John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

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John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

By christopher coady
John Lewis and the
Challenge of “Real”
Black Music

Christopher Coady

University of Michigan Press

Ann Arbor
Copyright © by Christopher Coady 2016
All rights reserved

This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form
(beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and
except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publisher.

Published in the United States of America by the

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c Printed on acid-free paper
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A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

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Names: Coady, Christopher, 1980- author.
­
Title: John Lewis and the challenge of “real” black music / Christopher Coady.
Description: Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, [2016] |
Series: Jazz perspectives | Includes bibliographical references, filmography, and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016027223| ISBN 9780472053209 (pbk. : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9780472073207 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780472122264 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Lewis, John, 1920–2001—Criticism and interpretation. | Modern Jazz
­
­
Quartet. | Third stream (Music)—History and criticism. | Jazz—1941–1950—History and
­
­
­
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criticism. | Jazz—1951–1960—History and criticism. | Music and race—United States—
­
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History—20th century.
­
Classification: LCC ML410.L6245 C5 2016 | DDC 781.65092—dc23
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LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016027223
for Caitlin
 Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without the support of the follow-
ing people and organizations. First and foremost I would like to thank my
colleagues at the University of Sydney for their ongoing encouragement
and interest in this project and for contributing to what I see as the extraor-
dinary intellectual culture of the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. It is in
this environment that the core arguments of this book were forged and I
am grateful to all those who provided feedback during their formation. In
particular, I would like to thank Charles Fairchild of the University of Syd-
ney and Gabriel Solis of the University of Illinois for reading draft chapters
and offering advice that truly helped shape my thinking around such a
complicated topic. The manuscript has been greatly improved by their ad-
vice. Any deficiencies in the work that remain are well and truly of my own
making. I also extend thanks to my colleagues at the University of New
South Wales Dorottya Fabian and John Napier for helping set things off in
the right direction many years ago, as well as to Nicholas Gebhardt of Bir-
mingham City University and Walter Van de Leur of the University of
Amsterdam for advice provided during this project’s initial stages.
I am indebted to Christopher Hebert, editor-at-large for popular music
­
­
and jazz at the University of Michigan Press, for helping me navigate the
submission of my first monograph and the Sydney Conservatorium of Mu-
sic Research Unit for the award of an Early Career Researcher grant that
helped carve out the time necessary to finish this project. Throughout the
years I’ve spent working on this book, the collegiality and advice provided
by the Musicology Colloquium Series at the University of Sydney in Aus-
viii • Acknowledgments

tralia and the Rhythm Changes research conferences in Europe have helped
keep me both motivated and on track, and for this I am also thankful. Fi-
nally, I’m sure I cannot thank enough my family, friends, and wife, Caitlin,
for their patience and encouragement during several years in which writing
time invariably crept into the time we normally spend together. Their sup-
port is woven through every page that follows.

BUT NOT FOR ME (from “Girl Crazy”)

Music and Lyrics by GEORGE GERSHWIN and IRA GERSHWIN
© 1930 (Renewed) WB MUSIC CORP.
All Rights Reserved
Used By Permission of ALFRED MUSIC

Colombine
By John Lewis
Copyright (c) 1958 (Renewed 1986) by MJQ Music, Inc.
This arrangement Copyright (c) 2015 by MJQ Music, Inc.
All Rights Administered by Hal Leonard - Milwin Music Corp.
International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved
Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation

Concorde
By John Lewis
Copyright (c) 1955 (Renewed) by JATAP Publishing Co. (BMI)
Worldwide rights administered by Blue Parasol (BMI),
a Division of Helene Blue Musique Ltd.
Reprinted by permission
All rights reserved

Django
By John Lewis
Copyright (c) 1955 (Renewed 1983) by MJQ Music, Inc.
This arrangement Copyright (c) 2015 by MJQ Music, Inc.
All Rights Administered by Hal Leonard - Milwin Music Corp.
International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved
Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation
 Acknowledgments • ix

Fontessa
By John Lewis
Copyright (c) 1956 (Renewed 1984) by MJQ Music, Inc.
This arrangement Copyright (c) 2015 by MJQ Music, Inc.
All Rights Administered by Hal Leonard - Milwin Music Corp.
International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved
Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation

Harlequin
By John Lewis
Copyright (c) 1958 (Renewed 1986) by MJQ Music, Inc.
This arrangement Copyright (c) 2015 by MJQ Music, Inc.
All Rights Administered by Hal Leonard - Milwin Music Corp.
International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved
Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation

The Queen’s Fancy

By John Lewis
Copyright (c) 1954 (Renewed 1982) by MJQ Music, Inc.
This arrangement Copyright (c) 2015 by MJQ Music, Inc.
All Rights Administered by Hal Leonard - Milwin Music Corp.
International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved
Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation

Three Little Feelings

By John Lewis
Copyright (c) 1957 (Renewed 1985) by MJQ Music, Inc.
This arrangement Copyright (c) 2015 by MJQ Music, Inc.
All Rights Administered by Hal Leonard - Milwin Music Corp.
International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved
Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation

Sketch For Double Quartet

By John Lewis
Copyright (c) 1960 (Renewed 1988) by MJQ Music, Inc.
This arrangement Copyright (c) 2015 by MJQ Music, Inc.
All Rights Administered by Hal Leonard - Milwin Music Corp.
x • Acknowledgments

International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved

Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation

Versailles
By John Lewis
Copyright (c) 1956 (Renewed 1984) by MJQ Music, Inc.
This arrangement Copyright (c) 2015 by MJQ Music, Inc.
All Rights Administered by Hal Leonard - Milwin Music Corp.
International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved
Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation

Sections of this work have been published previously and appear here with
the following permissions:

Chapter 5 from: Coady, C. (2012). AfroModernist Subversion of Film Noir

Conventions in John Lewis’ Scores to Sait-on Jamais (1957) and Odds
Against Tomorrow (1959). Musicology Australia, 34(1), 1–31. Reprinted by
permission of the publisher (Taylor & Francis Ltd, http://www.tandfonline.
com).
 Contents

Introduction 1

1 • Branching Out: The Great Era of Venue Creation 24


2 • “Bearded Undertakers”: Rhythm and Reputation 60

3 • “Finesse, Precision, and Logic”: Musical Traditions

and the African American Elite 83

4 • Composition in Context: Lewis and the MJQ, 1952–62 114
­

5 • Lewis and Film Noir 156

6 • “Real” Black Music 172

Appendixes
Appendix A: Formal Outlines of Selected Works 185

Appendix B: Sait-on jamais (1957) Soundscape 201
­

Appendix C: Odds against Tomorrow (1959) Soundscape 207

Notes 213

Bibliography 219

Scores 231

Filmography 233

Index 235

 Introduction

In February 1957 the pianist and composer John Lewis sat down with
Nat Hentoff of Down Beat magazine to discuss, among other things,
the public perception of Lewis’s music. This was not the first time Hen-
toff had taken an interest in Lewis and his group the Modern Jazz
Quartet (MJQ). He had already published two Counterpoint columns
between December 1953* and January 1954 charting the extent of West-
ern art music influence on the MJQ’s inaugural LP for the record label
Prestige. In October 1954 he riffed on a similar theme about works per-
formed by the group at a Birdland concert in New York. These public
analyses of the group’s engagement with Western art music tropes were
undeniably supportive. Hentoff even went so far as to refer to the resul-
tant music as “the epitome of modern jazz” (1955b, 14). Yet by the time
of the 1957 interview, suspicion had begun to creep into the journalist’s
tone. Lewis was asked to respond to criticism that the MJQ “wasn’t
funky enough,” that it had “too limited a range of expression,” and that
it relied “too much on fugal structures.” A parallel line of questioning
emerged about why Lewis preferred to remain entirely in jazz—the
­
subtext being that his musical innovations seemed to indicate an inevi-
table genre shift. This part of the interview did not go particularly well.
In Hentoff ’s words, Lewis was “incredulous,” shooting back: “This is
where I have to be. . . . I have no desire to be any place else. There has
never been any question in my mind about it” (1957b, 15).
The central mystery of this interview—and the focus of this book—is
­
­
how we might reconcile such divergent interpretations of Lewis’s musical
2 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

trajectory. Indeed, from the very outset, Lewis’s participation in the New
York jazz scene was characterized by a unique approach to composition
that seemed to denote, more often than not, the influence of Western art
music. Replacing pianist Thelonious Monk in 1946, Lewis first gained
prominence as a pianist and arranger for Dizzy Gillespie’s big band. His
through-composed work “Tocatta for Trumpet” (1947), premiered by Gil-
­
lespie at a 1947 Carnegie Hall concert, stood in stark contrast to the group’s
riff-driven Afro-Cuban numbers and signaled Lewis’s arrival in the popular
­
­
press as “a man to be watched in the writing field” (Levin 1947, 1). His fol-
lowing collaboration with the Miles Davis Nonet between 1949 and 1950
on what would eventually be termed the Birth of the Cool recordings in
turn resulted in “modal harmony and polyphony” applied to the group in a
way that mimicked the conventions of French impressionism (Van de Leur
2001, 19). This outward-looking compositional style continued to drive
­
many of the works Lewis would write for his own group, the MJQ, begin-
ning in 1952. Within this collection, perhaps the most overt are the fugal
pieces “Vendome” (1952), “Concorde” (1955), and “Versailles” (1957).
Given such an apparent compositional bent, it is easy to understand
why Hentoff might have asked a question or two regarding genre affilia-
tion. Yet Lewis’s response to Hentoff ’s query not only refutes the sugges-
tion that Lewis may have been moving away from the jazz realm through
the composition of these syncretic works, it appears to put forth the idea
that even Lewis’s most Western-sounding pieces have the potential to be
­
read as genuine jazz products. The reader of the Down Beat piece is then
left to wonder, Is there, in fact, a way of hearing the critiqued works as
being grounded in the jazz tradition, as Lewis suggests? Or do these
works cross an essential sonic “line in the sand,” precluding them from a
jazz-oriented analysis?
­
To be clear, these are familiar questions in jazz discourse. Works from
the diverse oeuvres of Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, and Charles Mingus
(to name just the tip of the iceberg) have at one time or another been sub-
ject to criticism for straying too far from ingredients perceived as essential
to the jazz sound. Yet through careful study of the historical worlds from
which these works emerged, jazz scholars have come to an understanding
of their syncretic nature in terms of a musical strategy aimed at keeping
alive particular African American musical tropes in an environment hostile
 Introduction • 3

to their presence (see Howland 2009; Magee 2007; Porter 2002). The cul-
tural significance of Lewis’s music remains less certain. Certainly there is a
willingness in jazz discourse to view Lewis’s works as part of the modern
jazz movement of the 1950s (see, for example, Floyd 1995; Joyner 2000;
Lopes 2002), yet a spectrum of views persist regarding how we might best
interpret Lewis’s particular modernist bent. Is the fusion inherent in Lew-
is’s approach, for instance, an attempt to resolve in jazz “significant short-
comings in the eyes of the classical music community” ( Joyner 2000, 80)?
Or might it better be understood as an approach aimed at “rescu[ing] jazz
from the banality of the endless solo” (Balliett 1971, 161)? In turn, does
Lewis’s embrace of Western art music conventions work to assert “jazz as a
colorblind art,” as Paul Lopes suggests (2002, 255), or does such fusion pose
a “musical, social, and cultural threat to ‘real’ black music,” as others have
claimed (Floyd 1995, 167)?
This book aims to wrestle with and bring some measure of clarity to this
spectrum of ideas by, for the first time, unpacking Lewis’s music through the
lens of what Scott DeVeaux refers to as “moments of historical particularity”
(1991, 553). Writing in the 1990s, DeVeaux produced two groundbreaking
works of scholarship that threw into question traditional methods of jazz
analysis. The first of these, an article titled “Constructing the Jazz Tradition”
(1991), put forth the argument that the acceptance of jazz as art music in the
United States between 1940 and 1950 was inextricably linked to perceptions
of the music as being evolutionary in nature. Jazz scholars seeking to put forth
a taxonomy of the genre’s development, then, naturally did so in positivistic
terms, aligning their work with the disciplinary norms of 1950s musicology.
DeVeaux believes that continued reliance on such a methodology forced
oversimplifications and mythological constructs to develop in relation to the
stories told about the emergence of different jazz styles. His book The Birth of
Bebop, published in 1997, set out to rectify this issue by providing a more nu-
anced and historically informed reading of one of these movements. Over the
course of the work, DeVeaux demonstrates that commonplace readings of
bebop as a “revolutionary” musical response to the commercialization of
swing music could be challenged by linking the economic and social pres-
sures experienced by the movement’s practitioners with the musical and pro-
fessional decisions they made. By telling the story of bebop’s emergence
through an analysis of how musicians negotiated a morphing wartime and
4 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

postwar music industry, DeVeaux demonstrated that the “revolutionary” nar-

rative of bebop’s emergence was overstated, debunking one of the more pow-
erful myths of the jazz canon.
One goal of this book is to contextualize Lewis’s work in a similar vein.
To this end, it begins by detailing shifts in the jazz marketplace following
the 1940s big band decline and then surveys the ways in which New York
and West Coast musicians recruited and initiated new patrons in order to
maintain their livelihoods amid a changed professional landscape. One
particular strategy utilized in this context was a compositional approach
that managed to conjure European compositional conventions through the
innovative deployment of what have traditionally been perceived to be Af-
rican American vernacular tropes. The clearest example of this double-

­
voiced construct is the use of independent improvised counterpoint—a

­
defining element of traditional New Orleans jazz—as a way of meeting the
­
relevant polyphonic requirements of fugal episodes and expositions in
Lewis’s pieces “Vendome,” “Concorde,” and “Versailles,” although a pleth-
ora of additional compositional strategies similarly conceived can be iden-
tified both across Lewis’s oeuvre and in the works of his contemporaries
Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck, and Charles Mingus.
Yet unpacking Lewis’s engagement with Western art music constructs
exclusively within an economic frame effectively circumvents dealing with
some of the trickier aspects of Lewis’s character. After all, this was a man
who spoke fondly of his “classical” training as a child (“MJQ Views” 1987,
28), pursued a bachelor’s degree from the Manhattan School of Music de-
cades before the school had a jazz program (Lalo 1991, 22), often expressed
a fascination with the commedia dell’arte theatrical form (writing several
pieces inspired by its characters), and, during the second half of his career,
set about recording both Bach’s Goldberg Variations and his Well-Tempered
­
Clavier. While such interests undoubtedly positioned Lewis on the edge of
the jazz world, I argue in this book that they do not necessarily cast him
beyond the parameters of “‘real’ black music” when one considers the wider
African American musical world. Through a survey of middle- and upper-
­
­
class African American musical practices extending from the antebellum
era through the 1950s, I demonstrate how, for many African Americans,
Western art music lay at the center of their musical lives. The musical works
produced by this demographic—notably those of the spiritual arranger
­
 Introduction • 5

Robert Nathaniel Dett and the symphonic composer William Grant

Still—celebrate a history of African American experience in the United
­
States connected with folk practice yet simultaneously more expansive. The
politics driving such engagement were undoubtedly rooted in an assimila-
tionist goal, yet in the minds of many middle- and upper-class African

­
­
Americans during the 1940s and 1950s, they had clearly yielded something
different: a particular conception of being African American that over-
lapped but did not graph neatly onto identity constructs of the white hege-
mony. Reading Lewis’s music in relation to this mind-set enables a para-

­
digm shift to occur in which we are able to understand its European sound
in relation to a unique African American experience linked strongly to so-
cial class.
Still, even this approach can seem, at times, a little forced. Indeed, to
approach Lewis’s works as artifacts of a realized racial identity essentially
prioritizes race over other contributing factors in the development of his
unique aesthetic approach. In particular, focusing on racial identity issues
crowds out discussion of developments in jazz “thought” that worked to
obliterate claims of musical authenticity grounded in racial ideas—

­
paradigms that inevitably resulted in expanded parameters around what
jazz could potentially sound like. Some of the more liberal of these philoso-
phies developed overseas. In France following World War II, for example,
“skepticism towards . . . dogmatic or purist cultural criticism” very much
defined the intellectual landscape ( Jordan 2010, 236). But even in settings
like postwar Germany, where African American musical ability was still
harshly stereotyped, the desire of local musicians to participate in the pro-
duction of jazz led to an erosion of racial prerequisites and an expansion of
musical approaches to the form. Indeed, the expansiveness of European-
­
based jazz concepts after the war coupled with an ongoing European fasci-
nation with American jazz musicians seems to have paved the way for Lew-
is’s positive reception on the Continent. This reception in turn appears to
have affected both Lewis’s confidence in and his selection of artistic proj-
ects both at home and abroad during the late 1950s and early 1960s.
These three ways of thinking about Lewis’s music highlight for me
both the usefulness and the challenge of answering DeVeaux’s call to ex-
amine jazz music within “moments of historical particularity.” Indeed,
while such a methodology yields much useful data that informs our un-
6 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

derstanding of why Lewis may have composed the way he did, it fails to
give us a definitive answer to the question of intent. If anything, the more
one charts out the complexity of a historic moment, the harder it be-
comes to tell a story about that moment that might convincingly come
across as complete and absolute. In other words, the more paradoxes or
contradictions one reveals to a set of readers, the more difficult it be-
comes for both readers and author alike to settle on definitive meanings
related to the use of particular musical tropes or compositional devices.
From this viewpoint, my phrase “the challenge of ‘real’ black music”
might be best understood as speaking to the difficulty involved in telling
a story about an artist’s involvement with something that many people
experience as a very real thing but conceive of differently.
I have therefore focused mainly in this monograph on charting out how
Lewis’s works might have ticked the “authenticity” box for an array of dif-
ferent listeners, without attempting to distill any specific underlying truth
about their musical pedigree. Yet at the same time I do not shy away from
the fact that I am most interested in undertaking arguments that challenge
the idea that Lewis’s music somehow evinced an abdication of African
American identity. Given all of the stories we could potentially tell about
Lewis, it is particularly revealing to me that the dominant theme of his re-
ception history—as I chart out in chapter 2—is that of an abandonment of
­
­
African American culture. I believe such an understanding emerges from
the persistent tendency of the trade press to decipher and write about Afri-
can and African American music as inherently rhythmic, effusive, mystical,
and naïve. The analyses I provide throughout the second half of this book
seek to break free from such discourse by offering new ways of thinking
about what it might mean to produce music reflective of the African Amer-
ican experience once we’ve accepted that such an experience is in no way
monolithic.

Decoding the “Double-Voiced”: Minstrel Masks and Signifyin(g)

­
Although the central argument of this book is for a consideration of di-
versity within the African American cultural experience, there can be
little doubt that parallels between Lewis’s double-voiced approach and
­
 Introduction • 7

metatropes of African American artistic expression do exist. In particu-

lar, the playful reinvention of hegemonic conventions through the de-
ployment of polyphonic improvisation that I describe in relation to Lew-
is’s fugal works above can be linked in no uncertain terms to what many
have considered a preeminent preservation strategy within African
American culture—the “masking” of vernacular tropes. Houston Baker’s
­
Blues, Ideology and Afro-American Literature (1984) and Modernism and
­
the Harlem Renaissance (1987) detail similar practices in the literary and
discursive realms, documenting how African American spokesmen of the
late nineteenth century appropriated rhetorical devices from outside the
African American cultural set as a means of preserving the African Amer-
ican voice in an environment hostile to African American progress. Per-
haps the most well-known figure of Baker’s Modernism study is the some-
­
what controversial educator and civil rights champion Booker T.
Washington—a man whose life work is often summed up as equal parts
­
racial advancement (most visible in his involvement with the Tuskegee
Institute) and accommodation to white interests, evident in his Atlanta
Exposition (or Atlanta “Compromise”) speech and the self-deprecatory
­
tone of his autobiography Up from Slavery ([1901] 2010).
Baker’s analysis of Washington’s autobiography, however, argues for a
different conception of its supposedly accommodationist tone. Engaging
rather than pushing to the side the plethora of African American stereo-
types present in the work, Baker demonstrates how the offensive serves as a
veil or “minstrel mask” through which more radical agendas could be sub-
versively articulated to a resistant audience. Such stereotypes are not diffi-
cult to find in the work; Baker points, for example, to Washington’s story
about how his mother stole chickens as a slave and to Washington’s admis-
sion of the difficulties involved in explaining to a “heathen” people the ben-
efits of education (1987, 27–28)—conceptions of African American moral-
­
­
ity and intelligence not uncommon in the target audience for Washington’s
work. Yet Baker views the intent of these stories as going beyond increasing
the mere commercial palpability of Washington’s autobiography in white
circles. He views their inclusion as a necessary framing device through
which Washington is able to articulate conceptions of African American
identity unfamiliar to the white hegemony. By beginning with stereotypes
but then telling a story of advancement that frames white paternalism as a
8 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

central gear in the mechanics of racial uplift, Washington is able to make

something potentially threatening to white audiences—the intellectual

­
and political empowerment associated with the Tuskegee Institute, for
instance—into something unthreatening and apparently organic within
­
the ideology of white supremacy (Baker 1987, 33). In other words, Baker
endeavors to show that Washington and others adopted a conscious rhe-
torical approach in which they were ostensibly able to say two things at
once about African American identity.
The findings of Baker’s study can be seen to have had a dramatic impact
on the development of both African American literary and African Ameri-
can musical theory in the following years. In particular, Baker’s findings
form the foundation of Henry Louis Gates’s (1988) theory of African
American literary criticism and his promotion of the “Signifyin(g)” rhe-
torical trope as a primary lens for reading African American cultural pro-
duction.1 Signifyin(g), in Gates’s study, refers to a mode of vernacular dis-
course long acknowledged by African American sociologists and linguists
in which multiple semantic relationships emerge through the playful de-
ployment of seemingly unrelated terms (1988, 49–52). Simply put, as with
­
Baker’s theory, it is the act of saying one thing and meaning another, usually
in a humorous way, and while many have pointed out that such semantic
play is not unique to African American discourse (Myers 1990; Fenster-
maker 2008), Gates (1988, 21) does convincingly demonstrate its dominant
function in the myths and storytelling of the African diaspora.
As a result, both Baker and Gates were used as central theorists through-
out the early 1990s in a body of cross-disciplinary scholarship aimed at il-
­
luminating syncretic strategies employed to political and social ends across
the spectrum of African American expressive culture (Murphy 1990; Tom-
linson 1991; Brackett 1992; Walser 1993; Floyd 1995). In the musical realm,
this “masking” principle proved particularly influential in the reassessment
of dismissed syncretic works produced by African American artists. In-
deed, it forms the primary analytical lens of Samuel Floyd’s The Power of
Black Music (1995), in which African American orchestral composers such
as William Grant Still and Robert Nathaniel Dett are rehabilitated as gen-
uine crafters of African American cultural products through the revelation
of their “double-voiced” strategies.2 This approach, according to Floyd, im-
­
bued works with the “semantic value” of both African American and Euro-
 Introduction • 9

pean musical traditions—but realized a more Afrocentric political aim in

­
its expansion of the African American voice into nominally white spaces,
such as the concert hall (1995, 110).
In recent years, similar applications of the Baker- Gates paradigm have

­
taken on new life in the analysis of symphonic pieces written by Duke El-
lington (Burrows 2007; Howland 2009) and assessments of the disparate
oeuvre of Miles Davis (Magee 2007). These studies demonstrate how com-
positional elements once viewed as working against vernacular elements in
jazz can alternatively be understood as providing a platform for their pro-
motion. Within this set of analyses, the accounts of George Burrows and
John Howland prove most convincing, as they take the additional step of
detailing the historically specific social and economic pressures that led to
the use of a “masking” approach in Ellington’s pieces. In both investiga-
tions, attitudes regarding the social value of jazz are shown to have stymied
broad promotion of the music, and Ellington’s symphonic approach is
framed as an initiative aimed at winning over a reluctant demographic. In
the view of Burrows and Howland, the strength of the Ellington enterprise
across diverse quarters of the music industry during the 1940s and 1950s
stands, in part, as a testament to the effectiveness of this strategy.
Given this current state of play, a Signifyin(g) or “masking” analysis of
John Lewis’s music certainly seems overdue. The MJQ recording of the “La
Ronde Suite” in 1955, for instance, shouts out to Europe in its title and mul-
timovement structure. Contrapuntal interplay drawing heavily on the
composed theme weaves a thread through each individual movement, and
Lewis’s planing of coloristic chords at the end of the first is hard to read as
anything but a direct reference to French impressionism. Yet these move-
ments are simultaneously filled with improvisation, each serving as a show-
case for a particular instrument in the quartet. In turn, the content of these
improvisations is unambiguously “bluesy”—they are chock full of pendu-
­
lar thirds, flat sevenths, and flat fifths, and each movement contains an
open passage based on a twelve-bar blues form. When we then shift our
­
focus from the sonorities of the work to its historic context, we can in turn
see a set of circumstances that seem to confirm the political aims of the
“masking” approach. Specifically, the work was recorded while Lewis was
embarking on a quest to find new venues and new audiences for his music.
He had formed the Modern Jazz Society in New York in 1955 and had ac-
10 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

tively reached out to patrons of “modern music” by including in his first

program Luigi Nono’s Polifonica, Monodia, Ritmica. Lewis was also poised
to bring the MJQ to Europe for the first time, a successful economic en-
deavor that many have made sense of in terms of the fusion of musical aes-
thetics outlined above.3
Baker’s “masking” concept helps us read this interplay of context and
sound within a “jazz” rather than a “classical” music framework. In other
words, instead of seeing a work like the “La Ronde Suite” as evidence of
Lewis stepping toward Western art music, we can conceive of it as operat-
ing in the interest of jazz by opening up new markets and providing a path-
way toward jazz appreciation for new consumers. It might even be seen in
this light as a didactic work, in that it teaches appreciation for jazz by elid-
ing contrapuntal and formal concepts from two different musical cultures.
Such an understanding appears to reconcile the paradox of Lewis’s orienta-
tion outlined in the opening pages of this book while carving out a space
for it in the body of “‘real’ black music.”

Heritage, Class, and the Idea of the “Negro Gentleman”

Or not. Certainly this would have been an easier book to write if all of John
Lewis’s syncretic works could be explained away in such terms—if his work
­
could somehow be reconceptualized in toto under the banners of
“Signifyin(g)” or the “minstrel mask.” Yet the way Western art music tends
to be valued in double-voiced analyses—as a vehicle suitable for the deliv-
­
­
ery of vernacular tropes only—does not seem to fit with what we know
­
about Lewis’s interests in and appreciation of the European cultural prod-
ucts that I described earlier.
Many have interpreted such interests as indicative of what jazz critic Bill
Coss referred to as a “sociological trend” during the 1950s (1956, 50). Be-
lievers in this trend saw African American involvement with what were tra-
ditionally held to be European cultural forms as a purposeful assimilation
project in which participants moved away from their folk roots and into a
sort of amorphous white American cultural milieu. The terms “black bour-
geoisie” (Frazier 1957) and “black Anglo-Saxons” (Hare 1965) were intro-
­
duced during this period by sociologists E. Franklin Frazier and Nathan
 Introduction • 11

Hare as a way of encapsulating the economic, political, and identity issues

tied up in what they viewed as increasing mimicry of white society among
African Americans. Yet others, particularly those driving commentary in
the African American newspapers the Chicago Defender and the New York
Age, held an opposing view on the nature of what appeared to Frazier and
Hare as blatant cultural abandonment. In the eyes of this group, the phe-
nomenon of the “black bourgeoisie” was evidence not of a rejection but of
a recommitment to African American values. As the editors of the New
York Age put it, it demonstrated the resilient “heritage” of what they termed
the “Negro gentleman” (“These Two Leave” 1953, 10). Unsurprisingly, when
it came to assessments of Lewis’s interests in European cultural products,
the idea that Lewis was actively abandoning his cultural “heritage” failed to
hold water with members of this camp, and it was in their publications that
he was loudly applauded for taking “jazz out of the ‘type’ category and
set[ting] it into international orbiting” (Pulley 1960, A17).
One way we can understand how such different views about the possi-
bilities or limits of African American identity could emerge so forcefully in
the 1950s is to break down the notion that the social experience of African
Americans throughout the history of the United States has been somehow
entirely uniform. In many ways, despite its combative tone, the first half of
Frazier’s The Black Bourgeoisie provides us the tools to start such a project
in that it details what at the time was a largely under-researched topic in
­
American history—the cultural legacy of wealthy African American fami-
­
lies. Frazier notes that many in this elite class could trace their lineage to
African Americans who “were free before the Civil War, or those who had
enjoyed the advantages of having served in the houses of their masters” and
places this group’s assimilation of traditions practiced by the “slaveholding
aristocracy” front and center in discussions of how members of the elite
maintained their (albeit limited) political power (1957, 112–14). Frazier
­
loosely defines these traditions as the celebration of European literature
and music, affiliation with the “Episcopal, Congregational, Presbyterian,
and . . . Catholic Churches,” the use of a particular set of social codes (what
Frazier calls “manners”), and the valuation of a “professional education”
(1957, 113–15). Yet while Frazier notes that economic and political integra-
­
tion correlated to some degree with the cooptation of these practices, he
points out that social integration remained perpetually elusive for the Afri-
12 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

can American elite. Such a state of affairs had the ironic result of causing
the “African-American aristocracy” (as Frazier sometimes refers to it) to

­
become an increasingly insulated social group, cordoned off from both
lower-class African Americans as well as from the wealthy white classes
­
whose traditions they had borrowed (1957, 113–14).

­
This isolation allowed the adopted traditions of the “slaveholding aris-
tocracy” to take on new meaning for many in the elite class and for those
who would later aspire to its ranks via education and the accumulation of
capital. Davarian Baldwin’s work on the great migration in Chicago is par-
ticularly enlightening in this regard. He describes the manner in which val-
ues linked to Frazier’s “genteel” tradition, such as “temperance, bodily re-
straint, and functional modesty in dress,” coalesced into an ideology of
African American identity held by upper-class African Americans during
­
the 1920s. Initially, those who promoted this identity publicly did so as a
way of presenting a “unified and positive public image of the [African
American] race [in order] to counteract the cultural assumptions of white
supremacy” (Baldwin 2007, 29). In her study of women activists in the
black Baptist Church at the turn of the century, Evelyn Brooks Higginbo-
tham points to a similar phenomenon and coins the term “the politics of
respectability” as a way of explaining the pursuit of racial uplift via the
adoption of hegemonic behavior (1993, 188). As the mouthpiece of the Af-
rican American elite, urban African American newspapers in turn fre-
quently endorsed such respectability politics by making comparisons be-
tween the “white” world and the accomplishments of the African American
world as a way of demonstrating the facts of racial equality.4 Yet these com-
parisons were almost always caged in the language of competing spheres. In
other words, even though the sort of cultural development prized by the
African American elite ran a parallel course to what they viewed as “white”
cultural development, the reality of segregation made it difficult for those
thinking about these issues to discuss them in unified terms.
Thus the framing of African American “genteel” behavior as a cultural
project separate from other cultural changes occurring in the United States
allowed it to garner the weight of a bona-fide African American tradi-
­
tion—a concept frequently articulated in the pages of the African Ameri-
­
can press during the 1940s and 1950s. Publications such as the Chicago De-
fender, the New York Age, the Pittsburgh Courier, and the Cleveland Gazette,
 Introduction • 13

among other African American newspapers, routinely presented features

and editorials that either implicitly or explicitly lay claim to refinement,
artistic sensibility, Christian morality, and education as part of what they
viewed as an African American cultural legacy. As consumerism and liber-
alism in turn became increasingly part of the ether of white middle-class

­
America (a societal change charted deftly in Elizabeth Fraterrigo’s Playboy
and the Making of the Good Life in Modern America [2009]), these media
outlets used this legacy to articulate what they saw as a growing rift be-
tween the values of AfroAmerica and the American cultural mainstream.
Therefore, from the perspective of the African American elite, the oft-

­
cited formal behavior and dress of the Modern Jazz Quartet—along with

­
the group’s apparent interest in Western art music—did not signal, as it

­
did to Coss (1956), a move away from African American culture. To the
contrary, it appeared to be the realization of a long-awaited style of jazz

­
that could effectively showcase folk elements while simultaneously re-
jecting liberal values of “rebelliousness” and “emotional abandonment”
(“Modern Jazz Quartet Top Unit” 1963, 29). The tools Lewis used to craft
such a product—his deployment of what one journalist at the Chicago
­
Defender referred to as “lapidarian construction” techniques but what
might more simply be referred to as an emphasis on preplanning and
composition—did not wipe out “jazz’s inspiration and spontaneity,” it
­
simply “disciplined and directed” it (“Modern Jazz Quartet Top Unit”
1963, 29). The point here is merely to highlight the fact that although
critics in the African American press were not necessarily reporting on
the music of the group in terms different from those used in publications
like the New York Times or the trade magazines Down Beat and Metro-
nome, the terms themselves carried different meanings depending on the
orientation of the press within which they appeared.
When the cultural frame of the “Negro Gentleman” is used to read the
works of John Lewis, Lewis’s embrace of Western art music conventions
can be seen to take on a decidedly different tone. To return to the example
of the “La Ronde Suite,” nods to French impressionism mentioned earlier
need not be understood in this alternate paradigm as some sort of market-
ing trick—or at least not solely in those terms. They can also be read as
­
celebrating a specific type of conservative musicality stemming from one
particular conception of African American identity. Lewis’s upbringing in
14 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

a middle-class New Mexico suburb (Lalo 1991, 9), his pursuit of a degree in

­
music theory, and his general interest in European cultural products cer-
tainly helps us place him in this world. But we can make an even stronger
claim to affinity with the bourgeois mind-set by considering Lewis’s com-

­
ments about strengthening jazz “with structure” (Hentoff 1953a, 8) along-
side his diatribes against those who would assume jazz necessarily corre-
lates with bad behavior (Hentoff 1957b, 16). Reading Lewis’s music through
this lens is no less political than a Signifyin(g) assessment, but it does ac-
complish a different sort of “cultural work” (to use Guthrie Ramsey’s [2001]
phase) by keeping the door open in the field of jazz studies for all sorts of
sonorities that might be considered “traditional” in assessments of African
American cultural presence.

Lewis and the European Encounter

Yet examining class-based ideological differences between African

­
American communities is not the only way we can chart out an increas-
ingly expansive view during the 1950s related to what jazz might sound
like. In the U.S. context, acceptance of increasingly modernist jazz prod-
ucts aligned neatly with rising interest in jazz from the university sector
and the publication of a range of musicological texts that celebrated the
pursuit of new sonic frontiers, including George Russell’s Lydian Chro-
matic Concept of Tonal Organization ([1953] 1959) and André Hodeir’s
Jazz: Its Evolution and Essence (1956a). Lewis’s directorship of the Lenox
School of Jazz from 1957 to 1960 in turn oversaw the recruitment of jazz
pedagogues with decidedly modernist mind-sets (such as Russell, Len-
­
nie Tristano, Bill Russo, and Jimmy Giuffre) and the endorsement of a
jazz curriculum aimed at pushing the limits of existing musical boundar-
ies. Yet Lewis’s confidence that this approach was, in fact, the right ap-
proach to teaching students new to the industry seems at odds with the
MJQ’s frustrating early tours of jazz clubs in the United States, detailed
in chapter 1 of this book—tours in which audience indifference occa-
­
sionally forced the group to abandon the stage. Indeed, as I will show,
such confidence seems to have instead arisen out of Lewis’s experiences
in Europe during the mid-1950s and his exposure to markets in both
­
 Introduction • 15

France and Germany that enthusiastically embraced syncretic jazz forms

and boundary-pushing jazz works.

­
In considering the French context first, it is important to note that an ex-
pansive view regarding the sonic possibilities of jazz music very much defined
the French encounter with the genre even before the existentialist turn that
followed World War II. There is of course no denying the fact that extensions
of the “noble savage” Enlightenment motif—specifically the idea that unique

­
musical ability resided in the biology of African descendants—typified

­
French jazz critiques during the interwar period (Jackson 2002, 154). Yet at
the same time it needs to be understood that alternate and more pluralistic
understandings of how one might authentically contribute to the form were
almost always simultaneously in play. For instance, Matthew Jordan details
how several interwar French jazz critics pointed to the music’s origin in New
Orleans—a city with deep French cultural ties—as a way of arguing that the
­
­
French had just as much right to claim ownership of the new musical genre as
those who were viewed as stewarding its “African” components (2011, 512–

­
14). The success of groups like the piano duo Wiéner and Doucet during the
1920s and Ray Ventura et Ses Collégians during the 1930s inextricably linked
with this conception of an authentic French jazz grounded in the audibility
of nationalistic tropes: Wiéner and Doucet, for instance, were applauded for
tapping into what was seen as jazz’s roots in “the French romantic song” tradi-
tion (Delage 1926, 19), while Ray Ventura was heralded for jazzing up French
folk songs (Jackson 2002, 160).
Most discussion of postwar jazz in France has focused on the debate
between those who endorsed pluralistic concepts of jazz practice—of
­
which the nationalist school was just one version—and the leaders of the
­
New Orleans revivalist movement, famously headed by the French jazz
critic Hugh Panassié ( Jackson 2002; Perchard 2011). Yet focusing on this
debate, in my mind, carries with it the potential to obscure the extent to
which French audiences welcomed and in fact expected to encounter sonic
shifts in the jazz world. Such an orientation is evident in even just a cursory
look at Lewis’s reception in France during the 1950s. Indeed, while to many
American critics Lewis’s style of composition signaled movement toward a
new musical genre, or the formation of what Gunther Schuller referred to
as a “Third Stream” of music (Schuller 1986, 120), French critics outside the
influence of Panassié weren’t so sure that the parameters of jazz had been
16 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

breached. Following the MJQ’s first tour of Europe in 1956 with the Bird-
land All-Stars, the Parisian publication Jazz Magazine came out in full sup-
­
port of the music audiences had heard, stating, “Ultimately, these concerts
marked an important victory for the ‘modern sound’ in our country and
French fans could see firsthand that jazz has never been better” (“Sous le
signe du ‘Birdland’” 1956, 19).5 In the same year, the English translation of
André Hodeir’s Jazz: Its Evolution and Essence was published, including an
expanded section on “the state of jazz at the death of Charlie Parker” (Ho-
deir 1956a), in which Hodeir applauded Lewis’s innovations for pointing
the way forward to a music that had lost its way. Hodeir writes of Lewis,
“He deserves unreserved praise for having faced up to the problem of the
relationship between theme, arrangement, and solo, which is the most crit-
ical and the most formidable problem the modern jazz-man has to solve. In

­
fact, it may be the problem on which the whole future of jazz depends”
(1956a, 278).6
Such resistance to purist jazz ideology seems to have in turn enabled
greater interdisciplinary use of Lewis’s music across the French cultural
landscape. The French filmmaker Roger Vadim, for instance, boldly ap-
proached Lewis in 1957 with the idea that he provide a score for Vadim’s
1957 “noir” film Sait-on jamais (1957). While the use of a jazz score in film
­
noir was not without precedent (see Butler 2002), Vadim’s offer did mark
Lewis’s first encounter with the form and resulted in an incredibly innova-
tive musical track in which improvisation was used to explore a variety of
narrative themes. Furthermore, it was in Paris in 1960 that Lewis began his
dalliance with writing for ballet, collaborating with choreographer Louis
Johnson on a work that saw dancers improvise in counterpoint to impro-
vised music played by the MJQ (“Precious Asset” 1960, 9). It is difficult to
avoid comparing these projects with their American counterparts: Lewis’s
score to the Robert Wise film Odds against Tomorrow, released in 1959, and
his score for the ballet Original Sin, performed by the San Francisco Ballet
company in 1961. Indeed, as I explore in depth in chapter 4, acceptance of
Lewis’s innovative vision within the French context seems to have encour-
aged Lewis’s pursuit of similar projects in works later performed on Ameri-
can soil.
Yet it was not only Lewis’s time in France that seems to have encouraged
commitment to his modernist project. Lewis’s encounter with the German
 Introduction • 17

jazz scene in turn can be seen to have endorsed aspects of his compositional
style that had met less friendly reception in the American sphere. Unlike in
France, postwar attitudes toward jazz in Germany remained firmly
grounded in myths about African American primitivism and intellectual
inferiority (Hurley 2009, 20). The majority of jazz assessments that did oc-
cur in print, at least those written immediately after the war, tended to be
negative and to depict the music as a continued threat to German society,
evincing, as Andrew Hurley has put it, “an ideological hangover from Na-
tional Socialist anti-jazz indoctrination” (2009, 20). German jazz advo-
­
cates in the postwar period were therefore required to find ways of chal-
lenging this ideology covertly—in that their primary aim was to convert,
­
not alienate, the German public. Jazz critic Joachim-Ernst Berendt deserves

­
credit for leading this assault, pursuing both musical and written projects
bent on illuminating for the German populace ways in which jazz could be
compared favorably to ernste Musik (serious music) (Hurley 2009, 24–25).

­
In particular, Berendt was interested in promoting the idea that alte Musik
(early music) shared an affinity with jazz that could not be denied. Toward
this end, he instigated a lecture tour in 1956 involving the music historian
Joseph Tröller and a jazz combo lead by Wolfgang Lauth—a tour that in-
­
volved the discussion and performance not only of the music of J. S. Bach
but also that of the MJQ (Hurley 2009, 27).
Indeed, for Berendt, the music of the MJQ highlighted a very plausible
route to changing German minds about the value of jazz, and accordingly,
he sought to promote the group widely during the 1950s. In addition to his
role in supporting the Tröller-Lauth tour and Lauth’s performance of Lew-
­
is’s fugal work “Vendome” (“Jazz und Alte Musik” 1957), Berendt worked
to call attention to the MJQ’s embrace of Western art music conventions in
the pages of Melos, describing in detail Lewis’s use of fugal processes before
concluding, “The connection between Jazz and European music is some-
thing many white Americans have experimented with, but John Lewis so
gratifyingly actualized—without an experimental phase—in his Modern
­
­
Jazz Quartet” (1955, 350).7 Furthermore, Berendt played an instrumental
role in organizing the German leg of the group’s first European tour in 1956,
arranging its appearance at “a Freiburg concert celebrating the SWF’s
[southwestern German public broadcasting station’s] one-thousandth jazz
­
program” and introducing the group to the DJF (German Jazz Federation),
18 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

which scheduled a national tour following the Freiburg concert (Hurley

2009, 26). This promotional blitz culminated in the MJQ’s performance at
the Donaueschingen Festival in 1957—a festival devoted to the promotion

­
of “new” art music and at which Igor Stravinsky served as guest conductor
in the same year (G. Lewis 2008, 248).
Given the context of Germany’s rediscovery of jazz and Berendt’s fram-
ing of the MJQ’s importance, it is unsurprising to see that when musical
opportunities arose for Lewis in Germany beyond those offered to his
quartet, they carried with them a decidedly ernste Musik bent. For instance,
Lewis’s work with the Süddeutscher Rundfunk Sinfonie-Orchester in

­
Stuttgart in February 1958 marked a new milestone for him in terms of
engagement with the European musical tradition. The orchestra was the
first Lewis had ever written for and the first, but not the last, he would ever
conduct. In his own words, it provided an opportunity to finally make use
“of everything I studied at Manhattan [School of Music],” yielding an al-
bum that in Nat Hentoff ’s view went far beyond earlier experiments in jazz
string scoring, in which arrangers used orchestras solely as “inert cushion[s]
for . . . other instrumental lines.” Lewis’s compositions instead drew on
what Hentoff framed as a European style of string writing consisteing of
both “logical” theme development and overt counterpoint (1958, 1).
While the effect of such an experience is difficult to prove in empirical
terms, there is little doubt that Lewis’s time with the Süddeutscher Rund-
funk Sinfonie-Orchester precipitated an era of experimentation with larger
­
ensembles. In 1959 Lewis would write the work “Sketch,” scored for both
the MJQ and the Beaux Arts String Quartet, and perform it in New York
at Town Hall. He would also write and record the work “Exposure” (1959),
performed by the MJQ and a small ensemble consisting of bassoon, cello,
harp, and French horn. In 1960 he would rework several earlier pieces into
a multimovement work titled Excerpts from “The Comedy,” scored for a
large brass ensemble comprising four trumpets, four French horns, two
trombones, and a tuba in addition to piano, bass, and drums.
When a consideration of Lewis’s ambiguous reception in American jazz
clubs prior to his European tours is taken into account, it seems likely that
encounters with jazz scenes on the Continent played at least some role in
encouraging Lewis to stay the course. The idea that such an encounter can
have an effect on one’s artistic mind-set is of course not a novel concept.
­
 Introduction • 19

Even in the realm of jazz, this is fairly well trodden territory. Tyler Stovall’s
Paris Noir, for instance, demonstrates the liberating effect an environment
devoid of racism had on the artistic ambitions of the first MJQ drummer,
Kenny Clarke, who moved to Paris permanently in 1956 (1996, 178). An-
negret Fauser in turn has discussed the “transformative effects of the French
gaze”—an eloquent aphorism for pedagogue Nadia Boulanger’s ideas
­
about what American music could be—on the music of Aaron Copland

­
(2006, 526). The argument I’m making here is not so different. Lewis’s ex-
tensive touring of the Continent, his positive reception, and his endorse-
ment by European modernists such as André Hodeir and Joachim-Ernst

­
Berendt make a strong case for reading works performed in the wake of his
European tours as somehow influenced by the European gaze. Further-
more, exploring this aspect of Lewis’s experience in the story of his musical
development allows us to engage with the very real power jazz held as a
global phenomenon during this particular historical moment, an impor-
tant methodological shift with serious ramifications for future investiga-
tions of this period

Challenges and Choices in Storytelling

In an attempt to set up a wide enough frame for weaving these somewhat

disparate themes together, I begin this book with a general overview of the
“how” and some “whys” behind the emergence of jazz-classical fusion
­
works during the 1950s. Leaving aesthetic motivations temporarily to the
side, in chapter 1 I examine how these works helped shore up a struggling
postwar jazz industry decimated by the 1940s big band decline. In particu-
lar, I demonstrate how many jazz composers endeavored to relocate their
music into new performance spaces, both appropriated and created, with
the intent of indoctrinating and winning over uninitiated patrons. While
these ventures often involved the direct appropriation of Western art music
conventions, I demonstrate in this chapter that many times the musical ap-
proach employed was far more subversive, involving the deployment of jazz
conventions in a manner that conjured—rather than drew upon—
­
­
European musical aesthetics. Lewis’s embrace of “double-voiced” or
­
Signifyin(g) devices during this period is therefore framed as not being
20 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

exceptionally different from the syncretic approaches embraced by his con-

temporaries (Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, and Charles Mingus, among
many others).
Yet there is no doubt that Lewis’s music was received as exceptionally
different. In chapter 2 I explain this reception in terms of internalized bi-
ases in the popular press around both what jazz should sound like and what
jazz musicians should look like. Surveying a history of essentialist rhetoric
regarding African and African American musical production, I demon-
strate a pervasive emphasis on rhythm in assessments of African American
musical authenticity. In the second half of the chapter I analyze discussion
of Lewis’s music in the popular press in light of this history, questioning the
veracity of essentialist readings and illuminating how the “double-voiced”

­
aspects of his work crowded out discussion of rhythm in favor of commen-
tary regarding “European” parity.
Furthermore, I demonstrate how the group’s physical presentation—

­
that is, their use of suits and tuxedos—was made to seem out of the ordi-
­
nary, when it in fact was not, in order to set the stage for discussions
about the cultural value inherent in Lewis’s music. Lewis’s response to
such criticism—also discussed in chapter 2—would of course evince a
­
­
clear frustration. In 1957, for instance, he would argue that “there’s noth-
ing remarkable” about “conducting ourselves as grown men” (Hentoff
1957b, 16), and in 1987 he would claim, “I’m not the one to say whether
we’ve added distinction to jazz—or whether that’s important or not,
­
even. Why not present a smart appearance and polished music?” (MJQ
Views 1987, 28). Yet despite such pushback, references to the group’s ap-
pearance can be seen to have continued to serve as a consistent opening
device for critics keen to interrogate the ways in which the MJQ appeared
to be abandoning African American traditions through its affiliation
with the Western art music world.
In chapter 3 I challenge the assumptions of the trade press discussed in
chapter 2 by charting out the cultural world of middle- and upper-class Af-
­
­
rican Americans during the 1950s, with a particular focus on the role West-
ern art music played in affirming class boundaries and articulating class
values. While I argue that editorials and feature articles in the African
American press serve as a useful window into this world, I also include a
discussion of how African American community orchestras and church-
­
 Introduction • 21

sponsored Western art music concerts, along with other social initiatives,
reified the views of the elite in African American urban centers. This dis-
cussion helps illuminate the importance of Western art music within cer-
tain constructs of African American identity while in turn countering
1950s popular press assertions regarding what African American cultural
production might entail. I end this chapter by examining Lewis’s positive
reception in this world along with comments regarding his perceived suit-
ability to its ideals.
I then turn in chapter 4 to a discussion of Lewis’s musical output pro-
duced between 1952 and 1962. An argument for the temporal parameters of
this study based on ideological shifts related to the emergence of the Black
Arts movement during the 1960s is put forth in the beginning of this chap-
ter. In particular, I argue that the ideological energy of “Black Nationalist”
thought reshaped conceptions of authenticity within the jazz world to such
an extent that tracing the ways in which race, class, and sound are bound up
in Lewis’s post-1950s works would effectively require a book-length study
­
­
of its own. Certainly many fascinating projects are omitted as a result of
this choice. Lewis’s involvement with Orchestra U.S.A. during the mid-

­
1960s, his scores for television programs during the 1970s, and his render-
ing of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier during the 1980s are, unfortunately, left
­
unaddressed in this account. Yet it should be noted that the aim of this
monograph is not, primarily, biographical. To the contrary, my intent is to
examine the ways in which historical energies constellate in the music for
which John Lewis is most renowned and to postulate how reading these
works through different modes of emphasis might expand our understand-
ing of the “cultural work” with which they are engaged.
Chapter 4 therefore proceeds by examining the compositional design
of works Lewis produced in association with the MJQ as well as with other
collaborators both at home and abroad during his first decade of productiv-
ity. This analysis is used to illuminate how the compositional ambiguities
inherent in Lewis’s music that had caused such a stir in the jazz press were
able to engage a range of different audiences, each with their own unique
set of aesthetic expectations and musical ideologies. Much of the music
from this period, for instance, can be understood as deploying “double-
­
voiced” tropes such as the innovative reshaping of blues forms, riffs, and
improvised counterpoint in a way that manifested or “shouted out” to
22 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

Western art music aesthetics. Yet I also discuss in this chapter how some of
Lewis’s works appear to be less subversive in terms of their engagement
with Western art music—or more genuine, depending on one’s orientation.

­
This is evident in his work with European orchestras, ballet companies,
large brass ensembles, and string quartets, together with his increasing fo-
cus on extended works during the late 1950s—interests that indicate in

­
their scope something beyond the use of European or Western art culture
as a mere veneer or “mask” for the vernacular. Given my discussion of mid-
dle- and upper-class African American music practices in chapter 3, I fre-
­
­
quently make the point in this discussion that such engagement should not
be read as cultural abandonment.
Lewis’s penchant for manipulating genre boundaries is further explored
in chapter 5 in relation to his scores for the noir films Sait-on jamais (1957)

­
and Odds against Tomorrow (1959). Building on the work of David Butler
(2002, 2009), I begin this chapter with a discussion of how shifts in the
cultural meaning of jazz led to the erosion of its use as a deviance trigger in
film noir, enabling more varied deployment of jazz across the film genre. In
teasing out this idea, I demonstrate that this shift was felt primarily in rela-
tion to the composed score, with improvisation remaining tied for the
most part to darker thematic strains. I then argue that Lewis’s use of impro-
visation in connection with a variety of narrative strains in Sait-on jamais
­
(1957) and Odds against Tomorrow (1959) worked to push the boundaries
of jazz’s potential role in film noir in a manner similar to the way in which
his syncretic musical works chipped away at the sonic parameters of the
jazz genre. In other words, I conceive of Lewis’s work in film as part of a
larger aesthetic concept aimed at delivering musical innovation in dialogue
with established hegemonic conventions.
In my final chapter I discuss the broader implications of the reassess-
ment of Lewis put forth in this book. I begin by reiterating that rather than
assimilating into European culture, many of Lewis’s syncretic projects dur-
ing the 1950s and early 1960s might be better understood as evidence of a
more complicated aesthetic agenda—an agenda informed by various ide-
­
ologies about what African American music could and should sound like,
woven together in different ways across the contexts of particular historical
moments. I then use this observation as a springboard for a discussion
about what it means to produce African American music, exploring the
 Introduction • 23

question of whether or not a piece of music can uphold African American

cultural values even if its content challenges prominent ideas about what
“real” African American music sounds like.
In discussing Lewis’s music in this manner, I hope to endorse a method-
ology for jazz studies that is more honest in terms of what we, as research-
ers, can actually do. Much to our chagrin, we cannot mind-read. But we can

­
embrace complexity and tell stories that force the public to question long-

­
held beliefs about much-loved music. In doing so, we can strip monolithic
­
paradigms of their power and bring to light a variety of competing opin-
ions, orientations, and approaches that have been unnecessarily silenced by
well-meaning but all too often narrow-minded “constructors of the jazz
­
­
tradition.” We don’t make the narrative game easier for ourselves by throw-
ing these gates open, but we are able to better depict the spirit, if not the
infinite complexity, of artistic process when we adopt such an approach.
1 • Branching Out

The Great Era of Venue Creation

When John Lewis moved to New York to pursue a music career in 1945, he
entered an industry on the precipice of collapse. Prior to World War II,
swing bands had led popular music sales in the United States, permeated
nightclubs and ballrooms, held hefty contracts with recording companies,
and occasionally been welcomed into venues normally reserved for the per-
formance of Western art music. They were, in many respects, the largest
part of the jazz industry, and the war years were to be no less kind. Al-
though many talented musicians were taken out of the market and con-
scripted into military service, those who remained were faced with increas-
ing demand for their services and the latitude—due to a lack of
­
competition—to experiment with the formal and harmonic elements of
­
the swing genre (Stowe 1994, 184).
Yet the end of World War II carried perilous repercussions for those
making their living in the swing market. The postwar recession affected the
entertainment budgets of swing supporters, setting off a chain reaction that
began with promoters losing money on guarantees, followed by band lead-
ers lowering payroll costs to assist promoters, then band leaders decreasing
the size of their ensembles to remain economically viable, and eventually
the dissolution of bands in their entirety (Stowe 1994, 192). Simultane-
ously, recording companies began to embrace a more efficient model of
popular music production by promoting singers over bands (Lopes 2002,
225). This new approach enabled labels like Columbia and RCA Victor to
draw on the newly saturated talent pool of instrumental musicians returned
from war, employing them for what was essentially “session” work and

24
 Branching Out • 25

thereby circumventing the more expensive payroll demands of bandleaders

who preferred working with consistent lineups.
There exists a long tradition in jazz historiography of pointing to the
bebop movement as a foreshadowing response to this market shift. Scott
DeVeaux (1997, 273–74), for instance, discusses the “centripetal pull” of in-
­
creasingly poor working conditions on jazz musicians during the early
1940s—a phenomenon that forced jazz practitioners to the periphery of
­
the music business but in turn provided the opportunity for a less corpo-
rate musical aesthetic to develop. Paul Lopes (2002, 213) in turn makes the
argument in Rise of the Jazz Art World that the bebop genre’s new chro-
matic language effectively reconceptualized jazz in the public eye as an art
music replete with its own base of “hipster” supporters, laying the founda-
tion for a new sort of jazz market. Yet despite such reshaping of the indus-
try, the bebop movement was ultimately unsuccessful in reconstructing a
workspace comparable to that of the heights of the Swing Era, and by the
early 1950s many jazz artists were again pressured to seek out alternative
paths toward financial stability.
Three broad performance options seemed to have been considered at
this point. The first was for jazz musicians to continue down the path of
bebop, utilizing increasingly smaller ensembles and capitalizing on indi-
vidual reputation in the hope of cornering the “hipster” market. Dizzy Gil-
lespie’s move from an ensemble of seventeen members in 1949 to a sextet in
1951 and a quintet in 1953, all marketed under his name, provides just one
example of an artist utilizing this approach. The second option was to move
the jazz genre back toward popular music by embracing the rhythm and
blues (R&B) style, “a kind of shuffle-boogie . . . that employed both swing
­
and blues elements” (Floyd 1995, 143). Initially there was a great deal of in-
teraction between the bebop and R&B worlds. Samuel Floyd (1995) points
to Paul Williams’s 1949 revision of Charlie Parker’s 1944 hit “Now’s the
Time” as evidence of dialogue between the genres, and John Gennari
(2006, 72) writes of jazz saxophonist John Coltrane playing R&B gigs dur-
ing his tenure at the Granoff School of Music in Philadelphia. Yet those
committed to the idea that the stability of the jazz world rested on develop-
ing jazz’s art music credentials saw little potential in R&B for advancing
their goals. While many of these artists remained convinced that given
time, the innovations of the bebop movement would suitably carve out a
26 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

sustainable market niche, other musicians appeared less certain. It is this

latter group that can be seen to have pursued yet another strategy—one in

­
which bebop chromaticism, African American blues elements, and sonic
effects seemingly derived from European compositional conventions were
fused into musical works that expanded the reach of jazz by tapping into a
parallel art music world. Initially this approach was referred to as “Cool
Jazz,” but variation within the camp would lead to what is currently referred
to as “Third Stream” music.
In the following pages I provide an overview of the emergence of these
styles and discuss their effectiveness in ushering in renewed interest in jazz
during the 1950s. I also make the more provocative point that many Cool
and Third Stream works deployed jazz improvisational practices and orga-
nizational tropes in a manner that resulted in music that sounded like Eu-
ropean classical music while not in fact employing European compositional
conventions per se. Both approaches can be read as the enactment of a
double-voiced compositional agenda that enabled Cool and Third Stream
­
practitioners to expand both the parameters of the jazz world and their
own economic power by relocating jazz practices into spaces where unfa-
miliar audiences could be introduced to jazz tropes surreptitiously. In the
early 1950s advances in jazz tertiary education opened up American univer-
sities to such endeavors, and by the mid-1950s jazz artists were creating per-
­
formance spaces themselves where jazz conventions were brought to the
uninitiated through the guise of “modern music.” Central to this story is
Lewis’s journey from arranger to small-group leader during the first half of
­
the decade—and his emergence as what many would call an “assimilation-
­
ist” during the second half.

