Musics of The World and Ellington's 'Suites' 43865499

Tourist Point of View?
Musics of the World and Ellington's "Suites"

Author(s): Travis A. Jackson
Source: The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 96, No. 3/4, Duke Ellington (Fall-Winter 2013), pp. 513-
540
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43865499
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Tourist Point of View? Musics of the
World and Ellington's Suites
Travis A. Jackson
Up until the late 1980s, the critical and scholarly consensus on Duke
Ellington was largely that the composer's best work appeared before 1942.
In the time spanning Ellington's arrival in New York in 1923 and reaching
a putative apex approximately nineteen years later, two periods are the
basis of that consensus: the years Ellington spent developing his style at
the Cotton Club in Harlem in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and the
period from roughly 1940 to 1942 when the ensemble designated the
"Blanton- Webster Band" - named for bassist Jimmy Blanton and tenor
saxophonist Ben Webster - made a celebrated series of recordings for
Victor, recordings that also featured early contributions from composer
and arranger Billy Strayhorn. In the notes for the 1986 reissue of those
recordings, Mark Tucker wrote that they "represent the creative peak of a
developmental process that had begun over 20 years earlier. The pieces
they contain impress us today with their variety, imagination, and craft,
also with their maturity of conception."1 Those recordings and their pred-
ecessors also led Gunther Schuller to write, following Ellington's death in
1974, that the temporal constraints of the then-dominant commercial dis-
tribution medium, the 10-inch, 78-rpm disc, rather than being a hin-
drance, played an important role in making Ellington one of the United
States' greatest composers: "He took this restriction and turned it into a
virtue. He became the master in our time of the small form, the miniature,
the vignette, the cameo portrait. What Chopin's nocturnes and ballades
are to mid-nineteenth-century European music, Ellington's 'Mood Indigo'
and 'Cotton Tail' are to mid-twentieth-century Afro- American music."2
Schuller's praise here is measured, to be clear, for he aligns Ellington with
a nineteenth-century composer not generally recognized for skill in long-
form composition - arguably the sine qua non for classical composition in
that century - and his phrasing condemns by omission the various
"extended works" composed by Ellington, beginning in the 1930s and
appearing with greater regularity after 1943. 3
doi: 10. 1093/musqtl/gdt01 8 96:5 13 -540

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514 The Musical Quarterly
Despite sporadic praise for works like Harlem (1951), Such Sweet
Thunder (1957), or The Far East Suite (1966), commentators on
Ellington's longer pieces generally follow the contours traced in the recep-
tion of Black, Brown and Beige (1943), his first-large scale piece. Many of
BBB' s contemporary critics - who heard it only once, at its Carnegie Hall
premiere on Saturday, 23 January 1943 - felt that, lasting nearly fifty
minutes, it was simply too long. Some of them doubtless shared the
opinion of Paul Bowles, who wrote in the New York Herald-Tribune two
days later that the composition "contained enough bright ideas for several
short pieces," but that overall it was "formless and meaningless." On the
assumption that Ellington aspired to be a classical composer or that
European composers had created the only viable models for long-form
compositions, Bowles further argued, "The whole attempt to fuse jazz as a
form with art music should be discouraged. The two exist at such different
distance from the listener's faculties of comprehension that he cannot get
them both clearly into focus at the same time."4 Similarly, looking back at
Ellington's complete corpus of extended works from the vantage of the
late 1980s, Schuller averred with some regret that Ellington had never
developed the necessary skills for creating longer pieces:
On a small scale, his melodic and harmonic invention, as well as his use of
instrumental color, were often as brilliant as ever. But, as mentioned,
larger forms do require that thematic material be developed - in some way
or other. And here Ellington's lack of technique and formal skills hindered
him. He was content to repeat thematic material, mostly with only the
scantest of variations (or indeed none) , too frequently relying on endless
pedal points, on rambling piano interludes filled in by himself, and more
often than not simply breaking off arbitrarily, turning to entirely different
unrelated material. ... At best, themes and ideas simply succeeded each
other; rarely did one have that sense of inevitability which marks great art.5
The problem, as Schuller saw it, resulted partly from Ellington's experien-
ces "providing music for . . . tableaux and 'production numbers'" at the
Cotton Club. And, according to Schuller, because Ellington later worked
so frequently with tone poems or rhapsodic forms, "both relatively free-
structured forms to begin with and primarily determined by extra-musical
considerations (visual, literary, historical)," he was never able "to free
himself from the apparent need for musical pictorialism."6 That is, rather
than developing a musical style that might operate effectively independ-
ent of programmatic concerns or suggestive titles - like so-called absolute
music - Ellington relied on narratives to lend his longer pieces coherence.
In the years since Schuller's assessment was published, a number of
writers have tried to reposition Ellington's suites, agreeing only that they
Musics of the World and Ellington's Suites 515
have been poorly served by extant literature.7 In some cases, they have
argued that the analytic procedures and underlying assumptions of histori-
cal musicology and Western music theory need either to be modified or to
be jettisoned if Ellington's suites are to be appropriately analyzed. Edward
Green and Stefano Zenni, respectively, suggest modifications: the former
deploys the analytical conceit of the Grundgestalt , and the latter questions
how extensively pieces in the concert music canon exhibit the non-narra-
tive, inevitable coherence Ellington's pieces purportedly lack.8 Alongside
Zenni, but with a less specific music-analytic bent, the writers Graham
Lock, Kevin Gaines, George Burrows, and Harvey G. Cohen, among
others, recommend a jettisoning and a grounding of the composer's work
more firmly within the overlapping cultural, political, artistic, and intellec-
tual worlds of African Americans during the twentieth century.9 Like
music scholars Marcello Piras and Denise von Glahn and literature-
oriented scholars Theodore R. Hudson and Stephen M. Buhler, a third
group of writers comprises those who urge analysts to see Ellington's
pictorial and narrative conceits as the key to understanding the extended
works they accompany rather than as elements that symbolize the
composer's failure.10
Although my purpose in this essay is neither to evaluate those latter
strategies nor to adjudicate claims about Ellington's relative merits as a
composer of extended pieces, the questions that animate the strategies
and the claims recur in debates on the subset of Ellington's work that I
examine here: the suites he wrote, often with Billy Strayhorn, apparently
in response to his travels outside (and within) the United States from the
1950s until his death in 1973. Although these "travel suites," as Gary
Giddins terms them,11 are subject to the same kinds of criticisms as their
nontravel predecessors and contemporaries, they raise additional ques-
tions about how Ellington, Strayhorn, and the other members of the
ensemble confronted and were affected by the musics they heard and the
people they encountered - in Asia, the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa,
and Latin America. What effects did those encounters have on the work
that Ellington and Strayhorn produced? How might one characterize
Ellington and Strayhorn's ways of responding to and representing other
musical cultures? How do their representational strategies compare with
those of their contemporaries? And, ultimately, how might one best evalu-
ate and analyze those works?
The Ellington Style and the Suites

More than a century after his birth and nearly forty years after his death,
Ellington has been the subject of several biographical treatments, ranging
in style and approach from the historical and analytic to the polemic, from
the anecdotal to the meticulously detailed.12 The major facets of his life
and his compositional style have been so well documented that here it will
suffice to explore only a couple of elements of the latter, those that make
his compositions audibly distinctive across his fifty-year career. The first is
his ability to draw upon the skills and tonal personalities of - and write
specifically for - the members of his band. He called time and again on
the alto saxophone playing of Johnny Hodges, for example, whose breathy
portamento gave portions of "Come Sunday" (1943) and "Race" (1968),
for instance, a particular beauty and poignancy. Likewise, the low rumble
of Harry Carney's baritone saxophone is as indispensible an element in
the Ellington sound as the composer's harmonic sensibility, contributing
unmistakably to work in every phase of the composer's career - from "East
St. Louis Toodle-Oo" (1927) to "Ko-Ko" (1940), to "Tourist Point of
View" (1966). Likewise, Ellington repeatedly juxtaposed and combined
the tonal personalities of clarinetist and tenor saxophonist Jimmy
Hamilton and tenor saxophonist Paul Gonsalves during the 1950s and
1960s (as can be heard, for instance, in recorded and live versions of the
Juan Tizol composition "Perdido").13
The second, related element of the style of Ellington and longtime
collaborator Billy Strayhorn is their approach to timbre, tonality, harmony,
and form. Schuller, for example, observes that by the mid- 1930s,
Ellington had already moved beyond his contemporaries in terms of his
choice of sonorities and his voicings of chords - the "Ellington effect"
audible in the front-line trio on "Mood Indigo" (1930) - and had begun,
as early as 1926, to treat form and phrase lengths more elastically with
pieces like "Birmingham Breakdown."14 Although popular song and blues
forms remained common in his output, they were not formal designs he
employed slavishly or uncritically. In his analysis of the Libertan Suite ,
Marcello Piras observes that Ellington's use of dissonance also became
more systematic after the early period of his career. Piras notes that at
several points in the suite, Ellington distinguished simultaneous and
successive parts using different scalar configurations - whole tone and
octatonic, for example, alongside chromatically treated versions of the
major and minor modes - for featured musicians or in ensemble passages.
In addition, Piras describes how often, perhaps beginning with Black ,
Brown and Beige , Ellington distributed the constituent pitches of altered
sonorities - for example, a half-diminished chord with an added ninth
and/or an eleventh - among different instruments and sections to make
each chord both a timbrai and a harmonic event.15 And John Howland's
analyses of Black, Brown and Beige and Harlem, among other Ellington
extended works, clarify the degree to which Ellington's approach to
extended form was more complicated than an additive sequencing of

