Such Sweet Thunder (1957) — Duke Ellington and His Orchestra

Listening

To listen to this album for free, visit Such Sweet Thunder @ Last.fm. To play a song, click the round play button next to its name. Note that the original release of the album was just the first 12 tracks, and that’s what I’ve focused my listening on for this week.

Nitty Gritty (Reference Section)

Recorded August 1956 through May 1957. Line-up: Duke Ellington (piano); Cat Anderson, Willie Cook, Ray Nance, and Clark Terry (trumpet); Quentin Jackson, John Sanders, and Britt Woodman (trombone); Harry Carney (baritone saxophone); Paul Gonsalves (tenor saxophone); Jimmy Hamilton (clarinet and tenor saxophone); Johnny Hodges (alto saxophone); Russell Procope (clarinet and alto saxophone); Jimmy Woode (bass); Sam Woodyard (drums). All songs by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn.

Personal Connections

My formal jazz education has been entirely under the guidance of Drew, a professor and friend of mine, who is a big fan of Duke Ellington. Between a few years of jazz band and a small handful of classes with Drew, he was able to expose me to a huge amount of Duke’s music. One of the amazing things about Duke is precisely how many-sided his oeuvre is. Duke lived from 1899-1974. Not only is this an unusually long life for a historical jazz musician, but it is also extremely well-timed to overlap with all of the important historical periods of the genre. Over the course of his lifetime, there were some constant through-lines in his music (sounds like you hear in Take The A Train or It Don’t Mean A Thing If It Ain’t Got That Thing, for instance), and other things that changed drastically. Compare the two examples below:

Take The A Train

Come Sunday (one of my favorite gorgeous ballads), featuring Mahalia Jackson

I am, personally, really interested in the difference between Duke’s “lighter” fare and his more “serious” fare. I am surprised by how much I knew about Duke’s music before I really began to discover his more “serious” fare.

Introduction To The Album

This album was conceived of as a musical suite (a group of pieces tied together in some way and intended to be performed together), in the classical tradition. Duke wrote a number of suites during his career, as well as other long-forms (sacred concerts, extended compositions, etc.). In this respect, he was more or less unique in the jazz idiom (yeah, I’m leaving out some important footnotes here, but I’m comfortable doing so for now). There is evidence that Duke’s use of suites was a sort of structural ‘cop-out’ when critics insisted that he didn’t have the skills to unify a long piece of music in more elaborate ways. A suite allows Duke to sort of throw together relatively unrelated musical material in a way that other long structures don’t. In any case, Duke made great and plentiful use of the suite structure throughout the latter half of his career.

This suite, Such Sweet Thunder, was a commission from the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, and all of its material is related (often very literally) to works of Shakespeare. The back of the album makes some interesting and strong connections between Duke and The Bard (credit to John Edward Haase from Beyond Category—The Life And Genius Of Duke Ellington): “As did Shakespeare, Ellington deployed his players like great actors on a stage. For nineteen years, Shakespeare was part owner of a repertory company, and wrote ONLY for that company. Likewise, Ellington had HIS own repertory company—for fifty years—and wrote almost exclusively for its players. Shakespeare’s plays have outlived the actors for whom they were conceived. Ellington’s music may, as the centuries pass, attain the same achievement.”

Musical “Program”

The first thing that should be said about this music is that it is what classical musicians know as “program music”. This is music that tells a literal story (a story that could, for instance, be printed in text on a concert program to help inform the audience listening experience). The music is supposed to more than just evoke certain moods, it is supposed to refer literally to specific characters, specific facets of those characters, specific settings, etc. This is the sort of music that might have woodwinds intended to sound like witches cackling or saxophones creating the sounds of a city.

This musical program plays itself out in a number of ways on this album. Songs are written to represent specific Shakespearean plays. Within the songs, specific instruments are often supposed to represent specific characters. In a few instances, Shakespeare’s literary structures are represented literally in the music as well.