“Double-voiced” Roots of 1950s “Modern” Jazz

­
It is of course necessary to point out that by the early 1950s, the potential
benefits of alluding to Western art music as a way of reaching out to new
audience demographics was not a novel concept to jazz musicians. Prior
to the big band decline, several artists had already nodded or “shouted
out” to the European tradition in the design or framing of their work,
including Duke Ellington, whose multimovement programmatic piece
 Branching Out • 27

“Black and Tan Fantasy” (1927) prefigured the structural arc of his later
work Black, Brown and Beige (1943), and Paul Whiteman, who famously
commissioned George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue (1924) for the con-
cert billed as “An Experiment in Modern Music” at Carnegie Hall (Schiff
1997, 2).
It is therefore perhaps more the scope than the general intent of syn-
cretic projects undertaken in the wake of the big band decline that makes
this musical period stand out. Certainly classical-jazz fusion began to

­
gather force during the late 1940s as a guiding aesthetic principle, surpass-
ing its previous role as an occasional curio effect. Indeed, as demand for
swing bands decreased, a virtual explosion of new musical approaches rip-
pled through the jazz industry—often in aid of what appears to have been
­
a two-tiered promotional approach in which artists sought to both sustain
­
remaining jazz supporters while simultaneously recruiting uninitiated pa-
trons from the art music realm.
For instance, during the 1940s orchestra leaders Claude Thornhill and
Stan Kenton embraced what seemed to be, on the surface, a dance band
format while pushing the sonic boundaries of the jazz genre through the
use of extended harmonies, the application of more diverse instrumental
pallets, and in the case of Kenton, the use of atonal melodic figures (Noss
1948, 414–15). Small jazz groups in turn played a part in reshaping the jazz
­
landscape. Pianist Lennie Tristano notably broke with the idea of pre-
planned form in his free jazz works Intuition (1949) and Digression (1949),
attracting the interest of the American avant-garde (Shim 2007, 72). John
­
Lewis’s arrangement of works for the Miles Davis Nonet in 1948 applied a
coloristic approach to chordal writing that—as stated earlier—shouted
­
­
out to fans of French impressionism (Van de Leur 2001, 19). Such diversity
in approaches (to which we might add Lewis’s later interest in baroque
fugal processes) set in place a strong foundation for the eventual accep-
tance of “modern” jazz as a diverse field of expression capable of satisfying
a variety of tastes. Yet during the waning years of the 1940s, many in this
camp struggled to find a way of framing their works in a manner truly ca-
pable of connecting with the uninitiated.
The syncretic works of Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn stand in
partial contrast to this overall trend. While many of these pieces were ini-
tially received with some ambiguity, the vast majority of their efforts con-
28 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

tributed to the strength of the Ellington organization over the course of the
1940s. It is certainly true that the dressing up of jazz in European garb met
with criticism from some Ellington supporters, as noted plainly in Barry
Ulanov’s ([1946] 1975, 253) account of Ellington’s Carnegie Hall debut, yet
the resultant buzz around Ellington’s syncretic approach appears to have
ensured repeated access to concert halls (Howland 2009, 247), setting in
place a promotional system that worked to lead at least some sectors of the
Western art music audience into an appreciation of African American ver-
nacular music.
Such a system was clearly at work during Ellington’s famous January 23,
1943, Carnegie Hall concert. Ellington’s framing of the Strayhorn work
“Dirge” (1943) on the program, for instance, presents solid evidence of an
attempt to lead listeners from an appreciation of one musical genre to the
appreciation of another. In terms of the music itself, Walter Van de Leur has
identified intense chromaticism as a constant theme in Strayhorn’s writing,
linking it in some cases to Ernö Lendvai’s (1971) axis system and in others
to the use of chords as discrete coloristic units typical of French impres-
sionism (Van de Leur 2001, 28, 22). This penchant for chromaticism can be
seen to fuse with African American vernacular music in “Dirge” through
the pairing of “dissonant chords” with a “free-flowing trombone melody . . .
­
that draws on the blues scale” (Van de Leur 2002, 90).
Yet Ellington was quick to dismiss the idea that the piece shared prog-
eny with the European realm, introducing it as the work of “a young man
who has really contributed so much to our recently acquired music” (1943;
emphasis added). Following its performance, and that of a second Stray-
horn piece, “Stomp” (which Van de Leur identifies as the already recorded
“Johnny Come Lately” [1942]), Ellington (1943) set out again to make the
audience understand that Strayhorn, as an artist, was grounded in African
American musical practice, claiming,

We feel that these two numbers selected in the Strayhorn group are
somewhat related. As we find it in the picture of the early jazz days,
when a jazz band, or rather a small band, was picked to play at a fu-
neral, they played the dirge—something like that—and then on
­
­
their way back from the funeral we find the dirge resembling some-
thing like Strayhorn’s Stomp.
 Branching Out • 29

Ellington’s promotion of Strayhorn’s work as part of the African American

expressive realm, while subtle, indicates an attempt to shift the sonic pa-
rameters of what the Carnegie Hall audience might have considered Afri-
can American music in the early 1940s. Such an approach would have al-
lowed Ellington to recruit support for his music, and jazz in general, by
drawing in patrons of Western art music by way of sonorities and composi-
tional devices familiar to that demographic. As the January 23 performance
led to a series of more or less regular appearances at Carnegie Hall over the
following eight years, the goals of recruitment and financial success embed-
ded in Ellington’s approach appear in part to have been realized through
this process.
Arrangements performed by the Claude Thornhill band during the late
1940s utilized a similar compositional strategy, albeit toward less effective
ends. While Thornhill’s arranger, Gil Evans, was not trained in Western art
music composition, his work for the ensemble incorporated the dissonance
of bebop and its related art music connotations. The fusion of this sonic
element with Thornhill’s expanded ensemble, a big band containing French
horns and tuba, distinguished the group from big band predecessors like
Benny Goodman. Yet improvisation continued to play a key role in works
performed by the group, occasionally echoing back to the polyphonic im-
provisation of the New Orleans jazz style (consider, for example, the inter-
weaving lines of improvised call-and-response between tenor saxophonist
­
­
Mickey Folus and clarinettist Danny Polo on the 1948 recording of “Rob-
bin’s Nest”).1
Thornhill’s indeterminate approach to marketing, however, hampered
the success of his syncretic ensemble. Avoiding both popular music align-
ment and what Gil Evans refers to as “concert orchestra” alignment
(Crosby 1971, 9), Thornhill played an increasingly marginalized role in
the 1940s jazz world. Although he produced several “sweet” music re-
cordings in the mid-1940s, Thornhill frequently chose to perform his
­
more modern works in dance halls, “baffle[ing] the dancers” who had
come to hear the commercial ballads (Crease 2002, 156). Ambiguity re-
garding the framing of these modern works is identified as having been a
key barrier to economic success (Crosby 1971; Van de Leur 2001). Indeed,
the demographic through which Thornhill sought financial reward was
not one in which “modern” effects would have held a good deal of inter-
30 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

est. Yet Thornhill’s sonic concept remains important in a discussion of

1950s Cool and Third Stream works, as Miles Davis and John Lewis
would employ it as part of their own uplift strategy in collaboration with
Thornhill arrangers during the late 1940s.
The Birth of the Cool album released in 1957 comprises recordings made
between 1949 and 1950 and is conventionally held to have emerged from
group discussions on the future of jazz hosted by Gil Evans and Miles Davis
at Evans’s New York apartment. While most historical accounts depict
these sessions as debates over aesthetics, it is fair to say that a degree of pro-
fessional networking and financial problem solving were at play as well.
Both Evans and apartment regular Gerry Mulligan spent time on the
Thornhill payroll in the late 1940s, and the band’s financial instability had
long undermined their ability to earn steady wages. In March 1947 Thorn-
hill was forced to disband his group and then hire back musicians at re-
duced rates in order to cover expenses for performances at the Glen Island
Casino (“Thornhill Ork on 3-Week Vacation” 1947, 1). A year later he dis-
­
banded for a two-month “vacation,” leaving his musicians without pay
­
while he worked on new compositions (“Claude Thornhill to Disband
Ork” 1948, 1). Davis, the project organizer, faced equally insecure economic
circumstances. Personality conflicts with his 1948 partner, Charlie Parker,
foreshadowed a split between the two (Davis 1989, 115), and his reputation
had not yet lead to a leadership position on a commercial recording. In ad-
dition, his improvisatory style remained quite similar to those of his bebop
peers. By collaborating with Mulligan and Evans on arrangements but re-
maining the lead improvisatory voice, Davis was able to negotiate a sonic
space that set him apart from the bebop realm while not requiring the de-
velopment of a new improvisatory style. In turn, Mulligan and Evans were
able to bridge an employment gap.
Such financial and professional benefits were not without their artis-
tic frustrations. Tension between a modernist drive for structure and the
promotion of improvisatory elements came to typify arguments between
Davis and his arrangers. In the end, membership in the latter group ex-
panded to include Lewis and an additional Thornhill staffer, Johnny Ca-
risi. Mulligan, for instance, believed that the new style of jazz did not
lend itself to the extensive soloing of the bebop era. He felt extended so-
los caused “the composed parts [to] lose their continuity . . . their connec-
 Branching Out • 31

tion with each other” and that this negatively affected the structural in-
novations of the music. Davis, in turn, remained focused on extended
improvisation during the workshop period of the project, improvising
for “more and more choruses” in performances of the arrangements at the
Royal Roost (Mulligan 1995, 16). Mulligan recalled Lewis’s shared frus-
tration with this approach, stating, “Lewis used to get really mad at him
because he wouldn’t assume the responsibility and wouldn’t consider the
band—because the band was a unique thing. It’s not like going into the
­
club with a sextet” (1995, 16).
The limits of 78-rpm recordings in part forced a compromise between
­
emphasis on structure and emphasis on improvisation. The two singles im-
mediately released from this collaboration, “Move” (1949) and “Budo”
(1949), both arranged by Lewis, are each under three minutes in length and
contain only one thirty-two-measure chorus by Davis each. The Royal
­
­
Roost recordings of “Move,” in contrast, are longer, with Davis soloing for
three choruses on both the September 4, 1948, and September 18, 1948,
club dates.2 Arrangements, however, are not lost in these club recordings.
To the contrary, written passages come across as far more rehearsed than
any of the improvisations. Unease with the chord changes on “Move,” for
instance, is apparent in trombonist Mike Zwerin’s September 4 perfor-
mance and saxophonist Lee Konitz’s September 18 performance, but both
recordings demonstrate close to perfect execution of the head and com-
posed coda. Importantly, it was these composed sections that held the most
immediate repercussions for Davis as a professional musician.
Presentation of the Birth of the Cool arrangements at the Royal Roost
can be clearly linked to Davis’s first leadership contract. According to
Stephanie Crease (2002, 160), Capitol had been searching for a way to de-
velop its jazz resources but held a general “antipathy” toward the bebop
style. Since its formation in 1942, the label had made the bulk of its money
by recording popular vocalists and had largely focused on building audi-
ences outside “race music” demographics. Yet the label’s success with Stan
Kenton between 1943 and 1947 indicated the potential for engagement
with jazz audiences, albeit through an appeal to more modern tastes, and
Davis’s embrace of Thornhill-sounding syncretism provided Capitol a
­
means of expanding the momentum it had built with Kenton while enter-
ing the bebop market at the same time.
32 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

Despite the immediate professional benefits for Davis, from a financial

perspective, the project was a failure. Crease writes,

After the Royal Roost engagement, the Nonet had no gigs and, as
the fall of 1948 wore on, no prospects of any kind. Meanwhile, the
Thornhill band started up again and reclaimed some of its person-
nel, while John Lewis and other Nonet musicians and colleagues
landed other gigs . . . Equally remarkable was the fact that these
recordings . . . sold dismally when initially released as singles.
(2002, 160)

The responsibility for a lack of follow-up gigs must at least partially lie with
­
Davis. Like Thornhill, Davis had embraced an ambiguous style of promo-
tion. He chose the Royal Roost as a venue because he had worked there
throughout 1948 with Tadd Dameron and because he had established some
credibility with the management. Yet the Royal Roost was synonymous
with the promotion of bebop, drawing heavily from bebop artists in its
lineup and broadcasting their performances live on Friday nights. This
near-exclusive focus had even garnered the venue the nickname “[the] Met-
­
ropolitan Bopera House” (Crease 2002, 158). The audiences at the Royal
Roost—the same that had embraced Davis as part of Parker and Dameron’s
­
group—were not part of the demographic that needed to be drawn into
­
jazz through new twists in its presentation. This new demographic existed
outside the jazz club scene.
Yet Capitol’s marketing of the Birth of the Cool singles also failed to
reach beyond the confines of Davis’s established audience. Using the
credit line “Miles Davis and His Orchestra” on the singles “Move” and
“Budo,” Capitol neglected to push the “arrangement” focus of the record-
ings, an approach that may have resulted in better alignment with the
Stan Kenton audience already tapped by the label. The 1950 release of the
nonet’s Venus de Milo recording does evince a slight change in approach,
with Mulligan given credit as arranger before Davis and his orchestra,
but the shift seems to have come too late. The earlier singles had already
been critically received as Capitol’s first bebop recordings (“Record Re-
view: Miles Davis” 1949a, 14; “Record Review: Miles Davis” 1949b, 14;
“Record Review: Miles Davis” 1949c, 15), and their arrangements would
 Branching Out • 33

not be given considerable focus until the 1957 release of the Birth of the
Cool album (Hentoff 1957a, 15).
This failure stands in contrast to Ellington’s success and can be best un-
derstood as the result of poor venue choice and ambiguous promotional
vision. Like Thornhill, Davis attempted to engage a new audience by way of
sound alone, but by remaining locked into established jazz domains, he put
the onus of expansion on those uninitiated. In other words, the success of
this strategy relied on the curiosity of a demographic located outside the
Royal Roost, a group Davis made little effort to reach. Ellington, on the
other hand, sought out the uninitiated within their own space, recruiting
outsiders through sonorities familiar to them while simultaneously expos-
ing them to African American blues and improvisatory tropes. Familiarity
with Ellington’s success, and with Davis’s and Thornhill’s failures, would
drive future jazz artists to pursue syncretic projects in venues outside the
jazz realm as they searched for economic security.

Expanding the Jazz Market: Jazz Goes to College

While the concert hall had served as an obvious venue choice in efforts to
reach new audiences a decade earlier, by the late 1940s the concept of the
jazz concert had become more or less normalized. Eddie Ronan illuminates
this shift in a 1947 issue of Down Beat:

With big band business still in a hazardous state, many sidemen to-
day are turning to the concert hall to keep in cakes and drapes. More
jazz concerts are being planned or held here at the present time than
at any other era of the biz. And local sidemen are enjoying them fi-
nancially as well as musically. It’s a chance to keep their wallets out of
an anemic condition and their lips in form at the same time. (Ronan
1947, 1)

The concerts Ronan cites as evidence include the Jazz at the Philharmonic
tours produced by Norman Granz and the Eddie Condon series of con-
certs performed at Carnegie Hall. Other examples would include Charlie
Parker’s and Dizzy Gillespie’s Carnegie Hall debuts in 1947 and the bebop-
­
34 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

heavy tribute to Charlie Parker after his death in 1955. Such performances
demonstrate the successful appropriation of these spaces as locales where
jazz could be performed for large, informed, and appreciative audiences.
New spaces were therefore required in order to tap a truly fresh market, and
advances in tertiary jazz education in the late 1940s and early 1950s made
the college campus an ideal domain for such growth.
The introduction of jazz lectures into American universities very point-
edly foreshadowed the formalistic approaches to jazz scholarship that Scott
DeVeaux critiques in “Constructing the Jazz Tradition.” Central to this ori-
entation was an acceptance of the linear evolution of jazz as championed by
jazz pedagogue Marshall Stearns. Stearns earned a PhD in English at Yale
in 1942 and began promoting the formation of university jazz clubs as a
Cornell University faculty member in 1947. The Cornell Rhythm Club
may have been the first of these, instituting a concert and lecture series
overseen by Stearns along with projects cataloging old periodicals and rare
records (“Stearns Starts Club” 1947, 4). Other early projects with Stearns at
the head included the 1950s courses Perspectives in Jazz and Giants in Jazz,
delivered at New York University (“NYU to Conduct Jazz Course” 1950, 1;
“Jazz Course at NYU” 1950, 1), and the now well-known roundtable dis-
­
cussions at Music Inn in Lenox, Massachusetts, beginning in 1951. Each of
these projects conceived of jazz as an evolving music in which stylistic shifts
revolved around the fusion of established conventions and new composi-
tional devices. As John Gennari indicates in Blowin’ Hot and Cool, the evo-
lutionary narrative of these lectures was often well received by participants
active in jazz performance, demonstrating for many both the usability of
the past and an impetus on future invention (2006, 217).
Acceptance of the evolutionary model in universities challenged defini-
tions of authenticity tied to early performance practice and helped solidify
a modernist theoretical perspective regarding the music in academic circles.
It must be noted that while Stearns was at the forefront of this movement,
he was not the only advocate working within the modernist paradigm.
John Lucas’s series of talks delivered at Carleton College in 1948 evince a
similar approach, tracing the development of jazz through five one-hour
­
lecture and music-sharing programs, covering “Folk song,” “Blues,” “Rag-
­
time,” “Jazz,” and “Swing” periods (Hoefer 1948, 11). Chicago promoter Joe
Segal’s 1951 lecture comparing Dixie and modern groups at Roosevelt Col-
 Branching Out • 35

lege again put forth an evolutionary narrative (“Tristano Returns to Chi”

1951, 6). Further evidence can be found in a 1952 Union College series fea-
turing “dixie” performances by Rex Stewart and a “modern” performance
by Billy Taylor (“Jazz Experiment” 1952, 8). By ending with a discussion of
“modern” jazz, these lecture-concerts legitimized syncretism as a key ele-

­
ment of the jazz tradition and primed college audiences for the acceptance
of new jazz products.
Yet like initial entry into the concert hall, access to these venues re-
quired a circumvention of perceptions of jazz as a musical practice linked to
deviant behavior. As Lopes writes, the jazz deviance trope, “whether ro-
mantic or derogatory,” was well entrenched in the popular imagination by
the 1940s (2002, 145). As a barrier to university entrance, the ramifications
of this stereotype are evident in the example of the University of Kentucky’s
1951 ban on jazz music. In laying out its reasoning, the university issued the
following statement:

A story on the front page of The Leader of Feb. 19 might give the
erroneous impression that the music department of the university
has been won over by the advocates of jazz or bop and is encouraging
wider and more generous acceptance in cultural circles of this strange
malady. . . . ‘Jazz’ music has no part in the university program. . . . It
is [the university’s] duty . . . to attempt to elevate the tastes of its
students and the people of the commonwealth. . . . No member of
the music faculty plays in any “jazz” band or has ever played in any
bar or orchestra. Furthermore, the university has never approved the
assembling of its students in any taproom or bar in this or other cit-
ies. (“Jazz Is Barred” 1951, 16)

Interestingly, the University of Kentucky ban seemed targeted at the type

of jazz played in clubs and pubs as opposed to the style performed in
dance halls and hotel ballrooms. The link between jazz and alcohol is
mentioned twice at the end of the passage, and in both instances it is
framed as an almost integral part of jazz culture. This is only a slightly
veiled dig at the bebop genre, as jazz in the form of swing had much ear-
lier moved from the “taproom” into more morally sound venues, evident
in its frequent use at college dances throughout the 1940s and 1950s
36 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

(“School Dance Contest” 1953, 1). The deviance associated with bebop,
on the other hand, kept permutations of jazz associated with African
American performers from expanding beyond established domains, de-
spite its art music status. Eric Porter describes this paradox:

Even as the practitioners of bebop were cast as artists and intellectu-

als, they could still be objects of the primitivist fascination that had
long characterized the jazz discourse. The perception of musicians as
social deviants was by no means inconsistent with the construction
of jazz as avant-garde expression. . . . Ronald Radano discusses the
­
development of a “primitive/intellectual homology” used to com-
prehend the character of black jazz musicians in the post-war United

­
States. White observers frequently saw “contrasting images of re-
spectability and degeneracy, of noble romanticism and black bestial-
ity” as they sought to understand the jazz artist. (2002, 92)

As Porter indicates, despite the art music status of bebop, the deviance as-
sociated with its practitioners impeded its expansion. As a result, perfor-
mance priority was given in tertiary settings to either white-dominated jazz
­
genres such as swing or, less often, simply to white jazz modernists.3
Two early examples of this expansion, Stan Kenton’s performance at the
University of Minnesota in 1951 and Lennie Tristano’s performance at
Brandeis University in 1952, were delivered as part of performance-lectures
­
similar to the Stearns model (“Kenton Lectures” 1951, 7; “Brandeis Arts
Festival” 1952, 5). Other performances shed the lecturing component but
remained largely focused on the presentation of “modern” pieces. Chet
Baker’s appearance at an inaugural University of California Los Angeles
jazz concert in 1954 (“New Approach” 1954, 12) and the MJQ’s perfor-
mance at Oberlin College in 1955 (“MJQ to Storyville” 1955, 6) are indica-
tive of this later approach.4 Yet no jazz musician capitalized more effec-
tively on this new space than pianist Dave Brubeck.
During the early 1950s, Brubeck and four members of his octet toured
college campuses extensively throughout the United States. By his own rec-
ollection, the group played up to ninety colleges per four-month tour,
­
building up a list of impressive venues that eventually included the Univer-
sity of California–Berkeley and Oberlin College (Garcia 2001, 39). Stylisti-
­
 Branching Out • 37

cally, the quartet sound was well suited to the university campus. As in Da-
vis’s Birth of the Cool recordings, the group was able to “mask” improvisation
and jazz rhythmic effects with composed arrangements. Gioia’s description
of Brubeck’s style in the early 1950s details the variety of devices employed
toward this end:

Many of his devices would become standard Brubeck fare in later

years, but in 1949 few jazz fans were conversant with compositional
techniques such as polytonality, unexpected modulations from ma-
jor to minor (listen to “Blue Moon,” where bassist Ron Crotty holds
on to the original changes while Brubeck’s harmonies take off into
the stratosphere); the jolting switch from twentieth-century to

­
eighteenth-century harmony at the close of “Indiana”; the rumbling,
­
dissonant block chords that transformed “Laura” and “Tea for Two”
into biting Bartókian vignettes. (1992, 86)

This list of devices is then tied inextricably to the group’s reliance on a re-
petitive, syncopated “ground beat,” a device Gioia locates in the African
American realm. He writes,

The group’s sense of ground rhythm owes more to Basie and Mc-
Shann than it does to Bartók and Milhaud. . . . The band’s rhythmic
experimentations, at their best, were often superimposed on this
steady ground beat rather than replacements for it. . . . It was perhaps
the underlying rhythmic conservatism of his music that allowed Br-
ubeck to incorporate elements of modernism into his work without
alienating—indeed while attracting—a large audience. (1992, 91)
­
­
As Gioia indicates, this pairing of tropes worked to Brubeck’s financial ad-
vantage as well as to the benefit of jazz dissemination. Not only was his
band allowed access to college campuses, his brand of modern jazz sold well
in these venues. Brubeck’s college tours led to his contract with Columbia
in 1954, and his first album for the label was compiled from recordings of
his 1953 Oberlin performance, released as Jazz Goes to College.5
Brubeck’s comments regarding the intent or spirit of his fusion enable
us to read such success in the context of a double-voiced expressive para-
­
38 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

digm. Admittedly, examining Brubeck in these terms—terms developed

­
for the study of African American expressive culture—might be viewed by

­
some as problematic. His tertiary training in Western art music at the Uni-
versity of the Pacific and his association with Darius Milhaud at Mills Col-
lege initially paint him as operating outside African American expressive
culture (along with the fact that he was, in fact, a white artist). Yet such
aspects of Brubeck’s background do not alter the fact that Brubeck himself
viewed his compositional approach as being grounded in an African Amer-
ican sensibility. While the degree of Brubeck’s cultural orientation, whether
toward Western art music or African American vernacular music, may
never be known (if such a thing is knowable with any musician), certainly
his desire to work from an African American foundation and to promote
its core elements is made clear in his early statements to interviewers, as
evinced in a description of the future of American music composition that
he provided in 1950:

Since jazz is not provincial, regional, nor chauvinistic, but as much

an expression of our people as our language, it is the natural idiom
for the American composer. I firmly believe that the composer who
will most successfully typify America will have been born into jazz,
will have absorbed it in his early years unconsciously, and will prob-
ably be an active participant in shaping its future course. (Brubeck
1950, 18)

Brubeck’s focus on uniting American culture with jazz culture in this state-
ment is at odds with Gates’s (1988) pan-African nationalistic readings of
­
African American cultural products but nonetheless demonstrates a per-
sonal connection to the processes believed to drive African American mu-
sic. While Brubeck strips jazz of African American ownership in this pas-
sage, he does not fully move it into the “white” or European musical realm.
Instead he chooses to realign it as a uniquely American, multiracial phe-
nomenon. This context allows Brubeck to put forth the argument that the
promotion of jazz vernacular elements is in fact a promotion of core Amer-
ican musical elements: “Most of the contemporary composers, including
most of the 12-tone system writers, are getting too far from the roots of our
­
culture. And for American composers, our roots should be in jazz” (qtd. in
Hentoff 1954c, 2).
 Branching Out • 39

Brubeck might be seen as working from these roots most overtly in his
use of rhythm or what Gioia (1992) refers to as his reliance on the “ground
beat.” Devices such as chromatic harmonizations, modal shifting, polyto-
nality, and polyrhythm are then added on top of this foundation. This com-
bination of elements, designed to engage a new market while holding cen-
tral the tenets of vernacular jazz rhythm, function to the same double-voiced

­
ends as Ellington’s, Strayhorn’s, and Davis’s projects. To exclude Brubeck
from this paradigm based on perceptions of his outsider status would
therefore ignore both his familiarity and facility with double-voiced com-

­
positional processes.
Yet Brubeck’s work is more often than not subsumed under the “Cool”
label (Gioia 1992; Lopes 2002; Meadows 2003), the definitions of which
mirror in technical terms but not in intent the syncretic “masking” pro-
cesses discussed above. Lopes, for example, defines “Cool” as “a reserved
soft version of the swing ensemble with influences from bop and European
classical harmony and timbre used by progressive big bands” (2002, 243).
Meadows in turn summarizes the musical facets of the genre as an “empha-
sis on written arrangements, interesting orchestrations, melodic counter-
point, less use of higher ranges on melodic instruments, use of conjunct
melodies and straight tone qualities, and a preference for ballads” (2003,
262). While these two definitions are certainly accurate as general descrip-
tions, they evince a tendency to avoid discussion of stylistic particularities,
such as Brubeck’s use of the “ground-beat” and Davis’s emphasis on impro-
­
visation. As demonstrated thus far, the presence of these musical elements
takes on increasing import when each work is contextualized in terms of
the “cultural work” with which it is engaged, both economic and social.

Expanding the Jazz Market: The Creation of

“Modern” Music Venues

A tendency to ignore the presence of improvisation, jazz rhythmic effects,

and blues sonorities is even more prevalent in discussion of works labeled
“Third Stream.” The term Third Stream, first introduced into the music
lexicon by Gunther Schuller at a Brandeis University lecture in 1957, has
been defined in retrospect as “improvisation or written composition or
both” that “synthesizes the essential characteristics and techniques of con-
40 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

temporary Western art music and various ethnic or vernacular musics”

(Schuller 1986, 377). Historically the term can be seen to have gained initial
traction as a label only for works meeting this definition and played by en-
sembles with instrumentation greater than that of standard small group or
big band setups. Smaller jazz ensembles utilizing a similar pairing of “West-
ern” and “non-Western” musical conventions were lumped into the West
­
Coast or Cool camps. Retrospective assessments have, however, cast a
slightly wider net, incorporating the mid-1950s jazz quartet works of John

­
Lewis into the Third Stream fold (Floyd 1995, 167; Joyner 2000, 79). This
problematic labeling is discussed further in chapter 4 but is introduced
here in order to argue that, to a large extent, the promotion of what would
come to be known as Third Stream works mirrored the attempts of Cool
Jazz modernists like Dave Brubeck to expand the jazz audience.
Composer-bassist Charles Mingus articulated a promotional strategy
­
conceived along these lines in a letter to Down Beat published in June
1951—six years before he wrote his now-lauded Third Stream work “Rev-
­
­
elations” (1957). Elaborating on comments from an earlier Down Beat
interview, Mingus wrote of learning from “every score of the great com-
posers, old and modern,” and of the practicality of viewing jazz and clas-
sical streams as “all one music” (Gleason 1951, 7). Such an orientation, he
assumed, would result in wider appeal for his own projects. As Eric Por-
ter writes in reflection, “He was convinced that the lines between classi-
cal music and jazz were not immutable, and he saw composition as a
means of moving outside the marketing categories imposed upon jazz”
(2002, 105). Yet Mingus did not view this approach as an abandonment
of African American musical culture. To the contrary, Porter indicates
that Mingus’s mid-1950s works utilized this approach as a means to an
­
end regarding the promotion of African American musical elements. By
casting rhythmic drive and blues tonalities within composed forms, Min-
gus was able to both promote vernacular tropes and expand his commer-
cial reach beyond the existing parameters of the jazz market (Porter 2002,
117). His concerts of “modern jazz composition” presented throughout
New York in the mid-1950s in turn demonstrate the importance of brand-
­
ing in achieving these goals.
Unable to enter the college market as directly as white modernists, Min-
gus chose instead to take part in a project that aimed to reinvent estab-
 Branching Out • 41

lished jazz spaces in a manner that might attract Western art music listen-
ers. This was largely accomplished through the promotion of his works
under the banner of “modern jazz composition.” While linkage between
the terms “jazz” and “composition” had been occurring in jazz since the
1930s, even quite overtly, as in the promotion of Ellington’s Carnegie Hall
performances, these early associations used the performer, not the compo-
sition, as their main focus. Ellington’s 1943 concert at Carnegie Hall, for
instance, received a good deal of attention related to his composition Black,
Brown and Beige, yet the performance was marketed to patrons under the
name “Duke Ellington and His Orchestra” (Tucker 1993, 161). Dizzy Gil-
lespie’s 1947 Carnegie Hall debut, in turn, despite its importance in show-
casing modern bebop innovation and John Lewis’s arrangements, was mar-
keted under Gillespie’s name (Levin 1947, 1). The promotion of Mingus’s
1950s performances, in contrast, switched the focus from “performer” to
“composition.”
Initially this was realized through Mingus’s 1954 collaboration with
the Jazz Composers Workshop, a collective that included Max Roach,
Thelonious Monk, Art Blakey, Kenny Clarke, John Lewis, Teo Macero,
and John LaPorta (Porter 2002, 116). Performances of works composed
by group members were set up at both Carnegie Recital Hall in January
and the Museum of Modern Art in May, the former demonstrating reli-
ance on an established domain and the latter, a shift in venue. The com-
positions themselves, and not the performers, were made the focal point
of these events and were given considerable coverage in the popular press.
Such focus, it should be noted, was not always beneficial. The works pre-
sented at the January concert served as fodder for the group’s first review
in Down Beat, which referred to them as “uniformly disappointing” in
terms of “structure, thematic content and rhythmic interest” (“Jazz Com-
posers Workshop” 1954, 21). George Simon’s review of the May perfor-
mance, published in Metronome, was again mixed, referring to Mingus’s
work “Background for Thought” as “an involved bit of writing, far too
confusing to be digested at one hearing, and even intricate enough to call
for a halt by Mingus and then a fresh start” (qtd. in Priestley 1982, 57). Yet
the group steadily progressed, and by 1955 follow-up performances had
­
been scheduled at Carnegie Recital Hall and the YMHA on Lexington
Avenue (“New Series” 1955, 16). Utilizing the series title “Developments
42 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

in Modern Jazz,” these concerts mirrored the format of Stearns’s lecture

series. Audience members were encouraged to ask questions after the per-
formance of each work, and in at least one instance debate surrounding
compositional intent erupted between performers on the stage (“New
Series” 1955, 16). The audience outreach goals of such a format were quite
obvious. Speaking on behalf of the musicians at a January 1955 perfor-
mance, Bill Coss told Down Beat, “Jazz is now at a point where it must
make some forward steps to meet its potential audiences,” a point to
which the journalist responded, “These concerts are an excellent and
commendatory example of one of the best ways for musicians to make
those steps” (“New Series” 1955, 16).
While Mingus’s relationship with the Jazz Composers Workshop
helped accomplish his goal of reaching a new audience, his compositions
for the group capitalized on this access by utilizing musical material and
performance conventions from the jazz realm to activate what would ap-
pear to many to be Western art music sonic concepts. This is most evident
in his arrangement of “Tea for Two,” released on the 1955 album Jazz
Composers Workshop. Here Mingus utilizes the standard thirty-two-bar

­
­
form of the title work but pairs the “Tea for Two” melody in counter-
point with the melodies of jazz standards “Perdido” and “Body and Soul”
(Priestley 1982, 58). The resulting polyphony Signifies on Western art
music contrapuntal practices, in effect presenting the work as derived
from European processes to one set of listeners while acknowledging its
debt to jazz history for others. His original composition “Purple Heart,”
released on the same album, utilizes improvised counterpoint to a similar
end. In the context of the “Developments in Modern Jazz” series, the in-
terweaving lines of clarinettist John LaPorta and baritone saxophonist
George Barrow would have likely appeared to be the jazz practice of poly-
phonic improvisation to one group of listeners and an effect derived from
European contrapuntal practices to the Western art music cohort.
Further evidence of Mingus’s double-voiced approach can be heard in
­
his work “Revelations” (1957), presented at the Brandeis University jazz
festival in June 1957. Mingus’s access to the university in this instance can
be understood as a result of both gradual advances during the early civil
rights movement and the normalization of modern jazz performances at
universities during the early 1950s. Yet it must also be noted that this was
 Branching Out • 43

not a “Mingus” concert. The focus of the festival lay in the promotion of
composition, similar to the “Developments in Modern Jazz” series. “Rev-
elations” was a commissioned work, as were the works by other festival
participants Jimmy Giuffre, George Russell, Harold Shapero, Milton
Babbitt, and Gunther Schuller. Such compositional focus likely aided
Mingus’s inclusion in the program while casting a wide net in terms of
potential audience members.
Certainly Babbitt’s participation would have contributed to the success
of the latter cause. Babbitt had established himself in the late 1940s and
early 1950s as a composer who synthesized and expanded on “Schoenber-
gian and Webernian practices” (Mead 1994, 54). The work Babbitt would
present, “All Set” (1957), built on the twelve-tone compositional proce-

­
dures he had advanced during the first part of his career while incorporat-
ing jazz improvisational and formal gestures (Wintle 1976, 121). As the
work marked Babbitt’s first interaction with jazz, it seems reasonable to
assume that some of his supporters would have been less familiar with the
genre than those who had long supported Mingus and the other composers
on the program, all of whom maintained at least some connection with the
jazz art world.
While Mingus’s awareness of Babbit’s involvement was likely, given the
early announcement of the festival participants (“Six Works” 1957, 11), it is
difficult to say with certainty that “Revelations” was designed with his par-
ticipation in mind. Still, the work Signifies on the atonality of the Second
Viennese School in a manner that would have engaged Babbit’s supporters.
This can be heard in the work’s opening section, which begins with a theme
performed in unison by the baritone saxophone, bassoon, horn, trombone,
harp, and bass.
While not strictly a twelve-tone row, the opening theme is highly chro-
­
matic and presents eleven out of twelve possible pitches in quick succession
(A♭/G# is missing and some notes are repeated). This passage then pro-
gresses through three interweaving composed solos, one for French horn,
one for trumpet, and one for trombone, all utilizing similar nondiatonic
pitch collections before the theme returns in its original orchestration. An
ostinato on the pitch B♭ begins the following section, played by the bari-
tone sax, bassoon, harp, guitar, and bass parts, accompanying a fanfare
played by the alto saxophone, French horn, trumpet, and trombone. This
44 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

section climaxes in the juxtapositioning of an A-major chord (spelled A–

­
­
D♭–E) against the B♭ ostinato and the lyric “oh yes, my LORD!” sung by the
­
percussionist.
It is the incorporation of this latter element that demands the most at-
tention in a Signifyin(g) analysis. Mingus made clear his intention to evoke
the vernacular in this moment, writing in his performance notes,

The singing shout “Oh, yes, my Lord” can be delivered by a per-

former other than the drummer, or optionally by several players. Fi-
nally, if no one is able to produce this shout in authentic “black
church” style, a brief improvised “shout” by, for example, the alto
saxophone could be substituted. (1976, 2)

This reference to the black church links the lyric to the “testifying” trope of
African American religious services in which vocal shouts are used as a
means of affirming preached content. One level of Signifyin(g) can there-
fore be seen when the shout is viewed as a comment on the strictures of
notated performance. Mingus’s dissonant opening pushes the limits of tra-
ditionally notated music, freeing his melody from the confines of diatoni-
cism by embracing atonal concepts. The shout comes at the climax of this
section, confirming or praising the preceding material while in turn point-
ing to additional or alternate freedoms found in vernacular practices.
This commentary is advanced further in Mingus’s section of “open”
improvisation. Located between the work’s quasi-atonal opening and
­
ending, this section draws on a slight variation of the blues scale in the
creation of a dissonant group improvisation. The structural components
employed toward this end are a two-measure repeated vamp and two sets
­
of “blowing scales,” written in the trumpet part. The same scales are pro-
vided earlier in the score for the other instruments directed to improvise
during this section. The first scale, located in measure 169, is the B♭ har-
monic minor scale with an added raised fourth degree. This pitch is blues
derived (an enharmonic equivalent of the flat fifth) and presents again in
the second scale, played over E♭7. Mirroring the first scale, this second
pitch collection includes another addition, a raised sixth degree, allowing
the performer access to pendular thirds over the E♭7 harmony. The two-
­
measure section includes the directions “Repeat ad libitum, build to cli-
 Branching Out • 45

max,” and the 1957 recording demonstrates an interpretation of this re-

quirement: the performers steadily increase both the length and volume
of their improvised statements until a high degree of dissonance has been
reached. This section is then followed by a restatement of the work’s ini-
tial theme.
Where Mingus’s shout confirms the use of notation in freeing music
from diatonic restrictions and points to alternate paths toward musical
freedom, the design of Mingus’s open section demonstrates the capacity
for blues-based polyphonic improvisation to achieve similar sonic goals.
­
The parallel between the approaches is made overt in the transition from
the “open” section to the (nearly) twelve-tone theme that follows, thus

­
framing polyphonic improvisation as an equal partner in tonal libera-
tion. In the Mingus examples cited thus far, it is important to note that
African American musical elements are utilized as the core building
blocks of Western art music sonic effects. Instead of using jazz (or West-
ern art music practices) as a veneer, Mingus manipulates the vernacular
directly, forcing it to speak the double-voiced utterances required by the
­
Signifyin(g) trope.
In terms of audience expansion, these compositional processes met
with mixed success. Gunther Schuller recognized the potential of Min-
gus’s compositions in what would become the Third Stream market and
collaborated with him on the 1960 project Pre-Bird, realizing jazz stan-
­
dards and syncretic Mingus originals through an expanded jazz orchestra
that included flute, oboe, and tuba (in addition to the traditional trum-
pets, trombones, saxes, and rhythm section). Development of the album
was supported by Mercury Records, yet its release marked Mingus’s first
and last project with the label. The work “Revelations,” in turn, would
become increasingly aligned with the Third Stream genre while the com-
poser moved more aggressively toward blues-based projects. “Revela-
­
tions” was released with other syncretic works, including Lewis’s “Three
Little Feelings” (1956), on a 1964 album titled Outstanding Jazz Composi-
tions of the 20th Century and has been referred to in retrospect as one of
the earliest commissioned Third Stream works ( Joyner 2000, 78) as well
as a hallmark of the “classical jazz modernist” approach (Lopes 2002,
244). The bulk of Mingus’s post-“Revelations” pieces, in contrast, are de-
­
scribed by Porter as follows:
46 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

Whether it was based on a fear of being marginalized by black refor-

mulations of the idiom, the influence of Charlie Parker and other
bebop architects, the expectations of record labels and audiences,
the political moment, an artistic impasse, or, more likely, a combina-
tion of factors, Mingus changed his approach to composition and
bandleading. He began working with original compositions that in-
cluded more African-American vernacular musical elements (for
­
example, gospel and blues inflections), and he allowed musicians
greater leeway in creating the melodic (if not harmonic) structure of
each performance of these compositions. (2002, 124)

The 1959 albums Blues and Roots and Mingus Ah Um are indicative of
this vernacular-heavy approach. While continuing to tease and ma-
­
nipulate the blues, these albums showcase vernacular elements such as
“open fourths and fifths, rhythmic vamps that shuffled back and forth
for extended periods, gospel cries of enthusiasm from the band stand
[and] melodies that traded the snaky chromatics of bebop for simpler
repeated blues statements” (Saul 2003, 195) in a more overt manner
than Mingus’s works for the Jazz Composers Workshop and the
Brandeis Jazz Festival. This approach was encouraged by Atlantic Re-
cords producer Nesuhi Ertegun (Saul 2003, 195) and can be seen to
permeate the popular 1961 album Mingus Oh, Yeah! Such alignment
moved Mingus’s compositions closer to the R&B and popular music
audience. As Saul notes, “The mainstream youth market” was already
embracing blues-heavy syncretic works by vocalists Sam Cooke and
­
Paul Anka, and while Mingus rejected popular music alignment in
interviews, his late-1950s success is at least partially tied to the inter-
­
ests of this demographic (2003, 195).

Lewis and the Search for a Third Stream Audience

Despite such a shift, Mingus’s participation in a project that had sought to

bring into the fold followers of Western art music instilled some lasting
promotional models in the jazz world. John Lewis in particular can be seen
to have continued to utilize the “modern music” banner during his work
 Branching Out • 47

with both the Modern Jazz Society and the Jazz and Classical Music Soci-
ety between 1955 and 1957. Alignment between the goals of the two com-
posers in terms of audience outreach is apparent in Lewis’s statements re-
garding a modernist agenda, put forth in a 1953 Down Beat interview with
Nat Hentoff. Echoing Mingus’s call for the expansion of the jazz audience,
Lewis vented frustration with bebop-style improvisation and his percep-

­
tion of its alienating effects, stating,

If solos go on for chorus after chorus, it’s hard enough for the musi-
cian to remember what he’s constructing. It must be even more dif-
ficult for the listener . . . The audience for jazz can be widened if we
strengthen our work with structure. If there is more of a reason for
what’s going on, there’ll be more overall sense, and, therefore, more
interest for the listener. (Hentoff 1953a, 8)

These comments parallel Mulligan’s recollection of Lewis’s attitude during

the Birth of the Cool sessions and have a tendency to be used in discussions
of Lewis’s appropriation of European compositional conventions (F. Davis
1983; Bourne 1992). Yet Lewis was quick to champion familiar jazz conven-
tions in the same article, pointing to the rhythmic interplay of New
Orleans–style improvisation as a solution to what he perceived as “rhyth-
­
mic dullness” in contemporary jazz and to the primacy of swing in creating
“meaningful rhythmic sense” in a work (qtd. in Hentoff 1953a, 26). Indeed,
balance between both the old and the new in jazz works was paramount in
Lewis’s vision, a sentiment made clear in his concluding statement: “It must
be possible to hear all of the music or else . . . these other aspects lose their
impact” (qtd. in Hentoff 1953a, 26). Yet as with Mingus, such an agenda
would prove problematic to implement within the confines of established
jazz domains.
Lewis’s experience with Davis’s nonet had demonstrated the futility of
syncretic pursuits in existing jazz venues. Like Davis, the arrangers and col-
laborators on the Birth of the Cool had felt the pain of a lack of follow-up
­
performances and the general disinterest by jazz consumers toward their
experiments. Lewis’s subsequent projects, in response, demonstrated a shift
away from the syncretic sound of the nonet back toward the earlier bebop
style. Examples from this period include a 1951 recording with Davis re-
48 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

leased as Miles Davis and Horns and four separate recordings made as part
of the Milt Jackson Quartet between 1951 and 1952.6 Yet Lewis struggled in
a style where pianistic virtuosity was paramount to success. As Davis re-
aligned with the bebop sound in the early 1950s, he dropped Lewis and re-
placed him with pianists more capable of performing bebop lines, a list that
eventually included, among others, Kenny Drew and Walter Bishop. As
Martin Williams would later point out, Lewis’s strength as a pianist did
“not include obvious finger dexterity” and he frequently avoided “the per-
cussively delivered chord patterns . . . typical [of ] modern jazz pianist[s],”
instead choosing to “offer complementary countermelodies behind . . .
soloist[s]” (Williams 1970, 158–59). While this approach apparently met
­
Jackson’s approval (evident in his reliance on Lewis as an accompanist), it
left little room for Lewis to maneuver outside his role as sideman. Leader-
ship success would instead need to be pursued through Lewis’s strengths in
arrangement and composition, embraced in a new permutation of the Milt
Jackson Quartet, this time with Lewis at the head.
Lewis articulated his strategy for the “new” ensemble—the Modern

­
Jazz Quartet—to bassist Percy Heath and vibraphonist Jackson in 1952,
­
and Heath remembered it in the following terms:

John’s vision for the group was to change the music from just a jam
session, or rhythm section and soloist idea, to something more. We
were all equal members, and the dress, the wearing of tuxedos, and
trying to perform in concert rather than always in nightclubs, was
part of what he envisioned to change the whole attitude about the
music. (Heath qtd. in Giddins 1998, 382)

Central to this strategy was the exploration of new performance spaces. Yet
despite a desire to play more “concert” settings, the MJQ initially struggled
to gain access to venues apart from nightclubs. Continuing to trade primar-
ily under vibraphonist Milt Jackson’s name, the group toured jazz clubs
along the East Coast during 1953 and 1954, enduring a paradox of critical
praise and audience disinterest. Evidence of the latter can be seen in Heath’s
recollection of a three-week residency at Birdland in 1954:
­
We had a hard time getting people to quiet down and listen. At that
time in nightclubs, people were talking about hanging out. In order
 Branching Out • 49

to break that down, instead of trying to play over the conversation,

we’d use reverse psychology and play softer. Suddenly, they knew we
were up there and realized the conversation was louder than the mu-
sic. Of course, it if got too loud, we’d come off—just stop playing

­
and walk off. It didn’t take long for them to realize they were wasting
their time because we weren’t going to entertain them in that sense.
(Heath qtd. in Giddins 1998, 384)

Critical reception of the Birdland performances, in contrast, demon-

strated excitement over the group’s musical approach. Nat Hentoff, the
journalist who had given Lewis a platform for articulating his modernist
strategy in 1953, echoed back Lewis’s comments regarding the balance of
more traditional jazz elements and modern structural elements in his re-
view of the performance:

One new work that is now in the book is a warmly lyrical new Lewis
original, Django, and a pungent True Blues. These numbers, like al-
most all of the Quartet’s book, combine careful but fluid form with
space for free improvisation. Thereby, the jazz improvisation be-
comes more meaningful within the added musical challenges pro-
vided by the imaginative form. Equally important is the fact that by
working within intelligently flexible form, the Modern Jazz Quar-
tet’s number mean more as a whole than the book of any other cur-
rent jazz small unit. There is thereby less inconsistency of perfor-
mance from night to night by the unit as a unit than occurs with
groups that are based almost entirely on the solo flights of its mem-
bers with only tenuous ensemble interconnections between those
solos. (Hentoff 1954a, 32)

Hentoff ’s praise offered support for Lewis’s syncretic style, but Heath’s rec-
ollections of club performances demonstrate its ill-fittedness for the jazz
­
scene. These club dates failed additionally in meeting the recruitment pri-
orities put forth in Lewis’s 1953 interview. Fortunately, his involvement
with the Jazz Composers Workshop in the early 1950s had modeled a way
of addressing both of these issues.
Lewis endeavored to create his own new performance space under
the label of the Modern Jazz Society in 1955. Like Mingus, Lewis strove
50 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

to establish a setting in which composition could serve as the main ve-

hicle for audience attraction. Teaming up with the French horn player
and composer Gunther Schuller, Lewis assembled a program of works
showcasing a range of ensembles, including the MJQ and a chamber
ensemble consisting of flute, harp, bassoon, and French horn as well as
more traditional big band units. Importantly, the Modern Jazz Society’s
emphasis on composition expanded beyond the jazz realm, evident in
the inclusion of Italian composer Luigi Nono’s Polifonica, Monodia,
Ritmica. This performance marked Nono’s first appearance in the
United States, and his reputation abroad as an “an unusually important
modern composer” formed part of the inaugural concert promotion
(Hentoff 1955b, 14). Like Babbitt’s later inclusion in the 1957 Brandeis
Jazz Festival, Nono’s inclusion on the Modern Jazz Society program
would have ensured a broader audience demographic than had Lewis
and the MJQ attempted to promote the performance on their own. In
addition, while the group utilized an established jazz domain, Town
Hall, the space was claimed early on in the name of composition as op-
posed to “jazz.” An announcement for the concert reads, “A unique
concert in Town Hall Nov. 19 will be the first venture of the new Mod-
ern Jazz Society, a nonprofit organization for providing a wider hearing
for contemporary music and musicians” (“Jazz Society Spots MJQ”
1955, 52). Such “unique” aspects of this performance in effect created a
new musical space in which Lewis’s expansionist agenda could be more
efficiently realized.
Indeed, the music itself appears custom built to intrigue both the West-
ern art music listener and the modern jazz connoisseur to which the Mod-
ern Jazz Society’s program was marketed. Lewis’s “Concorde,” performed at
Birdland on January 23 and January 30, 1955, as well as at the Modern Jazz
Society concert, stands out in this regard as a result of its Signifyin(g) treat-
ment of fugal processes. As Owens (1976) shows in an early analysis of the
work, the initial theme is treated in the manner of a fugal subject, traded
between the bass, piano, and vibraphone over the course of a twenty-five-
­
­
measure exposition. Yet the theme itself is composed largely of call-response
­
tropes (example 1.1).
The opening two bars form a “call,” employing the vernacular conven-
tion of pendular thirds, B moving to C, in transition to the A♭ harmony.
 Branching Out • 51

Example 1.1. “Concorde” (1954), “Fugal Subject,” bass, mm. 1–7. Pub-

­
lished score (reduced and set in Finale).

