengths more elastically with
pieces like "Birmingham Breakdown."14 Although popular song and blues
forms remained common in his output, they were not formal designs he
employed slavishly or uncritically. In his analysis of the Libertan Suite ,
Marcello Piras observes that Ellington's use of dissonance also became
more systematic after the early period of his career. Piras notes that at
several points in the suite, Ellington distinguished simultaneous and
successive parts using different scalar configurations - whole tone and
octatonic, for example, alongside chromatically treated versions of the
major and minor modes - for featured musicians or in ensemble passages.
In addition, Piras describes how often, perhaps beginning with Black ,
Brown and Beige , Ellington distributed the constituent pitches of altered
sonorities - for example, a half-diminished chord with an added ninth
and/or an eleventh - among different instruments and sections to make
each chord both a timbrai and a harmonic event.15 And John Howland's
analyses of Black, Brown and Beige and Harlem, among other Ellington
extended works, clarify the degree to which Ellington's approach to
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Musics of the World and Ellington's Suites 517
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518 The Musical Quarterly
Every time you get to these places where the flavour is so strong like when
we were in India and the Far East and the Near East, these flavours are so
strong when you are there, and immediately after you leave you're afraid to
touch them because you're afraid that you'll duplicate. And so I would
rather stay away from [composing based on those experiences] for a couple
of months like we did with the Far East tour, and let it come out in my
own language rather than in the language I heard.20
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Musics of the World and Ellington's Suites 519
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520 The Musical Quarterly
on the one hand, and mid-1950s world-music kitsch on the other from
what he labels as the "conceptual Orientalism" of (early) Cowell, Cage,
and Reich. The latter type, he argues, "is an oblique form of Orientalism,
not the direct incorporative or syncretic form to which the West is accus-
tomed. But it is still Orientalist"28 in that the composers are still working
extractively, but avoiding charges of theft or bad mimicry through separat-
ing concept from sound rather than the other way around. In other words,
rather than seeing East Asian, Indian, Indonesian, or African musics,
respectively, as complex systems that must be comprehended as histori-
cally contingent, ever-developing totalities, the composers regard them
reductively, often determining that whatever elements are most unlike
those with which they are familiar - philosophies, cyclical forms, proce-
dures for rhythmic layering, or the use of drones or cueing strategies - are
the most characteristic and/or usable elements. All else can be discarded.
As Corbett suggests, "Musical experimentation becomes metaphorical
microcolonialism."29
Such microcolonialism was not a unique feature of American experi-
mental composition in the twentieth century. Indeed, composers, classical
music scholars, and critics have been complicit in promulgating both
Chinoiserie and conceptual Orientalist approaches at least since the
seventeenth century, and their efforts resulted in the normalization of
such procedures and attitudes as a resource for later composers and per-
formers. In a book also covering literary and artistic Orientalisms, for
example, John M. MacKenzie chronicles a long history of composers and
performers "utilising Eastern instruments, tunes, or perceived melodic,
harmonic and rhythmic conventions!, mining] oriental history and fable
for programmatic ideas, opera or ballets [, and attempting] to create
Eastern colour by evoking places visited on journeys" in addition to
setting poems (in translation) to music and exploring refracted worldviews
and philosophies.30 By the early nineteenth century, the "Orient" came to
be generalized - that is, not confined to areas east of Europe - with "a
variety of internal as well as external Others" acting as subjects or sources
for European Orientalist composition, including Scotland for Beethoven,
Schubert, and Brahms with different pieces and Spain, Russia, Poland,
Hungary, and Czechoslovakia for others.31 MacKenzie's characterizations
resonate with those of Jonathan Bellman in The Exotic in Western Music .
