Duke Ellington (Photo by Marty Lederhandler) |
Friday, August 18, 2017
Ethan Iverson’s Superb “Duke Ellington, Bill Evans, and One Night in New York City”
A cool piece of jazz criticism appeared yesterday at
newyorker.com – Ethan Iverson’s “Duke Ellington, Bill Evans, and One Night in New York City” (“Culture Desk,” August 17, 2017). It’s a comparative analysis
of “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.” It
begins by helpfully providing links to the two performances:
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.
Then it focuses on Ellington’s version, describing it as a
blend of two interpretations of the song – “old style” (“The first chorus is piano in D minor/F major,
the ‘old style,’ fairly close to the first 1935 recording”) and “new style”
(“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”).
Of Ellington’s performance, Iverson writes,
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.
That “heavy block chords, cascades, even a long left-hand
trill underneath pointillistic right-hand stabs” is excellent.
Iverson then turns to Bill Evans’s version. He writes,
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.”
I like that bit about “Ellington’s unwinding scroll.” Remember
Adam Gopnik’s opinion that Ellington played “no better than O.K. piano” (“Two Bands,” December 23 & 30, 2013)? (I criticized it here.) Well, Iverson
provides a welcome corrective. He describes Ellington’s playing as “mysterious”
and “detailed.” He says, “Each of Ellington’s chords is its own universe.”
Referring to Ellington’s playing on John Coltrane’s 1962 version of “In a
Sentimental Mood,” Iverson says,
Coltrane then
leaves the star solo turn to Ellington, who offers one of the most perfect piano
improvisations in the whole Duke canon: mysterious, searching, surreal.
That surreal piano chorus is in stark contrast to Evans’s professional and
clean chorus with Gomez and Philly Joe, where each note of attractive melodic
improvisation in the right hand fits perfectly with the added-note harmony (and
implied chord scale) beneath.
Iverson favors
Ellington over Evans. He says,
Ellington could
connect all the dots—the social, the modernist, the intellectual, the populist,
the personally poetic—for a vision of American music truly epic in scope. As
great as Evans was, he didn’t have that kind of command.
Iverson’s exquisite piece led me in several different
directions. It led me to Whitney Balliett to see if the Master covered either
of these gigs. Sure enough, he attended Ellington’s stand at the Rainbow Grill
(see his “Small Band,” Ecstasy at the
Onion, 1971, in which he describes Ellington’s playing as “first-rate,” and
says of Johnny Hodge’s rendition of “On the Sunny Side of the Street,” he “left
fat, dying notes all over the bandstand”). It led me to Gopnik’s appallingly
wrong-headed piece, aforesaid. And, of course, it led me to the music. I’m
listening to Ellington’s 1967 version of “In a Sentimental Mood,” as I write this,
savoring those “heavy block chords, cascades, even a long left-hand trill
underneath pointillistic right-hand stabs.”
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You highlight the first half of the article and skip over the second part criticizing bone-headed "fake-book" jazz education in colleges and music schools.
ReplyDeleteLess dramatic writing but an important understanding of its consequences for the history of modern jazz.