The “response” that follows in bars 3–4 again employs pendular thirds but
­
embellishes the initial statement by adding yet another blues sonority, the
flat seventh over the tonic harmony on the upbeat of beat 1 in bar 4.
Signifyin(g) can then be seen to take place as the call-response statement
­
reenters, first in the piano and then in the vibraphone. The dovetailing of
these statements evokes the layered thematic construction of fugal compo-
sitions while simultaneously reiterating, again and again, the core blues
components of the “fugal” subject. To a jazz audience, the repeated state-
ments inherent to the fugal process may have signified an additional layer
of blues-derived call-response structure, while to others they would have
­
­
likely appeared linked to the canon of Western art music. Performing this
work in front of a diverse audience would have therefore allowed Lewis to
potentially entertain those “in the know” while simultaneously recruiting
those uninitiated.
A similar strategy is employed in Lewis’s work “Three Little Feelings”
(1956), written for the Jazz and Classical Music Society ( JCMS) in 1956.
The JCMS was an outgrowth of the Modern Jazz Society, designed with
the intent of encouraging the performance of contemporary music, espe-
cially works “written by composers in the jazz field who would not other-
wise have an opportunity for their less-conventional work to be pre-
­
sented” (Avakian 1957, 1). The term less-conventional does not in and of
­
itself strip African American alignment from these works, yet the JCMS
went further than any previous space-creation project in targeting an au-
­
52 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

dience of Western art music patrons. Not only did the group include the
term Classical Music in their title, they recruited New York Philharmonic
conductor Dmitri Mitropoulos’s participation in their inaugural concert,
seeking to capitalize on the reputation of a well-known Western art mu-

­
sic figure (“Jazz, Classical Music Society” 1956, 9). While this perfor-
mance was first delayed and then ultimately cancelled, early publicity
paved the way for the marketing of an album of works in which Mitro-
poulos participated, sharing conducting credit with Schuller, and issued
under the title The Jazz and Classical Music Society Presents a Program of
Music for Brass.
“Three Little Feelings” again employs the call-response trope as a key

­
structural device, seen most clearly in its first movement. The initial the-
matic statement, the “call,” is stated in unison by two trombones and two
French horns before being concluded in unison by two French horns and
two trumpets (example 1.2). The blues-derived flat fifth features promi-
­
nently in the second measure and the blues-derived flat third forms an in-
­
tegral part of the second half of the thematic figure seen in measure 4. The
second thematic statement, or the “response,” revises the first part of the
theme while maintaining the second. Again, the flat fifth plays a significant
role in the identity of the primary figure, falling to an F natural in measure
8 and thus paralleling measure 2 of the example; yet Lewis draws additional
attention to the blues inflection by requiring semitonal movement between
the pitch and scale degree 5 twice in measure 7 as opposed to just once in
measure 1.
Repetition of these two sets of thematic material makes up the vast ma-
jority of written music during the first movement, the details of which are
outlined in figure 1.1. The result is a riff-driven work in which nearly all
­
composed material can be linked back to the initial thematic statement.
The pairing of this material with improvisation in turn establishes its jazz
sensibilities even more convincingly (see figure 1.1).
The Signifyin(g) aspects of the first movement of “Three Little Feel-
ings” therefore have less to do with its compositional design than its choice
of instrumentation and selection of presentation space. The addition of
French horns, baritone horns, and tuba evoke associations with musical
styles separate from African American vernacular music, and its location
on an album with works conducted by Mitropoulos aligns it, at least in
 Branching Out • 53

terms of marketing, more with Western art music than with the jazz art
world. The extent to which the work’s riff-driven design was successfully

­
hidden by Lewis’s selection of instruments and the paratextual frame of the
album is evident in popular press reviews. Ray Ellsworth, for example,
places it outside the jazz realm with the exception of its improvised pas-
sages, stating,

The standout composition here for me is John Lewis’ Three Little

Feelings . . . I guess Lewis has the patent on this kind of writing, the
formal structure on a three-part invention written out in some com-
­
plexity with holes for blowing to provide the jazz feeling. (1957, 34)

Schuller concurs with Ellsworth’s assessment, stating that Lewis had, “in
a very simple, unspectacular way,” combined “the romantic and the classi-
cal in a judicious blending” (1957, 1). John Wilson, writing for the New
York Times, further contributes to the consensus, noting that “Three Lit-
tle Feelings” indicates there could be “jazz composition based on the
same kind of form and structure used in the composition of ‘serious’ mu-
sic” (1957, 97), while Dom De Micheal and Pete Welding note that the
work and Jimmy Giuffre’s “Pharaoh,” both included on the 1964 rerelease
of Music for Brass, “show clearly the influence of classical composition on
the composers” (1964, 25). While such assessments would have been cru-
cial in meeting the expansionist agenda inherent in works that utilize the
“minstrel mask,” too much success along these lines would work to sepa-
rate the piece in popular imagination from the realm of African Ameri-
can expressive culture.
Indeed, regardless of what these reviewers describe as a double-voiced
­
design, the lack of jazz listeners willing or able to hear the music as double-
­
voiced commentary is evident in Lewis’s increasing marginalization from
the jazz world, as surveyed in the following chapter. Part of this issue arises
from the fact that “Three Little Feelings” was not a work easily performed
outside of the newly created “modern music” venue and therefore was in
many ways limited to the expansion and not the maintenance part of the
double-voiced agenda. Another factor at play was the perceived subtlety of
­
its blues components. Yet debate over how much “masking” is too much
has constantly surrounded the reception of double-voiced texts. As dis-
­
54 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

Example 1.2. “Three Little Feelings” (1956), theme, mm. 1–5. Published
­
score (set in Finale).

cussed in the introduction to this book, Baker (1987) uses as his primary
“masking” example the speeches of Booker T. Washington, despite the fact
that the strategies employed in these speeches were frequently challenged
by those who favored more direct engagement with the African American
voice. Washington’s most notable critic, W. E. B. Du Bois, called out the
“masking” trope in his essay “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others,”
claiming that Washington “represents in Negro thought the old attitude of
 Branching Out • 55

Example 1.2 (continued). “Three Little Feelings” (1956), theme, mm. 6–

­
11. Published score (set in Finale).

adjustment and submission” and that “in failing thus to state plainly and
unequivocally the legitimate demands of their people, even at the cost of
opposing an honored leader, the thinking classes of American Negroes . . .
shirk a heavy responsibility” ([1903] 2007, 42). Du Bois’s critique makes an
appeal for clarity and demonstrates a desire for more direct action but does
not criticize the intent of Washington’s strategy. Later critics would be less
56 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

M. Section Length (mm.) Key Description

1 Introduction 12 Cmin Unison thematic entrance in horns and trom-

bone develops into harmonized thematic pas-
sage across the brass.
13 Composed trom- 8 Cmin Horns play theme in counterpoint to trombone
bone solo solo; drums and bass accompany.
21 Composed trum- 8 Cmin Call-and-response between composed trumpet

­
­
pet solo (theme line and horn backing figures derived from
paraphrase) mm. 1–2; drums and bass accompany.

­
29 Improvised trum- 32 Cmin One-measure horn, trombone, and baritone

­
pet solo backing figure derived from mm. 1–2 accom-

­
panies first sixteen measures; tympani and
drums accompany first fifteen measures; tym-
pani, drums, bass accompany last seventeen
measures.
61 Interlude 9 Eb Full brass harmonization of thematic material
from mm. 4–5; piano, tympani, drums, bass

­
accompany.
70 Tuba solo (exact 9 Cmin Tuba thematic statement accompanied by tym-
theme) pani and drums transitions to unison horns,
trombones, baritones, and tuba for second half
of theme.
79 Improvised trum- 7 Cmin Call-and-response between improvised trumpet
­
­
pet solo and theme played by the remaining trumpet
section. Horns, trombones, baritones and tuba
provide chordal accompaniment. Drums ac-
company.
86 Truncated theme 6 Cmin Unison truncated theme played by the trumpets
and cadence ending on unison G followed by three one-
­
measure Cmin chords with added scale de-
grees 9 and 11, formed across the brass.

Fig. 1.1. Formal outline of John Lewis’s “Three Little Feelings” (1956),
movement 1.

kind, aligning Washington with Uncle Tomism and the persistence of Af-
rican American disfranchisement (Norrell 2009, 15). As I will show, a simi-
lar trend persists in the evaluation of Lewis’s musical works. Yet by placing
them in the context of uplift strategies embraced following the 1940s big
band decline, it is possible to come away with a sense that the works do in
some way add up to more than the sum of their parts.
Such an interpretation would at first seem to confirm arguments put
forth by Samuel Floyd (1995, 164) regarding the intent of syncretic jazz
strategies deployed during the 1950s. Floyd bases this argument on Gary
 Branching Out • 57

Tomlinson’s observation that pairing Western art music tropes with ver-
nacular elements during this period allowed for communal affirmation of a
“wide-ranging variety of African-American perceptions” (Tomlinson 1991,
­
­
256). This agenda accorded with the tenets of dominant civil rights per-
spectives during the era in which “race-thinking” was viewed as working

­
against equality (Omi & Winant 1994, 96–100) while simultaneously rec-

­
ognizing the need to recruit audience members not yet initiated in African
American expressive culture. In other words, it advanced African American
social and economic presence by capitalizing on the idea that blackness was
not monolithic—that while vernacular musical tropes were essential to Af-
­
rican American music making, the assembly of these tropes could result in
aural effects far different from consensus surrounding what “real” African
American music sounded like. It is from this foundation that Floyd claims
syncretic musicians in the 1950s “play[ed] on the verges, exploring the
crossroads where African-American and European myth and ritual meet”
­
while producing cultural works “the Harlem Renaissance thinkers would
have embraced” (1995, 164).
Yet Floyd does not defend all 1950s syncretic compositions along these
lines and in some cases takes Lewis to task for giving up too much of the
vernacular in favor of Western art music alignment (1995, 166–67). In mak-
­
ing this assessment, Floyd relies on the criteria of sonic “balance,” failing to
read how the aggregate of musical tropes functioned in an historic context.
This is apparent in his description of the MJQ’s version of the Charlie
Parker piece “Now’s the Time”:

The musicians of the cool and Third Stream schools tended to dis-
card ring values, diluting the powerful expressions of Call-
­
Response. An example of this dilution is the MJQ’s ineffective
1957 version of Parker’s “Now’s the Time,” in which, after a shaky
start, the performers get into a cool groove but do not tell much of
a story because of their too subtle treatment of the ring tropes they
employ . . . For those who were emotionally and ideologically com-
mitted to the African-American side of the musical mix, many of
­
the products of the cool/Third Stream trend were viewed either as
vapid cultural irrelevances or as musical, social, and cultural threats
to “real” black music. (Floyd 1995, 167)
58 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

Here Floyd refers to Sterling Stuckey’s (1987) research on the early Afri-
can American musical practice of the “Ring Shout” as a means of refer-
encing a catalog of sonorities he views as essential to African American
music making.7 The use of such criteria in an assessment of Lewis’s align-
ment with African American expressive culture, however, demonstrates
an inconsistency in Floyd’s methodology. His reading of William Grant
Still’s Afro-American Symphony as well as the Birth of the Cool recordings
­
focuses on historical intent rather than a cataloging of sonorities. The
MJQ’s recording of “Now’s the Time,” in contrast, is left to float in the
ether of an ill-defined historical space—approached from the angle of its
­
­
primary sonic impression with no attempts made at hermeneutical analy-
sis. Compounding this issue is the fact that generalizations regarding the
breadth of John Lewis’s work are made throughout Floyd’s monograph
The Power of Black Music (1995), excluding Lewis from African American
expressive culture in nearly all instances. After detailing the MJQ’s
“Now’s the Time” performance in the previous quote, Floyd goes on to
extrapolate that the entirety of the MJQ output evinces “spiritual vacu-
ity” by way of a “paucity of ring tropes” and that the intent of this process
was to make the music “respectable in ‘proper’ (that is white) social cir-
cles” (1995, 167).
A different perspective is put forth in this chapter. Faced with a lack
of performance and recording opportunities at the beginning of the
1950s, many jazz artists sought to break new ground, broadening the
jazz market through the expansion of performance venues and audi-
ence demographics. A syncretic approach to composition in which fa-
miliar jazz devices and Western art music devices were fused helped
appeal to the modernist model of jazz development espoused in aca-
demic circles. Yet many of these works went even further, creating
Western art music sonorities through the innovative deployment of
jazz vernacular devices, clearly demonstrating applications of the
Signifyin(g) act as interpreted by Henry Louis Gates (1988). While the
degree to which these acts were overt varied from project to project,
their presence can be discerned across the compositional spectrum. In
the case of the MJQ, however, a perception of vernacular denial related
to this compositional approach would lead to a broader stripping of
African American identity in discussions surrounding the group mem-
 Branching Out • 59

bers’ behavior. Such claims evince a reverse of the racial stereotyping

outlined by Porter (2002), calling special attention to the “manners”
and “gentility” of the group as if these concepts were foreign to African
American culture. This reading of the MJQ, interrogated in chapter 2,
demonstrates the ultimate cost of interpreting African American syn-
cretic music apart from its particular historical context.
2 • “Bearded Undertakers”

Rhythm and Reputation

The 1957 Nat Hentoff interview with John Lewis that I discuss in the open-
ing of this book is undoubtedly a rich text. Lewis’s frustration with the
press’s critique of his music is palpable throughout—potentially fueled by a
­
sense of betrayal grown out of Hentoff ’s prior endorsements of Lewis’s
modernist approach. Yet at the same time, Lewis downplays his embrace of
Western art music conventions, asking rhetorically at one point, “Have we
played out our use of fugal structures? We only play three. . . . How can it
be said that that aspect of what we do has been played out?” (Hentoff
1957b, 15)—a truly intriguing comment given Lewis’s recent involvement
­
with the Jazz and Classical Music Society. And in yet another tension-filled
­
moment, Lewis seems pushed to the edge when confronted with praise for
the “sensitive and responsible attitude of the [MJQ],” stating plainly, “We’re
grown men . . . and we conduct ourselves as grown men. There’s nothing
remarkable about that” (Hentoff 1957b, 16). While each of these issues
raises a series of interesting questions, if there is one note that rings louder
than others in this interview, it is a sense of lost control over how Lewis’s
music and legacy were being conveyed to the public through the trade
press.
This is not to say that the trade press somehow treated Lewis un-
fairly. Indeed, over the course of the 1950s, Lewis’s syncretic approach
was given more than considerable attention in feature articles, editori-
als, and interviews that appeared in the North American magazines
Down Beat and Metronome as well as in international publications such
as the German journal Melos, the Parisian publication Jazz Magazine,

60
 “Bearded Undertakers” • 61

and the British Jazz Journal. The vast majority of these assessments de-
ployed familiar and outwardly fair journalistic methodologies, placing
(or attempting to place) Lewis’s work somewhere within the vast con-
temporary jazz milieu. In order to do so, journalists endorsed the model
of musical evolution discussed in chapter 1, describing Lewis’s work as a
step forward—in either a right or a wrong direction—but always with
­
­
an end point far from jazz’s folk roots in mind. Lewis had, in tandem,
seemed to encourage this sort of understanding through his early com-
ments on the importance of “structure” in jazz (Hentoff 1953a, 8), his
circulation of notes outlining the structural features of his music to
journalists (Hentoff 1954b, 27), and his development of the Modern
Jazz Society and the Jazz and Classical Music Society. Such actions
make it easy to understand why certain ideas about Lewis’s music gained
traction in the popular press and at first glance make Lewis’s attempt to
add nuance to his legacy seem a bit out of step.
Yet the need for such nuancing becomes undeniably clear when one
considers the effect descriptions of Lewis’s music were beginning to have on
depictions of Lewis’s character. Lewis’s penchant for dynamic control, in-
strumental balance, and complex structural devices had from the outset
garnered critique caged in language that highlighted mental rather than
physical engagement. Terms such as interesting, intellectual, and cerebral oc-
curred more frequently in accounts of his music than commentary regard-
ing physical response—a marker of authentic black music production
­
deeply embedded within the public imagination (Gioia 1989; Radano
2003). By the mid-1950s this critical bent had begun to distance the behav-
­
ior of Lewis and his colleagues from perceived African American cultural
norms in the popular press, perpetuating the subtle but biting racial stereo-
type that professional behavior was, for all intents and purposes, a stand-in
­
term for “white” behavior. In other words, stereotypical ideas about what
jazz music should sound like and how jazz musicians should act appear to
have collided in Lewis’s reception in a manner that severely limited the pos-
sibility of what critics were prepared to accept as genuine acts of African
American expression. Indeed, this seems to be the sort of issue Lewis is de-
termined to confront in his claim that “there’s nothing remarkable” about
acting like “grown men.”
In this chapter I aim to unravel the issues inherent in Lewis’s trade
62 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

press reception by first illuminating how loaded racialized language be-

came (and still remains in many cases) a part of the jazz lexicon. Ronald
Radano’s (2003) work on the rhetoric of “hot” music serves as a useful
platform for this discussion, as it highlights the fact that linguistic bridges
between behavioral and musical realms can be seen to extend as far back
as early European expedition reports of the African continent. With the
help of Radano and others, I trace these linguistic and ideological clichés
through early jazz writing and into the discourse surrounding Lewis’s
work. I then demonstrate how the use of such language crowded out dis-
cussion of Lewis’s own comments affirming what he viewed to be an op-
erational standpoint located within the boundaries of an African Ameri-
can artistic tradition. This argument allows Lewis’s own comments
regarding musical orientation to gain critical weight and begs for the in-
vestigation of ways in which we can understand Lewis as an artist with
roots in a different sort of African American expressive culture than the
one powerfully ingrained in the imagination of so many jazz enthusiasts.

Rhythm and Authenticity in Jazz Discourse

The idea that music of the African diaspora is, at its core, an especially
“rhythmic” music has long guided the interpretation and analysis of mu-
sical genres linked in some way to the African continent. In the field of
jazz studies, such overt rhythmicity was viewed as a key aesthetic ingredi-
ent during the first half of the twentieth century and was frequently used
as a way of denoting a level of essential difference between jazz and West-
ern art music. This understanding can be seen to permeate a spectrum of
critical views—extending from Hugh Panassié’s (1936, 4–5) “primitivist”
­
­
perspective, in which the ability to “swing” resided in the biology of Af-
rican descendants, to Barry Ulanov’s (1952, 12) sociological viewpoint
that conceptualized “rhythmic discipline” as a cultural practice brought
by African slaves to the New World. Yet in both cases, the championing
of overt rhythmicity as something uniquely African strikes a curious
chord given the contemporaneous experimentation with rhythm occur-
ring in the Western art music realm, notable, as Kofi Agawu points out,
in the works of “[Elliot] Carter, [Steve] Reich . . . [and Igor] Stravinsky”
(1995, 386). Why, we might ask, does the language of rhythm color so
 “Bearded Undertakers” • 63

much of the discussion of African and African-derived music during this

­
time period, despite the fact that a similar focus on rhythm was present in
a wide variety of music from around the world?
Part of the answer to this question lies in the fact that most of what was
known about African cultural practice in the 1950s was written with the
intent of making it seem more different from other sorts of music than it
might actually have been. Radano locates the origin of this sort of essential-
izing in early European travelogues about the African continent, in which
perceptions of savagery and primitivism were linked, in a genetic sense, to
African dance and musical performance as a way of highlighting the civility
and order (if not the perceived supremacy) of parallel European cultural
products (Radano 2003, 89–90). William Bosman’s “New and Accurate
­
Description of the Coast of Guinea” (1705/1814) provides one such exam-
ple, demonstrating how the syncopation and volume of percussive parts in
African music were sometimes exaggerated in order to “widen the gap
[both culturally and genetically] between Europeans and Africans”
(Radano 2003, 81). This is evident in Bosman’s reduction of the intricacies
of a group performance involving wind instruments and percussion to the
level of an ad-hoc percussive improvisation both “horrid and barbarous . . .
­
produc[ing] a sort of extravagant noise” (qtd. in Radano 2003, 81). Ac-
cording to Radano, such a comment “adopts what was by then a familiar
racial association, comparing their [the Guineans’] performance to the re-
gressive sounds and behavior of animals and children” (2003, 81). Follow-
ing this description, Bosman warns against “‘international’ sexual relations”
in an attempt to stem the flow of such musical practices into the European
heredity pool (Radano 2003, 82). A belief in biological predisposition to-
ward an overtly percussive musical style is thus clearly articulated in the
structure of this argument.
Radano goes on to make the argument that such rhetorical practice
followed depictions of African and African-derived music to the New
­
World—a phenomenon clearly evident in early descriptions of jazz mu-
­
sic. Indeed, Frank Salamone’s work in this area highlights several exam-
ples in which jazz’s “rhythmic vitality” was inextricably linked to com-
ments about “Negro blood” (2005, 735). One of his key pieces of
evidence—the defense of jazz offered by Frankfurt Conservatory direc-
­
tor Bernhard Sekles put forth in a 1928 New York Times article—pulls few
­
punches in this regard.
64 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

The teaching of jazz is not only the right but the duty of every up-to-

­
­
date musical institution. The majority of our musicians find them-
selves permanently or temporarily compelled to play in jazz ensem-
bles. Aside from this practical consideration, a serious study of jazz
will be of the greatest help to our young musicians. An infusion of
Negro blood can do no harm. It will help to develop a wholesome
sense of rhythm, which after all constitutes the life element of music.
(qtd. in “Jazz Bitterly Opposed” 1928, 10)

Sekles’s comment sets up “Negro” rhythm as biologically inherent, while

describing the rhythmic abilities of working European performers, in
contrast, as resulting from intellectual engagement. In this view, a sense
of “Negro” rhythm could be developed in European students through
study, while it existed in the genetic coding of African American per-
formers.1 Such understanding results in a paradox in which one route to
authentic performance circumvents the need for biological transmission
while the other continues to articulate a genetic imperative. In both cases,
however, rhythm is essentialized as a key component of the jazz style, and
the genus of jazz rhythmic sense is located within the biology of the Afri-
can American race. This sort of thinking was in no way unusual among
early jazz enthusiasts, and similar comments can be seen to permeate the
work of Panassié (1936), Sargeant ([1938] 1975), Goffin (1944), and Blesh
(1946), to name but a few.
Yet even in descriptions of jazz that did not outwardly mention African
American racial difference, the idea that the genre contained some sort of
magical rhythmic difference remained. Criticism along these lines typifies
early coverage of the genre published in the American journal the Musical
Quarterly. During the 1920s, several Musical Quarterly contributors were
keen to stress a particular concern with the impact jazz might have on com-
positions of Western art music. Important to both sides of this debate was
the influence that ethereal qualities ascribed to jazz rhythm might have on
European cultural products. Expanding the genetic myth, these qualities
were often depicted as a “musical infection” (Radano 2003, 235), spreading
from Africa to the West and carrying with them the symptom of uncon-
trollable physical response. Paul Laubenstein’s problematizing of jazz
rhythm and the seemingly related symptom of physical reflex put forth in
 “Bearded Undertakers” • 65

his 1929 article “Jazz—Debit and Credit” is emblematic of how this phe-

­
nomenon was conceived in the pages of the journal. After mentioning the
“physical hold” jazz induced on contemporary youth, Laubenstein explic-
itly dissects the components of the style’s rhythmic conventions, writing,

The mechanical domination is figured forth in the underlying

“rhythm” of jazz, in its mass production, its rapid standardization
and its speed. . . . What is new in jazz-rhythmics is the peculiar exag-

­
geration and distortion of rhythm, the contrasts produced by freely
moving figures gambolling in syncopation over an unvarying funda-
mental rhythm, both necessary for the proper jazz effect. (Lauben-
stein 1929, 609–10)
­
Laubenstein’s depiction highlights the importance of both tempo and
spontaneity in the creation of “jazz-rhythmics” as well as the fundamental
­
role “rhythmics” plays in conjuring the “proper jazz effect.” Similar impor-
tance is bestowed on rhythmic spontaneity in Randall Thompson’s work
for the Musical Quarterly, in which he documents jazz as a “rhythmical
style”:

Rhythm, by definition, involves repetition. By establishing an un-

varying beat, superimposing conflicting beats, and interrupting itself
from time to time in rhythmic variations of the first magnitude, jazz
achieves the very sum and substance of rhythmical style. (1932, 11)

The unpredictable nature of jazz rhythm in this description contributes to

what Thompson refers to as the “spell of ragtime and jazz,” a predilection
toward which he felt both European and American composers were begin-
ning to fall (1932, 15). Indeed, both Laubenstein and Thompson would ap-
pear in these passages to agree with the idea that jazz’s essential aesthetic
quality resided in its magical rhythmic power—a power that emerged via a
­
mysterious confluence of speed, syncopation, and spontaneity—resulting
­
in hypnosis at best and addiction at worst. Such an idea upheld the notion
that jazz performance practice was uniquely different from Western musi-
cal practice even as it worked to bury theories of racial difference under-
neath broader mystical themes.
66 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

It is important to note that those who lashed out at the circulation of

ideas about racial difference during the 1930s and 1940s were not immune
to the legacy of such ideas—particularly the notion that a uniquely African

­
rhythmic sensibility was required for successful jazz interpretation. Barry
Ulanov, for instance, credits African lineage for the germ of rhythmic affect
that would evolve into the “fundamental quality of rhythmic swing” (1952,
195), stating,

One cannot and one should not, in the heat of forensic rage, dismiss
the real contribution of African Negroes to jazz. Without looking to
the mysterious reaches of the unconscious, one can find a consider-
able administration of rhythmic discipline imposed by Southern
Negroes, whether of the first or third or fifth American generation,
upon the music they found around them. (1952, 12)

Similarly, although Sidney Finkelstein (1948) is strongly critical of Rudy

Blesh’s (1946) claims of a genetically encoded musical aptitude among Af-
rican Americans, he makes assertions about jazz’s rhythmic foundation in
terms that strongly echo the language of essential racial difference surveyed
thus far. Take, for example, an early sentence from Finkelstein’s Jazz: A
People’s Music that attempts to define the aesthetic feel of the jazz genre:
“Jazz is often a music of great basic simplicity, and gripping rhythmic force”
(1948, 24). Here use of the term gripping rhythmic force as a defining ele-
ment of the jazz style perpetuates both the central role of rhythm in the
genre as well as its ability to induce a physical hold. Later comments on the
collective rhythm section go even further:

The most splendid and new percussive achievement of jazz was its
collective rhythm section, powerful in its beat yet constantly varying
in timbre. . . . Through it jazz has restored rhythm as a powerful, in-
dependent musical voice. (Finkelstein 1948, 44)

Implicit in both of these comments is the idea that jazz rhythm is not a
subtle rhythmic effect; it is both pervasive and “powerful,” always chang-
ing, and a key component of the jazz sound. While Finkelstein denies a
link to the African continent, he maintains that rhythm plays a symbolic
 “Bearded Undertakers” • 67

role in articulating African American musical difference, where African

American music is viewed as an arena open to contributions from people
of all races.
As the works of early jazz discourse surveyed here show, the legacy of
theorizing rhythmic difference in African American musical production
was well entrenched across the spectrum of jazz politics by the 1950s. The
impact of such an understanding on subsequent jazz journalism appears
then to have been twofold. On a base level, critics of all camps continued to
write about rhythmic spontaneity and prominence as a ubiquitous part of
the jazz sound. On a secondary level, an emotive response seen as linked to
overt rhythmic effects became entrenched as a key criterion in the decod-
ing of jazz authenticity. As Ted Gioia reflects about criticism from the fol-
lowing decades,

Performances which fail to attain the frenetic and energetic ideal

postulated by the stereotype are labeled “cerebral”—one of the most
­
damning adjectives in the critical vocabulary of jazz writers. In con-
trast, the most excessive demonstrations of musical chaos are often
lavishly praised so long as they are done “with feeling.” (1989, 138)

Therefore, artists composing music that either neglected rhythmic spon-

taneity, masked rhythmic spontaneity, or elicited a response of “cerebral-
ity” despite rhythmic spontaneity risked having their works interpreted as
having been conceived outside the African American expressive realm.
All three routes to inauthentic performance are problematic in that they
emerge from a body of criticism more concerned with sonic representa-
tions of race than the processes involved in the composition of African
American musical works themselves. Certainly the works of Finkelstein
(1948) and Ulanov (1952) endeavor to free themselves from this history
of racialized discourse, but even in these progressive studies the weight
bestowed on rhythm appears indebted to older ideas about the nature of
musical performance in the African diaspora. Reading about the recep-
tion of Lewis’s syncretic works during the 1950s with the critical trends of
the previous thirty years in mind allows us to see how the language of
intellect and subtlety could indeed impact perceptions of overall cultural
alignment.
68 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

The Effect of Rhythmic Essentialism on

Lewis’s Portrayal in the Popular Press

Certainly the circumstance of Lewis’s initial popular press coverage

marked his work as rhythmically different from that of other jazz musi-
cians from the outset. As stated earlier, this attention began in connection
with Lewis’s arrangements for Dizzy Gillespie in 1946. Importantly, in dis-
cussions of Gillespie’s 1946–47 ensemble this collaboration often plays a
­
quieter role to that of Gillespie and his Cuban percussionist Chano Pozo.
Jairo Moreno points to the latter relationship as an attempt by Gillespie to
engage with the “North American modernist vanguard,” realized in this
case through the pairing of jazz and Latin rhythms (2004, 98). This brand
of syncretism can be seen to align with the 1940s outreach strategies of
Thornhill and Davis discussed in chapter 1, given the increasing number of
Caribbean immigrants and the growing popularity of Latin American
music in New York during the 1940s (discussed at length in Korrol 1983).
In addition, paralleling the critical trends outlined in the first part of this
chapter, documentation of this burgeoning music scene tended to essen-
tialize the rhythmic elements of rhumba and related Latin American mu-
sical styles, as these genres, like jazz, were seen to extend from musical
practices on the African continent. This is apparent in Bill Gottlieb’s de-
coding of rhumba in 1947 as a product of the “same African roots” as jazz,
evident in its rhythmic presentation: “Their music, for rhythmic fire, lush
coloring and jazz feel, can hold its own with the products of the best hot
orchestras” (1947a, 10). In turn, some practitioners described the link with
Africa as being even more authentic than the one shared by jazz. Cuban
bandleader Machito posited that “rhumba rhythms are both more primi-
tive and more rhythmically complex than jazz” as a result of Caribbean
music’s resistance to dilution: “We play this way in Cuba for over a hun-
dred years” (qtd. in Gottlieb 1947a, 10).2 Regardless of the veracity of such
a statement, depictions of Latin rhythm as closely tied to African music
during the late 1940s may have cast Lewis’s compositions for the Gillespie
ensemble on which Pozo did not play as somewhat removed from the Af-
rican American expressive realm.
At the very least Lewis’s interest in Western art music allowed Gillespie
to position the two styles of composition against each other. In the lead-up
­
 “Bearded Undertakers” • 69

to his 1947 Carnegie Hall concert, the Latin and classical sounds of Gil-
lespie’s program feature prominently in Down Beat’s coverage, suggesting
their inclusion in a press release. After a brief overview of the event, the
magazine foreshadows the premiere of two major works, one an “Afro Cu-
ban Suite” utilizing both a “conga and bongo drummer” and the other an
unnamed “concerto” by John Lewis (“Bebop to Carnegie Hall” 1947, 5).
Follow-up reviews comment on the same pieces, setting one firmly in the
­
jazz realm via a discussion of rhythmic elements and the other in the classi-
cal realm through a discussion of form. Michael Levin’s assessment of the
“Afro Cuban Suite,” conventionally referred to by the name of its two
movements, “Cubano Be, Cubano Bop” (1947),3 takes place under the text
subtitle “powerful, but rough” and links audience approval to its rhythmic
character:

The crowd unquestionably liked the Cubano Bop number with its
added bongo and congo [sic] drum soloists the best. Illustrating a
point the Beat has often made that there is much jazz can pick up on
from the South American and Afro-Cuban rhythm styles. (1947, 1)
­
In contrast, Levin discusses Lewis’s work “Toccata for Trumpet” (1947)
mostly in terms of its intellectual allure: “Formalistically, the Toccata ap-
pealed to me: Lewis displayed an economy of means and an interesting
series of ideas that make him a man to be watched in the writing field”
(1947, 1).
Levin’s comments regarding the formal elements of the “Toccata” are by
no means erroneous. Lewis had begun courses for a master’s degree in mu-
sic at the Manhattan School of Music in early 1946, and his composition
appears to reflect this influence, breaking with the formal conventions of
the blues and AABA bebop contrafacts (the work is through-composed
­
and stands in contrast to the riff-driven “Cubano Be, Cubano Bop” on
­
which Pozo performs). However, Gillespie’s twenty-two-bar improvisation
­
­
over an ascending saxophone riff and fast-swinging rhythm section echoes
­
the overtly rhythmic performance aesthetic viewed by many as central to
the authentic jazz sound. While it is understandable that this element of
the composition received little focus in Levin’s discussion, as it appears to
have been intentionally masked by the composed parts of the work, it is
70 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

significant to note that the language of form and structure that formed
Levin’s assessment would soon overshadow discussion of rhythm in Lewis’s
works even when the composer purposely directed listeners to his rhyth-
mic sensibilities.
Lewis’s 1953 interview with Nat Hentoff is emblematic of such tensions.
Following the 1953 midyear release of the MJQ’s first album, The Modern
Jazz Quartet, Hentoff ran two Counterpoint articles in which he cast Lewis
as a “particularly perceptive experimenter” in “extended form” (Hentoff
1953a, 8). The recording inspiring such contextualization included Lewis’s
first fugal work, “Vendome” (1952), and an arrangement of Jerome Kern’s
“All the Things You Are” (1939) in which the piano and vibraphone intro-
duce the work’s theme over a composed interplay of bass and cymbal rolls.
As stated previously, Lewis was quick to point out in the first of these col-
umns that these structural devices were employed in an effort to “widen”
the jazz audience. But in a less frequently discussed part of the interview,
Lewis can be seen to steer the conversation toward rhythmic concepts he
views as underpinning the group’s success:

Take rhythm. Any kind of improvisation—unless you’re playing by

­
yourself—is going to be more or less contrapuntal. But in jazz, ex-
­
cept for the best Dixieland people and a few others, there’s often
been a rhythmic dullness. The bass, drums, and piano should do
more than simply supply chords and a basic pulsation. Now Kenny
has never been caught in this rut. He doesn’t get stuck with any one
rhythmic pattern. In our work we also stimulate counterpoint rhyth-
mically this way: when someone is playing a solo, the other instru-
ments will play ideas in the background, ideas subordinate to those
of the soloist. They don’t slip back and just keep time. (Hentoff
1953a, 8)

Here Lewis echoes the essentialist rhetoric of jazz critics from both the
modernist and traditionalist camps by demonstrating the continued im-
portance of spontaneous, improvisational, and interactive rhythmic effects.
In other comments, such as “all the instruments in our group supply rhyth-
mic propulsion. . . . Anybody who plays on whatever instrument must sup-
ply rhythmic propulsion” (Hentoff 1953a, 8; emphasis in original), Lewis
 “Bearded Undertakers” • 71

articulates the physical hold component of the essentialist argument, albeit

in more subtle and musical terms than those surveyed in the first part of
this chapter. Such comments can be seen to temper Hentoff ’s questioning
around form, framing Lewis’s work for the Down Beat audience as authen-
tic jazz in the established language of authenticity. Yet while Hentoff clearly
sees value in Lewis’s descriptions (they are, after all, the published excerpts
of a longer interview), his follow-up piece engages even less with the rhyth-

­
mic components of Lewis’s syncretic projects.
Interpreting Hentoff ’s second Counterpoint column, published a
month later, in January 1954, is a complex process because much of his dis-
cussion is guided by notes Lewis provided yet the text itself is devoid of
quotation marks. Such reporting results in ambiguous expression, making
it nearly impossible to separate the critic’s thoughts from Lewis’s own ideas.
Hentoff ’s discussion of “The Queen’s Fancy” (1953) provides a pertinent
example of this problem:

The Queen’s Fancy shows another simple, effective combination of

form and improvised spontaneity. This begins with a written five
measure theme, sort of a fanfare. After it comes a new contrasting
idea in a kind of three-part song form that’s treated in a contrapuntal
­
fashion. (1954b, 27)

The first sentence of this quote can almost definitively be attributed to

Hentoff, as it is more or less an expression of opinion, but the third sen-
tence, discussing a “kind of three-part song form . . . in a contrapuntal fash-
­
ion,” seems to use language from outside Hentoff ’s specialty area. Compli-
cating this reading is the fact that the language embedded in the third
sentence suggests interpretation (Hentoff ’s qualification “in a kind of ”
speaks to this point). It does seem likely that Lewis’s notes included a good
deal of information regarding European structural devices, as Hentoff ’s
earlier discussion of “Vendome” begins with a description of the composed
“subject,” “answer,” and “countersubject” before surveying the work’s sec-
tional divisions using terminology such as “episodes” and “expositions”
(1954b, 27). But Hentoff ’s discussion of the function or purpose of these
devices cannot be read as a direct reflection of Lewis’s intent, given the ar-
ticle’s imbedded subjectivity.
72 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

Indeed, Lewis’s views expressed verbatim in the 1953 Counterpoint col-

umn and Hentoff ’s interpretation of Lewis’s notes in the 1954 Counter-
point column stand slightly askew. In the 1953 column, Lewis appears to
have seen European structure as a way of expanding the reach of the ver-
nacular, in as much as the vernacular voice manifested in the rhythmic pro-
pulsion and spontaneity he championed. In the 1954 column, Hentoff con-
ceptualizes the structural elements of Lewis’s work as bringing coherence to
vernacular elements themselves. This latter point is evident in Hentoff ’s
discussion of Lewis’s work “Django” (1954):

Milt Jackson will improvise on a chord progression that suggests

the first theme but is not exactly like it. On this chord progression
Milt will improvise in two keys, and he will be able to play almost
anything he feels like therein, because the progression, itself, will
be sufficiently reminiscent of the first theme to hold the perfor-
mance together. This, then, is another way in which the musician
can retain his jazz freedom while making it easier for the listener to
assimilate the work as a whole, rather than as a disjointed series of
solos (1954b, 27).

Here Hentoff focuses on the ease of engagement that repeated chord pro-
gressions will provide, and although this type of organization does not
seem to differ greatly from established jazz conventions, its integration into
a discussion that begins with a fugal analysis has the effect of making the
structure of “Django” appear different from jazz norms. Furthermore, it is
this formal difference that Hentoff depicts as aiding the listener’s under-
standing of Jackson’s improvised solo. Such discussion crowds out com-
ment on the improvisation itself in terms of melodic and rhythmic content
and leads to an overall critical assessment in which the value of the work is
tied almost exclusively to its structural components.
Again, there is certainly good reason for Hentoff to have interpreted
the work in this way. In addition to the notes provided by Lewis, the
composer’s 1953 comment cited in chapter 1 (“If there is more of a rea-
son for what’s going on, there’ll be more overall sense, and, therefore,
more interest for the listener” [Hentoff 1953a, 8]) appears to beg a
structural focus. Yet this comment was followed in the 1953 Counter-
point column by Lewis’s discussion of the importance of the work’s un-
 “Bearded Undertakers” • 73

derlying rhythmic sense. Taken together with Lewis’s marketing ap-

proach, analyzed in chapter 1, the tension in these columns might be
more appropriately read as the purposeful juxtapositioning of both Eu-
ropean and jazz influences aimed at simultaneously expanding and
stewarding Lewis’s appeal. Hentoff ’s focus on what would have been
perceived as the novel element of this syncretism, European formal de-
vices, aids one side of this strategy. Yet at the same time it foreshadows
a style of assessment in which discussion of structure and control in
Lewis’s compositions would gradually limit alternate readings.
Part of the responsibility for this trend lies with Lewis himself. Despite
the dissonance between the 1953 and 1954 columns, Lewis did not immedi-
ately counter the claim that value in his work was to be found primarily in the
structural realm. If anything, Lewis exploited this reading as he pushed for
venue expansion along the lines discussed in chapter 1. As a result, critics were
undeterred in essentializing the structural components of his compositions,
invoking an inversion of the racialized rhythm motifs tied to authentic jazz
performance. In other words, Lewis’s apparent focus on structure fit so neatly
into the “cerebral” side of Gioia’s (1989) “cerebral” versus “with feeling” para-
digm that a notion of Lewis’s works as intellectual artifacts more aligned with
European culture than with AfroAmerican culture emerged in the popular
press almost unquestioned. Hentoff ’s assessment of the 1955 Modern Jazz So-
ciety concert at Town Hall is made in these terms, once again praising Lewis’s
ability to build improvisations into a work “so that the listener was left not
with fragments but with an integrated experience” while linking such design
to a larger perception of cerebrality:

No one combines his quality of touch (even better than Wilson’s

and equal to Halberg’s if not Tatum’s), his classical (in the denotative
sense) taste, and his ability to swing deeply while appearing so qui-
etly fastidious. (1955a, 8)

The urbane qualities of control (“quietly fastidious”) and European align-

ment (“classical taste”) highlighted in this assessment are echoed in Ralph
Gleason’s review of a MJQ performance in San Francisco:

The music of the MJQ is fragile, to be sure; it is delicate, too, but it

is never dull. . . . To those who will listen, there are moments when
74 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

the sound these four men make has the same shattering effect as a
line by Donne or a sketch by Picasso. (1956, 18)

Here Gleason aligns Lewis’s work broadly with European artifacts through
mention of its subtlety—a connection he then makes specific through the

­
inclusion of Donne and Picasso as parallel artistic figures. John Wilson’s
coverage of the MJQ’s 1958 tour in the New York Times demonstrates simi-
lar European alignment; only this time specific artistic figures are replaced
with the broader term “European intellectuals”:

The restrained, rather intellectual jazz played by the Quartet (piano,

vibraharp, bass, drums) was felt by some observers to have proved
more accessible than other types of jazz might be to the older Euro-
pean intellectuals (1958a, X9).

Importantly, these comments are followed by Wilson’s discussion of Lew-

is’s use of “old forms” such as the “canon” and “fugue” (1958a, X9). This de-
scriptive milieu, in which adjectives regarding intellect merge with subjects
of European culture in the evaluation of compositions praised for their for-
mal elements demonstrates how drawing attention away from rhythm, the
use of blues sonorities, and improvisation allowed Lewis’s music to avert
primitivist portrayals and garner ascriptions of intelligence and discipline.
While discussion of vernacular components was not totally lost—Gleason
­
(1956, 18), for instance, writes that “the blues they have are the bluest,” and
Hentoff (1955a, 8) refers to Milt Jackson’s ability to “swing” as a positive per-
formative element—it is considerably downplayed in the summative state-
­
ments regarding the group’s ethos above. Such a portrayal surely worked in
support of Lewis’s outreach strategy but carried with it the unfortunate effect
of resurrecting attitudes regarding perceived behavioral differences between
African American cultural participants and Western artists.

Perceptions of Behavioral Difference in the MJQ’s Reception

A conception of the MJQ’s behavior as different from jazz norms is evi-

dent when quotes citing the “stature,” “sensitivity,” and “dignified appear-
 “Bearded Undertakers” • 75

ance” of the group are compared with popular press depictions of bebop
musicians from the late 1940s—portrayals derived in part from what

­
Lopes (2002, 210) refers to as perceptions of the “hipster cult.” The “hip-
ster,” in Lopes’s view, refers to a social identity in which artistic disposi-
tion lies paramount and often manifests as eccentricity in dress and be-
havior. The construct emerged in tandem with the bebop genre, and
many practitioners embraced the label as a way of affirming their desire to
pioneer something new without abandoning an underlying sense of
unity. As Dizzy Gillespie writes,

A “square” and a “lame” were synonymous, and they accepted the

complete life-style, including the music dictated by the establish-
­
ment. They rejected the concept of creative alternatives, and they
were just the opposite of “hip,” which meant “in the know,” “wise,” or
one with “knowledge” of life and how to live. . . . They were apathetic
to, or actively opposed to, almost everything we stood for, like intel-
ligence, sensitivity, creativity, change, wisdom, joy, courage, peace,
togetherness, and integrity. (1979, 297)

Admirable as Gillespie’s reflections are, the popular press frequently

conflated the antiestablishment music related to this mentality with behav-
ioral eccentricities in a way that mirrored the type of racialized discourse
surveyed by Radano (2003). As Ingrid Monson notes,

When transposed downtown and scrutinized by mixed audiences

and the press, the stylistic aspects of the musical scene—the clothes,
­
the hats, the talk, the goatees, the drugs—would breathe life into the
­
very primitivist presumptions that the new modern musical move-
ment, with its commitment to art, sophistication and social protest
most deeply opposed. (1995, 411–12)
­
Overlap between discussion of the hipster culture and behavioral depic-
tions in which artists were cast as slaves to their inner workings are woven
throughout popular press writing of the time. Echoing the language dis-
cussed at the beginning of this chapter, Time magazine drew on racially
loaded language in its description of bebop as a world full of “feverish prac-
76 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

titioners” dressed in “berets, goatees and green-tinted horn-rimmed glasses”

­
­
(“How Deaf Can You Get” 1948, 74). A Down Beat article focusing on pia-
nist Thelonious Monk in turn begins with a description of his hipster dress,
“goatee, beret and heavy shell glasses” before transitioning to a discussion
of artistic temperament that implicitly questioned his professionalism:

He’s so absorbed in his task he’s almost mysterious. Maybe he’s on

his way to meet you. An idea comes to him. He begins to work on it.
Mop! Two days go by and he’s still at it. He’s forgotten all about you
and everything else but that idea. (Gottlieb 1947b, 2)

Notwithstanding Lopes’s (2002) and Monson’s (1995) claims, this overt

return to the motif of innate drive seems to have arisen out of a plurality of
causes. As shown here, antiestablishment dress and behavior played a part,
but as several further quotes in the popular press indicate, spontaneity and
dissonance in the music itself may have proved just as important in driving
critics back to the behavioral clichés associated with “Hot” jazz criticism.
In 1946 Time ran an article referring to bebop as “hot jazz overheated,” an
essentially rhythmic reference, before continuing with a description that
aligned the style with “bawdiness” (“Be-Bop, Be-Bopped” 1946, 52). Simi-
­
­
larly, the speed and dissonance of melodic solo lines in the genre drove
Carter Hartman of the New York Times to label the music “semi controlled
frenzy” (1948, X13). The complexity of sorting out exactly how primitivist
portrayals continued to infiltrate readings of bebop does not, however, ne-
gate the fact that such depictions affirmed a rift between the behavior of
Lewis and the MJQ and that of the larger bebop community.
Curiously, the MJQ’s use of suits served as a particularly frequent
opening device in discussions of this perceived difference. A 1957 Esquire
article, for instance, opens with a passage comparing the group’s appear-
ance to that of “a splinter group . . . [of ] Baptist ministers” before transi-
tioning to a behavioral description of the quartet’s “dedicated and seri-
ous” attitude (“Slipped Disk” 1957, 12). In Down Beat, Ed Sachs described
Lewis’s arrival in a “mortician’s uniform” to a 1959 interview before com-
menting on his “calm, poised, and agreeable” demeanor (1959, 18). Fur-
ther evidence of the trope can be found in the New York Times, where
John Wilson related how many in the jazz community felt the formal
 “Bearded Undertakers” • 77

dress of the MJQ had given them the appearance of “bearded undertak-
ers” before juxtaposing Lewis with the “casual rough-and-tumble of . . .

­
­
old-time jazz musicians” (1960, 47).
­
This focus on dress is intriguing, particularly because it was not espe-
cially odd for jazz musicians to wear suits in both everyday life and in
performance. Even the MJQ’s occasional use of tuxedos—to which, it

­
must be noted, these journalists are not referring—had some precedent.

­
As Harvey Cohen points out, Duke Ellington and his orchestra fre-
quently dressed in tuxedos—a practice that extended back to their work
­
at the Cotton Club in the late 1920s (2004, 296, 310). Louis Armstrong,
in turn, wore a tuxedo so frequently when he was starting out that he gave
it a nickname: “my old Roast Beef ” (Giddins & Armstrong 1986, 236).
The suits that the members of the MJQ wore when they were not in
tuxedos—their “mortician’s uniform,” as Sachs put it—were, in fact, fairly
­
­
reflective of jazz stylistic norms. Certainly berets and horn-rimmed

­
glasses were absent, but in relation to other elements of style, the group
does not seemed to have dressed exceedingly better than those perform-
ing regularly at Birdland, the Five Spot, or the Village Vanguard. One
need only turn to the photojournalism of W. Eugene Smith (Stephensen
2009) or the photography of Herman Leonard (Leonard 2010) to appre-
ciate the ubiquity of suit jackets, slacks, and ties in both jazz rehearsals
and performances that took place over the course of the decade. How-
ever, the act of making the MJQ style of dress seem different, even though
it was not, did play into the narrative that the group was moving away
from African American cultural norms.
Often the distance traveled in these assessments required reviewers to
conceptualize Lewis in terms oppositional to African American culture at
large. Sachs, for instance, relays the following quote from an anonymous
source:

John is quite free of the anti white feeling that in smaller or larger
parts is fairly prevalent among many Negro musicians. One reason
may be that he ran into practically no race friction in New Mexico
while he was growing up. Another is that by now, he is so interna-
tionalized, that he has experienced and enjoyed people and social
contexts in many areas where race doesn’t count. (1959, 19)
78 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

While the anonymity of Sachs’s source makes it difficult to fully con-

textualize the comment, the clear division between the behavior of the
larger body of “Negro musicians” and Lewis’s behavior does speak to an
attempt to solidify Lewis’s difference in sociological terms. In addition,
the location of the comment within the article, immediately preceding
a description of Lewis’s travels to Europe and his “constantly favorable”
critical reception on the Continent (Sachs 1959, 19), seems to connect
European success with cultural realignment. It is Lewis’s “international-
ization,” it would seem through this pairing, that allows him to effec-
tively deliver his music to a European audience without being caught
up in the behavioral trappings of African American culture. John Wil-
son’s report for the New York Times in which the MJQ members are
described as “bearded undertakers,” discussed earlier, in turn highlights
how some in the jazz community were beginning to view Lewis as a bio-
logically inferior jazz musician:

They accused the group’s musical director and pianist John Lewis, of
stifling Mr. [Milt] Jackson (who was a major figure of the bop period
in the Nineteen Forties) and of being devoid of any jazz instinct
himself.” (1960, 47)

The return to the idea of “jazz instinct” in this quote via a discussion of
nonaligned hipster dress and a reference to musical control (the “stifling”
of Jackson) demonstrates how the web of associations discussed through-
out this chapter just as easily combine to strip an artist of perceived bio-
logical coding as they do to affirm perceived biological predisposition. In
this argument Lewis is implicitly connected to the instinct-less “whites”
­
of Sekles’s genetic paradigm (“Jazz Bitterly Opposed” 1928, 10) by way of
musical style. Later positioning of Lewis and vibraphonist Milt Jackson
as opposing forces in the quartet would further revive criticism based on
such “primitivist” assumptions.
This is particularly evident in the way Jackson and Lewis are compared
in a 1961 concert summary written by Don De Micheal. De Micheal begins
by discussing the strict attention to detail involved in the concert prepara-
tions (the cleaning of the piano keys by Lewis; the tuxedos worn by the
group members) before going on to claim that these elements add up to the
 “Bearded Undertakers” • 79

elimination of “visual distraction” during MJQ performances. Referring to

Milt Jackson, however, De Micheal views resistance to this agenda:

At the Ann Arbor concert, he appeared to be following the rules,

but as the evening progressed, the rules seemed to go out the win-
dow. The tail of his tuxedo jacket, which had been unbuttoned
from the first, flapped as his movements became more animated.
His feet spread farther apart. His wrists, undulating as if on ball-

­
bearings, were graceful blurs as he guided the mallets over his vi-
braharp. His head bent farther down. When he played a phrase
that seemed to delight him, he looked out over his glasses to see if
what he had played had struck anyone else as it had him. When it
was necessary to move to the upper octave of his instrument, he
made a discreet leap as he moved.
His solo over, he retired to the background, but, where before
he had stood solemnly, his stance was now relaxed. Smiling, he
nodded his head slightly in tempo, his fingers snapping occasion-
ally when the other three played in an especially strong manner.
(1961, 18)

While De Micheal’s comments are not as overt as the “primitivist” com-

mentary surveyed by Radano (2003), they are striking in their intense focus
on Jackson’s physical behavior. Not only do they set Jackson apart from the
rest of the group, they do so from the perspective that Jackson was incapa-
ble of adapting to the social norms adopted by the MJQ. This separation
creates the context for viewing Jackson’s playing as more authentically
grounded in the jazz tradition, as it evinces the type of behavior associated
with magical rhythmic performance. Lewis’s behavior is in turn depicted as
culturally distinct, evident in De Micheal’s comments regarding Lewis’s re-
sponse to an enthusiastic fan requesting one of Jackson’s blues composi-
tions in the middle of the concert:

The concert’s finale was given over to a several-part composition

­
written by Lewis, who announced and explained each part. Before
the third section, as he was explaining his attractive, but complex,
piece of work, a man in the first row shouted, “Bags’ Groove!” Lewis
80 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

recoiled as if a bucket of ice water had been thrown in his face. He

replied with dignity, “We’ll play that later.” (1961, 18)

Lewis’s control and “dignity,” as described by De Micheal, contrast with the

unpredictability and emotion of Jackson’s on-stage behavior. In a telling

­
decoding of this difference, De Micheal eventually enters into a compari-
son of musical styles, writing,

There is much of contrast between Lewis and Jackson. It can be seen

in the music they write. Jackson’s is usually more simple and takes
the form of blues or the 32-bar song much more often than does
­
Lewis’. While Lewis appears to like formality, Jackson does not. “I
don’t feel comfortable in formal clothes or formal settings,” he said.
“I dig being completely relaxed—although music has always been a
­
serious thing with me.” (1961, 20)

In De Micheal’s article, what begins as a discussion of behavioral dif-

ference ends up being a discussion of compositional form, thus confirm-
ing the fact that perspectives on musical aesthetics were occasionally
linked to behavioral depictions even in musical styles far removed from
early jazz. Jackson’s apparent aversion to the strictures of form is shown to
align with the qualities of spontaneity identified in his behavior, just as
Lewis’s penchant for musical structure is seen to be congruent with his
austere on-stage attitude. Critical trends essentializing African rhythmic
­
characteristics are likely responsible for the persistence of such categori-
zation. Just as jazz musicians who utilized overt rhythmic effects in early
jazz were cast in the primitive realm, those who chose alternate routes to
performance in later years ran the risk of being viewed as operatives from
outside the African American cultural arena. Although Lewis had spoken
about his reliance on rhythmic ideas early on, his failure to continually
articulate this aspect of his work to the popular press allowed perspec-
tives on the novel elements of his compositions, their formal compo-
nents, to dominate discussion. Such broad strokes conflated Lewis’s di-
mensions as a composer with an easily articulated archetype, a stigma
that persisted until the time of his death in 2001.
The summative statements of his obituaries speak to this point. In his
 “Bearded Undertakers” • 81

remembrance for Down Beat, Fred Bouchard draws on a European allusion

rather than jazz comparisons in his comment that “like his lifelong inspira-
tion J.S. Bach, Lewis consistently exhibited meticulous craftsmanship”
(2001, 22). Echoing Bouchard’s allusion to Bach, Lewis’s New York Times
obituary claims that the “MJQ’s music was largely a reflection of Mr. Lew-
is’s classical training. . . . Lewis drew as much inspiration from Bach as he
did from Gillespie,” a comment that seems to indicate that the composer
was at least equally split between European and vernacular realms
(Keepnews 2001, B9). A year later Bouchard would push the allusion to
Bach even further, not only claiming that Bach was Lewis’s “lifelong inspi-
ration” but that, like Bach, “Lewis drew on a wellspring of sublime melodic
invention, and set it in meticulously crafted orchestrations, often as fresh as
Bach inventions” (2002, 28). Finally, in Billboard, Lewis was described as
having “a penchant for longer, classical forms such as the fugue” and run-
ning a group that, in implied contrast to other jazz ensembles of the 1950s,
contained “no horns, which meant no spit, no sweat and no screaming”
(Goldberg 2002, 26). The location of value in these assessments falls
squarely on the way in which the formal elements of Lewis’s works aligned
with a European compositional ethos. With the limitations of critical
trends in the popular press now identified, such evaluations must be read
with some skepticism.
Indeed, they seem to tell a different story than the one Lewis would
endeavor to promote toward the end of his life. In an interview for Down
Beat in 2000, Lewis opened up to Eugene Holley about the significance of
the “formal” aspects of his compositions, painting a more complicated pic-
ture of their intent:

The primary thing for us was the interplay, which took a long time to
achieve. The whole point of a composition is to make a piece that
incorporates improvisation into it as seamlessly as possible, so you
won’t know what’s improvised and what’s not. It took a long time for
that to happen, but that was the goal we worked towards achieving.
(Qtd. in Holley 2000, 39)

Developing this idea further, Lewis spoke about trying to “incorporate the
blues in everything I play, to find some way to make the blues speak, and to
82 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

do it in a polyphonic way” (qtd. in Holley 2000, 43). Such comments echo

those Lewis had made decades earlier in his first Down Beat interview with
Hentoff: “We have to keep going back into the gold mine . . . the blues, and
things that are related to it” (Hentoff 1957b, 15). It is a testament to the re-
siliency of primitivist commentary in the popular press that so little atten-
tion has been given to reconciling such claims with the dominant themes of
Lewis’s historical reception.
One of the things we learn from such an inquiry, as shown in this
chapter, is that essentializing form and rhythm places artificial limits on
cultural identity. It is therefore no surprise that constant critique along
these lines irked Lewis into his “incredulous” standoff with Hentoff in
the anecdote that begins this book. While certainly well meaning, Hent-
off and his peers were operating within a field that utilized a style of lan-
guage that limited not only what might be viewed as genuine jazz but
what might be viewed as “normal” African American behavior. In the fol-
lowing chapter I set out a way for us to contextualize Lewis’s frustration
through a discussion of the values and musical practices of the African
American middle and upper class. Adding this lens into the historical
mix and exploring Lewis’s reception in this world helps erode the estab-
lished narrative around Lewis’s works while simultaneously enabling an
expansion of thought around what might be conceived of as authentic
African American musical expression, both within jazz and beyond.
3 • “Finesse, Precision and Logic”

Musical Traditions and the

African American Elite

On the night of February 22, 1946, Maestro Dean Dixon took the stage at
Carnegie Hall to conduct the American Youth Orchestra, an interracial
ensemble composed of exceptional young musicians from across the New
York area (Du Bois 1946, 15). Dixon had founded the group in 1944 after
receiving a prestigious Rosenwald Fund fellowship (“46 Get Rosenwald”
1945, 2), and their debut was lauded in the African American press for pre-
senting a pathway that “well-qualified” African American musicians might
­
follow into “the classical field” (“Another Race Barrier Falls” 1944, 12).
Throughout 1946 Dixon would lead the orchestra through some of the
more challenging works of the Western art music canon (“Dean Dixon
Back” 1946, 10), and the February 22 concert was to be no exception. Over
the course of the evening the ensemble would perform works by Khren-
nikov, Rachmaninoff, and Sam Morgenstern, showing off to an interracial
audience both their technical proficiency and their expressive prowess (Du
Bois 1946, 15).
One audience member, the noted intellectual and critic W. E. B. Du
Bois, was particularly impressed with what he saw. Writing in the Chicago
Defender the very next day under the headline “Winds of Time,” Du Bois
made the following observations:

This concert was not merely a plea for race tolerance. It was a great
deal more than this. It was the American Youth Orchestra composed
of musicians without reference to race and color. A black girl with a
violin sat in front far to the left. Dark men played brass and wind

83
84 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

instruments but above all guiding this whole orchestra of hundreds

of instruments was a young, handsome black man, Dean Dixon,
who seemed to hold their thoughts and hearts in absolute con-
trol. . . .
It has often been said that art is the clear, straight path to democ-
racy and while I have continually doubted this I have wanted this to
be true. Certainly as I look back upon our path in this land I can see
nothing that has guided us more consistently toward freedom and
accomplishment than our literature and music, our sculpture and
painting, our drama. Our political efforts despite our triumphs have
failed us; our economic emancipation has hardly more than begun;
our physical revolt died a-borning. But our art forms have not only
­
made America, they are an integral part of the 20th Century. (1946,
15).