Using "exotic" to cover the same practices as MacKenzie's "Orientalism"
encompasses, Bellman argues that for composers
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Musics of the World and Ellington's Suites 521
Given that experience, his suggestion that there was a "sameness" about
the music he heard, even if his comment is applicable only to South Asia,
seems baffling. If he meant it more broadly, then when one considers the
places his group visited between 6 September and 22 November 1963
(when the assassination of John F. Kennedy forced the postponement of
concerts), it is even more difficult to believe that Ellington would describe
the musics they heard in Damascus, Amman, Kabul, New Delhi, Sri
Lanka, Tehran, Madras, Mumbai (Bombay), Baghdad, and Ankara in that
manner. For someone with the aural acuity that Ellington possessed not to
hear differences in musics in either case might be possible only if the com-
poser had no interest in listening attentively, if he were deliberately not lis-
tening, or if he were listening only for the unique elements. In fact, his
acknowledgment that he did not hear anything new rhythmically and that
other (Western) musicians had already been there and copied scales and
rhythms leaves open the possibility that he might have had less anxiety
about imitation had he been the first to "try to give a reflection of the
music."35
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522 The Musical Quarterly
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Musics of the World and Ellington s Suites 523
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524 The Musical Quarterly
Example 1 . "Depk" ( Far East Suite), mm. 29-31, Words and Music by Duke Ellington
and Billy Strayhorn. Copyright © 1967 Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC and Tempo
Music, Inc. in the USA. Copyright renewed. All rights on behalf of Sony/ATV Music
Publishing LLC administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC. All rights for Tempo
Music, Inc. and for the world outside the USA administered by Music Sales Corporation.
International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission of Hal
Leonard Corporation and Music Sales Corporation.
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Musics of the World and Ellington s Suites 525
Example 2. "Depk" (Far East Suite), mm. 85-87, Words and Music by Duke Ellington
and Billy Strayhorn. Copyright © 1967 Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC and Tempo
Music, Inc. in the USA. Copyright renewed. All rights on behalf of Sony/ATV Music
Publishing LLC administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC. All rights for Tempo
Music, Inc. and for the world outside the USA administered by Music Sales Corporation.
International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission of Hal
Leonard Corporation and Music Sales Corporation.
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5 26 The Musical Quarterly
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Musics of the World and Ellington's Suites 527
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528 The Musical Quarterly
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Musics of the World and Ellington's Suites 529
Example 3 . "Tourist Point of View" ( Far East Suite), mm. 13-16, Words and Music by
Duke Ellington. Copyright © 1967 Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC. Copyright
renewed. All rights administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC. International
copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission of Hal Leonard
Corporation.
of musical signification are icons and indexes. Where the former resemble
or share defining characteristics with the objects to which they refer (and
thus might be most easily deployed for imitations), the latter work primar-
ily via associations that emerge from co-occurrences and might be arbi-
trary (and thus function more evocatively) : smoke acts as index for fire
because fires often create smoke, but the two are not the same, nor do
they share essential properties.54 Accordingly, if it is one's intention to
evoke something musically, there has to be some way for listeners to grasp
what is being evoked or how one thing points to another. Frequently, the
shortest route to ensuring listener comprehension is to resort to musical
conventions that signify particular kinds of "otherness" - as with the
selective and imitative orientalizing gestures that rendered "Turkish
music" in the key of C with rapid shifts between major and minor modes
in the early nineteenth century55 - or to give pieces titles that can do the
work of evocation.
For much of his career, Ellington had approached evocation, even in
shorter pieces, through "musical pictorialism" - using musical sounds to
capture or conjure people, objects, places, moods, and experiences.56 His
use of the words portrait and parallel in the titles or descriptions of many
such pieces point to their being indirect, intermedial renderings of their
subjects rather than directly iconic ones,57 and for people or places
without preexisting, commonly understood, and stable sonic referents,
such indexical or titular evocation might be the only possibility. For
musical styles or with places that already have established referents,
however, matters might be more complicated. Indeed, despite Ellington
and Strayhorn's considerable skill as composers and arrangers, they some-
times resorted to conventional orientalizing shortcuts instead of doing the
potentially more difficult work of evocation. In "Tourist Point of View,"
for instance, the baritone saxophone figure first played by Harry Carney in
mm. 13-16 (at 0:20), while evoking India, does so at least partially by
repeating what one might describe as stereotypical "Indian snake-
charmer" music, based on a diminished-scale formula (see ex. 3). 58 A
similar example comes from the early 1970s. By then, when the Latin
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530 The Musical Quarterly
American Suite was recorded, the vogue for mambos, cha-chas, and the
bossa nova had subsided in the United States, though all three were famil-
iar enough to the general public to work as sonic shorthand for a vaguely
defined, slightly kitschy Latin America. In the liner notes for the suite,
Stanley Dance writes, " Eque has to do with Ellington's first crossing of the
Equator, an event that would stir the imagination even without the pre-
sentation of a commemorative document in elegant, courtly Spanish."
