This music is the most important thing I've ever done or am likely to do. This is personal, not career. Now I can say out loud to all the world what I've been saying to myself for years on my knees.
- Duke Ellington (1899-1974)
Duke Ellington the jazz man is a world figure; Duke Ellington the churchman is almost unknown. Ellington the Elegant, the companion of kings and presidents, is familiar from the countless records, films, and photographs that document his glamorous life. Ellington the devout was shielded from public view.
Yet both Ellingtons were real - or rather, both were one very real man. Without making a show of the practice of religion, Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington was as sincere and committed in his religious beliefs as he was in his playing. And at the end of his life, in the last ten years, he was able to fuse these two forces in the forging of magnificent religious music - the three Sacred Concerts, which evidence a unique unity of jazz and devotion.
Audiences were surprised, to say the least, at this coupling. The thousands who jammed into churches around the world - San Francisco's Grace Cathedral, New York's St. John the Divine, London's Westminster Abbey, Paris' St. Sulpice, and dozens more - always did a double take at the sight of Ellington's classic "Big Band" clustered around the altar, with gospel choirs, singers, and even dancers!
Ellington knew, probably better than any of them, that religion and music - and especially religion and jazz - have a lot in common. The music that Ellington grew up with, the jazz he heard and played from his high school days to the end of his life, came out of the black religious experience. And by playing jazz in the cathedrals of the world, Ellington was only bringing it back home.
West African Origins
Jazz historians such as Lowell D. Holmes (see "The Origin of Jazz," THE WORLD & I, December 1986) have consistently pointed out some of the elements of West African music that came to Africa with the slaves of the 1800s and survive in jazz. West African music was quite different, in form and function, from its western counterpart. It was more social and religious, to begin with. And there was no separate "concert" tradition, with separate performers and audience; everyone was expected to join in, everyone learned the songs of the group, the songs that preserved their history, educated the young, and praised the gods. Naturally, this music was predominantly vocal, supported by a vigorous and varied drumming that combined three or four separate but simultaneous rhythms. This musical/social/religious experience was an intense one, often culminating in trance states in which the gods possessed the dancers, expressing themselves through the dancers' words and actions. Even today, in urban centers with large numbers of immigrants from Haiti, West African dances are preserved and performed in rituals that often lead to trance states.
Just as West African music differed in its social and religious aspects from that of Western Europe, it was also distinctive technically. The combining of separate rhythms was most striking and induced an
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