Du Bois’s comments in the Defender are particularly intriguing in that they

speak to a complicated notion of ownership over the music performed by
the American Youth Orchestra. In Du Bois’s view, the American Youth Or-
chestra was not a white ensemble in which African Americans participated.
It was an ensemble that at the very least evinced a shared sort of ownership,
but at most, as Du Bois mentions at the end of the quote, made public and
promoted long-standing African American facility and familiarity with
­
and love of Western orchestral music. In other words, Du Bois appears to
argue in this passage for the music performed by the ensemble to be heard
as an iteration of the African American musical voice—as an acceptable
­
expression of African American cultural accomplishment intrinsically
linked to a unique historical path.
In this chapter I endeavor to illuminate how this conception of African
American musical identity developed over the course of more than a hun-
dred years and to trace its effect on the coverage John Lewis received in the
African American press—a style of coverage uniquely different in tone
­
from that surveyed in chapter 2. Beginning with a discussion of cultural
changes promoted by African American church leaders during the 1800s, I
demonstrate how nondemonstrative behavior and an appreciation for Eu-
ropean musical styles were gradually adopted into the social life of middle-
and upper-class African American Christian denominations across the
­
­
 “Finesse, Precision, and Logic” • 85

United States as part of what Evelyn Higginbotham (1993) has referred to

as “the politics of respectability.” These politics advanced an agenda of cul-
tural transformation that challenged racist assumptions about who African
Americans were and how African Americans should act. Yet more impor-
tantly, the inward focus of such a movement—its goal of empowering seg-

­
regated African American communities—allowed for “respectable” behav-

­
ior and taste to become a celebrated part of a newly emergent form of
African American identity. Although such behavior paralleled the social
codes of the hegemony, this fact did not detract from the value bestowed
upon it by community leaders in terms of its ability to advance African
American economic, intellectual, and spiritual development. Indeed, as I
discuss in my survey of African American middle-class musical life during

­
the 1940s and 1950s, a persistent focus on the performance of Western art
music along with the showcasing of Westernized spirituals seems to have
reified belief in a malleable sort of African American culture indebted to a
particular historical legacy while concurrently open to outside influence.
In the final section of this chapter I return to the story of Lewis’s music,
only this time I study how it was received in a critical realm that endorsed
such malleable ideas about African American culture. In particular, I exam-
ine how the acceptance of Westernized spirituals and syncretic concert
works composed by African Americans set in place a language for discuss-
ing and evaluating other sorts of modern African American musical devel-
opments, such as Lewis’s work with the MJQ. While the language of this
reception—its focus on intellect and refinement—remained quite similar
­
­
to that used in the jazz press’s evaluation of Lewis, I demonstrate that its
function in the African American press differed dramatically. Far from pos-
iting that musical marks of “refinement” denoted a move toward European
assimilation, the African American press largely accepted such stylistic
choices as “par for the course” in terms of what they viewed as an expansive
and diverse field of African American musical expression.

The Black Church Prior to 1950 and the “Politics of Respectability”

Attempts to negotiate a version of African American identity that was

both uniquely African American and embracing of dominant American
86 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

cultural norms can be seen to underpin much of the history of African

American Christian worship in the United States. In his monograph The
Rise of Gospel Blues (1992), Michael Harris sets out a brief overview of
change throughout the evolution of the African Methodist Episcopal
Church (AME)—“the first black denomination in the United States”—in
­
­
which he illuminates nearly 150 years of tension between congregation
and ministry regarding the compatibility of folk practices and religious
decorum. Initially, these debates revolved around the continued use of
the Ring Shout—a form of worship involving singing, dancing, and hand
­
clapping that was performed in a style considered overly demonstrative
by the AME leadership (Harris 1992, 3). Inspired by outward-looking

­
looking ideologies of racial uplift, AME clergy like Bishop Daniel Alex-
ander Payne worked tirelessly during the antebellum era to exorcise black
musical practices like the Ring Shout from the church, encouraging in-
stead the performance of “European classical instrumental music” and
the establishment of choirs (Harris 1992, 8). Seeing out such a project
was, however, no easy feat. Payne would later decry in his autobiography
the resistance he had often felt for “not let[ting] them [congregants] sing
their ‘spiritual songs’” ( [1891] 2001, 93). Yet Payne’s goal in enacting such
changes does not seem to have been the wholehearted assimilation of Af-
rican Americans into white culture. Indeed, the AME Church itself was
established in response to dissatisfaction with the white Methodist Epis-
copal Church and “the second-class membership” afforded black partici-
­
pants (Harris 1992, 5). In Payne’s view, founding the AME had enabled an
“independence of character” to emerge in its African American member-
ship, a development he hoped would lead AME congregants to “feel and
recognize our individuality and our heaven-created manhood” ( [1891]
­
2001, 12). In other words, despite looking toward established white
churches for cues on how religious life should be celebrated, Payne re-
mained convinced that the AME’s physical and conceptual independence
from its white counterpart would ultimately strengthen the self-awareness
­
and self-investment of its members.
­
In her discussion of “the politics of respectability,” Evelyn Brooks
Higginbotham explores the paradox of how African American denomi-
nations could assert claims of bolstering individuality while simultane-
ously conforming to dominant social norms. Focusing on the black Bap-
 “Finesse, Precision, and Logic” • 87

tist Church of the early twentieth century, Higginbotham charts out the
manner in which female activists promoted “manners and morals” in
their communities as a way of challenging stereotypical expectations of
African American behavior. This agenda was seen by some as unshackling
the church community from the legacy of having value imposed upon it
from the outside; or more to the point, it was seen as a way of asserting an
ideology of self-determination against a backdrop of “crude stereotypes”
­
and “‘scientific’ racism.” Yet those who promoted this agenda were not
satisfied with mere behavioral parity between African American and
white Americans and implored church members to enact the values of
“temperance, cleanliness of person and property, thrift, polite manners
and sexual purity” even more rigidly than the white Christian populace
did. Such a pursuit allowed Baptist communities to assert equality and
individuality simultaneously—to be, in Higginbotham’s language, “both
­
black and American” as they perfected the respectable behavior with
which others continued to struggle (Higginbotham 1993, 188, 193).
Similar attempts to erode racist assumptions and promote “respectabil-
ity” as a core African American value can be seen to have driven the ideol-
ogy and social initiatives of Christian denominations more strongly associ-
ated with upper- and middle-class African Americans during the same time
­
­
period. Indeed, Davarian Baldwin’s Chicago’s New Negros (2007) explores
the central role such politics played in asserting a societal boundary be-
tween Chicago’s “old settler” families and the waves of African American
migrants coming to Chicago from the American South during the 1920s.
In Baldwin’s view, demonstrations of conservative behavior in African
American Chicago neighborhoods helped “establish a hierarchy of distinc-
tion that provided distance from but also dominion over the newly arriving
migrant masses” (2007, 59). Such social stratification then worked to define
the rough shape of African American urban centers through the first half of
the twentieth century.
The central role religious institutions played in seeing out this cultural
project was made apparent in early surveys of African American religious
life produced during the first half of the century. In his sociological study of
Episcopal, Presbyterian, and Congregational churches in Chicago during
the late years of the Depression, for instance, Vattel Daniel detailed a mid-
dle- and upper-class preoccupation with “conservatism, conformity, thrift,
­
­
88 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

[and] industry” that effectively echoed Higginbotham’s behavioral “poli-

tics.” Such values, in Daniel’s view, informed the mind-set of those involved

­
in “civic affairs” in Chicago, especially affairs in which “race” was deemed
to be a factor (1944, 23). This orientation is particularly evident in the com-
mentary of Robert S. Abbott—founder of the Chicago Defender and a

­
member of first an Episcopal and later a Presbyterian church—who im-

­
plored the religious leaders of Chicago in 1935 to fund a finishing school for
African American girls. His rationale, put forth in the pages of the De-
fender, claimed,

Unless our attention is directed more seriously toward the solution

of our social problems we shall be forever troubled with preju-
dice. . . . Our behavior, our decorum, our speech and laughter in pub-
lic or private places, at teas, receptions and recitals indicate to casual
observers that there is need for more culture and cultural inclina-
tion. I trust that some day our girls may be so transfigured culturally
as to take their places with grace, dignity and poise beside those
charming aristocratic ladies who are presented to the Buckingham
palace each year. (Abbott 1935, 11)

Abbott’s suggestion that African American churches foot the bill for such
a school speaks to his belief that a central part of the mission of these insti-
tutions was the promulgation of respectability. Furthermore, the tone of
Abbott’s comments reflects a conviction that African American culture at
large could in fact benefit from such an initiative—that “decorum” and
­
“grace” (words that appear to be code for nondemonstrative or conserva-
tive behavior in this passage) should be incorporated into the story of who
African American people were and become markers of African American
identity.
Undoubtedly, some have viewed this agenda as the unpardonable pro-
motion of assimilation into white culture. In his monograph The Negro
Church in America, E. Franklin Frazier denounces the “transfiguration”
Abbott writes about as evidence of an African American middle class seek-
ing “identification with and acceptance by the white middle class” through
its rejection of “Negro heritage, including . . . religious heritage” (1964, 85).
Frazier’s student Nathan Hare in turn called out “Negro ministers” for be-
 “Finesse, Precision, and Logic” • 89

ing “pathological imitators of . . . white clergymen” and for endorsing a

politics of “mimicry” in their congregations (1965, 35, 46). Yet the persis-
tent fact of segregation between African American and white communities
rendered Frazier’s and Hare’s appraisals, in some ways, moot. Writing in
1944 on the subject of “The Negro Church: Its Weakness, Trends, and
Outlook,” Gunnar Myrdal noted that Episcopalian and Presbyterian pref-
erences for conservative behavior seemed to have little impact on assimila-
tion, arguing instead that “the Negro church fundamentally is an expres-
sion of the Negro community itself ” ([1944] 1971, 874–75). That is to say,

­
for Myrdal, the behavior of the congregation was noteworthy in that it de-
noted commitment to the political goal of “moving the American Negroes
onward in their struggle against caste,” but it did not mark a capitulation of
independence ([1944] 1971, 874). African American behavior may have
been changing, and notions of white middle-class behavior may have driven
­
that change, but continued segregation ensured that any cultural shifts that
did occur functioned primarily in terms of local community development.
The articulation of this sort of malleable African American culture in
the comments of Myrdal, Abbott, and Payne underscores the central theme
of the New Negro movement in America. Promoted by African American
intellectuals such as Alain Locke and Charles S. Johnson during the 1920s
and 1930s, New Negro ideology viewed African American culture as a dy-
namic force capable of maintaining and celebrating certain aspects of Afri-
can American history while simultaneously incorporating new ways of
thinking and living into the fold. Locke in particular was an advocate of
breaking down the notion that “Negro culture” began and ended with folk
traditions. In his essay “The Negro’s Contribution to American Culture,”
Locke charts with great detail the way in which “Negro Art” incorporated
the aesthetic trends of “realism, regionalism, [and] proletarianism” while
maintaining a unique perspective honed from the African American expe-
rience (1939, 527–28). The manner in which hegemonic notions of respect-
­
ability were incorporated into the ethos of African American religious
practice appears to have worked in the same way. Early proponents of a
separate African American church recognized the potential of the organi-
zation to strengthen the African American position in America. For better
or worse, many decided that the best path forward was the adoption of
behavioral trappings espoused by white middle-class patrons of parallel
­
90 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

churches. Yet over the course of more than a hundred years, such attitudes
became a part of the ideal vision of what African American identity should
look like—at least when leaders of the African American church put forth
­
such visions. This conception of being African American continued to cen-
ter on race (Abbott was, after all, concerned with “our behavior” and “our
girls”) but remained dynamic enough to accommodate a spectrum of ex-
pression and cultural practices borrowed from across American society.

Music in the Black Church, 1870–1950

­
In the musical realm, such hybridity is perhaps most evident in the reintro-
duction of African American spirituals into religious contexts towards the
end of the nineteenth century. Sterling Stuckey’s work on early African
American music traces the roots of spirituals to songs sung as part of the
Ring Shout ceremonies of African slaves (1987, 30). As Christianity was
adopted by slave populations, the lyrical content of these ceremonies
changed, but the melodic content retained colloquialisms that continued
to set it apart from Western art music. As the ethnomusicologist John Wes-
ley Work III wrote in 1940:

There is a certain elusive quality heard in the native singing of the

melodies that defies musical notation. For lack of suitable symbols,
it is impossible to record on paper many of these songs as they are
sung in their native environment. Extravagant postamenta [sic],
slurs, and free use of extra notes serve to mystify the collector of
these songs who strives for accuracy. ([1940] 1998, 25–26)
­
Mirroring the language of essential difference surveyed in chapter 2, com-
mentators on African American spirituals in what Work refers to as their
“native” form often resorted to allusions that highlighted the spirituals’
perceived backwardness and immaturity. As Fredrika Bremer pointed out
after the performance of several spirituals at a Cincinnati-based African
­
Methodist church in 1850, “The hymns and psalms which the negroes
have themselves composed have a peculiar naïve character, childlike, full
of imagery and life” (qtd. in Epstein 1977, 223). Arthur Buckminster
 “Finesse, Precision, and Logic” • 91

Fuller, a chaplain of the Unitarian Church, in turn wrote of attending an

African American religious meeting at Fort Monroe in 1862 in which he
ventured the opinion that the singing of spirituals was “a little more de-
monstrative than I am accustomed to or suits my taste. . . . O, they [the
singers] were so mournful, so despairing (who wonders at that?) in their
view of this life; but they changed to wild paeans when they spoke of an
immortal state” ([1863] 2007, 199). Such a reading of the performativity
of spirituals worked against the goals of African American church leaders
bent on breaking free from primitivist stereotypes and led to their some-
what anachronistic presence in urban African American churches by the
1870s (Harris 1992, 113).
Indeed, at least in the realm of Episcopal, Presbyterian, and Congrega-
tional Churches—those denominations most concerned with charting a
­
new behavioral course—spirituals might have disappeared entirely if not
­
for the innovative experimentation of a select group of performers during
the final decades of the century. These developments might best be de-
scribed as a Westernized approach to the performance of spirituals and owe
a debt to the pioneering efforts of the Fisk Jubilee Singers. Formed under
the tutelage of Fisk University treasurer George L. White, the group’s first
incarnation in 1867 focused on the preparation of works associated with
the “white ‘art’ repertoire.” The aim of such an initiative was to both raise
money for the struggling institution and to showcase to the wider public
how much “former slaves had benefitted from higher education.” Yet their
performances of Western art music attracted far less attention than their
occasional performances of spirituals—a facet of their programming that
­
began to grow in earnest during the group’s 1871 tour (Brooks 2004, 193).
White’s fixation on the transformative effect of higher education seems to
have in turn informed his direction of those spirituals, leading to a break
with the demonstrative and unpredictable nature of African American
spiritual singing described earlier and instead pursuing what Work referred
to as:

A style of singing the spiritual which eliminated every element that

detracted from the pure emotion of the song. Harmony was diatonic
and limited very largely to the primary triads and the dominant sev-
enth. Dialect was not stressed but was used only where it was vital to
92 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

the spirit of the song. Finish, precision, and sincerity were demanded
by this leader. . . . Mr. White strove for an art presentation, not a
caricature of atmosphere. ([1940] 1998, 15)

White’s musical decisions left in place many key sonic components of the
spiritual—the frequent use of pentatonic scales, for instance, and the rhyth-
­
mic syncopations that played such a crucial role in establishing the genre’s
character. Yet he had stripped the genre of its more salient marks of “other-
ness,” those musical features that had often caused people to remark on its
overly emotional nature. This new style of performing spirituals was re-
ceived enthusiastically by both white audiences and African American au-
diences that endorsed the “politics of respectability,” leading to several suc-
cessful tours undertaken by the Fisk Jubilee Singers between 1871 and 1878
as well as the establishment of similar choral organizations at the African
American colleges Hampton and Howard (Brooks 2004, 194).
In turn, the Fisk Singers’ more reverent style of performing spirituals
was widely welcomed by leaders of African American churches, who had
long attempted to subdue congregants wishing for more acknowledgment
of the African American experience in their places of worship. As Michael
Harris neatly summarizes,

Whereas old-line directors had considered the spiritual in its classic

­
form to be crude and its first descendent musically trite, they found
the anthem/octavo spiritual a worthy medium through which to re-
store some aspect of their racial heritage from which it had been so
effectively expunged. (1992, 114)

Yet incorporating the use of these works into the liturgical practice of Afri-
can American churches at the turn of the century remained beyond the
pale of how far many church leaders seemed willing to go.1 Instead, ar-
ranged spirituals began appearing in concert programs performed outside
of worship hours. Functioning as social and cultural hubs, many urban Af-
rican American churches had long set in place concert series aimed at cele-
brating and promoting community expertise in Western art music. A biog-
raphy of the African American singer and composer Harry Burleigh’s early
life assembled by Jean Snyder (2004) provides ample evidence of both the
 “Finesse, Precision, and Logic” • 93

breadth and scope of such performance opportunities extending across the

urban centers of Cleveland, Buffalo, and New York. Burleigh had made a
name for himself in these cities as a classically trained baritone proficient in
art songs, but on the back of the Fisk Jubilee Singers’ success, he began in-
troducing solo arrangements of African American spirituals into his church
concerts around 1900 (Brooks 2004, 479). Burleigh was followed in this
regard by Robert Nathaniel Dett, who led the Hampton Institute Choir in
the performance of arranged spirituals and art songs at churches and recital
halls across the country during the 1920s and across Europe in 1930 (Brooks
2004, 491).
Those observing these concerts in the African American press were
impressed with the way in which this new take on the spiritual appeared
to reify New Negro ideology in sonic terms, demonstrating to the world
the sophistication and technical proficiency African American musicians
could attain in the performance of works with folk roots. In particular,
commentary on the “training” required to perform in the new spiritual
style and the “control” with which the music was delivered pervades Af-
rican American press coverage of the genre. Typical of this type of report-
ing are the comments made by Gamewell Valentine of the Atlanta Daily
World about a concert given by the Fisk Singers at the First Congrega-
tional Church in Atlanta on March 22, 1935. Valentine writes, “As to be
expected, Fisk maintains her supremacy in the dignified interpretation of
spirituals and their singing had fine tone production, rhythm, authority
and that finesse which only Fisk possesses” (1935, 1, 3). Laced through this
description are acknowledgments of the Fisk Singers’ nondemonstrative
approach and the idea that such a result stemmed from the training these
musicians received at Fisk rather than their own genetic predispositions.
A similar understanding of the value of the Westernized spiritual can be
seen in Frankye Dixon’s comments about the Hal Johnson Negro Choir
made several years earlier in the New York Amsterdam News: “Any prepos-
sessions you may have had against Madrigals and Spirituals as being un-
vocal or harsh or crabbed will melt like mist before the summer sun. . . .
Hal Johnson is to be greatly commended for his untiring efforts in the
training and the banding together of such a representative group.” Dixon
would in turn highlight Johnson’s “excellent choral arrangements” and
the “intelligence in interpretation” evinced by members of Johnson’s
94 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

choir as assurances “that a universal welcome will soon be the reward for
these living representatives of the only true native school of American
music” (1928, 9). The point here is that the language of musical “subtlety”
and “intellect” woven through these reviews can be seen to demonstrate
the impact respectability politics had on assessments of modern African
American musical developments in elite circles.
Of course the spiritual was not the sole musical vehicle of modernist
thought explored by African American composers during this period. An
important parallel aesthetic project can be seen to have occurred in the
concert works composed by Burleigh and Dett, as well as their contempo-
raries William Grant Still, Florence Price, and William Dawson. Dett, for
instance, would compose the concert oratorio The Ordering of Moses be-
tween 1931 and 1932 in order to fulfill the assessment requirements for his
master’s degree from the Eastman School of Music. The work had a founda-
tion in the African American spiritual tradition in that it used the melody
of “Go Down, Moses” as a unifying device, but at the same time, the work’s
extended form placed it outside the arranged spiritual model (Ryder 1997,
370). In 1935 Burleigh would in turn move beyond the realm of spirituals
and publish the art song “Lovely Dark and Lonely One,” based on a text by
Langston Hughes. In this work Burleigh pairs a series of motivic gestures
rooted in Western art music compositional practice with a “harmonic and
melodic structure . . . [based] on a succession of seventh and ninth chords”
suggestive of the blues (Snyder 1997, 191). Still, Price and Dawson ventured
even further afield, writing symphonies in which vernacular tropes and
Western compositional language were fused. Still’s Afro-American Sym-
­
phony (1930) integrated the twelve-bar blues form and the pentatonic blues
­
scale into a “modified sonata form” in its first movement (Floyd 1995, 109),
while Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony (1932) employed a pentatonic motive
as a structural link between the themes of various movements derived from
the melodies of African American spirituals (Strong 1997, 358). In line with
Still and Dawson, Price would embrace a pentatonic theme and folk-
­
inspired syncopated rhythms in her Symphony in E Minor (1932), which
would in turn draw heavily on orchestration effects explored in Dvorák’s
Symphony no. 9, From the New World (Brown 1997, 942).
As with the spirituals sung by the Fisk Jubilee Singers and related
groups, the African American press endorsed the works of Still and Daw-
 “Finesse, Precision, and Logic” • 95

son as excellent visions of what modern African American music might

sound like. Inherent in this commentary was language that pointed to the
“cerebral” nature of these works as evidence of their cultural value. Still’s
Afro-American Symphony, for example, was praised in the Defender for
­
demonstrating both “subtlety and skill,” factors that allowed Still to dem-
onstrate “his own genius” (“Race Symphony” 1935, 5). A similar critique of
the work was offered by the Pittsburgh Courier, which applauded the way
“‘blues’ themes and banjo parts” were “intricately woven to make up the
colorful fabric of the whole” (“Still’s Symphony” 1936, 8). Dawson’s Negro
Folk Symphony in turn was celebrated in the New York Amsterdam News for
harnessing the emotionalism of African American vernacular forms, evi-
dent in the critique that “one feels the religious fervor, the suffering and the
humor of the Negro, all skillfully woven into three movements” (Overton
1934, 4). Such comments echo the enthusiasm with which syncretic spiri-
tuals were received and unequivocally endorse the compositional idea of
fusing folk material with Western art music conventions.
Yet curiously, the performance of syncretic spirituals and other concert
works did not come to eclipse the performance of canonical works of West-
ern art music in African American social settings during this period. As
church concerts continued throughout the 1930s and 1940s, equal atten-
tion appears to have been given to the performance of works by Western art
music composers such as Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, and Chopin (among
others) and to the performance of compositions by African American art-
ists. Consider, for instance, the program performed by the junior choir of
the Mt. Carmel Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., on April 20, 1942, in
which the music of Dett was paired with that of Grieg, Brahms, Mozart,
and Elgar (“Junior Choir” 1942, 17), or the program performed by con-
tralto Jewell Yancey Humphrey at the St. Paul AME Church in St. Louis on
November 25, 1946, in which “excerpts from operas by the old masters in
French, German and Italian” were paired with “ever-beloved Negro spiritu-
­
als arranged by Jonson, R. Nathaniel Dett and Brown” (“Contralto Here”
1946, 19C). Examples of similar programs emerge in connection with a
range of African American Christian denominations across the decade,
providing further evidence of what appears to have been a fairly common
programming format (see “Ohio” 1946, 11; “Tarrytown” 1947, 17; Camp-
bell 1948, 18).
96 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

Two factors seem to have contributed to such continued focus on

Western art music works. The first was that a bona-fide aesthetic appre-

­
ciation for Western art music held by middle- and upper-class African

­
­
American concert patrons seems to have solidified during this period.
Such an appreciation is perhaps most evident in the negative—that is, in

­
reviews of concerts that did not quite live up to expectations. Cultural
critic Grace Tompkins, for instance, expressed less than total satisfaction
with singer Frankie Fambro’s performance at a 1941 concert in which her
delivery of “Mozart’s Alleluia lacked the delicate finesse and smooth le-
gato singing necessary for an excellent performance . . . show[ing] a ten-
dency toward breathiness and an inability to sustain the longer phrases”
(Tompkins 1941, 18). Venturing into even more technical terms, in a cri-
tique of Eva Vorhies’s piano recital at St. Martins Episcopal Church in
New York, a reviewer for the Defender first applauded the difficulty of the
program, on which both Beethoven’s “Waldsetein” sonata and Liszt’s
“Mephisto” waltz were performed, before going on to complain that
“overindulgence in the use of the damper pedal is her [Vorhies’s] greatest
fault” (“Eva Vorhies” 1942, 1). Such expressions of preference denote
more than a superficial or passing engagement with Western art music
and paint a picture of an informed and engaged public eager for opportu-
nities not only to hear classical music performed but to hear it performed
well.
A second factor that may have fed into continued engagement with
Western art music was the way Western art music proficiency was aligned
with success in the tertiary education sector. Indeed, performer biographies
that preceded discussion of concert programs in the African American
press were frequently laden with lists of universities and courses attended as
well as the names of musical mentors who had helped the performers along
the way. Represented in these lists were both historically African American
institutions such as Wilberforce University (“Singer Thrills” 1944, 17A)
and Howard University (“Junior Choir” 1942, 17) as well as integrated in-
stitutions such as the University of Pennsylvania (“Eva Vorhies” 1942, 21)
and the University of Minnesota (“Applaud Duo” 1954, 14). As the follow-
ing discussion of a performance given by twin brothers Rudolph and
Adolph Thornton at St. Marks AME Zion Church in Indianapolis demon-
strates, such a discursive frame allowed communities to endorse a model of
 “Finesse, Precision, and Logic” • 97

successful adulthood that incorporated both tertiary training and respect-

able music taste.

A packed house greeted the two maestros who are graduates of Cris-
pus Attucks high school and have made great strides in the field of
music. They are former students at Lucille S. Collins Conservatory
of Music and also studied under Norman L. Merrifield, concert pia-
nist of the Indianapolis Philharmonic [sic] Symphony Orchestra.
Thunderous applause greeted the brothers as they played a duet,
“The Star Spangled Banner,” a special arrangement by John Stafford
Smith. It was expertly rendered, without a flaw.
Following this rendition, Adolph played the works of Beethoven
and other composers, while Rudolph devoted his part of the pro-
gram to compositions by the great artist Chopin and others.
After the program, the talented twins were given a reception in
the parlors of the church, where they received the plaudits of their
friends and associates. (“Twin Brothers” 1950, 24)

The Thornton brothers’ reception reveals the degree to which Western art
music proficiency and tertiary education were woven together in the minds
of some African American communities as marks of ideal social advance-
ment. This mode of thinking is reflective of W. E. B. Du Bois’s endorsement
of a humanities-rich education as a pathway to racial uplift in his 1903 essay
­
“The Talented Tenth.” Similar to the goals of respectability politics, Du
Bois’s vision of a strong African American community revolved around dis-
proving assumptions about African American talent and aptitude through
the successful deployment of tertiary education programs on par with
those offered to whites. Specifically, Du Bois rejected the notion that the
best hope for racial uplift lay in industrial training, as promoted by Booker
T. Washington, arguing in contrast that “education must not simply teach
work—it must teach Life” and that “the sending out of teachers whose
­
training has not been simply for bread winning, but also for human culture,
has been of inestimable value” ([1903] 2007, 198, 205). Showcasing students
who had successfully studied the arts at tertiary institutions provided one
way for communities to publicly celebrate the advancements they had
made in securing the reins of self-determination as well as make the case
­
98 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

that the community itself was capable of producing members of Du Bois’s

envisioned leadership class. In this way, the performance of classical music
helped shore up boundaries between those who continued to pursue a folk,
or what Guthrie Ramsey (2003, 40) has referred to as a “provincial out-
look,” and those who pursued more “cosmopolitan” identities.
Further evidence of this willful stratification can be seen in the way
members of the “cosmopolitan” set rejected musical styles derived from
folk practices they perceived to be overly demonstrative. Just as the early
form of the spiritual had been rejected in African American church com-
munities, popular music in the form of jazz served as a particular lightning
rod for those looking to break free—or maintain their distance—from
­
­
folk-based identities. Writing a year before he promoted his idea for a “fin-
­
ishing” school in the pages of the Defender, Robert S. Abbott set about
critiquing jazz in the same essentialist language used by the the Musical
Quarterly authors surveyed in chapter 2. Under the heading “Jazz Is Scan-
dalizing,” Abbott wrote of young African American women “tearing down
every conceivable hope of redemption . . . [and] abandon[ing] themselves
into such frenzied epileptic contortions as ‘snake-hip,’ ‘black-bottom’ and
­
­
the vulgar dance de ventre [sic] known as the ‘rhumba’”(1934, 11). Lawrence
Levine’s documentation of jazz reception across African American periodi-
cals in the 1920s and 1930s uncovered similar views about the music’s value.
Levine cites New York Age critic Lucien H. White, who wrote in 1921 that
jazz appealed “only to the lover of sensuous and debasing emotions,” as well
as Maude Cuney-Hare of the Crisis, who in 1936 denounced jazz in lan-
­
guage that set it far outside the nondemonstrative realm: “Music should
sound, not screech; Music should cry, not howl; Music should weep, not
bawl; Music should implore, not whine” (qtd. in Levine 1989, 12).
From a contemporary viewpoint, such perspectives are certainly diffi-
cult to stomach. While they provide evidence of an intellectual project
aimed at rescuing the power of African American definition from the
hands of those who would stereotype, they simultaneously embrace a ra-
cialized and essentialist reading of jazz music that harks back to some of the
uglier moments of “primitivist” critique. In turn, it has not been uncom-
mon for scholars committed to promoting the value of the folk aspect of
African American music to read such views within a framework of manip-
ulation—to look at comments about the evils of jazz as evidence of a sort of
­
 “Finesse, Precision, and Logic” • 99

brainwashing of middle-class African Americans regarding the value of

­
folk products. Writing in 1963, LeRoi Jones (who would later change his
name to Amiri Baraka) chastised the likes of Abbott, Lucien White, and
Cuney-Hare in his claim that middle-class African Americans had engaged
­
­
in “willful dilutions” of African American music in order to answer “persis-
tent calls to oblivion made by the mainstream of the society” ( Jones 1963a,
131). More recent discussion of the phenomenon has been increasingly nu-
anced but continues to highlight the power dynamic of a dominant culture
imposing its will on a minority culture. In Guthrie Ramsey’s view, for in-
stance, “‘the politics of respectability’ championed by the black profes-
sional and upper-class citizens” evinced an agenda of “disciplin[ing] black
­
bodies into bourgeois submission” (2003, 51). No doubt Ramsey is refer-
ring to the bourgeois behavior of the African American upper class in this
statement, but use of the term submission in connection with a form of be-
havior modeled on white culture denotes a conceptual imbalance of power.
Taking the broad view, I do not argue with this sentiment. Given all of the
evidence I have relayed thus far, I feel it is safe to say that a bourgeois mind-

­
set driven by white notions of respectability worked to shape middle- and

­
upper-class African American identities—both social and musical—
­
­
­
throughout the first half of the twentieth century. As both Jones/Baraka
and Ramsey argue, and I would concur, it is important to acknowledge the
flow of power in the way these identities were shaped and the forms of ex-
pression such shaping clearly put at risk.
Yet at the same time, it is difficult to deny the fact that African Americans
like Abbott, Lucien White, and Cuney-Hare experienced and contributed to
­
a way of being African American that felt genuine to them. The musical
world in which they lived clearly celebrated Western art music, Westernized
spirituals, and syncretic orchestral works. Social church events in middle-
­
and upper-class communities revolved around the performance of canonical
­
Western art music works, and expertise in classical music performance
achieved through tertiary study was given a good deal of column space in
African American newspapers of the time. These facets of musical life may
have had limited success in altering hegemonic notions of African American
musical culture—those persistent ideas that I chart out in chapter 2—but
­
­
such a fact does not detract from the certainty that they held both aesthetic
and political value for the communities in which they were realized.
100 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

Moving Classical Music beyond the Church

during the 1940s and 1950s

As Ramsey has noted, this world would undergo significant change during
the middle decades of the century. Preliminary evidence of such a shift can
be seen in the increased coverage “entertainment-dance music” received in

­
the pages of the Defender during the late 1940s and the decrease in coverage
afforded “blacks in classical music, who had at one time dominated the so-
ciety pages” (Ramsey 2003, 51). Yet caution needs to be exercised when in-
terpreting this evidence, as performances of classical music undertaken by
African American musicians do not seem to have waned in the postwar
years. To the contrary, throughout the late 1940s and the 1950s African
American artists who had trained in tertiary institutions (and some who
had not) became increasingly interested in moving classical music outside
of church settings and into the wider community arena. The urban centers
of New York and Los Angeles in particular witnessed developments in the
promotion of classical music among African Americans through the estab-
lishment of community orchestras and the organization of non-church-

­
­
based recital programs. The support given these initiatives by the African
American press continued to highlight their perceived value in terms of
local community enrichment and speaks to the variety of artistic styles in-
forming African American cultural spheres at the time John Lewis would
begin to forge his musical voice.
A central factor in the expansion of community-based classical music
­
initiatives during this period appears to have been the influx of classically
trained African American musicians into a society that continued to en-
dorse the idea of segregated symphony orchestras. In her survey of African
American classical music organizations since the 1800s, D. Antoinette
Handy writes of how, by the 1950s, “impatience” had set in for “black ‘clas-
sically’ trained instrumentalists” in relation to “the snail-paced progress be-
­
ing made in [the] integration of American symphony orchestras.” As a re-
sult, African American musicians increasingly started to pursue the
development of “‘integration concerned’ orchestras” as a way of “afford[ing]
opportunity to highly gifted musicians regardless of age, sex, or national
origin” (Handy 1981, 9–10). To be fair, an African American orchestral
­
presence was not without precedent in the United States. Handy points to
 “Finesse, Precision, and Logic” • 101

“the Ida Club and Lyre Club symphony orchestras in New Orleans” as well
as N. Clark Smith’s “Little Symphony Orchestra in Chicago” during the
late 1800s, along with a host of others, to forward the notion that the idea
for such initiatives was already in the air (1981, 7). Yet the need for more
similarly minded institutions was plain enough even to the classical music
critics of the New York Times, who admitted in the mid-1950s that major

­
symphony orchestras continued to “act largely as if Negro string, wind,
brass and Percussion players did not exist” (Taubman 1956, X9).
Maestros Dean Dixon, Everett Lee, and Leroy Hurte were early pio-
neers in the fight against the status quo through their development of inter-
racial orchestral societies in New York during the 1940s and 1950s. Dixon’s
American Youth Orchestra, organized in 1944, was understood early on to
be a vehicle purpose-built for the “break[ing] down” of “barriers of preju-
­
dice and discrimination” that continued to stymie African American or-
chestral employment (Holt 1944, 6). The ensemble accomplished this not
only by offering professional training—which many participants had al-
­
ready received as part of their upbringing—but by contributing to what
­
might be considered “facts on the ground” in terms of African American
orchestral presence. In direct reference to Dixon’s American Youth Orches-
tra and Everett Lee’s Cosmopolitan Symphony Orchestra, founded four
years later in 1948, Lester Granger of the New York Amsterdam News
summed up the phenomenon in the following terms:

For many years it has been the dream of serious Negro musicians to
find outlet for their talents in the larger, widely recognized sym-
phony orchestras. But these world-famous groups have held their
­
ranks tightly, contemptuous of the efforts of qualified Negro musi-
cians to join their numbers. But in recent years something has been
done about this situation by persons who love music deeply and de-
mocracy even more. (1948, 11)

Indeed, both Dixon’s and Lee’s orchestras appear to have served as turning
points in the battle for orchestral employment. Lee’s interracial Cosmo-
politan Symphony Orchestra would in fact go even further than Dixon’s
American Youth Orchestra in this regard by nature of the fact that it was in
and of itself a professional ensemble with a payroll. The success of such an
102 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

enterprise in meeting its financial obligations impressed critics in the Afri-

can American press, particularly those aware of the fact that such success
occurred “in a town where even long-established music groups were dip-

­
ping into red ink” (Scott 1949, 13). In connection with Granger’s observa-
tions, such coverage belies the fact that financial security for classically
trained African American musicians resided front and center in the minds
of those assessing the cultural value of these new interracial orchestras.
Yet providing economic reward was not viewed as their sole societal
benefit. The emergence of integrated orchestras once again provided the
African American press the opportunity to celebrate the achievements of
middle-class community members. The coverage of Lee’s debut, for in-
­
stance, enabled a simultaneous public recapitulation of his success both as
a professional CBS Radio staff member and as an educator at the Berkshire
Festival and Columbia University (Northern 1948, 13). Coverage of the
launch of the amateur New York Orchestral Society in Harlem in 1953,
conducted by Leroy Hurte, in turn presented an opportunity for talking up
community achievements in both education and occupation. While the
New York Age was quick to outwardly promote the idea that the orchestra
established a platform for people of “all walks of life” to come together
under the umbrella of a “respected symphonic orchestra,” its discussion of
the society’s membership revealed a decidedly less diverse reality (“New
York Orchestral Society” 1953, 7). Only middle-class occupations are high-
­
lighted in the article (Andrew Johnson is described as a “minister-musician”
­
and Alvin Moore is described as a “cop-by-day and violinist-by-night”),
­
­
­
­
while members’ affiliations with Columbia University and the Greenwich
House music school are featured prominently. Furthermore, the New York
Age’s description of an audition process in which “scores of persons were
heard and screened” but only eleven made the initial cut speaks to the sort
of privileged training one would have needed to acquire in order to partici-
pate.
The location of the concerts held by groups like the American Youth
Orchestra, the Cosmopolitan Symphony Orchestra, and the New York Or-
chestral Society in turn demonstrates a shifting geography for African
American classical music performance during the late 1940s and early
1950s. Certainly there was a precedent for African American classical music
performance outside church settings in the decades prior. Harry Burleigh
 “Finesse, Precision, and Logic” • 103

performed at colleges and YMCA halls as early as the 1890s (Snyder 2004,
225), while Town Hall in New York served as a particularly useful venue for
African American performers with high profiles, such as Roland Hayes
(“Roland Hayes” 1937, 20), Marian Anderson (I. Smith 1938, 19), and Jules
Bledsoe during the 1930s (Berlack-Boozer 1938, 10). Yet the nature of hav-

­
ing a large African American or interracial ensemble without a particular
“home” church required the pursuit of non-church-based performance

­
­
spaces from the very start of these projects. The American Youth Orches-
tra’s Carnegie Hall debut was, for example, followed in short order by a se-
ries of performances at Hunter College (“Covering Concerts” 1945, 6),
while the Cosmopolitan Symphony Orchestra’s debut in the Great Hall of
City College (“Everett Lee to Present” 1947, 6) was followed by perfor-
mances at Town Hall (“Everett Lee to Conduct” 1948, 16). The New York
Orchestral Society in turn can be seen to have utilized the Harlem YMCA
auditorium during its short life before Hurte moved to Los Angeles, where
he would conduct the interracial Angel City Symphony Orchestra in per-
formances at East Los Angeles Junior College and the Wilshire Ebell The-
atre (“Angel City Symphony” 1958, A12).
Apart from developing new spaces for performance, the increased pro-
file for African American conductors built through these concerts seems to
have set in motion the wheels of integration for several historically white
ensembles. Hurte’s early work with the New York Orchestral Society, for
instance, was followed by requests that he guest conduct the Peter Merem-
blum Orchestra in 1956 and a Western Symphony Association concert in
1957 (“Leroy Hurte Directs” 1960, C2). Everett Lee was in turn recruited in
1951 to conduct the Louisville Philharmonic orchestra (the first southern
orchestra to be led by an African American) and the New York City Opera
Company in 1955 (“Negro Maestro Makes Bow” 1955, 1). Dixon’s develop-
ing profile would, on the other hand, lead to leadership positions abroad,
first with the Stockholm Symphony Orchestra (“Dean Dixon to Conduct”
1953, 4) and then with the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra (“‘Life’ Points
out Northern Bias” 1957, 2). The dedication with which the erosion of ra-
cial boundaries evident in the developing careers of these conductors was
followed by the African American press speaks to the importance such de-
velopments held for press stakeholders.
The combination of this sort of coverage, the expansion of African
104 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

American and interracial Western art music ensembles, and the continued
promotion of Western art music works both inside and outside of African
American church settings during the 1940s and 1950s paints a slightly dif-
ferent picture of the cultural milieu within which John Lewis operated
than is normally acknowledged in discussions of his music. Certainly those
views distancing Lewis from African American culture discussed in chapter
2 hold water if the limits of African American cultural expression are locked
into the realms of folk practices and demonstrative performativity. Yet such
an understanding of Lewis seems less tenable when one considers the plu-
rality of thinking around what might have constituted bona-fide cultural

­
expression in the minds of middle- and upper-class African Americans dur-
­
­
ing the postwar years. Indeed, Lewis’s interest in Western art music conven-
tions and Western art music ensembles like string quartets and symphony
orchestras (interests discussed in depth in chapter 4) place him quite evenly
in step with the likes of Hurte, Dixon, and Lee. From this perspective, Lew-
is’s music appears to evince a weaving together of versions of African Amer-
ican identity at play during the 1950s rather than an assimilationist move
toward a European cultural aesthetic.

Lewis’s Reception in the African American Press

Lewis’s coverage in the African American press can be seen to endorse

this very idea. Yet before such coverage can be unpacked, it is important
to note some intellectual shifts in relation to how jazz was valued in mid-
dle- and upper-class African American circles during the 1940s and 1950s.
­
­
This shift can most simply be described as a “warming” to jazz and seems
to have arisen out of two linked societal changes. The first was that musi-
cal developments in jazz during the 1930s and 1940s appeared to debunk
many aspects of the popular “primitivist” myth, affirming instead an in-
herent modernism in jazz more suitable to the ideological outlook of
New Negro adherents.2 The development of bebop in particular served as
a striking example of how jazz music might transform in complexity, and
while many felt the bebop genre was no less demonstrative than the sort
of “Hot” jazz Abbott decried in the pages of the Defender during the
1930s, the very fact of its transformation stood as reason enough in the
 “Finesse, Precision, and Logic” • 105

African American press for it to be celebrated as a milestone in African

American cultural development.3
The second issue that seemingly played a part in shifting the opinion of
the African American middle and upper class was the increasingly overt
role jazz musicians and ensembles played in the broader struggle for equal
rights. Indeed, increased coverage of jazz music in African American peri-
odicals seemed to go hand in hand with reports on the difficulties African
Americans faced in terms of negotiating segregated seating policies, access
to performance venues, and access to accommodation. Often, both musical
and political commentary were rolled together in these accounts. The New
York Age’s reporting on Louis Armstrong and Bennie Goodman’s April 17,
1953, Carnegie Hall concert, for instance, provides lengthy descriptions of
the musical innovations attributed to each performer before transitioning
to a description of Goodman’s role in leading the charge for integrated jazz
orchestras (“Goodman-Armstrong Team” 1953, 12). Coverage of the Jazz at
­
the Philharmonic tour in the same year is similarly structured, speaking to
the diverse lineup of musicians before embarking on a discussion of how
the tour represented a “triumph over the forces of bigotry throughout the
country, and the world” (“Granz’ ‘JATP’ Swings” 1953, 19).
In some cases, the sort of cultural work toward integration achieved by
jazz ensembles was cast as being even more effective than the political ac-
tion undertaken by African American civil rights leaders. In a critique of
the “top down” model of leadership that characterized the civil rights strug-
gle of the early 1950s, Mary Bethune of the Defender ventured the opinion
that perhaps better role models could be found in the jazz realm, singling
out Lionel Hampton in particular as someone “alive to progress, and alert
to the needs of the people of which he is a part. He has his finger on the
pulse of the plain people—and most of us are plain people” (1950, 6). A
­
similar notion forms the cornerstone of a 1954 “Simple Says” column writ-
ten by Langston Hughes for the Defender in which Hughes humorously
skewers the high-minded intellectual discourse of an imaginary “Race Re-
­
lations Seminar” by suggesting that the seminar might have worked better
if it had incorporated a jazz band into the program:

With a jazz band, they could work out integration in ten minutes.
Everybody would have been dancing together like they do at the
106 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

Savoy—colored and white—or down on the East Side at them Casi-

­
­
nos on a Friday night where jam holds forth—and you would have

­
been integrated. (1954, 9)

Such coverage clearly denotes a change in position toward jazz music. Yet it
must be acknowledged that such a change did not appear to signal a dra-
matic shift in respectability ideals. Rather, the growing endorsement of jazz
in the African American press seems to have stemmed from a renewed un-
derstanding about the meaning of jazz music itself. Evolution in musical
style and jazz’s demonstrated success in facilitating integration erased (or at
least minimized) notions of jazz’s backwardness or “primitive” nature in
these outlets, allowing the musical genre to be newly interpreted as a valu-
able and sophisticated cultural product.
Lewis’s music in particular played well into this new understanding as
its sonic brand audibly linked to the Westernized spiritual approach and
the syncretic concert work approach endorsed by the African American
press during the 1920s and 1930s. Indeed, coverage of African American
spiritual groups based on the Fisk Jubilee model and the orchestral works
of Still and Dawson seems to have set in place a way of talking about
modern African American music ripe for describing Lewis’s works. In
particular, the manner in which reviews of these earlier innovations
walked a tightrope between acknowledging folk roots and celebrating
new sonic components linked to notions of “cerebrality” and refinement
appeared, to many, directly applicable. The Atlanta Daily World, for in-
stance, highlighted both the MJQ’s popularity among “jazz lovers” and
its “unique combination of compositional skill, instrumental technique
and musical direction”—three qualities easily grouped under the idea of
­
musical control—in its coverage of an upcoming MJQ concert at More-
­
house College (“Modern Jazz Quartet Here Saturday” 1959, 3). In the
lead-up to a performance at Orchestra Hall in Chicago, Bob Hunter of
­
the Defender would in turn speak to the group’s improvisatory founda-
tions before applauding it for being able to “control . . . all its [jazz’s] wild-
ness” (1962, 10). Likewise, in its coverage of the opening night of the 1964
UCLA jazz series, the Los Angeles Times wrote of the group’s “improvisa-
tory freedom” and “earthiness” as part of a paradoxical style that also in-
cluded “finesse, precision and logic” (Clar 1964, C15), terms nearly iden-
tical to those Work used in his description of the Fisk Jubilee Singers’
 “Finesse, Precision, and Logic” • 107

“finish, precision and sincerity” ([1940] 1998, 15). On the surface, such a
reception does not appear markedly different from comments made
about the group in the jazz press and mainstream newspapers. Ascrip-
tions of intelligence and control abound in both sets of publications and
there is no shortage in either of comments supportive of the group’s more
“provincial” improvisatory elements.
Yet there does exist a notable difference between these sets of publica-
tions in terms of how the significance of Lewis’s innovations was inter-
preted. As I discuss in chapter 2, Lewis’s use of Western art music composi-
tional devices and his pursuit of a nondemonstrative performance aesthetic
led many reviewers to conceptualize his music as a departure from the
realm of African American expression. The newness of such an approach
would lead many to venture the notion that a novel style of music was being
forged between European and African American cultural realms and that
while this style of music was indebted to both cultural arenas, it belonged
fully to neither. Such debates are largely absent from the coverage Lewis’s
music received in the African American press. That is to say, while Lewis’s
syncretic projects were closely followed in these publications, they were not
showcased as breaks with tradition as they were in the jazz press. The De-
fender’s coverage of Lewis’s Parisian ballet project The Comedy in 1960, for
instance, details the work’s basis on the improvisational practices of the
commedia dell’arte without ever suggesting that such a basis might be con-
sidered problematic (“Modern Jazz Quartet Wins Acclaim” 1960, A17).
Down Beat’s coverage of the same project, in contrast, uses as its focal point
the debate about how some had viewed “the ballet-like dance” as having
­
“little to do with jazz” (“Precious Asset” 1960, 9). The New York Amster-
dam News’s coverage of the MJQ’s participation in a music series at Town
Hall titled “The Symbolic Sound of Impressionism” in turn would laud
Lewis’s score for the film Sait-on jamais (1957) for bearing a “striking simi-
­
larity in both tone-coloring and tone picturing” to the “impressionist mu-
­
sic of 19th Century France.” These comments were placed alongside cover-
age of the MJQ’s receipt of a National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People award for “cultural contributions in the field of music”
(“Music for Moderns” 1957, 13). New York Times coverage of the same work,
in contrast, focused on the music’s “borderline” stylistic status and took
place underneath the headline “Serious or Jazz?” (Wilson 1958b, X12).
It is of course understandable that the jazz press and jazz reporters for
108 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

the New York Times would be primarily concerned with matters related to
musical developments within the jazz genre. Yet the conclusions of these
critics—their idea that if Lewis’s work wasn’t jazz, it was either a part of the
­
European musical tradition or part of a brand-new American musical tradi-

­
tion taking shape under the Third Stream banner—seems to have missed

­
an opportunity to read the music as part of African American music-

­
making traditions that had long embraced Western art music aesthetics. In
other words, the apparent novelty of Third Stream music, a novelty evident
in jazz critics’ descriptions of it as a “developing” music (Wilson 1958b,
X12) or as a “brand of music . . . whose name we know not, whose form we
are just making” (O’Connor 1957, 18) seems to overstate the case when one
considers the legacy of syncretic spiritual traditions and syncretic orches-
tral works composed by African Americans in preceding years. There are, of
course, plenty of asides to syncretic precedents in the jazz realm in discus-
sions of Third Stream music. The extended works of Duke Ellington, for
instance, are mentioned by Wilson (1961, X16) as direct precursors to the
works presented on Lewis’s recording The Modern Jazz Quartet and Orches-
tra (1961), and both Ellington and James P. Johnson are credited as fore-
bears to what Charles Smith (1959, 39) referred to in Down Beat as a “bur-
geoning of composition in jazz” taking place in 1959. Yet even in these
discussions the framing of Ellington and Johnson as “pioneers” belies a
hesitancy to read facility or interest in Western art music conventions as
something commonplace within the African American middle-class expe-
­
rience.4
Given the African American press’s extensive documentation of African
American stewardship and engagement with Western art music in the pre-
ceding years, it is unsurprising to note that these publications viewed Lew-
is’s work through a different lens. In particular, the rhetoric of novelty is
stripped out of assessments of Lewis’s career published during the 1950s
and early 1960s. Consider, for example, the reporting on the diversity of
recording projects Lewis both supervised and took part in as an A&R man
for Atlantic Records, published in the New York Amsterdam News in 1962:

Lewis has already begun recording a new series of albums in various

parts of the world. The series will include all kinds of music. On a
trip to Europe Lewis supervised recording dates in several countries.
 “Finesse, Precision, and Logic” • 109

In Stockholm, Sweden, he produced an album in which he also

appears as a performer with the Swedish violinist Svend Asmussen.
The album, which will be released in the fall, is entitled “European
Encounter.”
In Milan Italy, Lewis recorded a modern classical chamber work,
the “Five Movements for String Quartet, Opus 5,” by Anton We-
bern, with the well-known Italian string quartet, Quartetto Di Mi-
­
lano.
Lewis also recorded extensively in Germany. In Baden-Baden, he

­
supervised an album with Albert Mangelsdorf, the most famous,
and reputed to be, the best jazz trombonist in Europe. Lewis played
piano in this album. (“Atlantic Records” 1962, 22)

Missing in this account is the editorializing that so persistently followed

Lewis in the jazz press—the constant interrogation of what Lewis was do-
­
ing and how well he was doing it. In its place we find instead a matter-of-

­
­
fact description of Lewis’s achievements in his new role. His suitability to
oversee the range of projects described is not explicitly set out, and this, in
fact, is the point of difference between the trade press and the African
American press. African American involvement with Western art music
like Webern’s String Quartet was not a remarkable event for those contrib-
uting to the New York Amsterdam News. Therefore, Lewis’s involvement
with the work did not require special explanation.
A similar ideology surrounds Harold Keith’s review of the MJQ’s Sait-
on jamais recording, published in the Pittsburgh Courier in 1958. In con-
­
trast to Wilson’s (1958b) assessment of the music underneath the heading
“Serious or Jazz?,” Keith’s review of the work avoids any attempt to make
sense of the score’s apparent Western art music bent, choosing instead to
simply document what he views as its sonic success. Keith begins his report
without proviso, writing,

[The] MJQ’s latest release for Atlantic can be labeled as an unquali-

fied triumph. The LP disc, based upon the original writings of pia-
nist John Lewis, presents a magnificence of composition which has,
in its swath, captured all of the lace and fluidic beauty of Venice, one
of the most beautiful cities in the world. (1958, 16)
110 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

Keith goes on to mention the “grace and tragic pageantry” of the work
“Cortege” and the “beautiful pictorialization of [the character] Sophie” in
the work “One Never Knows,” drawing on the language of musical “re-
spectability.” Yet Keith avoids mention of the work’s significance in terms
of a larger musical movement or, in fact, of its similarities to any parallel
European aesthetic paradigms. Indeed, beyond the mention of Venice, no
other references are made to either Europe in general or to compositional
conventions normally associated with Western art music. A similar critical
approach is used in a retrospective article on the MJQ run in the Defender
in 1963 in which the language of musical “control” abounds but no direct
links to Western art music or the Third Stream movement are made (“Mod-
ern Jazz Quartet Top Unit” 1963, 29). In fact, across the publications the
Chicago Defender, the New York Amsterdam News, the Pittsburgh Courier,
the Los Angeles Times, and the Atlanta Daily World, no mention of the
term Third Stream in connection with Lewis or the MJQ appears to have
been made at all between the term’s emergence in 1957 and the group’s ten-

­
year anniversary celebrated by the Pittsburgh Courier in 1965.
It therefore seems safe to assume that in the eyes of the African Ameri-
can press, Lewis’s engagement with Western art music did not evince a
groundbreaking move toward a new musical ideology. And when one ex-
amines the history of music making in middle- and upper-class African
­
­
American communities during the first half of the twentieth century, it be-
comes clear why. For at least seventy years before the formation of the
MJQ, a tradition of weaving folk and classical musical styles together had
existed within the realm of the African American spiritual and the concert
works authored by Burleigh, Dett, Still, Dawson, and Price. Such an ap-
proach found its rationale in what Higginbotham (1993) refers to as the
“politics of respectability” and what Baldwin (2007, 30) refers to as “old
settler ideology”—aligned political mind-sets in which the capacity for
­
­
self-determination was felt best demonstrated through the mastery of he-
­
gemonic cultural practices. The musical side of these politics, embodied in
syncretic works, would find additional purchase in the continued support
for a musical social world organized around the performance of canonical
works of Western art music. Lewis’s music was an exceptionally good aes-
thetic fit within this paradigm, as it capitalized on growing interest in mod-
ern jazz music emerging in middle- and upper-class African American cir-
­
­
 “Finesse, Precision, and Logic” • 111

cles while simultaneously adhering to the rules of sonic decorum well

entrenched in the ideology of respectability.
What then might an awareness of this orientation mean for the way in
which we interpret the mechanics of Lewis’s music? It seems to me that the
views of middle- and upper-class African Americans toward Western art
­
­
music during the 1950s hold a good degree of relevance in terms of how we
might read the intent of Western art music conventions such as fugal pro-
cesses, suite formats, composed contrapuntal passages, and the like in Lew-
is’s work. In chapter 1 I suggested that when we view these compositional
elements in connection with Lewis’s attempts to reach or build new jazz
audiences, they might be conceptualized as part of a double-voiced compo-

­
sitional strategy in which those unfamiliar with the jazz genre were intro-
duced to it through the use of more familiar sonorities. This same mode of
thinking in part helps explain the way Lewis’s works may have functioned
in relation to the experiences and musical tastes of middle- and upper-class

­
­
African Americans. The development of modern jazz styles in which “pro-
vincial” elements were embedded within “intellectual” frames led to a re-
newed (or brand-new) appreciation for jazz within this demographic, and
­
Lewis’s works can undoubtedly be read as part of this trend.
Yet we might also think of Lewis’s use of Western art music conventions
as emerging from the experience of being part of the African American
middle class. Raised in Albuquerque by a grandfather who was a small busi-
ness owner (Balliett 1971, 176), Lewis’ childhood contained all of the hall-
marks of middle-class life set out in the African American press. He was
­
trained in the performance of classical piano from a young age, studying
privately until the age of twenty-two, when he left home to join the army
­
(Lyons 1983, 77). His family were members of the Methodist Church—an
­
affiliation he would later paint in contrast to the more demonstrative Pen-
tecostal Church in Albuquerque (Holley 2000, 40)—and his educational
­
pursuits mirrored those applauded by the African American elite. Turning
away from the pressure to study dentistry imposed by a family friend, Lewis
enrolled in arts and science classes at the University of New Mexico in 1940
before being drafted into World War II in 1942 (Lalo 1991, 15; Lyons 1983,
77). Upon his return in 1944, he confirmed his commitment to a liberal
arts education by enrolling with an anthropology and music double major
(Balliett 1971, 176). Years later Lewis would confirm the effects of this
112 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

middle-class journey on his appreciation for classical music, claiming,

­
Classical music is something you do because you’re a middle class
person. At least, that was the case where I lived and grew up with my
family. Which I loved dearly; it was great to be exposed to as much
as possible. (“MJQ Views” 1987, 28)

This spectrum of experiences seems to beg for a reading of Lewis’s music

that takes into account the larger story of African American middle-class

­
music making.
In the following chapter I therefore seek to tell multiple stories about
how the compositional design of Lewis’s works might be understood
within the context of various African American music-making traditions.

