Duke Ellington - Reminiscing in Tempo vs George Gershwin - Rhapsody in Blue

The Gershwin is ofc rhythmic and exciting and has an unforgettable theme but the Ellington is pretty remarkable in terms of how much he gets out of pretty simple thematic material - mostly built out of a bluesy motive that is transposed, varied, layered in counterpoint, harmonized with dissonant extensions - it hits me on a deeper level.

RIB sounds like classical doing jazz (or pop doing classical doing jazz), the Ellington (new to me) sounds like swing going proto-third-stream. do they ever program this one at classical shows like they do Gershwin (or occasionally other Duke stuff)? idk how well it would work in that context

I like them both a lot but Duke wins, I think I could get a lot out of hearing this again

despite having heard both loads I still get the Gershwin mixed up with the Ravel piano concerto

I'd vote Duke Ellington without even thinking about it because I consider him a god. But tbh I've never listened to Reminiscing in Tempo before, although I'm straight off familar with classics like The Mooche and It Don't Mean a Thing. Anyway I'm glad I've spent some time with it because it is brilliant.

but I could imagine an attempt at a recital of R i T in a concert situation would be absolutely awful, even with the best intentions and finest musicians!

I remember that Treachout fella saying that Ellington was a procrastinator and generally needed a motivational nudge or two to get him to finish music projects on time. I can't understand how that could be true about someone who wrote and recorded such a huge body of music.

The one time I saw Reminiscing live, it was in a university concert hall with Eric Hofbauer's quintet doing it as well as an arrangement of Le Sacre du Printemps so I think the answer is kind of? It was good!

xp haha, yeah, the overarching thesis of Teachout's book is bizarre — that Ellington was essentially lazy and unable to get anything done ... like compared to who?! he definitely relied heavily on (and even stole from on occasion) his musicians, but his entire adult life was pretty much a constant swirl of creative activity.

Eric Hofbauer's version is interesting; it's part of a four-part series called "Prehistoric Jazz" that also includes interpretations of Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps, Ives' Three Places in New England, and Messiaen's Quatuor Pour la Fin du Temps. I recommend checking them all out.

Teachout’s book also called Ellington “a major composer, but not an influential one.”

It's funny; I read that book and didn't hate it as much as many other folks did, but that's just psychotic horseshit. No Ellington, no Mingus. Hell — no Ellington, no Cecil Taylor.

i didn't even hate it — lots of good info / research, etc. but teachout's attitude towards Ellington is really odd ...

And re Ellington being “lazy,” in addition to keeping his band on the road for 30-40 weeks a year for 50 years, Ellington managed to assemble a pretty hefty amount of new work, much/most of it brilliant. I don’t know how he had time to blink, much less sleep, much less allow himself any time to relax. Then there’s the famous story about how Nat Hentoff told Ellington, then in his late 60s, that he could probably retire on his ASCAP royalties. Ellington said, “Retire?! Retire to what?!”

when he puts out an album like New Orleans Suite in 1970, that it is someone still on the up, a creative force with a hunger etc, literally a few years before he dies.

I would put Creole Rhapsody above either of these.

Would vote Ellington if we were pitting their respective outputs against each other, but as far as this poll goes, it's Rhapsody in Blue for me, episodic fragments and all. Leonard Bernstein had this to say about it:

Rhapsody in Blue is not a real composition in the sense that whatever happens in it must seem inevitable, or even pretty inevitable. You can cut out parts of it without affecting the whole in any way except to make it shorter. You can remove any of these stuck-together sections and the piece still goes on as bravely as before. You can even interchange these sections with one another and no harm done. You can make cuts within a section, or add new cadenzas, or play it with any combination of instruments or on the piano alone; it can be a five-minute piece or a six-minute piece or a twelve-minute piece. And in fact all these things are being done to it every day. It's still the Rhapsody in Blue.

The same certainly cannot be said of 'Reminiscing in Tempo'.

Ha, yeah, that was among my reasons for voting Ellington.

I’ve never really liked Rhapsody in Blue that much. I mean I can’t say it’s bad, it certainly has memorable themes and some nice harmonies, but the “jazz” of it rings false.

The jazz in Rhapsody in Blue sounds odd because it comes at a particular moment - the first wave of jazz musicians in New York, mostly white people from New Orleans playing this hyperactive novelty music, is fading away. There are some great, proper jazz musicians recording by now - Clarence Williams, King Oliver - but they are still just emerging from the shadows of being backing bands for blues singers, and are not as culturally important as they would be in a few years. The strain of jazz most influential in Rhapsody in Blue is that of the band originally playing it - Paul Whiteman's orchestra, the most successful of a fair number of upworld dance bands who incorporated jazz elements from 1917 onwards. Some elements they would keep, blue notes and solos, some things they lost, most notably improvisation (even the ODJB planned their chaos carefully.) Rhapsody in Blue was part of a concert in which Whiteman's band demonstrated the supposed evolution of jazz from "primitive" to "sophisticated" - bearing this in mind, it is much better than it has any right to be.

If you want more contemporary context, my mix for 1924 has the two halves of the original recording of Rhapsody in Blue at either end, also a longer blog post about it - https://centuriesofsound.com/2020/05/04/1924/

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

That's fascinating background CaAL, and I hadn't been aware of it. I think that context explains very much how it feels and sounds to me, and fwiw I went back and listened to it for the first time in a long time and enjoyed it even less than I used to.

I guess the background makes it forgivable, but it also makes it more what it sounds like to me - an artifact of a very particular and brief moment in time, marred by certain racial and musical attitudes that, while progressive at the time, seem retrograde now. And at the same time a work that has a few iconic melodic moments sprinkled in, as it was written by a gifted and perhaps brilliant composer.

Yeah, in the OP, I was using "jazz" in the broad sense that it would have been used at the time. I did think it was interesting to compare attempts at 'serious' composition by these artists coming from different ends of 'jazz' (or American popular music) in the 20s and 30s. Thanks for expanding, CaAL.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Wow, nice