The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Duke Ellington · Duke Ellington and his Orchestra · produced by George Avakian · Columbia · five titles in three works, two sides
Mode
Big-band jazz in a live recording; the blues and the swing riff, a soloist set against a composed orchestra that answers and drives him
Mythos
The rite: a descent, a long trance of repetition, a return in force with the crowd drawn from watching into taking part; built by one track
Phase
Two sides; a festival suite in three parts, a slow feature for alto saxophone, then the piece of 1937 with an open interval between its halves, the climax placed last
Presentation
Album; the long-playing record issued by Columbia in 1956, five titles in three works, the set of one festival night as released, part of it remade in the studio after the event
Register
Reeds and brass in close-wound figures, a singing alto, a tenor saxophone heard at a distance over a driving rhythm section, a high trumpet over the close; medium and fast tempos with one slow track
Scale
An orchestra of a dozen and more voices, a festival crowd at night in a summer resort town, a career turned in one evening
Governing Proposition
An orchestra twenty years past its first fame closes a festival night with a piece of 1937, opens a space between its two written halves for one tenor saxophone to play the blues chorus after chorus, and lets the noise of the crowd rise into the music until the written ending returns at full force. The record made of that night shows that a public can be part of a performance; it shows it once, at the end, and part of what it presents as the night was made afterwards.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
On the night of 7 July 1956 Duke Ellington and his Orchestra closed the evening programme of the Newport Jazz Festival, at Freebody Park in Newport, Rhode Island. Columbia issued the set later that year as a long-playing record, produced by George Avakian, and that record, the album as first released in its original sequence, is the work judged here. It has two sides and five titles in three works. Side one is the Newport Jazz Festival Suite by Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, in three parts, “Festival Junction”, “Blues to Be There” and “Newport Up”. Side two is “Jeep’s Blues”, by Ellington and Johnny Hodges, and “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue”.
The suite was written for the occasion, and it sounds like it: three blues-based swing pieces in the band’s established manner, each passing its soloists in turn, the orchestra answering and driving them. It swings, and it establishes the band, its sections and its voices, before the record turns to what it is for. It does not rise, and it builds nothing the record needs. Any one of its three parts could be taken away without the record knowing less, and the three could be reordered, or exchanged for other festival numbers, without the side changing what it says. Half the record, in running time, is a band warming.
That is the first thing that holds the record where it stands. Its greatest passage is a quarter of an hour on its second side, and the first side is the setting for it rather than a part of it. The record’s law holds across both: the blues and the swing riff, a soloist set against a composed orchestra. But the law is narrow, nearly everything blues-based and nothing slow on the first side, and the narrowness is not coherence. A record of this length that spends its first half permitted rather than compelled has given away a large part of its claim before its height arrives.
Movement II
Side two opens slowly. “Jeep’s Blues” is a feature for Hodges’s alto saxophone, the kind of number a band’s set carries by habit, and on the record it does a job. Hodges’s tone is complete, his bent notes and glissandi slow and sure, and the beauty is of a calm kind, singing and intimate. It is the only slow track on the record, and it is placed to quiet the room before the last track lowers it further and then breaks it open.
The sequence is the record’s one formal decision across its tracks, and it serves the end. A suite to establish the band; a slow feature to set a calm; then the long build, with the climax placed last. Remove “Jeep’s Blues” and the record loses the contrast that makes the last track’s rise a rise. It is still a feature, and its material is the band’s own; but here, between the suite and the close, it stands where it needs to stand.
Hodges’s blues and the interval to come are the two most distant things on the record. One is slow, private and sung; the other is fast, repetitive and public. Both are blues with one voice over a band, and both keep the record’s law, so that the slow feature and the fast trance stand as the same music at two distances from the crowd. That is the record’s inner coherence at its widest, and it is not very wide: two tempos and one form, held with complete command.
Movement III
The last track is a piece of 1937, revived. Its first half, the diminuendo, is among Ellington’s most intricate writing for the band: reeds and brass in close-wound figures, the music sinking as it goes. The orchestra of 1956 plays it with full command. It is old music in the band’s hands, and the descent it makes is a descent of the room as well as of the volume: by its end the listener, and the crowd on the record, have been lowered.
