10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature: #10 Ethan Iverson's "Duke Ellington, Bill Evans, and One Night in New York City"

This is the first post in my series “10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature.” Ethan Iverson’s “Duke Ellington, Bill Evans, and One Night in New York City” (newyorker.com, August 17, 2017) is one of the coolest, most original, most memorable pieces of comparative analysis I’ve ever read. Here’s the opening paragraph:

Since the nineteen-sixties, there have not been jazz musicians as artistically significant and generally popular as Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, or Bill Evans. Today, jazz music is a miscellaneous collection of wide-ranging and disputed genres that stands to the side of American culture. How did the train go off the tracks? A listen to Ellington and Evans both playing an Ellington standard, “In a Sentimental Mood,” on the same hot Thursday night in New York City—August 17, 1967—offers a few clues. Here is Ellington’s version, at the Rainbow Grill, with the tenor saxophonist Paul Gonsalves, along with John Lamb on bass and Steve Little on drums. And here is Evans’s version, at the Village Vanguard, with Eddie Gomez on bass and Philly Joe Jones on drums.

That enticing introduction shines a brilliant beam of light down through the rest of the piece – illuminating its theme (jazz isn’t what it used to be) and setting up a fascinating contrast (Ellington vs. Evans). At the heart of it: two versions of Ellington’s great “In a Sentimental Mood” performed at different venues on the same night in New York City. What a wonderful subject! Iverson uses it as a springboard into an argument about the negative influence of “scalar thought” on jazz education. But first he describes the two performances. He says of Ellington,

Ellington packs a whole history of composition into only two and a half choruses. The first chorus is piano in D minor/F major, the “old style,” fairly close to the first 1935 recording. After the “old-style” chorus, Duke modulates to Bb minor/Db major for Gonsalves’s entrance, the same key used for the “new-style” version of “In a Sentimental Mood” tracked with John Coltrane, in 1962. Gonsalves’s greatest fame was authoring twenty-six choruses of shouting blues on “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue” at the Newport Jazz Festival, in 1956, a moment that many credit with revitalizing Ellington’s career. However, Gonsalves was also one of the greatest ballad players, and his silky, furry, almost murky legato here is pure delight.

Gonsalves’s mastery is only to be expected, but the sixty-eight-year-old Ellington is still full of surprises. Playing with Coltrane, Ellington’s “new-style” arrangement had a mournful raindrop piano part that was dramatic and distinctive. At the Rainbow Grill, Ellington doesn’t play many of the raindrops but goes all out in rhapsodic style: heavy block chords, cascades, even a long left-hand trill underneath pointillistic right-hand stabs. It would be hard to find ballad accompaniment this busy anywhere else.

This is descriptive analysis at its finest. I devoured it. And what a treat to be able to click on the text’s embedded hyperlinks and hear the actual music that Iverson is writing about. 

Iverson then shifts his focus to Evans’s performance. He writes,

The current Evans trio was a mix of new and old. Eddie Gomez was a fresh firebrand in the tradition of Scott LaFaro (the extraordinary bass virtuoso on “Sunday at the Village Vanguard”). The drum great Philly Joe Jones was a familiar Evans associate from their Miles Davis days and the swinging 1958 trio session “Everybody Digs Bill Evans.”

Bill Evans recorded “In a Sentimental Mood” a few times over the years, usually as a ballad, but at the Vanguard that night it was a medium swinger. There are three different takes from three different sets on August 17th and 18th, but the piano part is consistent. Gomez and Jones make all the rhythmic hits and substitute changes with the pianist, but they are also free to offer tasteful commentary. Over all, this is a much more modern and interactive approach to the rhythm section than Lamb and Little with Ellington at the Rainbow Grill. Unlike Ellington’s unwinding scroll, conventional small-band jazz practice dictated an identical “melody in” and “melody out.”

Note that word “conventional.” It’s the first hint of Iverson’s argument. In his next paragraph, he makes his point explicit: “It’s all very hip for 1967, but there was, nonetheless, a faintly homogenous and predictable air from Evans at this point.”

Iverson then makes another interesting analytical move. He looks at “The Real Book.” He says,

During the mid-seventies, a lead sheet of “In a Sentimental Mood” appeared in “The Real Book,” the most widely disseminated jazz manual ever made, a “fake book” of tunes and chord changes produced by students in the powerful jazz program at Berklee College of Music, in Boston.

If a student wanted to sound like Bill Evans on “In a Sentimental Mood,” he or she could quickly start getting close with the help of a chart in “The Real Book.” The sheet begins with four versions of D minor, “D-, D-(maj7), D-7, D-6.” These aren’t wrong, exactly, but they are far closer to Evans than Ellington, and suggest ways of articulating harmony in a blocky and unmusical fashion, one divorced from the idea and emotion of the original song.

Far closer to Evans than Ellington – right there is Iverson’s crucial point. For him, Evans represents homogeneity; Ellington represents avant-gardism. He puts it this way: 

If a student wants to sound like Ellington, there’s no point in looking at “The Real Book.” Ellington’s performance is too mysterious and detailed. Each of Ellington’s chords is its own universe. Some chords have added-tone harmony that fit a scale; some do not.

That “Each of Ellington’s chords is its own universe” is inspired! The whole piece is inspired – a masterpiece of comparative analysis.

Credit: The above photo of Duke Ellington is by Marty Lederhandler.