Tchaikovsky Goes Strayhorn and Ellington

Recasting 'The Nutcracker' in the language of Ellingtonia

Welcome music lovers once again!

With December now here and the holiday season in full swing, it’s time once again for some reflections on the sounds of the season. First up is an essay on a recording I have written about before: Billy Strayhorn and Duke Ellington’s adaptation of Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker. Back when I first turned my attention to this triumphant work in 2021, I was still getting my feet wet here on Substack and also with writing about music. Now that I have three more years of experience under my belt, I thought I would take what I did back then, make some revisions and also slightly expand it. I hope you like the end product and will also share your thoughts as well.

Two small stylistic notes: while it was most common to refer to Ellington and Strayhorn in that order when discussing their partnership, I have reversed the order here in recognition of Strayhorn’s central role in creating The Nutcracker Suite. As well, when referring to the pieces in Tchaikovsky’s score, I have refrained from using quotations for them, primarily for ease of reading.

Until next time, may good listening be with you all!

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Very soon, no matter where you live, one will likely be able to attend performances of two warhorses of the classical repertoire. One is Handel’s Messiah and the second is Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker. While among the Bible verses as part of the libretto for Handel’s oratorio is part of the story of the Nativity as written in the Gospel of Luke, Messiah is not strictly a work of Christmas although its continued, justified popularity is no doubt aided by the greater receptiveness to religion at this time of the year, The Nutcracker, on the other hand, is most certainly a work of the season, taking place on Christmas Eve.

The ballet’s second act is set in the Land of Sweets where Clara and the Prince, the nutcracker come to life whom her godfather gave her and her brother Fritz as a Christmas present, have travelled. For it, Tchaikovsky wrote a series of dances performed by a series of delicacies from around the world brought to life. These, in addition to the Overture, are the most recognizable parts of Tchaikovsky’s score. They have proved to be, like so much of the seasonal repertoire, deeply adaptable, from the fairly gonzo reimagining by Spike Jones to the modern-jazz sensibility imparted by the short-lived Classical Jazz Quartet of Stefon Harris, Kenny Barron, Ron Carter and Lewis Nash. With regard to the latter, it’s possible to consider what recasting portions of The Nutcracker in the jazz vernacular has to say about the dividing line between jazz and classical music.

This is where one of my favourite clips on YouTube comes into play. It's from a joint interview of Duke Ellington and Leonard Bernstein, two of 20th-century music’s titans, from July 2, 1966 in River Hills, Wisconsin. Part of the discussion centres on the growing convergence between the jazz and the classical listener.

Ellington: What I have been trying to do is to de-categorize this American music. It’s American music, or the stuff that we’re in anyway. It’s gotten to the point where the modern contemporary composer and the guy who is supposedly the modern jazz composer, they all come out of the same conservatories. And it’s very difficult to find a place to draw the line.

Bernstein: Well, you were certainly one of the pioneers in that.

Ellington: Oh, yeah, well I didn’t come out of the conservatory.

Bernstein: No, but you were one of the first people who wrote so-called symphonic jazz.

Ellington: I had a conservatory in the Capitol Theater. Sit there and listen to the symphony before the picture.

Bernstein: Maybe that’s really the difference between us. That you write symphonic jazz and I write jazz symphonies.

Ellington’s facility beyond the standard jazz compositional form was prodigious, from early extended works like ‘Creole Rhapsody’ and ‘Reminiscing in Tempo’ to the large-scale Black, Brown and Beige to thorough-composed works like ‘A Tone Parallel to Harlem’ to the many suites he wrote himself or in partnership with Billy Strayhorn, his musical soulmate and closest collaborator. Consider as well how compositions for the Ellington band were often composed for a particular soloist, in essence treating them like one-movement concertos such as the very literal ‘Concerto for Cottie [Williams]’ and the many pieces written for Johnny Hodges, for example.

The intersection of jazz and classical was faddishly called “Third Stream” music in the fifties. Composers such as Aaron Copland, Maurice Ravel and of course Bernstein too added moments of syncopation to their scores. For Bernstein, think of the fiendishly difficult stride-piano part in ‘The Masque’ section of his Age of Anxiety symphony or the foxtrot violin line in the second moment of his Kaddish symphony (to my ears, the best of his three symphonies).

Jazzing up The Nutcracker may be on a smaller scale of ambition than these examples but what resulted when Strayhorn and Ellington took their turn doing so was a transformation of the most well-known sections of the work into an enduring work of Ellingtonia. For example, the Arabian Dance was instead ‘Arabesque Cookie,’ the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy became ‘Sugar Rum Cherry’ and the Dance of the Reed Pipes was rechristened ‘Toot Toot Tootie Toot.’

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The idea came from Strayhorn and satisfied Columbia Records’ (Ellington’s label at the time) wish for a prestige project that could make a splash. Strayhorn worked on the arrangements in New York, conferring with Ellington over the phone wherever he and the band were appearing. Based on reedman Jimmy Hamilton’s description of the recording sessions for the resulting album in David Hajdu’s indispensable biography of Strayhorn, Lush Life, it's clear Strayhorn was largely in charge.

