East St. Louis Toodle-Oo

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East St. Louis Toodle-Oo is a jazz - composition of Duke Ellington and Bubber Miley from the year 1927th

The "Jungle Style"

The title was part of the classic repertoire of the Duke Ellington Orchestra , was the band's first signature tune and the first record on their list of Billboard's Top 30 shellac records . With the title Black and Tan Fantasy, which was created at the same time, it is one of the best-known examples of the " jungle style " of that time, which was able to establish itself towards the end of the 1920s. According to the judgment of Hans Ruland were for less musical relevance as a social reasons: "Africanism and Negritüde were at the former intelligence in . The desire to encounter the erotic fascination of the black world in a white robe with a glass of champagne in the club was supposed to satisfy the desire for a frivolous, tingling, admittedly harmless adventure. Bubber Miley's growl effects met the taste of the times ”.

East St. Louis Toodle-Oo became the Ellington Orchestra's first chart success; it reached position 10 on the Billboard Top 30 in July 1927 and stayed in the charts for four weeks.

The composition

According to Ellington's biographer JL Collier, the title was Ellington's first significant composition. It was recorded for the first time by Duke Ellington's orchestra on December 18, 1927, and then played and released countless times over the next 50 years of his career.

The first theme, called a "sawtooth tune," is commonly attributed to Bubber Miley. Bubber was in the habit of singing the words on billboards that suggested music to him. In his Ellington biography, Collier tells the story that it was an advertisement for a cleaning company called Lewando that Miley had seen over and over from the train window on the way from New York to Boston. Bubber then began to sing, "O, lee-wan-doo, o, lee-wan-do," and so the East St. Louis Toodle-Oo theme was born. “The number begins with an eight-bar introduction to the leewando theme, followed by Bubber, 'shouting' and growling , as wild and as dense as he could possibly be. Tricky Sam Nanton blows the solo on the second theme, then the clarinet plays sixteen bars on the minor theme; now comes a brass trio, followed by a duet of clarinet and soprano saxophone and half a chorus of the whole band. At the end, Bubber Miley plays an eight-bar coda on the minor theme, ”said JL Collier in his analysis of the title. In his opinion, this piece shows a compositional principle very early on that has been fundamental for Ellington throughout his career: “Contrast. In his work there is diversity, change, movement everywhere. Nothing is static, with every step of the way something new appears. With "East St. Louis Toodle-Oo" Ellington stopped being just a so-called "songwriter", he fought to become a composer. "

The melody line of the first theme is so simple that - apart from the stuffed tin and the growl effects - it could have come from a folk song. The way in which the melody is accompanied over long stretches of parallel, on the other hand, is noteworthy and, according to Gunther Schuller, can be described as the “Ellington effect”, which was created collectively by the musicians of the orchestra.

Remarkably, the piece did not have a completely fixed structure: The composition consists of two parts which - as the early recordings of the Ellington Band show - can be joined together in different ways: ABA′B′B ″ A or ABAB′A′B ″ A, where the last A is just an eight-bar recapitulation of the 32-bar A section.

literature

  • James Lincoln Collier: Duke Ellington . Berlin, Ullstein, 1999
  • Hans Ruland: Duke Ellington - his life, his music, his records . Oreos, Gauting
  • Gunther Schuller: Early Jazz. Its roots and musical development. New York, etc .: Oxford University Press 1986; ISBN 0-19-504043-0

Remarks

  1. ↑ Collier is critical of the importance of Ellington as a composer of many of the works he and his orchestra have played, and comes to the conclusion that East St. Louis Toodle-Oo is primarily based on the musical ideas of Bubber Mileys; see. Collier, p. 436. He writes that of all of the early songs on which Ellington's fame as a songwriter and his ASCAP royalties were based, only the title Solitude was his work.
  2. ↑ cit. after Ruland, p. 66
  3. ↑ cit. according to Collier, p. 164. According to Collier, the title "tu-dul-o" is pronounced.
  4. ↑ Collier. P. 165 f.
  5. ↑ Collier, p. 167
  6. ↑ Schuller, Early Jazz, p. 327
  7. ↑ Schuller, Early Jazz, p. 329