thirty-two-, sixteen-, twelve-, and eight-bar popular-song derived units.
Although there were certainly precedents for Ellington's formal designs
and his treatment of melodic material, the "motivic saturation" of the
former piece and the "integrated motivic technique" of the latter were
distinctive even among those producing symphonic jazz. Moreover,
Howland writes, Ellington's formal and motivic strategies were more
accurately described as extensions of the stylistic practices characteristic
of his recorded 10-inch miniatures than as his adaptation of other
musicians' techniques.16
These two elements - personalized composition and distinctive, if
not innovative, style - are foundational for understanding any of
Ellington's output. And they have particular relevance for assessing the
suites that Ellington wrote after (and sometimes during) the tours he and
his band took under the auspices of the U.S. State Department in the
1960s and early 1970s.17 On each of those trips, as well as those arranged
independently, Ellington and the members of his band had many experi-
ences that subtly modified their outlooks on various groups of people and
forced them to reflect on their own ways of being. In various printed
sources and interviews, the Ellingtonians speak fondly and sometimes not
so fondly of the sights, sounds, smells, foods, and peoples they encoun-
tered while journeying through India, Pakistan, Japan, Iraq, Iran, Turkey,
Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Australia, and other countries.18 However
illuminating it might be to focus on the moments of misrecognition
that these trips occasioned, it is far more interesting to explore how brief
and sustained moments of encounter with a wider world affected
Ellington's and Strayhorn's music making - that is, to examine whether
and how they transferred and transformed their "tourist" experiences
into music.
"Suspicion of Appropriation," Orientalism,

and Experimentation
Three of the clearest places to examine the process of transferrai and trans-
formation are the Far East Suite , Latin American Suite , and Afro-Eurasian
Eclipse . 19 In his own descriptions of the pieces and his compositional
process, Ellington claims that he was not attempting to imitate the different
musics he heard during the tours. Rather, his primary aim was to allow all of
the experiences he had - musical and nonmusical - to vaguely influence his
way of composing. Reflecting in 1971 on the 1963 tour that led to the Far
East Suite, Ellington told Stanley Dance in an interview on BBC Radio:
Every time you get to these places where the flavour is so strong like when
we were in India and the Far East and the Near East, these flavours are so
strong when you are there, and immediately after you leave you're afraid to
touch them because you're afraid that you'll duplicate. And so I would
rather stay away from [composing based on those experiences] for a couple
of months like we did with the Far East tour, and let it come out in my
own language rather than in the language I heard.20
Even for someone as advanced in his career as Ellington was (sixty-four at

the time of the tour) , his desire to write as himself and his anxiety regard-
ing imitation were both clear. Ellington's "suspicion of appropriation," as
Penny Von Eschen termed it, "was grounded in [his] resistance to being
defined and categorized by critics - a resistance that had long animated
[his] life and work. Writing about the tours, he . . . embraced the stance
of misrecognition, calling attention to his frequent lapses in understanding
as when in Bombay he had misunderstood the gesture for ' yes ' and pro-
ceeded to eat the worst thing on the menu for seven days in a row."21 His
more extensive 1964 comments on the same tour present a less charitable
picture than either Von Eschen or I acknowledged in 1999:
From my perspective, I think I have to be careful not to be influenced too

strongly by the music we heard, because there is a great sameness about it,
beginning in the Arabic countries and going through India all the way to
Ceylon [Sri Lanka]. There are many different kinds of drums, of course,
and many strange instruments, and in India and Ceylon they have about
ten scales, but the moment you become academic about it you are going to
fall into the trap of copying many other people who have tried to give a
reflection of the music. I don't think that is the smart thing to do. I would
rather give a reflection of the adventure itself, though that sameness of
sound may well creep into it. . . . So far as the rhythms are concerned, I
don't think there is anything new there. Other musicians who had been
there before us picked up on all of them. That's another reason why I
didn't want to get academic about it and copy down this rhythm or that
scale. It's more valuable to have absorbed it while there. You let it roll
around, undergo a chemical change, and then seep out on paper in a form
that will suit the musicians who are going to play it.22
Ellington again exhibits an implicit awareness of - or discomfort with -

the issues involved when musicians from the United States or Europe seek
to incorporate elements of world music into their work. Perhaps he
regarded as antiexemplars work by composers like Colin McPhee or Henry
Cowell or the kitschy exotica that was seemingly ubiquitous in the
English-speaking world of the 1950s and 1960s and might have repelled
any musician who wished to be taken seriously.23 In any case, one might
argue that, through his statements, Ellington questions whether acts of

musical appropriation might be more accurately described as either paying
homage to the appropriated musics or presenting exploitative, disrespect-
ful parodies of them. Exploring such questions for more recent performers
in Global Pop, Timothy D. Taylor argued that the apparently respectful
borrowings of Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel, and the Kronos Quartet from
various traditions have been complicated by "orientalizing" stereotypes of
non-Westerners, by the legacies of colonialism, and by the significantly .
greater access to power and capital enjoyed by American and European
musicians, especially those with broad institutional or cultural support.24
In this light, Ellington's statements might function as an implicit critique
of musicians who have indeed copied down scales and rhythms or brought
back instruments in order to "rejuvenate" their music with the "inherent
vitality" of musics from other cultures.25
It is not entirely clear, however, that Ellington's strategy of "being
influenced" would have been sufficient to differentiate him from less cir-
cumspect musicians. Writing about (white) American experimental musi-
cians in the concert music tradition, John Corbett observes that one
defining feature of their collective work after the Second World War was a
shift away from previously conventional concerns with "tone, dynamic
[sic] , rhythm, harmony, form and timbre" and toward the "process,
method, procedure, tools, framework, and even context" of music making.
That is, part of their strategy for differentiating themselves from nine-
teenth-century and early twentieth-century composers was to avoid using
them as direct models. Moreover, in his examination of the compositional
practices of Henry Cowell, John Cage, and Steve Reich, among others,
Corbett notes that those composers often took a similar approach where
musics from other cultures were concerned. He implicitly praises the
oblique, influence-over-imitation strategies of CowelPs early prepared
piano work for adaptation of East Asian techniques of playing stringed
instruments and John Cage's use of Buddhist philosophy rather than
Chinese musical instruments or sounds in his aleatory compositions. Both
strategies emerged from the composers' belief in their musical practice as a
metaphorically scientific and therefore "value-free" process of discovery,
focused less on extracting and refining sonic raw materials than on using
non-Western musics to provide "a mirror that allows Western music to
reconsider itself."26 Likewise, Steve Reich wanted to avoid direct quota-
tion, favoring the processes rather than the sonic substance of African and
Asian-derived musics; he preferred that "the non-Western influence [be]
there in the thinking, but not in the sound."27
In the end, however, Corbett admits that he cannot completely dif-
ferentiate the "contemporary Chinoiserie" he hears in CowelPs Persian Set ,
on the one hand, and mid-1950s world-music kitsch on the other from
what he labels as the "conceptual Orientalism" of (early) Cowell, Cage,
and Reich. The latter type, he argues, "is an oblique form of Orientalism,
not the direct incorporative or syncretic form to which the West is accus-
tomed. But it is still Orientalist"28 in that the composers are still working
extractively, but avoiding charges of theft or bad mimicry through separat-
ing concept from sound rather than the other way around. In other words,
rather than seeing East Asian, Indian, Indonesian, or African musics,
respectively, as complex systems that must be comprehended as histori-
cally contingent, ever-developing totalities, the composers regard them
reductively, often determining that whatever elements are most unlike
those with which they are familiar - philosophies, cyclical forms, proce-
dures for rhythmic layering, or the use of drones or cueing strategies - are
the most characteristic and/or usable elements. All else can be discarded.
As Corbett suggests, "Musical experimentation becomes metaphorical
microcolonialism."29
Such microcolonialism was not a unique feature of American experi-
mental composition in the twentieth century. Indeed, composers, classical
music scholars, and critics have been complicit in promulgating both
Chinoiserie and conceptual Orientalist approaches at least since the
seventeenth century, and their efforts resulted in the normalization of
such procedures and attitudes as a resource for later composers and per-
formers. In a book also covering literary and artistic Orientalisms, for
example, John M. MacKenzie chronicles a long history of composers and
performers "utilising Eastern instruments, tunes, or perceived melodic,
harmonic and rhythmic conventions!, mining] oriental history and fable
for programmatic ideas, opera or ballets [, and attempting] to create
Eastern colour by evoking places visited on journeys" in addition to
setting poems (in translation) to music and exploring refracted worldviews
and philosophies.30 By the early nineteenth century, the "Orient" came to
be generalized - that is, not confined to areas east of Europe - with "a
variety of internal as well as external Others" acting as subjects or sources
for European Orientalist composition, including Scotland for Beethoven,
Schubert, and Brahms with different pieces and Spain, Russia, Poland,
Hungary, and Czechoslovakia for others.31 MacKenzie's characterizations
resonate with those of Jonathan Bellman in The Exotic in Western Music .
Using "exotic" to cover the same practices as MacKenzie's "Orientalism"
encompasses, Bellman argues that for composers
musical exoticism is not equivalent to ethnomusicological verisimilitude,

