Passage III

HUMANITIES: Passage A is adapted from the biography Duke:A Life of Duke Ellington by Terry Teachout (@2013 by Terry Teachout). Passage B is adapted from the biography I'll Take You There: Mavis Staples, The Staples Singers, and the March Up Freedoms Highway by Greg Kot (@2014 by Greg Kot)

Passage A by Terry Teachout

What Duke Ellington sought and got from his "accumulation of personalities" was a loose, festive ensemble sound far removed from the clean precision of Benny Goodman's band. He had no interest in the smoothly blended playing that leaders like Goodman, Jimmie Lunceford, and Artie Shaw demanded from their groups. He preferred to hire musicians with home made techniques that were different to the point of apparent incompatibility, then juxtapose their idiosyncratic sounds as a pointillist painter might place dots of red and green side by side on his canvas, finding inspiration in their technical limitations ("With a musician who plays the full compass of his instrument as fast or as slow as possible, there seems, paradoxically, less opportunity to create"). That is why his charts never sound quite right when performed by other groups, however accomplished the individual players may be. It is also why a keen-eared virtuoso like Jack Teagarden, the greatest jazz trombonist of his generation, found it impossible to enjoy the Ellington band. "I never did like anything Ellington ever did," he said. "He never had a band all in tune, always had a bad tone quality and bad blend." What Teagarden meant, whether h knew it or not, was that the band had an unconventional tone quality, one that had little in common with received ideas about how a big band ought to sound. Asked why he hired Al Hibbler when he already had a singer on the payroll, Ellington replied, "My ear makes my decision." To him, no other ear mattered.

Billy Strayhorn, who saw Ellington's working methods up close and understood them best, gave them a name in a 1952 article about his mentor: " Ellington lays the piano, but his real instrument is the band. Each member of his band is to him a distinctive tone color and set of emotions, which he mixes with others equally distinctive to produce a third thing, which I call the Ellington Effect." Sometimes he worked "on" his players as a choreographer makes a ballet "on" his dancers, passing out or dictating scraps of music, then shaping and reshaping them on the spot into a piece that would later be reduced to written form. Even a work that had already been notated was subject in the heat of the moment to total transformation motivated solely by whim of the composer. The goal, he explained, was "to mold the music around the man." and the men around whom his music was so tightly molded rarely sounded more themselves than when they were playing it.

Passage B by Greg Kot

In a six-member male gospel group calling themselves the Trumpet Jubilees, Pops was third lead, singing mostly in a falsetto voice, and managed the group, booking their appearances and scheduling rehearsals. He was a stickler for punctuality and precision, for looking and sounding sharp, for taking the job seriously. But not everyone in the group shared his commitment; his exasperation mounted until one day he quit. Pops decided to devote his time to a singing group that he could run from top to bottom, that would show up on time at every rehearsal, no questions asked. Mostly, he wanted to sing because it was a crucial part of his identity: since boyhood all he could remember was the pleasure singing brought him and his older brothers and sisters. When singing in the Trumpet Jubilees became a chore, he turned to his family.

"One night he came home early because the guys in the Trumpet Jubilees didn't show up for rehearsal," Mavis says. "He was disgusted. He went into the closet in the living room and got a little guitar he had brought home from the pawnshop. It didn't have more than three or four strings on it, but it was enough to get us started."

Mavis, Pervis, Cleotha, and Yvonne sat in a semicircle in front of their father on the beige carpet in their living room at 506 East 33rd Street. Pops hunched over his $7 guitar and plucked a series of notes, assigning one to each of his children.

"People always ask, ' How do we get the sound we have?' And that came from my father-the sound he had with his family in Mississippi when they sang on the gallery after dinner. He gave us [an E chord] and the parts his brothers and sisters would sing. He would hit a note on his guitar and would say, 'Now, Mavis go here, a baritone part, because even then I had the deepest voice. Pervis was second lead behind Pops because he had the most experience, and he could hit those high notes like Michael Jackson later could. Cleedi had the high harmony. The first song he taught us was ' Will the Circle Be Unbroken.'”