With that description in mind, perhaps Ellington's use of bossa nova
rhythms in "Eque," at least initially, does evoke crossing the Equator, but
it does so primarily through the association of Brazil with notions of what
is equatorially tropical. At the same time, that evocative correspondence
falters on linguistic and geographic terms: Portuguese is the nation's most
widely spoken language, and the Equator crosses Brazil at its northerly
extremes and the Tropic of Capricorn does the same in the south, where
both Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo are located, nearly 1,600 miles (or
more than 2,500 kilometers) from the Equator.59
For the most part, however, what Ellington and Strayhorn do in
these suites is to use their common fund of resources to communicate
their impressions, without resorting to sonic cliches. "Oclupaca," which
opens the Latin American Suite, is a case in point. Although its drum
pattern recalls some of Ellington's early "jungle" pieces like "The
Mooche," there is a sense in which, for someone who has read the liner
notes, it might capture the enjoyable experiences the band had in
Acapulco, some at the beach, others in a nearby bar.60 The piece is yet
another that, after a long introduction, uses twelve -bar blues form and fea-
tures the subtle writing for reeds and brass that had become an Ellington
trademark. In that sense, "Oclupaca" captures less the geography or char-
acter of Acapulco than, by association, the various pleasures the band
experienced while there. "Gong," from Afro-Eurasian Eclipse , has analo-
gous functions. It is, for me, one of the most effective sections of the suite,
not least for the vagueness of its reference. During the session, Stanley
Dance writes, Ellington asked the recording engineer whether there were
any Chinese gongs available for the band to play. And though the gongs,
which were overdubbed after other parts had been recorded, may conjure
associations with Cantonese opera performance or gamelan, Ellington
uses them to frame a piece that might be mildly evocative of "the East"
but is, after a brief introduction, yet another blues-based composition with
characteristically piquant dissonances.
The relative success of Ellington and Strayhorn's strategy of compos-
ing via influence, in the end, seems to rest most squarely on the work
done by the titles of individual pieces and their respective placement in
larger suites. Except for relatively isolated examples like the reference to
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Musics of the World and Ellington's Suites 53 1
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532 The Musical Quarterly
Notes
Travis A. Jackson is an associate professor of Music and the Humanities at the University
of Chicago. He is also the author of Blowin the Blues A way: Performance and Meaning on
the New York Jazz Scene (2012), an ethnography focused on the differing social, cultural,
spiritual, and economic contexts surrounding straight-ahead jazz musicians' performance
and recording practices. His other writings include essays on jazz history and
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Musics of the World and Ellington's Suites 533
historiography, intersections between jazz and poetry, the politics of punk, and popular
music and recording technology. He is currently conducting research for a monograph on
post-punk music, graphic design, and attitudes regarding race and empire in the United
Kingdom between 1977 and 1984. E-mail: travieso@uchicago.edu.
2. Gunther Schuller, "Ellington in the Pantheon," in The Duke Ellington Reader , ed.
Mark Tucker (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 415, originally published in
High Fidelity (November 1974), 63-64.
3. Ellington frequently used terms like "tone parallel" and "extended work" perhaps to
distinguish his compositions from other long-form pieces, such as those in the European
concert music tradition. For a discussion of the latter term's genesis and application by
Ellington, see John Howland, Ellington Uptown: Duke Ellington , James P. Johnson , and the
Birth of Concert Jazz (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 179-81.
4. Paul Bowles, "Duke Ellington in Recital for Russian War Relief," in Tucker, Duke
Ellington Reader , 166. Other contemporary reviews of Black , Brown and Beige , as well as
overviews from a greater historical distance can be found following the Bowles piece,
166-85. For a thoughtful and useful meditation on the varied responses to the piece, see
Scott De Veaux, "Black, Brown and Beige and the Critics," Black Music Research Journal 13,
no. 2 (1993): 125-46.
