NEWPORT UP: AN ELLINGTON SUITE

by Tomas P. Fredell

The late critic Martin Williams wrote in his influential study The Jazz Tradition that Duke Ellington "is probably the largest and most challenging subject in American music for our scholars, our critics, our musicologists, our music historians."2 This paper addresses a fateful episode in the lives of Ellington and his nonpareil band, their appearance on July 7, 1956 at the American Jazz Festival in Newport, Rhode Island. The historical commonplace linking Ellington's Newport sensation to a revitalized late career seems sound enough. Surprisingly, however, one of the reasons for the link has received little attention: the interest of Duke Ellington and His Orchestra in the rhythm and blues idiom that has dominated popular music since the mid-1950s.

Blues To Be There

The years from 1951 to 1956 represent the lowest point in Ellington's half-century as a musical institution.3 His was the only swing-era big band to survive America's post-war transformations relatively intact, but it was not easy. Teenagers who had once stomped at the Savoy--and later, as soldiers, sailors, airmen, and defense workers, spent plentiful wartime dollars in local juke joints and swank downtown clubs--now stayed home in the suburbs, raised the kids who would scream for the Beatles, and ascended through middle management. Radio networks killed live music broadcasts. The new mass medium of television, leery of Southern reaction, steered clear of black music and black faces until the fall of 1956, when NBC allotted jazz pianist-cum-crooner Nat Cole a niggardly 15 minutes per week. At decade's start solo pop singers of the Doris Day and Rosemary Clooney variety ruled the national charts. A few years later, the likes of Bill Haley and Elvis Presley would shoulder them aside. Black Americans increasingly preferred "jump" or rhythm-and-blues artists like Louis Jordan, the Orioles, Chuck Berry and Little Richard. Jazz seemed a small-combo affair dominated by the "cool" white musicians who attracted mildly nonconformist college types.

In short, Duke Ellington and His Orchestra were not a hot commodity, and they had to adjust to a changed world. In true American fashion, no Archbishop of Salzburg or government bureau was about to subsidize the greatest living exponent of the country's greatest indigenous art form. So Ellington set aside the pursuit of beauty to concentrate on bookings, payroll, and promotion. In past slack times he had been able to fund the band with his substantial composing royalties, but by the early '50s he had not topped the charts in a commercial eon. When he left Columbia Records in 1953 for the singles-oriented Capitol, he reportedly told his new producer Dave Dexter "I want a hit, Dave. Other bands make hits. I want to hear Ellington records in the jukeboxes, and on the radio, and playing over the p.a. systems in shops and markets."4 The execrable upshot was that the man who gave "Ko-Ko" to the world put out an album aping the current mambo fad. Mercifully, it died quickly. The nadir came two years later. In the summer of 1955 Ellington booked six weeks at the "Aquacades" show in Flushing Meadows. Management excluded four band members who did not carry local union cards, and added girl harpists. Ellington presented medleys of his moldy hits, then left while his peerless musicians played background for the water skiers. "It was regular employment," trumpeter Clark Terry later observed laconically.5

Personnel turnover was both cause and effect of Ellington's troubles, although it probably also contributed to the band's ultimate salvation. By 1950 his famous sidemen knew that, in the short run, they could make more money fronting their own small groups. Tenor sax idol Ben Webster left that year, to be replaced by Paul Gonsalves, a relatively unknown 29 year-old Cape Verdean from Pawtucket, Rhode Island. In 1951 Ellington lost three musicians with nearly 75 years' collective experience in the band, most notably alto sax man Johnny Hodges, his "single sine qua non player."6 The defections meant more to Ellington, of course, than the loss of fine artists and friends. They adversely affected his music. He never wrote for fungible horns or reeds, but for the character, talents and idiosyncracies of a Hodges or Webster, a Bubber Miley or Jimmy Blanton or "Tricky Sam" Nanton. It took time to artistically reorient himself to different players. Ellington tended to replace the defectors with energetic younger men comfortable with up-to-date music. Both Gonsalves and trumpeter Willie Cook came from Dizzy Gillespie's big band; Clark Terry was a noted bop stylist. In time, the new blood restimulated and complimented Ellington's compositional talents, producing, for example, Terry's boppish "Newport Up," included as the third section of the "Newport Jazz Festival Suite" the band would premiere at the 1956 happening.

Hodges, with renewed respect for Ellington's bandleading skills, brought his emotional tone and lyrical blues sensibility back after the "Aquacades" fiasco. The band was now split into generational cliques, with young turks like Gonsalves, Terry, and the rhythm section of drummer Sam Woodyard and bassist Jimmy Woode goading--musically and otherwise--oldsters like Hodges, baritone sax great Harry Carney, and alto saxist/clarinetist Russell Procope. Those who heard the results in the early months of 1956 knew that reports of the band's demise had been premature. Count Basie, who had reformed his big band in 1955 after a three-year hiatus, was undoubtedly one of those in-the-know about Ellington's resurgence. In a downbeat interview published six weeks before Newport, Basie said that his "biggest thrill as a listener" came on a 1951 evening when Ellington and his band blew away "the so-called progressive jazz" mavens on opening night at Birdland. The interviewer, seeking to clarify Basie's compliment that "the greatest band of all time was Duke Ellington's," wondered whether it excluded present company. Basie's response switched to the present tense: "I mean that Duke Ellington is the greatest of them all."7