to the foreign music in its true form. The exotic equation is a balance of
the familiar and unfamiliar: just enough "there" to spice the "here" but
remain comprehensible in making the point. . . . Exoticism is not about

the earnest study of foreign cultures: it is about drama, effect, and evoca-
tion. The listener is intrigued, hears something new and savory, but is not
aurally destabilized enough to feel uncomfortable.32
In that sense at least, Ellington's desire to be influenced sounds at once

less unique and less neutral His "stance of misrecognition" may thus be
read less charitably as an indifference toward learning about or respecting
the complexity of other musical cultures (or at least an unwillingness to
reveal how much he does know about them). When, for instance, he
writes of South Asian musical systems that they have "ten scales," how are
his readers to interpret that enumeration? Is ten too many? Or too few?
Either way, he seems glibly unconcerned - perhaps because of his desire
not to be academic - with expressing any knowledge of a system for
dealing with pitches that is much more complex than the word scale
would indicate.33 In his autobiography, published after both of the pre-
vious quotations, he reveals that at the very least he had the opportunity
to learn more about South Asian musics:
While in Delhi, we have a very special musical experience. We are invited

to the music department of the university, where they demonstrate all the
indigenous Indian instruments. . . . [And later,] in another part of the
university, they demonstrate some rarer instruments, and we learn a good
deal about the music itself. We are also given manuscripts, drums, a sitar,
and a tabla.34
Given that experience, his suggestion that there was a "sameness" about
the music he heard, even if his comment is applicable only to South Asia,
seems baffling. If he meant it more broadly, then when one considers the
places his group visited between 6 September and 22 November 1963
(when the assassination of John F. Kennedy forced the postponement of
concerts), it is even more difficult to believe that Ellington would describe
the musics they heard in Damascus, Amman, Kabul, New Delhi, Sri
Lanka, Tehran, Madras, Mumbai (Bombay), Baghdad, and Ankara in that
manner. For someone with the aural acuity that Ellington possessed not to
hear differences in musics in either case might be possible only if the com-
poser had no interest in listening attentively, if he were deliberately not lis-
tening, or if he were listening only for the unique elements. In fact, his
acknowledgment that he did not hear anything new rhythmically and that
other (Western) musicians had already been there and copied scales and
rhythms leaves open the possibility that he might have had less anxiety
about imitation had he been the first to "try to give a reflection of the
music."35
If one accepts these more complicated readings of Ellington's state-

ments, then a few central questions emerge in assessing these three suites
and Ellington's stance toward the musics of other cultures. In practice,
what is for Ellington the difference between imitation and influence, and
how does his way of differentiating the two differ from that of Orientalist
experimental composers? If both distinctions hold, how do Ellington's
compositional strategies mark his travel suites as influenced rather than
imitative? And finally, how well does his preference to write based on
influence help him to avoid the problems he feared might arise from
imitation?
Imitation, Influence, and Ellington's (Sound) World

Based on Ellington's comments, it seems that in the simplest sense,
musical imitation refers to those instances where one might seek, more or
less deliberately, to distill specific ways of using (audible) musical mateři-
als - pitch, harmony, rhythm, meter, and timbre, for example - to
re-create a specific style or to produce something that indexically points
toward that style. If Ellington and Strayhorn were, for example, to have
made a systematic study of Indian music with the aim of imitating it, one
might reasonably expect that they would have sought ways to adapt
drones, techniques of modal exploration and ornamentation, and perhaps
broader cosmological and spiritual principles to pieces like "Bluebird of
Delhi (Mynah)" or "Agra" from the Far East Suite . Musical influence, for
them, seems to work in a more subtle way. Rather than invoking other
musical traditions through imitation of specific sonic details, the musically
influenced work evokes those traditions in an already existing musical
style. Such influence, to be clear, is not so much a matter of incorporating
specific elements of Indian music into jazz as it is a matter of conjuring up
associations: Ellington and Strayhorn's evocation should sound less like
Indian music than it does like an idea of India presented in the familiar
Ellington style.36
The latter scenario seems to obtain where "Bluebird of Delhi" is con-
cerned. In examining, for instance, a representative gat, a composition in
the repertory of Hindustani (North Indian) classical music set in a partic-
ular raga , one might note several defining characteristics. Among them
would be reliance on a drone - sustaining at least a "tonic" pitch, though
often with an additional pitch (the perfect fifth, if present in the piece's
rãgay or mode, otherwise a fourth or seventh) - that would constantly
remind a knowledgeable listener of the tonal center of the rãga. Moreover,
one might also hear as definitive the manner in which the "melody" of the
ãlãpy the gať s unmetered opening section, would systematically explore
Musics of the World and Ellington s Suites 523
and develop certain pitches in the configuration of that rãga - starting an

octave or more below the central pitch and gradually moving higher to
pitches an octave or more above that central pitch. If we compare that
simplified description to the opening of "Bluebird of Delhi," some interest-
ing similarities might come to mind, but it would be difficult to describe
this piece as imitative of Indian musical practice.37 Although the pattern
played by the bassist at the beginning - primarily featuring open fifths -
might be described as drone-like, it clearly does not function in a manner
analogous to a drone whose constituent pitches do not change in the
course of a piece: the measure-to-measure alterations in the "Bluebird"
pattern make it instead a four-measure ostinato. Likewise, while one
might imagine correspondences between the ornaments of Jimmy
Hamilton's clarinet part and what one might hear in a gat, the differences
between them could not be more divergent. A Hindustani performer is
often engaged in an improvisational or quasi-improvisational exploration of
the pitches of his piece's rãga and the gaťs characteristic motions through
it, whereas Hamilton repeats and elaborates Ellington and Strayhorn's
written interpretation of birdsong heard in New Delhi. Even if Hamilton
were improvising, the rules governing his choices of pitches, rhythms, and
other performance nuances would be recognizable as jazz-derived, not
Indian classical music-derived.38
The fourth piece from the same suite presents a more complicated
example. Stanley Dance's original liner notes for The Far East Suite
describe the genesis of "Depk" thus, at points quoting Ellington: "Inspired
by a dance Ellington witnessed in the Near East, Depk brings a change of
pace and mood. 'It was a wonderful dance by six boys and six girls,' he
says, 'and I tried to get the cats in the band to do it. All I could remember
afterwards was the kick on the sixth beat.'" Ellington and his band likely
had their encounter with dabke on Sunday, 8 September 1963, right after
the tour began. At a party thrown in their honor, they presumably wit-
nessed an ensemble featuring seven male dancers (instead of six) and six
female dancers accompanied by five instrumentalists not mentioned in
the recollection in the recording's liner notes.39 On record, the piece
inspired by that encounter begins with a four-measure introduction played
by Ellington, bassist John Lamb, and drummer Rufus Jones. What follows
is essentially alternation between two units: (A) a ten-measure melody
with a sequentially varied motive and an occasional four-bar tag derived
from measures seven to ten of the melody; and (B) an eighteen-bar
passage with six three-measure units, each of which features an accent on
the second half note of the third bar. Listeners primed by having read the
liner notes might likely hear six cut-time pulses in each three-bar unit of
the B-section as indexing the steps of the dance Ellington and his band
Example 1 . "Depk" ( Far East Suite), mm. 29-31, Words and Music by Duke Ellington
and Billy Strayhorn. Copyright © 1967 Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC and Tempo
Music, Inc. in the USA. Copyright renewed. All rights on behalf of Sony/ATV Music
Publishing LLC administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC. All rights for Tempo
Music, Inc. and for the world outside the USA administered by Music Sales Corporation.
International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission of Hal
Leonard Corporation and Music Sales Corporation.
witnessed: a six-beat pattern with a pronounced accent on the final pulse.

