Duke Ellington: The Quintessential Composer of the 20th Century?
In the final excerpt from my Afterword for Murray Talks Music, we continue our narrative about a deep and wide-ranging radio discussion on the legacy of Duke Ellington by Albert Murray, Stanley Crouch, and Loren Schoenberg in 1989. We’ll conclude by summarizing Murray’s comprehensive perspective on the cultural role and function of art in human life, as symbolic tools for meaning-making, from the idiomatic to the universal. For the sake of continuity, let’s begin with the last paragraph of our previous post:
The Blues and Jazz as Aesthetic Statement (conclusion)
In the context of Murray’s body of work and thought, Duke is central as the most comprehensive realization of the vernacular imperative to transmute the raw experience of his life into universal aesthetic statement. Duke also distinguished musical greatness in twentieth-century American terms in contradistinction to the European concert tradition. Even when Ellington rearranged Grieg and Tchaikovsky, he framed it within his own blues idiom aesthetic, values, and style. In fact, if Homo Americanus—according to Constance Rourke: part Negro, part Yankee, part Native American, and part frontiersman—is the cutting edge of Western culture, as Murray often said, then Duke may be the quintessential composer of the century (an idea that wouldn’t have been lost on Milhaud, Ravel, and others).
In their swinging discussion, Murray, Crouch, and Schoenberg reference and play works from Ellington’s decades of musical creativity across the swath of jazz history from the 1920s to the early ‘70s. Duke’s genius becomes translucent through their insights on how Ellington’s grasp of blues, ragtime, and stride extended to his capacious gifts as a leader, pianist, arranger, and nonpareil composer. Crouch, for example, astutely relays how Ellington saw the conceptual depths beyond surface technique and extended basic ideas across time.
Schoenberg emphasized Ellington representing a new category of composer in Western music. Echoing Crouch’s earlier insight regarding the “statement of the harmony with a percussive inflection” in jazz, as well as Murray’s emphasis on the definitive incantational and percussive nature of the blues idiom, Schoenberg proclaimed that Duke’s particular percussive approach to harmonic structure—which strongly influenced Thelonious Monk—was actually new to Western music. And so some folks don’t get the continuum twisted, as Murray said to Wynton Marsalis in this book: “Nobody called Monk old-fashioned. Monk is Duke. And Duke is ragtime.”
Murray expanded the usual perception of the jazz composer as simply writing individual tunes by projecting Duke as a composer for his orchestra—for which he famously composed and arranged with specific musicians in mind—who wrote the equivalent of five or six symphonies a year! The trio of discussants also riffed on the technological limitations of LP length as a formal and structural constraint that Duke used to brilliant pragmatic advantage. Ellington was always steps ahead and above, says Murray:
Most people somehow or other had the feeling that what he was doing was always totally different from what other people were doing. It was the apotheosis of what they were doing. Because he was a composer. They could see it, they could feel it—whether they articulated it in that way or not. These other people had arrangers, they did things, you had these other bands that were very popular in hotels and so forth. Their music was popular music derived from more serious aspects of this music. And Ellington was not just providing that type of entertainment. He was stylizing his own life. In fact, I remember very well a definition that he gave of jazz. Someone said, “What is your definition of jazz?” And he said, “It is Negro American feeling expressed in rhythm and tune.”
By expanding the compositional, technical, and emotional range of jazz, Ellington became representative of the tones, attitudes, and textures of twentieth-century America. For Murray, Ellington is matched only by Louis Armstrong as a prime representative of jazz as a fine art, exemplary, then, of humanity’s potential for mastery and fulfillment in the face of the blues as such: absurdity, chaos, depression, entropy.
