not even know what an opera is; and yet Porgy and Bess is an opera and it has power and vigor.” Thomson was, in fact, paying Gershwin a compliment—the highest that he could offer to a composer who lacked the correct credentials and could never be considered “one of us.”
Gershwin’s racial ambiguities, his miscegenating mixture of Western European, African-American, and Russian-Jewish materials, also caused trouble. The black singers were generally overjoyed by what Gershwin had written for them; J. Rosamond Johnson, James Weldon Johnson’s brother, who sang the part of Lawyer Frazier in the premiere, went so far as to describe the composer as the “Abraham Lincoln of Negro music.” African-American critics were more cautious, though generally positive. A few commentators on the political left attacked what they perceived to be white exploitation of black material. Unexpectedly, Duke Ellington, who seldom had a bad word to say about anyone, led the critique. “Grand music and a swell play,” Ellington was quoted as saying, but “it does not use the Negro musical idiom. It was not the music of Catfish Row or any other kind of Negroes.” As it turned out, some of Ellington’s remarks had been fabricated by an over eager Marxist journalist, although in a subsequent clarification Ellington stated once more that Porgy was not a true Negro opera.
Thomson picked up on this leftist critique of Porgy when he wrote, “Folklore subjects recounted by an outsider are only valid as long as the folk in question is unable to speak for itself, which is certainly not true of the American Negro in 1935.” In the end, the racial debate around Porgy (was it a real Negro opera?) bled into the aesthetic debate (was it an opera at all?). Thomson concluded thus: “I don’t mind his being a light composer and I don’t mind his trying to be a serious one. But I do mind his falling between two stools.”
Falling between two stools was, in fact, the essence of Gershwin’s genius. He led at all times a double life: as music-theater professional and concert composer, as highbrow artist and lowbrow entertainer, as all-American kid and immigrants’ son, as white man and “white Negro.” Porgy performed the monumental feat of reconciling the rigidity of Western notated music with the African-American principle of improvised variation. In the end, Gershwin re united two sides of the composer’s job that should never have been separated to begin with, and he came as close as any composer of the day—his chief rival was Kurt Weill—to the all-devouring, high-low art of Mozart and Verdi.
Tragically, Gershwin did not live to fulfill his entire vision. Not long before his sudden death in 1937, of a brain tumor, he told his sister: “I don’t feel I’ve really scratched the surface of what I want to do.”
The Duke
The Harlem Renaissance, insofar as W. E. B. Du Bois and others defined it, aspired to create an African-American version of “high culture.” By the early thirties, that mission was becoming more difficult to sustain. A terrible riot in 1935 exposed the misery and rage behind the illusion of an upwardly mobile black culture.
As Paul Allen Anderson explains in his book Deep River, a split opened between the original leaders of the Renaissance and younger artists such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, who disavowed what Hughes called the “Nordicized Negro intelligentsia” and sought a less status-conscious, less politely affirmative definition of black culture. Du Bois and his colleagues had dreamed, in Anderson’s words, of a “hybridic fusion” of African-American, mainstream-American, and European ideas. Alain Locke, in his musical commentaries, remained suspicious of commercial jazz and saved his highest praise for the symphonies of William Grant Still, William Dawson, and Florence Price. By contrast, the young rebel Hughes—whose great-uncle John Mercer Langston had been a good friend of Will Marion Cook’s father—celebrated the authenticity of “hot” jazz and rural blues. “We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how,” Hughes wrote, in a widely quoted 1926 essay, “and we stand on the top of the mountain, free within ourselves.”
The split between the Harlem Renaissance elders and the new radical Negroes formed the backdrop for Duke Ellington’s career. Like Gershwin, Ellington had a flair for ambivalence. He partook of Du Bois and Locke’s cosmopolitanism, their rhetoric of uplift and transcendence. Yet he also adopted Hughes’s slogans of resistance and subversion.
There’s a wonderful scene in a 1944 New Yorker profile in which Ellington is shown deflating the expectations of an Icelandic music student who tries to nudge him toward the “classical,” “genius” category. The student keeps peppering the master with questions about Bach, and, before answering, Ellington makes an elaborate show of unwrapping a pork chop that he has stowed in his pocket. “Bach and myself,” he says, taking a bite from the chop, “both write with individual performers in mind.” With that pork-chop maneuver, Ellington put distance between himself and the European conception of genius, though without rejecting it entirely. Another time he addressed the issue head-on: “To attempt to elevate the status of the jazz musician by forcing the level of his best work into comparisons with classical music is to deny him his rightful share of originality.”
Black musicians had to work fast and hard to escape appropriation. The great early jazz records, from Louis Armstrong’s Hot Fives and Hot Sevens onward, show an art form developing at blinding speed. As the composer Olly Wilson has said, jazz composers compensated for the limitations of the three-or four-minute track by exploiting a “heterogeneous sound ideal”: multiple rhythms, call-and-response patterns, and diverse timbres conspire to create “a high density of musical events within a relatively short musical time frame.” Albert Murray writes in his classic book Stomping the Blues: “The phonograph record has served as the blues musician’s equivalent to the concert hall almost from the outset. It has been in effect his concert hall without walls, his musée imaginaire …” European harmonies were one more ingredient added to the mix.
Dvořák had assumed that American music would come into its own when it succeeded in importing African-American material into European form, but in the end the opposite thing happened: African-American composers appropriated European material into self-invented forms of blues and jazz.
When Duke Ellington set about making his name, he went for advice to Will Marion Cook. The grand old man of African-American music would give him informal lessons in the course of extended horse-and-buggy rides around Central Park. “I’d sing a melody in its simplest form,” Ellington recalled, “and he’d stop me and say, ‘Re-verse your figures’ … Some of the things he used to tell me I never got a chance to use until years later, when I wrote the tone poem Black, Brown and Beige.” Cook was expounding Brahmsian principles of variation and development: “Reverse your figures” suggests the notes of a theme spelled in inversion or retrograde. Cook also directed Ellington to discover his individual voice: “You know you should go to the conservatory, but since you won’t, I’ll tell you. First you find the logical way, and when you find it, avoid it, and let your inner self break through and guide you. Don’t try to be anybody else but yourself.”
Ellington’s “inner self” is present in his first original recording, “East St. Louis Toodle-oo,” from 1926. The piece is distinctive because it creates a distinctive tension between a blues theme on solo trumpet and a straitlaced accompaniment in the band. The lead tune, written and played by the master trumpeter Bubber Miley, depicts an old man shuffling in wearily from the cornfield. The minor-key accompaniment, Ellington’s work, takes the form of a hypnotic string of closely voiced chords, circling around like a cool crowd of onlookers.
An improvising soloist was, of course, hardly a novelty in musical history; Mozart’s and Beethoven’s concertos offered spells of cadenza freedom, and opera singers had freely ornamented their parts for centuries. The difference in Ellington’s jazz pieces—as in Armstrong’s and Fletcher Henderson’s—was that the distinction between the composed and the improvised broke down at an almost subatomic level. Players moved in and out of the improvisatory circle, taking their solos. They burst into exhilarating runs that sounded spontaneous but were in many cases intricately rehearsed beforehand.
