Imagine the public outcry if thousands of pages of music by Beethoven or Mozart could not be performed, heard or studied anywhere in the world.
The prospect of life without Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony or Mozart’s “Marriage of Figaro” would distress listeners from Chicago to Vienna.
Yet that’s the predicament of Duke Ellington’s music on the 100th anniversary of his birth.
Even as the cultural world on Thursday celebrates the occasion, many of Ellington’s most imposing orchestral and stage scores are in too poor a condition to be performed publicly. And when bands do perform Ellington’s instrumental masterworks, their scores rarely include every note, phrase and musical detail as the composer originally penned it.
Moreover, though listeners will be hearing countless musicians riffing on “Satin Doll,” “Sophisticated Lady” and other Ellington hit tunes throughout this centennial year, the tattered remains of the composer’s exquisitely detailed manuscripts are years from being properly edited for public consumption.
So the Ellington centennial is proving bittersweet: Although Ellington is as famous as ever, his painstakingly written scores are extremely difficult to come by a quarter-century after his death.
Thanks to Ellington’s desire to keep his writing techniques secret as well as his scores unpublished, the man’s written music was kept far from public view until he died in 1974. Ever since then, cultural and racial attitudes, as well as a morass of copyright conflicts, have prevented dozens of Ellington’s works from being heard in live performance.
Instead, listeners must turn to scratchy old recordings that never did justice to the symphonic brilliance of such Ellington scores as “Afro-Eurasian Eclipse,” “The River” or the stage work “Jump for Joy.”
Although some of the lost or destroyed scores have been re-created by arts groups in Chicago, Washington and New York, and in addition the Smithsonian Institution has cataloged approximately 200,000 pages of Ellington ephemera, most of the music is in no shape to be performed publicly.
“In most cases, the (complete) scores don’t exist, and even when they do, you typically can’t get them,” said William Russo, conductor of the Chicago Jazz Ensemble and a music professor at Columbia College Chicago.
“And the real tragedy is that the scores are being re-created and transcribed (from recordings) by people all over the world. But there’s no collective editing going on, no definitive version of all this music being made available,” as there is in music of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms, Russo said.
The loss is staggering, not only because of the sheer size of Ellington’s catalog, which spans the 1920s to the 1970s, but because of its stature.
“We’re talking about music by the greatest all-around musician this country has produced,” said John Hasse, curator of American Music at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, where the Ellington family donated the composer’s archives in 1988.
“I know that’s saying a lot, because the United States has produced many great composers, outstanding orchestrators, brilliant soloists, gifted band leaders and conductors, but no one who did all of those things so originally.”
Yet much of the music that made Ellington’s reputation is beyond public reach, in part because of the idiosyncratic working methods of Ellington and his band. Though the myth endures that Ellington sketched themes for his players to improvise upon, in fact he wrote his scores meticulously, marking specific passages for individual musicians.
Because Ellington band members typically stayed with the group for years, they played from memory, and the scores eventually decayed.
Why didn’t Ellington preserve them?
“For one thing, he was secretive about his writing,” said Russo, who as a composer worked with Ellington. “It’s like the old New Orleans trumpet players who kept a handkerchief over the valves of their horns so other musicians wouldn’t see their fingerings and steal them.
“Duke was concerned about the sources of income of his band, and he didn’t want the secrets of his sound widely available.”
Ellington also was a prolific artist, consumed with the present and the future, not the past.
“I think Ellington’s attitude was that we create music because it’s fun, and when we’re tired of it, we move on to new pieces,” said David Berger, whose authoritative transcriptions of Ellington scores have been played by Russo’s band, Wynton Marsalis’ Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra and others.
“Once, some of the copyists in Duke’s band prepared beautiful books of the scores for his `Liberian Suite’ and all these great compositions at considerable cost and effort, and they presented it to him at a celebratory dinner. Duke graciously thanked them, never looked at the books and left them at the restaurant where the dinner was held. That roughly summed up his attitude on the past.”
Unfortunately, Ellington’s scores have suffered general neglect, in part because American culture never regarded music in the black-jazz tradition as equal to its European symphonic counterpart.
To this day Ellington exists in the American imagination more as a pop entertainer than as a serious composer.
“And we have a long, long way to go to change that notion,” Hasse said. “Most people think of Ellington as a leader of a dance band or a writer of popular song hits, but a very small number recognize him as one of the great instrumental composers of the 20th Century.”
Yet there are glimmers of hope on the horizon. The Smithsonian, for instance, in addition to organizing his archives has championed Ellington’s instrumental music via concerts by its touring repertory band, the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra. And Jazz at Lincoln Center, in New York, during the last four years has transcribed and published 28 Ellington compositions, distributing them for free to high schools participating in its annual Essentially Ellington competition.
In addition, the Jazz at Lincoln Center program is negotiating with publishers, lawyers and copyright experts to win permission to disseminate roughly 600 additional Ellington works that it has had transcribed during the last decade. Jazz at Lincoln Center hopes to begin publishing and releasing these scores in the next few years, said director of education Laura Johnson.
But bringing some of Ellington’s most imposing pieces back to life is a formidable task, as a group of Chicago cultural activists discovered last year when offering the first performances of the musical “My People” since its premiere at McCormick Place in 1963. By unearthing surviving bits and pieces of the original score at the Smithsonian and scouring the country for a single reel-to-reel tape of the show, the group was able to stage the show for the first time in 35 years.
The performance of the reconstructed score, which will be donated to a musical archive, kicked off a year’s worth of Ellington centennial activities. Still to come is Thursday’s performance of Ellington’s Sacred Music in Washington, D.C., his hometown; Saturday’s Field Museum performance by Billy Taylor and others; Russo’s Symphony Center tribute on May 7; and an all-Ellington evening during the Chicago Jazz Festival on Sept. 5.
But the heroic task of re-creating “My People” will have to be repeated dozens of times if listeners are to hear all the music Ellington wrote the way he wrote it.
“It took Ellington approximately 50 years, 10 million miles of travel, 20,000 engagements, 10,000 recordings and 800 musicians who passed through his band to accomplish what he did,” said Hasse, of the Smithsonian.
“We can’t expect to absorb it in 10 years. There’s enough here to keep students, scholars, teachers and musicians working for decades.”