5. Gunther Schuller, The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz, 1 930- 1 945 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1989), 153. See also Max Harrison, "Reflections on Some of
Duke Ellington's Longer Works," in A Jazz Retrospect (Newton Abbot: David and
Charles, 1976), 121-28.
6. Schuller, Swing Era , 15 1 ; see also Gunther Schuller, Early Jazz • Its Roots and Musical
Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 348. For similar arguments,
though presented with less nuance or sympathy, see James Lincoln Collier, Duke Ellington
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 182-83; Terry Teachout, "(Over)Praising Duke
Ellington," Commentary , September 1996, 74-77. The latter piece stimulated a vigorous
response in the letters section of the next issue of the magazine: "Duke Ellington,"
Commentary, December 1996, 6-11. Months before, an essay by the same author on race and
jazz engendered a similar response; see Terry Teachout, "The Color of Jazz," Commentary ,
September 1995, 50-53; and "Race and Jazz," Commentary , January 1996, 13-21.
7. Brian Priestley and Alan Cohen's analysis of Black, Brown, and Beige is an often-
noted exception to that characterization. Brian Priestley and Alan Cohen, "Black, Brown
and Beige," in Tucker, Ellington Reader , 186-204, originally published in Composer 51
(Spring 1974): 33-37; 52 (Summer 1974): 29-32; and 53 (Winter 1974-75): 29-32.
8. Edward Green, "'It Don't Mean a Thing If Ain't Got That Grundgestalt!' - Ellington
from a Motivic Perspective," Jazz Perspectives 2 (2008): 215, 216, 223-24; Stefano Zenni,
"The Aesthetics of Ellington's Suites: The Case of Togo Brava" Black Music Research
Journal 21 (2001): 2, 4-5. Both essays make thoughtful arguments, but falter on underex-
amined assumptions. For the former, one might suggest that the problem, rather than
scholarly reliance on a nineteenth-century understanding of coherence, is uncritically
equating artistic greatness with coherence, however one defines the term. For the latter
essay, the distinction the author draws between literate and aural approaches leaves too
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534 The Musical Quarterly
little room for the possibility that musicians might have both orientations simultaneously
or strategically rely on one or the other at particular moments.
9. Graham Lock, Blutopia : Visions of the Future and Revisions of the Past in the Work of
Sun Ra, Duke Ellington, and Anthony Braxton (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999),
105-41; Kevin Gaines, "Duke Ellington, Black, Brown, and Beige, and the Cultural
Politics of Race," in Music and the Racial Imagination , ed. Ronald M. Radano and Philip
V. Bohlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 585-602; George Burrows,
"Black, Brown and Beige and the Politics of Signifyin(g): Towards a Critical
Understanding of Duke Ellington," Jazz Research Journal 1 (2007): 45-71; Harvey
G. Cohen, "Duke Ellington and Black, Brown and Beige : The Composer as Historian at
Carnegie Hall," American Quarterly 56 (2004): 1003-34.
11. Gary Giddins, Visions of Jazz : The First Century (New York: Oxford University Press,
1998), 499.
