Sweet Thunder: Duke Ellington’s Music in Nine Themes by Jack Chambers

 © Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

"I remember probably better than anything the time we were tied up in Shanghai alongside a ship that had come out later, and somebody on it had a record of Black and Tan Fantasy- played, as I did not learn at the time,...

by Duke Ellington. That was a world heard through a porthole, and never to be forgotten." 

- Otis Ferguson, Seaman First Class (later journalist), ca. 1928

“Duke Ellington has not been well served by writers.  Two books, one by Terry Teachout and one by James Lincoln Collier are not only inaccurate but border on the malicious.  Unlike them, Jack Chambers knows jazz.  His books on Miles Davis and Richard Twardzik are the results of research, tempered with admiration.  The overriding impression that remains when you read this book is of Chambers’ love and admiration for his subject. In his own words he hopes ‘to provide new insights to readers who already know Ellington’s music’ +and ‘most of all’ to offer ‘an entry-point for relative newcomers’.

The task of encapsulating the vast legacy that Ellington left is a conundrum.  Chambers has rejected the biographical or the discographical approach.  He has, as the book’s title suggests, chosen to look at themes. The themes include the importance of plunger mutes, tenor players from Webster to Gonsalves, the mystery of the Hodges-Strayhorn relationship, the story of “the stockpile”, Ellington’s piano playing and the musical links with Shakespeare and with Africa and Asia.

This is a fascinating book full of generosity, insight and detail that is not available elsewhere.  It is a script to return to.  It challenges, informs, illuminates, reassures, intrigues. The admiration that Chambers has for his subject is evident throughout.  He is a great guide to the vast swathes of Ellington; driving you back to the albums or inspiring you to buy some of the music. The book stands side by side with the other great book on Ellington.  ‘A Listener’s Guide Duke Ellington’ by Eddie Lambert (Scarecrow Press).  Both of them increase understanding and enable deeper understanding of the remarkable musician and composer.”

 -Reviewed by Jack Kenny, Jazz Views blog

Jack Chambers, a jazz author and  critic is perhaps best known for his two-volume biography of Miles Davis Milestones: The Music and Times of Miles Davis [New York: William Morrow, 1989].

He has also written the first full-length biography of the pianist, Bouncin' With Bartok: The Incomplete Works of Richard Twardzik, published by The Mercury Press. In 2008.

Talk about a study in contrasts: from one of the most well-known and influential Jazz musicians in the history of Jazz to one of the music’s most short-lived and obscure players!

Jack is once again back to the famous and prominent, this time as the author of Sweet Thunder: Duke Ellington’s Music in Nine Themes [self-published, Milestones Music and Art, 2019].

“Sweet Thunder explores the music of Duke Ellington by tracing nine themes through his amazingly productive 50-year career as composer, orchestrator, pianist, and cultural icon. Lifelong listeners to Ellington and newcomers seeking an entry-point into Ellington’s voluminous works will find this book stimulating, illuminating, and entertaining.”

How the book is organized and how best to read it is explained by Jack in the following Introduction: Black and Tan Fantasies:

This book invites readers to explore the music of Duke Ellington (1899-1974) by pursuing nine themes that recur in his music. The themes have been pieced together selectively from Ellington's voluminous output and show how he developed them, picking and choosing images, ideas and predilections that intrigued him. The themes that I discuss here are organized in ways that make them coherent and accessible, and tracking them can bring great satisfaction to listeners of diverse tastes and backgrounds. I know this because I have tested all of them with audiences. I have presented them all and seen them work.

I hope the organization into themes will bring new insights to listeners who already know Ellington's music. Most of all, I hope it will provide an entry-point for relative newcomers to Ellington's 50-year creative journey. Previous presentations of each of the themes (or chapters, in this context) are listed at the end of this Introduction; it is a scholarly appendage that can be easily skipped but giving it a glance might be encouraging for readers who might harbor doubts.

Duke Ellington's music is in danger of being ignored. He is not alone, of course. Serious music of all kinds faces the same threat. Ellington poses a formidable task for listeners who might be attracted to him because of the sheer volume of his work. The numbers defy credulity - more than 2,000 compositions, including songs, soundtracks, revues, hymns, big-band jazz, ballets, tone poems, and concert pieces. He was at least a hundred times more prolific in his output than Bach, Beethoven, Richard Strauss, Erik Satie,Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, or other musicians who might entice listeners looking for substantial musical experiences. What really counts has nothing to do with the numbers, of course. Ellington's works resound with memorable melodies, fascinating rhythms and, above all, splendid harmonies. That is what counts.

Where does one begin? The themes in this book make very good starting points.

Not only is the sheer volume formidable, but most of his music, nearly all of his greatest music, is music without words. He wrote at least a hundred songs, including the standards "Sophisticated Lady," "Satin Doll," "I'm Beginning to See the Light," "Just Squeeze Me (But Don't Tease Me)," and dozens more. His songs seem like confections in the company of the masterful instrumental compositions. Happily, Ellington's first astute critic, the classicist R. D. Darrell, in a prescient critique in 1932, made exactly the same point. "Ellington writes naturally for instruments alone," Darrell wrote. "The human voice is not disdained" but "Ellington has emancipated American popular music from text for the first time since the Colonial days of reels and breakdown." In our day the inextricable mating of words with music has come not fromTin Pan Alley (as in Darrell's day) but from rock music in its many guises, including hip hop, perhaps the most doggedly prosaic pop music of all time. For more than half a century the most common music to which three generations of young people have been exposed is almost exclusively music with words, music dominated by lyrics. It envelops us in elevators, shopping malls, on iPods and web streams. The quality of the lyrics can be poetic or pathetic. No matter. The quality is less important than the fact that the words predominate. Words are the common coin of our daily existence; words are the stuff of shopping lists, invoices, memos, want ads, newspapers, e-mail messages, tweets, Harlequin romances....