The setting in the first of those units (see ex. 1) as well as each successive
unit is about as direct a reference he and Strayhorn might have inserted,
though the concomitant switch in harmonic rhythm and from phrases
with even numbers of bars to phrases with three might seem odd without
the dance to explain it musically.
Whether Ellington said more to Stanley Dance about the piece's
referent than what appears in the liner notes or whether he had more to
say about his encounter beyond a brief statement in his autobiography,40
he might have been even more technically taken with what he heard than
his published comments reveal. That is, though there is indeed a sixth-
beat emphasis in the dance that is depke , or dabke, the music to which one
does the dance has a different tactus , one that emphasizes duple metrical
organization - two (or four) beats for each three in the dance. In other
words, for a listener or event participant entrained to downbeats in the
accompanying eight-beat instrumental rhythmic cycle, the visual (and
perhaps aural) accent on a sixth beat in the dance - falling after the
Musics of the World and Ellington s Suites 525
Example 2. "Depk" (Far East Suite), mm. 85-87, Words and Music by Duke Ellington
and Billy Strayhorn. Copyright © 1967 Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC and Tempo
Music, Inc. in the USA. Copyright renewed. All rights on behalf of Sony/ATV Music
Publishing LLC administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC. All rights for Tempo
Music, Inc. and for the world outside the USA administered by Music Sales Corporation.
International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission of Hal
Leonard Corporation and Music Sales Corporation.
seventh beat in an eight-beat cycle - might indeed be the most memora-

ble thing for someone who has never seen the dance. The dancers appear
to be in phase but oddly out of synchrony with the musicians.41 Being able
to maintain the 3-to-2 tension between the dance and the music's pulse
groupings, respectively, is also one of the most difficult and enjoyable chal-
lenges for those who dance depke at weddings, parties, or in other social
settings.42
The seeming strangeness of Ellington and Strayhorn's setting of the
B section using three-measure units - rather than units comprising two
bars of 6/4 or four of 3/4 - makes notational sense when one reaches
measure 85 of the piece (see ex. 2), about one minute and thirty seconds
into the recording. At that point, one might hear that letting the dance
unfold over twelve quarter notes, grouped in twos, allows them - without
changing the notated tactus or having the ensemble play half-note
triplets - to present the 3:2 tension by having the ensemble accent the
first quarter-note pulse of the section and every third pulse for the
duration of the B unit. The result is a grouping dissonance, wherein it
5 26 The Musical Quarterly
seems as though the duple music of depke (now rendered as four

three-pulse beats) is in tension with the triple dance, whose other
appearances in the composition do not call the existing duple groupings
of the A units into question. From a contextual standpoint, this strategy
also perhaps finds Ellington and Strayhorn musically realizing an aspect of
depke in a manner that sits somewhere closer to imitation than influence.
In any event, what distinguishes the influenced work from its imita-
tive counterparts for Ellington is a consistently applied approach to com-
position, whether the basic materials involved come from trips to different
parts of the world, readings of Shakespeare plays, or suites by European
composers.43 As I noted earlier, one of Ellington's primary compositional
strategies was to write specifically for the members of his band. In doing
so, he kept their individual skills and abilities at the forefront of his think-
ing. In this respect, the degree to which features for Hodges, Hamilton,
Carney, Gonsalves, and Ashby appear in various sections of the three
suites under discussion is no accident. It is instead an extension of the
same strategy that Ellington had employed in composing or co-composing
his 10-inch miniatures. Thus, the individual parts of these world music-
influenced travel suites are as much - if not more - about expressing the
individual and collective identities of the Ellington orchestra as they are
about evoking certain places and experiences.
Indeed, a couple of facts about the composition of these suites throw
such issues into stark relief. The ballad "Isfahan" from the Far East Suite
had little to nothing to do with the tour that inspired the suited other sec-
tions. According to David Hajdu's biography of Billy Strayhorn, the tune
had been composed by Strayhorn long before the tour and, when recorded
in July 1963, had originally been titled "Elf." "Isfahan" might then be
more accurately described as a feature for Johnny Hodges that also
happens, via its title and its placement in the Far East Suite, to evoke the
Persian city.44 A compelling case might be made as well that the seed for
"Ad Lib on Nippon" was planted with the first performance of the Liberian
Suite in 1947. The opening, rising bass pattern of that suite's "Dance No.
5," as at least one commentator has noted, appears to have been recycled
and reconfigured in the rising fifths that open "Ad Lib on Nippon."45
Similarly, examination of the liner notes for A fro-Eurasian Eclipse and dis-
cographical sources indicate that "Acht O'Clock Rock" - one of its com-
ponent pieces - had been recorded twice before, on 1 1 July and 15
November 1967, more than two years prior to Ellington's hearing
Marshall McLuhan's prediction that the whole world was "going Oriental"
and that "no one will be able to retain his or her identity, not even the
Orientals" - the prediction that ostensibly inspired the composer's work
on the suite.46 On both of the earlier recordings, the arrangement is a
more or less straight rendition of a blues-based tune in the Ellington band

style, and the rock/soul arrangement in the suite, with an added
Hammond organ, is supposedly proof, in Stanley Dance's strained phrasing
from the LP's liner notes, of "how contemporary idioms leap borders.
Whether it was eight o'clock in Germany, Austria, or Switzerland was not
determined, but the point is the all-pervasiveness of rock." It might be
more accurate, then, to say that Ellington was not-so-subtly pushing lis-
teners to make a connection (but of what kind?) between the world's
going "Oriental" and losing its identity, and the world's going "rock."
"Isfahan," "Ad Lib on Nippon," and "Acht O'Clock Rock" bring up
another aspect of Ellington's compositional style: a penchant for continu-
ally reworking, revising, and reusing older material in new contexts and
situations. In that regard, Ellington and Strayhorn's working methods
were no different from those of other composers or songwriters (or anyone
who does creative work by contract) : when confronted by new challenges
or impending deadlines, they had a stock of ideas in reserve or already-
complete items that might be fitting despite their having been created
under other circumstances.47 Two of the pieces from 1957's Such Sweet
Thunder "Half the Fun" and "The Star-Crossed Lovers," for instance,
were originally recorded in 1956 with the titles "Lately" and "Pretty
Girl."48 Likewise, pieces that had little to do with the concentrated experi-
ences of the State Department-sponsored tours could easily be included
in the resultant suites if Ellington and Strayhorn so desired. Again,
without its title, "Isfahan" would simply be a ballad featuring Johnny
Hodges; and the opening motive of "Dance No. 5"/" Ad Lib on Nippon"
might call to mind the triumph of African-descended populations in the
United States and Liberia over adversity or "some cats in Tokyo who were
just too much" depending on the suite in which one heard it.49 Even the
reworking and subtle retitling of "Acht O'Clock Rock" (originally "Ocht
O'Clock Rock") perhaps signaled a punning transformation: from the
piece's original use, as a feature for Hodges and Cat Anderson, to a new
one, as part of a larger suite and as a feature for reedmen Harold Ashby
and Norris Turney.
That the travel suites are an extension of Ellington and Strayhorn's
typical practice rather than an attempt to re-create what they heard (or
something that sounds like what they heard) seems even clearer when one
considers the settings the two writers gave the suites' individual pieces.
The introductory, apparently "exotic"-sounding piece of the Far East
Suite, "Tourist Point of View," features dense, dissonant chords that have
counterparts in a number of other pieces composed by Ellington - e.g., in
the passage following rehearsal letter D in "Later," the second part of T he
Controversial Suite ,50 or in the opening of Ellington's score for the film
Anatomy of a Murder . That is, they feature dissonances that might be