12. Examples of historical and analytic work include Mark Tucker, "The Renaissance
Education of Duke Ellington," in Black Music in the Harlem Renaissance : A Collection of
Essays, ed. Samuel A. Floyd Jr. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990); Mark
Tucker, Ellington: The Early Years (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991); Ken
Rattenbury, Duke Ellington: Jazz Composer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); and
John Edward Hasse, Beyond Category: The Life and Genius of Duke Ellington (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1993). James Lincoln Collier's Duke Ellington alone can represent
polemic treatments of Ellington. The anecdotal work par excellence is perhaps Stanley
Dance, The World of Duke Ellington (New York: Scribner, 1970). Among detailed
accounts of Ellington's music making and daily life, some of the most notable are Klaus
Stratemann, Duke Ellington, Day by Day and Film by Film (Copenhagen: JazzMedia, 1992);
Jerry Valburn, Duke Ellington on Compact Disc: An Index and Text of the Recorded Work of
Duke Ellington on Compact Disc (Hicksville: Marlor Productions, 1993); W. E. Timner,
Ellingtonia: The Recorded Music of Duke Ellington and His Sidemen , 4th ed. (Lanham:
Scarecrow Press, 1996); Ken Vail, Duke's Diary, Part One: The Life of Duke Ellington,
1927-1950 (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2002); and Duke's Diary, Part Two : The Life of
Duke Ellington, 1950-1974 (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2002). There is also an emergent
body of work on Billy Strayhorn that, though not as exhaustive, is nonetheless illuminat-
ing. See, for example, Walter van de Leur, Something to Live For: The Music of Billy
Strayhorn (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
13. "Come Sunday" premiered at Ellington's 1943 Carnegie Hall Concert as part of
Black, Brown and Beige (The Duke Ellington Carnegie Hall Concerts, January 1 9 43 , Prestige
2PCD 34004-2, 1977 [orig. rec. 28 January 1943, Boston], 2 CDs). "Race" appeared in
several guises in The Degas Suite (The Private Collection, vol. 5: The Suites, New York 1968
and 1970, SAJA 7 91045-2, 1987 [orig. rec. 6 November 1968], CD). The best-known
version of "East St. Louis Toodle-oo" (rec. 19 December 1927, New York) can be found
on Early Ellington ( 1 927- 1 934) , BMG/Bluebird 6852-2-RB, 1989, CD, and "Ko-Ko"
appears on the Blanton-Webster Band release (cited in n. 1). Discographical information
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Musics of the World and Ellington's Suites 535
for "Tourist Point of View" is the same as for the Far East Suite , indicated in n. 19. Among
the celebrated recordings of "Perdido" featuring Gonsalves and Hamilton are the one
included on Ellington Uptown (see n. 16) and another on The Great Pans Concert,
Atlantic 304-2, 1973 (orig. rec. 1,2, and 23 February 1963, Paris), LP.
14. Schuller, Early Jazz , 318-57, 46-157. Billy Strayhorn is credited with coining the
phrase the "Ellington effect" in 1952. In a Down Beat article, he was quoted as saying:
"Ellington plays the piano, but his real instrument is his band. Each member of his band is
to him a distinctive tone color and set of emotions, which he mixes with others equally
distinctive to produce a third thing, which I like to call the Ellington Effect. . . .
Sometimes this mixing happens on paper and frequently right on the bandstand. I have
often seen him exchange parts in the middle of a piece because the man and the part
weren't the same character." Billy Strayhorn, "The Ellington Effect," Down Beat , 5
November 1952, 2. "Mood Indigo" is available on Early Ellington .
16. Howland, Ellington Uptown , 184-99, 280-88, esp. Table 4.6 (188) and Table 6.2
(281). See also Mimi Clar, "The Style of Duke Ellington," Jazz Review 2, no. 3 (1959):
6-10; Tucker, The Early Years, 211-58. The first recorded version of Harlem can be
found on Ellington Uptown , Columbia/Legacy CK 87066, 2004 (orig. rec. 7 December
1951, New York).
17. Penny Von Eschen provides the most extensive discussion to date of Ellington's
involvement in the State Department's Cold War cultural diplomacy initiatives. See
Penny M. Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 121-47.
18. Dance, World of Ellington, 16-22, 268-81; Duke Ellington, Music Is My Mistress
(Garden City: Doubleday, 1973), 301-89; Stuart Nicholson, Reminiscing in Tempo:
A Portrait of Duke Ellington (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1999), 350-55,
384-85,389-90, 395-99.
19. Subsequent references to these pieces and their constituent parts will be to these
recorded versions: The Far East Suite, Bluebird/BMG 66551-2, 1995 (orig. rec. 19-21
December 1966, New York), CD; Latin American Suite , Fantasy 8419, 1970 (orig. rec. 5
November 1968, New York, and 7 January 1970, Las Vegas), LP; Afro-Eurasian Eclipse,
Fantasy OJCCD-645-2, 1991 (orig. rec. 17 February 1971, New York), CD.
21. Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows up, 145. Von Eschen's comments came partly in
response to an earlier version of this essay. She and I did a joint presentation, titled
"Ellington Abroad: The Politics and Musicality of Black Worldliness," at Columbia
University's Center for Jazz Studies on 30 November 1999, about five months after I pre-
sented the first version of this essay at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation's symposium,
"Duke Ellington: The First 100 Years," in Lisbon, Portugal. The other presenters at that
event were Krin Gabbard, Robert G. O'Meally, Brian Priestley, and Mark Tucker.
