Jazz scholar Lewis Porter has an interesting post featuring an all-but-forgotten composition in which Ellington runs down the history of jazz in three+ minutes. The only available recording is on a short film-clip, which Porter includes in his post.
Here's Porter's account of what happens:
A lot happens in this piece, which actually runs about 3 minutes and 45 seconds. First of all, it’s not a chronological history. It’s a kind of collage, with many short sections at different tempos that could, conceivably, be rearranged at will. It starts with a close-up of the clarinet going into a New Orleans piece—then it suddenly goes into a bebop line, followed by a tiny quote of Basie’s hit “One O’Clock Jump,” then a fast excerpt of that same number, followed by a little bit of stride piano by Duke. It’s from his own piece for Willie “The Lion” Smith, “The Second Portrait of the Lion.” At 1:50 all six saxophones play a ballad while the camera pans from left to right, as we saw above. Suddenly at 1:56 the whole band claps and sings “ah, ah, a-a-ah!” That marks the end of the first half.
The second half begins with Rouse playing, solo, a few phrases from the famous 1939 “Body and Soul” recording by Coleman Hawkins. Then the previously heard ballad continues, now featuring Glenn’s trombone. At 2:36 Duke plays some boogie-woogie, then goes into an abstract version of “Basin Street Blues” while Nance imitates Louis Armstrong with a handkerchief. But it’s a pantomime—he makes no sound! Then there’s a wild fast number, interrupted when we are suddenly taken back to the New Orleans piece that started it all—and finally, once again, “ah, ah, a-a-ah!”:
[FILM CLIP IS HERE]
What a journey! And what does it all mean? Today we might call this “post-modern” for the way it draws freely from such a range of styles, in a seemingly random, chopped-up fashion
This film also represents a step in Duke’s long-standing interest in creating a piece about jazz history. He credited Orson Welles for having gotten him thinking about this in the early 1940s, when Welles commissioned Duke to work on a history of jazz. Welles paid Duke in advance for that project, but it never happened. Soon afterward, in 1943, Ellington premiered his major suite, Black Brown and Beige. This was not a history of jazz—Duke’s subtitle was “A Tone Parallel to the History of the Negro in America"— but one could see these projects as related, since both involve creating musical works that offer a long historical view. He returned to jazz history in 1950 with the piece you just watched. The next year, 1951, he wrote his Controversial Suite with its two chronological sections, “Before My Time,” and “Later.” Then came A Drum is A Woman, recorded in 1956 and televised in 1957, which Ellington explicitly referred to as a history of jazz.
By all means, follow the link to watch the clip. It's marvelous.
