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.

Interesting Emendations: Stanley Crouch's Great "The Duke's Blues"

Stanley Crouch (Photo by Martine Bisagni)

Stanley Crouch, who died September 16, 2020, wrote a great New Yorker piece called “The Duke’s Blues” (April 29 & May 6, 1996). It’s a celebration of Duke Ellington’s music. Crouch said,

Ellington maintained such a commanding touch with his art and the world that his fifty years of development constitute what just might be the most impressive evolution in the American arts. The blues was the key, and Ellington was surely the greatest manipulator of blues form and blues feeling that jazz has ever known. He understood the blues as both music and mood. He knew that those who thought of the blues as merely a vehicle for primitive complaint had their drawers or their brassieres on backward. The blues knows its way around. It can stretch from the backwoods to the space shuttle, from the bloody floor of a dive to the neurotic confusion of beautifully clothed woman in a Manhattan penthouse. The blues – happy, sad, or neither – plays no favorites.

That “He knew that those who thought of the blues as merely a vehicle for primitive complaint had their drawers or their brassieres on backward” is pure Crouch; it makes me smile every time I read it. 

An interesting variation on “The Duke’s Blues,” called “Duke Ellington: Transcontinental Swing,” appears in Crouch’s wonderful 2006 essay collection Considering Genius. In this piece, the above-quoted New Yorker passage reads as follows:

Considering himself “the world’s greatest listener,” Ellington maintained such commanding touch with his craft and the culture of the world at large that his fifty years of development constitute what is perhaps the single most comprehensive evolution in all of American art. Much of this has to do with something as American as the bandleading composer himself. Ellington was the greatest manipulator of blues form and blues feeling. He understood it as music and as mood. He knew that those who thought of the blues as merely a vehicle for primitive complaint had their drawers or brassieres on backward. The blues always knows its way around. It can stretch from the backwoods to the space shuttle, from wet blood on the floor of a dive to the neurotic confusion of a beautifully clothed woman in a penthouse overlooking the very best view of Manhattan. The blues, happy or sad or neither, plays no favorites.

The New Yorker version seems tighter, but the book version strikes me as slightly bluesier. Both pieces swing, enacting the rhythm of the music they describe. 

Ethan Iverson’s Superb “Duke Ellington, Bill Evans, and One Night in New York City”

Duke Ellington (Photo by Marty Lederhandler)

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.” 

May 26, 2014 Issue

Notes on this week's issue:

1. I suppose the use of a 1950s Saul Steinberg baseball drawing for a cover on this week’s issue is meant as a homage to Steinberg, creator of perhaps The New Yorker’s most famous cover – the 1976 view of the world westward from Ninth Avenue. But the grayish, crudely sketched baseball cover, which shows a catcher crouched in front of an umpire, each with a masked head that looks like the caged top of a lighthouse, strikes me as somewhat dismal. For a much sunnier, more vivid, natural rendition of the summer game, see Richard Merkin’s great April 5, 1993 New Yorker cover, titled “The Changing of the Guard in the House That Ruth Built.”

2. Richard Brody’s syntax is delicious. Thought, in his pieces, flows in jazzy runs of blended description and perception joined with the adroit use of dashes, semi-colons, and brackets. This week’s GOAT contains three excellent examples:

With the bright colors of new urban landscapes (built up in the wake of wartime destruction) and the brazen clash of calmly assertive compositions, Ozu captures the ordinary desolation at the natural heart of things – and contemplates his own place on the edge of the precipice.

The cast and crew of a politicized costume drama are holed up in a Spanish villa while awaiting their star, their equipment, and their money; meanwhile, they drink joylessly and engage in provocative sexual escapades, subtly Machiavellian manipulations, and cruel displays of power that threaten the film with emotional sabotage.

The druggy and drunken parties, games of truth or dare, casual sex, and violent amusements are recklessness-by-number; the catalogue of petty derelictions and frustrated yearnings is anchored by no inner world, framed by no context, and there’s nothing distinctive in the twenty-six-year-old Gila Coppola’s direction.

