Orchestral jazz

Fletcher Henderson, the originator

It was in the 1920s that the first forms of true orchestral jazz were developed, most significantly by Fletcher Henderson and Duke Ellington. Although large aggregations had begun to appear in the late teens, these were dance orchestras playing the popular songs and novelty pieces of the day, with nary a smattering of jazz. The credit for being the first to perform and record orchestral jazz must go to Henderson, who, starting in about 1923, gathered together from the small beginnings of quintets and sextets a growing number of notable New York-based players and formed a full orchestra. By the mid- to late 1920s, Henderson could boast a 13- or 14-piece band and had the arranging services of the outstanding alto saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist Don Redman. It was Redman who developed antiphonal call-and-response procedures in orchestral jazz, juxtaposing the two main choirs of brass and reeds in ever more sophisticated and challenging arrangements.

Duke Ellington, the master composer

Although he was very much aware of Redman’s and Henderson’s work, Duke Ellington took a somewhat different approach. From the start more truly a composer than an arranger, Ellington blended thematic material suggested to him by some of his players—in particular trumpeter Bubber Miley and clarinetist Barney Bigard—with his own compositional frameworks and backgrounds (e.g., “East St. Louis Toodle-oo” [1926] and “Black and Tan Fantasy” [1927]). Once ensconced in Harlem’s famous Cotton Club as the resident house band (a tenure that lasted three years, until early 1931), Ellington had the opportunity to explore, in some 160 recordings, several categories of compositions: (1) music for the club’s jungle-style production numbers and pantomime tableaus, (2) dance numbers for the 16-girl chorus line, (3) dance pieces for the club’s patrons (all white—Blacks were allowed only as entertainers), (4) arrangements of the pop tunes or ballads of the day, and (5) most important, independent nonfunctional instrumental compositions—in effect, miniature tone poems for presentation during the shows. The most celebrated of these was “Mood Indigo” (1930), the first of many pieces with a blueslike character, usually set in slow tempos. In these and in such other song and dance numbers as “Sophisticated Lady” (1932) and “Solitude” (1934), Ellington was able not only to exploit the individual talents of his musicians but to extend and vary the forms of jazz. In addition, he expanded upon his already highly developed feeling for instrumental timbres and colours and his extraordinary forward-looking harmonic sense. In early works such as “Mystery Song” (1931), “Delta Serenade” (1934), and “In a Sentimental Mood” (1935), Ellington experimented with never-before-heard brass sonorities (using mutes peculiar to jazz, including the lowly bathroom plunger) and unusual blendings of brass and reeds, as in his grouping of saxophones and Juan Tizol’s light valve trombone sound. Ellington’s instinctive genius for harmonic invention, using the outer extensions of basic triadic and dominant seventh chords, led him to use bitonality (two keys at once) or polytonality (several keys) at least a decade before anyone else. Striking examples of this aspect of his work are, to name only a few, “Eerie Moan” (1933), “Reminiscing in Tempo” (1935), “Alabamy Home” (1937), and “Azure” (1937), the last verging on atonality at several points.

All these Ellington innovations, nuanced and fulfilled as they were by the extraordinary cast of characters and individual soloists in his orchestra, served to create a more personal expression and emotional depth than had previously been achieved in jazz. The heterogeneity of personalities and talents in Ellington’s orchestra virtually guaranteed that even the least of their efforts would be superior to the best of most other orchestras of the time. Motored by a remarkably cohesive rhythm section, each instrumental choir boasted dramatically different, individualistic personalities (e.g., Arthur Whetsol and Cootie Williams on trumpet; Rex Stewart on cornet; Lawrence Brown, Joe “Tricky Sam” Nanton, and Juan Tizol on trombone; and Johnny Hodges, Barney Bigard, Otto Hardwick, and Harry Carney on reeds) who nevertheless whenever needed would blend instantly into perfect ensembles.

Other notables of the 1920s

As remarkable as Ellington’s innovations were, they had relatively little impact on the field in general. In the racially still-very-divided world of the 1930s, not only were white bands such as the Casa Loma and Benny Goodman orchestras much more popular than the great Black orchestras of Ellington, Jimmie Lunceford, Chick Webb, and Bennie Moten, but Ellington’s music in particular was considered formally and harmonically too challenging and at the same time too subtle for the tastes of the average 1930s swing fan. Ellington’s big, worldwide success with the public did not come until the 1960s, when he and his orchestra made lengthy annual tours all over the world, had some hugely popular successes with “Satin Doll” (1953) and other compositions, and began to consistently receive accolades—including a Presidential Medal of Freedom and the French Legion of Honour—from the broader musical, artistic, and intellectual community.