­
On one level I explore the compositional implications of a double-voiced

­
recruitment agenda evident in works produced across Lewis’s first decade
of ensemble leadership. I support this position by asking the reader to con-
sider the context of these works’ performance, the sorts of audiences in
attendance and the works’ paratextual frames. Yet at the same time I en-
deavor to show that many of Lewis’s musical decisions seemed to be driven
by a fascination with Western art music born out of his Western art music
training in the United States and his relationship with jazz modernists
both at home and abroad. In other words, even when a double-voiced in-
­
tent might be identified in Lewis’s work, one can easily point to other
forces surrounding him that may have had an equal impact on his aesthetic
decisions. As I discuss in this chapter, being guided by such forces is not a
uniquely “white” phenomenon. A proud legacy of African American
stewardship and engagement with Western art music apart from double-
­
voiced syncretic works exists, and Lewis’s music can just as easily be under-
stood as an extension of this tradition. It is not my intent in making this
claim to argue that such a tradition functioned entirely separately from
the musical traditions of the white hegemony. Indeed, as the movement
toward integrated orchestras shows, considerable overlap and line blurring
can undoubtedly be seen to occur between the two. My intent in pointing
to African American stewardship and feelings of ownership around West-
ern art music is simply to take some steps toward eroding notions of aes-
thetic ownership based on race alone while at the same time finding a way
 “Finesse, Precision, and Logic” • 113

to honor notions of tradition as they may have been experienced within a

particular historical moment. Ideas about tradition are powerful and valu-
able but they are not universally felt, and it is the acknowledgment of this
diversity that positions us the best for understanding the ways in which
Lewis’s works functioned within the complex landscape of ideas about
culture that defined 1950s America.
4 • Composition in Context

Lewis and the MJQ, 1952–62

­
The central compositional vehicle for Lewis’s musical vision during the
1950s was a quartet composed of vibraphone, bass, drums, and piano.
Breaking with industry norms, the group set out not under Lewis’s name,
but under a title that pointed directly to the innovative style of music the
four members were committed to exploring—it was to be a Modern Jazz
­
Quartet in both name and mission.
Although the group officially formed in 1952, its origins can be seen to
extend back to Lewis’s first major gig on the East Coast. After spending
three years in the army—two of which he spent playing with drummer
­
Kenny Clarke—Lewis moved to New York in 1945 and began classes at the
­
Manhattan School of Music while waiting out receipt of his union card.
Apart from a few one-nighters in groups run by Allen Eager, Eddie Davis,
­
and Hot Lips Page, it wasn’t until Clarke’s return to New York in 1946 that
Lewis began participating in the jazz scene in any sort of sustained manner.
The most significant development along these lines was his introduction to
Dizzy Gillespie via Clarke in 1946. Gillespie hired Lewis first on a tempo-
rary basis and then, satisfied with the result of the three-month trial, asked
­
Lewis to join up for a series of ninety one-night shows on the road begin-
­
ning in September 1946 (Balliett 1971, 164). As Lewis continued to extend
his tenure in the band, a small subgroup of the ensemble began to take
shape, made up of Lewis on piano, Clarke on drums, Ray Brown on bass,
and Milt Jackson on the vibraphone. This precursor to the MJQ would
play between Gillespie’s big band sets and served as a side ensemble for the
musicians when the band would go on vacation (Lyons 1983, 79). Ray

114
 Composition in Context • 115

Brown left the group in 1952—a result of his apparent expense, according

­
to Lewis—and Percy Heath was brought in as the new bass player (Balliett
­
1971, 162). The core of the MJQ was then set, and apart from the replace-
ment of Clarke with drummer Connie Kay in 1955, the group would re-
main a consistent unit for the next twenty-two years.1

­
There must have been a sense early on that the music these four (and
later Kay) would play together was going to be different. As Lewis reflected
years later, “There were things wrong in the music around us that we all
agreed on, and some of them were long, long solos and that formula on a
tune of everybody playing the melody in the first chorus, followed by a
string of solos, and then the melody again” (Balliett 1971, 162). Even before
the quartet was established, Lewis had begun exploring solutions to this
problem through his arrangement efforts. His works for Gillespie seemed
more structured than others in the ensemble book and he had played a
central role in crafting the Birth of the Cool recordings.
In this chapter I turn my focus directly to what it was that made Lew-
is’s compositional approach unique. While part of such a project requires
the documentation of specific aspects of Lewis’s compositional style, I
also endeavor in the following pages to interpret the design of these
works in relation to the messy and paradox-ridden historical context
­
from which they emerged. One focal point of my analysis is therefore the
manner in which many of Lewis’s compositions from the 1950s and early
1960s responded to the economic pressures detailed in chapter 1 by lead-
ing new audiences into an appreciation of jazz. Indeed, throughout this
historic period Lewis can be seen to have reinvented hegemonic conven-
tions through the clever deployment of vernacular devices—a composi-
­
tional approach ripe for double-voiced analysis. This musical play often
­
began with the evocation of Western art music, usually through a combi-
nation of the use of straight rhythmic time, melodies devoid of blues so-
norities, fanfares, composed counterpoint, and composition titles refer-
ring to European forms (or simply to European locales). These
expectations were then teased in a myriad of ways, including the intro-
duction of blues sonorities into composed counterpoint, the use of im-
provised counterpoint, the use of improvisation to meet relevant West-
ern art music criteria in the exposition and episode sections of “fugues,”
and the reinterpretation of formal strictures implied by multimovement
116 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

formats on the basis of folk conventions. This mimicry of Western art

music through the innovative implementation of what many considered
to be vernacular devices effectively packaged “new” material in the shell
of the familiar as Lewis strove to locate and recruit audience members
from the Western art music world.
Yet at the same time, many of Lewis’s compositional innovations ap-
pear to have arisen out of a modernist mind-set that transcended the

­
paradigm of subversion. Or more to the point, Lewis’s modernist sensi-
bilities seemed to simultaneously advance notions of African American
musical identity not solely focused on the preservation of the folk. So
while on one hand we can view Lewis’s compositions as leading Western
art music patrons into an appreciation of jazz, on the other we can view
them as operating within a more standardized model of musical modern-
ism. In other words, Lewis’s syncretic compositions can also be under-
stood as expressing a unique vision of a desired future musical landscape,
and the fact that such a vision overlapped in many ways with the syncretic
ideas of African American composers such as R. Nathaniel Dett and Wil-
liam Grant Still allows us to continue to interpret them within notions of
African-American musical tradition.
­
Considering both versions of compositional intent together is not, as
it might first seem, an impossible task. In his exploration of the same mu-
sical period, Guthrie Ramsey introduces the term Afro-modernism as a
­
way of focusing on two key questions: “What was modernity to African
Americans at the historical moment under consideration? How were
their attitudes to it worked out artistically and critically?” (2003, 97). In
relation to Lewis, there are no easy answers to these questions. Given
Lewis’s background as a member of the African American middle class
steeped in classical music training as well as a pianist fascinated by and
active in the New York jazz scene, it seems likely that multiple concep-
tions of musical progress may have been at play in the compositional de-
sign of his works. Discussing these different conceptions simultaneously
allows us to unpack in an honest way possible pluralities of mind, and
only through this acknowledgement of paradox can we begin to chip
away at the relationship between Lewis’s works and the complex histori-
cal moment from which they emerged.
Furthermore, my discussion of Western art music conventions in Lew-
 Composition in Context • 117

is’s oeuvre also focuses on how Lewis engages with and explores Western art
conventions in a celebratory manner. Of particular interest in this regard is
Lewis’s exploration of commedia dell’arte characters—extending from his

­
1956 work Fontessa to his 1960 album The Comedy—and his pursuit of in-

­
creasingly diverse instrumental ensembles during the latter part of the
1950s. These musical pursuits cannot be separated out in every case from
what I have deemed to be a recruitment agenda or a development of New
Negro compositional ideology, but at the same time they should not be
read entirely within these contexts. As I explain in the second half of this
chapter, Lewis’s musical training and relationship with European modern-
ists exhibited influence on his compositional process in a manner not al-
ways easily tied to subversive or assimilationist uplift strategy. Indeed, given
the different cultural landscape of jazz scenes in postwar France and Ger-
many, it is possible to read many of Lewis’s works performed in these con-
texts as responding to existing notions of modern jazz espoused by Euro-
pean critics and musicians rather than engaging with American racial
politics. I do not mean to suggest that these narratives are not tightly wo-
ven together. I simply aim to point out that reading this material as celebra-
tory rather than subversive helps in understanding the global dimension of
Lewis’s compositional voice.
An investigation into such phenomena is of course not without its limi-
tations, and it should be expressed at the outset that the analyses in this
book are concerned with works produced by Lewis in connection with the
MJQ, as well as other ensembles, during the first decade of his ensemble
leadership only (1952–62). The limitation of my analysis to this decade
­
arises as a condition of what DeVeaux might refer to as the moment’s his-
torical particularities. The economic and social pressures that shaped vari-
ous conceptions of jazz during the 1950s and that I survey in the first three
chapters of this book were undoubtedly unique. And while several shifts in
the aesthetics of jazz music did occur within the first ten years of Lewis’s
ensemble leadership, a major conceptual change in the jazz world as a whole
would not be seen until the emergence of the Black Arts movement of the
early 1960s. It is this latter fact that makes it impossible to incorporate
Lewis’s later 1960s works into the same conceptual paradigm used to exam-
ine his 1950s oeuvre.
As Paul Lopes (2002) explains, a broad embrace of “Black Nationalism”
118 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

intrinsically linked to the energy of the civil rights movement during the
early 1960s added a further layer of tension surrounding what might consti-
tute “real” black music. In musical terms, many in the jazz art world lived
out this political ideology by overtly embracing African American folk
tropes, a move that effectively positioned “Cool” and “Third Stream” art-
ists firmly against the wall (Lopes 2002, 251). In part, this “blues-heavy”

­
approach can be linked to what Omi and Winant have described as the
“rearticulation of black collective subjectivity,” an ideological shift in the
civil rights movement that encouraged the idea of African American col-
lective identity, thus contrasting with the dominant civil rights paradigm of
the 1950s in which “race-thinking” was viewed as working against equality
­
(1994, 96–100). While one decade of output may seem a somewhat arbi-
­
trary limitation to place on the study of such an important phenomenon,
the increasing militancy of the Black Power movement in the years imme-
diately preceding the passage of the Civil Rights Act by the U.S. Congress
in 1964 (Haines 1984, 38) and its residual impact on the jazz art world
(Hersch 1996, 117) make it difficult to discuss the meaning(s) of Lewis’s
syncretic works produced throughout the 1960s without including a
lengthy exploration of the radically new social and political landscape.
Such investigation would, however, form a natural extension of the argu-
ments put forth in this book.

Ambiguity and Difference in Lewis’s Early Works, 1952–56

­
As discussed in chapter 1, Lewis and the MJQ made their first commercial
recording in 1952 for the record label Prestige. The session tracks included
two jazz standards, “All the Things You Are” (1939) by Jerome Kern and
“Rose of the Rio Grande” (1922) by Harry Warren, as well as two of Lewis’s
own compositions, “La Ronde” (1952) and “Vendome” (1952). The subse-
quent marketing of these tracks involved two initial 78-rpm releases. The
­
first was issued with “All the Things You Are” on the A-side and “La Ronde”
­
on the B-side and the second with “Vendome” on the A-side and “Rose of
­
­
the Rio Grande” on the B-side. All four tracks cut on the December 22,
­
1952, recording date were then rereleased on Prestige LP 7059 under the
title Modern Jazz Quartet with Milt Jackson in 1953.
 Composition in Context • 119

Lewis’s syncretic approach in relation to the jazz standards recorded in

December 1952 is most obvious in his treatment of the “heads,” defined
here as the amalgamated unit of the work’s main themes and underlying
harmonic form. The convention of beginning a work by playing through
the head and then transitioning to an open improvisatory section before
returning to a statement of the main theme defined much of the bebop-era

­
approach to performance (DeVeaux 1997, 203). Lewis’s use of an asymmet-
rical seven-bar introduction to “All the Things You Are,” which paired cym-
­
bal rolls and bass ostinato with a fragmented melody, as well as the com-
posed contrapuntal line played by the bass and piano underneath the
vibraphone’s initial thematic statement on “Rose of the Rio Grande,” set
these works apart from the bebop norm from the outset—although not so

­
far apart as to make their relationship unrecognizable.2
Lewis’s original compositions, however, would go further. The 1952 re-
cording of “Vendome” in particular is notable in this regard, as it employs
fugal gestures, a facet of the work Lewis would highlight in notes provided
to Hentoff in 1954 in advance of Hentoff ’s Counterpoint columns dis-
cussed in chapter 2 (Hentoff 1954b). Thomas Owens’s analysis of the work
describes its adherence to fugal conventions in terms of its bona-fide fugal
­
exposition “based on a neo-Baroque subject . . . answered in the dominant”
­
(1976, 26). This exposition is followed by what both Hentoff and Owens
refer to as improvised “episodes,” and the alternation of composed thematic
statements based on the exposition with these subsequent episodes form
the structure of the work. This structure, in turn, directly reflects common
Western art music expectations regarding what fugal process entails.3
Yet “Vendome” embraces adherence to Western fugal processes in a sub-
tler way as well through its employment of modulatory passages within
episodes. Paul Walker has pointed to modulation within episodes as a con-
ventional aspect of Western art music fugal writing (Walker 2010, ¶1), and
table C in appendix A chart out these harmonic shifts within the episodes
of the work. Each exposition is prepared by a modulatory passage embed-
ded within an improvisatory episode and all expositions following the ini-
tial opening demonstrate a change in tonality from the immediately pre-
ceding exposition. Taken together with the use of fugal subjects and
answers in Lewis’s expositions, extensive preplanning seems to permeate
“Vendome.”
120 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

Still, without an extant score, it is frustratingly difficult to determine

the extent of written or preplanned melodic parts composed for individual
members of the quartet—and this ambiguity seems largely the point of the

­
work. Obviously the thematic content of the piece was composed, and
other moments of preplanning might be discerned in relation to unison
melodies, repeated contrapuntal lines, and melodic interplay in transitional
or bridging passages. Yet the preplanning of many other melodic moments
remains unclear. Consider, for example, the independent contrapuntal line
Lewis plays behind Jackson’s improvised solo in the third episode of “Ven-
dome.” Its straight-time feel and the fact that it facilitates a modulation
­
from E minor to G major draws it out of the ensemble texture, reminding
the listener of the contrapuntal effects that determine the character of the
expositions. At the same time, it grows naturally out of Lewis’s chordal
comping during the first part of Jackson’s solo, leading the listener to hear
it as part of an improvisatory accompaniment. When one considers the
expansion goals I discuss in chapter 1, this tension might be seen as driving
a double-voiced design. By performing improvised parts in a manner that
­
sounds composed or by doing the opposite, performing composed parts in
a manner that sounds improvised, Lewis is able to infuse his work with
perpetual questions about where improvisation and preplanning/composi-
tion begin and end. These questions lead members of both jazz and West-
ern art music audiences into a discussion about unfamiliar conventions,
and in this way, the work achieves a didactic goal.4
Such didactic ambiguity can in turn be discerned across much of Lewis’s
output from the early 1950s. For instance, on June 25, 1953, six months after
their first recording session, the MJQ recorded another four tracks for
Prestige. Again the session included two jazz standards, “Autumn in New
York” (1934) by Vernon Duke and “But Not for Me” (1930) by George Ger-
shwin, as well as two of Lewis’s own compositions, “Delaunay’s Dilemma”
(1953) and “The Queen’s Fancy” (1953). As with the group’s approach in
1952, the tracks were released as double-sided 78-rpm singles before being
­
­
incorporated into the multitrack LP Modern Jazz Quartet with Milt Jack-
son.5 Composed and improvised counterpoint feature prominently on
these sides, and the ability of these features to conjure Western art music
associations is evident in the album’s critical reception. As Hentoff wrote
for Down Beat,
 Composition in Context • 121

Lewis’ writing is of a charm, meaningful direction, and spare unpre-

tentiousness. There is also a quiet humor as in Vendome and The
Queen’s Fancy which bring to mind an 18th century cat, time-

­
machined to now, and wailing on a sunny morning in May. (Hentoff
1953b, 16)

The pairing of “The Queen’s Fancy” and “But Not for Me” on one of the
initial double-sided singles from this date echoes the blurring of composed
­
and improvised contrapuntal lines discussed in relation to “Vendome”
above. Located on the A-side of the record, “The Queen’s Fancy” intro-
­
duces a Western art music expectation from the start by beginning with a
straight-time fanfare (example 4.1) before transitioning to a contrapuntal
­
passage in which thematic statements are offset against each other (exam-
ple 4.2).

Example 4.1. “The Queen’s Fancy” (1953). Prestige LP 7057. Fanfare, mm.
1–5. Transcription.
­
Straight-time and preplanned contrapuntal passages are then compart-
­
mentalized, bracketing improvisatory passages and signaling a division be-
tween what might be seen as the work’s Western and non-Western sides
­
(see appendix A, table D). Yet the B-side of the recording, Lewis’s arrange-
­
ment of “But Not for Me,” complicates the symbolic role of juxtaposed
melodies in “The Queen’s Fancy” by utilizing contrapuntal lines colored by
blues sonorities as backings to improvised passages (example 4.3). The most
obvious example of this can be seen in the third measure of Milt Jackson’s
solo, transcribed in example 4.3, where the piano employs both pendular
thirds and a flat seventh over the E♭ harmony.
Example 4.2. “The Queen’s Fancy” (1953). Prestige LP 7057. Offset the-
matic statements, mm. 14–19. Transcription.
­
Example 4.3. “But Not for Me” (1930) [1953]. Prestige LP 7057. Impro-
vised counterpoint, mm. 91–97. Transcription.
­
 Composition in Context • 123

In connection with the scored counterpoint of “The Queen’s Fancy,” the

likely improvisatory genesis of Lewis’s contrapuntal lines and their “bluesy”
content in “But Not for Me” reveal much about the function of counter-
point in Lewis’s oeuvre. For instance, it is easy to hear both sides of the re-
lease as “contrapuntal” and even as “contrapuntal” in a fairly similar way—as

­
utilizing clear melodic lines structured into phrases and then juxtaposed
against each other. From this perspective, the sonic effects of composed
and improvised counterpoint blur across the sides of the 78-rpm single. Yet

­
at the same time these effects are made distinct through the unique applica-
tion of rhythmic effects (straight time vs. swing time) and their melodic
design (strictly diatonic vs. blues inflected). Such celebration of difference
allows for counterpoint to form a bridge between stylistic realms while not
obliterating all that has been deemed to be unique about these realms.
Therefore, the simultaneous blurring and reifying of boundaries in these
works enables listeners to hear in general terms both Western and non-

­
Western musical worlds even though the limits of where, exactly, one be-
gins and one ends remain unclear.6
Such plurality of musical difference undoubtedly underpinned the ac-
claim and professional momentum the group would experience following
the 1953 recording session. Indeed, the MJQ’s access to jazz venues rose
upon the release of these recordings, with 1953 and 1954 seeing a good deal
of performances by the group on both the East and West Coasts of the
United States. The MJQ’s first major booking at Birdland in New York dur-
ing October 1953 gave way to engagements in Boston, San Francisco, Los
Angeles, and Philadelphia (Giddins 1998, 384). Yet despite an obvious de-
sire by venue owners to book the group, jazz club audiences were slow to
respond positively to the MJQ’s music. Heath’s recollections of the group’s
1954 Birdland residency discussed in chapter 1, in which audience chatter
more than once forced the group to simply get up and walk off the stage,
indicates the difficulty Lewis and the MJQ faced in connecting with jazz
fans—at least within the context of jazz clubs. Yet Lewis remained unde-
­
terred and would continue to introduce syncretic works into the group’s
repertoire over the coming year.
Indeed, such an approach appears to have undergone considerable de-
velopment in advance of the MJQ’s next recording for Prestige, made on
December 23, 1954, and January 9, 1955. In particular, the manner in which
124 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

conventional jazz practices and references to Western art music are inte-
grated in the “La Ronde Suite” and “Django” (two works from the result-
ing LP, Modern Jazz Quartet Volume 2) demonstrate new sorts of experi-
mentation with musical form. Specifically, there seems to be an increased
interest in these works in how formal structures normally associated with
jazz might be caged within references to Western art music. The 1955 re-
cording of the “La Ronde Suite” accomplishes this goal by utilizing the
multimovement expectation induced by the term suite to present a series of
variations on the 1952 “La Ronde” form (see appendix A, table E). Each
movement in the “La Ronde Suite” is therefore roughly similar in struc-
tural design to the 1952 model, utilizing alternations in tempo and featured
soloists as a means of creating diversity (see appendix A, tables F.1–F.4).

­
Embedded within these movements are extended improvisatory passages
that occur over a twelve-bar blues. While the blues form itself is not modi-
­
fied to invoke Western art music alignment, its use across the movements,
grouped by the term suite, creates a dialogue with Western art music at the
macro level. In other words, there is undoubtedly a degree of semantic play
going on here. Despite its name, the “La Ronde Suite” can essentially be
understood in analytical terms as a series of twelve-bar-blues showcases,
­
­
evincing an overt attempt to use a formal convention from the jazz realm to
articulate a Western art music concept.
Lewis’s “Django” focuses on a different formal aspect of jazz practice—
­
the use of vamps—and sets this convention side by side with a chromati-
­
cally shifting chord progression emulating facets of European guitarist
Django Reinhardt’s style. Givan identifies the latter as consisting, in part,
of harmonic modulations “partially driven by the use of strict motivic
transposition” (2010, 146), and an examination of the opening bars of Lew-
is’s “Django” reveals a similar process at play, with a motive repeated four
times over the course of nine measures and the tonicization of both chords
iv and III by way of secondary dominants.
The chromaticism of this opening is then echoed in the chord changes
upon which Lewis and Jackson solo, and the improvisatory passages that
outline these modulations may be understood as an initial level of syncre-
tism in the work. Yet a stronger moment of dialogue between musical
genres can be found in an embedded four measure repeated vamp on the
chords G♭7 and D♭7 during which Heath performs the following bass line
(example 4.4).
 Composition in Context • 125

Example 4.4. “Django” (1954). Prestige LP 7057. Bass line over four-

­
measure vamp, mm. 45–48. Transcription.

­
The prominence of the flat seventh in the riff and what could be construed
as a IV–I chord choice given the modulatory nature of the work echoes
­
gospel and R&B organizational practices. Indeed, such “plagal” gestures
form a central part of Kernfeld’s (2002, 635) understanding of the connec-
tion between the two styles. Positioning this section against the bulk of the
“Django” aesthetic can therefore be seen as framing the sort of repetition
viewed in chapter 2 as an essential part of African American music within
the chromaticism of an individual style of jazz invented off the American
continent.
On the one hand, Lewis’s study of Reinhardt certainly constitutes hom-
age, as the use of strict motivic transposition presented underneath Rein-
hardt’s name undoubtedly aims to celebrate the guitarist’s unique musical
approach. Yet in connection with the semantic play of the “La Ronde
Suite,” the embedded use of the plagal vamp seems to indicate a simultane-
ous desire to create a work that adds up to more than the sum of its parts.
Indeed, in some ways the vamp has the effect of “Americanizing” the
“Django” aesthetic, or at least of bringing into relief the difference between
the style of Django Reinhardt and those essentialized elements of jazz dis-
cussed in chapter 2. While discerning which intent sat more prominently
in Lewis’s mind is indeed a difficult task, there is little doubt that the work
foreshadowed a clear pivot to more prominent engagement with European
cultural references on the group’s next album for Prestige, Concorde (1955).
The session tracks for Concorde were recorded on July 2, 1955, and again
included a mix of jazz standards and originals, including a blues with a
canon-like head (“Ralph’s New Blues” [1955]) written by Milt Jackson and
­
Lewis’s second fugal work, from which the album takes its name. Concorde
refers to the Place de la Concorde public square in Paris, a fact evident in
the locale’s sketched representation on the album cover. As a point of con-
trast, other jazz artists for Prestige tended to highlight individuality over
126 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

place in the titles and album cover content of their 1954 and 1955 releases.
Bob Weinstock’s action photography of Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Ben-
nie Green, and Bob Brookmeyer often captured the musicians with instru-
ments poised at their lips, positioned in front of microphones. These im-
ages then served as backdrops for album covers with self-referential titles

­
such as Miles Davis All Start Sextet (1954), Sonny Rollins and Thelonious
Monk (1954), Bennie Green Blows His Horn (1955), and The Dual Role of
Bob Brookmeyer (1955). The absence of the MJQ from the Concorde album
cover, the depiction of the Place de la Concorde, and the decision to go
with a non-self-referential title positioned the album against the bulk of
­
­
Prestige releases, setting the group apart from other jazz artists in a way that
echoed Lewis’s move toward “modern music” venues during the same year.7
The recording was also unique in that it marked a change in the group’s
personnel. Kenny Clarke, whose connection to Lewis extended back to
their time in Dizzy Gillespie’s big band, decided to leave the group in Feb-
ruary 1955 (Giddins 1998, 385). Clarke’s ability to improvise had been high-
lighted extensively in the works Lewis composed—most notably on “La
­
Ronde” and the “La Ronde Suite”—yet his replacement, Connie Kay, was
­
admittedly averse to the practice. As Kay explained to Whitney Balliett in
1971, “I don’t like to take drum solos at all. Drums are a flat instrument. . . .
I know how I feel when other drummers solo. It seems like you’ve heard
them all before” (qtd. in Balliett 1971, 167). In addition to this alternate
view on improvisation, Kay produced a very different sound on the instru-
ment. While Clarke’s performance practice had derived from the effusive
rhythmic accompaniment of the bebop era, Kay showed an interest in the
clarity of individual sounds, eventually emerging as “an adept colorist . . .
seated behind an array of drums, chimes, triangles, and cymbals” (Giddins
1998, 386).
In musical terms, the ambiguous contrapuntal effects established in
Lewis’s earlier works once again rise prominently to the fore on this album.
In addition to Lewis’s polyphonic “Concorde”—the double-voiced nature
­
­
of which I discuss in chapter 1—the standard “Softly as in a Morning Sun-
­
rise” (1928) by Romberg and Hammerstein is arranged with a four-bar
­
double-time introduction in which displaced entrances of an introductory
­
theme lead into independent contrapuntal lines before transitioning to the
AABA form of the work and improvised solos backed by improvised me-
lodic licks. The balance of independent polyphony in the opening of Jack-
 Composition in Context • 127

son’s “Ralph’s New Blues” and the polyphonic comping behind the blues
form that composes the body of the work in turn fits neatly into the
blurred-lines aesthetic approach I describe in relation to the group’s earlier
­
recordings.
Yet this particular collection of works also demonstrates a break with
precedent in terms of which audience Lewis would seek to engage through
the deployment of these effects. As I discussed earlier, despite critical praise
and successful jazz club bookings during 1954, Lewis’s musical initiatives
struggled to find a foothold with nightclub patrons. His foundation of the
Modern Jazz Society in 1955 indicated a promotional shift aimed at ad-
dressing this problem, its declared purview enabling Lewis to highlight his
music’s “modernism” rather than its jazz credentials. The selection of “Con-
corde,” “Softly as in a Morning Sunrise,” and “Ralph’s New Blues” as works
to be performed as part of the inaugural concert program in turn indicates
which works in the quartet book Lewis felt to be most emblematic of his
particular modernist brand.
Selecting Town Hall as a venue for the project was, furthermore, a par-
ticularly clever move in terms of facilitating audience recruitment from be-
yond the jazz realm. In specific terms, the venue’s historic role in bringing
together both African American and white patrons of classical music would
have opened the floodgates to potential recruits. As I describe in chapter 3,
Town Hall held a special significance for African Americans who chose to
steward and develop Western art music. The venue had been one of the few
large-scale rooms open to performers such as Roland Hayes, Jules Bledsoe,
­
and Marian Anderson in New York during the 1930s, and it had served as
an important platform for interracial orchestras such as Everett Lee’s Cos-
mopolitan Symphony Orchestra and Dean Dixon’s American Youth Or-
chestra during the 1940s. In the months preceding the Modern Jazz Society
concert, the venue had hosted the interracial New York Concert Choir
(Diton 1955, 5) and the African American classical pianist Una Hadley
(“Praise Goes to Town Hall Pianist” 1955, 8). Performing within this con-
text would therefore not only have allowed Lewis’s music to connect with a
variety of Western art music aficionados, it would have placed it conceptu-
ally on par with other strains of modern African American music celebrated
by middle-class African Americans, ranging from the arranged spirituals of
­
R. Nathaniel Dett to the symphonic works of William Grant Still.
This purposeful framing of the MJQ as a vehicle for “modern” music in
128 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

turn seems to have driven Atlantic Records to recruit the group in the same
year. Giddins (1998, 386), after all, credits producer Nesuhi Ertegun for ap-
proaching the group as part of his vision to encourage “modern sounds” on
the label. Their first recording for Atlantic, Fontessa (1956), again included
a mixture of originals and jazz standards, including the works “Woody’n
You” (1942) by Dizzy Gillespie, “Willow Weep for Me” (1932) by Ann
Ronnell, “Angel Eyes” (1946) by Matt Dennis and Earl Brent, and “Over
the Rainbow” (1939) by Harold Arlen and E. Y. Harburg. Curiously, Lew-
is’s interpretation of the standards on this album seemed to incorporate
fewer Western art music conventions than his previous arrangements while
highlighting the use of blues sonorities early on, a development facilitated
in part by the works’ heads. Indeed, the straight-ahead arrangements of

­
these melodies signaled a departure from many of Lewis’s early arrange-
ments of jazz standards, in which Western art music engagement was em-
bedded into opening passages through the deployment of composed con-
trapuntal lines underneath themes and the use of straight rhythmic time
and ostinatos.
Yet Lewis’s original compositions continued to explore the contra-
puntal ambiguity that was quickly becoming a signature aspect of his
compositional style. Like “Concorde” and “Vendome,” Lewis’s “Ver-
sailles” (1956) is based on the thematic interplay of fugal processes—
­
although in this case, appears to utilize at least some improvisation in its
expositions. As Thomas Owens related in 1976, “John Lewis told me re-
cently that the quartet worked from the written subject only; nothing
else about this piece—neither its overall structure, key areas, chord pro-
­
gressions, nor accompanying ostinatos—was ever written down” (1976,
­
30). Such absence of written music, however, must not be confused with
a lack of planning. For as Heath would later reflect, the contract with
Atlantic brought with it a new attitude regarding preparation: “It wasn’t
like other record dates where you go in and the guy scratches out some
chords and hands it to you at the date, like a lot of the Miles recordings.
Everything was not only rehearsed, it was refined before we got to the
studio” (qtd. in Giddins 1998, 387; emphasis in original). The fact that
reconciling these two accounts (i.e., the amount of preplanned material
versus the amount of improvisation in the exposition) is so challenging
from the position of a blind listening makes “Versailles” one of the most
successful examples of contrapuntal ambiguity in Lewis’s oeuvre.8
 Composition in Context • 129

Furthermore, contrapuntal ambiguity extends into the improvised epi-

sodes of the work, infusing the whole of the composition with questions
about what is improvised and what is preplanned. Take, for example, the use
of subject motifs played by Jackson during Lewis’s solo. Like both “Vendome”
and “Concorde,” the work aligns the sound of independent counterpoint
with Western art music practices through a fugal exposition (example 4.5)
before employing it as an accompaniment feature of improvised episodes (ex-
ample 4.6). Example 4.5 demonstrates how Lewis is able to infuse the fugal
subject and answer with blues sonorities (pendular thirds in the first full
measure of the C-major subject and F-major answer) as well as the chromatic
­
­
inflection of the flat ninth, a prominent part of the jazz lexicon during the
bebop era (second full measure of the C-major subject and F-major answer).
­
­
Jackson’s riff-like backings during Lewis’s solo draw on the blues-derived flat
­
­
fifth before sounding repeated subject motifs, an approach that both main-
tains and expands the presence of blues tropes established in the exposition.
Yet because the nature of preplanning in the exposition is already unclear, the
listener is left hearing such moments of repetition without a clear sense of
which musical world they emerge from. In other words, if the quotation of
subject motifs in “episodes” or “choruses” is just as normal in Western fugal
process as it is in jazz practice (as Walker [2010], in his definition of fugal
process, assures us it is), then it becomes exceedingly difficult to tell which
tradition is being realized during Jackson’s employment of subject quotations
during Lewis’s solo.
The title work, “Fontessa” (1956), in turn pursues a similar strategy, evi-
dent in how extemporizations of various themes morph into improvised
solos and vice versa (see appendix A, table G). While such a practice is not
at all outside the realm of standardized jazz practice, the straight-time set-
­
ting of the initial “Fontessa” theme successfully alludes to Western art mu-
sic. Lewis would in turn heighten this connection by explaining in the liner
notes how the work’s various themes were meant to conjure various figures
from the “Renaissance Commedia dell’Arte” theatrical tradition. In expla-
nation of the work’s design, he writes,

FONTESSA is a little suite inspired by the Renaissance Commedia

dell’Arte. I had particularly in mind their plays which consisted of a
very sketchy plot and in which the details, the lines, etc. were impro-
vised.
130 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

Example 4.5. “Versailles” (1956). Atlantic LP 1231. Exposition, mm. 1–8.

­
Transcription.

This suite consists first of a short Prelude to raise the curtain and
provide the theme. The first piece after the Prelude has the character
of older jazz and improvised parts are by the vibraphone. This piece
could perhaps be the character of Harlequin. The second piece has
the character of less older jazz and the improvised parts are played by
the piano. The character here could perhaps be Pierrot.
The third piece is of a still later jazz character and develops the
main motif. The improvised parts are by the drums. This character
could perhaps be Pantaloon. The opening Prelude closes the suite.
Fontessa is the three-note main motif of the suite and is perhaps
­
a substitute for the character of Colombine. ( J. Lewis 1956, 1)

These stock characters—the miserly Pantaloon (Pantalone), the astute Co-

­
lombine, the mischievous Harlequin, and the naïve Pierrot—are all de-
­
picted on the cover of the Fontessa album. Again, determining exactly what
is composed and what is improvised in relation to iterations of the themes
based on these characters remains beyond the aural realm, and this gray
 Composition in Context • 131

Example 4.6. “Versailles” (1956). Atlantic LP 1231. Thematic motif behind

piano solo, mm. 25–40. Transcription.
­
area seems to have been pursued largely on purpose. By highlighting to an
audience the idea that art from Western culture may also contain improvi-
satory components, Lewis effectively deepens in “Fontessa” the ambiguity
between what might be seen as being linked to jazz practices in the work
and what might have been seen as its “Western” components. In other
words, the aural question shifts from discerning between what is impro-
vised and what is composed to the impossible task of figuring out which
aspects of improvisation draw inspiration from jazz and which aspects
draw inspiration from the commedia dell’arte tradition.
The illumination of this and similar compositional strategies in the
early works of Lewis’s oeuvre helps flesh out in specific terms the musical
132 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

mechanics driving Lewis’s reception in both the jazz and the African Amer-
ican press. Indeed, after just this brief survey, it becomes abundantly clear
why members of both camps utilized European allusions in their discus-
sions of Lewis’s music. The works themselves wear their engagement with
European culture on their sleeves. Not only do they utilize French names,
deploy Parisian imagery, and shout out to the commedia dell’arte as part of
their paratextual frames, they span the allusory gamut of European musical
styles, moving from fugues to suites to an homage to Django Reinhardt.
Yet underneath these surface elements lies a more profound compositional
agenda in which composed and improvised elements are woven together in
such a way as to make their culture of origin unclear.
In the arena of the Modern Jazz Society concert, the sonic result of such
an approach may have been interpreted in a variety of ways. To those who
grew up as part of the New Negro movement, it may have signaled the sub-
versive preservation of the folk, or an act of vernacular music uplift, as did
the arranged spirituals of the previous decades. Younger African American
patrons may have simply heard it as the natural sonic representation of
Lewis’s experience as an African American middle-class musician fusing
­
the plurality of his musical experiences into a coherent style. And still an-
other cohort may have heard it as an attempt to modernize the genre of
classical music by infusing jazz-based improvisational practices and blues
­
sonorities into Western forms. The ambiguity of Lewis’s music—
­
particularly that of its contrapuntal facets—lies at the heart of why it was
­
able to speak in so many different ways, and while this may have made it
difficult for music critics to pin it down in terms of intent, such flexibility
would ultimately contribute to the expansion of Lewis’s musical reach both
at home and abroad.

An Expansion of Confidence: The MJQ’s 1956 European Tour

Indeed, Lewis’s early recordings with the MJQ made considerable waves
in European jazz circles even before the group’s first European tour took
place in the fall of 1956. Lewis’s “Vendome” in particular intrigued the
German jazz critic Joachim Ernst Berendt, who had spent the majority
of the postwar years trying to rehabilitate the image of jazz in German
 Composition in Context • 133

society. As I mention in the introduction to this book, throughout the

early 1950s Berendt embraced a strategy of articulating jazz’s worth by
comparing its features to “serious” music. His 1955 assessment of “Ven-
dome” in the pages of the music journal Melos is unambiguously made in
these terms through a careful piecing together of how the work’s exposi-
tions and episodes unfold. Yet Berendt seemed simultaneously aware in
this assessment of the composition’s didactic power—its ability to fool

­
the listener into hearing improvisation as composition—writing, “Much

­
of what seems obviously ‘European’ in the music of the Modern Jazz
Quartet, was subconsciously improvised by the musicians, who—except

­
for John Lewis himself—are dedicated to the jazz tradition alone and
­
who do not for a single moment suspect that anything they play could
be ‘European’” (1955, 349).9 Such ambivalence gave the MJQ a unique
status in Berendt’s mind in terms of the cultural work they could be de-
ployed to perform within the German jazz scene, and over the next sev-
eral years he would take on an active role in promoting the group
through his position as jazz editor of the southwestern German radio
station Südwestfunk (SWF).
Within the French context, it was Lewis’s work “Milano” (recorded in
1954 for the Concorde album) that would strike a chord in advance of the
group’s arrival. André Hodeir, the famous French jazz critic and composer,
would arrange and record the work with his ensemble Le Jazz Groupe de
Paris in the summer of 1956. Hodeir’s relationship with members of the
MJQ extended back to the liberation of Paris and his befriending of the
deployed Kenny Clarke during the waning months of World War II (Hag-
gerty & Clarke 1985, 203). For nearly a decade after the war, Hodeir’s inter-
est in modern jazz (and bebop in particular) would be pursued alongside a
fascination with serialism and avant-garde music, resulting in projects as
­
diverse as his bebop collaboration with Clarke titled “Laurenzology”
(1948) and his composition “Jazz et Jazz” (1952) for piano and magnetic
tape, written in connection with the Groupe de Recherche de Musique
Concrète (Pautrot 2006, 4–5). His establishment of Le Jazz Groupe de
­
Paris in 1954 served to further develop his compositional palette through
its purposeful emulation of the Miles Davis Nonet’s aesthetic (Pautrot
2006, 6). Hodeir’s arrangement of “Milano,” released on the group’s second
album, is emblematic of this particular period, effectively draping the tim-
134 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

bral effects conjured by Davis’s ensemble over the bones of Lewis’s poly-
phonic chart.
In contrast to Berendt’s idea that the value of the MJQ’s music lay (at
least for Berendt’s political reasons) in the echo of the Baroque, Hodeir
seemed more impressed with the way in which the music played by the
group signaled a progressive move into new musical territory. Although he
avoided mention of the MJQ in the original publication of his Hommes et
problèmes du jazz (1954), his revised edition, translated into English and
published two years later in the United States under the title Jazz: Its Evo-
lution and Essence contains a lengthy discussion of the significance of the
MJQ’s music. Hodeir begins this passage with a critique of Lewis’s “allu-
sions to classical and pre-classical European forms,” calling out “Vendome”
­
in particular as being “close to . . . pastiche,” but then changes course, writ-
ing the passage I cite in the introduction to this book:

Lewis’ most remarkable conceptions bring into play the necessary

relationship between the infrastructure and the superstructure, as
well as a renewal of the spirit of collective creation that this idea im-
plies. . . . He deserves unreserved praise for having faced up to the
problem of the relationship between theme, arrangement, and solo,
which is the most critical and the most formidable problem the
modern jazz-man has to solve. In fact, it may be the problem on
­
which the whole future of jazz depends. (1956a, 278)

In December 1956 Hodeir (1956b) would contribute a French version of

this passage to the magazine Jazz Hot, building a case in France for Lew-
is’s importance in the development of jazz as well as for the style of jazz
Hodeir himself seemed interested in writing. His relationship with Lewis
would in turn develop over the coming years through a series of compo-
sitional collaborations and performances aimed at transforming these
ideas into sonic facts.
In October 1956 the MJQ would arrive in Europe for the first time and
record a series of tracks for South German Radio (SDR) in Stuttgart. Their
trip to the Continent was made possible by Norman Granz’s decision to
include the group as part of the Birdland All-Stars (BAS) tour (with head-
­
liners Miles Davis, Bud Powell, and Lester Young) scheduled to kick off the
 Composition in Context • 135

following month at the Salle Pleyel concert hall in Paris. Their first concert
of the tour on November 2, 1956, was followed by twenty-three shows

­
within a one-month period, taking them across France and Germany (as
­
well as Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark, and It-
aly). Following the tour, the MJQ would take on their own two-week resi-

­
dency at the club Saint-Germaine in Paris (Lalo 1991, 69).
­
The recent release of five tracks recorded for SDR on October 26, 1956,
reveals a great deal about Lewis’s compatibility with German tastes in jazz
during this period. They include two standards (“Willow Weep for Me”
and “I’ll Remember April”), Jackson’s “Ralph’s New Blues,” a new arrange-
ment of the traditional “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” and Lewis’s origi-
nal large ensemble work “Midsömmer” (1955) (which had premiered at the
Modern Jazz Society concert in 1955). Given Lewis’s compositional trajec-
tory in the U.S. context, the musical approach employed across these re-
cording is unsurprising. The polyphonic head of “Ralph’s New Blues” and
the straight-time overlapping statements of the theme on “God Rest Ye
­
Merry Gentlemen” position these works in a close conceptual relationship
with “Vendome,” maintaining and promoting what had become a signature
element of Lewis’s compositional style. Indeed, if just these two recordings
are considered, it is difficult to discern any change in Lewis’s approach and
one might get the sense that any compatibility with Berendt’s vision of
what jazz art music might sound like was little more than coincidence.
Yet there is some evidence on these recordings that indicates a retooling
of works toward Berendt’s “serious music” ideal did take place. Consider,
for instance, the striking difference between the MJQ’s version of “Willow
Weep for Me” made on January 22, 1956, for Atlantic and the version made
on October 26, 1956, for SDR. As I stated earlier, the version of “Willow
Weep for Me” recorded for the Fontessa album contains minimal allusion
to Western art music. Blues sonorities are featured prominently from the
start in Milt Jackson’s interpretation of the head, and the rather straight-
­
ahead approach to the rest of the tune sets it apart from Lewis’s “aug-
mented” standards like the 1952 version of “All the Things You Are” or the
1955 version of “Softly as in a Morning Sunrise.” Lewis’s backing of Jackson’s
interpretation of the head on the Atlantic recording is similarly straight
ahead, repeating a falling major second figure (scale degrees 6-5), which is
­
occasionally added to melodically in order to create an echo of the theme.
136 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

For the recording made for SDR, Lewis makes the small but crucial change
of altering this backing figure to a falling minor second (scale degrees flat
6-5) before repeating it in various permutations against Jackson’s version of
­
the head. Lewis’s insistence on this interval, the volume at which it is
played, and the clashes that occur when Jackson plays scale degree 6 against
Lewis’s flat 6 all combine in a showcase of dissonance marking a clear de-
parture from the aesthetic concept of Lewis’s earlier arrangement.
Such showcasing of dissonance is pursued even further in Lewis’s work
“Midsömmer,” recorded on the same date. Norman Granz commissioned
“Midsömmer” in connection with “Sun Dance” (1955) for an envisioned
LP of Lewis’s extended compositions in advance of the 1955 Modern Jazz
Society concert. It was originally scored for drums, bass, trombone, French
horn, clarinet, tenor saxophone, bassoon, and harp (Hentoff 1955a, 8). The
version recorded for SDR uses the Harald Banter Ensemble on the same
chart while adding in Lewis and Jackson, who play short sections of impro-
vised content in-between passages of impressionistic chordal passages
­
voiced across the ensemble.10 The frequent use of these nonfunctional col-
oristic chords makes clear allusion to French composers like Debussy and
Ravel and points to an expansion of thinking around how dialogue be-
tween dissonance and consonance might be infused into Lewis’s composi-
tions. In this way, Lewis’s rearrangement of “Willow Weep for Me” and his
“Midsömmer” explore similar conceptual ground, using nonfunctional
harmonic effects as a means of creating sonic tension and release.
Yet the significance of these recordings is in some ways less about the
musical processes they document and more about what their existence
tells us about German interest in these musical processes. In the U.S. con-
text, Lewis’s recordings had for the most part relied on a balance of musi-
cal components readily identifiable as jazz and compositional effects
drawing on or conjuring Western art music. Even his move to Atlantic in
1956—a move supposedly aimed at ushering in a new era of modern
­
sound on the label—continued this trajectory, pairing his extended work
­
“Fontessa” and his fugal work “Versailles” with straight-ahead takes on
­
jazz standards. The absence of such straight-ahead playing on the SDR
­
recordings (only “I’ll Remember April” comes close) indicates a different
sort of valuation surrounding Lewis’s music. In other words, out of the
range of works in the quartet’s book in 1956, only those clearly nodding
 Composition in Context • 137

toward Western art music were allocated tape in the group’s first record-
ing session on German soil.
Following the Birdland All-Stars tour, Lewis would go into the recording

­
studio again, this time in Paris, to record the album Afternoon in Paris (1956) for
the French label Versailles. The recording reunited original MJQ drummer
Kenny Clarke with Lewis and bassist Percy Heath while adding into the mix
French guitarist Sacha Distel and French tenor saxophonist Barney Wilen.
While for the most part the tracks recorded were arranged in a way that al-
lowed for as much blowing from Distal and Wilen as possible, elements of
genre juxtaposition reminiscent of Lewis’s early works can still be heard. Lewis’s
arrangements of the jazz standards “Willow Weep for Me” and “All the Things
You Are,” for instance, employ straight-time figures in their introductions. In
­
turn, the theme of the Swedish folk song “Dear Old Stockholm” is broken up
into an exchange between unaccompanied guitar, saxophone, and piano.
While Distil and Wilen interpret their thematic figures in swung time, Lewis
plays his section of the theme straight. Such juxtaposition allows for the simul-
taneous articulation of Western and non-Western rhythmic practices, indicat-
­
ing a degree of aesthetic similarity to the syncretic compositional practices
Lewis deployed in his earlier recordings made in the United States.
Again, the musical processes documented on this album are not re-
markably different from anything Lewis had done before. Yet the way such
processes were received by French audiences does call for some comment.
To be sure, Lewis’s musical approach was not without its controversies in
French jazz circles. Jazz Magazine’s coverage of the Birdland All-Stars tour
­
included an article written in December 1956 that used the headline “We
Pose the Question to 10 Jazzmen That Is on Everybody’s Lips . . . Is the
M.J.Q. Jazz?”11 Such a controversial frame seemed at first to parallel the
sentiments of the American jazz critics I survey in chapter 2. The article’s
follow-up questions were, however, far less contentious, indicating an ap-
­
parent desire to protect the integrity of the group’s artistic achievements
regardless of whether the “10 jazzmen” interviewed labeled the MJQ a jazz
group or not, such as: “Is it an interesting formula and valid in itself, but
one which will have no impact on the evolution of jazz, like for example
Django Reinhardt’s string quintet?” (“Sous le signe du ‘Birdland’” 1956,
21).12 The logic of this follow-up question rested on the notion that the
­
group’s jazz credentials might to some extent be irrelevant to assessments of
138 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

the group’s value within the broader musical landscape. Such logic stood at
odds with accusations leveled at Lewis for not being “funky enough,” utiliz-
ing “too limited a range of expression,” and relying “too much on fugal
structures” (Hentoff 1957b, 15) in Down Beat three months later and led to
some fascinating responses.
Most participants in the feature article—including former MJQ drum-

­
mer Kenny Clarke—expressed unease with using the label jazz to describe
­
the music of the MJQ.13 Yet the majority of participants expressed general
enthusiasm about the potential Lewis’s approach might hold for the musi-
cal world in general—regardless of how it might eventually be labeled. Re-
­
cent collaborator Sacha Distel referred to the “wonderful music” played by
the group as a new musical “genre,” and French pianist Henri Renaud
claimed that Lewis was “making his own way” as “the only musician who
[had] managed to integrate the contrapuntal language of classical music
into jazz.” Pianist Martial Solal, in turn, while voicing skepticism that
younger jazz audiences would embrace the music of the MJQ, referred to
the group as “a remarkable musical achievement.” Trombonist Benny Vas-
seur would come out in even stronger support, describing their playing as
“the music of the future” (“Sous le signe du ‘Birdland’” 1956, 20–21). Cer-
­
tainly some members of the American jazz press would develop similar
views over time, particularly in the wake of the group’s follow-up European
­
tour in the winter of 1957–58. The point here is simply to indicate that on
­
the back of the frustrating Birdland residency of 1954—the residency that
­
led to the formation of the Modern Jazz Society in 1955 and the Jazz and
Classical Music Society in 1956—such a positive reception in Europe must
­
have been a welcome change for the group.
If nothing else, the experience appears to have solidified for Lewis the
idea that he was moving in the right direction. Knauer (1990, 48–49), for
­
instance, writes of the impact Lewis’s European reception had on the sorts
of venues Lewis would seek out in the United States following his time on
the Continent. Building on the venue expansion project Lewis had begun
in 1955, the MJQ would recommit to seeking out the “atmosphere[s] [of ]
concentrated listening” (Knauer 1990, 49) they had experienced in Europe
during the latter part of the decade by pursuing performances in art galler-
ies (Wilson 1958c, 18), concert halls (Wilson 1959, 33), and contemporary
arts festivals (“Arts and the MJQ” 1959, 10). Lewis would, in addition, pur-
 Composition in Context • 139

sue larger and larger musical projects during this period, in terms of both
instrumentation and formal conception. While it is difficult to discern in
these works any particular compositional devices Lewis may have “picked
up” in Europe, their mere existence makes a different and, in my view, more
intriguing point. It demonstrates increased confidence in the modernist
project Lewis began when he formed the MJQ (regardless of whether one
views Lewis’s modernist bent as double-voiced or not)—a confidence de-

­
­
rived from gaining acceptance in regions of the world where ideologies
about the sort of music African American “jazzmen” might explore dif-
fered markedly from those entrenched in the United States.
Conceiving the “European” impact on Lewis in this way shifts the focus
in discussions of Lewis’s connection to the Continent. It allows us to break
free from the tradition of parsing what Western art music conventions
might be discerned in Lewis’s works and instead turns our attention to how
modern European culture may have affected Lewis’s determination to pur-
sue his compositional vision. The widespread endorsements of Lewis’s mu-
sic as something “valid in itself ” in the French context, for instance, seem
to have had the effect (at least temporarily) of lifting Lewis out of para-
digms of comparison bound to classical music. In turn, the style of jazz art
music endorsed by German jazz radio (evident in the recording session for
SDR) would have reified for Lewis the idea that the jazz genre was itself
malleable and that there was indeed an audience out there for the syncretic
products Lewis was producing. These experiences pushed to the side ques-
tions of whether or not Lewis was a composer of “real” black music. In Eu-
rope at least, Lewis was a composer of “real” music, period, and his unique
vision was welcomed.

