Duke Ellington:The Afro-Eurasian Eclipse: A Suite in Eight Parts

At the start of Duke Ellington's album, The Afro-Eurasian Eclipse: A Suite in Eight Parts, Ellington himself speaks for a couple of minutes about the whole world "going Oriental." Apparently, Marshall McLuhan said something to that effect (read full incomprehensible statement here) and while McLuhan had some good points buried in his "going Oriental" statement (mainly because he threw every idea he had about Indochina at the wall and by happenstance, some of it stuck) none of it really matters to the music that follows. Still, Ellington delivers his monologue sincerely and intones that he and his band mates have, in their travels, "noticed this to be true" (that everyone is going Oriental, that is - were The Vapors inspired by this too? Do we have McLuhan to blame for Turning Japanese?). Ellington's enunciation is so precise and eloquent I don't even care what he's says, I just like listening to how he says it. He speaks as if he's teaching someone how to pronounce the words properly in English and the result is, in it's own way, a kind of Ellington a capella lead-in.

The music that follows doesn't match up against the extraordinary body of work Ellington produced before it but then, how could it? What it does do, and rather well, is take Big Band Jazz, Eastern and Western instrumentation, Oliver Nelson-style television theme scoring and rock-centered backbeats and blend it into an exciting mix of something one could call Big Band Fusion. The first track, Chinoiserie, opens with Ellington hammering away at the piano, solo for a minute or so before the horns come in and transform the sound into something slightly menacing and dangerous. In fact, most of the album's mere eight songs evoke feelings of disquiet and unease. It's easily one of the most atmospherically successful albums ever produced.

This mood carries through the first six songs, even as each one takes a slightly different tack. Didjeridoo, despite it title, evokes nothing of the outback but much of risky urban life. Afrique rolls into its melody with drums meant to evoke tribal rhythms but really sounds more like Benny Carter by way of Max Steiner by way of the 1930's Duke Ellington. Acht O'Clock Rock is Oliver Nelson dramatic punctuation all the way, right down to it's dramatically heightened final chord. Gong brings the rolling drums back in for a thematic reprise of Afrique and Tang opens and closes with sustained brass chords mingled with plucking strings that clearly influenced Bernard Herrman's cue music to the bloody aftermath of Travis Bickle's whorehouse shooting spree for Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver.

It's not until the seventh song that the mood noticeably changes when True brings in the breezy, swinging rhythms of the late fifties/early sixties as a kind of tonic to everything that preceded it. Not that what preceded it was bad, just a bit heavy and True finds a way to lighten the load and allow the listener a breather.

The album finishes with Hard Way which brings everything back home. It's easily the most conventional of all the songs on the album and its placement is no accident. Since the entire album has maintained the air of Big Band Jazz throughout, the final song isn't as jarring as it probably should be, considering it sounds like a piece Ellington could have written in between Sophisticated Lady and In a Sentimental Mood. Instead, it sounds exactly like an encore for a band performing a new sound but not wanting to alienate its audience to the point where they won't return and listen again.

To say the whole album is a pastiche is both true and complimentary while that same term might be derisive when applied to another artist. With Ellington, it isn't, because few composers had the talent and skill to imitate, blend and mesh other styles with their own and make it sound so good. My only complaint is that he didn't conclude the album with another perfectly enunciated monologue designed to gently guide the listener to go back to the start of the album and begin again.

Oscar Peterson: Motions and Emotions

Oscar Peterson's career as a jazz pianist was always a bit tricky. Unlike a Bill Evans or Herbie Hancock or Victor Feldman, who could control a set through steady use of block chords and minimal melodic adornment, Peterson was all about flourishes. His style was such that the left hand was of only nominal use while the right hand created intricate melodic magic. Which is all to say, Peterson worked best as a front man, not an accompanist. And when accompanying him, best to keep it simple. Too much counter melody, too intricate a bass line and the whole thing could quickly become an incoherent mess. Perhaps that's why Peterson's foray into orchestral jazz turned out so well.

In 1969, Peterson recorded Motions and Emotions, an orchestral jazz album, sometimes derisively referred to as Muzak Jazz due to the lush strings and sonorous piano lines. Certainly those strings, beautifully arranged by Claus Ogerman, sound reminiscent of the type of music those over forty might recall hearing in department stores and elevators in their youth (hence the term, "elevator music"). But just because the unimaginative covers of popular hits for the Muzak corporation used lush strings doesn't mean they're a bad thing, just that they can be used well or poorly. On Motions and Emotions, Peterson and Ogerman use them perfectly.

Motions and Emotions, with its beautifully swirling wave cover, was a clear attempt by Peterson to put out music more tuned in to the new standards, if not more tuned in to the new sound. Peterson was no fool and wasn't about to start playing rock/jazz fusion just because most standard jazz was suddenly passé (to the incredibly short-sighted, that is). No, while other performers in jazz did just that, most notably Miles Davis on Bitches Brew, Peterson stuck to his strength and made nods only to song choice, not style. And those choices serve his style well, until the last third of the album collapses under the weight of a musical genre gap that simply cannot be overcome.

