Houston music lovers have rare chance to hear Duke Ellington’s ‘Nutcracker’ live
By the late 1950s, Duke Ellington’s career was back on track.
In his late fifties himself, the legendary composer, pianist and bandleader had seen his star wane some as bebop and its smaller-combo cousins (hard bop, cool jazz, etc.) supplanted big bands like his as the hip sounds of the moment. Crowds dwindled; gigs were harder to come by, forcing his orchestra into less-than-ideal venues like skating rinks; and his newer compositions failed to kindle the kind of spark “Sophisticated Lady” and “Mood Indigo” had decades before.
Then, on July 7, 1956, Ellington headlined the Newport Jazz Festival, closing out a weekend jammed with such luminaries as Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck, and many others.
The first set was largely unremarkable, with several band members allegedly either drunk, no-shows or both. In the second, however, the ensemble steadily built up a righteous head of steam, climaxing with saxophonist Paul Gonsalves’ frenzied ten-minute solo during “Diminuendo and Crescendo In Blue.”
The performance provoked “a near-riot in the audience,” producer Irving Townsend recalled many years later in The Atlantic. Indeed, one track on the corresponding live album on Columbia Records, “Ellington at Newport,” is entitled “Riot Prevention.” Released four months after the festival, the record stayed in the charts into the following summer and remains Ellington’s best-selling release.
Newport revived Ellington’s flagging career even sooner than that; the next month, he became one of only five jazz musicians ever to appear on the cover of Time magazine.
He wasted no time spending his newfound cultural capital over the next few years, either: developing the suite “A Drum Is a Woman” for television; composing “The Queen’s Suite” in honor of Queen Elizabeth II; appearing at the newly established Monterey Jazz Festival and returning to Newport, both in 1958; and composing the score for director Otto Preminger’s “Anatomy of a Murder.” His orchestra even gets a pinch of screen time in a scene set in a honky-tonk, where the Duke briefly shares the keyboard with star Jimmy Stewart.
Around this time, Ellington also tried something that seemed totally logical in some ways and revolutionary in others: exploring the intersection of jazz and classical music. For reasons unknown — although a possible hint lies in George Balanchine’s sensational New York City Ballet production, which almost immediately cemented Peter I. Tchaikovsky’s ballet as a bedrock American holiday tradition upon its 1954 premiere — he chose as his first test subject the Nutcracker Suite.
Ellington was definitely partial to suites, but the meeting between the two composers at Las Vegas’ Rivera Hotel, as described by Townsend in the 1960 Columbia recording’s liner notes, most assuredly never happened: Tchaikovsky died in 1893, six years before Ellington was born. Nevertheless, the kinship is obvious from the opening notes of the Overture onward, as are the invaluable contributions of Ellington’s right-hand man and arranger supreme, Billy Strayhorn.
A gifted composer in his own right (“Lush Life”) and one of the few openly gay Black men in the mid-century music industry, the usually reclusive Pittsburgh native shared equal billing with Ellington (and Tchaikovsky) on the Nutcracker album cover, which is only fitting as the arrangements are as intricate and imaginative as their Tchaikovsky counterparts: the fizzing chorus of reeds on “Toot Toot Tootie Toot” (“Dance of the Reed Pipes”); Booty Wood’s plungeraided trombone on “Sugar Rum Cherry” (“Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy”); and Russell Procope’s bamboo whistle on “Arabesque Cookie” (“Arabian Dance”), to name but a few examples. As you can see, even the titles have been appropriately “reorchestrated.”
Ellington and Strayhorn’s Nutcracker collaboration was well-received upon its release, but soon enough receded into the depths of the Duke’s prodigious catalog. Its profile has increased since the score was finally published in 2010, however, as more and more ensembles make it part of their holiday programming — as the Houston Symphony and conductor Gonzalo Farias will on Dec. 12, alternating selections from Tchaikovsky’s original suite with the Houston Jazz Orchestra’s Ellington/Strayhorn twists. Khambrel Marshall, KPRC’s widely admired soonto-retire meteorologist, will narrate.
As popular as Tchaikovsky’s original has grown, Ellington and Strayhorn’s is still fairly obscure (for now), so this concert represents a rare and welcome opportunity to hear both versions with fresh ears.
“The Ellington forces have proved once again that in any setting, this great band and its strong personality pervade all the music it plays,” Townsend’s 1960 liner notes conclude. “But that Tchaikovsky has also triumphed is an indication of the perennial strength of his music. As Duke commented, ‘That cat was it.’”