23. For an overview of pop exotica, see Philip Hay ward, "The Cocktail Shift: Aligning
Musical Exotica," in Widening the Horizon: Exoticism in Post-War Popular Music, ed. Philip
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536 The Musical Quarterly
Hayward (Sydney: John Libbey, 1999), 1-18. For more narrowly focused studies, see the
following essays in Widening the Horizon : Shuhei Hosokawa, "Martin Denny and the
Development of Musical Exotica," 72-93; Shuhei Hosokawa, "Soy Sauce Music:
Haruomi Hosono and Japanese Self-Orientalism," 1 14-44; Rebecca Leydon, "Utopias of
the Tropics: The Exotic Music of Les Baxter and Yma Sumac," 45-71. For a slightly dif-
ferent take, one that provocatively and compellingly applies such thinking to countercul-
tural expressions in the 1960s and beyond, see Phil Ford, "Taboo: Time and Belief in
Exotica," Representations 103 (2008): 107-35.
24. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978); Timothy D. Taylor, Gbbal
Pop : World Music, World Markets (New York: Routledge, 1997), esp. chaps. 1 and 2.
25. Taylor, Global Pop , 19-21. Included among those Ellington implicitly criticized
might be Dave Brubeck, whose 1958 album Jazz Impressions of Eurasia (Columbia CS
8508, 1958, orig. rec. 28 and 30 July and 23 August 1958, New York) featured more self-
conscious and literal attempts to build upon what he heard on his own State Department
tour that same year. Brubeck makes clear his own worries regarding imitation in the
album's liner notes: "I did not approach the writing of this album with the exactness of a
musicologist. Instead, as the title indicates, I tried to create an impression of a particular
locale by using some of the elements of their folk music within a jazz idiom." The album's
final track, "Calcutta Blues," nonetheless represented Brubeck's attempt to adapt Indian
rãgas in jazz composition and performance. See Peter Lavezzoli, The Dawn of Indian Music
in the West: Bhairavi (New York: Continuum, 2006), 296-97. When Ellington, a few
weeks into his Far East tour, was asked at a reception held by the Press Guild of India
whether he might do something similar, he replied: "I have nothing definite in mind. . . .
I prefer to absorb everything, to drink it all in, and then have it come back to me natu-
rally. I want it to be an internal process; I want it to be reflection and not refraction. Of
course, we have had the fascinating experience of hearing Indian music, of seeing your
instruments, of touching them, but I can't say to what extent I will use the ideas I have
picked up here. Actually, in jazz we do not even have instruments like yours which can
produce quarter tones." "Duke Ellington Honored at Press Guild Reception in Bombay,"
U.S. Information Service Bombay Special Release, 9 October 1963, Box 2, Folder 2,
Series 2 (Performances and Programs), Subseries 2 A (International Tours), Duke
Ellington Collection, Archives Center, National Museum of American History,
Smithsonian Institution (henceforth DEC).
26. John Corbett, "Experimental Oriental: New Music and Other Others," in Western
Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation and Appropriation in Music y ed. Georgina
Born and David Hesmondhalgh (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 165-66,
168-69.
29. Corbett, "Experimental Oriental," 166. Discussing Charles Ives's quoting and adap-
tation of many different musical sources, Timothy D. Taylor writes, "These other musics
were simply 'material' to him, exchangeable, aestheticized bits, available to be appropri-
ated from other works into his own." Timothy D. Taylor, Beyond Exoticism: Western Music
and the World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 104.
30. John M. MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory, and the Arts (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1995), 139. The use of the word "Eastern" in this context
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Musics of the World and Ellington's Suites 537
32. Jonathan Bellman, "Introduction," in The Exotic in Western Music , ed. Jonathan
Bellman (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998), xii-xiii. Both MacKenzie's and
Bellman's statements confirm the accuracy of Born and Hesmondhalgh's characterization
of historical musicologists' general approach to Orientalism/musical exoticism. They
write: "There is no lack of studies of Western music's long history of borrowing from and
evoking non-Western cultures and musics. Commonly, however, the main analytical
issue has been the accuracy and authenticity of the appropriated material. Elsewhere, the
act of borrowing from other musical cultures has been portrayed as primarily an open-
minded and emphatic gesture of interest in and fascination with marginalized musics.
