uTopianTurtleTop

EPISTEMOLOGICAL AND COSMOLOGICAL UNDERTONES OF SWING (Part 10 of Driving Down the Mountain with Ella and Friends)

The English composer Constant Lambert, writing in 1934 in his book “Music Ho!”: “The most irritating quality about the Vododeo-vo, poo-poop-a-doop school of jazz song is its hysterical emphasis on the fact that the singer is a jazz baby going crazy about jazz rhythms. . . . Folk songs do not inform us that it is great to be singing in 6/8 time, or that you won’t get your dairymaid until you have mastered the Dorian mode. . . . It is almost impossible to find a quick foxtrot, however, that does not inform us that it is in a particular variant of common time, and that it is very gay as a consequence. Martin Tupper, who claimed to be the first since King David to set words to a dance tune, has a heavy onus to bear if he is the father of the numerous technical songs such as ‘I’m going to Charleston, back to Charleston’, ‘Crazy Feet, I’ve got those Crazy Feet,’ and ‘I tell you Rhythm is the Thing, Rhythm is the Thing, Rhythm is the Thing of to-day.’ What should we think of a concert aria which kept harping on the fact that the singer’s mouth was open and that her vocal cords were in prime condition?”

*

One of my favorites of the swing era’s manifesto songs is Duke Ellington’s “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing” of 1932. Duke’s song, more ambitiously than any other manifesto song I can think of, equates the condition of meaningfulness with swinging. Not just, Roll Over, Beethoven -- the song says: Beethoven has no meaning if he doesn’t swing. Unintelligibility. Banishment.

*

The dogmatism of Ellington’s song gets an unexpected echo from American avant-garde minimalist La Monte Young. In an interview with British author and musician David Toop, published in Toop’s 1995 book “Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary Worlds,” Young said: “God created the body so that the soul could come to earth and study music so that it could have a better understanding of universal structure. Music can be a model for universal structure because we perceive sound as vibration and if you believe, as I do, that vibration is the key to universal structure you can understand why I make this statement.”

Young elaborated: “From the beginning of recorded time, people have always wanted to understand their relationship to universal structure and to time. Even in as simple a way as where do we come from, why are we here and where are we going? I point out that our entire concept of time is dependent on an understanding of periodicity. Time is depending on night and day, the periodic rotation of the planets, the stars, the periodic functions of our bodies and the seasons, all of these various periodic events, and without them we really have no concept of time. Time is really a very important aspect of universal structure.”

*

Young is saying, Ellington is right, because everything is dependent on swing. More affirmatively and explicitly than Ellington’s song, Young’s argument posits that everything swings.

*

Rhythm is the Thing, Rhythm is the Thing, Rhythm is the Thing.

*

(When I wrote in my post of Sunday, March 14, that Terry Riley and Steve Reich were the first classical composers since Debussy and Ravel to have an influence on pop songs, I neglected to include La Monte Young in the list. John Cale of the Velvet Underground played in Young’s band and imported Young’s conception of the drone into rock via such Velvet songs as “Heroin.” Riley played in Young’s band too, and Reich played in Riley’s, as did Jon Hassell. Tom Constanten, an early member of the Grateful Dead, played previously in Reich’s band. The minimalist moment.)

*

La Monte Young’s comments help me articulate what it is I hear in Ives’s polyrhythms (which I wrote about on March 15) and similar polyrhythms of Armstrong, Monk, Mingus, Kirk, Ornette, and Hassell (which I flailed at on January 30 and 31). Ives, Ornette, and Hassell explicitly produce music with non-periodic polyrhythms: polyrhythms that don’t link up in simple overlapping periods. African and Latin American polyrhythms tend to be variations of 4/4 over 3/4, where one measure of 3/4 being played by one player takes the same amount of time as a measure of 4/4 being played by another player. Ives’s polyrhythms in his Fourth Symphony usually require two or three conductors to delineate. Players like Armstrong, Monk, Mingus, and Kirk very occasionally suggest non-periodic polyrhythms through highly personal use of rubato and rhythmic obliquity and displacement in their solo improvisations over dance-related rhythm sections.

*

Young’s comments also articulate why this type of musical phenomenon excites me so. “Music can be a model for universal structure.” The word “model” is key. Not “metaphor,” which implies a verbal construct. A model to be experienced, with music being more explicitly body-ful experience than that of language.

*

My other favorite swing manifesto-song is “Vote For Mr. Rhythm,” which Ella Fitzgerald sang with her peerless ebullience as a member of Chick Webb’s Orchestra. “Vote for Mr. Rhythm / Let Freedom Ring! / Soon we’ll all be saying / Of thee I swing!”

*

Ella was, as her long-time producer wrote on the liner note to her summit album with Count Basie in 1964, the swingingest of swing singers. And -- the First Lady of Song, by acclamation, for decades, and without a presidential husband making her so. On her own terms.