Tone Parallel
Issue 14 November 2024
Here is a transcription of part of Ellington’s commentary to The Second Sacred Concert from a performance in Barcelona, 24 November 1969:
“Our next selection is one of our fire and brimstone sermonettes. It has to do with an imaginary intersection, a corner… Every two or three minutes we have to decide whether we’re going to make left-hand turn or right-hand turn, go straight ahead or make a U-turn at practically every corner. …In Denver Colorado there is a place called the five points and of course in Paris there’s the Arc de Triomphe that has many, many outlets and it’s… much more confusing… but down at the end… we imagine there is this enormous intersection with millions of outlets and only one goes to the main gate, the free way to the pearly gates. …Of course, there are many distractions… The pavement is slippery; there are holes; there are snares; there are all sorts of traps and of course the opposition has the most outrageous commercials. Opposition has people there who are dressed like friends who come up to you and say, ‘Of course I know it’s beautiful over there with those golden streets and the diamond door knobs but you should see how the chicks are swingin’ down where we are.’ Well, you can’t go for any nonsense at this point. You keep straight on down to the gate. This is the biggest, the noisiest, the loudest, the most insidious intersection, down at the end where all ends end just before the beginning.”
The composition Ellington is introducing is The Biggest And Busiest Intersection. Originally entitled Kixx, it was composed over two years earlier as music to accompany a production of the morality play The Jaywalker by the English actress and playwright Barbara Waring. The play received its première in June 1967 in the city of Coventry. Ellington had performed selections from his first Sacred Concert a year previously in the city’s cathedral.
It is worth a small digression momentarily for a word about the rhythm section on the original recording of Kixx. There was an extensive rehearsal of the composition in Milan on 25 February, 1967 followed by a studio recording on 4 April. The April session was the second studio session comprising music recorded for The Jaywalker (this earlier session laying down the track Mac which subsequently retitled TGTT was also incorporated into The Second Sacred Concert). For the second Jaywalker session, Rufus Jones’s place on drums had been taken by Bobby Durham, a musician who has the dubious distinction of belonging to that small group of musicians Duke Ellington allegedly fired from his band. The drums were augmented on both sessions by a conga player. In the major Ellington discographies, this player is usually listed as ‘unknown’. A reviewer of The Jaywalker CD on Amazon, however, confidently identifies the conga player as Emmanuel Abdul-Rahim. This does not seem an unreasonable assertion since, as Juan Amalbert, he was present on recordings for Ellington’s My people in 1963 and, indeed, his presence on the sessions for The Jaywalker is confirmed in Lord’s Jazz Discography. A small mystery solved, perhaps.
Like the enigma of who played the conga, however, little seems to be known about the play The Jaywalker itself and whether it was ever performed again is a subject for further investigation. The photograph above (the caption of which reads “Long haired leather jacketed girls and boys watching a scene from this rehearsal of the first of the Coventry Cathedral Drama Porch Plays 67 The Jay Walker, which has music specially written by Duke Ellington”) is virtually all I could find about the production on line.
The play is about a Christ-like figure who is “crucified between a lorry and a Rolls Royce” at a congested crossroads.
The relationship of Ellington’s introduction to the piece, recycled and retitled for The Second Sacred Concert clearly derives from the theme of the morality play with music upon which he had worked a year earlier and may, in consequence, account for the ‘fire and brimstone’ in Ellington’s preamble
Like recurring motifs in a suite or symphony, these same images echo and re-echo throughout Ellington’s work. The image of the crossroads in The Jaywalker was incorporated one assumes by Barbara Waring rather than by Ellington himself. And yet, the traffic intersection was prefigured in a work which dates from at least two years earlier.
1965 saw the première of The Golden Broom and the Green Apple. The Poetic Commentary, present in a live performance of the work at The Hollywood Bowl (which may be listened to here) and the studio version recorded for Decca in 1970 with The Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra alludes to the theme of the traffic intersection. It also, perhaps unwittingly, contains one of Ellington’s most candid public statements:
“… We may find the symbol of ourselves in the very handsome traffic cop, flashing his reds, greens and ambers as he stomps his authority around the intersection when the paths of the beautiful, rich city witch with her golden broom and the poverty-strick country chick, with her green apple will sooner or later converge and the decision has to be made with only one ticket left in our book which of the two ladies gets the ticket. Now the reason that the handsome traffic cop’s book is so depleted and down to one ticket is that all the more desirable ladies prefer to commit their violations at his intersection.”
The most conspicuous use of the image of the intersection – which I’m sure Ellington would have had in mind when he was writing the commentary to The Golden Broom, occurs, of course, in the 1956 work A Drum Is A Woman.
In his narrative, and in listing the various accessories and accoutrements of the chief protagonist of the work, Madam Zajj, Ellington includes, “… the longest automobile you’ve ever seen, 88 cylinders came through town one night doing 440 miles per hour, stopped for a green light, cop came up and gave her a ticket and said, “Lady, that will be five dollars fine.” She gave him a ten dollar bill and while he was looking for change, the light changed and when she saw that red light, she blew her horn, pushed the throttle to the floor and said, “Keep the change officer, ’cause I’m coming back just as fast as I’m going.”
Pausing only momentarily to consider the delicious pun of “she blew her horn,” for a tone parallel to the history of jazz, we can say that like the “rich city witch”, “the poverty-strick country chick” and even “Pretty” (of Monologue: Pretty and the Wolf), Madame Zajj is a woman who generally exercised considerable agency over her own life. That may not have been quite as true for the real women in Ellington’s life who opted commit their violations at his intersection…
It is at this same figurative intersection and with the character of Madam Zajj in particular, however, that we can begin to look for Queenie Pie where there is considerable evidence, as we shall discover, that A Drum Is A Woman was the most direct influence at that time on the creation of Ellington’s street opera. Down at the end where all ends end just before the beginning…