described as systematic additions of tones a (major) seventh above chord
tones, distributed, as Piras has indicated, among the ensemble's different
instrumental personalities. The piece is, as Howland has observed more
generally, less beholden to conventional pop song forms than it is to a
more episodic, contingent kind of structuring featuring the alternation of
eight- and sixteen-measure units with occasional four-measure transi-
tional phrases. Each of the sixteen-measure units is an occasion for the
featured saxophonist, Paul Gonsalves, to elaborate Ellington's themes by
playing precomposed or contextually appropriate solo material.51 Likewise,
Ellington's clearly rhythm-and-blues influenced "Didjeridoo" from Afro-
Eurasian Eclipse uses Harry Carney's baritone saxophone to conjure associ-
ations with the Australian aboriginal instrument, but it does so, as in
"Acht O'Clock Rock," using the twelve-bar blues as its point of departure.
Though the arrangement occasionally features Carney sustaining shifting,
individual pitches, he never does so in the manner a didgeridoo player
might: using circular breathing, vocalizing, and various other means to
manipulate the timbre of an instrument generally capable of producing
only one pitch.52 In some ways, then, "Tourist Point of View" and
"Didjeridoo," like "Isfahan," again raise the question of whether individual
pieces would indeed conjure specific associations were their titles to be
changed or removed. Relatedly, they lend credence to the assertion that,
as with Ellington's spoken introduction to Afro-Eurasian Eclipse , the
pieces and titles might leave audiences wondering whether they are
"being put on."53
What these examples make clear is that the pieces in Ellington and
Strayhorn's travel suites, as Ellington suggested, emerge primarily from
using their normal working procedures and doing little to refer to what
they heard in any but the most superficial sense. Instead, they filtered
their varied experiences on the State Department tours into new composi-
tions, pieces that might have been written and have become part of the
Ellington band's book even if no tours had taken place. Ellington and
Strayhorn were composing as they always did - writing for the musicians
and using a stable but varied series of strategies and forms to communicate
their musical ideas.
As I suggested previously, even if Ellington and Strayhorn had suc-
ceeded in writing from influence, there was no guarantee that that strategy
would allow them to avoid the problems Ellington associated with imita-
tion. For individual pieces or complete suites to do the evocative work the
composers might have sometimes intended, they would have had to func-
tion like indexes in Peircian semiotic theory. That is, of the three sign
types Charles Sanders Peirce describes, the two most applicable in studies
Example 3 . "Tourist Point of View" ( Far East Suite), mm. 13-16, Words and Music by
Duke Ellington. Copyright © 1967 Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC. Copyright
renewed. All rights administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC. International
copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission of Hal Leonard
Corporation.
of musical signification are icons and indexes. Where the former resemble
or share defining characteristics with the objects to which they refer (and
thus might be most easily deployed for imitations), the latter work primar-
ily via associations that emerge from co-occurrences and might be arbi-
trary (and thus function more evocatively) : smoke acts as index for fire
because fires often create smoke, but the two are not the same, nor do
they share essential properties.54 Accordingly, if it is one's intention to
evoke something musically, there has to be some way for listeners to grasp
what is being evoked or how one thing points to another. Frequently, the
shortest route to ensuring listener comprehension is to resort to musical
conventions that signify particular kinds of "otherness" - as with the
selective and imitative orientalizing gestures that rendered "Turkish
music" in the key of C with rapid shifts between major and minor modes
in the early nineteenth century55 - or to give pieces titles that can do the
work of evocation.
For much of his career, Ellington had approached evocation, even in
shorter pieces, through "musical pictorialism" - using musical sounds to
capture or conjure people, objects, places, moods, and experiences.56 His
use of the words portrait and parallel in the titles or descriptions of many
such pieces point to their being indirect, intermedial renderings of their
subjects rather than directly iconic ones,57 and for people or places
without preexisting, commonly understood, and stable sonic referents,
such indexical or titular evocation might be the only possibility. For
musical styles or with places that already have established referents,
however, matters might be more complicated. Indeed, despite Ellington
and Strayhorn's considerable skill as composers and arrangers, they some-
times resorted to conventional orientalizing shortcuts instead of doing the
potentially more difficult work of evocation. In "Tourist Point of View,"
for instance, the baritone saxophone figure first played by Harry Carney in
mm. 13-16 (at 0:20), while evoking India, does so at least partially by
repeating what one might describe as stereotypical "Indian snake-
charmer" music, based on a diminished-scale formula (see ex. 3). 58 A
similar example comes from the early 1970s. By then, when the Latin
American Suite was recorded, the vogue for mambos, cha-chas, and the
bossa nova had subsided in the United States, though all three were famil-
iar enough to the general public to work as sonic shorthand for a vaguely
defined, slightly kitschy Latin America. In the liner notes for the suite,
Stanley Dance writes, " Eque has to do with Ellington's first crossing of the
Equator, an event that would stir the imagination even without the pre-
sentation of a commemorative document in elegant, courtly Spanish."
With that description in mind, perhaps Ellington's use of bossa nova
rhythms in "Eque," at least initially, does evoke crossing the Equator, but
it does so primarily through the association of Brazil with notions of what
is equatorially tropical. At the same time, that evocative correspondence
falters on linguistic and geographic terms: Portuguese is the nation's most
widely spoken language, and the Equator crosses Brazil at its northerly
extremes and the Tropic of Capricorn does the same in the south, where
both Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo are located, nearly 1,600 miles (or
more than 2,500 kilometers) from the Equator.59
For the most part, however, what Ellington and Strayhorn do in
these suites is to use their common fund of resources to communicate
their impressions, without resorting to sonic cliches. "Oclupaca," which
opens the Latin American Suite, is a case in point. Although its drum
pattern recalls some of Ellington's early "jungle" pieces like "The
Mooche," there is a sense in which, for someone who has read the liner
notes, it might capture the enjoyable experiences the band had in
Acapulco, some at the beach, others in a nearby bar.60 The piece is yet
another that, after a long introduction, uses twelve -bar blues form and fea-
tures the subtle writing for reeds and brass that had become an Ellington
trademark. In that sense, "Oclupaca" captures less the geography or char-
acter of Acapulco than, by association, the various pleasures the band
experienced while there. "Gong," from Afro-Eurasian Eclipse , has analo-
gous functions. It is, for me, one of the most effective sections of the suite,
not least for the vagueness of its reference. During the session, Stanley
Dance writes, Ellington asked the recording engineer whether there were
any Chinese gongs available for the band to play. And though the gongs,
which were overdubbed after other parts had been recorded, may conjure
associations with Cantonese opera performance or gamelan, Ellington
uses them to frame a piece that might be mildly evocative of "the East"
but is, after a brief introduction, yet another blues-based composition with
characteristically piquant dissonances.
The relative success of Ellington and Strayhorn's strategy of compos-
ing via influence, in the end, seems to rest most squarely on the work
done by the titles of individual pieces and their respective placement in
larger suites. Except for relatively isolated examples like the reference to
Musics of the World and Ellington's Suites 53 1
the 3:2 tension of dabke in "Depk" or the snake charmer motive in

"Tourist Point of View," Ellington and Strayhorn have left little direct evi-
dence to support charges that they engaged in the Orientalist, schizo-
phonic exploitation of the sonic and musical resources of other cultures
most famously criticized by Steven Feld.61 Their oblique strategy also
seems to differ from that of the conceptual Orientalists identified by John
Corbett in that they avoid adapting the philosophical, social, or ritual ele-
ments that are crucial to the formation and ongoing maintenance of other
traditions. Only through the widest leaps and with the most speculative
logic might one identify the kind of conceptual underpinning for what
Ellington and Strayhorn have done that obtains in work, for example, by
John Cage or Steve Reich.
In composing and arranging these suites, Ellington and Strayhorn's
modus operandi was the same as it ever was. They wrote for their musicians
and used the musical materials they had drawn upon for decades. Their
experiences on the State Department tours, rather than altering their
compositional style, gave them, if anything, vague inspiration and fleeting
impressions on which to base new work (or to revise older material). If
one takes seriously Ellington's explanations, often mediated by Stanley
Dance, these three suites are most successful when they do exactly what
Ellington intended: to present in musical form the wonder of all he experi-
enced. Whether their evocations are successful and on what terms,
however, is another question.
The answer to that question lies in how well these pieces and their
larger suites perform the indexical functions that evocation requires. If co-
occurrence or some other mechanism of repetition encourages sufficient
numbers of listeners or musicians over time to associate particular constel-
lations of sounds with specific ideas, places, or people, then those sounds
can be effectively evocative - in the same way that, for listeners in the
United States, Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth" (1967) in the
film Apocalypse Now (1979) could evoke not only the Vietnam era but
also the antiwar mood among different segments of the U.S. population
(despite the lyrics being about a street protest rather than the war) . That
kind of indexical principle is not operative in most of the pieces in these
suites. Or, more clearly, that principle was, at the time these pieces were
compiled as suites, more aspirational than actual, for there were no
indications - beyond titles and the sometimes not entirely plausible
explanations Ellington gave to Dance - that they relied on prior associa-
tions. Questions of musical, historical, or geographical accuracy alongside
those of convention, then, were less important than the possibility that,
on initial hearings and over time, these pieces might have come to evoke
other locales simply through their placement in the suites, as Anthony
Brown's Asian American Orchestra's recasting of the Far East Suite

perhaps indicates.62 Also over time, ironically, they might come to repre-
sent further additions to the toolbox of would-be Orientalists - imitative,
conceptualist, or otherwise.
In other words, influence and evocation allowed Ellington and
Strayhorn to do at least two things simultaneously. The first was to insu-
late themselves from criticisms regarding the accuracy or ethics of musical
borrowing. The second, more cynically, was to avoid their having to do
anything other than what they usually did, perhaps trusting that the
expressive power of their existing style could sustain any associations
arising from the titles, narratives, or contexts. Unlike the exoticists who
incorporated foreign musics into already existing styles, Ellington and
Strayhorn, keeping their audible and conceptual adaptations limited,
seemed mostly content to ignore even conventional ways of referring to
other cultures musically. Although they might have been tourists in addi-
tion to being cultural ambassadors as they traveled the world and pro-
duced albums "documenting" their experiences, they approached their
task unlike stereotypical tourists - neither with a shallow understanding
nor with an exploitative aim.
In that sense, how one evaluates these travel suites as evocations
returns us to the question of how one evaluates Ellington's suites more
generally. It may well be that the search for points of accuracy or compari-
son are as fruitless and misguided as the search for an uncritically vaunted
notion of coherence. These suites may, in the final instance, be judged
not through the two simplest answers to the question of whether they
work as music with or without narrative associations but on how willing
listeners, critics, and fans are to believe that they are evocative in some
way that matters to them or to believe that they have specifiable and
compelling relationships, whether iconic or indexical, to their referents.
Or, barring those options and given the possibility that Ellington and
Strayhorn might indeed have been putting everyone on even in titling
the suites, future assessments may rest on what they tell us about the
Ellington style rather than whether his point of view was indeed that of a
tourist. There, if anywhere, may be the place to search for coherence and
evocation.
Notes
Travis A. Jackson is an associate professor of Music and the Humanities at the University
of Chicago. He is also the author of Blowin the Blues A way: Performance and Meaning on
the New York Jazz Scene (2012), an ethnography focused on the differing social, cultural,
spiritual, and economic contexts surrounding straight-ahead jazz musicians' performance
and recording practices. His other writings include essays on jazz history and
historiography, intersections between jazz and poetry, the politics of punk, and popular
music and recording technology. He is currently conducting research for a monograph on
post-punk music, graphic design, and attitudes regarding race and empire in the United
Kingdom between 1977 and 1984. E-mail: travieso@uchicago.edu.
1. Duke Ellington, The Blanton-Webster Band , RCA/Bluebird 5659-2-RB, 1986 (orig.

