A Shakespearean Duke

In 1941 Thelonious Monk and Kenny Clarke copyrighted “Epistrophy,” one of the best-known compositions of the bebop era. The song’s title refers to a literary device — the repetition of a word or phrase at the end of successive clauses — that is echoed in the construction of the melody. Written two decades later, Amiri Baraka’s poem “Epistrophe” alludes slyly to Monk’s tune. Whether it is composers finding formal inspiration in verse or a poet invoking the sound of music, hearing across media is the source of innovation in black art. In Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination, Brent Hayes Edwards explores this fertile interface through case studies in jazz literature — both writings informed by music and the surprisingly large body of writing by jazz musicians themselves. Here is an excerpt from the book looking at Duke Ellington’s influence on the Stratford Shakespeare Festival and Shakespeare’s influence on him.

It seems that [Duke] Ellington was particularly attracted to the Stratford Shakespeare Festivals in Ontario partly because of the complex creative connections between literature and music fostered there in the late 1950s. The festival was unique in that it featured not only Shakespeare performances but also extensive musical lineups, in effect proposing a dialogue or consonance between aesthetic media. In 1956 the festival presented Benjamin Britten’s opera The Rape of Lucretia, as well as the Ellington band, Dave Brubeck, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Willie “the Lion” Smith, and the Art Tatum Trio; in 1957 it premiered Britten’s The Turn of the Screw and programmed Ellington’s Such Sweet Thunder, as well as Count Basie, Billie Holiday, Gerry Mulligan, and the Teddy Wilson Trio; in 1958 John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera was presented next to the Maynard Ferguson Orchestra, Carmen McRae, the Billy Taylor Trio, the Dizzy Gillespie Orchestra, and Henry “Red” Allen and his All Stars, who performed with the poet Langston Hughes. In the program notes to Such Sweet Thunder, Ellington commends the 1957 Festival’s “awareness” of the “parallel” between Shakespeare and “top-grade jazz,” and comments:

There is an increasing interrelationship between the adherents to art forms in various fields. . . . it is becoming increasingly difficult to decide where jazz starts or where it ends, where Tin Pan Alley begins and jazz ends, or even where the borderline lies be- tween classical music and jazz. I feel there is no boundary line and I see no place for one if my own feelings tell me a performance is good.

In the final analysis, whether it be Shakespeare or jazz, the only thing that counts is the emotional effect on the listener. Somehow, I suspect that if Shakespeare were alive today, he might be a jazz fan himself — he’d appreciate the combination of team spirit and informality, of academic knowledge and humor, of all the elements that go into a great jazz performance. And I am sure he would agree with the simple and axiomatic statement that is so important to all of us — when it sounds good, it is good.

Here, Ellington slyly pulls the rug out from under the critics who applaud the “Shakespearean” qualities in his music. If anything, in this description of boundary crossing, Shakespeare is revealed to be an Ellingtonian before his time. What unites jazz and Elizabethan drama, for Ellington, is above all a common concern with capturing the vibrant complexity of a particular social milieu. As Billy Strayhorn added in an interview, “Duke also said that the only way Shakespeare could have known as much about people as he did was by hanging out on the corner or in the pool room. He says that if William Shakespeare were alive today, you would surely find him down at Birdland listening to jazz.”

In 1956, the first time that the orchestra was invited to the festival, Ellington and Strayhorn had been less inspired, offering a set of mainly old hits like “I Got It Bad (and That Ain’t Good)” and “Take the ‘A’ Train.” They did offer one selection, though, that seemed geared for the theatrical environs and toward an interest in the “interrelationships” between art forms: “Monologue,” also known as “Pretty and the Wolf” (which had first been recorded in 1951). The piece features Ellington with Jimmy Hamilton, Russell Procope, and Harry Carney. The record not only captures Duke’s “vagabond syntax” (in Barry Ulanov’s description), but also might be heard as an attempt to capture the feeling of one of those late-night arranging session narratives, with Duke narrating a piece to the band. One might hear “Pretty and the Wolf” as a kind of orchestration of that ephemeral process, a version of one of those casual tales spun to incite elaboration and embellishment.