Between the two written halves Ellington opened a space. Paul Gonsalves, on tenor saxophone, plays the blues there, chorus after chorus, with the rhythm section under him; then the crescendo, the second written half, returns. The form is written, then unwritten, then written again, so that the soloist’s freedom is framed by the orchestra’s composition. What the record knows lives in that open middle, and only there: put the interval at the start, or close it after six choruses, and it is gone.
The frame was not new. The piece was nineteen years old, the open interval inside a composed frame was Ellington’s own earlier practice, and long solos over a riff were being worked out in small groups at the same time. Live jazz on the long-playing record was established too: Benny Goodman’s Carnegie Hall concert of 1938, issued in 1950, Norman Granz’s Jazz at the Philharmonic, the Massey Hall concert of 1953. The stake was the night, a band with its standing in doubt and a long interval in an unrehearsed shape at a late hour. A great night on a proven path is not a swerve, and the record’s turn from its inheritance is the smallest of its figures but one.
Movement IV
The interval runs twenty-seven choruses of the twelve-bar blues by the usual count: 324 bars. Gonsalves keeps to the middle of the horn, riffs and repeats, and does not lose the time or the thread. The intensity is built by restraint and repetition, not by display. The bass and drums hold the tempo under a growing noise, the band shouts behind him, and the crowd joins. By the last choruses the sound of the place is part of the music, and the record is heard hearing it and answering.
That is what the record brings into the open: that a public can be a participant in a performance, and that the blues, pressed as a riff and a beat, is an engine of collective arousal rather than of complaint. Read with its date, it is also a Black orchestra twenty years past its first fame reclaiming a public in a night. The disclosure is real and can be stated, but it is thin. Most of it is a condition of feeling, excitement held and released, and it is said once, at the end, by an event the record partly reconstructed.
The shape is the rite. The diminuendo lowers the room; the interval is a long trance of repetition until the line between player and public breaks; the crescendo is the return in force, with the many. The pattern is built, not alluded to, and it bears the record’s weight for a quarter of an hour. It is built by one track, though, on a frame made in 1937 for other ends, and the myth the world tells of this night, the band reborn in an evening, belongs to the legend and the sleeve more than to what the music makes.
Movement V
The crescendo returns to the written piece with the orchestra at full force, Cat Anderson’s high trumpet over the close. It is the height the record exists for, transport of a physical kind, and among the highest passages in recorded jazz. The cost is frequency: the record rises in “Jeep’s Blues” by beauty and in its last quarter-hour by force, and on its first side not at all. The record is also not wholly what it says it is. Gonsalves is heard at a distance, because he played into a microphone other than the one feeding the record; and by the account made public with the complete edition of 1999, parts of the festival tape were unusable, and part of what the original record presents as the night was remade by the band in the studio after the festival, with applause added. Which passages are which is not set out here.
That substitution is part of the work as released, and it costs where it bears. It costs the making, whose central soloist is half heard and part of whose body is a remake dressed as live. It costs the record’s law, whose frame says one night and part of whose matter is another day. It costs its survival: the record’s defining claim holds only in part, and the Newport set is now more often heard in the complete edition than in the sequence of 1956. The event and the last track remain widely and continuously present after seventy years, the mono fabric dated and sound, and that presence holds the survival high.
The record restored Ellington’s band to commercial and critical standing for the rest of his career, and the late suites followed; it made the live album a central format for jazz on Columbia and elsewhere; and the long tenor solo built to lift a room became a familiar shape of the decade after. That reach is large. The jazz albums on this desk above it, Kind of Blue at 8.8 and A Love Supreme at 8.9, turned the ground their music stood on; this record documents, and in part reconstructs, a great night on ground already turned. It holds a society, a public and, unstated, a history, and not much else. It stands at 7.8 on what it is: a record whose second half is among the great events of recorded jazz, and whose first half, whose swerve and whose making keep it below the canon.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test bites on side one. The Newport Jazz Festival Suite was written for the occasion and plays as three blues-based swing pieces that pass soloists in turn: any one of its parts could go and the record would know what it knew, and the suite as a whole could go at the cost only of the band warming. “Jeep’s Blues” is a feature of the kind a set carries by habit, though here it does a job, setting a calm the last track breaks. The last track resists. Its written halves need each other, and the interval is long because the length is the argument. Half the record compelled, half permitted: just above the cap.