rec. 1940-42), 3 CDs.
2. Gunther Schuller, "Ellington in the Pantheon," in The Duke Ellington Reader , ed.
Mark Tucker (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 415, originally published in
High Fidelity (November 1974), 63-64.
3. Ellington frequently used terms like "tone parallel" and "extended work" perhaps to
distinguish his compositions from other long-form pieces, such as those in the European
concert music tradition. For a discussion of the latter term's genesis and application by
Ellington, see John Howland, Ellington Uptown: Duke Ellington , James P. Johnson , and the
Birth of Concert Jazz (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 179-81.
4. Paul Bowles, "Duke Ellington in Recital for Russian War Relief," in Tucker, Duke
Ellington Reader , 166. Other contemporary reviews of Black , Brown and Beige , as well as
overviews from a greater historical distance can be found following the Bowles piece,
166-85. For a thoughtful and useful meditation on the varied responses to the piece, see
Scott De Veaux, "Black, Brown and Beige and the Critics," Black Music Research Journal 13,
no. 2 (1993): 125-46.
5. Gunther Schuller, The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz, 1 930- 1 945 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1989), 153. See also Max Harrison, "Reflections on Some of
Duke Ellington's Longer Works," in A Jazz Retrospect (Newton Abbot: David and
Charles, 1976), 121-28.
6. Schuller, Swing Era , 15 1 ; see also Gunther Schuller, Early Jazz • Its Roots and Musical
Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 348. For similar arguments,
though presented with less nuance or sympathy, see James Lincoln Collier, Duke Ellington
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 182-83; Terry Teachout, "(Over)Praising Duke
Ellington," Commentary , September 1996, 74-77. The latter piece stimulated a vigorous
response in the letters section of the next issue of the magazine: "Duke Ellington,"
Commentary, December 1996, 6-11. Months before, an essay by the same author on race and
jazz engendered a similar response; see Terry Teachout, "The Color of Jazz," Commentary ,
September 1995, 50-53; and "Race and Jazz," Commentary , January 1996, 13-21.
7. Brian Priestley and Alan Cohen's analysis of Black, Brown, and Beige is an often-
noted exception to that characterization. Brian Priestley and Alan Cohen, "Black, Brown
and Beige," in Tucker, Ellington Reader , 186-204, originally published in Composer 51
(Spring 1974): 33-37; 52 (Summer 1974): 29-32; and 53 (Winter 1974-75): 29-32.
8. Edward Green, "'It Don't Mean a Thing If Ain't Got That Grundgestalt!' - Ellington
from a Motivic Perspective," Jazz Perspectives 2 (2008): 215, 216, 223-24; Stefano Zenni,
"The Aesthetics of Ellington's Suites: The Case of Togo Brava" Black Music Research
Journal 21 (2001): 2, 4-5. Both essays make thoughtful arguments, but falter on underex-
amined assumptions. For the former, one might suggest that the problem, rather than
scholarly reliance on a nineteenth-century understanding of coherence, is uncritically
equating artistic greatness with coherence, however one defines the term. For the latter
essay, the distinction the author draws between literate and aural approaches leaves too
little room for the possibility that musicians might have both orientations simultaneously
or strategically rely on one or the other at particular moments.
9. Graham Lock, Blutopia : Visions of the Future and Revisions of the Past in the Work of
Sun Ra, Duke Ellington, and Anthony Braxton (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999),
105-41; Kevin Gaines, "Duke Ellington, Black, Brown, and Beige, and the Cultural
Politics of Race," in Music and the Racial Imagination , ed. Ronald M. Radano and Philip
V. Bohlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 585-602; George Burrows,
"Black, Brown and Beige and the Politics of Signifyin(g): Towards a Critical
Understanding of Duke Ellington," Jazz Research Journal 1 (2007): 45-71; Harvey
G. Cohen, "Duke Ellington and Black, Brown and Beige : The Composer as Historian at
Carnegie Hall," American Quarterly 56 (2004): 1003-34.
10. Marcello Piras, "Ellington Narratore di Storie: La Liberian Suite," in II Duca al

Conservatorio : Ommagio a Duke Ellington nel Centenario della Nascita , ed. Rodolfo Dini and
Massimo Mazzoni (Ancona: Instituto Gramsci Marche, 1999), 39-65; Theodore
R. Hudson, "Duke Ellington's Literary Sources," American Music 9 (1991): 20-42; Denise
von Glahn, The Sounds of Place: Music and the American Cultural Landscape (Boston:
Northeastern University Press, 2003), 142-60.
11. Gary Giddins, Visions of Jazz : The First Century (New York: Oxford University Press,
1998), 499.
12. Examples of historical and analytic work include Mark Tucker, "The Renaissance
Education of Duke Ellington," in Black Music in the Harlem Renaissance : A Collection of
Essays, ed. Samuel A. Floyd Jr. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990); Mark
Tucker, Ellington: The Early Years (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991); Ken
Rattenbury, Duke Ellington: Jazz Composer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); and
John Edward Hasse, Beyond Category: The Life and Genius of Duke Ellington (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1993). James Lincoln Collier's Duke Ellington alone can represent
polemic treatments of Ellington. The anecdotal work par excellence is perhaps Stanley
Dance, The World of Duke Ellington (New York: Scribner, 1970). Among detailed
accounts of Ellington's music making and daily life, some of the most notable are Klaus
Stratemann, Duke Ellington, Day by Day and Film by Film (Copenhagen: JazzMedia, 1992);
Jerry Valburn, Duke Ellington on Compact Disc: An Index and Text of the Recorded Work of
Duke Ellington on Compact Disc (Hicksville: Marlor Productions, 1993); W. E. Timner,
Ellingtonia: The Recorded Music of Duke Ellington and His Sidemen , 4th ed. (Lanham:
Scarecrow Press, 1996); Ken Vail, Duke's Diary, Part One: The Life of Duke Ellington,
1927-1950 (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2002); and Duke's Diary, Part Two : The Life of
Duke Ellington, 1950-1974 (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2002). There is also an emergent
body of work on Billy Strayhorn that, though not as exhaustive, is nonetheless illuminat-
ing. See, for example, Walter van de Leur, Something to Live For: The Music of Billy
Strayhorn (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
13. "Come Sunday" premiered at Ellington's 1943 Carnegie Hall Concert as part of
Black, Brown and Beige (The Duke Ellington Carnegie Hall Concerts, January 1 9 43 , Prestige
2PCD 34004-2, 1977 [orig. rec. 28 January 1943, Boston], 2 CDs). "Race" appeared in
several guises in The Degas Suite (The Private Collection, vol. 5: The Suites, New York 1968
and 1970, SAJA 7 91045-2, 1987 [orig. rec. 6 November 1968], CD). The best-known
version of "East St. Louis Toodle-oo" (rec. 19 December 1927, New York) can be found
on Early Ellington ( 1 927- 1 934) , BMG/Bluebird 6852-2-RB, 1989, CD, and "Ko-Ko"
appears on the Blanton-Webster Band release (cited in n. 1). Discographical information
for "Tourist Point of View" is the same as for the Far East Suite , indicated in n. 19. Among
the celebrated recordings of "Perdido" featuring Gonsalves and Hamilton are the one
included on Ellington Uptown (see n. 16) and another on The Great Pans Concert,
Atlantic 304-2, 1973 (orig. rec. 1,2, and 23 February 1963, Paris), LP.
14. Schuller, Early Jazz , 318-57, 46-157. Billy Strayhorn is credited with coining the
phrase the "Ellington effect" in 1952. In a Down Beat article, he was quoted as saying:
"Ellington plays the piano, but his real instrument is his band. Each member of his band is
to him a distinctive tone color and set of emotions, which he mixes with others equally
distinctive to produce a third thing, which I like to call the Ellington Effect. . . .
Sometimes this mixing happens on paper and frequently right on the bandstand. I have
often seen him exchange parts in the middle of a piece because the man and the part
weren't the same character." Billy Strayhorn, "The Ellington Effect," Down Beat , 5
November 1952, 2. "Mood Indigo" is available on Early Ellington .
15. Piras, "Ellington Narratore," 75, 77-78, 81.
16. Howland, Ellington Uptown , 184-99, 280-88, esp. Table 4.6 (188) and Table 6.2
(281). See also Mimi Clar, "The Style of Duke Ellington," Jazz Review 2, no. 3 (1959):
6-10; Tucker, The Early Years, 211-58. The first recorded version of Harlem can be
found on Ellington Uptown , Columbia/Legacy CK 87066, 2004 (orig. rec. 7 December
1951, New York).
17. Penny Von Eschen provides the most extensive discussion to date of Ellington's
involvement in the State Department's Cold War cultural diplomacy initiatives. See
Penny M. Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 121-47.
18. Dance, World of Ellington, 16-22, 268-81; Duke Ellington, Music Is My Mistress
(Garden City: Doubleday, 1973), 301-89; Stuart Nicholson, Reminiscing in Tempo:
A Portrait of Duke Ellington (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1999), 350-55,
384-85,389-90, 395-99.
19. Subsequent references to these pieces and their constituent parts will be to these
recorded versions: The Far East Suite, Bluebird/BMG 66551-2, 1995 (orig. rec. 19-21
December 1966, New York), CD; Latin American Suite , Fantasy 8419, 1970 (orig. rec. 5
November 1968, New York, and 7 January 1970, Las Vegas), LP; Afro-Eurasian Eclipse,
Fantasy OJCCD-645-2, 1991 (orig. rec. 17 February 1971, New York), CD.
20. Quoted in Nicholson, Reminiscing in Tempo, 397.
21. Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows up, 145. Von Eschen's comments came partly in
response to an earlier version of this essay. She and I did a joint presentation, titled
"Ellington Abroad: The Politics and Musicality of Black Worldliness," at Columbia
University's Center for Jazz Studies on 30 November 1999, about five months after I pre-
sented the first version of this essay at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation's symposium,
"Duke Ellington: The First 100 Years," in Lisbon, Portugal. The other presenters at that
event were Krin Gabbard, Robert G. O'Meally, Brian Priestley, and Mark Tucker.
22. Quoted from Dance, World of Ellington, 17-18, originally published as