Jump For Joy

The Duke Ellington Orchestra did not keep extended pieces in repertoire indefinitely. Usually, they would play something until it reached definitive development, record it, play it another few months, then put it aside and move on to newer material. Such was the fate of Numbers 107 and 108 in the Ellington book, "Diminuendo in Blue" and "Crescendo in Blue." Ellington wrote and recorded these together in 1937, just before the advent of Webster and Blanton made his 1940-42 aggregation the most celebrated big band in jazz history. The 1937 "Diminuendo and Crescendo" is a dramatic potpourri of shifting tonality, subtle rhythms, irregular measures, and inimitable orchestration, played with swing-era urbanity over a Cheshire Cat undertone reminiscent of Cotton Club exoticism. The piece clocks in at just under six glorious minutes. It is so striking that in 1987 Martin Williams chose to include it in the Smithsonian's standard recorded history of jazz. Paul Gonsalves played "Diminuendo and Crescendo" only once before 1956, at Birdland in the early '50s.8 At that time everyone in the band was concerned about "dying" in a modern house, and as the resident "modernist" Gonsalves thought it meet to ask Ellington for a solo during the break between the two halves of the work. The leader assented, the tenor man got up and blew numerous choruses, and the band left the boppers "standing on their chairs."9

Ellington knew that to shake the career doldrums, and to land the contract he was then negotiating for his return to Columbia--he had left Capitol without securing another major label recording deal--he needed a similar triumph at Newport in July 1956. In two short years impresario George Wein, sometime pianist and jazz instructor at Boston University, as well as full-time proprietor of the Hub's Storyville nightclub, had built his American Jazz Festival at the sleepy retreat of the Vanderbilt set into the music's premier event. Miles Davis had cemented his post-heroin addiction comeback (the first of many) by conquering Newport in 1955. National media and the parochial jazz press alike blanketed the 1956 proceedings. The Voice of America broadcast the sounds of freedom to benighted foreigners and all the ships at sea. For the first time ever at an outdoor festival, Columbia's engineers would preserve every note for posterity on their state-of-the-art remote recording equipment.

Columbia browbeat Wein into booking Ellington to headline the event's Saturday night finale, despite the promoter's protests about the band's diminished drawing power. All the other big names had performed on Thursday and Friday, so Ellington's Saturday night compatriots included the competent but relatively undistinguished white singer Anita O'Day, mildly interesting experimentalists Jimmy Guiffre and Chico Hamilton, the conservative Teddy Wilson Trio, something called the Friedrich Gulda Septet, and another something called the Bud Shank Quartet, which Leonard Feather described in downbeat as "a sort of Reader's Digest version of west coast jazz."10 The evening got underway at 8:30 with four musicians unaccounted for--not unusual for the eccentric Ellingtonians, but hardly the way to begin a crucial gig. The shorthanded band opened with perfunctory run-throughs of "Take the 'A' Train" and "Black and Tan Fantasy," then turned the stage over to the lesser lights for nearly three hours.

During the long intermission Ellington talked business backstage with Columbia executive producer Irving Townsend. As time wore on he groused to Wein about the lateness of the second set, complaining "What are we--the animal act, the acrobats?"11 Shortly before Chico Hamilton's half-hour performance ended, Ellington gave his men a rare pep talk and informed them that they would play "something different," Numbers 107 and 108 with a Gonsalves interval on his cue. According to Ellington's lyricist Don George, Gonsalves could not remember the key. Someone told him "B flat. All you do is blow the blues."12

By the time the band resumed the stage at full strength for the second set, it was 11:45 p.m. and some of the seven thousand paying customers were heading for the exits. The diehards responded politely to twenty-five minutes of well-played "Newport Jazz Festival Suite," followed by "Sophisticated Lady" and another pop tune. Ellington then turned to the "Diminuendo and Crescendo"--erroneously introduced as "1938 vintage"--and set down a groove with Woodyard and Woode. With a shout from Ellington, the brass and reeds roared in. The leader drove his men with more shouts and hand claps, until he signalled Gonsalves to step forward and improvise over the unaccompanied rhythm. At about the soloist's fifth chorus the crowd began to clap on the downbeats. A platinum blond in a tight black strapless stood up in the expensive boxes and started to twirl, head thrown back in abandon. Jitterbugging broke out all over the festival grounds, and couples danced down the aisles toward the stage. Ellington himself was dancing and yelling at the piano, still pushing his tenor man. Gonsalves, encouraged by his leader, shouts from the band, cheers from his fellow Rhode Islanders in the crowd, and a rolled-up Christian Science Monitor slapped on the stage by Basie drummer Jo Jones half-hidden in the orchestra pit, seemed the paradigm of the passionate jazz musician. Wein, spooked by the possibility of a riot, shouted at Ellington from the wings to wrap it up. Ellington shouted back "Don't be rude to the artists," and continued to build the number. Legs together, shoulders swaying, eyes shut and veins popping with intensity, Gonsalves blew twenty-seven choruses and more than six minutes without a squeak or honk. The band flew into the "Crescendo" with brio, and the magic climaxed amidst lusty cheers.

Ellington wisely calmed the crowd with a ballad, Hodges providing the balm--and the highlight of the entire festival, in purely musical terms--with a transcendently beautiful "Jeep's Blues." After two more encores the set ended. It was past one a.m. Duke Ellington and His Orchestra were back on top of the jazz world. As Ellington later recalled in his memoirs, "that night caught fire."13 It is even alleged in some quarters that the legendary stone face of Johnny Hodges cracked into a brief smile on the bandstand.