In general, I don’t much care for program music. Here, though, Shakespeare does some interesting work. I particularly like the song Up And Down, Up And Down (I Will Lead Them Up And Down), which portrays a specific plotline from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Puck (represented by the trumpet) chases, watches, and interacts with three different couples (Demetrius and Helena: clarinet and violin; Lysander and Hermia: alto and tenor saxophones; Oberon and Titania: alto sax and valve trombone). To me, this conceit is very clear musically (especially the way the three pairings interact with one another and with Puck). Puck sounds spritely indeed. Apparently, Puck’s textual quotation “Lord, what fools these mortals be” is supposed to be represented by the final trumpet statement (but I am not sold on this).

One element of the program that I have mixed feelings about is Duke’s attempts to fairly literally represent literary sonnets. It is clearest in Sonnet For Caesar, where the clarinet melody has fourteen 10-note-long statements (corresponding to 14 10-syllable lines in a sonnet): 12 similar ones and two final statements that stand out to create the ending. I don’t think that I experience the sonnets on this album in anything like the way that I experience literary sonnets. That said, exploration of this rigid set of constraints was clearly a useful one for Duke, as it allowed him to create some pretty unexpected material (I find Sonnet For Caesar in particular to be bizarre and wonderful).

Work As A Theatrical Director

On this album, Duke did a lot to fulfill the role of a theatrical director, interpreting Shakespeare’s text. He has very clear visions governing his portrayal of each of the characters. These beautiful re-imaginings are, in part, what makes me feel so uncomfortable about how literal some of his programmatic devices are. In any case, I love the ways in which Duke paints each of the characters. He chooses a somewhat unique direction to go in with regards to Lady Macbeth (on the song Lady Mac), emphasizing simultaneously the elegance of her upbringing (through the use of waltz meter) and the extremity of her passion. These two sides meet during the section beginning at 1:26 in the music. Lady Mac’s dark side is revealed at the very end of the song (this coda is a musical theme used throughout the suite).

"Though she was a lady of noble birth," Ellington says, "we suspect there was a little ragtime in her soul". Photo of Jessie Bear by Eleftherios Kostans.

I also love Duke’s portrayal of the witches from Macbeth (along with Iago from Othello) in the song The Telecasters. I love Duke’s connection between the fortune-tellers in these two plays and the creepy way that he paints them (especially through his use of silence). While I think the specifics of the program are not terribly useful here, the chorus of trombones is supposed to represent the witches while the baritone saxophone represents Iago.

Other Thoughts

Three other brief comments about the album:

-I can’t think of anything to say about the opening song (Such Sweet Thunder), and the first piano entrance on the song in particular (at 0:27, although the entrance of the brass right after that also deserves a strong mention) other than that it defines bad-ass for me.

-If you can’t hear the bass on Sonnet In Search Of A Moor, you are missing the melody of the song (have you caught the pattern here? The bass represents Othello. How innovative!). Let this be a reminder that the built-in speakers on a Mac (or other bad speakers) simply won’t do. Take a listen on headphones or better speakers instead!

-The song Circle Of Fourths stands out for having no apparent explicit connection to the works of Shakespeare. The liner notes of the album explains that this song is “inspired by Shakespeare himself and the four major parts of his artistic contribution: tragedy, comedy, history, and the sonnets”. This is represented by the musical interval of a fourth which dominates the harmonic language of the piece (as it does most Western music, but it is rare to move by fourth as quickly and frequently as Duke does in this piece without firmly establishing a tonal center). More can be said about the potential significance of the interval of a fourth in Circle Of Fourths, but I don’t know that the piece is particularly worthy of it (the song seems like a throw-away to me).

Wrap-Up

I thoroughly enjoyed getting to know this suite this week. It has a ton to offer—in the relationships between the music and its source material, in the beautiful melodies, in the great grooves, and in the cleverness of it all. My only warning is to not spend too much time with the bonus material. Much of it is intended only for true collectors (5 or so takes of The Star Crossed-Lovers on track 22 alone is almost enough to spoil the beauty of the piece), although the material not part of the original release is at least worth a listen (I especially like the simple song Suburban Beauty, which sounds more like a Basie tune than an Ellington tune to me).

Hope you enjoy it too.

Thanks again for reading!
Dan