Albert Murray in Paris, 1950
Albert Murray’s Comprehensive View of Art
To Murray, that’s the ultimate existential value of art. In fact, art is so fundamental to Cosmos Murray that he ventured his own descriptions, combining denotative clarity and connotative implication. An all-too-brief summation of a braided conceptual base of Murray’s take on art is: Art is feeling in form (Susanne K. Langer) as well as the processing of form and raw experience into style (André Malraux), leading to style as strategy and art as equipment for living (Kenneth Burke). Murray’s formulations elaborate upon this foundation. He proposed a layered plurality of art: the first via stylization, another two describing such stylization in idiomatic and universal registers:
Stylization: “Art is the means by which the raw materials of human experience are processed into aesthetic statement.” (From the Briarpatch File: On Context, Procedure, and American Identity, 29)
Idiomatic: “Art is the extension, elaboration, and refinement of the local details and idiomatic particulars that impinge most intimately on one’s everyday existence.” (Ibid., 3)
Universal: “Art is the ultimate extension, elaboration, and refinement of the rituals that reenact primary survival technology; and hence it conveys basic attitudes toward experience of a given people, in a given time, place, circumstance, and predicament.” (This definition is synonymous with Murray’s conception of “fine art.”) (Robert G. O’Meally, ed., The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, 111)
I’ll close with a quote from The Omni-Americans, a statement that considering the content of this book—from Gary Giddins’s Foreword, Paul Devlin’s Introduction, the interviews with and the relatively short pieces by Murray, to my attempt to characterize special aspects of the volume in this Afterword—should now reverberate from the idiomatic to the universal:
The definitive statement of the epistemological assumptions that underlie the blues idiom may well be the colloquial title and opening declaration of one of Duke Ellington’s best-known dance tunes from the mid-thirties: “It Don’t Mean a Thing if It Ain’t Got That Swing.” In any case, when the Negro musician or dancer swings the blues, he is fulfilling the same fundamental existential requirement that determines the mission of the poet, the priest, and the medicine man. He is making an affirmative and hence exemplary and heroic response to that which André Malraux describes as la condition humaine. Extemporizing in response to the ... situation in which he finds himself, he is confronting, acknowledging, and contending with the infernal absurdities and ever-impending frustrations inherent in the nature of all existence by playing with the possibilities that are also there. Thus does man the player become man the stylizer and by the same token the humanizer of chaos; and thus does play become ritual, ceremony, and art; and thus also does the dance-beat improvisation of experience in the blues idiom become survival technique, esthetic equipment for living, and a central element in the dynamics of U.S. Negro life style.
Murray detailed why and how the devices and processes of jazz such as improvising on the “break” were a moment of opportunity, not solely a source of psychoanalytic trauma; how swinging resilience in the midst of a social and structural briar patch can bring existential fulfillment, at least for as many measures as we can play in our lifetimes; and how train metaphors both reflected and expressed elements of black American life and music within the context of American experimentation and creativity.
As with the postmodernists and American pragmatists, he knew that there is no “essential” self. However, a victim model, a frame of rejection, was antithetical to his temperament, character, and experience. He embraced a mythic hero mode typified by, among others in his image house of affirmation through confrontation, the jazz musician and the swinging ensemble. He wanted the “rhapsodized thunder” and “syncopated lightning” of the blues idiom called jazz to speak to the hero in you.
December 2015
National Coverage for Murray’s Blues Idiom
Now, five years later, after the horror and chaos of four years of Donald Trump defiling the office of the American presidency, his predecessor’s best-selling manuscript, A Promised Land, garnered just last week a review by opinion writer David Brooks in The Atlantic that quotes Murray on the heroic and stylistic imperatives of the blues idiom:
We all have to decide where to situate ourselves in the world, and again and again Obama situates himself with the idealists . . .
Perhaps there is something distinctly African American about this posture. African Americans are among the most mistreated people in America, but they are also, as survey after survey shows, the most optimistic people in America. Poor Black people are even more optimistic than wealthy Black people. One sees an almost willful decision to simply refuse to be ground down by circumstances, an insistence on seeing a brighter day ahead and observing the present from the vantage point of a better future.
“The spirit of the blues,” the great writer Albert Murray once observed, “moves in the opposite direction from ashes and sackcloth, self-pity, self-hatred, and suicide. As a matter of fact the dirtiest, meanest, and most low-down blues are not only not depressing, they function like an instantaneous aphrodisiac!” You can’t always choose your life, Murray argued, but you can choose your style. The blues idiom starts not by “obscuring or denying the existence of the ugly dimensions of human nature,” but by making “an affirmative and hence exemplary and heroic response.” When you sing the blues you become the “humanizer of the chaos.”
We wish each of you a safe and warm Thanksgiving. We’ll be back in a week.