Diminuendo And Crescendo

The conventional wisdom properly holds that the band's sensation at Newport substantially boosted Ellington's career. It put him back in the public spotlight, inaugurated a mutually beneficial relationship with Columbia that would result in many now-classic recordings, and enhanced his standing with fellow musicians. Of more immediate concern, the books of Duke Ellington, Inc., reflected a large increase in club, college and concert hall gigs at far better prices. Whether Newport also pointed to a major artistic revitalization is more problematic. This is not the place to address the difficult issue of the later extended works, or to survey the widely divergent opinions of their merits. On balance it seems fair to say that the post-Newport Ellington outshone his early 1950s incarnation, even if he did not routinely regain the heights of the 1940s. One might suggest at any rate that a critic's reception of the 1956 "Diminuendo and Crescendo" and what it stands for seems to function as a passable indicator of his or her probable orientation toward Ellington's late music.

Ellington did not hear his records on the market p.a. immediately after Newport, but he could read about himself at the checkout counter in the pages of Saturday Review and Holiday. On August 20, Time set aside the gathering Suez crisis to splash him across its cover in typical garish '50s fashion, immortalized by binderies everywhere between the 13th's Harry Truman and the 27th's Gamal Abdel Nasser. The six-page spread--nestled amongst an Andrea Doria post-mortem, gossip about Juan Peron and his nubile secretary, prognostication of Brooklyn's pennant chances, Jackson Pollock's obituary, and ads trumpeting corporate America's ability to kill millions of Communists very quickly indeed--was all Ellington could have asked.

Or, in fact, had asked. As biographer John Edward Hasse revealed in 1993, a tape from the vast cache of private Ellingtonia son Mercer donated to the Smithsonian several years ago shows that as far back as April the bandleader shrewdly advised Time, "I think it would be better for you--well, for me, too, of course, if we don't get, uh, too historic....I mean, it would do me a hell of a lot more good if--if the reason for the goddamned thing is--has to do with now."14 Time led off with a long description of Newport as "the turning point in a career."15 The unsigned story (it was still Henry Luce's no-byline era) thereafter emphasized the here and now within its outline of Ellington's past achievements: the sound was "as distinctive today as it ever was." The band was "once again the most exciting thing in the business." The master himself was "bursting with ideas and inspiration" to lay down on wax under a fat new Columbia contract according him "the broadest possible scope."16

The jazz press proved equally helpful. On August 8 Leonard Feather told downbeat readers of his raptures over Saturday's "brilliant crescendo in blue," while colleague Jack Tracy forestalled any suspicion of the magazine's mere hero worship by eviscerating Louis Armstrong's Friday performance.17 British reviewer Albert McCarthy's comment that the performance served as "a reminder of what jazz was like before the cool boys ripped out its heart" circulated widely on both sides of the Atlantic.18 Critics raved again after Columbia rushed the $3.98 Ellington At Newport album into the stores for Christmas. downbeat's Nat Hentoff gave it four-and-a-half stars, a star or star-and-a-half more than other Newport releases from Armstrong, fellow Time cover alumnus Dave Brubeck (class of 1954), and the Coleman Hawkins/Buck Clayton All Stars. High Fidelity's John Wilson noted that "[t]he welcome resurgence of the Ellington band is inescapable" on the record.19 In Britain, Jazz Journal hailed "some of the best and meatiest Ellington we have had for a long time."20

As a result of all the excitement, for the first time in a decade Ellington returned to the top of the charts, At Newport heading downbeat's "Jazz Bestsellers" column for several weeks in January and February, 1957. As late as June the record stood at number four, while his extended work A Drum Is A Woman held down the eighth spot--ahead of young hotshot Miles Davis' efforts on 'Round About Midnight and Walkin', respectively numbers seven and nine. Eventually Ellington at Newport sold hundreds of thousands of copies, a feat matched by few instrumental jazz records before Columbia's 45 r.p.m. release of Brubeck's "Take Five" pushed the music into the million-seller range in 1962. The big numbers pleased and impressed Columbia enough for artist and label to work out a happy modus vivendi that would continue well into the 1960s. Essentially they agreed to alternate uncompromising aesthetic statements (A Drum Is A Woman, Such Sweet Thunder, Suite Thursday) with more commercially-oriented material that often included inspired jazz and pop (Ellington Indigos, Jazz Party, collaborations with Count Basie and Ella Fitzgerald). Ellington's new-found status as hitmaker also attracted Hollywood, always ready to jump on a bandwagon. Otto Preminger came calling in 1959, and Ellington's score for Anatomy Of A Murder won three Grammies.

Bad music often fools the public, as any cynical record producer will admit. It is another thing entirely to fool one's fellow musicians. Jazzmen were not given to the rhetoric of the professional scribes, nor to the general consumerism, but they too sensed some new momentum in the Ellington launched at Newport. According to Feather's on-the-spot account, unidentified "elder jazz statesmen" compared the band's energy and effect to the scene at Benny Goodman's 1936 Paramount Theater gigs.21 Even the heartless cool boys were impressed. Bill Crow, bassist in the ultracool Gerry Mulligan Quartet, who happened to be filling in with another group at Newport's 1956 Saturday finale, admitted that he "danced and carried on" to a band "playing exceptionally well."22 Brubeck alto saxist Paul Desmond told Gonsalves later that summer "What you and the band played was the most honest statement that night."23

A surprising effect of Ellington's return to form and increased visibility after Newport was the eagerness with which young jazz innovators sought his musical company in the late '50s and early '60s. Of course the youngsters respected Ellington's historical stature, and no link can be established directly to the festival sensation, but it seems less likely that they would have sat down seriously to create with the old man absent the post-Newport common knowledge that he still had something to say. Particularly important were two off-label 1962 efforts, Money Jungle with iconoclasts Charles Mingus and Max Roach, and Duke Ellington and John Coltrane with spiritualist Coltrane and intimidating technician Elvin Jones. The latter Impulse album found Ellington right in step with the messianic tenor's extended soloing, as well as the Detroit drummer's rhythmic complexities--this from a man born in 1899 who had played successfully with Sidney Bechet!

