Music Matters, 7/4/12

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Items on Kathleen Ferrier , Duke Ellington, the career of the percussionist Colin Currie, and the MS of Britten's Young Person's Guide.

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From Ian Thumwood on the Jazz Board:

Looking at the influence of Ellington on all forms of musical culture in the 20th Century I would initially be inclined to agree with the premise of this book. Part of me is a bit sceptical to consider Ellington quite in the league as someone like Bela Bartok who probably deserves to be considered the greatest figure in composition during the last century and there are plenty of other composers from the last 100 years who even the most ardent Ellington fan would have to acknowledge superiority. Within the confines of jazz, his greatness cannot be contested. As far as reflecting the "rapidly changing social conditions of modern life" this is difficult to deny (albeit a US-centred vision) and I think that Ellington (and Strayhorn) very much created the language within which jazz composition should be seen to express itself. Looking at the blurb, I am pleased to see that the author considers harmony, rhythm and melody in his analysis and this only serves to make me want to read this book even more.

However, it is interesting to consider just how influential Ellington actually was. Even in jazz circles, I think that very few people were obviously influenced by him - he was always totally original and never within the jazz mainstream. From the 30's there are recording by the likes of Spike Hughes and MBRB which definately owe everything to Duke but few of the big bands in the Swing Era really followed suit with the exception of Charlie Barnet who employed Billy May to write in a very similar style even if the likes of Lunceford frequently recorded his music. Don't think Ellington's band had the impact on his contemporaries as say Basie's 30's aggregation. Later on, I really feel that Mingus borrowed a tremendous amount from Ellington and even the likes of Richard Muhal Abrams have produced orchestrations that sound like the Duke. Today, Wynton Marsalis is another disciple. in the UK we have Stan Tracey. I think Ellington set the agenda and definately established the template from which jazz composition could be considered as "serious" as Classical music. In this respect, I think he might have been the first jazz composer to get recognition from the Classical establishment as early as the first years of the 1930's. Ellington's style is so distinctive that it makes the boundary between influence and slavish copying a bit blurred at times. (Mingus got it right, perhaps Wynton is just too much of a Duke-wannabe????)

Despite this, I really feel that this author might be over-playing Ellington's significance. You can't overstate the importance of jazz as a whole but I am not wholly convinced by the singular significance of Ellington. I don't think too many Classical composers have ever recognise Ellington as an influence - the only one I can recall reading about is John Adams. Whilst Ellington definately reflected the changing society in his music, I think it should be balanced by the fact that Classical music became increasingly less relevant in the late 20th Century to the point that it had become totally irrelevent by the 1970's. By the 1910's Classical music started to divorce itself from any social allegience it might once have had. The cold, academic nature of Classical music exacerbated the situation after the war and even it it endeavoured to reflect totalitariasm, other than Shostokovich, I would have tought the majority of people wouldn't have been listening! I would agree with someone like (I think) Gavin Bryars who made the comment that it is impossible to write relevant Classical music without acknowledging jazz, I think that Ellington is probably only a small part of the whole ingredient. i believe that jazz is probably the most significant "movement " or "development" in the 20th century music and its consequences have been more fair-reaching that Impressionism, Romanticism, Serialism, Rock, Rap, C & W or anything else you might care to mention. For me, this is because jazz deals with improvisation / development which is integral to what makes music "Great." As far as social commentary, i don't think that this need be brilliant music - Billy Bragg excellent for social comment , for example, but absolute carp as music.

Since Ellington's death, jazz composition has come in leaps and bounds and whilst I salute his pioneering work that laid the foundations, many of today's composers are probably writing to a level that is more on a par with Classical music. I don't think that we should forget that much of his work consists of 12-bars blues (albeit in a rainbow of possibilities) or simplistic forms and that the extended works / suites are often song forms bolted on to each other.

The odd thing with Ellington is that , had be been alive now, I strongly believe that his music would have grown in stature. Although I like the stuff from the 1920's, whenever I listen to his later recordings like "The New Orleans Suite", I wish Ellington had lived maybe 10-20 years longer as I think he would have continue to evolve as a creative artist. When I first heard the "The Sacred Concert" I was staggered by his ambition. Even though newer composers like Gil Evans, Bob Brookmeyer, Maria Schnieder, etc have arrived on the scene, Ellington still seems like a giant and even if so-called Modern Jazz composers like Monk, Mingus, Silver, Dameron, etc may have produced an impressive corpus of work, they never surpassed the Duke. For years, Ellington was unchallenged in jazz as the pre-eminent composer.

I'm not enthused by much of the Classical music in the 2nd half of the last century (although I like the first half best of all with Debussy, Ravel, Bartok, Jancek, Delius, Scriabin being the pick of the bunch for me) and think Ellington's use of tone colours had little appeal to the more dry, academic and atonal composers that followed WWII. I would almost certainly argue that Ellington had even less influence of pop music after this point and by the time that someone like Glenn Miller had captured popular taste and learned to "manufacture" perfected pop music, it is probably fair to say that Ellington was effectively shunted more towards "art music" than something "popular." Perhaps only Gershwin or Kurt Weill were of a similar genius evem though I prefer DE personally. By the time of the advent of Rock, Ellington must have had zero influence and therefore this author's stance must make quite an intriguing read. From 60's onwards, I would suspect that it would be difficult to argue that Ellington had much bearing on popular music. By the time of his death, Ellington's audience must have wholly consisted of jazz fans and the last vestiges of popular interest evapourated.

This book looks thought-provoking and certainly more interesting that last year's weighty volume that looked at Ellintgon in the context of social history.