"Orientations: Adventures in the Mid-East," Music Journal 22, no. 3 (March 1964):
34-36, 104.
23. For an overview of pop exotica, see Philip Hay ward, "The Cocktail Shift: Aligning
Musical Exotica," in Widening the Horizon: Exoticism in Post-War Popular Music, ed. Philip
Hayward (Sydney: John Libbey, 1999), 1-18. For more narrowly focused studies, see the
following essays in Widening the Horizon : Shuhei Hosokawa, "Martin Denny and the
Development of Musical Exotica," 72-93; Shuhei Hosokawa, "Soy Sauce Music:
Haruomi Hosono and Japanese Self-Orientalism," 1 14-44; Rebecca Leydon, "Utopias of
the Tropics: The Exotic Music of Les Baxter and Yma Sumac," 45-71. For a slightly dif-
ferent take, one that provocatively and compellingly applies such thinking to countercul-
tural expressions in the 1960s and beyond, see Phil Ford, "Taboo: Time and Belief in
Exotica," Representations 103 (2008): 107-35.
24. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978); Timothy D. Taylor, Gbbal
Pop : World Music, World Markets (New York: Routledge, 1997), esp. chaps. 1 and 2.
25. Taylor, Global Pop , 19-21. Included among those Ellington implicitly criticized
might be Dave Brubeck, whose 1958 album Jazz Impressions of Eurasia (Columbia CS
8508, 1958, orig. rec. 28 and 30 July and 23 August 1958, New York) featured more self-
conscious and literal attempts to build upon what he heard on his own State Department
tour that same year. Brubeck makes clear his own worries regarding imitation in the
album's liner notes: "I did not approach the writing of this album with the exactness of a
musicologist. Instead, as the title indicates, I tried to create an impression of a particular
locale by using some of the elements of their folk music within a jazz idiom." The album's
final track, "Calcutta Blues," nonetheless represented Brubeck's attempt to adapt Indian
rãgas in jazz composition and performance. See Peter Lavezzoli, The Dawn of Indian Music
in the West: Bhairavi (New York: Continuum, 2006), 296-97. When Ellington, a few
weeks into his Far East tour, was asked at a reception held by the Press Guild of India
whether he might do something similar, he replied: "I have nothing definite in mind. . . .
I prefer to absorb everything, to drink it all in, and then have it come back to me natu-
rally. I want it to be an internal process; I want it to be reflection and not refraction. Of
course, we have had the fascinating experience of hearing Indian music, of seeing your
instruments, of touching them, but I can't say to what extent I will use the ideas I have
picked up here. Actually, in jazz we do not even have instruments like yours which can
produce quarter tones." "Duke Ellington Honored at Press Guild Reception in Bombay,"
U.S. Information Service Bombay Special Release, 9 October 1963, Box 2, Folder 2,
Series 2 (Performances and Programs), Subseries 2 A (International Tours), Duke
Ellington Collection, Archives Center, National Museum of American History,
Smithsonian Institution (henceforth DEC).
26. John Corbett, "Experimental Oriental: New Music and Other Others," in Western
Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation and Appropriation in Music y ed. Georgina
Born and David Hesmondhalgh (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 165-66,
168-69.
27. Quoted in Corbett, "Experimental Oriental," 174.
28. Corbett, "Experimental Oriental," 171.
29. Corbett, "Experimental Oriental," 166. Discussing Charles Ives's quoting and adap-
tation of many different musical sources, Timothy D. Taylor writes, "These other musics
were simply 'material' to him, exchangeable, aestheticized bits, available to be appropri-
ated from other works into his own." Timothy D. Taylor, Beyond Exoticism: Western Music
and the World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 104.
30. John M. MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory, and the Arts (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1995), 139. The use of the word "Eastern" in this context
reinscribes an obvious and denotatively vague marker of European ethnocentrism. From

locations outside Western Europe, different relative designations would work better. Even
within Western Europe, the term can misleading: Turkey is more east-southeast than east
from most of Western Europe.
3 1 . MacKenzie, Orientalism, 147 -48.
32. Jonathan Bellman, "Introduction," in The Exotic in Western Music , ed. Jonathan
Bellman (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998), xii-xiii. Both MacKenzie's and
Bellman's statements confirm the accuracy of Born and Hesmondhalgh's characterization
of historical musicologists' general approach to Orientalism/musical exoticism. They
write: "There is no lack of studies of Western music's long history of borrowing from and
evoking non-Western cultures and musics. Commonly, however, the main analytical
issue has been the accuracy and authenticity of the appropriated material. Elsewhere, the
act of borrowing from other musical cultures has been portrayed as primarily an open-
minded and emphatic gesture of interest in and fascination with marginalized musics.
Such a perspective holds the danger of treating non-Western cultures purely as a resource
for the reinvigoration of Western culture." Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh,
"Introduction: On Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music," in Born and
Hesmondhalgh, Western Music and Its Others , 8.
33. It is entirely possible that Ellington was referring to the ten that in the Hindustani
(North Indian) system of raga classification. The inclusion of Sri Lanka in his statement,
however, confuses rather than clarifies matters, since Carnatic (South Indian) approaches
are more common there and Carnatic classification systems include many more than twelve
"scales."
34. Ellington, Music Is My Mistress , 3 1 2. It is unclear whether Ellington kept those