Such a perspective holds the danger of treating non-Western cultures purely as a resource
for the reinvigoration of Western culture." Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh,
"Introduction: On Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music," in Born and
Hesmondhalgh, Western Music and Its Others , 8.
33. It is entirely possible that Ellington was referring to the ten that in the Hindustani
(North Indian) system of raga classification. The inclusion of Sri Lanka in his statement,
however, confuses rather than clarifies matters, since Carnatic (South Indian) approaches
are more common there and Carnatic classification systems include many more than twelve
"scales."
35. David Hadju also suggests, though without providing a source, that Ellington and
Strayhorn embarked on the tour "hoping to draw inspiration for a new suite." David
Hajdu, Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
1996), 230.
36. An analogy to wine-tasting might amplify the distinction. When one says that a partic-
ular wine has hints of cinnamon, almonds, or berries, "reflectively constru[ing]" an experi-
ence in Michael Silverstein's terms, it is clear that those items are not actually in the wine,
nor were they involved in the process of making it. Somehow the tasting of that wine can
evoke or bring to mind, "projectively construct," the aroma or taste of "what seems, merely,
to be 'there.'" Even (or especially) in the case of wine-tasting, however, other, decidedly
hierarchical social distinctions are also at work. See Michael Silverstein, "Old Wine, New
Ethnographic Lexicography," Annual Review of Anthropology 35 (2006): 484-85.
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538 The Musical Quarterly
37. Indeed, the most consistent association the opening has for me is the image of large
animals trudging slowly in oppressive sunlight and desert heat in a cartoon or a
Hollywood film.
38. See George Ruckert and Richard Widdess, "Hindustani Raga," in The Garland
Encyclopedia of World Music , vol. 5: South Asia: The Indian Subcontinent , ed. Alison
Arnold (New York: Garland, 1999), 64-88, 188-95.
39. "Party for Duke Ellington and Orchestra at Home of Mr. and Mrs. John Tobler,"
Box 2, Folder 3, Series 2 (Performances and Programs), Subseries 2 A (International
Tours), DEC.
40. "The music of Jordan is haunting, formidable, beautiful, and compelling. It is here, I
think, that we learned to love the Depke dance. We have a wonderful visit in Amman."
Ellington, Music Is My Mistress , 303.
41. Here, I am reversing the terms used in an essay about (rhythmic) participatory dis-
crepancies in music. Steven Feld, "Aesthetics as konicity of Style (Uptown Title); or,
(Downtown Title) 'Lift-Up-Over Sounding': Getting into the Kaluli Groove," in Music
Grooves: Essays and Dialogues, ed. Charles Keil and Steven Feld (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1994), 109-50.
42. Recognizing the rhythmic relationship between the music and the dance, for some
listeners or dancers, might be complicated by the fact that the four-beat measures may
contain internal accents that do not coincide with the tactus - e.g., 3+3 + 2 eighth-note
groupings of percussion strokes. For more on the latter point and a more detailed discus-
sion of meter in dabke, see Shayna Mei Silverstein, "Mobilizing Bodies in Syria: Dabke,
Popular Culture, and the Politics of Belonging" (PhD dissertation, University of Chicago,
2012), 128-59.
43. The latter two references are to Ellington and Strayhorn's Such Sweet Thunder
(Columbia/Legacy CK 65568, 1999 [orig. rec. August 1956-May 1957, New York], CD)
and their adaptations of Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker Suite and Grieg's Peer Gynt, respec-
tively. The two adaptations can be found on The Ellington Suites , Columbia CK 46825,
1990, CD.
44. Hajdu, Lush Life , 234. The issues raised by what this particular piece might evoke
are complicated by and related to those regarding the status of "absolute music" and
musical meaning in discussions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century concert music. See
Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music , trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1989); Peter Kivy, Music Alone: Philosophical Reflections on
the Purely Musical Experience (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990); and Stephen
Davies, Musical Meaning and Expression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994) for differ-
ing examinations of these issues.