Teaching Modernism at the Lenox School of Jazz

A parallel set of experiences seems to rest alongside Lewis’s 1956 tour of the
Continent in terms of building his confidence in his particular composi-
tional approach: Lewis’s involvement with the Lenox School of Jazz be-
tween 1957 and 1960. The Lenox School emerged out of the lecture series at
Music Inn initiated by Marshall Stearns that I discuss in chapter 1. Lewis
and the MJQ had participated in this series in the summer of 1956 and en-
140 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

dorsed the overwhelming consensus of the attendees that the event be ex-
panded into a summer school the following year (Wilson 1956, X9). Lewis
was appointed director, and in August 1957 the Lenox School of Jazz
launched its first season (“Jazz School’s First Session” 1957, 13).
The ideology of the Lenox School curriculum revolved around two
key ideas. The first was that formalizing jazz education was a useful thing
to do. John Gennari points to coverage in the Berkshire Eagle advertising
the school along these lines, depicting it as “the first effort to present jazz
as a creative and vital art form which can be presented and taught as other
art forms are taught, in a serious and vital relationship between the stu-
dent and the creating artist” (qtd. in Gennari 2006, 219–20). The rough

­
pedagogical design of the enterprise therefore mirrored that of a standard
conservatorium program, employing both mentor-student pairings and

­
sit-down classes in jazz history and composition. The content of these
­
classes would, in turn, promote the second core idea on which the school
was based—the notion that jazz was a modern and evolving music. Such
­
an ideological bent is evident in the seminar titles alone from the school’s
first season. Over the course of the session, students were presented with
a full evolutionary narrative of jazz, beginning with the seminar Music of
Africa taught by Fela Sowande, followed by the seminar Primitive Begin-
nings of Jazz taught by Willis James, then Techniques in Jazz Composi-
tion, delivered by George Russell, and finally Jazz Frontiers, delivered by
Bill Russo and Lennie Tristano (“School of Jazz” 1957, 23). Fundamental
to the idea of such programming was that musical progress in jazz in-
volved both the mastery of techniques from the past and the pursuit of
musical works that pioneered new sonic “frontiers”—as Russo and
­
Tristano would have it.
This ideology was in turn endorsed by both jazz and African American
press coverage of the school, giving an additional measure of critical weight
to the project. Such support in the jazz press is of course unsurprising given
the “victory of jazz modernists over jazz traditionalists” in the “moldy fig”
debate that had played out in editorials and letters in journals like Down
Beat and Metronome during the 1940s (Lopes 2002, 218). Coverage of the
Lenox School a decade later merely solidified the idea that jazz was an
evolving music by highlighting the way music history at Lenox was taught.
John Wilson’s description of the 1956 Lenox seminars for the New York
 Composition in Context • 141

Times is unambiguously made in these terms. Under the subtitle “Warring

Camps,” Wilson writes,

One of the great stumbling blocks of the modern jazz musician has
been his lack of knowledge or understanding of the background of
the music he is attempting to play. This ignorance has been en-
couraged by the schism between the older forms of jazz and the
newer ones, a split in which it has become fashionable for musi-
cians on one side of the fence to offer little but scorn to those on
the other side.
But when moderator Willis Conover opened the discussion of
“Rhythm” by asking Wilbur De Paris, whose music career began in
1907 with a carnival, and Sammy Price, who started playing piano
professionally in 1914, to sketch in some of the early uses of rhythm
in jazz, their remarks developed into a short lecture on the history of
jazz rhythms simply because such modernist members of the discus-
sion group as drummers Max Roach and Connie Kay, bassists Percy
Heath and Ray Brown and pianist Dick Katz were so fascinated to
learn where they had come from, musically, that it never occurred to
them to interrupt. (1956, X9)

Coverage in the African American press tended to endorse the evolu-

tionary narrative in a different manner by focusing on just how far jazz had
come from its folk roots. The Pittsburgh Courier, for instance, would report
on Bill Russo and George Russell’s involvement in the 1958 Lenox season in
terms laden with the language of modernist uplift surveyed in chapter 3.
Russo is described in the article as a “composer who is currently composing
a major work for the New York Philharmonic at the request of Leonard
Bernstein and whose arrangements for Stan Kenton ushered in a new era
for band arranging” (“Top Jazz Musicians” 1958, 15). George Russell is in
turn referred to as a “composer, arranger and music theorist whose Lydian
concept of tonal organization represents the most magnificent step in for-
malizing a jazz theory” (“Top Jazz Musicians” 1958, 15). Positioning the
work of Russo and Russell against the hegemonic institutions of the New
York Philharmonic and the arena of formalized musicology in no uncer-
tain terms endorsed the idea of cultural syncretism—a key component of
­
142 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

the “politics of respectability” governing the behavior of many middle- and

­
upper-class African Americans. Such support aligned in broad terms with
­
the support offered the school by the jazz press but simultaneously (and in
its particulars) highlighted the legacy of a very different, class-oriented ide-

­
ology of African American music making.
Most of the material performed by Lewis at the school during the 1957
season would not disappoint the spectrum of stakeholders committed at
least in a general way to the idea of an evolutionary jazz narrative. Through-
out 1957 Lewis worked to expand the musical ideas he had explored in con-
nection with commedia dell’arte figures in his 1956 work “Fontessa.” On
August 24, 1957, Atlantic would record three new works by Lewis at Music
Inn, titled “Harlequin,” “Pierrot,” and “Colombine,” and release these the
following year on the album The John Lewis Piano (1958).14 In addition to
Lewis on piano, “Harlequin” would incorporate drummer Connie Kay and
“Pierrot” and “Colombine” would incorporate fellow Lenox faculty mem-
ber Jim Hall on guitar.
Curiously, the thematic material Lewis associated with the characters
Harlequin, Pierrot, and Colombine in his “Fontessa” suite is largely absent
in these 1957 recordings. Yet degrees of aesthetic similarity between the
works abound in other ways. In the liner notes to the Fontessa album Lewis
writes that his section based on Harlequin employs “the character of older
jazz,” a character Lewis appears to understand in terms of blues tropes like
call-response and the flattened fifth scale degree he infuses heavily into the
­
passage (example 4.7). The 1957 version of “Harlequin” uses a different
theme but continues to base this theme on blues components (example
4.8). For instance, the opening bars of the 1957 work are completely penta-
tonic, making as overt a link to the blues scale as the use of the flat fifth does
in the earlier “Fontessa” setting. Furthermore, after a two-bar introduction
­
in the 1957 version, Lewis can be seen to again deploy a call that is repeated
with slight alteration and then answered over the second half of the me-
lodic phrase.
The overtness of the blues aesthetic in both works opens the door for
speculation about ways in which the blues may have been emblematic for
Lewis of Harlequin’s commedia dell’arte character traits. In particular, it is
tempting here to point to Harlequin’s status in the commedia dell’arte as a
trickster figure appearing outwardly foolish but simultaneously “display
­
 Composition in Context • 143

Example 4.7. “Fontessa” (1956). Atlantic LP 1231. Harlequin theme, mm.

22–25. Transcription.
­
Example 4.8. “Harlequin” (1957). Atlantic LP 1272. Opening, mm. 1–12.
­
Transcription.

[ing] a very special quickness of mind” (Nicoll 1963, 72). Allardyce Nicoll’s
survey of the genre endeavors to illuminate this character trait by detailing
several scenarios in which Harlequin can be seen to do “two things at once,”
sometimes outwardly attempting to get out of a situation while subver-
sively prolonging it for his own amusement or the reverse, outwardly com-
mitting to a particular action he does not want to do and then subversively
sabotaging his chances at success (1963, 72). Harlequin’s self-agency, despite
­
his status as a servant and his appearance as a fool, neatly parallels in effect
the double-voiced tropes of Houston Baker’s “minstrel mask” and Henry
­
144 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

Louis Gates’s Signifyin(g) theory. In other words, Harlequin’s trickster fac-

ulties place him on the same level as those in African American profane
discourse, able to say they are doing one thing while actually doing another.
Yet regardless of whether or not Lewis’s Harlequin settings purposely
allude to some sort of pan-tricksterism, they set in place a framework for

­
future explorations of the Harlequin character based on blues sonorities.
That is to say, unity between Lewis’s 1956 Harlequin theme, his 1957 work
“Harlequin,” and the version of “Harlequin” he would record with the
MJQ four years later as part of the group’s 1962 album The Comedy is most
apparent in the fact that all three of these works are the most blues-heavy

­
works in the collections within which they appear. There is, of course, more
thematic similarity between the 1962 version of “Harlequin” and the 1957
version of the work than there is between either of these versions and the
Harlequin theme from “Fontessa.” Yet an examination of the setting of
other commedia-inspired themes from “Fontessa” in the 1957 Lenox re-
­
cordings seems to confirm the idea that, at least initially, conjuring aesthetic
rather than thematic similarity was at the forefront of Lewis’s mind.
Consider, for example, the three-note “Fontessa” motif that Lewis as-
­
sociates with the character Colombine (example 4.9) and the four-note

­
motif on which the “Colombine” theme of the 1957 recording is based (ex-
ample 4.10).

Example 4.9. “Fontessa” (1956). Atlantic LP 1231. Colombine theme, mm.

1–3. Transcription.
­
The slow tempo at which both motifs are delivered and Lewis’s choice to
limit these motifs to just a few notes not only creates a unified Colombine
aesthetic or musical character, it sets this character against the more elabo-
rate and blues-inflected Harlequin themes. In turn, the constant modula-
­
tions of both the section of “Fontessa” based on Pierrot and Lewis’s “Pier-
rot” recorded in 1957 solidify Pierrot’s musical character in terms distinctly
different from both Harlequin and Colombine. Again, it is tempting to
 Composition in Context • 145

Example 4.10. “Colombine” (1957). Atlantic LP 1272. Opening, 0:18.

Transcription.

read character traits such as “calculation” into the Colombine motif and
“wistfulness” into the Pierrot themes, traits that largely defined the ways
these characters were played. Yet whether such parallels are real or not is
beside the point.
The real importance of these relationships is that they indicate an in-
terest in the commedia dell’arte that extends beyond what might be con-
sidered a subversive “masking” of African American folk expression. In-
deed, while the overt use of blues-heavy music paired with references to a
­
commedia character like Harlequin might at first seem to be a double-

­
voiced attempt to recruit into jazz curious patrons of Western art music,
such a reading is complicated by the fact that the conceptual framework
of Lewis’s commedia dell’arte works does not seem exclusively tied to the
jazz realm. In other words, it is knowledge of the commedia dell’arte
tradition—and not necessarily jazz practices—that help us best under-
­
­
stand the relationship between “Fontessa” and the 1957 works recorded
at Lenox. These works do not tell the same story in a different way—a
­
reference to jazz practice that would perhaps have been appropriate if
Lewis had reset thematic material. They instead realize aesthetic
characters—that is, ways of musical thinking—in different musical sce-
­
­
narios. Lewis’s liner notes to the 1956 Fontessa album support this inter-
pretation, referring to his Harlequin and Pierrot movements as “having
the character of ” certain jazz styles rather than exploring or developing
particular themes ( J. Lewis 1956, 1). It therefore seems reasonable to as-
sert that by delivering to listeners the aesthetic characters defined in
“Fontessa” in the context of the different melodic and harmonic stories
he produced in 1957, Lewis was effectively engaged in the development of
a musical version of the commedia dell’arte tradition. Such an idea would
have been truly modern and progressive within the realm of improvised
146 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

music in the mid-1950s and thus would have fit neatly into the ideologies

­
driving the Lenox educational program.
Furthermore, throughout 1957 Lewis can be seen to have engaged in
other projects that similarly highlighted a continued interest in exploring
what were referred to at Lenox as “new frontiers.” For instance, 1957 is also
the year Lewis would write music for his first film, Roger Vadim’s Sait-on

­
jamais, the particularities of which I discuss at length in the following
chapter. In turn, it was a year that would see him begin to score his multi-
movement brass work Excerpts from “The Comedy” (recorded and released
in 1960 on the Atlantic LP The Golden Striker). In addition to setting the
characters of Polchinella (Pulcinella) and La Cantatrice in this work, Lewis
would explore new ways of “masking” the blues by clashing major triads
from different keys against the changes of a twelve-bar blues passage in C

­
major ( J. Lewis 1960, 3; 16). Such developments more than anything indi-
cate a staying of the course for Lewis.
Yet the factors driving Lewis’s motivation to stay on this path appear to
have shifted. In chapter 1 I argue that Lewis’s decision to “go modern” was
at least in part mediated by financial concerns in the wake of the big band
decline. My survey of the compositional design underpinning Lewis’s early
works in the first section of this chapter demonstrates how many of these
pieces may have indeed enacted such an agenda by drawing listeners into
jazz through the deployment of improvised counterpoint that sounded
composed and vice versa. What makes studying Lewis’s works from the
1957 Lenox season so interesting is that they break with the overtness of
these early works. While “cerebral” elements linked to timbre, speed, and
volume continue to sit readily on their surface, understanding their pro-
found and actual connection to Western artistic traditions requires consid-
erably more focused listening. In other words, audience appeal no longer
appears to be the driving force behind Lewis’s engagement with the West at
Lenox. His appropriation of European cultural traditions instead seems to
have become something much more personal—or at least something much
­
less commercial. When we read such a shift in the context of the Lenox
environment and Lewis’s 1956 European experience it becomes clear that
Lewis was supported in this transition by movements in jazz “thought.”
Indeed, despite the jazz press’s suggestion that Lewis was moving away from
the jazz genre through his exploration of different ways of thinking about
 Composition in Context • 147

compositional process, in the company of his compatriots at Lenox, Lewis’s

work was clearly ideologically on task.

Return to Europe and Lewis’s “Third Stream” Works, 1957–62

­
Over the next four years, Lewis would continue to operate within this mi-
lieu of similarly minded artists and promoters. His return to Europe for a
four-month tour with the MJQ beginning in October 1957 enabled further
­
contact with European modernists such as Hodeir and the staff of SDR
and SWF, the results of which can be heard on the album European Win-
dows (1958) and on two albums released decades later: Longing for the Con-
tinent (1985) and The Modern Jazz Quartet—Germany 1956–1958 Lost Tapes
­
­
(2013). In the aftermath of the tour, Lewis’s interest in writing for increas-
ingly diverse instrumental ensembles would in turn lead to his association
with the emerging Third Stream movement and the recording of the now
famous Atlantic LP Third Stream Music (1960), which included both Lew-
is’s compositions and the works of Gunther Schuller and Jimmy Giuffre.
Although Lewis’s compositional approach would not break markedly
with the past during this period, this was the era of increased public discus-
sion of the value of his works and the historical moment in which his ap-
parent split from the jazz realm became solidified in the eye of the jazz
press. Such tension between musical fact and public opinion appears to
have been the result of a phenomenon in which Lewis’s works for ensem-
bles larger than the MJQ tended to be slapped with the Third Stream label
while his writing for the MJQ remained conceptually linked to the jazz
genre—a confusing distinction given the fact that similar compositional
­
strategies informed both sets of works. Lewis’s perceived distance from the
jazz realm in the minds of jazz critics during this period therefore appears
to have had more to do with his increased interest in using large ensembles
than with the compositional devices he deployed within these contexts.
Lewis had, of course, explored large ensemble works prior to this pe-
riod. The work “Three Little Feelings” that I discuss in chapter 1 and “Mid-
sömmer,” which I discuss in this chapter, utilized instrumentalists from
beyond traditional big-band setups, such as French hornists, bassoonists,
­
and harpists, in order to manifest unique timbral effects. What would make
148 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

several of Lewis’s post-1957 large ensemble works unique was that they

­
marked the first time Lewis would write for established Western ensemble
formats such as symphony orchestras and string quartets.
Lewis’s loose association with these ensembles correlates with his return
to Europe in October 1957 to perform with the MJQ at the Donaueschin-
gen Music Days festival. The inclusion of jazz at Donaueschingen—an

­
avant-garde music festival founded in 1922 and revived after World War
­
II—began in 1954 with a work commissioned by Berendt and festival direc-
­
tor Heinrich Strobel: Rolf Liebermann’s Concerto for Jazz-Band and Or-

­
chestra (Hurley 2009, 25). In 1957 the festival organizers would make the
decision to build on the success of the 1954 program by pursuing a wider
jazz presence, inviting Hodeir’s Jazz Groupe de Paris, Eddie Sauter’s Big
Band, and the Modern Jazz Quartet to perform. Innovative energy per-
vaded the resulting concerts, with Hodeir’s and Sauter’s works both draw-
ing heavily on the atonal practices of the Second Viennese School and
Lewis and the MJQ performing pieces that showcased a different sort of
modernist approach: the reflexive use of composed and improvised coun-
terpoint.
While Lewis’s extensive touring in the aftermath of Donaueschingen
would see the MJQ collaborate with a variety of ensembles—including
­
Hodeir’s Jazz Groupe de Paris, which would record Lewis’s work “Sketch 3”
and Hodeir’s work “Ambiguité”—it was Lewis’s earlier involvement with
­
South German Radio during his 1956 tour that seems to have set in place
his first encounter with a symphony orchestra. On February 20–21, 1958,
­
Lewis was offered the opportunity to record with SDR’s Süddeutscher
Rundfunk Sinfonie-Orchester in Stuttgart. Choosing not to bring new
­
works to the group, Lewis instead used the opportunity to reset works he
had already recorded with smaller ensembles, including both “Midsöm-
mer” and “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen”—tracks Lewis had recorded in
­
1956 for SDR—and the works “Three Windows” and “Cortege,” which the
­
MJQ had played at Donaueschingen and recorded as part of the soundtrack
to the French film noir Sait-on jamais. The remaining pieces Lewis selected,
­
“The Queen’s Fancy” and “Two Degrees East—Three Degrees West”
­
(1956), had their roots in smaller ensembles Lewis had recorded with (in-
cluding the MJQ) in the United States during the previous years.
The result of these recording sessions would be the album European
 Composition in Context • 149

Windows, released by RCA Victor in 1958. Importantly, when assessing the

significance of this album it is crucial to note that the use of an orchestral
ensemble appears to have had little effect on Lewis’s compositional ap-
proach. Indeed, the paradox of contrapuntal practices functioning both as
distinct cultural tropes and as a blurred aesthetic concept remains the most
notable feature of the music, as is evident in Hentoff ’s reflections on Lew-
is’s arrangements:

Note the frequent use of counter-lines beneath soloists and between

­
sections of the orchestra. Note too the clear, logical development of
his themes; they are never swallowed or stifled by the orchestra-
tion. . . . And there is not a little influence from Lewis’ jazz experi-
ences here. The way, for example, the improvised flute and baritone
solos flow naturally into and out of the surrounding texture so that
they are always a continuing, organic part of the whole work. (1958,
1; emphasis in original)

While Hentoff ’s comments were made in reference to the entire album,

they seem to speak particularly well to Lewis’s reimagining of the work
“Three Windows,” from his score to Sait-on jamais. The overlapping the-
­
matic statements of the fugal exposition in this work are immediately fol-
lowed on the European Windows recording by a forty-measure improvised
­
flute solo performed by Gerry Weinkopf. The first thirty-two measures of
­
this improvisation occur over an AABA form in C minor. Weinkopf then
interjects subject motifs into his solo for eight measures while the bass
plays the fugal countersubject. Gradual thematic layering continues to oc-
cur as Weinkopf moves from improvisatory material to a firmer statement
of the fugal subject set against contrapuntal backings beginning in measure
seventy (see appendix A, table H). The gradual increase of overlapping the-
matic backings during Weinkopf ’s solo and the eventual transition of
Weinkopf ’s improvisation into a statement of the fugal subject itself af-
firms the interchangeability of contrapuntal techniques described by Hen-
toff. In other words, Weinkopf participates in the “fugal” nature of the
work by providing both improvised independent counterpoint utilizing
subject motifs against the statement of the fugal countersubject in the bass
as well as by performing the subject itself amid the thematic layering begin-
150 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

ning at bar 70. While such an approach does not differ dramatically from
the use of improvisation in the MJQ fugal works “Vendome,” “Concorde,”
and “Versailles,” Lewis’s choice to deploy this trope with the Süddeutscher
Rundfunk Sinfonie-Orchester did mark a shift in the type of ensembles

­
Lewis would seek out to realize such syncretic goals.
Confirmation of this shift would be made clear in September of the fol-
lowing year, when Lewis would team up once again with Gunther Schuller
in the United States to produce a concert of jazz, Western art music, and
fusion music at Town Hall, New York. Lewis and Schuller recruited the
Beaux Arts String Quartet for this concert and designed a program split
into three sections (similar to the format used by the Jazz and Classical
Music Society), emphasizing different compositional approaches. The first
section contained a performance of Haydn’s Quartet, op. 74, no. 1, played
by the Beaux Arts String Quartet; the second section was composed of the
Modern Jazz Quartet playing selections from its repertoire of jazz stan-
dards, and the third section contained premieres of compositions by Lewis
and Schuller written for a combined ensemble made up of the two quartets
(Hoefer 1959, 46). These latter compositions, “Conversation” (1959) by
Schuller and “Sketch” (1959) by Lewis, would be released the following year
on the Atlantic LP Third Stream Music.
Far from a revolutionary break into a “Third Stream” paradigm, Lewis’s
“Sketch” can be unpacked almost entirely in reference to the concepts of
contrapuntal ambiguity and the integration of “choruses” within com-
posed contrapuntal passages—conventions Lewis had worked with as far
­
back as “The Queen’s Fancy” and “La Ronde.” Drawing on this tried-and-
­
­
true approach, Lewis uses the “Sketch” theme to link composed and impro-
vised counterpoint in the opening measures of the work before pivoting to
choruses of open blowing. In specific terms, he juxtaposes the “Sketch”
theme against a composed bass line beginning at measure 21 (example 4.11)
and then transitions to a section of improvisation (example 4.12) in which
he reiterates an improvised version of the theme against an independent
bass line (example 4.13) before embarking on the six improvised choruses
that comprise the work’s bulk.
The fact that Heath and Lewis both construct their improvised parts in
relation to figures from the opening thematic passage outlined in example
4.11 before transitioning to the improvised choruses is, suffice to say, a
 Composition in Context • 151

Example 4.11. “Sketch” (1959). Polyphonic thematic setting, mm. 21–25.

­
Published score (set in Finale).

Example 4.12. “Sketch” (1959). First eight measures of open improvisa-

tion, mm. 35–42. Published score (reduced and set in Finale).
­
pretty unremarkable feat given Lewis’s more ambitious engagement with
contrapuntal effects in the past. True, an element of consistency emerges
when “Sketch” is compared to Lewis’s earlier works, and the use of a string
quartet in “Sketch” might be understood as moving this compositional for-
mat into a new domain, yet the cognitive dissonance that made pieces like
“Fontessa” and “Versailles” so interesting is largely eradicated by the
straightforwardness with which composed and improvised counterpoint
are deployed in “Sketch.” Compounding this issue is the fact that the string
quartet does not engage in contrapuntal interplay, offering only homopho-
nic statements of the theme when called on to deliver thematic content.
152 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

Example 4.13. “Sketch” (1959). Atlantic LP 1345. Interpretation of first

eight measures of open improvisation (piano and bass), mm. 35–42. Tran-

­
scription.

Indeed, unlike Lewis’s exploration of commedia dell’arte characters at

Lenox, “Sketch” appears to evince a step backward toward a more superfi-
cial or “showy” approach to engagement with Western art music.
Yet inclusion of the work on the LP Third Stream Music would effec-
tively make a different point. Seizing on discussion in the jazz press about
an emerging “body of music . . . that is to some extent jazz and yet . . . just
as much a part of serious music” (Wilson 1958b, X12), or in the words of
Norman J. O’Connor, “a third brand of music, whose name we know
not” (1957, 18), Atlantic’s Third Stream Music LP essentially used Lewis’s
“Sketch” and Schuller’s “Conversation” to define where the parameters of
this new genre lay. In other words, by promoting works that in some way
incorporated instrumental ensembles beyond big band setups as exem-
plars of the Third Stream movement, Atlantic’s LP set in place a criteria
for categorizing music that could essentially circumvent debates about
compositional design.
The effects of this conceptual model are evident in the reception of
Lewis’s commedia dell’arte works realized in the late 1950s and early
1960s. As I stated earlier, Lewis’s time at Lenox corresponded with both
the development of a large ensemble brass work titled Excerpts from “The
Comedy” and three smaller ensemble works titled “Harlequin,” “Pierrot,”
and “Colombine,” all of which draw on similar compositional language.
The release of the brass work on Atlantic LP 1334 under the title The
Golden Striker would overlap with the release of the album Third Stream
Music and the two would be reviewed side by side in the pages of Down
Beat in December 1960 in terms that would unequivocally unite them
(“Spotlight Review” 1960, 36). Lewis’s development of “Harlequin,”
“Pierrot,” and “Colombine” for the MJQ along with the movements
 Composition in Context • 153

“Polchinella” (recorded as “Pulcinella”), “Spanish Steps,” and “Piazza Na-

vona” from the brass work would be released on the Atlantic LP The
Comedy in 1962. Despite the Western art music expectation induced by
the commedia dell’arte associations of both projects and the neat compo-
sitional similarity in both the MJQ and brass settings of “Polchinella/
Pulcinella,” “Spanish Steps,” and “Piazza Navona,” only the brass ensem-
ble work was framed initially as a Third Stream composition. As Gary
Kramer writes in his liner notes to The Golden Striker,

Considerable comment has been expended on John Lewis’s inde-

pendent use of both classical and traditional jazz devices in his work.
Recently critic John S. Wilson hit upon the phrase “third stream
music” to designate a new and growing body of music which, like
John’s, overlaps both fields to the point where it is hard to classify by
older standards. (1960, 1)

Kramer’s comments do not call out instrumental difference directly, yet

such criteria seem to play at least a part in Third Stream attribution when
this reading is compared with his discussion of the later MJQ version of the
work. Using the improvisatory elements of The Comedy as opposed to its
composed elements as evidence, Kramer endeavors to dispel confusion
around the work’s cultural origin in his liner notes to the 1962 album:

It might . . . be a source of bewilderment to some that a jazz com-

poser should be so obsessed by these quaint figures that come from a
European tradition that antedates jazz by many centuries. John
Lewis long ago perceived that there were many analogies between
jazz and the Italian comedy, however. Its improvised character at-
tracted him instantaneously; these plays were not written down,
only a bare outline of a plot was posted in the wings, and the players
had to take it from there. This was not an author’s theatre; it was a
player’s theatre, just as jazz has been, in the main, an instrumentalist’s
medium rather than a composer’s. (1962, 1; emphasis in original)

A comparison of Kramer’s two essays seems to indicate a perception of

there being different degrees of preplanning at play in the two variations of
the work, yet there is little discussion of what the difference in composed
154 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

elements might actually have been. Of course, when one considers the mar-
ket mechanisms set in place by the Atlantic Third Stream Music LP, this
sort of distinction makes a certain amount of sense. By providing a mast-
head for syncretic works that used large ensembles, the Atlantic LP effec-
tively linked the Third Stream concept with works like “Three Little Feel-
ings” and “Midsömmer”—pieces at the center of the new-venue-creation

­
­
­
project discussed in chapter 1. Such use of the term might therefore be un-
derstood as having expanded the venue-creation project into the realm of

­
commercial recordings. From this perspective it is then possible to see the
“jazz” branding of Lewis’s small-group version of The Comedy as a purpose-
­
ful attempt to market the same sonic material (albeit this time in a state of
undress, having shed its symphonic garb) to an audience not at all inter-
ested in the expanded ensemble aesthetic.
The point I am trying to make here is that despite the use of the Third
Stream label to market Lewis’s works “Sketch” and “Excerpts,” a change in
compositional approach large enough to designate an actual paradigm shift
in these pieces is difficult to discern. Indeed, despite their different instru-
mentation, “Sketch” and “Excerpts” share a strong degree of aesthetic simi-
larity with Lewis’s earlier pieces “Fontessa” and “The Queen’s Fancy,” works
that had helped Lewis establish a robust jazz profile—a profile strong
­
enough to support multiple tours of European jazz venues and allow him
to take on the directorship of the Lenox School of Jazz. By making this ar-
gument I am not suggesting that these works should necessarily be read as
jazz works, only that the phenomenon of Third Stream attribution seems
somewhat detached from the actual musical content of the syncretic works
to which it is ascribed.
Of course there is no doubt that the jazz and Third Stream labels (along
with the label modern) were all at one point or another used by Lewis as he
developed and promoted his music both in the United States and in Eu-
rope during the 1950s. Throughout this chapter I have endeavored to dem-
onstrate why such labels may have resonated more with certain demograph-
ics than with others and how Lewis benefited by framing his music in
different ways. Yet at the same time I have tried to argue that Lewis’s works
are often more than what they appear to be in these settings. To the right
set of ears, modern fugal works have the potential to be read as blues works
in disguise and bluesy jams like “Harlequin” have the potential to be read as
 Composition in Context • 155

musical embodiments of the commedia dell’arte tradition. The capacity for

these works to give rise to a spectrum of musical associations—despite

­
whether one unpacks such a phenomenon in reference to the ideas of Baker
and Gates—indicates a unique musical achievement often overshadowed
­
by later assessments of the Third Stream genre (and Lewis’s music, by asso-
ciation) as a cultural and aesthetic failure.
In this chapter I have tried to counter such assumptions by demonstrat-
ing that Lewis’s works did indeed accomplish important cultural work.
They advanced an aesthetic agenda of compositional ambiguity that cata-
pulted Lewis to the front lines of the jazz modernism movement, allowing
him to make advancements in jazz education, reestablish a jazz scene in
German society, and move forward the work of New Negro composers that
aimed to challenge ideas about the sort of music African American artists
might create. Lewis may not have undertaken his modernist project with
these specific goals in mind, yet thinking of Lewis’s work in these terms,
rather than in relation to which label best fits his music, allows for a more
dynamic view of its ultimate value and historical significance.
5 • Lewis and Film Noir

There are two musical moments in the Robert Wise film Odds against To-
morrow (1959) that speak volumes as to how Lewis would carry his ability
to frustrate aesthetic boundaries into the realm of film scoring. Both in-
volve the main character, Johnny (played by Harry Belafonte), a jazz musi-
cian with a gambling problem struggling to reunite his estranged family.
The first finds Johnny performing the song “My Baby’s Not Around” (1959),
backed up by the sound of the MJQ at a jazz club owned by the mob. Bela-
fonte pantomimes improvisation along with Milt Jackson’s vibraphone
part while playing into stereotypes of the loose jazz musician (during the
song the character’s gambling debts are called in and immediately after the
performance he begins sweet-talking an ex-girlfriend). After a meeting
­
­
with the mob boss in which an ultimatum about repayment is issued, the
tone of both the acting and improvisation changes. Gone is the easy confi-
dence of the first scene as Johnny retakes the bandstand, now drunk and
anxious, to perform the song “All Men Are Evil” (1959) with pop-jazz singer
­
Mae Barnes.1 After constantly interrupting Barnes with an unsolicited call-
­
and-response, Johnny begins a frantic vibraphone improvisation that even-
­
tually causes the band to come to a halt. Here, Milt Jackson’s sonic voice is
united with Belafonte’s emotional state, revealing the potential for impro-
visation in film to convey a complex array of emotions spanning distress,
anger, and guilt. Such use of improvisation breaks free in this moment from
the cartoonish jazz stereotypes of the first scene and points to the potential
for more dynamic use of the convention within the film noir context.
I am, of course, not the first to point out that jazz was occasionally

156
 Lewis and Film Noir • 157

deployed in film noir toward diverse ends. Indeed, the supposedly ubiq-
uitous role of jazz in film noir “as a trope for the darker side of the Amer-
ican urban experience” (Lopes 2005, 1468) is increasingly undergoing
revision. Although there is little dispute that clichéd deviance triggers
conjured from juxtaposed jazz bass lines and “world percussion” grooves
permeate the form at large (Ford 2008, 120), many recent studies of the
field have provided a broader understanding of how African American
vernacular tropes function in the genre (Butler 2002, 2009; Cooke
2009). David Butler’s (2002) monograph, for instance, demonstrates
that while many 1950s noir films utilize deviance triggers along the lines
Ford describes, moments of innovative jazz use that work against this cli-
ché do at times emerge. Butler’s most compelling case study focuses on
the Robert Wise film I Want to Live! (1957) and charts the use of nondi-
egetic jazz scoring across a range of narrative strains connected to the in-
ternal soul searching of “falsely” convicted murderer Barbara Graham
(2002, 116–27). Both Butler and film scholar Mervyn Cooke pursue this
­
line of enquiry further in the edited collection Thriving on a Riff: Jazz
and Blues Influences in Literature and Film (2009), highlighting mo-
ments in noir films from 1959 that continue to buck the deviance cliché,
both in regard to preplanned jazz-inflected scoring and in the placement
­
of improvised passages.
This particular approach to the use of jazz in film noir during the 1950s
might be considered a natural extension of the genre’s progressive use of
music during the 1940s. Richard Ness, for instance, argues that film noir’s
rejection of narrative themes and tropes associated with prewar comedies
and melodramas echoes in music tracks that break with “the tonal tradition
of classical Hollywood film scoring” (2008, 53). Through an analysis of the
films Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Laura (1944), and Murder, My Sweet
(1944), Ness demonstrates how the use of “dissonance and atonality, . . . the
breakdown of traditional diegetic/nondiegetic distinctions and the use of
unusual instrumentation and experimental recording techniques” came to
define “an overall noir musical style” by the dawn of the 1950s (2008, 52–
­
53). Such “modernist leanings in soundtrack design”—as Mervyn Cooke
­
(2009, 253) puts it—seem to have set in place a platform for musical ex-
­
perimentation in the form that would increasingly come to the fore during
the second half of the decade.
158 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

As a particular example of this experimentation, Cooke points to Duke

Ellington’s score for the Otto Preminger film Anatomy of a Murder (1959).
Engaging with claims made by Krin Gabbard that moments in the music
track feel “randomly tacked on,” Cooke argues that the progressive turn in
film scoring in which the noir genre played an important part allowed for a
more abstract relationship between “music and image” to develop. Such
abstraction enabled composers to conceive of the music they would con-
tribute to film as extensions of their own creative aesthetic projects and
freed them from “narrative-dominated sensibilities” that had permeated
­
earlier styles of Hollywood film production (Cooke 2009, 253). The result
of such freedom may have resulted in a looser moment-to-moment rela-

­
­
tionship between image and music but would not, in Cooke’s view, weaken
the impact of a score on the overall aesthetic outcome of a film project. To
the contrary, Cooke, quoting Royal Brown, argues that such approaches to
film scoring enabled “a parallel aesthetic component to the film’s visual and
narrative structures” to emerge in which one might find unexpected “con-
junctions of music and drama” that were both “oddly compelling and
thought provoking” (Cooke 2009, 254–55).
­
Lewis’s initial entry into the world of film music was no doubt facili-
tated by this increasingly expansive view regarding what might make up a
film noir music track. Yet the scores Lewis would provide for his first two
projects, Roger Vadim’s Sait-on jamais (1957) and Robert Wise’s Odds
­
against Tomorrow, do not break totally with “narrative-dominated sensi-
­
bilities” in the manner suggested by Cooke above. To the contrary, these
scores seem to set in place Lewis’s vision for a more expansive improvisa-
tory voice in film delivered in aid of particular narrative strains. As Lewis
claimed in a 1959 Down Beat interview, “Jazz hasn’t been used yet to fill all
of the needs of the motion picture. You haven’t heard jazz used with love
scenes or certain dramatic situations. The answer is improvisation that can
be as tender or as dramatic as the scene demands” (“Jazz in Films” 1959, 16).
His scores for Sait-on jamais and Odds against Tomorrow take action along
­
these lines by frequently calling on various improvisatory styles to counter-
point and heighten the emotional content of particular narrative moments.
At the same time, Lewis can be seen to conform to certain conventions of
the noir genre established during the 1940s—particularly in relation to his
­
use of deviance triggers that align with the musical model identified by
 Lewis and Film Noir • 159

Ford above. The use of this familiar convention allowed Lewis to develop
scores that fit a familiar auditory template while simultaneously expanding
the use of improvisation across the length of the film. In other words, there
is at least some potential to read these scores as double-voiced—as scores

­
­
that actively package the unfamiliar within the boundaries of the familiar.
Of course, such an approach need not necessarily be understood as a pur-
poseful act of vernacular preservation in line with the Baker- Gates

­
paradigm—especially given the dynamic nature of 1950s modernist
­
thought explored in the preceding chapter. Nevertheless, such a methodol-
ogy does demonstrate a level of compositional continuity between Lewis’s
concert works and film scores only tangentially mentioned in current sur-
veys of Lewis’s noir participation and is therefore ripe for exploration in
this study of Lewis’s music.

Deviance Triggers and Film Noir

Such an analysis, of course, must begin with a brief survey of how familiar
musical tropes came to be, in fact, familiar within the noir context. At-
tempts at summarizing the noir construct span decades (Durgnat 1970;
Schrader 1972; Silver & Ward 1992; Pfeil 1993; Vernet 1993), with perhaps
the most inclusive interpretation put forth by Naremore in his overview of
a “loose, evolving system of arguments and readings” that draws broadly on
the negative in human relationships (1998, 11). Associations derived from
this system inspire a related web of visual imagery (“low-key photography,
­
wet city streets”) and narrative traits (“pop Freudian characterizations . . .
[a] romantic fascination with femme fatales”) (Naremore 1998, 9). Butler
(2002) is quick to identify jazz as a core component of Naremore’s negative
milieu, particularly in what are now considered to be the first wave of noir
texts: Phantom Lady (1944), D.O.A. (1950), and The Asphalt Jungle (1950).
All three of these works use either “live” performances by jazz musicians or
diegetic props (a bar jukebox) to deliver vernacularly based musical accom-
paniment underneath morally ambiguous narrative moments. In Phantom
Lady the protagonist, Kansas, slips into a sexually charged undercover per-
sona in order to track down and seduce a witness at a jazz club; in D.O.A.
businessman Frank Bigelow gets his drink spiked while being distracted by
160 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

dancing at a jazz nightclub; and in The Asphalt Jungle the character Doc
Riendenschneider plays jazz on a jukebox in order to get a young couple to
dance, indulging his penchant for voyeurism. The “primitivist” connota-
tions of jazz surveyed in chapter 2 help us make sense of why such choices
were so frequently made and the difficulty involved in moving jazz’s semi-
otic function beyond such moments.
Indeed, the pairing of jazz and deviance would come to form a resilient
trope in the noir context as jazz transitioned from diegetic contexts to a
clichéd reduction of itself in nondiegetic symphonic noir scoring of the
1950s.2 Ford depicts this later scoring convention as an aggregate assembly
of “musical codes” that are “exotic in a generic sense . . . without belonging
to any specific place” (2008, 118). Its creation relied on the reduction of
Latin and American popular music to core components and then the reas-
sembly of these components into a stratified texture juxtaposed against a
walking bass. As Ford explains,

This music is less jazz than something written to sound like jazz. The
polarity between walking basses and the figures superimposed against
them becomes a metonymic reduction of the jazz sound, something
composers rely on to conjure up an image of jazz and all that is associ-
ated with it: shades and beret, a smoky club after dark, etc. What this
suggests is that composers seeking to depict jazz rather than simply
write it will intensify that polarization between bass line and horn fig-
ure, or, more abstractly between figure and ground. (2008, 123)

Ford uses Henry Mancini’s score to the Orson Welles film Touch of Evil
(1958) to provide evidence of this effect, outlining the stratified music that
begins the film as follows:

After a unison fanfare that hammers out the tonic, a taunting per-
cussion ostinato begins, at first slowly and then locking into a groove.
At measure 16 the first ostinato line enters in the saxophones; at
measure 30, a new line enters in the trombones, accompanied by a
new bass ostinato. Then at measure 42, the texture splits into five
layers: the percussion, the bass ostinato, a baritone sax ostinato, the
trombone line (now doubled in the trumpets), and a new osti-
nato—a leering figure in alto and tenor saxophone. (2008, 120)3
­
 Lewis and Film Noir • 161

A reading of this cliché as deviance trigger or trope can be seen in Ford’s

subsequent assessment that “here Henry Mancini does with a complex
multilayered groove what the camera does in images, striking the film’s
tone of menace, its looming promise of interest to be paid on an accumu-
lated debt of wicked deeds” (2008, 119–20). Further examples pairing the

­
“world” percussion sound, bass ostinato, and layered horn lines of Ford’s
model with moments of transgression are illuminated in his discussion of
the noir classics The Wild One (1953) with music by Leith Stevens, The
Sweet Smell of Success (1957) with music by Elmer Bernstein, I Want To
Live! (1958) with music by Johnny Mandel, and Compulsion (1959) with
music by Lionel Newman. Indeed, the cliché would be used with such
frequency in the 1950s that it would eventually develop its own moniker
in anthologies of film noir music: “crime jazz.”4
Such standardization of the reductive “crime jazz” trope appears to
have, almost paradoxically, enabled a greater degree of vernacular engage-
ment within other aspects of noir scoring. With the deviance trigger locked
into such an easily replicated and recognizable convention, composers were
free to experiment with the use of jazz harmonies, rhythms, and melodic
features as accompaniments to other narrative strains. Butler (2002) identi-
fies this concept as a driving force behind Johnny Mandel’s “jazz based”
symphonic score for I Want to Live! While Mandel continues to draw on
the “crime jazz” cliché to induce anxiety, particularly notable in convicted
murderer Barbara Graham’s nightmare sequence (Ford 2008, 129), he si-
multaneously incorporates swing rhythmic time and a melody incorporat-
ing blues sonorities into a sequence in which Graham writes to her psy-
chologist expressing a love of life and a desire to fight her execution
sentence. While the latter scene cannot be construed as an entirely uplift-
ing event, it is framed in the film as a moment of hope—there is the possi-
­
bility, however fleeting, that Barbara’s doctor will help save her life.
Yet at the same time that Mandel was eroding the jazz stereotype in
his film score, director Robert Wise was upholding it in the placement of
improvised music. Although Wise expressed a belief that West Coast or
“Cool” jazz improvisation could carry with it more nuanced connota-
tions than had typically been ascribed to jazz music in the past (Butler
2002, 119), the final release of the film evinces a continued tendency to
connect improvised passages performed by an ensemble led by “Cool”
jazz practitioners Shelly Manne and Gerry Mulligan with the themes of
162 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

drug use, a seedy underworld, and internal conflict. Butler describes the
establishment of this link in his overview of the film’s opening jazz club
sequence, in which Mulligan is featured:

Wise . . . [shot] the majority of the club sequence through a variety

of tilted camera angles that seem to be intended to create a sense of
distorted perception, possibly due to the marijuana, in partnership
with the jazz band. The sense of having entered a world of transgres-
sion is also suggested through the club’s clientele. Mixed generation
couples are visible, as well as black audience members, although they
are always in the background. The ‘two cool types’ . . . are included
and are coded for seediness, seen smoking in a corridor as the musi-
cians play. (2009, 122)

While Butler suggests that the fleshing out of Graham’s character enabled
the sound of the Mulligan-Manne band to later symbolize a variety of “con-
­
flicting associations,” it is never liberated entirely from the connotations of
this opening scene, and Graham’s most redeeming moment is cast in direct
opposition to the ensemble.
This scene of transcendence occurs in Graham’s cell and begins with
Graham listening to a jazz radio program on which the Mulligan-Manne
­
band performs. The music switches over to the news and her guard begins
to search for a new station. Graham directs the guard to stop at the sound
of classical piano with the line “There, leave that . . .” and then the revela-
tion “There’s lots of long-hair music I like.” This exchange transitions to
­
Graham’s reflection on self-sacrifice. In an attempt to console the prison
­
guard, who is struggling with a failed marriage, Graham describes the pain
of giving up her own marriage for the sake of her husband’s career. The
scene is ultimately redemptive, with the condemned counseling the free
through a parable of sacrifice and forgiveness.
It is notable that this moment is underscored by classical music and not
symphonic jazz or improvisation. While Mandel and Wise appear to be
motivated by a more nuanced understanding of jazz music’s potential in
film, this scene demonstrates an ultimate reluctance to accompany a mo-
ment of real deliverance with music from the jazz realm. Indeed, while jazz
elements do emerge throughout the symphonic score in connection with a
 Lewis and Film Noir • 163

variety of narrative themes, the unambiguous nature of the “crime jazz” cli-
ché and a hesitance to fully detach improvisation from Graham’s links to
the underworld serves to perpetuate the jazz/deviance stereotype in I Want
to Live! Lewis’s music track to the 1957 film Sait-on jamais echoes the use of

­
music in Wise’s film in that it plays deviance triggers off more expansive
jazz placement but can in turn be seen to go further, calling on improvisa-
tion in addition to jazz-imbued scoring as accompaniment to an array of
­
themes that extend beyond the darker strains of the narrative.

Improvisation in Lewis’s Score for Sait-on jamais (1957)

­
The path to Lewis’s involvement in the Sait-on jamais project can at least
­
partly be understood as stemming from his earlier creation and promotion
of syncretic works within the French context. Lewis’s recording of the al-
bum Afternoon in Paris following his 1956 tour of the Continent, for in-
stance, demonstrated a willingness to juxtapose musical conventions seen
by many to emerge from contrasting aesthetic realms. This compositional
approach echoed French developments within the film noir genre during
the same period. As Ginette Vincendeau (2007, 42) explains, in an attempt
to expand film noir beyond clique status in France, French productions of
the form between the late 1950s and early 1960s tended to cast its dark nar-
rative strains against spectacular visual imagery, thus challenging standard
noir conventions. She cites the Mediterranean setting of René Clément’s
Plein soleil (1960) as proof of this stylistic shift, although the Venetian
landscape of the Roger Vadim film under scrutiny here, Sait-on jamais,
­
serves as an equally pertinent case in point. Indeed, both films help illus-
trate Vincendeau’s definition of a discrete French film noir style relying on
a “paradoxical relationship between visual style and narrative ideology”
(2007, 45). This approach to the form allowed the policier (French noir
genre) to grow in appeal, attracting an audience outside the noir demo-
graphic through its use of spectacular visual imagery, eventually driving the
genre to account for “a quarter of French film production” between the late
1950s and early 1970s (Guérif 1981, 75). Lewis’s syncretic concept offered a
sonic parallel to the paradox Vincendeau identifies, thus making him an
ideal candidate for Vadim’s noir project.
164 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

The plot of Sait-on jamais follows the character Sophie, portrayed by

­
Françoise Arnoul, as she attempts to break free from her longtime care-
giver, Baron Eric von Bergen, played by O. E. Hasse. The Baron, in addi-
tion to his role as Sophie’s protector, is an expert forger with a staff of
criminal accomplices. Early in the film Sophie meets Michel, a photo-
journalist, who impresses her with his honesty and legitimate income,
and the two begin a romantic relationship. Distressed by Sophie’s new-
found love, the Baron confides to an underling named Sforzi that he has
deposited millions of pounds into bank accounts across the Continent
bearing Sophie’s name. Sforzi seduces Sophie away from Michel in the
hope of winning access to the hidden money. He then kills the Baron
when told of his change of heart regarding Sophie and Michel’s relation-
ship along with his intent to transfer control of Sophie’s assets to Michel.
Michel suspects Sforzi of the Baron’s murder, and after uncovering evi-
dence to this effect in Sforzi’s possession, the two are involved in a chase
across rooftops that ends in Sforzi falling to his death.
Lewis’s score for the film draws heavily on six different works: “The
Golden Striker,” “One Never Knows,” “The Rose Truc,” “Cortege,” “Ven-
ice,” and “Three Windows.” Recordings of these pieces can be heard on the
Atlantic album No Sun in Venice, released after the film in 1957. Both in the
film and on the soundtrack recording (variations in arrangement and im-
provisation do exist between the two), the works are presented as the alter-
nation of thematic head arrangements with improvisatory solos performed
by Lewis, Jackson, and Heath. The composed themes, unsurprisingly, con-
tinue to evince Lewis’s penchant for “masking” thematic material with Eu-
ropean sonorities, most evident in the use of a fugal veneer on the work
“Three Windows” (Owens 1976, 31).
The “Three Windows” theme is in turn deployed throughout the film
as a deviance trigger along the lines Ford (2008) describes. Its opening
four-note motive, typically played by the bass, is linked to appearances of
­
the Sforzi character. As thematic stratification occurs through the intro-
duction of the two other themes, Ford’s “crime jazz” trope is activated,
and it is this fully formed cue that is used to underscore scenes in which
Sforzi’s plans unfold (see appendix B). Lewis’s intention to score the film
in this way seems plain enough when comments he made in a 1962 inter-
view with Ralph Gleason are considered. When asked by Gleason how he
 Lewis and Film Noir • 165

approached writing for film, Lewis replied, “For No Sun in Venice . . . I

had to work from a script and a script that had time sequences, and from
the script you had to get some idea of what you think the image and the
sound should be going together.” Expanding further, Lewis spoke about
using the “old-fashioned Wagnerian technique [of ] leitmotif ” in con-
­
nection with the “three main male characters in the picture” ( J. Lewis
[1962] 2006). Such comments are rather unambiguous and beg us to un-
derstand the placement of the “crime jazz” cliché as purposeful while in
turn inviting us to read direct relationships between music and image
during other moments in the film.
Along these lines, it is worth noting that Sophie’s struggle toward
liberation—a liberation at least tangentially connected to her burgeon-
­
ing relationship with Michel—frequently unfolds in counterpoint to im-
­
provised material. The pairing of improvisation with this thematic strain
begins diegetically in a club where Michel has brought Sophie on a date.
The two discuss their feelings for each other while pointedly avoiding
conversation about their problematic past relationships. There is the
sense that while both share troubled pasts, their meeting indicates a new
beginning. In the background, Milt Jackson improvises over the form of
the “Three Windows” theme and is supported by bass, piano, and drums.
This performance transitions to a new piece, “The Rose Truc,” in which
the theme is quickly followed by a vibraphone improvisation over the
harmonic form. The following scene then sees Sophie convince Michel to
come back to her room in the Baron’s villa so that they can listen to music
in a private setting. The camera cuts to Sophie’s bedroom, where a vibra-
phone improvisation over a twelve-bar blues is used to underscore their
­
flirtations. After a brief interlude in which Sophie tells the Baron of Mi-
chel’s visit, Sophie returns to the room and appeals to Michel to rescue
her from the Baron’s control. Their subsequent tryst is accompanied by
another vibraphone improvisation, played over “The Rose Truc” chord
changes.
The use of improvisation to counterpoint Sophie’s potential rescue in
both the bar scene and these early bedroom scenes can be seen to mark a
turn in film noir scoring toward increased improvisational presence. Cooke
has made sense of this shift as part and parcel of the abstraction he hears
occurring in the Anatomy of a Murder music track, referring to Lewis’s score
166 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

as “coolly detached” and grouping it with Miles Davis’s improvisatory score

to Louis Malle’s Ascenseur pour l’echafaud (1957) as examples of “autono-
mous” scores that foreshadow “the non-specific use of music in many 1960s

­
French films” (2009, 253). In other words, the break from specifically scored
accompaniment seems to indicate, for Cooke, a break from the practice of
purposefully placing particular musical material against specific narrative
moments. Yet Lewis’s comments seem to indicate that the presence of im-
provisation in these moments is meant to function in aid of the film narra-
tive. Therefore, while it is difficult to articulate just what aspects of Sophie’s
liberation are being commented on through the use of improvisation in
these moments, the ongoing presence of the crime jazz cliché might be seen
as a tool used to purposefully cast these moments as being somehow op-
positional to the darkest strains of the Sait-on jamais story.
­
This dynamic is perhaps made most clear in a subsequent scene in
which the Baron informs Sforzi that he plans to transfer money out of
Sophie’s accounts and into Michel’s control. The first part of their con-
versation, in which Sforzi tells the Baron that Sophie is beginning to re-
member signing papers setting up the accounts and that he intends to
steal the money, is underscored by the crime jazz cliché in the form of the
“Three Windows” theme. As the Baron produces a letter to the bank out-
lining his wishes, Jackson begins to improvise on the chord changes to
“Cortege” and Sforzi articulates his distress that his plans to drain Sophie
of her inheritance have been ruined. The music then abruptly stops as
Sforzi tells the Baron that he has no choice but to kill him. The nondi-
egetic improvisation in this scene draws a distinction between the Baron’s
well-intentioned, if belated, support for Sophie and Sforzi’s nefarious
­
plans to strip Sophie of her millions. Importantly, the effect of this musi-
cal moment relies on the presence of the crime jazz cliché. That is to say,
while it is difficult to unpack all the ways in which improvisation might
play off the Baron’s change of heart in this moment, we can be certain the
convention is meant to mark distance from Sforzi’s mind-set due to Lew-
­
is’s placement of the crime jazz trope. In the context of this book, such an
approach to scoring can be seen to provide further evidence of Lewis’s
penchant for placing hegemonic conventions at the center of projects
aimed at moving forward musical boundaries, aligning it with the com-
positional approaches charted out in chapter 4.
 Lewis and Film Noir • 167

Improvisation in Lewis’s Score for Odds against Tomorrow (1959)

Lewis’s subsequent film noir score for Robert Wise’s Odds against Tomor-
row evinces a further development of this compositional strategy. Butler
(2009) was the first to identify the innovative treatment of improvisation
in the work, tracing its connection with a variety of opposing thematic
strains. Yet the manner in which the work continues to engage with specific
noir conventions, such as the use of “dissonance and atonality . . . [and] the
breakdown of traditional diegetic/nondiegetic distinctions” (Ness 2008,
52–53) begs for additional attention in relation to a discussion of Lewis’s
­
developing compositional practice. In particular, the use of a brass-heavy

­
“twenty-three-piece orchestra” (Butler 2009, 231) that alternates with the
­
­
sound of the MJQ and improvisations performed by Milt Jackson can be
seen to once again frame the innovative (i.e., the more expansive use of
improvisation) within the boundaries of the expected.
Even when music is left to the side, Odds against Tomorrow can be read
as a film designed to break down barriers. It signified a series of “firsts” in
Hollywood, among them the first film produced by an African American
(Harry Belafonte) and the first film noir with an African American pro-
tagonist (also Belafonte).5 The buzz surrounding these milestones was en-
hanced by Belafonte’s refusal to play into African American stereotypes in
the script, a resolve he articulated to the press months before the film’s re-
lease as follows:

The Negro always has played the same film part or a variation of the
same part. Take my good friend Sidney Poitier; he always plays the
role of the good and patient fellow who finally wins the understand-
ing of his white brothers. Well, I think the audience is ready to go
beyond even films like The Defiant Ones. I think they would be ter-
rifically relieved to see on the screen the Negro as he really is and not
as one side of a black-and-white sociological argument where broth-
­
­
erhood always wins in the end. (qtd. in Nason 1959, X7)

Such a desire for real human nuance contrasted with the “Freudian charac-
terizations” of the noir genre, throwing into jeopardy conventional depic-
tions of good and evil. Building on this concept, the emerging plot neces-
168 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

sarily recast typical two-dimensional “heist” characters as three-dimensional

­
­
battlers: struggling men navigating a complex range of racial prejudices,
constructs of masculine loyalty, and the weight of familial responsibility.
The film plot follows the undoing of these men, each operating with
varying degrees of hostility toward the law. Burke, played by Ed Begley, is
an ex-cop forced to retire in the wake of an ethics hearing. He recruits
­
Slater, played by Robert Ryan, and Johnny, played by Belafonte, to hold up
a bank in the suburban town of Melton, New York. Slater, recently released
from prison, agrees but becomes distressed once he finds out that Johnny is
African American. Johnny, in contrast, is initially reluctant but relents
when his gambling debts are called in. The three are then required to work
together to plan the heist while mitigating Slater’s prejudice, an ultimately
futile act that ends with the death of all three.
The use of improvisation and scored material in the film is mapped in
the soundscape that forms appendix C. The scored material largely derives
from the theme played under the opening credits, consisting of both a four-