Like the tale Ellington tells the band in the rehearsal recounted in the Boyer article, like “Moon Maiden,” and indeed like much of Ellington’s writing, “Pretty and the Wolf” is a parable of seduction, as well as an insouciant reflection on African American urban migration. “Once upon a time,” Duke opens as the three reeds unfurl behind him, “there came to the city a pretty little girl — a little country, but pretty; a little ragged, but a pretty little girl. There she met a man, a city man — smooth — handsome — successful — cool. A well-mannered type man. And since she was pretty, he saw fit to give her an audience, so he talked to her for quite a while.” The Wolf, standing on the corner casually twirling his “diamond-studded gold chain,” agrees to assist the pretty girl in her ambition to “get somewhere.” (The piece’s simple conceit turns on the two meanings of the phrase: in other words, the narrative sets up an analogy between sexual conquest and material success.) She obsequiously purrs “Yes, Daddy” at his every suggestion. “And so agreed, they danced,” Ellington intones, as Jimmy Woode and Sam Woodyard enter on bass and drums, falling into an infectious swing. But the dynamics of the seduction switch during the dance, a “mad whirl” that leaves the seemingly unflappable city dweller in an amorous “spin.” By the end of the two-and-a-half-minute piece, it is no longer the Wolf, but the “pretty girl” who twirls the gold chain. As she “enumerates the various conditions and ways for him to get somewhere, you can hear him say, ‘Yes, Baby. Yes, Baby. Yes, Baby.’ ” It is as though Ellington is attempting to perform that singular arranging technique — the music shifting with the bandleader’s narrative, taking on shape as his “Monologue” develops. The reeds “spin” in chromatic triplets as the Wolf twirls his chain, rock into rhythm when the characters start dancing, and later wheeze at the close of the piece, punctuating the Wolf’s “Yes, Baby” with resignation.

Deeply impressed by the 1956 festival, Ellington and Strayhorn promised to return the next year with a new composition specifically for that context. The result was Such Sweet Thunder, which premiered in New York in the spring of 1957 at the Music for Moderns series at Town Hall, and then was performed in Stratford that summer. Ellington explained that “the idea of writing a Shakespearean suite occurred to me during a visit to Anne Hathaway’s cottage when we first toured England in 1933. I have often wondered, had I been asked to play for the Bard, what devices I would have used to impress him. Consequently, I was very pleased when it was suggested that I compose a work for the Shakespearean Festival in Stratford, Ontario, since I found Shakespeare as per- formed there to be a thrilling experience. The suite is constructed around “parallels” to the stories of a number of Shakespearean characters, including Othello, Julius Caesar, Henry V, Lady Macbeth, Puck, Hamlet, and Romeo and Juliet.

“It was the preparation that was tremendous,” Billy Strayhorn told Stanley Dance later. “We read all of Shakespeare!” He told another interviewer:

You have to adjust your perspective, you know, as to just what you’re going to do, and what you’re going to say, and what you’re going to say it about, and how much of it is supposed to be coming . . . and this included also consultations with two or three Shakespearean actors and authorities, you know. We’d sit down and discuss for hours . . . And it was a matter of just deciding finally [that] on one album we’re not gonna parallel any, you know, anything of Shakespeare You need a thousand writers and a thousand years to do it to cover Shakespeare. So, we’ll say well we’ll just devote one number to one Shakespearean word, or one Shakespearean phrase, you know, something like that. Just like “Lady Mac,” you know.

Ellington described the process more figuratively — and with characteristic irreverence: “I kept thinking what a dandy song Lady Macbeth would make. The girl has everything. Noble birth, a hot love story, murder — even a ghost. Then there’s Othello and Desdemona. There’s a swinging story for you. What a melodrama! What a subject for the blues. Blues in the night!”

I would argue that this transformation of Shakespeare is doing work very different from other black expressive appropriations one might assume are similar, like Langston Hughes’s poem “Shakespeare in Harlem”:

Hey ninny neigh! And a hey nonny noe!
Where, oh, where
Did my sweet mamma go? Ney ninny neigh
With a tra-la-la!
They say your sweet mama Went home to her ma.

Ellington and Strayhorn do not place Shakespeare in Harlem, challenging our preconceptions about “high” and “low” art in the process. Instead, Such Sweet Thunder is above all a reading of Shakespeare — perhaps from Harlem — and an elaborate reading at that. In the liner notes to the album, Duke describes the title cut (featuring Ray Nance on trumpet) as “the sweet and singing, very convincing story Othello told Desdemona. It must have been the most, because when her father complained and tried to have her marriage annulled, the Duke of Venice said that if Othello had said this to his daughter, she would have gone for it too.” The point is that the speech of seduction is not given in the play itself: here, the music fills the silences or interstices of Shakespeare’s work. It imagines what cannot be or is not given in the written language — aiming to capture in sound the enthralling effect of Othello’s violent and bloody tales of his life as a soldier. And to do so, the music “rhymes” Othello with an entirely different moment from another play, as Barry Ulanov has noted:

On stage Ellington introduces each “major work” with a vagabond syntax that makes one wonder why he bothers. But if one listens carefully, both to the words and the music, one discovers why. One finds, for example, that in titling a piece about Othello with a quotation from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (“I never heard so musical a discord, such sweet thunder”), he has gone right to the root of Othello’s problem. His blunt and jazzy explanation is probably closer to the substance of the play than the long and involuted commentaries of most Shakespearean scholars.

David Hajdu has commented that the Ellington-Strayhorn suites, even when inspired by literary characters, are in no way “traditional descriptive music.” Ellington writes in a press release for the Stratford Festival,

“In the suite I am attempting to parallel the vignettes of some of the Shakespearean characters in miniature . . . sometimes to the point of caricature.”