Words in a song affix music to our conscious experience, our daily lives. Music, in its essential form, is nonverbal. Music without words, if it is inspired, bypasses experience that is rooted in the verbal and infiltrates a more mysterious human domain, a place that can be eloquent though wordless, expressive though uncanny, intelligent though rooted in feeling. So the generations who have heard only music with words must learn to discover the thrill of music without words, music that is not burdened by verbal messages but has a deeper reality.

Obviously, songs are music too. Music with words has its own distinguished place. Most of my chapters discuss songs.1 [1 Indeed, one of the themes I have traced through Ellington's music, though it is not included in this book, is his creative use of the voice; it is called (quoting R.D. Darrell) "The human voice is not disdained." For details, go to <torontodukeellingtonsociety. com> and click on "Archives."]

Those songs range from the playful, such as "Drop Me Off in Harlem" (in chapter 1) to the dramatic, as in Billy Strayhorn's stunning "Lush Life" (in chapter 4). One chapter discusses songs that have Shakespeare's words set to Ellington's music (chapter 6). But mostly I discuss music without lyrics, and I hope listeners will discover that it carries the sensual thrill of an experience that goes deeper. It carries the sensation E.E. Cummings captured in his famous stanza - 

since feeling is first 

who pays any attention 

to the syntax of things 

will never wholly kiss you

Symphony-goers, opera buffs and modern dance aficionados -people who have had the curiosity to look beyond word-laden pop music - will need much less persuading to take this guided tour through Ellington's music.

Duke Ellington's music is rich and various. Chosen with care, it has the breadth of Shakespeare, but Ellington is four centuries closer to us than Shakespeare. Judiciously selected, it has the depth of Bach, but Ellington is two hundred years closer to us than Bach. Ellington's music is grounded in times and places and situations more or less familiar to us and yet sublimated so that we see them freshly, as if for the first time. His music has its roots in dance-band rhythms, blues harmonies and pop-song melodies but it is, at its best, so much more than any of those things. It literally rose out of them.

Listeners with preconceptions will lose those preconceptions as we make our straightforward trip through the themes in this book. Readers who come to it saying, "I don't like jazz," will be consoled to discover that Duke Ellington also didn't like jazz. Those who come to it saying, "I don't understand jazz," will have the inestimable advantage of hearing the music fresh and unfettered.

The themes in this book trace evolutions and configurations in the way Ellington used instruments (the plunger-muted trombone, the tenor saxophone, the piano), and the way he expressed emotion (sensuality, melancholy, comedy, tragedy), and the astonishing ways he used tones as evocations of the world around him (flora and fauna, cityscapes, a river flow, wise guys, nobility). The themes explore some of Ellington's "black and tan fantasies," as he put it in the title of his first great composition (1927). In tracing these themes in Ellington's music, I have sometimes encumbered the text with scholarly trappings (tables, figures, discographies, an occasional footnote) but they are easily ignored by those who don't want them or need them. Ellington's music speaks for itself, of course, and I hope it speaks all the louder by allowing each piece to shine in its place and time.

Duke Ellington's music deserves your attention. All it asks of you is an open mind and a willing spirit. With good planning and a little luck, it will make its way into the part of your mind where feeling is first.

Each chapter is intended to be self-contained. (Because of that, there is occasionally some repetition, but, I hope, not annoying.) Each chapter, including this one, ends with the list of References (with page references to direct quotations in italics} and the Playlist (the recorded works in order of their appearance in the chapter). The order of the chapters is not arbitrary. I start with "Ellington's Harlem" (chapter 1) because that theme more than any other follows the major peregrinations of Ellington's first 50 years. I want the music to be the focal point, not the biography. (There are many biographies, some better than others.2) Starting with themes that take in a span of time will provide enough biography, I think, to satisfy most music lovers whether they come to the book knowing something or nothing about Ellington's life. I end with "Three Steps into The River" because the strangely imperfect form of that masterpiece of Ellington's last years necessarily implicates the frenetic pace at which Ellington felt compelled to live those years. The River is often overlooked even by specialists (and, as I show in the chapter, by Ellington himself) at least partly because of the hurly-burly surrounding it. The hurly-burly makes a striking contrast to the grace and serenity of the music that came out of it.

Reading the chapters in sequence is not required or expected. From my experience in presenting these themes to audiences, the ones that audiences seem to find most entertaining are "Bardland: Shakespeare in Ellington's World" (chapter 6) and perhaps "Panther Patter: Duke Ellington at the Piano" (chapter 5). They appear near the middle of the book. According to the sequencing strategy people are taught in marketing classes, they should have been placed last and first, respectively. Readers should feel free to apply this sequencing strategy or any other.

In whatever sequence you choose, I know you will find a rich, rewarding, sensual experience. Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington (1899-1974) had the uncanny ability to convey the world around him in melody and harmony and rhythm. It is a world of color and grace and pulsations, at once novel and wry and yet strangely familiar.”

Hopefully this feature has whet your appetite for a further reading of Sweet Thunder: Duke Ellington’s Music in Nine Themes but will have to wait awhile as Jack shared the following in a personal email:

“Good to hear from you, Steven. I took the book out of print to clear the way for a larger work, twice the size with five more themes. One of the few blessings of COVID-19 canceling my classes. It is near completion …”

Needless to say, when the expanded version is published, a review of it will appear on these pages.