The Mingus/Roach sessions on Blue Note featured Ellington in the role of peacemaker when his cohorts fell out violently in the studio over that hardy perennial, "artistic differences." In a 1963 New Yorker review, Whitney Balliett perceptively caught the record's "warlike" ambience, translating the strident call of Mingus' bass to Ellington's massive left hand chording as "I revere you and I shall prove it by demolishing you."24 In Balliett's view Ellington did the demolishing, and dominated the album. English critic Max Harrison was far more kind to Mingus in a 1969 Jazz Journal piece on Ornette Coleman. He saw the "astonishing" Money Jungle fretwork as a significant signpost toward the freer use of strings in jazz, a trend culminating in Coleman's wild '60s period piece We now interrupt for a commercial.25 The point is that, good, bad or indifferent, Ellington once again stood in the thick of what was happening in jazz. It became routine in the 1960s to connect him to such antiestablishment figures as Mingus, Coleman, Cecil Taylor, and Sun Ra.

The following may be said of the simultaneous diminuendo and crescendo of praise surrounding the later efforts of Duke Ellington and His Orchestra. Virtually everyone agreed after Newport that the band sounded great, and they were right. It was still the best in the business, especially after wanderers from the glory years Laurence Brown, Shorty Baker, and Cootie Williams came home to join the Newport contingent. It is common today to rank the early 1960s unit as second only to the Blanton-Webster 1940 band. As for the new Ellington pieces these men were playing, little doubt exists that the Newport breakout produced at least one masterpiece, 1957's witty and at times moving programmatic evocation of Shakespeare, Such Sweet Thunder. Beyond this, critical judgments exist from every point in the spectrum.

What is interesting for present purposes is that some nexus may exist between reactions to the 1956 "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue" and to Ellington's later "serious" music. Although the observation is schematic, generally those who like the former seem to value the latter more than those who denigrate Gonsalves' wailing interval as mere show biz, or worse. Naturally, fandom sometimes determines this outlook. downbeat, for instance, has always been something of an Ellington cheerleader. In the magazine's five-star review of Ellington at Newport for its 55th anniversary in 1989, Jack Sohmer filled in the extra half-star denied by Nat Hentoff in 1956 with an exclamation that the "Diminuendo and Crescendo" performance "must be heard to be believed."26 While the review may indeed be on the money, it is instructive to remember that downbeat also gave five stars to A Drum Is A Woman, Ellington's almost embarrassingly juvenile pastiche of jazz history for a forgettable CBS television fantasy.

But it would oversimplify matters to say that the loose affinity between positive views of the Newport appearance and later Ellington expressions results solely from an uncritical attitude. For example, a decade ago a German jazz writer of imposing ponderousness lauded Gonsalves' and the band's "stimulating" 1956 workout, while sharing the transports of his notoriously unmusical countrymen over the Second Sacred Concert and the New Orleans Suite, which they rated highly in 1969 and 1970 record-of-the-year polls.27 The New Yorker's Balliett has always maintained objectivity despite his plain affection for Ellington; for him Newport was "a bravura performance," and he found "David Danced Before The Lord" from the Second Sacred Concert to be "spectacular" music despite reservations about the work as a whole.28 The conservative junta that ran the Classical Jazz series at Lincoln Center in the late 1980s hardly lacked for musical and critical chops: "artistic advisor" Wynton Marsalis included At Newport in an essential Ellington discography for the June 1991 downbeat, while his "artistic consultant" Stanley Crouch is probably today's foremost exponent of works like Such Sweet Thunder, Suite Thursday, and Anatomy of A Murder.

On the other side of the debate, some certified musical heavyweights dismissed Newport and all that came after. In their 1988 New Grove Dictionary of Jazz entry on Ellington, composers and musicologists Andre Hodeir and Gunther Schuller did not deign to notice the 1956 sensation, while opining that the subject's creativity "declined substantially after the mid-1940s, many of the late-period extended compositions suffering from a diminished originality and hasty work...."29 One need not guess at Hodeir's probable disgust vis a vis the 1956 "Diminuendo and Crescendo." In the spring of that year, between the Capitol and Columbia contracts, Ellington released some reinterpretations of his 1940s classics, including "Ko-Ko," on a minor label. Hodeir responded two years later in the French journal Arts, with what has to be one of the most tortured polemics in the annals of criticism. The avowed purpose of "Why Did Ellington 'Remake' His Masterpiece?" was to "put the reader on his guard against the enticements of a once glorious name which now represents only an endless succession of mistakes."30 A list of translated adjectives--one shudders to think of the French--includes "criminal," "hideous," "atrocious," "grotesque," "insensitive," "stupid," and "decadent."31 In a similar vein, in a 1991 piece on late Ellingtonia, Harrison termed 1956 the "rape and murder" of the "Diminuendo and Crescendo."32 He found Ellington's post-Newport major efforts--some of Such Sweet Thunder excepted-- structurally limited and stylistically inconsistent, despite what "abject hagiographers" said about "one who might have become one of our century's greatest composers but who instead persisted in leading a band."33