Score: 7.6 / 10
What the record brings into the open can be stated, but it is thin. It discloses, in sound, that a public can take part in a performance: the crowd’s rising noise across the interval is part of what is heard, and the band is heard hearing it and answering. It shows the blues as an engine of collective arousal rather than complaint, a riff and a beat pressed until a crowd stands. Read with its date, it shows a Black orchestra twenty years past its first fame reclaiming a public in one night. Held low because most of this is a condition of feeling, excitement held and released, said once, at the end, by an event the record partly reconstructed.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Height comes late and comes hard. The diminuendo is the Ellington of 1937, reeds and brass in close-wound figures, sinking. The interval climbs by insistence: Paul Gonsalves keeps to the middle of the horn, riffs and repeats, the rhythm section and the shouts from the band push, the crowd joins, and by the last choruses the sound of the place is part of the music. The crescendo returns to the written piece at full force, Cat Anderson’s high trumpet over the close. That is transport of a physical kind. “Jeep’s Blues” has beauty of another kind. Frequency is the cost: the suite swings and does not rise, and half the record waits for the height.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The archetype in reach is the rite: a descent, a long trance, a return in force, with a crowd drawn from watching into taking part. The last track builds that pattern rather than alluding to it. The diminuendo lowers the room, the interval is repetition until the boundary between player and public breaks, and the crescendo is the return with the many. It is built, and it bears load for a quarter of an hour. But it is built by one track, from a frame of 1937 Ellington had used to other ends, and the night as the world tells it, the band reborn, belongs to the record’s legend and sleeve more than to what the music constructs. The suite builds nothing archetypal.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The record departs little from what it inherited. Its material is a piece of 1937, a feature for Johnny Hodges and a festival suite in the band’s established manner. Live jazz records were already established on the long-playing record: Benny Goodman’s Carnegie Hall concert of 1938, issued in 1950, Norman Granz’s Jazz at the Philharmonic, the Massey Hall concert of 1953. What was staked was the night: a band with its standing in doubt closing a festival at a late hour with a long open interval in an unrehearsed shape, and then the decision to issue the night as an album built round it. The wager was made on stage; the studio took the safe course and repaired the record.
Score: 7.4 / 10
On the last track the form is the instrument of the knowledge. Diminuendo, open interval, crescendo: written, then unwritten, then written again, so that the soloist’s freedom is framed by the orchestra’s composition, and what the record knows, that a public can lift a performance, can only be known in the open middle. Put the interval first or close it after six choruses and that knowledge goes. The sequence serves it, counted here once: a suite to establish the band, a slow feature to quiet the room, then the long build, the climax placed last. The suite is a container, its parts exchangeable for other festival numbers. And a form that claims to be one night is in part a later day.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Evidence, seventy years of it, of a particular kind. The interval has been studied and argued over: how many choruses, who was shouting from the band, how near the crowd came to disorder. The complete edition of 1999 reopened the record as an object, setting out what had been festival and what studio. Musicians return to Gonsalves’s solo as a model of building intensity by restraint and repetition. What the returns yield, though, is mostly the event and its making, not new meaning in the music. The suite has drawn little attention, and the piece of 1937 is studied in its own right. Formal depth on one track, documentary depth on the whole.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Intrinsic force is modest. The record does not reorganise what jazz could be: its music is the band’s established language, and its one structural proposal, a long open interval inside a composed frame, was Ellington’s own earlier practice and was being worked out in small groups at the same time. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record restored Ellington’s band to commercial and critical standing for the rest of his career, and with it the late suites; it made the live album a central format for jazz on Columbia and elsewhere; and the long tenor solo over a driving rhythm section, built to lift a room, became a familiar shape of the late 1950s and the 1960s, though through many channels.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Survival is weighed over seventy years, on form, presence and fabric, for the record as released. The form survives whole, but its defining claim, that this is the night, has been shown to hold only in part, and the Newport set is now more often heard in the complete edition of 1999 than in the sequence of 1956. Presence is wide and continuous for the event and for “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue”, much thinner for the suite and for the original sequence as a whole. The fabric is a mono recording of 1956 with a soloist heard off his microphone and applause laid on: dated, and sound. Both form and presence are charged, and the event keeps the figure up.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The playing is at a very high level. The writing of 1937 for the diminuendo and crescendo is among Ellington’s most intricate for the band, and the orchestra of 1956 plays it with full command; Gonsalves sustains invention for twenty-seven choruses without losing time or the thread; bass and drums hold the tempo under a growing noise; Hodges’s tone is complete. The costs fall on the recording, which is part of the medium: the central soloist is heard at a distance, because he played into a microphone other than the one feeding the record; and, by the account made public with the complete edition of 1999, part of what is presented as the festival was remade in the studio, with applause added.
