April 29th marks Duke Ellington’s 125th birthday. I am certain of few things in this life, but I am certain of this: Duke Ellington is the greatest American composer, and it’s not particularly close.
“Tensile Curves,” from Dynamic Maximum Tension, is dedicated to him.
The depth and breadth of Ellington’s genius, combined with the enormity of his output, is genuinely humbling to contemplate: he wrote so much music, over 2000 individual works. There are stone masterpieces at every stage of his five-decade long career, from “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo” to the unfinished “Three Black Kings.” It’s impossible to overstate Ellington’s significance: his mastery and innovations in orchestration and timbre (including, of course, writing for the unforgettable individual voices in his bands), form and development, songcraft, harmony, rhythm, drama, and all aspects of bandleading, including his own undeniable pianism, are all without parallel. But of course Ellington was much bigger than his music. He was a towering cultural figure, a world-renowned ambassador for Black genius, a futurist who created for himself the space he wanted to inhabit.
The first recording of Duke Ellington that I can remember hearing as a child was a cassette of First Time: The Count Meets The Duke. This is a record that seemed destined to come off as a stunt or a novelty, featuring the combined forces of the Ellington and Basie orchestras, with Duke’s band in the right channel and Basie’s band in the left. But it’s actually a fantastic album that brings out the best in both orchestras. I remember listening to it obsessively, on endless repeat in the car on my Walkman on family trips. I recently acquired a copy on LP, and marveled all over again at the deft trading between Ellington and Basie throughout, the exhilarating string of solos on “Battle Royal,” the magical pairing of Ray Nance’s violin with Frank Wess’s flute on “Segue in C,” drummer Sam Woodyard’s unbelievable groove on “Wild Man” (assisted by Juan Tizol on tambourine), the exhilarating sax section entrance on Billy Strayhorn’s “B D B” (Basie, Duke, and Billy) — it’s all so, so great.
When I was commissioned by my hometown big band, The Hard Rubber Orchestra, led by trumpeter John Korsrud, to write something for them, I thought of my time growing up in North Vancouver and discovering that Ellington cassette. I wanted to write something that captured the feeling of wonder and discovery and endless possibility that I felt listening to First Time for the first time. The piece was also co-commissioned by the Newport Jazz Festival, and that sealed the deal: I knew what I had to do.
When you think of Ellington and the Newport Jazz Festival, you of course think of “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue.” The story of Duke’s 1956 Newport performance is the stuff of jazz legend: Paul Gonsalves’s 27-chorus “wailing interval,” fueled by the relentless swing of bassist Jimmy Woode and drummer Sam Woodyard; the platinum blonde socialite in a black dress who stood up to dance and got the rest of the audience on their feet; the utter pandemonium that ensued; the revival of Ellington’s career — for years afterwards, Duke would claim “I was born at Newport.” But of course, the piece that inspired all this was actually written and recorded nearly twenty years earlier.
“Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue” dates back to 1937, when it was released on two sides of a 78 RMP shellac record. In a body of work filled with almost infnite bangers, this one stands out as one of the greatest single examples of Ellington’s compositional genius. I wrote about the piece (and Gunther Schuller’s perplexingly error-ridden analysis of it) at some length for Ethan Iverson’s blog. You can find it, along with Ellington’s Diminuendo manuscript, here.
I have also made a reduction of “Diminuendo” for score study purposes, which I’m making available here:
“Tensile Curves,” the piece commissioned by the Hard Rubber Orchestra and the Newport Jazz Festival, is my response to “Diminuendo in Blue” — the “Diminuendo” section specifically — and my love letter to Duke. I’m not trying to make my music sound like an Ellington pastiche, of course, but the opening nods to the intense fanfare that opens “Diminuendo.” There are also passages through inspired by the sounds of some of my favorite Ellingtonians: Jimmy Hamilton’s clarinet, Harry Carney’s baritone sax, Clark Terry’s flugelhorn, Jimmie Blanton’s bass, Lawrence Brown’s trombone, Ray Nance’s violin, and of course Paul Gonsalves’s tenor saxophone. (N.B. I don’t actually make John Ellis go 27 choruses for his tenor solo, but I could.)
“Tensile Curves” follows the same epic sweep of keys as “Diminuendo”: Eb major, G major, C major, F minor, and, finally, Db major. In place of the gradual reduction in volume, density, and disruption that Ellington used in “Diminuendo,” since I was working over a much longer timeline — 34 minutes vs. under 3 minutes for the original — I opted instead for a gradual reduction in tempo: every time the piece modulates to a new key, it also modulates metrically to a progressively slower tempo, finally ending with a surreally-slow 12-bar blues, around 41 beats per minute. (For the record, this is even slower than Duke’s famously slow Cootie Williams showpiece, “The Shepherd (Who Watches Over The Night Flock)” — but that’s the original inspiration.) Throughout, we hear short motives extracted from “Diminuendo” that form the connective tissue that unifies the piece, and there’s also an eight-note figure — first heard in the bari sax, guitar, and piano — that heralds each new tempo.
It’s always a tricky thing paying tribute to your heroes. It took me a long time to build up the chutzpah necessary to write a response to one of Ellington’s greatest masterpieces! But by the time I started to write “Tensile Curves,” I felt that I had something to say, musically, about Ellington, about “Diminuendo,” about his personal importance to me, and his perpetually contemporary legacy.
Happy 125th, Duke.
P.S. My own personal favorite recording of “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue” is this one. Broadcast live from the Alhambra in Paris a couple of years after the famous Newport performance, the whole band is on fire — and I don’t think Sam Woodyard ever played it better.
More DMT Inspirations:
Alan Turing
Bob Brookmeyer
Mae West
Laurie Frink
Buckminster Fuller