ARTS & AMUSEMENTS
Black, Brown and Beige
By HUMPHREY LYTTELTON
I F a Duke Ellington concert tour is nowadays fairly predictable, then so too are the reactions to it. Among the critics, the Swing Era veterans can be sure to reach for their superlatives, pro- viding that the band looks reasonably alert and happy and that certain proscribed items—the medley of Ellington hits and the extended drum solo—are left out. Against this warm tide of approval run small and isolated cold currents. There will i"ways be the odd 'purist' who beefs about the lack of 'real improvisation,' and the militant modernist who listens in vain for avant-garde trends (as if Duke, having in- fluenced several generations of avant-gardists in his time, should now start to be influenced by them in a sort of mad game of artistic leapfrog).
So varied in style and content is a two-hour Ellington concert that, for-every person in the audience, anathema must lurk somewhere. It might be the Ducal whimsicalities (`Now we'd like to have you meet our piano player') or the vaudeville, antics of Ray Nance, both of which have acquired an element of self-parody through constant repetition. Or it may be the juxta- position of 'serious' works like Black, Brown and Beige with brash firework displays by 'Cat' Anderson, the type-casting of the sensitive Paul Gonzalves as a sort of mob-orator in up-tempo numbers, the impassive sound of Jimmy Hamilton's clarinet or the impassive look on Johnny Hodges's face. All of these minor com- plaints have in fact been voiced publicly. All.can be justified from one standpoint and refuted just as reasonably from another. They reflect a dilemma which is not Duke's alone. It is inherent in almost all contemporary jazz, and simply magnified through an Ellington performance.
Basically, it's all in the mind. Locked away in each one of the 3,000 heads which alternately nod with rhythmic approval or waggle with dis- cordant irritation at an Ellington concert is a neat set of preconceived ideas. With every tour, some item in the programme releases one or two of them so that they can be read clearly like the bubbles in a strip cartoon. This year, it was the inclusion of extracts from the work Black, Brown and Beige which acted as a catalyst. The piece, a sort of montage of two themes from the original, was universally acclaimed with an air of 'This is more like it!' One or two writers were emboldened to suggest that the British audience is 'intelligent' enough to take the work unabridged. And out of every head emerged a balloon bearing the words 'Duke Ellington, one of the great "serious" composers of our time.'
Measured against this conception—and in itself it is not an unreasonable one—some of the goings on at an Ellington concert are un- doubtedly bizarre. By all accepted standards, performances of 'serious' works are not inter- spersed with instrumental gymnastics eccentric dancing and ribald 'vocals.' If Menuhin followed the Beethoven Violin Concerto with an im- promptu buck and wing or a bit of `shoobie- doobie' scat singing, the shock waves would shatter every pane of glass in the Festival Hall and crack a few in neighbouring County Hall, too. Ray Nance's singing and hilarious foot- work are expected and, in general, accepted. But there is a note of uneasiness in the giggles. Is this right? Should it be happening? Is it necessary?
Somewhere above I used the phrase 'accepted standards.' Accepted by whom? Well, certainly not by Duke Ellington. It would indeed be odd— and a bit suspect—if a man who has worked for almost half a century in the night club-cum-dance hall-cum-band show medium in which both he and jazz itself grew up should suddenly adopt the conventions of the orchestral concert on the strength of a few extended compositions. We know that Duke is not particularly concerned about posterity or the future of his 'works.' In a BBC itherview last year he confessed: 'I am an impetuous writer—I don't like to write tonight and not hear it for six months after. I want to hear it tomorrow . . . I'm a chronic listener. I want to hear—it's the purpose of the whole thing.' And having heard, he is apparently satisfied. It is not contempt for his audience which prompts him to curtail Black, Brown and Beige. It is because no one in his entourage, himself included, has ever kept track of the band parts and half of them are lost.
Duke Ellington has perhaps suffered more than any other contemporary jazz musician from preconceived notions. He himself is strikingly innocent of any artistic pretensions. In the same radio interview he expressed a musical policy which could have come from the lips of any commercial bandleader in Tin Pan Alley:
We play everything . . . we play concerts like we do here, we play proms, we play balls and all the parties and receptions. And it's fun. We play dances, and people might want to hear something . . . some old couple might want to hear a waltz—why not play it for them? Not that we have it in the book, you know . . I'll just go round the band and say 'Who knows this?' Lawrence Brown usually knows every- thing . . . he's got the big responsibility of everything, so he just plays it. And people are happy, so what?
The philosophy is familiar to anyone who has talked to jazzmen of mature years. For forty years, until the first 'hopper' turned his back on his audience, it was the solid foundation of all jazz. The difference—and the only difference— between Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong on the one hand and Sid Bloggs and his Rhythm Syncopators on the other is in the quality of the musical mind behind the performance. In other words, what is bizarre and 'out of place' in an Ellington band show is not the trumpet pyro- technics, the comic dancing or the leader's flash clothes, but the surpassing virtue of the music itself. Here is the dichotomy and the dilemma. The jazz fan tends to think that the composer of Black, Brown and Beige is the real Duke Ellington, labouring under the necessity to play down to an ignorant audience. But the real Duke Ellington is the chronic listener who wrote Black, Brown and Beige with his colleague Billy Stray- horn because it was fun—as much • fun, indeed, as playing waltzes for an old couple to make them happy, or letting Sam Woodyard thrash away at the drums for ten minutes because this is what half the audience are waiting to hear.
The thought naturally occurs that the only way to resolve the dilemma is to stage separate Ellington concerts, with special occasions re- served for the major works. Somehow the mind rebels against this sort of musical apartheid— and is reassured by the knowledge that no one will ever find enough surviving band parts to stage such a formidable event. There is, too, the cautionary example of what happened when a 'jazz appreciation society' staged a special con- cert at the Royal Festival Hall so that Lionel Hampton could 'escape' from his highly showy and flashy stage show to play 'what he really wanted.' Two thousand serious jazz enthusiasts and musicians assembled to hear the special con- Duke Ellington cert—and at the end of the first number Lionel Hampton concluded a frenetic drum solo by leaping on to a tom-tom.
Of course, it's quite possible that the dilemma Will vanish with the passage of time. Just after the Ellington Band left, we heard a performance by the Jimmy Giuffre Trio. Under the name of Contrapuntal Abstract Jazz, it consisted of a succession of startlingly eccentric noises delivered With an air of portentous solemnity. If this is the shape of things to come, then a jazz concert Will eventually become altogether serious and seemly. Personally I'm in no hurry to get there.
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