CHAPTER 12 | FOUR GIANTS OF EARLY JAZZ 301
compellingly, to and from the subconscious.” In Ellington’s view, musicians per-
formed their best for knowledgeable listeners—especially on those rare occa-
sions when “audience and performers are determined not to be outdone by the
other, and when both have appreciation and taste to match.”
But again, distinctive timbre—sometimes called “the Ellington effect”—was
Ellington’s trump card, making his band instantly recognizable and emotionally
potent. The chief architect of the Ellington effect as it emerged in “East St. Louis
Toodle-Oo,” a composition of the latter 1920s, was trumpeter Bubber Miley. Miley
had discovered that by buzzing his lips, gargling, and humming at the same time,
he could “growl” through his trumpet, a sound he shaped further with a plunger
mute for “wah-wah” effects. By combining this with a “pixie” mute in the bell of
the instrument, which added a pinched quality to the timbre, Miley achieved his
distinctive plunger-and-growl technique, an extension of King Oliver’s fasci-
nation with various muted timbres. “Tricky Sam” Nanton made the technique
equally effective on the trombone. Ellington loved this sound and maintained it
in his arsenal of effects after Miley left the band.
The plunger-and-growl sound is prominent in Black and Tan Fantasy (LG 12.5),
an Ellington composition from 1927. It begins with Miley’s tightly muted trum-
pet playing a paraphrase of “The Holy City,” an 1892 sacred song that was popu-
lar with vocal recitalists both black and white, here transformed into a doleful
lament over a twelve-bar blues progression in the minor mode. In complete con-
trast is the slinky major-mode strain that follows on alto sax, the quintessence
of urbane sophistication. Then comes a series of major-mode twelve-bar blues
choruses for Miley, Ellington, and Nanton, fi nishing up with a quotation from
Chopin’s “Funeral March.”
The combination of such disparate elements suggests that Ellington may
have had in mind a program: some extramusical content such as a story, picture,
or person that the music describes. Ellington wrote many programmatic pieces
throughout his career, sometimes describing the program explicitly, sometimes
not. Black and Tan Fantasy combines a religious song with the blues, and in that
sense crosses the boundary between sacred and secular. Because a “black and
tan” was a nightclub that catered to both black and white patrons, the title might
refer to crossing racial boundaries. Or, by combining colors and a
classical genre designation in the title, Ellington may be signify-
ing on Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, written three years earlier, a
piece that crosses the boundary between jazz and classical music
(see chapter 13). With nothing more to go on than a provocative
title and evocative music, attentive listeners are free to discover
their own meanings in Ellington’s richly textured composition.
The sound of plunger-and-growl was an important part of the
“jungle music” the band played to accompany the Cotton Club’s
exotic fl oor shows. In Concerto for Cootie (1940), written to show off
the talents of Miley’s replacement in the band, Cootie Williams,
the growl is liberated from the jungle and used as one of many
timbral qualities at Williams’s command. Ko-Ko, a minor-mode
blues number from the same year, opens with a menacing sound
built on the foundation of Harry Carney’s room-fi lling baritone
sax. Another kind of Ellington sound is heard in a family of piecesplunger-and-growlLG 12.5K On the road with
Ellington. Card players
in this candid railroad-
car shot include singer
Ivie Anderson, drummer
Sonny Greer, and Ellington
himself.172028_12_280-304_r3_ko.indd 301 23/01/13 8:41 PM