Hodges at Newport: The Rhetoric of “Jeep's Blues”

Abstract The Duke Ellington Orchestra's performance at the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival is remembered chiefly for its hard-swinging rendition of “Diminuendo in Blue and Crescendo in Blue” with an extended “interval” of twenty-seven solo choruses by tenor saxophonist Paul Gonsalves. While that number generated much excitement and considerable publicity, the band's later rendition of “Jeep's Blues” has received wider critical acclaim. The slow-tempo performance runs for six choruses, and Johnny (“Jeep”) Hodges' solo is based on only a few distinctive figures. By skillfully ordering and varying those figures Hodges created a coherent and moving statement, one that can be explicated in terms of concepts associated with musical rhetoric. Previous studies have shown that jazz musicians often conceive their improvisations in rhetorical terms. This study provides transcriptions of the Newport Festival performance of “Jeep's Blues” and another recording made some thirty-six hours later in a New York recording studio. The festival performance is analyzed using concepts and methods adapted from rhetoric as well as musical form, phrase rhythm, and Schenkerian voice-leading analysis. My analysis demonstrates that much of Hodges's musical eloquence derives from the way he ordered, elaborated, repeated, varied, and articulated a few basic ideas. It also examines how Hodges used temporal pacing and dynamic shading to further enhance expression. After briefly comparing the festival performance to the studio recording, I consider how a more recent theory of rhetoric, that of “signifying” might apply to “Jeep's Blues.” Notes 1For a thorough account of Ellington's career, see John Edward Hasse, Beyond Category: The Life and Genius of Duke Ellington (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993). 2The fourteen-minute work, which came to be called Harlem, was commissioned by Arturo Toscanini for the NBC Symphony Orchestra, composed in 1950, but “premiered by the Duke Ellington orchestra in a benefit concert for the NAACP at New York's Metropolitan Opera House on January 18, 1951.” Subsequently, Harlem was recorded and issued on the LP Ellington Uptown in Hi-Fi. That LP was later reissued by Columbia Records as Ellington Uptown (Hasse, Beyond Category, 296–297, 323). Another large-scale work, Night Creature, was premiered by the Ellington band and the Symphony of the Air at Carnegie Hall on March 16, 1955 (Ibid., 316). 3Hasse, 316–317. 4For a thorough account of the festival performance, its historical context, and its effect on Ellington's career see John Fass Morton, Backstory in Blue (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press, 2008). 5Duke Ellington, Ellington at Newport. Columbia Records, CL934 (x “Lp” 38810), n.d. 6 Beyond Category, 324. 7Mark Evan Bonds, Wordless Rhetoric: Musical Form and the Metaphor of the Oration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 53. 8 Wordless Rhetoric, 80. 9Ibid., 81 10Ingrid Monson, Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). See also Paul F. Berliner, Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). For a more focused application of rhetoric to jazz see Larson, Steve, “The Art of Charlie Parker's Rhetoric,” Annual Review of Jazz Studies vol. 8 (1996): 141–166. 11Hasse, Beyond Category, p. 111. 12Helen Oakley (Dance), “Impressions of Johnny Hodges” Tempo (November, 1936), 10, 12. Reprinted in Mark Tucker, ed., The Duke Ellington Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 449–451. 13Vocalion M793-1 (rec. in New York on March 28, 1938). 14Two discographies: Tom Lord, The Jazz Discography (West Vancouver, B. C.: Lord Music Reference, 1992) and W. E. Timner, Ellingtonia: The Recorded Music of Duke Ellington and His Sidemen, 5th ed. (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2007) list no Ellington recordings of “Jeep's Blues” between the December 28, 1947 Carnegie Hall Concert and the Newport Festival performance on July 7–8 1956. The Hodges medley on the Carnegie Hall recording (reissued on Prestige 2PCD-24075-2) includes only one chorus of “Jeep's Blues.” The dearth of other recordings by Ellington during this period is due to the recording ban imposed by the AFM during most of 1948, illness of various band members, and Hodges's 1951 to August, 1955 absence. 