3. Adam Gopnik has a piece in this week’s issue. But I didn’t read it. I’m boycotting his work in protest against his appallingly wrong-headed characterization of Duke Ellington’s compositional process as “theft” ("Two Bands," The New Yorker, December 23 & 30, 2013).

December 23 & 30, 2013 Issue

Adam Gopnik has gone from the sublime to the ridiculous. Author of one of this year’s most beautiful pieces, “Bread and Women” (The New Yorker, November 4, 2013), he’s now produced one of its most execrable. The piece, titled “Two Bands,” in this week’s issue, is a review of Terry Teachout’s Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington and Mark Lewisohn’s Tune In. In it, Gopnik calls Ellington a thief. He lists a number of Ellington classics (e.g., “Take the A Train,” “Chelsea Bridge,” “Caravan,” “Mood Indigo,” “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” “I’m Beginning to See the Light,” “I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart,” “Sophisticated Lady,” “Prelude to a Kiss,” “In a Sentimental Mood”) and says,

Ellington owned them, but they didn’t start in his head, or take form under his fingers. Teachout says all the right things about how, without Ellington’s ears to hear them and his intelligence to fix and resolve them, these might have been butterflies that lived a day, fluttered, and died. But you sense that he’s shaken by the news. It seems like theft.

Gopnik goes on to say, “Ellington really did take other men’s ideas and act as if they were his own. But he did this because he took other men’s ideas and made them his own. There are artists whose genius lies in exploiting other people’s talent, and we can recognize the exploitation as genius.” Gopnik undercuts Ellington’s status as a brilliant composer, praising instead his managerial skills (“Duke Ellington was a great impresario and bandleader who created the most stylish sound, and brand, in American music, and kept a company of musicians going for half a century”).

In his piece, Gopnik identifies two types of originality – originality of ideas and originality of labor. I have no problem with Gopnik’s equal valuation of these two kinds of originality, but I strongly object to his implication that Ellington’s originality was mainly in labor. It’s a stunted interpretation, emphasizing only part of Ellington’s creative process. Whitney Balliett, in his Collected Works: A Journal of Jazz 1954 – 2000, describes this process as follows:

Ellington composes a number, which may be a blues, a capsule concerto, a ballad, a program piece, a tone poem, a sly bit of portraiture, an up-tempo celebration of nothing in particular, or a reworking of a standard. It is tried out by the band, which makes suggestions, and an arrangement is developed. This arrangement is orchestrated and played over and over and, if it is found not wanting, passes into the band’s repertory. Once there, it is far from static, for each time it is performed it is improvised upon, to different degrees, by both the ensemble and the soloists, among them the composer himself. Finally, a kind of composite rendition emerges, and a “Solitude” or “Mood Indigo” or “Never No Lament” takes permanent, though malleable shape. Thus Ellington is at once a classical and a popular-music composer, an interpretive classical musician, a conductor, and a jazz improviser.

This description is, to my mind, much fairer to Ellington than Gopnik’s “theft” accusation. Gopnik slights Ellington in another way, too. He says Ellington played “no better than O.K. piano.” Anyone who’s ever heard Ellington’s gorgeous “All The Things You Are (take 2),” on his superb Piano In The Foreground knows better than that. Balliett, in his review of a 1967 Ellington stand at the Rainbow Grill, wrote, “And of course there was Ellington, playing first-rate piano” (“Small Band,” Ecstasy at the Onion, 1971).  

September 16, 2013 Issue

Writing this blog, tracking my New Yorker reading experience, my effort is mainly one of appreciation. Even on those rare occasions when the magazine seems, at first glance, totally uninteresting, which is the case this week, I find there’s always something – a line, a detail, a note – that attracts my attention. In this week’s “Goings On About Town,” for instance, I saw, under “Jazz and Standards,” that “the whip-smart pianist Frank Kimbrough released a fine trio album recorded at this night spot [Jazz at Kitano].” I love piano jazz. I wasn’t aware of this particular Kimbrough album. I went online to iTunes and purchased several tracks, including Duke Ellington’s great “Single Petal of a Rose.” Kimbrough plays it exquisitely. It went straight onto my “Best of Piano Jazz” playlist.