Rockin' In Rhythm

No one with two ears can believe that the 1956 "Diminuendo and Crescendo" on the Ellington at Newport album matches its original 1937 incarnation. The live performance lacks the suave airiness, the mesmerizing precision of antiphonal brass and reed riffing, the tonal careening, the sheer, stark architectonic craziness of its predecessor. This is not to say that the 1956 outing is a bad effort--far from it. The Newport version is no more a "rape and murder" of earlier perfection than is Ellington's swinging 1937 update of his 1927 "East St. Louis Toodle-Oo." It is simply an effort to speak in a different musical language. That language is rhythm and blues--rock and roll, if one prefers--the bugbear of 1950s jazz purists. When considered as a rhythm and blues-inflected performance, it is easier to fathom both the sensational reaction to the Gonsalves showcase and the prejudice of some listeners. Ellington's rhythmic attack at Newport was symptomatic of his larger interest in the idiom, an interest that certainly contributed to his revivified career, and perhaps to the aesthetic quality of his later compositions.

That the Newport "Diminuendo and Crescendo" is an R & B piece becomes apparent in the first four choruses, when Ellington's angular chordal stride in the bass register--his masterly piano playing is arguably the only improvement on the 1937 record--lays down for the rhythm section what the funk masters of the 1970s would call "a monster groove." Thereafter, the band makes an elementary emotional appeal amidst proliferating devices of the genre. Ellington's syncopated yelps, growls and hand claps, two measures of crosscut low-down mean blues piano, the stuttering trumpet intro to the "Crescendo"--all heighten the rhythmic tension. Gonsalves' solo itself contains many recognizably R & B figures, especially in the middle and late choruses, although his liquid tone remains far more articulate than that of the honking King Curtis-style rock and roll sax men. Indeed, the very idea of the long, long solo inside, not over the beat--through his entire six minutes Gonsalves stays within two octaves of his initial launch from Ellington's percussive piano--would become something of a rock cliche as the music matured in the late 1960s. In 1956 the jazz apotheosis of this approach in the work of Coltrane and Sonny Rollins was still a few years away.

The character of the band's Newport performance was not lost on contemporaries. Balliett told Saturday Review's highbrow subscribers, slumming through his Newport account after the Robert Graves cover story and some typically button-down Archibald MacLeish verse, that "'Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue'...included an extraordinary ten-minute [sic] solo blues interlude played by Paul Gonsalves as honest, old-time rhythm and blues...."34 Feather's downbeat piece noted that the crowd had reacted in a fashion usually associated with rock 'n' roll, although he was careful to label Ellington's work as "great jazz."35 Time similarly raised the specter of beat-driven "rock 'n' roll riot," happily forestalled by jazz artistry.36

It was a canny career move for Ellington to introduce something of this wider sensibility at Newport. During the festival's Saturday afternoon "Future of Jazz" panel discussion the talking heads generated some heat about the beat's necessity in jazz. It was a prophetic discussion, and not solely because of the Ellington band's impending blowout. Cool was about played out in 1956, and jazz indeed stood at a crossroads over the issue of the beat. Ornette Coleman and kindred souls would soon develop free jazz--complexly percussive, but pulseless to the casual ear. Ellington would give a nascent nod in the direction of this music on his Coltrane sessions, but swing was his life's blood. Much more to his taste and talents was the emerging "soul" or "funky" style associated with his future Money Jungle partner, Charles Mingus, and the "hard bop" leanings of players like Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers. These expressions, like contemporary Chuck Berry's, often featured a backbeat one couldn't lose. Authentic jazzmen like Cannonball Adderley and Horace Silver would soon produce crossover R & B hits, and it would not be long before Miles Davis was jamming with Jimi Hendrix. So it may be that Ellington's 1956 "Diminuendo and Crescendo" represented his claim for renewed leadership in the jazz vanguard, as well as a bid for practical renewal.

Besides, Ellington had an expensive aggregation of musicians to support, and people liked some R & B spice on occasion. More specifically, as Elliington no doubt knew, the people in Newport, Rhode Island on July 7, 1956, liked it. At that early date the festival was not yet the youth bacchanal that would culminate in tear gas and National Guard intervention in 1960, but Robert Parent's photographs for Time and downbeat confirm the impression that Ellington's lively audience was heavily weighted toward college students. Their music, of course, was rhythm and blues. Promoters would soon incorporate this phenomenon into jazz events. The New York Post, for example, touted Sarah Vaughn for one of its late '50's jazz shows as "the rock-a-dilly filly with the two-octave range".37 Similarly, in 1958 the Newport program featured--along with Duke Ellington and His Orchestra--jazzman-cum-soul innovator Ray Charles, and a flamboyant guitarslinger named Chuck Berry, onetime disciple of Chick Webb's rocking sax man Louis Jordan. Ellington was never adverse to giving an audience what it wanted, regardless of musical category. He would not have understood George Wein's assertion--fatuous, considering the source--at Newport's 1956 Friday seminar: "You must not go to hear what you want to hear in jazz. You must go to hear what the musicians want to play for you."38 Instead, Ellington thought that "If a guy plays something and nobody digs it, then he hasn't communicated with his audience. And either he goes somewhere to an audience that does dig him, or else he adjusts what he's doing to the audience he has."39

In sum, Newport's R & B-flavored "Diminuendo and Crescendo" likely served multiple purposes for Ellington: commerce, communication, aesthetic development. Ellington, who probably never read Andre Hodeir, did not share jazz purists' disdain of rhythm and blues crudity; as he enthusiastically rhymed for downbeat in 1964,