45. J. R. Taylor makes that observation in the notes to The Duke Ellington Carnegie Hall
Concerts , December 1947 album (Prestige 2PCD 24075-2, 1977 [orig. rec. 27 December
1947, New York], CD), which features the premiere public performance of the Liberian
Suite. The piece was recorded, interestingly enough, two days before its public premiere,
on 24 December 1947, and the resultant version was among the first 100 LPs Columbia
produced in the summer of 1948, with an unspecified "brassy passage" from the suite
(likely from "Dance No. 1") providing the LP's creators with material "to test the tracking
of the lightweight pickup arm" they had devised to deal with rapid, large changes in
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Musics of the World and Ellington's Suites 539
dynamic levels. Gary Marmorstein, The Label: The Story of Columbia Records (New York:
Thunder's Mouth Press, 2007), 153-66.
46. For discographical information on "Acht O'Clock Rock," see Valburn, Ellington on
CD, 194. Ellington apparently heard McLuhan, in a televised interview on 31 December
1969, utter the words quoted here. Ellington, Music Is My Mistress, 203.
47. Cal Schenkel's sleeve for the Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention recording,
Burnt Weeny Sandwich (1970), furnishes a good example from the design world. Schenkel
originally devised the sleeve for an Eric Dolphy recording that was never released. Nick
de Ville, Album: Style and Image in Sleeve Design (London: Mitchell Beazley, 2003), 110.
48.-» Stephen M. Buhler, "Form and Character in Duke Ellington's and Billy Strayhorn's
Such Sweet Thunder ," Borrowers and Lenders : The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 1 ,
no. 1 (2005): 3.
49. The Liberian Suite explanation comes from Piras, "Ellington Narratore," 65, and the
Far East Suite gloss comes from the liner notes to the original release.
50. The Controversial Suite , Box 81 , Folders 11-13, Series la (Music Manuscripts),
DEC.
51. Beginning in the 1990s, a number of writers have highlighted the degree to which
Ellington and Strayhorn wrote out "solos" for featured musicians in the suites.
Comparison of the originally released take of "Tourist Point of View" with an earlier,
alternative take reveals that Gonsalves had considerable leeway in playing his part. For
more on "simulated" improvisation in Ellington's suites, see Wolfram Knauer, '"Simulated
Improvisation' in Duke Ellington's Black , Brown , and Beige" Black Perspective in Music 20
(1990): 21-38.
52. Alex Tarnopolsky et al., "The Vocal Tract and the Sound of a Didgeridoo," Nature
(July 2005): 39; Martin Thomas, "The Rush to Record: Transmitting the Sound of
Aboriginal Culture," Journal of Australian Studies 90 (2007): 107-21.
54. Travis A. Jackson, "Spooning Good, Singing Gum: Meaning, Association and
Interpretation in Rock Music," Current Musicology 69 (2000): 21-22; Thomas Turino,
"Signs of Imagination, Identity, and Experience: A Peircian Semiotic Theory for Music,"
Ethnomusicobgy 43 (1999): 226-27 , 233; Richard Middleton, Studying Popular Music.
(Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1990), 220, 224-25.
57. Brent Hayes Edwards, "The Literary Ellington," in Uptown Conversation: The New
Jazz Studies y ed. Robert G. O'Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards, and Farah Jasmine Griffin
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 336-38.
58. One might also speculate that the Paul Gonsalves solo that follows, and which
begins with a paraphrase of the snake-charmer figure, offers a signifying commentary on
such conventional exoticism.
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540 The Musical Quarterly
62. Asian American Orchestra, Far East Suite , Asian Improv Records 0053, 1999 (rec.
31 March and 1 April 1999, Richmond, CA), CD. Mark Lommano's essay on Brown's
piece (as well as an adaptation by Tony Overwater) provides a thoughtful meditation on
how the Far East Suite and some of the issues it raises have traveled and themselves been
transformed over nearly five decades. Mark Lommano, "Ellington's Lens as Motive
Mediating: Improvising Voices in the Far East Suite ," Jazz Perspectives 6 (2012): 162-73.
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