15 Beyond Category, 305. 16I wish to thank saxophonists Susan Fancher and Chad Eby for proofreading and critiquing my transcriptions. 17The final eight bars of chorus 6 are not shown because their melodic content was apparently pre-arranged as discussed below. 18This symbology is essentially that used in Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff, A Generative Theory of Tonal Music (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983) except that my grouping-structure brackets are placed above the staff rather than below. Criteria for isolating groups are informed by the Grouping Preference Rules in Chapter Three. 19The idea that rhythm is essentially the relationship between grouping and meter was proposed by Grosvenor Cooper and Leonard B. Meyer in The Rhythmic Structure of Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960) and developed more fully by Lerdahl and Jackendoff in A Generative Theory of Tonal Music. 20The idea that stress (dynamic accent) affects the grouping of notes in weak metric positions is presented in Cooper and Meyer, The Rhythmic Structure of Music, p. 20 passim. 21The term “rhythmic shape” denotes the placement of a figure's downbeat on the metric grid and the length of its upbeat (anacrusis) and afterbeat segments. 22Elaine R. Sisman, Haydn and the Classical Variation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 27. 23The gradual acceptance by historical theorists and composers of music as a language in its own right, independent of any text, is summarized by Bonds on pp. 62–66. 24The term “compound melody” denotes a melodic line that presents more than one voice-leading strand. For a more thorough discussion see Forte, Allen and Gilbert, Steven, Introduction to Schenkerian Analysis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982). Chapter 3. 25For a discussion of how and to what extent Schenker's voice-leading models are realized in jazz contexts see Henry Martin, Charlie Parker and Thematic Improvisation (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1996), Chapter 2. 26Reissued on Johnny Hodges, Jeep's Blues. Living Era CD AJA 5180. 27Brian Rust, Jazz Records, 1897–1942 (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House Publishers, 1978), 1:696; and Lord, The Jazz Discography, 9: H358. 28 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Mood. Accessed 1/11/2010. 29For extensive discussions of closing function, see William E. Caplin, Classical Form (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) and James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). 30See Sisman's extensive quote from [Rhetorica] Ad Herrenium, the major treatise of antiquity in Haydn and the Classical Variation, 36. 31The terms “prefix” and “suffix” are used in Rothstein, William, Phrase Rhythm in Tonal Music (New York: Schirmer Books, 1989; reprint Chelsea, MI: Musicalia Press, 2007) to denote groups that respectively precede or follow the main group within a phrase, period, section, or movement. 32The durational values in both transcriptions reflect notational decisions made by the author. Other transcribers might notate Hodges' more rhapsodic figures in a slightly different way. 33 Ellington at Newport (Complete), Columbia/Legacy C2K 64932, 1999 (orig. 1956), compact disc. The rationale for making this recording is explained in the liner notes. 34Examples are related in Berliner, Thinking in Jazz, p. 5 and supporting notes. 35Steve Larson cites and answers Wilhelm Furtwangler's complaint that “in jazz, long-range hearing is absent.” in his Analyzing Jazz: A Schenkerian Approach (Hillsdate, NY: Pendragon Press, 2008), 31. 36The question of whether Schenkerian analysis can and should be applied to jazz is explored in Larson, Analyzing Jazz, Chapter Two, as well as Martin, Charlie Parker and Thematic Improvisation, Chapter 2. 37John P. Murphy., “Jazz Improvisation: The Joy of Influence,” The Black Perspective in Music, 18 (1990): 8. 38Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 63. 39In addition to Murphy's “Jazz Improvisation,” 10–17, and Berliner's Thinking in Jazz, Part II, see Monson, Ingrid, Saying Something, Chapter 4. 41Mark Evans Bonds, “The Symphony as Pindaric Ode,” in Haydn and His World, ed. Elaine Sisman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 135. 40Gates, 63–64.

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