The album kicks off, wisely, with a Henry Mancini tune, Sally's Tomato, from Breakfast at Tiffany's. If you're going to kick off an orchestral jazz album with any composer, there's probably not another one out there more suited to the task than Mancini. It also gives Peterson and Ogerman the chance to throw in a soft samba undertone, a foreshadowing of not only the album's grandest moment but one which may stand as one of Peterson's finest achievements. More on that in a moment.

After that we get into the more poppy of the new standards Peterson is covering, beginning with Sunny, that old pop hit warhorse covered more times than most other songs ever written combined. It may not be the gold standard of modern music but, by God, Peterson and Ogerman make it work beautifully with Ogerman giving the orchestra a dramatic punch that the original version, and every other pop cover of it, could only hope to replicate. Ironically, when the album collapses later, it will be with source songs infinitely better than Sunny. Go figure.

From here, Peterson breezes through Jimmy Webb's By the Time I Get to Phoenix, Gayle Caldwell's Wandering and Burt Bacharach's This Guy's in Love with You in a way that makes them all of a piece, kind of a trilogy stuck in the middle of the album. The tempos and rhythms of each move perfectly in and out of each other and signals in imagination not just in arrangements but of song order as well.

And then we get Wave. One of my favorite jazz composers, Antonio Carlos Jobim, penned Wave in 1967 and it became an immediate standard among jazz musicians. I have the original version by Jobim as well as four other versions. They are all splendid. Peterson's is majestic! It is not only the high point of the album but one of the high points of Oscar Peterson's recording career. Taking Jobim's original three minute samba song and extending it out to six minutes gives Peterson and Ogerman the time to transform it into an epic piece of modern music, slowly bringing in the low strings, then strumming guitar and horns before Peterson adds a few simple melodic lines, then trades off each verse with the orchestra until the final two minutes when both orchestra and piano build towards a crescendo that never arrives but fades away as Peterson and Ogerman see how many contrasting notes can be played without falling into the realm of cacophony. It is, quite simply, marvelous, and worth the whole damn album on its own.

After that, Mancini's Dreamsville is the perfect song to take the album out, gently serenading us into a hypnotic state of orchestral jazz bliss. And that's where it should have ended. Unfortunately, there are three more songs and all three are serious misfires threatening to bring the whole enterprise down. They don't, but only because what preceded it is so very strong. Earlier, I alluded to the fact that the album collapses with songs far better than Sunny, with which it succeeds. And it's true, when the album collapses, the source songs are better. The problem is, no matter how talented the piano player, they're simply not songs suited for jazz. At all.

Two of the final songs are Yesterday and Eleanor Rigby by Paul McCartney and released, of course, by The Beatles (with the usual contractual "Lennon/McCartney" songwriting credit regardless of whether both had a hand in any given song or not). Those may be songs of superb craftsmanship but, brother, they just don't work for jazz. The clash between the opening jazz tempo arranged by Ogerman for the orchestra and the suddenly altered tempo once Peterson starts playing the Yesterday melody is too awkward to not be noticed, and too noticeable to be enjoyed. The two separate sections, the one playing the familiar melody and the one where Peterson riffs, are both well done, it's the forcing of the square peg into the round hole when smashing the two together that causes the problem.

Eleanor Rigby is so wrong one wonders how it even made the cut. It's baroque melody clashes with the feel of piano jazz in such as way as to make it virtually unlistenable. Ogerman and Peterson do the best job they can, but Peterson's flourishes sound more like desperate attempts to pull something, anything, out of the melody that one could riff off of. He tries, there's just not much there to work with. The result, like Yesterday, is a song done in two distinct sections, one with the familiar Eleanor Rigby tune and the other, wholly different, force-fitted onto the end.

Finally, the album reaches its final song with Bobbie Gentry's Ode to Billy Joe and shifts abruptly, and I mean abruptly(!), into honky tonk! While Peterson and Ogerman's take on the song isn't half-bad really, it has the unfortunate effect of sounding as if it arrived from another album entirely, or maybe another planet. Imagine watching The Godfather for two and a half hours only to have the final reel replaced with the one from Brian De Palma's Scarface. They're both about gangsters, both star Al Pacino, but they really don't work together and take you in very different directions. This song's arrangement and inclusion on the album is a true head scratcher.

The fact that they weren't comfortable releasing an album with just seven songs is unfortunate because I can tell you that if this album ended after Dreamsville, it would be damn near perfect. As it is, it is a work of orchestral jazz that has some of Oscar Peterson's finest work but crashes and burns within feet of reaching the finish line.