items and if so what he did with them. Moreover, although Ellington does not say specifi-
cally with whom he interacted at Delhi University, materials in the Duke Ellington
Collection at the Smithsonian indicate that, at the very least, Ellington met Dr. V. K.
Narayaa Menon, secretary of Sangeet Natak Akademi, and saw two films on Indian music
at a State Department briefing session on Sunday, 22 September 1963. At other unspecified
points, he might also have met the celebrated tabla player Chatur Lai, the Kathak dancer
Pandit Birju Maharaj, and the founding dean of Delhi University's Faculty of Music and
Fine Arts, Dr. R. L. Roy. See "Duke Ellington and His Orchestra, Briefing Session, Sunday,
September 22," Box 2, Folder 7, and "List of Individuals," Box 2, Folder 14, Series 2
(Performances and Programs), Subseries 2A (International Tours), DEC.
35. David Hadju also suggests, though without providing a source, that Ellington and
Strayhorn embarked on the tour "hoping to draw inspiration for a new suite." David
Hajdu, Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
1996), 230.
36. An analogy to wine-tasting might amplify the distinction. When one says that a partic-
ular wine has hints of cinnamon, almonds, or berries, "reflectively constru[ing]" an experi-
ence in Michael Silverstein's terms, it is clear that those items are not actually in the wine,
nor were they involved in the process of making it. Somehow the tasting of that wine can
evoke or bring to mind, "projectively construct," the aroma or taste of "what seems, merely,
to be 'there.'" Even (or especially) in the case of wine-tasting, however, other, decidedly
hierarchical social distinctions are also at work. See Michael Silverstein, "Old Wine, New
Ethnographic Lexicography," Annual Review of Anthropology 35 (2006): 484-85.
37. Indeed, the most consistent association the opening has for me is the image of large
animals trudging slowly in oppressive sunlight and desert heat in a cartoon or a
Hollywood film.
38. See George Ruckert and Richard Widdess, "Hindustani Raga," in The Garland
Encyclopedia of World Music , vol. 5: South Asia: The Indian Subcontinent , ed. Alison
Arnold (New York: Garland, 1999), 64-88, 188-95.
39. "Party for Duke Ellington and Orchestra at Home of Mr. and Mrs. John Tobler,"
Box 2, Folder 3, Series 2 (Performances and Programs), Subseries 2 A (International
Tours), DEC.
40. "The music of Jordan is haunting, formidable, beautiful, and compelling. It is here, I
think, that we learned to love the Depke dance. We have a wonderful visit in Amman."
Ellington, Music Is My Mistress , 303.
41. Here, I am reversing the terms used in an essay about (rhythmic) participatory dis-
crepancies in music. Steven Feld, "Aesthetics as konicity of Style (Uptown Title); or,
(Downtown Title) 'Lift-Up-Over Sounding': Getting into the Kaluli Groove," in Music
Grooves: Essays and Dialogues, ed. Charles Keil and Steven Feld (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1994), 109-50.
42. Recognizing the rhythmic relationship between the music and the dance, for some
listeners or dancers, might be complicated by the fact that the four-beat measures may
contain internal accents that do not coincide with the tactus - e.g., 3+3 + 2 eighth-note
groupings of percussion strokes. For more on the latter point and a more detailed discus-
sion of meter in dabke, see Shayna Mei Silverstein, "Mobilizing Bodies in Syria: Dabke,
Popular Culture, and the Politics of Belonging" (PhD dissertation, University of Chicago,
2012), 128-59.
43. The latter two references are to Ellington and Strayhorn's Such Sweet Thunder
(Columbia/Legacy CK 65568, 1999 [orig. rec. August 1956-May 1957, New York], CD)
and their adaptations of Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker Suite and Grieg's Peer Gynt, respec-
tively. The two adaptations can be found on The Ellington Suites , Columbia CK 46825,
1990, CD.
44. Hajdu, Lush Life , 234. The issues raised by what this particular piece might evoke
are complicated by and related to those regarding the status of "absolute music" and
musical meaning in discussions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century concert music. See
Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music , trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1989); Peter Kivy, Music Alone: Philosophical Reflections on
the Purely Musical Experience (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990); and Stephen
Davies, Musical Meaning and Expression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994) for differ-
ing examinations of these issues.
45. J. R. Taylor makes that observation in the notes to The Duke Ellington Carnegie Hall
Concerts , December 1947 album (Prestige 2PCD 24075-2, 1977 [orig. rec. 27 December
1947, New York], CD), which features the premiere public performance of the Liberian
Suite. The piece was recorded, interestingly enough, two days before its public premiere,
on 24 December 1947, and the resultant version was among the first 100 LPs Columbia
produced in the summer of 1948, with an unspecified "brassy passage" from the suite
(likely from "Dance No. 1") providing the LP's creators with material "to test the tracking
of the lightweight pickup arm" they had devised to deal with rapid, large changes in
dynamic levels. Gary Marmorstein, The Label: The Story of Columbia Records (New York:
Thunder's Mouth Press, 2007), 153-66.
46. For discographical information on "Acht O'Clock Rock," see Valburn, Ellington on
CD, 194. Ellington apparently heard McLuhan, in a televised interview on 31 December
1969, utter the words quoted here. Ellington, Music Is My Mistress, 203.
47. Cal Schenkel's sleeve for the Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention recording,
Burnt Weeny Sandwich (1970), furnishes a good example from the design world. Schenkel
originally devised the sleeve for an Eric Dolphy recording that was never released. Nick
de Ville, Album: Style and Image in Sleeve Design (London: Mitchell Beazley, 2003), 110.
48.-» Stephen M. Buhler, "Form and Character in Duke Ellington's and Billy Strayhorn's
Such Sweet Thunder ," Borrowers and Lenders : The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 1 ,
no. 1 (2005): 3.
49. The Liberian Suite explanation comes from Piras, "Ellington Narratore," 65, and the
Far East Suite gloss comes from the liner notes to the original release.
50. The Controversial Suite , Box 81 , Folders 11-13, Series la (Music Manuscripts),
DEC.
51. Beginning in the 1990s, a number of writers have highlighted the degree to which
Ellington and Strayhorn wrote out "solos" for featured musicians in the suites.
Comparison of the originally released take of "Tourist Point of View" with an earlier,
alternative take reveals that Gonsalves had considerable leeway in playing his part. For
more on "simulated" improvisation in Ellington's suites, see Wolfram Knauer, '"Simulated
Improvisation' in Duke Ellington's Black , Brown , and Beige" Black Perspective in Music 20
(1990): 21-38.
52. Alex Tarnopolsky et al., "The Vocal Tract and the Sound of a Didgeridoo," Nature
(July 2005): 39; Martin Thomas, "The Rush to Record: Transmitting the Sound of
Aboriginal Culture," Journal of Australian Studies 90 (2007): 107-21.
53. Stanley Dance, liner notes to Afro-Eurasian Eclipse.
54. Travis A. Jackson, "Spooning Good, Singing Gum: Meaning, Association and
Interpretation in Rock Music," Current Musicology 69 (2000): 21-22; Thomas Turino,
"Signs of Imagination, Identity, and Experience: A Peircian Semiotic Theory for Music,"
Ethnomusicobgy 43 (1999): 226-27 , 233; Richard Middleton, Studying Popular Music.
(Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1990), 220, 224-25.
55. MacKenzie, Orientalism, 142-43.
56. Tucker, The Early Years , 23 1 -58.
57. Brent Hayes Edwards, "The Literary Ellington," in Uptown Conversation: The New
Jazz Studies y ed. Robert G. O'Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards, and Farah Jasmine Griffin
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 336-38.
58. One might also speculate that the Paul Gonsalves solo that follows, and which
begins with a paraphrase of the snake-charmer figure, offers a signifying commentary on
such conventional exoticism.
59. Havana is roughly the same distance from the Equator.
60. Dance, World of Eüingtont 277 - 78.
61. Steven Feld, "From Schizophonia to Schismogenesis: On the Discourses and

Commodification Practices of 'World Music' and 'World Beat,'" in Keil and Feld, Music
Grooves , 257-90; Steven Feld, "The Poetics and Politics of Pygmy Pop," in Born and
Hesmondhalgh, Western Music and Its Others , 254-79.
62. Asian American Orchestra, Far East Suite , Asian Improv Records 0053, 1999 (rec.
31 March and 1 April 1999, Richmond, CA), CD. Mark Lommano's essay on Brown's
piece (as well as an adaptation by Tony Overwater) provides a thoughtful meditation on
how the Far East Suite and some of the issues it raises have traveled and themselves been
transformed over nearly five decades. Mark Lommano, "Ellington's Lens as Motive
Mediating: Improvising Voices in the Far East Suite ," Jazz Perspectives 6 (2012): 162-73.

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Tourist Point of View?

Musics of the World and Ellington's "Suites"

doi: 10. 1093/musqtl/gdt01 8 96:5 13 -540

The Ellington Style and the Suites

extended form was more complicated than an additive sequencing of

"Suspicion of Appropriation," Orientalism,

Even for someone as advanced in his career as Ellington was (sixty-four at

From my perspective, I think I have to be careful not to be influenced too

Ellington again exhibits an implicit awareness of - or discomfort with -

argue that, through his statements, Ellington questions whether acts of

musical exoticism is not equivalent to ethnomusicological verisimilitude,

remain comprehensible in making the point. . . . Exoticism is not about

In that sense at least, Ellington's desire to be influenced sounds at once

While in Delhi, we have a very special musical experience. We are invited

If one accepts these more complicated readings of Ellington's state-

Imitation, Influence, and Ellington's (Sound) World

and develop certain pitches in the configuration of that rãga - starting an

witnessed: a six-beat pattern with a pronounced accent on the final pulse.

seventh beat in an eight-beat cycle - might indeed be the most memora-

seems as though the duple music of depke (now rendered as four

more or less straight rendition of a blues-based tune in the Ellington band

Anatomy of a Murder . That is, they feature dissonances that might be

the 3:2 tension of dabke in "Depk" or the snake charmer motive in

Brown's Asian American Orchestra's recasting of the Far East Suite

1. Duke Ellington, The Blanton-Webster Band , RCA/Bluebird 5659-2-RB, 1986 (orig.

10. Marcello Piras, "Ellington Narratore di Storie: La Liberian Suite," in II Duca al

15. Piras, "Ellington Narratore," 75, 77-78, 81.

20. Quoted in Nicholson, Reminiscing in Tempo, 397.

22. Quoted from Dance, World of Ellington, 17-18, originally published as

27. Quoted in Corbett, "Experimental Oriental," 174.

28. Corbett, "Experimental Oriental," 171.

reinscribes an obvious and denotatively vague marker of European ethnocentrism. From

3 1 . MacKenzie, Orientalism, 147 -48.

34. Ellington, Music Is My Mistress , 3 1 2. It is unclear whether Ellington kept those

53. Stanley Dance, liner notes to Afro-Eurasian Eclipse.

55. MacKenzie, Orientalism, 142-43.

56. Tucker, The Early Years , 23 1 -58.

59. Havana is roughly the same distance from the Equator.

60. Dance, World of Eüingtont 277 - 78.

61. Steven Feld, "From Schizophonia to Schismogenesis: On the Discourses and

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