Score: 8.4 / 10
One law governs the music: the blues and the swing riff, with a soloist set against a composed orchestra that answers and drives him. The two most distant elements obey it. “Jeep’s Blues” is slow, singing and intimate; the interval is fast, repetitive and public; both are blues with one voice over a band, and the three parts of the suite keep the same law. The range is narrow: nearly everything is blues-based, and the tempos sit at the medium and the fast, with one slow track. Narrowness is not coherence, and the figure is held there. The second cost is the mixture of studio and festival under one surface: the record’s frame says one thing and part of its matter another.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Judged on what the record holds. It holds the band as a society: a dozen and more voices, each soloist stepping out and the composition holding him, the individual and the collective integrated as Ellington’s orchestra always integrated them. It holds a public, and that is its distinctive order: the crowd is in the music, not outside it. It holds history, unstated: an African American orchestra at a festival in a resort of old money in 1956, a piece of 1937 revived, a career turned in a night. What holds the axis lowest is absence: consciousness appears only as a collective state, and the family, labour beyond the band’s own working life, the state, the sacred and the natural order are not there.
Score: 6.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.6, then The Sublime at 8.5 and The Made at 8.4. Seventy years of wide and continuous presence for the event and for its last track; a quarter-hour of rising intensity with the room in it, from the sinking diminuendo through twenty-seven choruses to the high close; and an orchestra playing intricate writing of 1937 with full command while its soloist sustains invention without losing the time.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.8: a band as a society and a crowd inside the music, with history held unstated and the family, the state, the sacred and the natural order absent. Then The Swerve at 7.4, the lowest of the eleven: old material, an established format and Ellington’s own practice, a great night on a proven path. Then The Inevitable, The Unconcealment and The Archetypal Deep at 7.6: a suite the record could lose, a disclosure said once and mostly as feeling, and a rite built by one track only.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.6 against a threshold of 7.5, by a tenth. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 7.9, The Made at 8.4, The Inner Law at 7.9, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 8.6 clears the bar of 8.5 by a tenth, but Pressure on Tradition at 7.8, The Unconcealment at 7.6, The Archetypal Deep at 7.6 and The Swerve at 7.4 fall short. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Swerve, 7.4, below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.8. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 7.8, in the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · the long-playing record issued by Columbia in 1956, produced by George Avakian, as first released and in its original sequence: on side one the Newport Jazz Festival Suite (Ellington and Strayhorn) in three parts, “Festival Junction”, “Blues to Be There” and “Newport Up”; on side two “Jeep’s Blues” (Ellington and Hodges) and “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue” (Ellington), with Paul Gonsalves’s interval between its halves. The set was played at the Newport Jazz Festival on 7 July 1956. The record as released is judged, studio and festival together; Ellington at Newport 1956 (Complete) (Columbia/Legacy, 1999) is evidence, not the object. Judged from knowledge of the recording, its making and its reception; no recording or score was in hand. There are no words but titles and spoken announcements, and nothing is quoted. The count of twenty-seven choruses is the usual one. Not given, being unverified here: the catalogue number and format, the running times, the full personnel, which passages are studio and which festival, the speed of the suite’s writing, the earlier history of “Jeep’s Blues” and Gonsalves’s earlier performances of the interval, the record’s sales and the magazine cover that followed, the producer and method of the complete edition, a later history of the festival and the set, and the reported scenes in the crowd and at the side of the stage.