Into each life some jazz must fall

With afterbeat gone kickin';

With jive alive, a ball for all,

Let not the beat be chicken!40

He did not of course believe in the cynical reduction of his band's capabilities along the lines of Lionel Hampton's mindless rock excursions or the Buddy Rich Big Band's later arrangements of Sonny & Cher. Rather, his effort was to incorporate the potentialities of rhythm and blues into his own ongoing musical odyssey--and it was some measure of worth if people danced and bought records. In this regard his attitude during and after Newport echoed his generous assessment of another interesting young music a decade before:

Why be surprised that be-bop is ridiculed? Jazz and swing got the same treatment in their early days, too. Anything that's alive must progress and music is alive. There are young minds, wonderful young minds working on fresh musical ideas. These ideas have spread and some part of them will be incorporated into the music of tomorrow.41

Ellington's own music of tomorrow could find room for raw rhythm and blues vitality--what he termed "the most raucous form of jazz"42--as well as for Coltrane, Mingus, his Columbia pop sides, his new "classical" compositions, and widely divergent readings of his own ouevre like the Gonsalves re-working of "Diminuendo and Crescendo." It is not surprising then, that in 1962 he benignly shared a stage with both Sonny Rollins and Howlin' Wolf, icon of highly-amplified sledgehammer Chicago blues. Later in the 1960s he expressed strong admiration for Aretha Franklin, and recorded uncondescendingly "witty" arrangements of Beatles tunes.43 For the fun of it, he occasionally penned throwaway R & B pieces like 1956's "Rock 'n' Roll Rhapsody," 1966's "Imagine My Frustration," 1971's "One More Time," and the score for the 1968 film Change of Mind.

Ellington found willing accomplices among his associates, the band demonstrating fine flair for this sort of work. Hodges, for instance, while unsurpassed as a jazz balladeer, had proven his mettle in 1951 on an R & B hit called Castle Rock, recorded under his own name with several Ellington sidemen. Not surprisingly, Paul Gonsalves took enough time away from Ben Webster worship to develop a strong R & B affection. He had grown up listening to hillbilly records and playing guitar, and his assimilation of Portuguese folk music from the old neighborhood, the swing styles of Lunceford and Ellington, his tutor's Boston Conservatory repertoire, and Dizzy Gillespie's big band bop experiments gave him a uniquely ecumenical musical outlook. He was known to disappear during intermissions to catch a Memphis Slim or Willie Dixon when they played the same venues as the Ellington band.

Only the likes of Gunther Schuller and Andre Hodeir would fault Ellington and his men for fooling around with rhythm and blues once in awhile. After all, at parties Mozart was known to pound out a drinking song or two on his piano. But the usual late-period critical divide appears over Ellington's considered expressive use of the idiom in his more significant compositions. 1971's eight-movement extravaganza Afro-Eurasian Eclipse is shot through with R & B, especially in tenor sax man Harold Ashby's showcase section, "Acht O'Clock Rock." Village Voice critic Gary Giddins, who was fifteen when the Beatles landed in New York, effusively praised the piece in 1976, but otherwise it has received little attention. More successful, perhaps, was Ashby's moving contribution to Ellington's 1970 New Orleans Suite. Ashby understudied for Gonsalves throughout the 1960s, finally taking a permanent second tenor chair in 1968. He was perhaps Ellington's purest rhythm and blues player, following his obligatory Ben Webster period with an early '50s stint as house tenor for Chicago's Chess Records. Ashby played on many of the seminal electric blues recordings of Willie Dixon, Memphis Slim, Otis Rush, and Sonny Boy Williamson, and Ellington eventually gravitated toward him because, as Ashby told Chip Deffaa of the New York Post, "The sound that I had was, you know, compatible with their type of thing."44 Ashby's stripped-down, keening Delta blues on the New Orleans Suite's "Thanks for the Beautiful Land on the Delta," effectively uses R & B directness to illustrate Ellington's view, expressed in a magazine piece about Such Sweet Thunder, that "In the final analysis, whether it be Shakespeare or jazz, the only thing that counts is the emotional effect on the listener."45 The Englishman Max Harrison, who characterized the 1956 "Diminuendo and Crescendo" as "rape and murder," found the New Orleans Suite's rock-tinged effects "frightful."46

Coda

In celebration of Ellington's fortieth year in the public ear, the New Yorker's Balliett wrote that "his originality, grace, durability, and variety demand that he be considered in relation to all American music."47 The paths leading to and from Ellington's 1956 Newport experience illustrate the justness of that demand. Duke Ellington and His Orchestra created the music of has-beens hustling for a buck, and of sleek Columbia commercial product. They were rock stars and avant gardists and apostates and priests of Western civilization. They were ordinary men facing uncertainty, decline and renewal. With Newport at the fulcrum, they expressed the catholic eclecticism of the maddeningly sprawling, vulgar, sublime, kinetic America that spawned them. And they made the people dance.

1Ezra Pound, A.B.C. of Reading (London 1934), 61.

2Martin Williams, The Jazz Tradition (New York 1993), 96.

3To avoid footnote overkill, this paper will minimize attribution of factual assertions other than direct quotations. Each section derives from a synthesis of sources listed in the Bibliography. The best concise and readable outline of the early 1950s and Ellington's 1956 performance at Newport appears in the biography Beyond Category by John Edward Hasse, Smithsonian music curator and Renaissance man of jazz.

4Dave Dexter, Jr., Playback (New York 1976), 138.

5John Edward Hasse, Beyond Category (New York 1993), 317.

6Id., 305.

