The Sound of New York: Marsalis and Ellington

Wynton Marsalis’ Symphony No 4 ‘The Jungle’ comes from a long line of works written in response to the sound of New York City. Edgard Varese’s Amériques, premiered in 1926, placed the screeching of fire engine sirens inside the orchestra; John Cage’s 4’33” put a frame around the sound of the city; the glacial variation of material over harmonic grids characteristic of minimalism seems like a perfect sonic metaphor for Manhattan.

But the model and style most closely aligned to Marsalis’ approach to composition is Duke Ellington, who, starting during the early 1930s, created a string of New York – Harlem specifically – related compositions. Harlem Speaks, Drop Me Off In Harlem, Harlem Flat Blues, Eerie Moan, Echoes of Harlem, I’m Slappin’ Seventh Avenue, Uptown Downbeat and Harlem Air Shaft all told of his deepening relationship with his neighbourhood.

Marsalis’ title – ‘The Jungle’ – plays with a dual meaning. When Ellington’s orchestra made their debut at the Cotton Club in Harlem on 4 December 1927, playing the first night of a new revue called Rhythmania, he faced a paradox. A proud Black musician, his music feeding off the peppy energy of the ‘Harlem Renaissance’, the painted Cotton Club backdrop surrounded him with the imagery of the jungle and of plantation slavery. But the jungle Ellington wanted his music to evoke turned out not be African – it was the modern-day urban jungle of New York City.

The ‘jungle’ Marsalis invokes is cast in Ellington’s image, and Ellington would have felt entirely at home walking through the city Marsalis portrays. Marsalis has spoken of New York as ‘the most fluid, pressure-packed, and cosmopolitan metropolis the modern world has ever seen’ – a city that managed to incubate such a diversity of music and approaches to making it. Marsalis’ symphony ranges through blues, gospel, bop, big band pizazz, Latin American grooves, with occasional hints of George Gershwin, Leonard Bernstein and Miles Davis’ arranger of choice, Gil Evans; and Ellington, as always, led the way in demonstrating how to reconcile different styles within the same composition.

Drop Me Off In Harlem was a melodically hip pop song, moreish and catchy, and later much beloved of Ella Fitzgerald, while Echoes of Harlem served up a sepia mood-painting, stark blues trumpet floating against Ellington’s plush saxophone section. Then Harlem Air Shaft, recorded on 22 July 1940, changed everything. Airshafts – vertical shafts dropping from ceiling to floor in apartment blocks that allowed buildings to ventilate – were what New Yorkers relied on before air conditioning became ubiquitous. As Ellington explained during an interview for the New Yorker in 1944: ‘So much goes on in a Harlem air shaft. You get the full essence of Harlem in an air shaft. You hear fights, you smell dinner, you hear people making love. You hear intimate gossip floating down. You hear the radio. An air shaft is one great big loudspeaker.’

This ‘great big loudspeaker’ bounced noise into Ellington’s living space, and Harlem Air Shaft was a compositional working through of those sounds that turned up randomly in his apartment. It’s a piece that launches itself in mid-motion, then obsessively rewinds back on itself, as though starting again and again, before freely associating musical building blocks bounce against a sequence of brusque gear-changes. Embedded deep inside the piece were references to I Love Bread and Butter, a then popular song, as Harlem Air Shaft diced up sounds in the New York air that wafted into Ellington’s apartment.

When performing his Symphony No 4 ‘The Jungle’, Marsalis has often chosen to offer up Ellington’s piece C-Jam Blues as a free-wheeling encore, acknowledgement of the fact that Ellington remains the core of everything.