­
note ascending scalic motive and a two-note ascending leap. As noted
­
throughout appendix C, repetition of motives “a” (scalic) and “b” (leap)
makes up the vast majority of composed material, and Lewis employs a va-
riety of timbral and textural effects in order to imbue distinction upon
these statements. Improvisatory material in Odds is similarly divided into
two sets, one utilizing the electric guitar and one utilizing the vibraphone.
Guitar improvisations employ pendular thirds and flat sevenths frequently
while vibraphone improvisations take on the more chromatic elements of
the bebop genre. The vibraphone in turn carries additional significance in
Odds in that it is connected diegetically with Belafonte’s character, Johnny
(Butler 2009, 230).
Perhaps the most curious aspect of the score is the way in which the
scored cues, many of which feature loud, dissonant chords orchestrated
across the brass, seem to be placed in a somewhat abstracted relationship
with the film image and narrative, while improvisation, at least in regard to
the vibraphone, is frequently called on to give rise to the memory of Bela-
fonte’s character, Johnny. Lewis’s towering chords do occasionally work to
heighten specific moments of anxiety in the film, such as when they are
used to underscore Slater and Burke’s initial trip up to Melton or when
Johnny sees the bank they have agreed to rob for the first time. Yet many
 Lewis and Film Noir • 169

times, the sort of anxiety they are meant to induce seems less clear, such as
in the scene in which they sound in tandem with Johnny chauffeuring
Burke downtown after initially rejecting his offer or the scene in which they
are used to underscore Slater’s arrival at Burke’s apartment. Certainly a
heavy pulse of anxiety connects these moments, yet the quality of the anxi-
ety the audience is meant to experience is uncertain. That is to say, the scor-
ing of dissonant brass chords does not function in Odds against Tomorrow
the same way the “crime jazz” trope functions in Sait-on jamais. Their pres-

­
ence does color storytelling in the film at the macro level, but it clarifies
little in relation to the undercurrents of specific scenes.
The use of vibraphone improvisation in the film, in contrast, plays a
more direct storytelling role. The first moment of improvisation along
these lines occurs diegetically in the jazz club scene I describe in the be-
ginning of this chapter. As Butler remarks, use of the vibraphone as an
echo of Johnny’s character is then further explored during the longest
section of nondiegetic improvisation in the score (2009, 230). This pas-
sage accompanies Johnny, Burke, and Slater’s trip up to Melton on the eve
of the robbery. Johnny travels by bus while Burke and Slater travel in
separate cars, leaving one halfway between New York and Melton so that
the group can split up after the robbery (Butler 2009, 230). Jackson be-
gins improvising over a two-note ostinato figure as Slater tests the get-
­
away car on a stretch of open road. According to Butler,

What makes this sequence so striking is that Slater, a white racist,

has his moment of emotional freedom accompanied by an impro-
vised jazz solo played on the instrument diegetically associated with
his colleague Johnny, the black jazz musician for whom he has noth-
ing but contempt. Lewis underlines here, far more explicitly than
anything in the script, the breakdown of the duality between Johnny
and Slater. This point is of major significance—black jazz is em-
­
ployed to convey the innermost feelings of a white character. (2009,
230)

It seems that Butler’s ideas of this moment’s significance overlap with how
it might be read in terms of a double-voiced analysis. The use of jazz vibra-
­
phone in connection with Slater, the darkest character in the film, harks
170 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

back to stereotypical jazz deviance associations, providing an initial level of

meaning. Yet the music is also the anthem of the most morally aware char-
acter in the film, Johnny, and its use highlights the fact that Slater, while
inexcusably racist, is on some level still trying to do the right thing; he is
tied up in the same financial and familial responsibilities as Johnny and is
endeavoring, like Johnny, to claw his way out.
The echo of Johnny’s morality in other moments of vibraphone impro-
visation further point to a purposeful deployment of these cues as a tool for
enhancing scenes in specific ways. For instance, after finding out that
Johnny is African American, a distressed Slater enters a bar. Polonsky’s
(1999, 70) script calls for an interior shot of this moment with a radio
“humming old tunes,” but in the released version of the film this require-
ment is replaced by the MJQ performing what would come to be known as
“Cue #9” (1959) on the film soundtrack. The bar is populated by a young
soldier, the soldier’s girlfriend, and another male companion, and upon
Slater’s entrance the music grows louder, suggesting its diegetic role. As
Slater sits and orders, the soldier demonstrates a self-defense move and in-
­
advertently causes his male companion to collide with Slater. Jackson’s im-
provisation and embellishments of the “Cue #9” theme underscore the al-
tercation as Slater does his best to shake off the assault, embracing the
moral qualities associated with Johnny. As the soldier continues his dem-
onstration, this time with the girl as the model, Slater reaches his threshold
of tolerance and the music cuts out in connection with the line “Honey, if
you’re goin’ to throw that bum, throw him the other way” (Polonsky 1999,
73). This abrupt shift echoes Lewis’s cue underscoring the Baron’s murder
in Sait-on jamais, requiring improvisation to conjure a certain emotional
­
milieu before calling on its absence to articulate a narrative shift.
There is certainly a degree of collaboration that must be considered in
this analysis of Odds against Tomorrow. The choice to locate improvisation
diegetically in the jazz club sequence probably has more to do with the
choices of Polonsky and Wise than those of Lewis. Yet the script itself
would have made the symbolic nature of the vibraphone clear to Lewis, and
it is therefore against this understanding that the presence of vibraphone
improvisation in the film might best be read, especially given the attention
to character Lewis paid in crafting his score for Sait-on jamais.
­
Of particular relevance to the arguments woven throughout this book
 Lewis and Film Noir • 171

is the fact that the effectiveness of such an approach relied on a rather con-
servative notion of how a film score might function. That is to say, in con-
trast to Cooke’s argument about jazz scores enabling an abstraction to oc-
cur between image and film, Lewis can be seen to have used specific musical
effects to enhance the narrative arc of the film projects with which he was
involved. In turn, whether these effects related to the use of the “crime jazz”
cliché in Sait-on jamais, the use of a brassy, dissonant, modernist backdrop
­
in Odds against Tomorrow, or the use of a textural leitmotif in the shape of
improvisation in both Sait-on jamais an Odds against Tomorrow, Lewis’s
­
aim to expand the presence of improvisation in these films was realized
through dialogue with existing noir-scoring conventions. This strategy of
­
engaging the familiar to deliver the unfamiliar links clearly with Lewis’s
projects outside the domain of film during the 1950s and allows us to un-
derstand in specific terms how his film scores might be seen to evince the
continuation of an aesthetic practice forged in his earlier compositions.
6 • “Real” Black Music

As the 1950s drew to a close and frustration with the progress of the civil
rights movement added fire to the “Black Nationalist” movement in the
United States, the criticism Lewis faced took on a decidedly more militant
feel. Leading the charge of this critical turn was a young writer named Le-
Roi Jones, who struck out against Third Stream artists and other Western
art music appropriators in a 1961 essay for Metronome titled “The Jazz
Avant-Garde.” To be clear, in no way was Jones a “moldy fig”—a critic who
­
­
believed jazz’s best days were behind it, somewhere between Buddy Bolden
and Duke Ellington. As he would write in the opening of his Metronome
essay, “We are, all of us, moderns, whether we like it or not” ( Jones [1961]
2010, 82). Yet at the same time Jones took exception to artists, like Lewis,
who appeared to express their modernity uncritically—those who seemed
­
to unquestionably engage with the hegemonic values and aesthetics of the
dominant social class. For Jones, such an approach signaled the unforgiv-
able sin of willful “indoctrination” and worked to undermine the real intel-
lectual work achieved by those committed to stewarding what he believed
to be the “roots” of African American music: the musical conventions of
blues and bebop ( Jones [1961] 2010, 82).
In an effort to clearly set out what a more appropriate approach to jazz
modernism might look like, Jones’s essay quickly pivoted to a discussion of
the music produced by up and coming jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman.
Coleman had truly shaken up the jazz world two years prior with the re-
lease of his album The Shape of Jazz to Come (1959), a collection of six orig-
inal compositions, each containing passages of non-chord-based improvi-
­
­
172
 “Real” Black Music • 173

sation. His follow-up album, Change of the Century (1959), was similarly

­
conceived, and both have often been contextualized as prefiguring the “free
jazz” movement of the 1960s. Yet the intrigue of these recordings lay for
Jones not on their “free” aspects but on the fact that despite rejecting the
use of an underlying harmonic structure, the tracks on these albums con-
tinued to articulate a very real connection to blues and bebop tropes—

­
those musical elements Jones viewed as essential to authentic African
American music production. In reference to Coleman’s composition
“Ramblin’”, Jones wrote that “the very jaggedness and abruptness of the
melodic fabric itself suggest[s] the boppers’ seemingly endless need for de-
liberate and agitated rhythmical contrast” and that one simply needed to
“whistle Ramblin’, then any early Monk [piece]” for “the basic physical
similarities of melodic lines . . . [to] be immediately apparent” ([1961] 2010,
87). Putting the same concept in more poetic terms, Jones argued that
Coleman’s modernist aesthetic might be best viewed as a project in which
the innovations of beboppers like Charlie Parker were held up as a sort of
“hypothesis” from which Coleman was then able to develop conclusions
“separate and unique” ([1961] 2010, 85). Such an approach stood distinct in
Jones’s mind from the work of John Lewis, whose focus on Western art
music principles set in place a very different core impulse—one that in
­
Jones’s mind “served to obscure the really valuable legacies of bop” ([1961]
2010, 88).
Given the intensity of Jones’s critique, it is somewhat surprising to note
that Lewis was in fact one of Coleman’s strongest early supporters. In-
trigued after witnessing performances of Coleman’s group in 1958, Lewis
encouraged Coleman to attend the Lenox School of Jazz in 1959 and facili-
tated his move to Atlantic Records in the same year, a career development
that resulted not only in the albums The Shape of Jazz to Come and Change
of the Century but also in Coleman’s legendary album Free Jazz (1960) (Ka-
plan 2009, 204–5). Furthermore, throughout the early 1960s Lewis evinced
­
a personal interest in the specifics of the young saxophonist’s music, initiat-
ing double bills featuring the MJQ and Coleman’s quartet at the Village
Vanguard in 1960 and recording Coleman’s original work “Lonely Woman”
(1959) on the MJQ’s 1962 album of the same name.
Of further curiosity is the fact that both Jones and Lewis appear to have
been drawn into Coleman’s “avant-garde” music in similar ways. In an in-
­
174 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

terview published in the March 1960 issue of Jazz Review, Lewis reflected
on the saxophonist’s innovative use of bebop gestures in terms that neatly
foreshadowed Jones’s “hypothesis” model, stating,

Ornette is, in a sense, an extension of Charlie Parker—the first I’ve

­
ever heard. This is the real need I think [that] has to take place, to
extend the basic ideas of Bird until they are not playing an imitation
but actually something new. I think that they may have come up
with something, not perfect yet, and it’s still in the early stages, but
nevertheless very fresh and interesting. (Qtd. in Thorne 1960, 7)

Yet despite the fact that both Jones and Lewis were able to discern a bebop
echo in Coleman’s music, the two would not articulate the significance of
this echo the same way. For Lewis, extending the innovations of Charlie
Parker fell neatly in line with the evolutionary narrative of jazz develop-
ment endorsed by the Lenox School of Jazz and European modernists like
André Hodeir. His praise of Coleman’s group printed in Martin Williams’s
liner notes for The Shape of Jazz to Come is unambiguously made along
these lines, highlighting the importance of forward movement in the genre
through his comment that Coleman’s music was “the only really new thing
in jazz since the innovations in the mid-forties of Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie
­
Parker and Thelonious Monk” (Williams 1959, 1). Jones, on the other hand,
interpreted the significance of Coleman’s innovations firmly along stew-
ardship lines. He acknowledged that Coleman’s method was undoubtedly
shaped by the modern world but felt that its prioritization of certain bebop
aesthetics activated or kept in play the “roots” of jazz music—musical
­
“idea[s] we love, no matter what the subsequent disfigurement” ( Jones
[1961] 2010, 84).
The fact that both Jones and Lewis could hear in Coleman’s music so
much worth praising despite understanding its significance differently
speaks volumes to the central idea of this book—that is, the very simple
­
notion that one’s understanding of musical significance is always unique. In
other words, there is no empirical test through which we might be able to
discern once and for all whether The Shape of Jazz to Come was an album
focused primarily on the idea of vernacular stewardship or one focused pri-
marily on the idea of breaking new ground—especially given the fact that
­
 “Real” Black Music • 175

the sonic result of the album can easily be interpreted through either para-
digm of emphasis. Where one falls on the spectrum of interpretation rests
instead on one’s understanding of the historical energies surrounding the
work. For Jones, the historical moment of The Shape of Jazz to Come was
clearly charged with anxiety over the obliteration of the African American
musical voice. His angry dismissal of “white middle-brow [critics] . . .

­
enforc[ing] white middle-brow standards of excellence” ( Jones 1963b, 17)
­
in the pages of Down Beat, in connection with his critique of Cool and
Third Stream artists in his “The Jazz Avant-Garde” essay, identify clearly

­
those Jones viewed as responsible for the threat. Yet for Lewis, Coleman’s
album seemed to grow out of a different historical space. Shaped at the
Lenox School of Jazz and supported by the same label that had supported
Lewis’s modernist projects, Coleman’s work represented the fruits of
(rather than a reaction against) a decade of progressive musical thought
bent on challenging assumptions about what jazz music should, and should
not, sound like.
Over the course of this book I have aimed to illuminate the myriad of
forces behind why Lewis may have viewed such a challenge to be necessary
as well as how such an ideology manifested aurally in his own musical
works. This choice in storytelling began in my first chapter with a discus-
sion of how the syncretic works surveyed in this book were conceived dur-
ing a period of exceptional transition in the jazz market. During the 1940s,
a shift in record company support from big bands to individual vocalists
left an employment and audience hole in the jazz industry that several art-
ists attempted to fill by designing works that utilized both Western art mu-
sic and African American vernacular sonorities. While some of these artists
discovered successful promotional models (Duke Ellington, for instance,
stands out in this regard), most struggled to package their works in a man-
ner that consistently enabled financial success. Fortunately, the modernist
concept of jazz as a developing music advanced by Marshall Stearns and
others at tertiary institutions during the late 1940s and early 1950s opened
up a new type of venue primed specifically for the promotion of syncretic
projects: the university campus. This advancement was of course not with-
out its problems, with access to university venues initially limited to white
syncretic jazz groups only. I therefore also discussed in this chapter how
African American syncretic composers were forced to capitalize on increas-
176 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

ing modernist interest by opening parallel “modern” music venues built on

the foundation of established African American musical spaces. This shift
in venue choice and aligned embrace of classical-jazz fusion techniques did

­
indeed enable the recruitment of new supporters but, in the eyes of many,
seemed to court alignment with Western art music to an uncomfortable
extent.
Such unease appears largely linked to the historic essentialization of
rhythm in African and African American musical discourse discussed in
chapter 2. My discussion of Lewis’s reception within this critical milieu
aimed to illuminate the inevitable result of such a mind-set. Throughout

­
the chapter I endeavored to show how ambiguous counterpoint and multi-
movement formats utilized by the MJQ frequently pushed to the side
rhythmic consideration in appraisals of the group’s music made by the jazz
press. Such criticism then worked to cast Lewis’s music against established
notions of “genuine” jazz. Furthermore, I set out the manner in which such
criticism conjured an image of Lewis and the MJQ as abdicators of African
American social norms. Specifically, I argued that the reception of Lewis’s
musical identity as “European” went hand in hand with ascriptions of con-
servative behavior and dress that were coded in the jazz press as “white,”
articulating a persistent stereotype about African American behavior and
culture being the opposite: primitive and wild.
Yet for many African Americans, such assessments about what consti-
tuted “real” African American social and cultural norms missed the mark
in more ways than one. In chapter 3 I looked at the history of challenges
to African American behavioral and cultural stereotyping that took place
in middle- and upper-class African American circles during the seventy
­
­
years prior to Lewis’s emergence in an effort to demonstrate both why
African Americans saw power in a conservative cultural model that mir-
rored hegemonic values and how many African American artists sought
to realize these values in musical terms. This discussion demonstrated
that challenges to cultural stereotypes did indeed help many African
Americans reassume the reigns of self-determination by effectively
­
achieving behavioral parity within a society that overtly denied the basic
facts of equality. I then put forth the argument that persistent segrega-
tion in the United States resulted in many members of this group viewing
their maintenance of behavioral parity—most evident in the domains of
­
 “Real” Black Music • 177

“genteel behavior” and the celebration of Western art music—not as a

­
shared cultural heritage with “white” America but as a discrete tradition.
The discussion of musical works that then took place in chapter 4
sought to graph how the legacy of this tradition impacted the exploration
of new markets and Lewis’s musical practice during his first decade of en-
semble leadership. Immediately apparent in these analyses was the fact that
Lewis frequently pursued contrapuntal ambiguity in his works—a compo-

­
sitional approach that engaged listeners in questions about where genre
boundaries stood and whether the supposed rigidity of compositional
realms was in fact something real. Such an approach required intimate
knowledge of jazz-based improvisational practices as well as Western art
­
music contrapuntal techniques (or processes) and quickly elevated Lewis’s
music to the forefront of a modernist jazz movement centered on the idea
that jazz was an evolving, forward-looking music. The confidence Lewis
­
gained from this acceptance—particularly in relation to the exponents of
­
modernism abroad—seems to have in turn contributed to a deeper engage-
­
ment with Western artistic ideas, most notable in his ongoing exploration
of the commedia dell’arte theatrical form over the latter half of the 1950s.
Yet the musical traditions of the African American middle and upper class
discussed in chapter 3 allow us to view even these works as something other
than outward-looking vehicles of appropriation. Indeed, whether or not
­
one agrees entirely with the idea that works like “Colombine” and “Harle-
quin” should be ascribed the label of “real” black music, there is at the very
least an historical basis for conceiving of these works as part of a bona fide
African American music-making tradition based on the celebration and
­
stewardship of Western artistic forms. Furthermore, Lewis’s desire to ex-
pand the presence of improvisation in the realm of film scores, discussed in
chapter 5, further confirms at least some level of involvement with a project
aimed at reshaping ideas about African American music, aligning it with
middle- and upper-class uplift strategy.
­
­
Beyond the Audible Black Voice

Interpreting Lewis’s music in relation to this spectrum of cultural forces

sets the stage for a discussion of the effects of sonic essentialism in African
178 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

American musical discourse more generally. For instance, in an examina-

tion of one of Lewis’s contemporaries, bassist-composer Charles Mingus,

­
Eric Porter rightly identifies a shift in the overtness of vernacular tropes
following the scoring of Mingus’s work “Revelations” (discussed in chapter
1) but couples this observation with the statement that “Mingus’s music
became, in a sense, ‘blacker’” (2002, 117). On one hand, Porter is clearly
right. The blues sonorities and rhythmic drive that permeate the 1959 al-
bums Blues and Roots and Mingus Ah Um articulate a clear commitment to
musical tropes from the folk realm. But pointing to the overt use of these
tropes as the essence of what it means to produce “black” music marginal-
izes a history of African American music making concerned with the explo-
ration of other sorts of musical phenomena. Porter uses quotation marks
around the term “blacker” in an effort to denote that it is perceptions of
blackness to which he is referring and so it is not his reading of Mingus’s
shift that directly requires revision. It is instead the enduring nature of es-
sentialist perceptions of blackness that must be interrogated if we are to
understand why audibility of blues sonorities continues to signal blackness
to a greater extent than the sonic realization of a rhetorical trope like “revi-
sion with difference” or even the performance of certain works of Western
art music—musical “traditions” that have at various times played equally
­
central roles in African American musical experience.
Of course, one must not be naïve in regard to the danger of dismissing
the many ways in which blues aesthetics have shaped significant aspects of
African American culture. Indeed, the centrality of blues aesthetics to the
vernacular theory texts of the 1960s and 1970s—of which Jones’s/Baraka’s
­
Blues People (1963) and Black Music (1961) are a central part—can largely
­
be understood as responding to the very real threat of cultural devaluation
posed by those who would downplay the importance of blues sensibilities.
The broad methodological trend in jazz discourse prior to the advent of
vernacular theory typically involved tracing the evolution of structural ele-
ments in the genre through transcriptions and analytical techniques estab-
lished for the study of Western art music. Evaluation in these investigations
then revolved around a comparison of the structural elements of the jazz
works studied with musical conventions typically found in the works of
European composers. Winthrop Sargeant’s Jazz Hot and Hybrid ([1938]
1975), published at the height of the swing era, provided the first book-
­
 “Real” Black Music • 179

length study oriented along these lines. As the incorporation of European

elements into jazz became more pronounced following the 1940s, however,
others would begin applying similar methodologies (Schuller 1958, 1968;
Schmitz & de Lerma 1979). When viewed from a contemporary context,
such assessments appear to evince Eurocentric bias. Were this to have be-
come the dominant analytical trend in jazz discourse, it is conceivable that
the genre’s blues roots might have eventually become more or less a foot-
note in a broader discussion of a new style of syncretic American music.
Such an outcome was not desirable to those who understood and in
many cases had participated in a system of creation that seemed distinct
from Western creative practices. And whether or not this distinction was
true in an absolute sense is beside the point.1 Faced with marginalization,
these authors understandably rejected descriptions of African American
music that saw value in it only when it mirrored Western conventions and
sought to illuminate innovative vernacular use whenever and wherever it
occurred. While part of this involved the discussion of African American
rhetorical tropes such as “revision with difference” and “double-voiced”

­
constructs, sonic effects such as rhythmic syncopation, blues sonorities,
pendular thirds, riffs, and all other facets derived from what Sterling
Stuckey refers to as the “Ring Shout” (discussed in chapter 1) were in turn
reasonably championed as valuable components of African American mu-
sic making. Yet the way in which these authors prioritized this long list of
sonorities associated with folk culture over sonorities developed in connec-
tion with cosmopolitan African American culture effectively drew a line in
the sand for what might constitute “real” black music.
In a recent book titled Racial Uplift and American Music: 1878–1943
­
(2012), Lawrence Schenbeck writes of being inspired by a question asked by
one of his students in an introductory music class that appeared to grow out
of this essentialist position: “Just what is black about the music of [orchestral]
composer Florence Price (1888–1953)?” (2012, 3). Over the course of his
­
monograph, Schenbeck answers this question by discussing the history of
African American spirituals and orchestrated works through a framework
similar to that used in chapter 3 of this book. Specifically, he focuses on how
the “politics of respectability”—or what he refers to as “uplift ideology”—
­
­
was used to redefine notions of African American identity throughout sev-
eral historic periods of migration and community formation in the United
180 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

States. Writing about a shift toward more direct, community-oriented politi-

­
cal activism at the end of the 1940s, Schenbeck then reaches the following
conclusion:

For better or worse black Americans’ fight for civil rights and equal
opportunity would no longer be waged in those concert halls and
artist studios where the quiet demonstration of “civilized” behaviors
had had to serve as the only weapon available for gaining basic re-
spect and better treatment. Art as a survival strategy, as a marker of
gentility, education, and potential for inclusion, would be sup-
planted in the coming decades by legal battles, protest marches and
legislation. The privileges politely requested by the Talented Tenth
would become rights demanded by all African Americans. And,
linked to that sea change in attitudes, the stature of the Race’s Na-
thaniel Detts, Carl Ditons, and Howard Swansons would be over-
taken by its Duke Ellingtons, Dinah Washingtons, and Miles Da-
vises. (2012, 242)

While I agree with the vast majority of Schenbeck’s assertions, I do feel that
the story I have told in this monograph paints a slightly different picture
regarding the legacy of uplift ideology. In other words, I feel that Schen-
beck’s summary above has the potential to lead some readers to the idea
that the sort of identities constructed through the uplift project were a
means to a political end only and that as attitudes in the United States to-
ward African Americans began to change, African Americans were allowed
to slide back into their vernacular roots (or at the very least, to begin to lift
the symphonic robes with which they had draped their blues sensibilities).
Certainly there seems to be some truth in reading the situation that way.
The acceptance of bebop and modern jazz in elite African American circles
during the 1940s (discussed in chapter 3) shows absolutely how narratives
regarding cultural evolution espoused by the New Negro movement were
eventually used to elevate musical forms long associated with provincial
folk elements—at least as soon as the white hegemony was also ready to
­
embrace such forms as modern art.
Yet to suggest that this elevation was the only important outcome of the
project seems to marginalize a group of people who had grown to think of
their musical heritage in different terms. John Lewis’s expansive view re-
 “Real” Black Music • 181

garding the possibilities of modern music in particular seems to have grown

out of a conception of musical practice that more often than not aimed to
deny the audibility of folk elements and at other times went further, remov-
ing folk elements from the musical core of his works in order to make room
for Western art concepts. The long history of utilizing “double-voiced” mu-

­
sical tropes in African American culture that I discuss in the opening of this
book demonstrates one way in which we can see the former set of works as
upholding African American cultural practice even as they produced con-
tent that challenged consensus surrounding what “real” black music should
sound like. Contextualizing the latter group of works in similar terms is
more difficult.
Still, before dismissing the latter group as somehow inauthentic, it is
vitally important to consider Guthrie Ramsey’s call to consider “what . . .
modernity [was] to African Americans at the historical moment under
consideration” (2003, 97) For many African Americans (although not
nearly all), the 1950s were a moment of arrival. Decades of musical practice
long undertaken separately from the white Western art music world were
now bearing fruit in the form of interracial orchestral societies across the
United States. Symphonic works by African American composers had in
turn begun to infiltrate mainstream orchestral performance, and the segre-
gation of traditionally white ensembles was beginning to slowly erode.
These changes were not brought about apathetically. They resulted from
nearly a hundred years’ worth of struggle, training, and musical innovation
within African American communities. To consider these advancements as
somehow disconnected from the African American cultural world would
therefore be to seriously misunderstand their significance.
Yet this is the attitude against which Lewis would struggle as he strove
to promote his musical vision and the attitude against which his legacy
would be assessed at the time of his death. It is worth keeping such a discon-
nect in mind as the historical particularities of jazz movements are parsed
further—particularly as we continue to develop frameworks for under-
­
standing various conceptions of authenticity, a phenomenon experienced
by many in very real terms but rarely agreed upon universally by those who
lay claim to it. As we embrace this challenge, we must be prepared to nu-
ance our long-held understandings about much-loved music, but the pay-
­
­
off of such a sacrifice is much greater than anything we might lose. Accept-
ing the fact that multiple conceptions of “real” black music might exist at
182 • John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music

any one time allows the voices and stories of individuals, rather than the
generalized voice of an imagined group, to gain critical weight. In this way
we bring to the forefront of our musical discussions actual experiences of
race and culture rather than imagined constructs of these terms and give
power to individuals who for whatever reason have never fit easily into a
single mold.
Appendixes
Appendix A
Formal Outlines of Selected Works
Table A. “All the Things You Are.” Recorded December 22, 1952: Prestige LP7059.
M. Section Length (mm.) Improvisation Rhythmic features

1 Interplay between bass ostinato + cym- 7 X Bass ostinato and

bal/drum rolls. cymbal/drum
rolls.
7 “A” section of theme played by piano 14 X Cont.
and vibraphone in unison at the oc-
tave twice with final two bars omit-
ted.
21 “A” section of the theme played by piano 8 X Drums switch to
and vibraphone in unison at the keeping swung
octave. Theme evinces slight rhythmic time.
alteration from lead sheet.
29 Second “A” section paraphrased in the 8 Vibraphone Cont.
piano, vibraphone improvisation
played on top.
37 Piano improvisation over the chord 8 Piano Cont.
changes of the “B” section.
45 Piano and vibraphone play newly com- 12 X Cont.
posed melody in unison over chord
changes of the third “A” section (+
tag).
57 Composed unison break followed by 4 X/vibraphone Ensemble plays in
improvised vibraphone lick, which rhythmic unison.
leads into the next improvisatory sec-
tion.
61 Vibraphone improvises over the thirty- 36 Vibraphone Drums keep swung
­
six-bar form of the piece. Piano time.
­
comps chords and bass plays changes.
97 Piano improvises over a bridging sec- 8 Piano Cont.
tion.
105 Bass improvises over the chord changes 12 Bass Cont.
of the “B” section and the first four
bars of the third “A” section. Piano
and vibraphone motifs derived from
the melody provide harmonic sup-
port.
117 Piano and vibraphone play melody from 6 X Cont.
bar 49 with the final two bars omit-
ted.
123 First four bars of first “A” section played 9 X Bass ostinato and
by the piano and vibraphone in uni- cymbal/drum
son at the octave. Bass ostinato and rolls.
cymbal/drum rolls follow for four
bars. Final bar is held on the tonic
chord by the bass, vibes, and piano.

In relation to the discussion on p. 119, note the use of an asymmetrical introduction and the
widespread use of improvisation in this work.

186
Table B. “Rose of the Rio Grande.” Recorded December 22, 1952: Prestige LP7059.
M. Section Length (mm.) Improvisation Rhythmic features

1 Introductory call-and- 4 X Unison—drums begin play-

­
­
­
response between vibes, ing with the ensemble on
piano, and bass. the piano entrance.
5 Theme composed of overlap- 8 X Drums (brushes) accent pi-
ping parts (vibraphone ano part.
and piano) played for
eight bars.
13 Theme repeated. 8 X Cont. In bar 18 drums pro-
ceed to play swung time
and bass walks.
21 Vibraphone improvisation. 32 Vibraphone Drums keep swung time.
Bar 21 contains quote of
introductory call figure.
Piano comps chords and
short contrapuntal lines.
Bass walks changes.
53 Piano improvisation. 32 Piano Cont.
85 Theme composed of overlap- 8 X Drums (brushes) accent pi-
ping parts (vibraphone ano part.
and piano) played for
eight bars.
93 Theme repeated. 8 X Cont. In bar 98 drums pro-
ceed to play swung time
and bass walks.

In relation to the discussion on p. 119, note the contrapuntal interplay in the thematic state-
ments as well as the widespread use of improvisation in this work.

187
Table C. “Vendome.” Recorded December 22, 1952: Prestige LP7059.
Length Rhythmic
M. Section (mm.) Improvisation features

1 Fugal subject played by vibraphone in 3 + anacrusis X Drums

C minor. (brushes)
play swung
time.
4 Fugal answer played by piano in G 3 X Cont.
minor. Vibraphone plays half-note-

­
­
length harmonic support.
7 Fugal subject returns an octave higher in 3 X Cont. Exposition 1
the vibraphone in C minor. Piano
plays half notes in harmonic support
and two bars of independent counter-
point.
10 Fugal answer played by bass in G minor 3 X Cont.
while vibraphone and piano continue
in independent counterpoint.
13 Vibraphone improvisation. Piano comps 16 Vibraphone Cont. Episode 1
chords and occasionally independent
contrapuntal lines. Over final bars
ensemble modulates to F minor.
29 Fugal subject played by piano in F mi- 7 X Cont. Exposition 2
nor. Vibraphone plays answer while
piano continues underneath in inde-
pendent counterpoint.
38 Piano improvisation. Vibraphone plays 11 Piano Cont. Episode 2
whole-note-length harmonic support.
­
­
Over final bars ensemble modulates
to D major.
49 Fugal subject played by vibraphone in D 4 X Cont.
major.
53 Composed bridging passage involving 13 X Cont. Exposition 3
vibes/piano and bass interplay.
66 Fugal subject played by piano in E 5 X Cont.
minor.
71 Vibraphone improvisation. Modulation 37 Vibraphone Drums keep Episode 3
from E minor to G major. Piano swung
comps chords and occasionally inde- time
pendent contrapuntal lines. Over (clearer ac-
final bars modulation back to cents on
C minor. beats 2
and 4).
108 Overlapping statements of the fugal sub- 6.5 bars1 X Cont. Exposition 4
ject between the vibraphone and the
piano played in C minor.
114.5 Composed coda for all instruments end- 7 X Cont. Coda
ing on Picardy third.
1
There appears to be a two-beat error (omission) in the performance around bar 113.
­
In relation to the discussion on p. 119, note how preplanned expositions alternate with impro-
vised episodes in this work and how modulations that occur in the episodes enable expositions
in a variety of tonalities.

188
Table D. “The Queen’s Fancy.” Recorded June 25, 1953: Prestige LP7057.
M. Section Length (mm.) Improvisation Rhythmic features

1 Opening fanfare. 5 X Drum rolls on snare.

Straight time.
6 Theme stated in the vibra- 8 X Syncopated drum/piano/
phone. bass hits for first four
bars, then on the beat
hits for the remaining
four bars. Straight time.
14 Theme played in the piano 8 X Drum rolls on snare; bass
and offset in the vibra- plays contrapuntal line
phone. for first five bars, then
doubles the vibraphone
in bar 19 and plays
straight quarter notes in
bars 20–21. Straight

­
time.
22 Bass plays secondary theme 8 X Drums keep swung time.
and is accompanied by uni-
son melodic interjections
performed by the vibra-
phone and piano.
30 Repeat of opening fanfare 4 X Drum rolls on snare.
with final bar omitted. Straight time.
34 Vibraphone improvisation 32 Vibraphone Drums keep swung time
over AABA form. and bass walks changes.
Piano comps chords.
66 Repeat of opening fanfare 4 X Drum rolls on toms.
with final bar omitted. Straight time.
70 Bridging passage in which the 12 X Drums keep swung time
secondary theme is trun- and bass walks changes.
cated into a motif played
four times by the vibra-
phone and passed through
a series of ii–V–I changes
­
­
(beginning in F and ending
in Db).
82 Piano improvisation over 32 Piano Drums keep swung time
AABA form. and bass walks changes.
Vibraphone comps a few
melodic lines behind the
improvisation.
114 Repeat of the eight-bar sec- 8 X Drums keep swung time.
­
tion beginning in bar 22.
122 Repeat of opening fanfare 4 X Drum rolls on snare.
with final bar omitted. Straight time.

In relation to the discussion on p. 121, note how straight-time and preplanned contrapuntal
­
passages bracket improvisatory passages in this work.

189
Table E. “La Ronde.” Recorded December 22, 1952: Prestige LP7059.
M. Section Length (mm.) Improvisation Rhythmic features

1 Composed introduction in 8 Drums Improvised drum fills.

which ensemble hits alter-
nate with drum fills.
9 Theme played in unison at 16 X Drums keep swung time.
the octave by piano and
vibraphone.
25 Theme repeated in unison at 16 X Cont.
the octave by piano and
vibraphone. Second half
of the theme is modified
melodically but continues
to be played in unison.
41 Composed bridging section. 8 X Drums keep swung time.
49 Ensemble hits derived from 16 Drums Improvised drum fills.
the final eight bars of the
theme alternate with
drum fills.
65 Vibraphone improvisation 24 Vibraphone Drums keep swung time.
over two twelve-bar blues
­
forms. Piano comps
chords and bass walks
changes.
89 Piano improvisation over 12 Piano Cont.
one twelve-bar blues
­
form. Bass walks changes.
101 Composed bridging section. 20 X/drums Cont. Improvised drum fills
Piano plays in between en- in bars 117–20.
­
semble breaks during bars
114–15. Drum fills alter-
­
nate with ascending piano
line in bars 117–20.
­
121 Theme played in unison at 13 X/drums Drums keep swung time.
the octave by piano and
vibraphone. Final two bars
of form played as drum
solo.
134 Improvised drum solo for 17 Drums Improvised drum solo.
sixteen bars. Piano/vibes/
bass play final chord in bar
150.

In relation to the discussion on p. 124, note the centrality of twelve-bar blues choruses embed-
­
ded within a composed frame in this work.

190
Table F.1. “La Ronde Suite.” Recorded January 9, 1955: Prestige LP7057. Part I (quarter
note = 312 approx.) Tempo is not given in cut-time in order to facilitate comparison of form

­
between the movements.
M. Section Length (mm.) Improvisation Rhythmic features

1 Composed introduction 8 X Ensemble plays in rhythmic

where ensemble hits alter- unison.
nate with piano fills.
9 Theme played by the vibra- 16 X/piano Drums keep swung time.
phone while piano impro-
visation occurs simultane-
ously. Bass walks changes.
25 Theme repeated in the vibra- 16 X/piano Cont.
phone while piano impro-
visation continues. Bass
walks changes.
41 Composed bridging section 8 X/piano Bass, drums, and vibraphone
in which the bass and vi- play in rhythmic unison.
braphone play the melody
while the piano impro-
vises fills.
49 Ensemble hits derived from 16 X/piano Ensemble plays hits in rhyth-
the final eight bars of the mic unison.
theme alternate with
piano fills.
65 Piano improvisation occurs 24 Piano Drums keep swung time.
over two twelve-bar blues
­
forms. The vibraphone
adds independent backing
lines over the second cho-
rus. Bass walks changes.
89 Composed bridging section; 8 X/piano Bass, drums, and vibraphone
piano plays in between play in rhythmic unison.
ensemble breaks in each
bar.
97 Theme played by the vibra- 16 X/piano Drums keep swung time.
phone while piano impro-
visation occurs simultane-
ously.
113 Piano improvises unaccom- 20 Piano Interpretation is swung but
panied coda. there is no percussion
accompaniment.

191
Table F.2. “La Ronde Suite.” Recorded January 9, 1955: Prestige LP7057. Part II (quarter
note = 169 approx.)
M. Section Length (mm.) Improvisation Rhythmic features

1 Composed introduction 8 X Ensemble plays in rhythmic

where ensemble hits alter- unison.
nate with bass fills.
9 Theme played by the piano 16 X/bass Drums keep swung time.
and vibraphone while bass
improvisation occurs
simultaneously.
25 Theme played by the piano 16 X/bass Cont.
and vibraphone while bass
improvisation occurs
simultaneously.
41 Composed bridging section 8 X/bass Cont.
in which the vibraphone
and piano play the mel-
ody while the bass impro-
vises fills.
49 Ensemble hits derived from 16 X/bass Cont.
the final eight bars of the
theme alternate with bass
fills.
65 Bass improvises over two 24 Bass Cont.
twelve-bar blues forms
­
while the vibraphone and
piano play backing figures
over both choruses.
89 Composed bridging section; 8 X/bass Drums hit on beat 1 of bars
bass plays in between en- 89 and 91, then begin
semble breaks in each bar. swung time in bar 93.
97 Theme played by the piano 16 X/bass Drums keep swung time.
and vibraphone while bass
improvisation occurs
simultaneously.
113 Bass improvises coda. Vibra- 12 Bass Drums keep swung time
phone and piano ostinato until bar 123.
accompanies the first four
bars, then the bass per-
forms over swing time
without vibraphone and
piano backing until bar
123, where it plays unac-
companied.

192
Table F.3. “La Ronde Suite.” Recorded January 9, 1955: Prestige LP7057. Part III (quarter
note = 260 approx.)
M. Section Length (mm.) Improvisation Rhythmic features

1 Composed introduction 8 X Piano and bass play in rhyth-

where ensemble hits alter- mic unison. Drums keep
nate with vibraphone fills. swung time until bar 7,
where they give a two-bar

­
break.
9 Theme played by the piano 16 X/vibraphone Drums keep swung time.
while vibraphone impro-
visation occurs simultane-
ously. Bass walks changes.
25 Theme played by the piano 16 X/vibraphone Cont.
while vibraphone impro-
visation occurs simultane-
ously. Bass walks changes.
41 Composed bridging section 8 X/vibraphone Drums play in rhythmic uni-
in which the piano and son with piano and bass.
bass play the melody
while the vibraphone
improvises fills.
49 Ensemble hits derived from 16 X/vibraphone Drums keep swung time.
the final eight bars of the
theme alternate with
vibraphone fills.
65 Vibraphone improvisation 24 Vibraphone Cont.
over two twelve-bar blues
­
forms. Piano comps
chords. Bass walks
changes.
89 Composed bridging section; 8 X/vibraphone Drums hit on beat 1 of bars
vibraphone plays in 89 and 91, then begin
between ensemble breaks swung time in bar 93.
in each bar.
97 Theme played by the piano 16 X/vibraphone Drums keep swung time.
while vibraphone impro-
visation occurs simultane-
ously. Bass walks changes.
113 Vibraphone improvises 12 Bass Drums keep swung time
coda. Piano and bass play until bar 123.
hits over swung time until
bar 123, when the vibra-
phone is left to play unac-
companied.

193
Table F.4. “La Ronde Suite.” Recorded January 9, 1955: Prestige LP7057. Part IV (quarter
note =192 approx.)
M. Section Length (mm.) Improvisation Rhythmic features

1 Composed introduction 8 Drums Improvised drum fills.

where ensemble hits alter-
nate with drum fills.
9 Theme played in unison at 16 X/drums Cont.
the octave by piano and
vibraphone. Bass plays on
beat 1 of bars 9 and 13
before supporting the
ensemble in rhythmic
unison at bar 17.
25 Theme repeated in unison at 16 X/drums Cont.
the octave by piano and
vibraphone. Bass plays on
beat 1 of bars 25 and 29
before supporting the
ensemble in rhythmic
unison at bar 33.
41 Composed bridging section. 8 X/drums Cont.
Drums play fills in be-
tween ensemble breaks in
each bar.
49 Ensemble hits derived from 16 Drums Cont.
the final eight bars of the
theme alternate with
drum fills.
65 Vibraphone and piano im- 12 Vibraphone + Drums keep swung time.
provise over one twelve- piano
­
bar blues form. Bass walks
changes.
77 Vibraphone and piano play 12 X Cont.
new chordal melody over
twelve bars. Bass pedals
on Db half notes.
89 Composed bridging section. 8 X/drums Improvised drum fills.
Drums play fills in be-
tween ensemble breaks in
each bar.
97 Theme played in unison at 13 X/drums Cont.
the octave by piano and
vibraphone. Bass plays on
beat 1 of bars 97 and 103
before supporting the
ensemble in rhythmic
unison at bar 107.
110 Drums play unaccompanied 20 seconds Drums Drum solo.
solo.

In relation to the discussion on p. 124, note the centrality of the blues form in each movement
of the suite.

194
Table G. “Fontessa.” Recorded January 22, 1956: Atlantic LP1231.
M. Time Section Length (mm.) Improvisation Rhythmic features

1 0:00 Colombine motif played by vibra- 21 X Straight time. No percus-

phone and piano in straight-time sion accompaniment

­
counterpoint. Bass supports har- until cymbal rolls with
mony with long, sustained notes. sticks in measures 15–

­
19.
22 1:04 Harlequin theme played by the vibra- 8 X Drums keep swung time.
phone and supported by chordal
vamp in the piano. Bass supports
using vamp rhythm.
30 1:23 Harlequin theme played by the vibra- 8 X/piano Cont.
phone. Piano improvises contra-
puntal lines with some blues sonor-
ities behind vibraphone in the
right hand while outlining vamp
with the left. Bass supports using
vamp rhythm.
38 1:42 Vibraphone and piano introduce a 8 X Cont.
secondary melody in unison. Bass
continues to support using vamp
rhythm from bar 22.
46 2:01 Harlequin theme is played in unison 8 X Cont.
by the vibraphone and piano for
one bar before being staggered be-
tween the two instruments. Bass
continues to support using vamp
rhythm from bar 22. The final two
bars of this section consist solely of
the drums keeping time.
54 2:20 Vibraphone solos over the thirty-two- 32 Vibraphone/pi- Cont.
­
­
bar AABA form established be- ano
tween measures 22 and 53. Piano
comps chords and bass alternates
between playing vamp rhythm and
walking. Piano plays independent
contrapuntal line behind the vibra-
phone over the final “A” section.
86 3:36 Bass plays supporting line from m. 22. 4 X/vibraphone Cymbal rolls.
Vibraphone improvises.
90 3:44 Harlequin theme repeated an octave 8 X/piano Drums keep swung time.
higher in the vibraphone. Piano
improvises contrapuntal lines be-
hind vibraphone in the right hand
while outlining vamp with the left.
Bass supports using vamp rhythm.
98 4:04 Vibraphone and piano play “B” sec- 8 X Cont.
tion melody in unison. Bass con-
tinues to support using vamp
rhythm from bar 22.

195
Table G.—continued
106 4:24 Vibraphone plays Harlequin theme. 7.52 X Cont.
Piano extracts rhythmic motif
from secondary theme and plays
a contrapuntal line. Bass contin-
ues to support using vamp
rhythm.
114 4:39 Piano improvisation largely unac- Unclear Piano/X Straight time. Some drum
companied. Bass and vibes pro- hits, but minimal accom-
vide some chordal support in paniment.
bars 121–25. Last two bars of
­
solo repeat later in the work and
appear to be preplanned.
5:06 Piano improvises over new chord 6 Piano Drums keep swung time.
progression (Pierrot progression)
while bass and vibes provide har-
monic support.
5:24 Piano plays material from bars 2 X Swung time. No percussion
124–25 accompaniment.
­
5:30 Piano continues to improvise over 8 Piano Drums keep swung time.
chord progression from 5:06,
which extends into the “filled”
measures in this iteration.
5:54 Unaccompanied piano solo. Unclear Piano Straight time. No percus-
sion accompaniment.
6:21 Piano improvises over chord pro- 16 Piano Drums keep swung time.
gression from 5:30 twice while
bass and vibes provide harmonic
support.
7:00 Piano improvises over new eight- 8 Piano Cont.
­
bar chord progression while bass
and vibes provide harmonic sup-
port.
7:21 Ensemble returns to material and 8 Piano Cont.
setting from 6:21.
7:42 Unaccompanied piano fill derived Unclear Piano Swung time. No percussion
from the final measure of impro- accompaniment.
vised material in the previous
section.
7:46 Vibraphone and piano play new 8 X Drums keep swung cut-
­
call-and-response riffs in cut- time.
­
­
­
time.
7:57 Repeat of previous eight measures. 8 X Cont.
8:07 Unaccompanied piano solo. Vibra- Unclear Piano Swung time. Percussion ac-
phone, drums, and bass play companiment accents
onbeat-offbeat hits between 8:15 onbeats during “hits”
­
and 8:20. Solo ends with piano passage only.
material from mm. 124–25.
­
2
As the half measure of this section appears to be the result of an editing splice with the next section of the work, this schematic
treats measures 106–12.5 as a full eight-measure block.
­
­
196
Tables G.—continued
8:27 Pantaloon section: Improvised bass Unclear Bass Swung time. Percussion ac-
solo with dissonant chord arpeg- companiment limited to
giation played by the vibraphone the interjection of cym-
and piano. Drum fills on cymbals bal rolls during the solo.
punctuate the solo.
9:11 Improvised drum solo with disso- Unclear Drums Improvised drum solo.
nant chord arpeggiation played
by vibraphone, piano, and bass
added at 9:40.
10:09 Fontessa theme played again by vi- 22 X Straight time. No percus-
braphone and piano in straight- sion accompaniment

­
time counterpoint. Bass supports until cymbal rolls with
harmony with long, sustained sticks from 10:45 to
notes. 11:00.

In relation to the discussion on p. 129, note how preplanned thematic passages morph into
improvised solos in this work. In relation to the discussion on pp. 142–45, note the different

­
musical styles with which Lewis associates commedia dell’arte characters.

197
Table H. “Three Windows.” Recorded February 20–21, 1958: RCA Victor LP1742.

­
Length Rhythmic
M. Section (mm.) Improvisation features

1 Drums play swung pattern on finger 5 X Swung time

cymbals. on finger
cymbals.
6 Fugal exposition. Violins state fugal 12 X Cont. Exposition 1
subject, violas and violins state fugal
answer while other violins play
countersubject, low strings state
subject once again while high
strings play counterpoint. Exposi-
tion continues with a statement of
the subject made by the flute while
strings play in counterpoint behind
followed by two more statements of
the subject by the string sections of
the orchestra.
18 Exposition continues with a statement 12 X Cont.
of the subject by the flute accompa-
nied by string counterpoint and
two more statements of the subject
by the string sections of the orches-
tra.
30 Improvised flute solo with melodic 24 Flute Cont. with Episode 1
string countermelodies as backings the incorpo-
over AAB chord progression (eight ration of
measures per section). other cym-
bals.
54 Improvised flute solo with pizzicato 8 Flute Swung time
string backings over another “A” on finger
section. cymbals.
62 Flute improvisation plays subject mo- 4 Flute Cont.
tifs while bass plays countersubject.
66 Violins play fugal subject. Flute con- 4 Flute Cont. Exposition 2
tinues to improvise.
70 Two statements of the fugal subject. 8 X Cont.
Flute joins the ensemble.

198
Table H.—continued
Length Rhythmic
M. Section (mm.) Improvisation features

78 Flute introduces new composed melody. 8 X Cont.

Strings echo in call-response.

­
86 Melodic turns in the flute and pizz. hits from 4 X Cont.
measures 81–82 are repeated.
­
90 Another new theme is played by the saxo- 8 X Cont. Episode 2
phone over the first four measures and
echoed in the strings over the second four
measures.
98 Strings continue to play melodic material de- 6 X Cont.
rived from saxophone theme.
104 Ensemble breaks with fills by the flute and sax- 10 X Cont.
ophone derived from the fugal subject.
114 Fugal subject stated in the saxophone. Answer 8 X Cont. Exposition 3
and countersubject performed by strings.
122 Exposition continues with two more state- 8 X Cont.
ments of the subject by the string sections
of the orchestra.
130 Improvised saxophone solo with melodic 32 Saxophone Cont. Episode 3
string countermelodies as backings over
AABA chord progression.
162 Saxophone continues to improvise while bass 4 Saxophone Cont.
plays countersubject.
166 Violins play fugal subject. Saxophone contin- 4 Saxophone Cont. Exposition 4
ues to improvise.
170 Two more statements of the subject occur in 8 X Cont.
the strings alone.
178 First two measures of the fugal subject are 9 X Cont. Coda
repeated in harmonic sequence by the
strings. Final measure of the work sustains
on a Picardy third.

In relation to the discussion on p. 149, note the use of improvised subject motifs in the flute
solo beginning in bar 62 and the improvised counterpoint juxtaposed against the fugal subject
beginning in bar 66.

199
Appendix B
Sait-on jamais (1957) Soundscape
­
Appendix B. Sait-on jamais (1957) soundscape

­
Diegetic/
Time nondiegetic Sound source Scene description Music description

1:07–1:18 Nondiegetic N/A Sophie is watching a cartoon Orchestral accompaniment.

­
in a cinema. The cartoon
character is kidnapped by
a flying saucer.
1:52–2:04 Nondiegetic N/A Aliens speaking in “jive” de- Blues-based trumpet mel-
­
­
scribe the good-looking ody played over drum

­
girls on the alien planet. ostinato.
2:12–2:15 Nondiegetic N/A Cartoon character is intro- Trumpet fanfare.
­
duced to alien king.
4:12–4:15 Nondiegetic/ Cinema speakers Sophie leaves the cinema. Trumpet fanfare plays as
­
Diegetic part of the cartoon.
5:12–6:35 Nondiegetic N/A Michel introduces himself to “Golden Striker” theme
­
Sophie outside of the cin- “One Never Knows”
ema. They walk through theme (MJQ).
the streets of Venice.
6:36–7:50 Nondiegetic N/A Sforzi sees Michel and Sophie “Crime jazz” cliché “Three
­
speaking outside a bar. Windows” theme
(MJQ).
7:51–8:13 Nondiegetic/ Live jazz quartet Michel and Sophie enter bar. “Three Windows” theme
­
Diegetic continues (MJQ).
8:14–9:50 Nondiegetic/ Live jazz quartet Michel and Sophie flirt while Vibraphone improvisation
­
Diegetic avoiding discussion of past over “Three Windows”
relationships. form (MJQ).
9:51–10:37 Nondiegetic/ Live jazz quartet Sforzi enters bar to confront “The Rose Truc” theme
­
Diegetic Sophie. (MJQ).
10:38–11:40 Nondiegetic N/A Sforzi takes Sophie over to Vibraphone improvisation
­
empty bandstand to warn over “The Rose Truc”
her against seeing Michel. form (MJQ).
11:41–12:52 Diegetic Live jazz quartet Sophie and Michel eat dinner “Venice” theme (MJQ).
­
while a jazz combo plays in
the background. Sophie
invites Michel back to her
villa.
13:43–14:32 Nondiegetic/ Record player Michel and Sophie discuss Vibraphone improvisation
­
Diegetic their relationship in over major twelve-bar
­
Sophie’s bedroom. blues.
15:38–16:02 Diegetic Live piano Michel stumbles on Bernard Unidentified rag.
­
playing piano.
17:35–19:43 Nondiegetic/ Record player Sophie tells Michel of how “Venice” theme Vibra-
­
Diegetic the Baron rescued her from phone improvisation
poverty. over “Venice” form “The
Rose Truc” theme
(MJQ).

202
Appendix B.—continued
Diegetic/
Time nondiegetic Sound source Scene description Music description
19:44–19:52 Diegetic Live piano Bernard plays ragtime on the Unidentified rag.
­
piano. The Baron, frustrated
by Michel’s presence, enters
and tells him to stop.
22:17–22:58 Diegetic Record player Sophie tells Michel she loves Piano improvisation over
­
him the morning after their major twelve-bar blues.

­
tryst.
22:59–24:38 Nondiegetic N/A Michel bets on racing mice Piano improvisation con-
­
with Bernard and Sforzi. tinues, transitions to vi-
braphone improvisation.
26:12–29:09 Nondiegetic N/A Michel plays chess with the “Three Windows” theme
­
Baron. The Baron offers a “One Never Knows”
different version of how he theme (MJQ).
and Sophie met then the
one Sophie offered the pre-
vious night.
32:22–33:15 Nondiegetic N/A Michel enters the Baron’s “Three Windows” theme
­
study, where the Baron is (MJQ).
either restoring or forging
a painting.
33:16–34:40 Nondiegetic N/A Michel tells the Baron he is Piano improvisation over
­
taking Sophie away. “Three Windows” form
(MJQ).
34:40–34:55 Nondiegetic N/A Sophie goes to say good-bye “Three Windows” theme
­
­
to the Baron. (MJQ).
38:22–38:42 Nondiegetic N/A Sforzi enters the Baron’s villa “Cortege” theme (MJQ).
­
and finds a man hanging by
a noose.
38:43–38:57 Nondiegetic N/A Sforzi pulls the hand of the Piano improvisation over
­
man and it comes off, re- “Three Windows” form
vealing it to be a dummy (MJQ).
constructed by the servants
as a practical joke.
45:32–47:20 Nondiegetic N/A Sforzi interrupts Michel and Chopin, Piano Sonata No.
­
Sophie at their hotel. He 2 in Bb Minor, op. 35
attempts to seduce Sophie
in an effort to bring her
back to the Baron.
48:30–49:46 Diegetic Live jazz quartet Michel and Sophie have din- Unidentified calypso
­
ner at a Venice club. (MJQ).
49:47–51:22 Diegetic Live jazz quartet Sophie is confronted by “Venice” theme (MJQ).
­
Sforzi in a back room of
the club. He hits her and
declares his love for her.