7Don Freeman, "My Biggest Thrill? When Duke Roared Back: Basie," downbeat (February 1994), 31 (reprinted from May 16, 1956).

8At least that is what Gonsalves told Stanley Dance in 1961. Stanley Dance, The World of Duke Ellington (New York 1970), 173. An Englishman named G.E. Lambert wrote that same year that Gonsalves had played the piece in Pasadena in 1953. G.E. Lambert, Duke Ellington (New York 1961), 28. Lambert's assertion appears in a 95-cent "Kings of Jazz" series paperback that does not bowl one over with scholarly apparatus. Hasse, op. cit., 320 says without documentation that the tenor man had performed his "wailing interval" on several occasions before Newport.

It is probable that the Birdland appearance mentioned by Gonsalves is the same one that Basie recalled so fondly in 1956. Dance's liner notes for the Ellington at Newport album give the same date for Gonsalves' first extended solo as that recalled by Basie, 1951. Stanley Dance, Ellington at Newport (New York, undated), 4 (Columbia Jazz Masterpiece reissue number 40587, compact disc liner notes). Basie appears even more prescient in his downbeat interview if he was in fact remembering a performance of "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue" to back his assertion of Ellington's preeminence.

9Dance, The World of Duke Ellington, 173.

10Nat Hentoff, Jack Tracy and Leonard Feather, "Newport Festival," downbeat (August 8, 1956), 17.

11Hasse, op. cit., 319.

12Don George, Sweet Man (New York 1981), 118.

13Edward Kennedy Ellington, Music Is My Mistress (Garden City, New York 1973), 241.

14Hasse, op. cit., 319. It was fortuitous that the Time story followed Newport. It had been in the works since the early months of the year; Ellington sat for his cover portrait in June. So many jazz writers gloss over this point in their inexplicable need to establish that Newport caused the Time cover, that it is too bothersome to cite them all. One might perhaps pick on Ellington confidante Stanley Dance, who really ought to know better. In his notes to one of the band's Columbia pop albums, he states that Newport "resulted in Ellington's appearance on the cover of Time." Stanley Dance, Duke Ellington Indigos (New York 1989), 4 (Columbia Jazz Masterpieces reissue number 44444, compact disc liner notes). The timing of the piece of course suggests that Ellington's comeback was well underway before Newport, although the sensation there certainly updated the feature's original historically-oriented conception.

15 "Mood Indigo & Beyond," Time (August 20, 1956), 54.

16Id.

17Hentoff, Feather and Tracy, op. cit., 16-18.

18Quoted in Max Harrison, A Jazz Retrospect (Newton Abbot, England, 1976), 124.

19John S. Wilson, "The Best of Jazz," High Fidelity (February 1957), 92.

20Sinclair Traill, "Record Reviews," Jazz Journal (May 1957), 25.

21Leonard Feather, "Duke Ellington," in Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff (eds.), The Jazz Makers (New York 1957), 194.

22Bill Crow, From Birdland to Broadway (New York 1992), 141.

23Dance, The World of Duke Ellington, 173.

24Whitney Balliett, Such Sweet Thunder (Indianapolis 1966), 105.

25Harrison, op. cit., 112.

26 "The Fifties," downbeat (September 1989), 56. The anniversary reassessments went in both directions. On the same page the magazine downgraded Thelonious Monk's 1956 Brilliant Corners--whose personnel incidentally included Ellingtonian Clark Terry--from five stars to four.

27Joachim E. Berendt, The Jazz Book (Westport, Connecticut 1982), 63-64.

28Whitney Balliett, Goodbyes and Other Messages (New York 1991), 24, 133.

29Andre Hodeir and Gunther Schuller, "Duke Ellington," in Barry Kernfeld (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz (London 1988), 334.

30Andre Hodeir, Toward Jazz (New York 1962), 32.

31Id., 24-32. Even Hodeir admitted that he was "still impressed" by the band. Id., 151.

32Max Harrison, "Some Reflections on Ellington's Longer Works," in Mark Tucker (ed.), The Duke Ellington Reader (New York 1993), 390.

33Id., 394.

34Whitney Balliett, "Jazz at Newport: 1956," Saturday Review (July 28, 1956), 25.

35Hentoff, Tracy and Feather, op. cit., 18.

36 "Mood Indigo & Beyond," op. cit., 54.

37John S. Wilson, Jazz: The Transition Years 1940-1960 (New York 1966), 148.

38Hentoff, Tracy and Feather, op. cit., 42.

39Duke Ellington, "What the Performer Thinks," in Esquire's World of Jazz (New York 1962), 200.

40Duke Ellington, "Reminiscing in Tempo," in Tucker, op. cit., 358.

41Wilson, Jazz: The Transition Years, 20.

42Duke Ellington, "Where Is Jazz Going," in Tucker, op. cit., 325.

43Balliett, Such Sweet Thunder, 114.

44Chip Deffaa, Swing Legacy (Metuchen, New Jersey 1989), 239.

45Duke Ellington, "Jazz and Shakespeare," Music Journal (1957 Annual), 94.

46Harrison, The Duke Ellington Reader, 393.

47Balliett, Such Sweet Thunder, 99. Balliett's title for these collected jazz essays is a tribute to Ellington.

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1Ezra Pound, A.B.C. of Reading (London 1934), 61.

2Martin Williams, The Jazz Tradition (New York 1993), 96.

3To avoid footnote overkill, this paper will minimize attribution of factual assertions other than direct quotations. Each section derives from a synthesis of sources listed in the Bibliography. The best concise and readable outline of the early 1950s and Ellington's 1956 performance at Newport appears in the biography Beyond Category by John Edward Hasse, Smithsonian music curator and Renaissance man of jazz.