Three other musical groups met with outstanding success in the 1920s: Jelly Roll Morton’s Red Hot Peppers, Paul Whiteman’s Orchestra, and William McKinney’s Cotton Pickers. The 17 sides Morton and his Red Hot Peppers recorded for RCA Victor in 1926–27 are among the finest classics of early jazz. Blending late ragtime with the rapidly burgeoning improvisational advances of the time, Morton gathered a group of veterans of New Orleans-style jazz, then in their prime. By avoiding a random succession of solos—indeed, by careful structural planning that astutely distributed the seven players’ efforts over the three-minute limit allowed by a 10-inch 78-rpm disc—and by painstakingly rehearsing the group before the recording sessions, Morton achieved an almost perfect balance of ensemble and solo. Miraculously, the improvisations and compositions enhanced each other; thus, solos were integrated into arrangements in a way that remained uncommon in jazz for decades thereafter. Morton recorded both multithematic ragtime pieces (including “Black Bottom Stomp” and “Grandpa’s Spells”), each piece with several strains in different chord progressions, and monothematic 12- and 32-bar pieces featuring a single passacaglia-like repetitive harmonic sequence (such as “Smokehouse Blues,” “Jungle Blues,” and “Dead Man Blues”). These recordings had nothing to do with the typical dance music of the period. Moreover, by balancing compositional unity with a maximum of textural and timbral variety—to an extent that was remarkable in a three-minute miniature form, with only a small band—and by reconciling composition and improvisation as well as polyphonic and homophonic ensembles in one fell swoop, Morton pointed a way toward the future of jazz. Alas, in the quasi-commercial and career-driven world of the late 1920s and 1930s, his comprehensive lesson was learned by only a handful of musicians. But Morton’s example may have influenced Ellington, who for reasons never made clear considered Morton his musical archenemy.

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The case of Whiteman, though completely different, is almost equally important, and certainly Whiteman was of enormous influence. Although he is ignored or maligned by most jazz historians, Whiteman made considerable contributions to jazz, not only because of his orchestra’s enormous popularity. More important, Whiteman explored hitherto uninvestigated avenues of expression.

By the mid-1920s Whiteman had expanded his band beyond the size of the standard jazz orchestra—five or six brass, five saxophones, a four- or five-piece rhythm section—to include a small violin section and had incorporated into his dance repertory a number of pieces associated with “serious” and “semiclassical” music. The accusations hurled at Whiteman—that he was “contaminating” jazz with classical affectations and trying to “make a lady out of jazz”—were patently unfair. He not only brought into his orchestra such bona fide jazz musicians as Beiderbecke, violinist Joe Venuti, saxophonist Frankie Trumbauer, and guitarist Eddie Lang but also hired such outstandingly gifted orchestrators and arrangers as Ferde Grofé, Bill Challis, William Grant Still, and Lennie Hayton. Furthermore, by adding multiple wind instruments—even oboe, bassoon, heckelphone, and bass clarinet—Whiteman expanded the registral range of his orchestra from the highest piccolo to the lowest tuba and thereby enriched the orchestra’s timbral palette. In this way Whiteman’s conception of a jazz orchestra was as original and unique as Ellington’s, although entirely different. That the orchestra’s arrangements and compositions sometimes suffered from severe instrumental and homophonic overweight cannot be denied. But at their best, when conceived by the likes of Challis and Grofé and imbued by Whiteman’s improvisers with a true jazz spirit, his musical contributions are surely not to be sneered at.

Both Ellington and Henderson considered McKinney’s Cotton Pickers, a Detroit-based band, their only serious rival. The distinctiveness of the Cotton Pickers’ work during the band’s heyday is attributable primarily to the remarkable leadership and the composing and arranging talents of John Nesbitt, whose work was mistakenly credited to Redman for many decades. Nesbitt was obviously aware and respectful of Ellington’s fast-tempo “stomp” pieces. And like Morton, Nesbitt was intent on utilizing his 10- or 11-piece jazz orchestra to produce the most varied yet balanced integration of solo improvisation and arranged ensemble, as well as a maximum of textural and structural variety. In such recordings as “Put It There,” “Crying and Sighing,” and “Stop Kidding,” Nesbitt and the band demonstrated their virtuosic command of what were for their time rather complex scores, replete with implied metre permutations, challenging rhythmic overlays, hard-driving solos, daring modulations, and—as Morton often urged—“plenty of solo breaks.”

In these ways the orchestras of Morton, Whiteman, and McKinney (as well as that of Ellington) went considerably beyond Henderson’s and Redman’s method of setting solos off against arranged ensembles, showing that composition, and not mere arrangement, was completely compatible with jazz.