203
Appendix B.—continued
Diegetic/
Time nondiegetic Sound source Scene description Music description
51:23–52:57 Diegetic Live jazz quartet Sophie returns to Michel and Vibraphone improvisation
­
asks to leave. Sforzi meets over “Venice” form
the detective investigating Piano improvisation
the Baron at the bar. The over “Venice” form
detective tells Sforzi he has (MJQ).
blood on his shirt.
53:07–54:22 Nondiegetic N/A Sforzi meets Sophie on her “Crime jazz” cliché “Three
­
way home from the shops. Windows” theme
He gives her a rose and con- (MJQ).
vinces her to leave Michel.
1:01:39–1:02:05 Nondiegetic N/A Sforzi enters the Baron’s study “Three Windows” theme
­
and tells the Baron that “Cortege” theme (MJQ).
Sophie remembers where
to find the hidden money.
1:02:06–1:02:30 Nondiegetic N/A The Baron shows Sforzi a let- Vibraphone improvisation
­
ter he has written to Michel over “Cortege” form
transferring access to the (MJQ).
funds.
1:03:03–1:04:05 Diegetic Piano in far room Sforzi explains to the Baron Chopin, Grande Walse Bril-
­
why he needs to kill him. lante, op. 34, no. 2.
1:04:45–1:05:00 Nondiegetic N/A The Baron tells Sforzi he “The Rose Truc” them
­
doesn’t believe he has the (MJQ).
courage to commit murder.
1:05:01–1:05:31 Nondiegetic N/A Sforzi stabs the Baron. Cymbal roll, ascending
­
vibes/piano/bass melody.
1:11:45–1:12:52 Nondiegetic/ Record player The detective interviews Guitar melody.
­
Diegetic Michel about his relation-
ship with Sophie and Sforzi
in Michel’s hotel room.
1:14:05–1:15:32 Nondiegetic N/A Funeral procession through “Cortege” theme (MJQ).
­
canals.
1:15:33–1:16:25 Nondiegetic N/A Michel pulls up to Sophie’s Vibraphone improvisation
­
gondola and kisses her Piano improvisation
hand. over “Cortege” form
(MJQ).
1:16:26–1:17:18 Nondiegetic N/A An angry Sforzi hits Sophie. “Cortege” theme (MJQ).
­
Sophie tells the gondolier
to let her out.
1:22:26–1:24:11 Nondiegetic N/A Sophie waits with Sforzi in his “Crime jazz” cliché “Three
­
apartment. She secretly lets Windows” theme Piano
Michel in to find the letter improvisation over form
the Baron wrote giving Mi- (MJQ).
chel control over his estate.

204
Appendix B.—continued
Diegetic/
Time nondiegetic Sound source Scene description Music description
1:29:30–1:29:43 Nondiegetic N/A Sforzi leaps a gap between Cymbal roll, ascending
­
buildings while chasing vibes/piano/bass melody
Michel across the rooftops (same as scene where the
of Venice. Baron is stabbed).
1:31:12–1:33:44 Nondiegetic N/A Police pull Sforzi’s body from “Three Windows” theme
­
the canal after he has fallen “One Never Knows”
to his death. theme (MJQ).

205
Appendix C
Odds against Tomorrow (1959) Soundscape
Appendix C. Odds against Tomorrow (1959) soundscape
Diegetic/
Time Nondiegetic Sound source Scene description Music description

0:00-0:14 Nondiegetic N/A Universal logo. Universal theme music.

­
0:15–1:57 Nondiegetic N/A Opening credits. Introductory theme in which motive “a”
­
and motive “b” are paired and orches-
trated for the full ensemble.
2:05–2:35 Nondiegetic N/A Slater walks down Motive “b” is stated by the guitar and tran-
­
a New York sitions to motive “a.”
street on the
way to Burke’s
apartment.
2:36–2:43 Nondiegetic N/A Cont. Solo trumpet interlude (not obviously
­
improvised).
2:44–2:50 Nondiegetic N/A Cont. Motive “a” performed by solo guitar.
­
2:51–3:07 Nondiegetic N/A Slater careens Motive “a” continues in the guitar and is
­
into an African paired with motive “b” in the trumpet.
American child An additional trombone line adds dis-
playing outside sonance.
the apartment
building. He
refers to her as
a “pickininny.”
3:08–3:22 Nondiegetic N/A Slater enters Motive “b” orchestrated into dissonant
­
Burke’s apart- brass chords.
ment building
and pounds on
the manager’s
desk.
7:37–8:08 Nondiegetic N/A Slater confronts Drums play on toms and are paired with
­
Burke about bass. Horn plays motive “b,” trumpets
the assumption enter with the same motive.
that he is a
criminal.
8:09–8:14 Nondiegetic N/A Burke tries to Drums and bass play a syncopated riff uti-
­
convince Slater lizing octaves and a flat seventh.
to do the rob-
bery.
8:15–9:10 Nondiegetic N/A Johnny drives up Brass chords to the rhythm of motive “b”
­
to the front of transition to a flute solo over quartet
Slater’s apart- backing. While the solo is not obviously
ment building, improvised, it evinces a good deal of
exits his car, syncopation and it is swung.
and enters.

208
Appendix C.—continued
Diegetic/
Time Nondiegetic Sound source Scene description Music description

12:58–13:57 Nondiegetic N/A Johnny gives Burke a ride Layering of horn and trombone
­
downtown. melodies set a tritone apart give
way to variations of motive “a”
played by the vibraphone and set
against a sustained low brass
pedal. Dissonant brass chords
played to the rhythm of motive
“b” are used to signal the end of
the scene as Burke exists Johnny’s
car.
17:27–18:47 Nondiegetic N/A Slater’s girlfriend loans Motive “b,” played by a solo guitar,
­
Slater money for the transitions to a doubling of the
trip to Melton. motive in the guitar and bass.
Motive “a” is then played by the
guitar and supported by disso-
nant brass chords before being
paired solely with flute trills.
19:04–19:51 Nondiegetic N/A Slater and Burke drive to Motive “b” orchestrated into disso-
­
Melton. nant brass chords.
19:52–20:26 Nondiegetic N/A Slater and Burke arrive in Layering of motive “b,” beginning in
­
Melton. the tuba and then incorporating
the French horn and trumpets.
20:44–22:25 Nondiegetic N/A Slater and Burke watch a Tympani plays motive “b” and these
­
waiter deliver food to statements are interspersed with
the bank after hours. snare rolls.
Burke describes the
robbery plan.
22:30–24:41 Diegetic Live band Johnny sings and plays “My Baby’s Not Around” (1959),
­
the vibraphone at a written by Belafonte and per-
jazz club. formed by the MJQ with Bela-
fonte as vocalist. Milt Jackson
improvises over a discussion
between Johnny and one of his
creditors. Apart from Belafonte,
the other musicians on stage pan-
tomime their parts.
24:55–28:50 Diegetic Live band Johnny runs into his ex- Bebop-style improvisation begin-
­
­
­
girlfriend and has his ning in the piano is followed by
debt called in by the bass and saxophone improvisa-
local crime boss. tion.
29:28–30:22 Diegetic Live band Johnny drunkenly accom- “All Men Are Evil” (1959), an R&B-
­
­
panies another singer style song written by Belafonte
at the jazz club. and performed by Mae Barnes.
The song ends with a frantic vi-
braphone improvisation panto-
mimed by Belafonte.
209
Appendix C.—continued
Diegetic/
Time Nondiegetic Sound source Scene description Music description
33:18–33:42 Nondiegetic N/A Johnny kisses his wife Motive “a” performed by the vibra-
­
good-bye when phone, underscored by string

­
picking up his daughter. pedal.
33:44–35:22 Diegetic/Non- Merry-go- Johnny’s daughter rides Carnival-style organ music transi-
­
­
­
­
diegetic round the merry-go-round. tions to motive “b,” played by the

­
­
Johnny sees that he is trumpets.
being followed by the
gangsters he owes
money to.
35:23–36:30 Diegetic Skating rink Johnny calls Burke from a “Skating in Central Park” (1959),
­
speakers pay phone to confirm orchestrated.
his involvement in the
robbery.
40:48–42:20 Diegetic/Non- N/A Slater enters a bar and Vibraphone improvisation over the
­
diegetic confronts a young army form of “Cue #9” (1959). Music
cadet. stops abruptly at the time of con-
frontation, effectively confirming
a nondiegetic sound source.
43:38–44:27 Nondiegetic N/A Slater explains to the bar- Guitar and brass perform a variation
­
tender that he didn’t of motive “a,” which transitions
mean to hurt the cadet. to chordal brass statements of
motive “b” and then solo guitar
statements of motive “b.”
44:28–47:35 Nondiegetic N/A Burke’s girlfriend attempts Motive “b” in the guitar transitions
­
to console him. to swing ostinato doubled in the
bass. An improvised guitar solo
utilizing blues tropes follows.
Dissonant brass chords to the
rhythm of motive “b” accompany
Slater’s girlfriend’s exit and his
call to Burke confirming his par-
ticipation.
48:00–51:22 Nondiegetic N/A Johnny and his wife flirt. Motive “a” begins in the guitar and
­
She then asks him to is doubled by the vibraphone. A
leave the apartment for bass ostinato and vibraphone solo
the sake of their child. follows (not obviously impro-
vised). Motive “a” then returns in
the harp accompanied by a flute
melody.

210
Appendix C.—continued
Diegetic/ Sound
Time Nondiegetic source Scene description Music description

51:27–55:17 Nondiegetic N/A Slater’s next-door neighbor Bass and drum ostinato gives way
­
­
comes over to complain about to cascading piano lines and
her husband. She asks Slater brass chords played to the
about the man he killed before rhythm of motive “b.” This pas-
he went to prison. Their flirta- sage in turn gives way to the
tions lead to sex. quartet performance of “No
Happiness for Slater”(1959),
during which Lewis impro-
vises.
59:01–59:40 Nondiegetic N/A Burke praises Johnny for his idea Ensemble trumpet passage ending
­
on how to get the bank guards with motive “b.”
to open the door after hours.
59:41–1:01:00 Nondiegetic N/A Slater’s girlfriend apologizes for Swung guitar performance of mo-
­
their fight. tive “b” with high hat and flute
accompaniment.
1:02:05–1:04:45 Nondiegetic N/A Burke, Johnny, and Slater travel Ostinato first stated in the vibra-
­
up to Melton. phone and then in the bass ac-
companied by drums. As the
tempo of the score increases,
the ostinato reduces from four
notes to two and an extended
vibraphone improvisation can
be heard over the top. This pas-
sage is punctuated by dissonant
brass chords played to the
rhythm of motive “b.”
1:05:58–1:07:54 Nondiegetic N/A Burke and Slater discuss the Motive “b” in the brass is followed
­
hiring of Johnny. During the by motive “a” in the harp before
conversation, the bus Johnny returning to motive “b” in the
is taking to Melton passes them brass. This passage then transi-
on the highway. tions back to the four-note osti-
­
nato of the previous scene.
1:10:03–1:10:16 Nondiegetic N/A Johnny sees the bank for the first Dissonant layering of motive “b”
­
time. in the brass.
1:13:01–1:17:53 Nondiegetic N/A The three independently explore Tympani rolls paired with motive
­
Melton before the robbery. “a” in the guitar and motive “b”
in the flute. This passage is fol-
lowed by a return to the four-
­
note and then two-note osti-
­
nato figure accompanied by a
vibraphone melody with added
trills and gliss embellishments.
The vibraphone melody gives
way to an improvised guitar
melody utilizing blues tropes.
The passage ends with a brass
fanfare.
211
Appendix C.—continued
Diegetic/ Sound
Time Nondiegetic source Scene description Music description
1:22:58–1:23:53 Non-Diegetic N/A Johnny approaches the bank Tympani plays motive “b” and
­
­
dressed as the waiter. these statements are inter-
spersed with snare rolls.
1:25:09–1:26:56 Non-Diegetic N/A Johnny, Slater, and Burke enter Motive “a” is played at a fast
­
­
the bank. tempo while the brass repeat a
countermelody in unison. Dis-
sonant brass chords played to
the rhythm of motive “b” are
then added to the passage.
1:27:08–1:28:24 Non-Diegetic N/A Slater pulls the real waiter inside Unison trumpet melody utilizing
­
­
the bank to avoid his calling blues third and blues seventh al-
the police. ternates with dissonant brass
chords. Toward the middle of
this passage, lip trills are added
to the brass chords.
1:32:29–1:34:08 Non-Diegetic N/A Johnny chases Slater into a gas Tympani plays motive “b” and
­
­
plant. these statements are inter-
spersed with both snare and
cymbal hits. Cymbal hits evolve
to a constant cymbal roll, the
ending of which corresponds to
the plant explosion.
1:34:46–1:36:01| Non-Diegetic N/A Johnny’s and Slater’s corpses are Exit theme combining elements of
­
­
revealed to the police investiga- motive “a” and motive “b” tran-
tors. sitions to “No Happiness for
Slater” (1959), performed by
the MJQ underneath the end-
ing credits.

212
 Notes

Introduction

1. The words Signifyin(g) or Signifies will appear without quotation marks from this
point forward. I have adopted Gates’s spelling in an effort to clarify usage between the
English-language term signifying, in which there can be only one meaning for something
­
that is signified, and the rhetorical trope of the “double-voiced” described here.
­
2. Still, for instance, is shown to mask his use of twelve-bar blues by integrating it
­
into “a sonata-allegro format” in his Afro-American Symphony (1930) (Floyd 1995, 253).
­
­
3. Wolfram Knauer’s overview of the Modern Jazz Quartet’s reception in Europe, for
instance, holds that even though some on the Continent felt these musical fusions stifled
improvisation, Lewis’s musical approach was generally effective in building an audience
of “educated middle class” patrons who were “accustomed to classical music” (1990, 58).
In turn, in an assessment of the German context, Andrew Hurley has pointed to the way
in which the MJQ’s use of European sonorities fit neatly into legitimization paradigms
developed by Joachim-Ernst Berendt that sought to build acceptance for the music in the
­
postwar era (2009, 24–25).
­
4. Feature articles in the Chicago Defender throughout the 1920s and 1930s fre-
quently worked to tell this story. For instance, W. S. Turner’s 1927 Social Forces article
“Has the Negro Arrived?” was reprinted in the Defender in the same year under the head-
ing “Writer Says There Is No Such Thing as ‘New Negro.’” Turner’s argument held that
while on the surface there appear to be differences in achievement between the races in
the United States, most of these could be explained away through an analysis of institu-
tionalized racism; once such a force was accounted for, intellectual parity was evident.
Other notable articles that provide additional evidence of this type of argument include
Carter Wilson’s “Dr. Woodson Raps Race ‘Tear-Down’ Tendencies” published in the De-
­
fender on January 21, 1933, and Jesse Thomas’s “The History of Race Relations,” published
on May 4, 1935.
5. The original text in French reads, “En définitive, ces concerts marquerent une im-
portante victoire du ‘modern sound’ dans notre pays et les amateurs français purent con-
stater de visu que le jazz ne s’est jamais mieux porté.”
6. This is not to suggest that the French reception of the Modern Jazz Quartet was
without detractors. Indeed, at the end of the very same Jazz Magazine article that wel-

213
214 • Notes to Pages 17–58

comed Lewis to the Continent we are presented with a collection of interviews under the
heading “We posed the question to 10 jazzmen that was on everyone’s lips . . . is the Mod-
ern Jazz Quartet jazz?” (“Sous le signe du ‘Birdland’” 1956, 19), in which the musicians
Ralph Schecroun and Martial Solal take Lewis to task for abandoning what they view as
the essential rhythmic drive of the music.
7. The original text in German reads, “Die Verbindung von Jazz und europäischer
Musik, an der zahllose weiß Musiker in Amerika seit Jahren experimentieren, wurde von
John Lewis—ohne ein Stadium des Experimentes—in seinem Modern Jazz Quartet.”
­
­
Chapter 1

1. Polo’s first improvisatory chorus is accompanied by bass, piano, and drums. The
brass then enter with backings during the second chorus and Folus can be heard to play
in counterpoint to Polo’s improvisation. The third chorus, led by Folus, involves constant
reiterations, or echoes by Polo, uniting the two in improvisatory dialogue.
2. On the September 4 broadcast Davis trades fours with drummer Max Roach over
his last two choruses. On the September 18 broadcast this trading occurs only during the
first half of the third chorus, at which point Roach plays the chorus out.
3. Dizzy Gillespie’s 1947 performance at Cornell University stands in contrast to this
trend. His premiere at Carnegie Hall in the same year and Stearns’s creation of the
Rhythm Club at Cornell should be taken into account in viewing this event in the overall
context of venue access.
4. The MJQ’s entirely African American racial composition stands in contrast to the
trend identified above and will be contextualized as part of a perception of “whiteness”
discussed in chapter 2.
5. In a clear indication of the important role college audiences played in Brubeck’s
success, Down Beat would subsequently report, “Dave Brubeck’s quartet will henceforth
play only a limited number of club dates in the east. . . . [His] main concentration . . . will
be on college and other concerts because of unprecedented demand for his quartet on
campuses throughout the country, and also because Brubeck feels that the college audi-
ence has been vitally important in his popularity” (“Brubeck Dave” 1954, 1).
6. According to Davis (1989, 143), Lewis left early on the recording date for Miles
Davis and Horns, leaving Davis to play most of the piano tracks himself.
7. Floyd sets out his understanding of Stuckey’s research as follows:

Stuckey regards the Negro spiritual as central to the ring and foundational to all
subsequent Afro-American music-making. He noticed in descriptions of the shout
­
­
that, in the ring, musical practices from throughout black culture converged in the
spiritual. These included elements of the calls, cries, and hollers; call-and-response
­
­
devices; additive rhythms and polyrhythms; heterophony, pendular thirds, blue
notes, bent notes, and elisions; hums, moan, grunts, vocables, and other rhythmic-
­
oral declamations, interjections, and punctuations; off-beat melodic phrasings and
­
parallel intervals and chords; constant repetition of rhythmic and melodic figures
and phrases (from which riffs and vamps would be derived); timbral distortions of
various kinds; musical individuality within collectivity; game rivalry; hand-
­
 Notes to Pages 64–108 • 215

clapping, foot patting, and approximations thereof; and the metronomic founda-
tional pulse that underlies all Afro-American music. Consequently, since all of the

­
defining elements of black music are present in the ring, Stuckey’s formulation can
be seen as a frame in which all black-music analysis and interpretation can take

­
place—a formulation that can confirm the importance of the performance prac-
­
tices crucial to black music expression. (1991/1999, 267–68)

­
Chapter 2

1. There exists, of course, the possibility that blood serves as a metaphor for culture in
the statement, yet I would argue that based on Radano’s (2003) study, if the term is being
used as a metaphor, the choice of comparison is indebted to a history of biological pre-
disposition discourse and that essentialist connotations remain.
2. Machito was born Francisco Raúl Gutiérrez Grillo in Havana, Cuba, on February
16, 1908 (Child 1998, 801).
3. The work was written by George Russell for the Gillespie ensemble in 1947, al-
though Monson notes in her discussion of the work that “the idea for the project came
from Gillespie” (1998, 165).

Chapter 3

1. In purely archival terms, David Music has pointed out that “African-American
­
spirituals . . . made little impact on mainline congregational song collections (whether
white or black) until after World War II” (2001, 8).
2. This phenomenon is explored in considerable detail throughout Paul Lopes’s Rise
of a Jazz Art World (2002). See in particular pp. 215–16.
­
3. A striking example can be seen in a 1946 article about the potential use of bebop
in symphony orchestras written by Elaine Greenidge for the Pittsburgh Courier.
Greenidge presents quotes by Teddy Wilson, Tadd Dameron, and Edgar Sampson about
the suitability of the style within the orchestral context that utilize the language of evolu-
tion. Dameron, for instance, claims, “Bebop will hold a high place in the classical world
of tomorrow. In bebop, instead of jumping from one chord to another, you find various
ways of getting to each chord. This allows for more originality and feeling in arrange-
ments” (qtd. in Greenidge 1946, 21). Similar endorsements of bebop as a new, “intelli-
gent” form of jazz in the African American press can be found in Dan Burley’s (1948, 25)
assessment of Thelonious Monk’s “genius” published in the New York Amsterdam News
and the Chicago Defender’s framing of the music as linked to an expansion of tertiary
music training (“Lionel Hampton Writes of Bebop” 1948, 8).
4. I am not attempting to dilute or belittle the very real “pioneering” work these
composers undertook in the service of jazz music. For an extensive discussion of these
contributions, see John Howland’s Ellington Uptown: Duke Ellington, James P. Johnson,
and the Birth of Concert Jazz (2009). My intent here is to simply point out that a wider
array of precedent existed in relation to their work than was normally acknowledged in
the trade press.
216 • Notes to Pages 115–37

Chapter 4

1. The group disbanded for the first time in 1974. It then reformed in 1981 and per-
formed in a variety of contexts until the death of Connie Kay in 1994.
2. Short introductions were often included before bebop heads (see Dizzy Gillespie’s
“Bebop” [1945] and Charlie Parker’s “Yardbird Suite” [1946]), and the general structure
of the head-solos-head format remained in Lewis’s arrangements, with improvisation
­
­
continuing to permeate the standards. Indeed, sections of open improvisation occur in
over 57 percent of the bars that make up “All the Things You Are” and over 64 percent of
the bars that make up “Rose of the Rio Grande” (see tables A and B in appendix A).
3. As Paul Walker notes in his definition of episode in Oxford Music Online: “A fugue
is generally laid out as an opening Exposition followed by alternation between episodes
and groups of thematic statements” (2010, ¶1).
4. Wolfram Knauer’s analysis of the work touches on this phenomenon in his obser-
vation that Lewis delivers an improvised solo “integrated fully into the compositional
frame” (1990, 126).
5. The album Modern Jazz Quartet with Milt Jackson contains all the tracks recorded
on December 22, 1952, and June 25, 1953.
6. As Thomas Owens (1965, 12) rightly points out in his 1965 MA thesis, describing
the improvised side of this equation as “collective improvisation”—which some critics

­
were prone to do—was somewhat of an overstatement. Lewis’s improvised contrapuntal
­
lines were far more compact than what might result from a simultaneous solo. Yet this, in
fact, seemed largely the point of the approach. Despite their improvisatory genesis, these
interjections mirrored closely the contrapuntal subjects or motifs Lewis would use in the
opening and closing sections of his works.
7. The name The Modern Jazz Quartet does appear below the word Concorde on the
album cover, but it is less prominent, and as it refers to a group rather than an individual,
it is less focused on individuality.
8. In Thomas Owens’s view, such ambiguity was heightened by the fact that Lewis
often composed thematic material in a style similar to the melodic lines he would impro-
vise. In relation to the fugal work “Three Windows” (1957), discussed in chapter five,
Owens writes, “Lewis obtains further unity by composing the thematic material com-
pletely in the style of his own improvisational style. Each of the subjects and countersub-
jects sounds as if it had been improvised on the spur of the moment, yet each fits with the
others in an obviously preplanned way” (1965, 79).
9. The original text in German reads, “Es wird damit deutlich, wie vieles, was in der
Musik des MJQ als eindeutig ‘europäisch’ erscheint, unterbewußt improvisiert wurde
von Musikern, die—außer John Lewis selbst—sich allein der Jazz-Tradition verpflichtet
­
­
­
fühlen und in keinem Augenblick ahnen, daß irgend etwas, was sie spielen, ‘europäisch’
sein könnte.”
10. Use of the same arrangement can be discerned by comparing the SDR recording
with the recording of the Modern Jazz Society concert released on Verve Records 823
089–1.
­
11. The original text in French reads, “Nous avons posé à 10 jazzmen la question qui
était sur toutes les lèvres . . . le M.J.A. fait-il du jazz?”
­
12. The original text in French reads, “S’agit-il d’une formule intéressante et valuable
­
en elle-même, mais qui n’aura pas d’incidence sur l’evolution du jazz, comme par exemple
­
le quintette à cordes de Django Reinhardt?”
 Notes to Pages 138–79 • 217

13. The musicians interviewed by Jazz Magazine were Don Byas, Kenny Clarke, Sacha
Distel, Raymond Fol, Mac Kac, Henri Renaud, Ralph Checroun, Martial Solal, Benny
Vasseur, and Barney Wilen.
14. These three works were released in connection with recordings of “Dear Old
Stockholm” (retitled “Warmland”) and the Lewis original “The Bad and the Beautiful”
(1956), recorded in the summer of 1956, along with the Rogers and Hart song “Little Girl
Blue” (1935) and the Lewis original “D&E” (1955), recorded in February 1957 for the la-
bel.

Chapter 5

1. Authorship of these songs is attributed to Lewis in Michelle Best’s (1999) discus-

sion of the Odds score, but copyright registered to Belafonte and Okun credits the pair
for words and music. Copyright for “My Baby’s Not Around” was first issued on March
5, 1959, and caries U.S. Copyright Office (USCO) registration number EU0000565275.
It was renewed on December 18, 1987, with USCO registration number RE0000360706.
Copyright for “All Men are Evil” was first issued on March 5, 1959, with USCO registra-
tion number EU0000565274. It was renewed September 9, 1987, with USCO registra-
tion number RE0000349661.
2. This discussion relies on Mervyn Cooke’s (2009, 255) definition of symphonic film
music as music that is both “pre-composed” and “orchestral.”
­
3. Ford’s analysis is linked to the released 1958 version of the film. The 1998 director’s
cut, informed by editing instructions from Welles to Universal Studios, replaces Manci-
ni’s opening with a series of diegetic cues (Eagan 2010, 545).
4. Ford (2008, 117) points to the term’s use by “collectors of obscure vinyl” and in the
recently collated Crime Jazz: Music in the First Degree (Rhino 72912) and Crime Jazz:
Music in the Second Degree (Rhino 72913) when sourcing its origin.
5. In addition to the politics of race, Belafonte sought to wage a quieter political
battle in the film’s production by enlisting the blacklisted writer Abraham Polonsky to
write the script (Schultheiss 1999, 137). Polonsky won recognition in Hollywood as an
exceptional scriptwriter following his 1948 noir classic Force of Evil but was blacklisted
for his leftist sympathies during the congressional hearings of Senator Joseph McCarthy
in 1951. Polonsky continued to work as a television writer in New York during the 1950s
but was forced to use other writers’ names as “fronts” and to tone down the leftist sympa-
thies that had brought about his blacklisting (Schultheiss 1996, 148–49).
­
Chapter 6

1. As I have noted previously; “Amy Fenstermaker views the Signifyin(g) act as

closely related to what Linda Hutcheon (1989) refers to as ‘complicitous critique,’ a de-
vice through which an author ‘draws on a historical figure or event and simultaneously
undermines the historical accuracy of that representation’ in an effort to highlight ‘the
ideology behind that representation.’ She goes on to assert that ‘whether one calls the
artistic process “complicitous critique” or Signifyin(g), the term one uses is, to some ex-
tent, dependent upon the author’s race’ (Fenstermaker 2008, 1)” (Coady 2011, p. 7).
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Wilson, J. S. (1958a, April 6). Homecoming Jazzmen: Striped Pants of the Modern Quar-
tet Astounded a British Enthusiast. New York Times, p. X9.
Wilson, J. S. (1958b, November 2). Serious or Jazz? New York Times, p. X12.
Wilson, J. S. (1958c, November 15). Modern Jazz Quartet Is Heard in Concert at Nona-
gon Gallery. New York Times, p. 18.
Wilson, J. S. (1959, May 25). Jazz Concert Given at Carnegie Hall. New York Times, p. 33.
Wilson, J. S. (1960, November 3). Extremes of Jazz Meet Nightly. New York Times, p. 47.
Wilson, J. S. (1961, April 2). Duke Ellington Still the Pioneer. New York Times, p. X16.
Wintle, C. (1976). Milton Babbitt’s Semi-simple Variations. Perspectives of New Music,
­
14(2), 111–54.
­
Work, J. (1998). American Negro Songs: 230 Folk Songs and Spirituals, Religious and Secu-
lar. New York: Dover. Originally published 1940.
Yanow, S. (2004). Jazz on Film. San Francisco: Backbeat Books.
 Scores

Bauer, B., & Sher, C. (1991). New Real Book. Vol. 2. Petaluma, CA: Sher Music.
Lewis, J. (1954). Concorde [Score]. New York: MJQ Music.
Lewis, J. (1957). Three Little Feelings [Score]. New York: MJQ Music.
Lewis, J. (1959). Sketch for Double Quartet [Score]. New York: MJQ Music.
Lewis, J. (1960). Excerpts from “The Comedy” [Score]. New York: MJQ Music.
Lewis, J. (1987). Three Windows [Score]. New York: MJQ Music.
Mingus, C. (1976). Revelations [Score]. New York: Margun Music.

231
 Filmography

Ascenseur pour l’echafaud. (1957). Louis Malle (director). DVD. Paris: Nouvelles Editions
de Films, 2002.
Cab Calloway’s Hi-De-Ho. (1934). Fred Waller (director). In The Best of Jazz and Blues.
­
­
Hollywood Rhythm, vol. 1. DVD. New York: Kino International, 2001.
I Want to Live!. (1958). Robert Wise (director). DVD. Los Angeles: MGM, 2002.
Odds against Tomorrow. (1959). Robert Wise (director). DVD. Los Angeles: MGM,
2003.
Sait-on jamais. (1957). Roger Vadim (director). DVD. Paris: René Chateau, 2005.
­
Touch of Evil. (1958). Orson Welles (director). DVD. New York: Universal Pictures,
2000.

233
 Index

Abbott, Robert S., 88, 98 Anatomy of a Murder: soundtrack, 158,

African American identity, 4–5; behav- 165–66
­
­
ioral difference and, 74–82; class and, Anderson, Marian, 127
­
10–14; double-voiced constructs and, Angel City Symphony Orchestra, 103
­
­
6–10; politics of respectability and, 12– “Angel Eyes” (Dennis and Brent), 128
­
­
13, 85–90, 110–11; redefinitions of, 179– Armstrong, Louis, 77, 105
­
­
­
81; rhythm and, 62–67; social class/val- Ascenseur pour l’echafaud: soundtrack, 166
­
ues and, 10–14, 20–21, 82–113; The Asphalt Jungle film, 159, 160
­
­
­
syncretism and, 22–23. See also double- authenticity, 6, 21; assumptions about jazz
­
­
voiced constructs; masking; and, 175–82; behavioral difference and,
­
Signifyin(g) 74–82; essentialist views and, 68–74;
­
­
African American vernacular tropes; call- perceptions of Lewis’s, 107–11; “real”
­
­
response, 50–51; double-voiced use of, black music and, 172–82; rhythm and,
­
­
­
4, 6–10; politics of respectability and, in jazz, 62–67
­
­
85–90; in “real” black music, 173–75, “Autumn in New York” (Duke), 120
­
­
178–79; Ring Shouts, 57–58, 86; testi-
­
­
fying, 44–45; in Third Stream music, Babbitt, Milton, 43–45
­
­
40–46. See also masking; rhythm “Background for Thought” (Mingus), 41
­
African Methodist Episcopal Church, 86, Baker, Chet, 36, 54–56
­
88, 89 Baker, Houston, 7–8, 143
­
Afro-American Symphony (Still), 58, 94– Baldwin, Davarian, 12, 87, 110
­
­
95 Baraka, Amiri. See Jones, LeRoi
“Afro Cuban Suite” (Lewis), 69 Beaux Arts String Quartet, 18, 150
Afro-modernism, 116, 181 bebop: alcohol linked with, 35–36; evolu-
­
­
Afternoon in Paris album, 137–38, 163 tionary narrative of, 3–4; Lewis on, 47;
­
­
“All Set” (Babbitt), 43–45 press depictions of, 75–76; in “real”
­
­
“All the Things You Are” (Kern), 70, 118– black music, 173–75; Royal Roost and,
­
­
19, 135, 137, 186 32; Third Stream and, 47–48; transfor-
­
“Ambiguité” (Hodeir), 148 mation of, 104–5; venue creation and,
­
American Youth Orchestra, 83–84, 101, 25
­
102, 103, 127 Belafonte, Harry, 156, 167–68
­
235
236 • Index

Berendt, Joachim-Ernst, 17, 19, 132–33, 148 46, 152–55. See also “Fontessa” (Lewis)

­
­
­
Birdland, 48–49, 123 compositional ambiguity, 21–22, 114–55;

­
­
­
Birdland All-Stars tour, 134–37 in commedia dell’arte pieces, 142–46;
­
­
­
The Birth of Bebop (DeVeaux), 3–4 in Concorde, 126–27; in early works,

­
­
Birth of the Cool album, 2, 30–33, 47–48, 118–32; ensemble size and, 147–53;

­
­
­
­
58, 115 “real” black music and, 177; in South
“Black, Brown and Beige” (Ellington), German Radio work, 134–37

­
26–27, 41 “Concorde” (Lewis), 2, 4, 50–51
­
­
“Black and Tan Fantasy” (Ellington), 26– Concorde album, 125–27, 133–34

­
­
­
27 “Constructing the Jazz Tradition” (De-
Black Arts movement, 117 Veaux), 3, 34
The Black Bourgeoisie (Frazier), 10–12 “Conversation” (Schuller), 150, 152
­
Black Music ( Jones), 178 Cooke, Mervyn, 157–58, 165–66

­
­
Black Nationalist movement, 21, 117–18, Cool Jazz, 26, 30–33, 39, 118
­
­
172–73 “Cortege” (Lewis), 148, 164, 166
­
Bledsoe, Jules, 103, 127 Cosmopolitan Symphony Orchestra,
blues: the black church and, 86; in com- 101–2, 127
­
media dell’arte pieces, 142–46; coun- counterpoint: in Concorde album, 126–27;
­
­
terpoint with, 115–16; Lewis on, 81–82; in European Windows, 149–50; in New
­
­
­
masking, 142–46; in “The Queen’s Orleans jazz, 4; in “The Queen’s
­
Fancy,” 123; in “real” black music, 173– Fancy,” 120–23; in “Sketch,” 150–52; in
­
­
­
75, 178; in Third Stream music, 39–40; “Vendome,” 120
­
in “Willow Weep for Me,” 135 crime jazz, 161–63, 165, 166
­
Brandeis University jazz festival, 42–43 “Cubano Be, Cubano Bop” (Russell), 69
­
Brown, Ray, 114–15, 141 “Cue #9” theme (Lewis), 170
­
Brubeck, Dave, 4, 36–39
­
“Budo,” 31 Davis, Miles, 2, 4, 9, 30–33, 126, 134–37,
­
­
Burleigh, Harry, 92–93, 94, 102–3 166
­
­
Butler, David, 22, 159, 167, 168, 169–70 “Delaunay’s Dilemma” (Lewis), 120
­
“But Not for Me” (Gershwin), 120, 121–23 Dett, Robert Nathaniel, 4–5, 8–9, 93, 116
­
­
­
“Developments in Modern Jazz Series,”
call-response tropes, 50–51, 156 41–42
­
­
­
Change of the Century (album), 173 deviance, jazz and, 35–36, 159–63, 169–70
­
­
­
civil rights movement, 105–7, 117–18, 172– “Digression” (Tristano), 27
­
­
­
73 “Dirge” (Strayhorn), 28–29
­
Clarke, Kenny, 19, 41, 114, 126, 133–34, 138 Distel, Sacha, 137, 138
­
classical music, 26, 100–104; in the black Dixon, Dean, 83–84, 101, 103, 127
­
­
church, 90–99; film noir and, 162–63; “Django” (Lewis), 72–73, 123–25
­
­
­
­
Lewis’s appreciation of, 111–12; success D.O.A. film, 159–60
­
­
in, 95–99. See also Western art music Donaueschingen Festival, 18, 148
­
Coleman, Ornette, 172–75 double-voiced constructs, 4, 6–10, 19–20,
­
­
­
­
“Colombine” (Lewis), 142–46, 152–55, 112–55, 181; in commedia dell’arte
­
­
­
177 pieces, 143–46; in European Windows,
­
Coltrane, John, 25 149–50; Lewis’s use of, 115–16; by Min-
­
­
The Comedy album, 107–8, 117, 144, 152– gus, 42–43; in 1950s jazz, 26–33; in
­
­
­
­
55 “Three Little Feelings,” 53–57; in “Ven-
­
commedia dell’arte, 18, 117, 129–31, 142– dome,” 120
­
­
 Index • 237

Down Beat magazine, 33; on the blues, 82; “Fontessa” (Lewis), 129–31, 142, 144–45,

­
­
on The Comedy, 107; on commedia 196–98

­
dell’arte pieces, 152–255; on composi- Fontessa album, 117, 128, 145

­
tion in jazz, 108; on film noir Frazier, E. Franklin, 10–11, 88–89

­
­
soundtracks, 158; on formal intent in Free Jazz album, 173
composition, 81–82; Hentoff interview French impressionism, 9–10, 13–14, 27,
­
­
­
in, 1–2; on hipsters, 76; on Jazz Com- 107
­
posers Workshop, 41; on Latin French jazz scene, 14–16

­
rhythms, 69; on Lewis, 60–61; Lewis’s fugal processes, 17; improvisation in, 115–
­
­
obituary in, 80–81; on MJQ’s behav- 16, 119; in Sait-on jamais, 164–65;
­
­
­
ioral/dress difference, 76; on modern- Signifyin(g) and, 50–51; in “Three

­
ism, 47; on venue expansion, 42 Windows,” 149–50; in “Vendome,”

­
Du Bois, W. E. B., 54–56, 83–84, 97–98 119–20; in “Versailles,” 128
­
­
­
­
Ellington, Duke, 2; at Carnegie Hall, 41; Gates, Henry Louis, 58–59, 143–44

­
­
double-voiced constructs by, 26–27; German jazz scene, 16–17
­
­
­
Lewis compared with, 108; masking by, Gershwin, George, 27, 120
9; soundtrack for Anatomy of a Murder, Gillespie, Dizzy: at Carnegie Hall, 33, 41;
158; syncretic works by, 27–29; tuxedos ensemble size used by, 25; on hipsters,
­
worn by, 77; venue choice by, 33 75; Lewis and, 2, 114; MJQ and, 114–

­
Ertegun, Nesuhi, 46, 128 15; rhythmic difference in Lewis’s ar-
essentialist view of jazz, 2–3, 98–99; rangements for, 68–69; “Woody’n
­
­
­
dress/behavior in, 74–82; effects of, You,” 128
­
177–82; Lewis’s portrayal in, 68–74; or- Giuffre, Jimmy, 14, 43, 53, 147
­
­
igins of, 63–64; rhythm in, 62–67; spir- “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” 135,
­
­
ituals and, 90–99 148
­
Eurocentrism, 178–79 “The Golden Striker” (Lewis), 164
­
European Windows album, 147, 148–50 The Golden Striker album 153–54
­
­
Evans, Gil, 29, 30 Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, 103
evolutionary view of jazz, 3, 34–35, 1 Granz, Norman, 33, 134, 136
­
79–81
­
“Excerpts from ‘The Comedy’” (Lewis), Hal Johnson Negro Choir, 93–94
­
18, 146, 154 Hall, Jim, 142
“Exposure” (Lewis), 18 Hampton Institute Choir, 93
Harald Banter Ensemble, 136
film noir, 16, 22, 156–71; deviance triggers Hare, Nathan, 10–11, 88–89
­
­
­
and, 159–63; in France, 163–66; jazz as Harlem Renaissance, 57
­
­
trope for darkness in, 156–57; modern- “Harlequin” (Lewis), 142–46, 152–55, 177
­
­
­
ist soundtracks in, 157–58 Hayes, Roland, 103, 127
­
finishing schools, 88, 98 Heath, Percy, 48–49, 115, 123, 141, 150–52
­
­
Fisk Jubilee Singers, 91–92, 93, 94, 106 Hentoff, Nat, 18, 119; on the blues, 82; es-
­
Floyd, Samuel, 3, 8–9, 25, 56–58 sentialist views by, 70–72; on European
­
­
­
folk practices, 86, 132; civil rights move- Windows, 149–50; on Jackson, 74;
­
ment and, 117–18; essentialist perspec- Lewis’s frustration in, 60; on MJQ, 49;
­
tives on, 98–99; Mingus and, 178; on modernism, 47; Modern Jazz Quar-
­
modernism and, 116; syncretism of, 91– tet with Milt Jackson album, 120–21; on
­
­
95; uplift ideology and, 179–81 perception of Lewis’s music, 1–2
­
­
238 • Index

Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks, 12, 85, 86– 65; Lewis’s marketing and, 154–55;

­
­
87, 110 press biases on, 20–24, 60–82; racial-

­
­
hipsters, 25, 75–76 ized language in discourse on, 62–67;

­
­
historical particularity, 3–6, 181–82; rhythm and authenticity of, 62–67;

­
­
­
avant-garde music and, 174–75; “real” Third Stream vs., 147–55; venue cre-
­
­
­
black music and, 172–74; social class/ ation for, 24–59

­
­
values and, 83–113; surrounding Lewis, Jazz and Classical Music Society ( JCMS),
­
117 47, 51–52, 138

­
Hodeir, André, 14, 16, 19, 133–34, 174 The Jazz and Classical Music Society Pres-
­
Hughes, Langston, 94, 105–6 ents a Program of Music for Brass al-
­
Hurte, Leroy, 101, 102, 103 bum, 52, 53
Jazz at the Philharmonic, 33, 105
improvisation: by Clarke, 126; Cool jazz “The Jazz Avant-Garde” ( Jones), 172–74

­
­
and, 30–31; in Fontessa album, 128–31; Jazz Composers Workshop, 41, 42
­
­
in fugal processes, 115–16, 119–20; Jazz Goes to College album, 37
­
­
Lewis on, 47; Lewis’s use of, 115–16; in Jazz Groupe de Paris, 133–34, 148
­
­
Odds against Tomorrow, 167–71; pre- The John Lewis Piano album, 142–46
­
­
planned material and, 128, 153–54; in Jones, LeRoi, 99, 172–74, 178
­
­
“The Queen’s Fancy,” 121–23; in Sait-on
­
­
jamais, 163–66, 171; in “Sketch,” 150– Kay, Connie, 115, 126, 141, 142–46
­
­
­
52; in soundtracks, 158–59; in Third Kenton, Stan, 27, 31, 36
­
Stream music, 26 Kern, Jerome, 70, 118–19 ­
“Intuition” (Tristano), 27 Konitz, Lee, 31
I Want to Live! film, 157, 161–63
­
“Laurenzology” (Hodeir and Clarke), 133
Jackson, Milt, 47–48; in “But Not for Lauth, Wolfgang, 17
­
Me,” 121, 122; Hentoff on, 74; improvi- Lee, Everett, 101–2, 103, 127
­
sation by, 72; in MJQ, 114; in Odds Lenox School of Jazz, 14, 139–47, 154, 173,
­
against Tomorrow soundtrack, 156; as 175
opposing force to Lewis, 78–80; in Lewis, John, 30; behavioral difference of,
­
Sait-on jamais, 165–66 74–82; character of, depictions of, 61;
­
­
­
jazz, 165; academic interest in, 14–15, 33– classical training of, 4–5; Coleman and,
­
­
­
39; African American tropes in, 2–3; 173–74; compositional style of, 2; cul-
­
­
art music tropes engagement with, 1–2; tural significance of music by, 3; essen-
­
assumptions about, 175–82; behavioral tialist views of rhythms by, 68–74; Eu-
­
­
difference and, 74–82; change in valua- ropean cultural appropriation by,
­
tion of, 104–6; classical music and, 26– 146–47; European views on, 14–19,
­
­
­
­
33; composition vs. performer emphasis 134–39; in Jazz Composers Workshop,
­
in, 41–42, 51–57; Cool, 26; crime, 161– 41; at Lenox School of Jazz, 139–47;
­
­
­
­
63, 166; deviance linked with, 35–36, music trajectory of, 1–2; obituaries on,
­
­
159–63, 169–70; early music compared 80–81; perception of music by, 1–2, 6;
­
­
­
­
with, 17; civil rights movement and, press on, 19–20, 60–82; social back-
­
­
105–7; European views of, 5, 15–19, ground of, 111–12; in Third Stream, 40,
­
­
­
132–34; evolutionary view of, 3–4, 34– 46–59; Third Stream works, 147–55
­
­
­
­
­
35, 174; film noir and, 156–57; free, 173; Locke, Alain, 89
­
historical moment analysis of, 3–6, 117; “Lonely Woman” (Coleman), 173
­
impact of on Western art music, 64– Longing for the Continent album, 147
­
 Index • 239

Louisville Philharmonic, 103 Modern Jazz Society, 9–10, 49–50, 127,

­
­
“Lovely Dark and Lonely One” (Bur- 138
leigh), 94 Monk, Thelonius, 2, 41, 76
“Move,” 31
Malle, Louis, 166 Mulligan, Gerry, 161–62

­
Mancini, Henry, 160–61 Murder, My Sweet film, 157
­
Mandel, Johnny, 161–63 ­
Music Inn, 34, 139
Manne, Shelly, 161–62
­
masking, 6–10; by Brubeck, 37; in com- Negro Folk Symphony (Dawson), 94, 95
­
media dell’arte pieces, 142–45; “how ­
New Negro movement, 89, 93, 104–5, 132,

­
much is too much” debate on, 53–56; in 155, 180–81
­
­
Sain-on jamais, 164–65 New Orleans jazz, 4, 15–16
­
­
­
Melos journal, 17, 60–61, 133 New York City Opera Company, 103
­
Metronome magazine, 41, 60–61, 172–74 New York Concert Choir, 127
­
­
“Midsömmer” (Lewis), 135, 136, 147–48, New York Orchestral Society, 102, 103
­
154 Nono, Luigi, 10, 50
“Milano” (Lewis), 133–34 No Sun in Venice album, 164–65
­
­
Miles Davis Nonet, 2, 27, 30–33 “Now’s the Time” (Parker), 25, 57–58
­
­
Milt Jackson Quartet, 47–48
­
Mingus, Charles, 2, 4, 40–46, 178 Odds against Tomorrow soundtrack, 16,
­
Mingus Ah Um album, 46 22, 156–57, 158–59; improvisation in,
­
­
minstrel masks. See masking 167–71; soundscape of, 209–13
­
­
modernism, 3, 177; Birth of the Cool and, “One Never Knows” (Lewis), 164
30–31; Lewis in, 46–59, 147–55; Lewis’s Orchestra U.S.A., 21
­
­
­
marketing and, 154–55; market issues The Ordering of Moses (Dett), 94
­
and, 175–76; primitivism vs., 104–5; in Original Sin ballet, 16
­
­
soundtracks, 157–58; spirituals and, 93– Outstanding Jazz Compositions of the 20th
­
­
94; Western art music and, 94–95 Century album, 45
­
Modern Jazz Quartet (MJQ): drummer “Over the Rainbow” (Arlen and Har-
change in, 126; European tour, 1956, burg), 128
132–39; European tour, 1957, 147; for-
­
mal dress/behavior of, 13, 20, 74–82; Panassié, Hugh, 15–16, 62, 64
­
­
framed as modern music group, 127– Parker, Charlie, 25, 30, 33–34, 174
­
­
28; French response to, 137–38; Ger- Payne, Daniel Alexander, 86
­
man views of, 17–18; Hentoff on, 1–2; Phantom Lady film, 159–60
­
­
­
at Oberlin, 36; origins of, 114–15; press “Pharaoh” (Giuffre), 53
­
on, 107–8; sonic approach in, 106–7; “Piazza Navona” (Lewis), 152–53
­
­
­
on South German Radio, 134–37; “Pierrot” (Lewis), 142–46, 152–55
­
­
­
venue expansion and, 48–49 Plein soleil (Clément), 163
­
The Modern Jazz Quartet album, 70 “Polchinella,” (Lewis) 152–53
­
The Modern Jazz Quartet and Orchestra Polifonica, Monodia, Ritmica (Nono), 10,
album, 108 50
The Modern Jazz Quartet—Germany politics of respectability, 12–13, 85–90, 99,
­
­
­
1956–1958 Lost Tapes album, 147 110, 179–81
­
­
Modern Jazz Quartet Volume 2 album, 124 The Power of Black Music (Floyd), 8–9, 58
­
Modern Jazz Quartet with Milt Jackson al- Pre-Bird album, 45
­
bum, 118, 120–22 Preminger, Otto, 158
­
240 • Index

press perceptions, 19–23, 60–82; African “Rose of the Rio Grande” (Warren), 118–

­
­
­
American, of Lewis, 104–13; of cere- 19, 187

­
brality, 73–74; of classical music, 100– “The Rose Truc” (Lewis), 164, 165
­
­
104; of commedia dell’arte pieces, 152– Royal Roost, 31–32

­
­
55; editorializing in, 109; French, Russell, George, 14, 43, 140, 141–42

­
137–38; German, 134–36; of Lenox Russo, Bill, 14, 140, 141–42
­
­
­
school, 141–42; Lewis’s frustration
­
with, 60–61, 82; of Lewis’s Third Saint-Germaine club, Paris, 135
­
­
Stream works, 147–55; on masking, 53– Sait-on jamais soundtrack, 16, 22, 146,
­
­
­
57; “real” black music and, 176, 177–82; 148; improvisation in, 163–66, 171; nar-

­
­
shaped by social class/values, 82–113; of rative and, 158–59; press on, 109–10;
­
­
­
significance of Lewis’s innovation, 107– soundscape of, 203–7; “Three Win-
­
­
11; of spirituals, 93; of structure vs. dows” from, 148, 149–50

­
spontaneity, 71–73; of Third Stream Schuller, Gunther, 15–16, 43; in Jazz and
­
­
Music album, 152 Classical Music Society, 52; in Modern
Price, Florence, 94, 179–81 Jazz Society, 50; in Pre-Bird, 45; on
­
­
primitivist perspective, 62, 63–64, 98–99; Third Stream album, 147; on Third
­
­
; civil rights movement and, 105–6; Stream music, 39–40; on “Three Little
­
­
dress/behavioral difference and, 78–80 Feelings,” 53; Town Hall concert, 150
­
jazz in debunking, 104–5 Shadow of a Doubt film, 157
­
The Shape of Jazz to Come (album), 172–

­
“The Queen’s Fancy” (Lewis), 71–72, 75
­
120–23, 148, 189 Signifyin(g), 6–10, 19–20, 143–44; by
­
­
­
­
Mingus, 42, 44–45; in “Three Little
­
Radano, Ronald, 36, 75 Feelings,” 51–53; venue expansion and,
­
“Ralph’s New Blues” ( Jackson), 125, 126– 58–59
­
­
27, 135 “Sketch” (Lewis), 18, 150–52, 154
­
“Ramblin’” (Coleman), 173 “Sketch 3” (Lewis), 148
Ramsey, Guthrie, 98, 99, 116, 181 social class and values, 10–14, 20–21, 82–
­
­
­
Ray Ventura et Ses Collégians, 15 113, 176–77; politics of respectability
­
Reinhardt, Django, 125, 132 and, 12–13, 85–90, 110–12; Western art
­
­
­
“Revelations” (Mingus), 40, 42–43, 178 music and, 96–99
­
­
Rhapsody in Blue (Gershwin), 27 “Softly as in a Morning Sunrise” (Rom-
rhythm: essentialist view of Lewis and, berg and Hammerstein), 126, 127, 135
68–74; ground beat, 37, 39; jazz au- Solal, Martial, 138
­
thenticity and, 62–67, 176; Latin, 68– South German Radio (SDR), 134–37
­
­
­
69; physical force of, 66–67 “Spanish Steps” (Lewis), 152–53
­
­
rhythm and blues (R&B), 25–26, 125 spirituals, 90–99; backwardness/immatu-
­
­
Ring Shouts, 57–58, 86, 90, 179 rity of, 90–91; modernism and, 94–95;
­
­
­
The Rise of Gospel Blues (Harris), 86 “real” black music and, 179–81; roots
­
“La Ronde” (Lewis), 118, 126 of, 90; Westernized, 91–92, 106–7
­
­
“La Ronde Suite” (Lewis): Clarke’s im- spontaneity, 65, 70–71, 71–73. See also im-
­
­
provisation in, 126; conservative musi- provisation
cality in, 13–14; formal outline of, 190– Stearns, Marshall, 34–35, 42, 139, 175
­
­
­
95; masking in, 9–10; plagal vamps in, Still, William Grant, 4–5, 8–9, 58, 94, 116
­
­
­
125; Western art music references in, Stockholm Symphony Orchestra, 103
123–25 “Stomp” (Strayhorn), 28–29
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 Index • 241

Strayhorn, Billy, 27–29 venues, expansion of, 9–10, 24–59; Birth

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Stuckey, Sterling, 58, 179 of the Cool and, 30–33; black churches

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Süddeutscher Rundfunk Sinfonie- and, 92–94; classical music, 100–104;

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Orchester, 18, 148–50 in colleges/universities, 33–39; compo-

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“Sun Dance” (Lewis), 136 sition vs. performer emphasis in, 41–

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swing bands/music, 24–25, 36 42, 51–57; European reception of MJQ

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symphony orchestras, 18, 29, 100–102, and, 138–39; for MJQ, 123; nightclubs,

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112–13, 127, 148–50, 181 127; performance spaces and, 48–49,
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51–52; postwar music industry and,

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“The Talented Tenth” (Du Bois), 97–98 24–26; Third Stream and, 39–59; West-

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“Tea for Two,” 42 ern art music and, 26–33

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Third Stream music, 15–16, 26, 30, 108, “Versailles” (Lewis), 2; compositional am-
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118; audience for, 46–59; definition of, biguity in, 128–29; counterpoint in, 4;
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39–40; Jones on, 172–74; Lewis’s mar- exposition in, 130; motifs in, 131
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keting and, 154–55; origins of term de-
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scribing, 152; presss on, 109–10; venue Washington, Booker T., 7–8, 54–56, 97
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expansion and, 39–46, 39–59; works by Welles, Orson, 160–61
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Lewis, 147–55 Western art music, 1–2; in African Ameri-
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Third Stream Music album, 147, 152, 154 can musical life, 4–5; African Ameri-

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Thornhill, Claude, 27, 29–30, 33 can ownership of, 112–13; in black
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“Three Little Feelings” (Lewis), 45, 51–57, churches, 92–94; fear over impact of
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147–48, 154 jazz on, 64–65; folk material and, 91–
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“Three Windows” (Lewis), 148, 149–50, 95; improvisation and, 115–16; Lewis’s
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164–65, 199–201 engagement with, 4–5, 109–11, 116–17;
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“Toccata for Trumpet” (Lewis), 2, 69– marketing and, 175–76; Mingus and,
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70 42; in “The Queen’s Fancy,” 120–23; ­
Touch of Evil soundtrack, 160–61 rhythm experimentation and, 62–63;
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Town Hall, 50, 103, 127, 150 Signifyin(g) and, 58–59; social class
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Tristano, Lennie, 14, 27, 36, 140 and, 10–14, 20–21; success aligned
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twelve-tone compositions, 43–45 with, 96–98; syncretism with, 56–58;
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“Two Degrees East—Three Degrees venue creation and, 26–33, 51–52
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West” (Lewis), 148 Western Symphony Association, 103
White, George L., 91–92
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Ulanov, Barry, 28, 62, 66, 67 Wiéner and Doucet, 15
Up from Slavery (Washington), 7 The Wild One film, 161
uplift ideology, 30, 96–98, 177, 179–81 “Willow Weep for Me” (Ronnell), 128,
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135–36, 137
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Vadim, Roger, 16, 146, 158, 163–66 “Winds of Time” (Du Bois), 83–84
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values. See social class and values Wise, Robert, 16, 156–57, 161–63
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“Vendome” (Lewis), 2; counterpoint in, “Woody’n You” (Gillespie), 128
4; European popularity of, 132–33; for- Work, John Wesley III, 90
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mal outline of, 188; fugal processes in,
119–20; Hodeir on, 134; rhythms in, 70 Young, Lester, 134
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“Venice” (Lewis), 164
Ventura, Ray, 15 Zwerin, Mike, 31