4Dave Dexter, Jr., Playback (New York 1976), 138.

5John Edward Hasse, Beyond Category (New York 1993), 317.

6Id., 305.

7Don Freeman, "My Biggest Thrill? When Duke Roared Back: Basie," downbeat (February 1994), 31 (reprinted from May 16, 1956).

8At least that is what Gonsalves told Stanley Dance in 1961. Stanley Dance, The World of Duke Ellington (New York 1970), 173. An Englishman named G.E. Lambert wrote that same year that Gonsalves had played the piece in Pasadena in 1953. G.E. Lambert, Duke Ellington (New York 1961), 28. Lambert's assertion appears in a 95-cent "Kings of Jazz" series paperback that does not bowl one over with scholarly apparatus. Hasse, op. cit., 320 says without documentation that the tenor man had performed his "wailing interval" on several occasions before Newport.

It is probable that the Birdland appearance mentioned by Gonsalves is the same one that Basie recalled so fondly in 1956. Dance's liner notes for the Ellington at Newport album give the same date for Gonsalves' first extended solo as that recalled by Basie, 1951. Stanley Dance, Ellington at Newport (New York, undated), 4 (Columbia Jazz Masterpiece reissue number 40587, compact disc liner notes). Basie appears even more prescient in his downbeat interview if he was in fact remembering a performance of "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue" to back his assertion of Ellington's preeminence.

9Dance, The World of Duke Ellington, 173.

10Nat Hentoff, Jack Tracy and Leonard Feather, "Newport Festival," downbeat (August 8, 1956), 17.

11Hasse, op. cit., 319.

12Don George, Sweet Man (New York 1981), 118.

13Edward Kennedy Ellington, Music Is My Mistress (Garden City, New York 1973), 241.

14Hasse, op. cit., 319. It was fortuitous that the Time story followed Newport. It had been in the works since the early months of the year; Ellington sat for his cover portrait in June. So many jazz writers gloss over this point in their inexplicable need to establish that Newport caused the Time cover, that it is too bothersome to cite them all. One might perhaps pick on Ellington confidante Stanley Dance, who really ought to know better. In his notes to one of the band's Columbia pop albums, he states that Newport "resulted in Ellington's appearance on the cover of Time." Stanley Dance, Duke Ellington Indigos (New York 1989), 4 (Columbia Jazz Masterpieces reissue number 44444, compact disc liner notes). The timing of the piece of course suggests that Ellington's comeback was well underway before Newport, although the sensation there certainly updated the feature's original historically-oriented conception.

15"Mood Indigo & Beyond," Time (August 20, 1956), 54.

16Id.

17Hentoff, Feather and Tracy, op. cit., 16-18.

18Quoted in Max Harrison, A Jazz Retrospect (Newton Abbot, England, 1976), 124.

19John S. Wilson, "The Best of Jazz," High Fidelity (February 1957), 92.

20Sinclair Traill, "Record Reviews," Jazz Journal (May 1957), 25.

21Leonard Feather, "Duke Ellington," in Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff (eds.), The Jazz Makers (New York 1957), 194.

22Bill Crow, From Birdland to Broadway (New York 1992), 141.

23Dance, The World of Duke Ellington, 173.

24Whitney Balliett, Such Sweet Thunder (Indianapolis 1966), 105.

25Harrison, op. cit., 112.

26"The Fifties," downbeat (September 1989), 56. The anniversary reassessments went in both directions. On the same page the magazine downgraded Thelonious Monk's 1956 Brilliant Corners--whose personnel incidentally included Ellingtonian Clark Terry--from five stars to four.

27Joachim E. Berendt, The Jazz Book (Westport, Connecticut 1982), 63-64.

28Whitney Balliett, Goodbyes and Other Messages (New York 1991), 24, 133.

29Andre Hodeir and Gunther Schuller, "Duke Ellington," in Barry Kernfeld (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz (London 1988), 334.

30Andre Hodeir, Toward Jazz (New York 1962), 32.

31Id., 24-32. Even Hodeir admitted that he was "still impressed" by the band. Id., 151.

32Max Harrison, "Some Reflections on Ellington's Longer Works," in Mark Tucker (ed.), The Duke Ellington Reader (New York 1993), 390.

33Id., 394.

34Whitney Balliett, "Jazz at Newport: 1956," Saturday Review (July 28, 1956), 25.

35Hentoff, Tracy and Feather, op. cit., 18.

36"Mood Indigo & Beyond," op. cit., 54.

37John S. Wilson, Jazz: The Transition Years 1940-1960 (New York 1966), 148.

38Hentoff, Tracy and Feather, op. cit., 42.

39Duke Ellington, "What the Performer Thinks," in Esquire's World of Jazz (New York 1962), 200.

40Duke Ellington, "Reminiscing in Tempo," in Tucker, op. cit., 358.

41Wilson, Jazz: The Transition Years, 20.

42Duke Ellington, "Where Is Jazz Going," in Tucker, op. cit., 325.

43Balliett, Such Sweet Thunder, 114.

44Chip Deffaa, Swing Legacy (Metuchen, New Jersey 1989), 239.

45Duke Ellington, "Jazz and Shakespeare," Music Journal (1957 Annual), 94.

46Harrison, The Duke Ellington Reader, 393.

47Balliett, Such Sweet Thunder, 99. Balliett's title for these collected jazz essays is a tribute to Ellington.