“Billy was very, very greatly involved in the recording. He had quite a few musical ideas all prepared for us, and we had to do them very exactly. [Russell] Procope was supposed to play this strange little whistle. [Juan] Tizol played the tambourine. It was his ideas, and everybody was very happy with the results—I mean, Duke and everybody who was involved.”

Perhaps as a reflection of how Strayhorn drove the project, he was not only credited on the resulting album cover but also pictured with Ellington, something that was the exception rather than the rule in their working relationship, leading to a lack of clarity over who contributed what and elevating Ellington’s contributions while often obscuring Strayhorn’s.

The album, called simply The Nutcracker Suite, was recorded in May and June 1960, the middle of a very fertile period for Ellington and band. The reed section was arguably Ellington’s best: in addition to Hodges, Hamilton and Procope, there was Paul Gonsalves and the longest serving of all Ellingtonians, Harry Carney. The trumpet and trombone sections were a mix of the familar: Ray Nance, Willie Cook and Britt Woodman, new faces: Andres Merenguito, Eddie Mullins and Booty Wood and two who recently recently returned to the fold: Lawrence Brown, whose return lasted until 1968 and Juan Tizol, whose returned was far more short-lived. Aaron Bell was new on bass and Sam Woodyard, in a sign of the profound loyalty Ellington engendered, primarily through running quite a loose ship, was only the band’s third drummer since its start in the mid twenties.

Ellington’s kind of hands-off management and predilection for scrambling at the last moment to be ready for a record date or complete a work occasionally manifested in the band sounding ragged and lumbering. The Nutcracker Suite has them sounding anything but. Here, the Ellington band is a force of nature, playing about as good as they ever did in the LP era.

There is a swaggering gait to the trumpet lines after the opening Procope-Hamilton clarinet duet on ‘Toot Toot Tootie Toot’ and an ease in the swing as the reeds play the opening gambit of the recasting of the Russian Dance as ‘The Volga Vouty.’ ‘Peanut Butter Brigade,’ the March of The Nutcracker, has the most daring ensemble writing with trumpets playing the main motif while the trombones play a marching figure and the reeds swirl around it all with a windmill-like line up and down the musical staff.

What’s equally interesting are the choices Strayhorn and Ellington made in adapting Tchaikovsky’s score. For ‘Peanut Brittle Brigade,’ its regal nature is recast as a celebration after the opening trumpet fanfare which approximates, or more accurately can be said to comment on, what Tchaikovsky had written down. After that, it turns into an Ellington burner. It ends with Gonsalves, naturally, tearing into a tenor solo that climaxes with a rollicking series of cadenzas, each punctuated by a blast from the band. The final bring-down-the-house exclamation has such a satisfying finality that one can imagine Ellington having risen from the piano bench (his solo halfway through is one of the very few times he is heard at the keys during the suite) to raise a finger to the studio ceiling to signal one and all to go for broke.

For ‘Sugar Rum Cherry,’ Tchaikovsky’s music-box precision has been swapped for the hand drums of Woodyard, a sensuous syncopation punctuated by Carney’s baritone and Gonsalves’ tenor and underlined by Procope and Hamilton’s clarinets. Gonsalves’ dreamy interlude suggests our sugar-plum fairy has gone full beatnik. For ‘Chinoiserie,’ the retitled Chinese Dance, Strayhorn and Ellington hew close to the tinker-toy, department-store cadence of the score and turn it into a glorious trio feature for Woodyard, Gonsalves and Hamilton. Two pieces, two separate decisions on how to adapt the source work, for each the right choice was made. Another was to switch the exact beat of the Overture and fling it to the back—Woodyard was an expert at relaxing the beat without sacrificing momentum.

As notable as the choices that Strayhorn and Ellington made in creating the nine charts for The Nutcracker Suite is how they tailored them to feature the band’s soloists. The ‘Overture’ and ‘Entr’acte’ provide brief moments for Gonsalves, Brown, Nance, Carney, Hodges and Hamilton to shine.

The final two pieces are the ones that most expressly act as features for an individual musician—Brown on ‘Dance of the Floreadores’ (the recast Waltz of the Flowers) and Hodges on ‘Arabesque Cookie.’

For the former, the trombonist alternates low, sweeping notes with an aggressive drive on the main melodic phrase that is both dignified and jubilant. To these ears, it’s the peak of the suite. The latter is Strayhorn and Ellington’s most elaborate, electrifying arrangement, connecting the exoticness of Tchaikovsky’s dance with the band’s own brand of it.

It begins with Procope playing a bamboo whistle, immediately establishing a mood. Bell plays a snake-charmer figure and is soon joined by Tizol on tambourine, Woodyard on the toms and Carney on bass clarinet twinned with Hamilton on clarinet. The impression here is of wandering in an undulating, unending desert (important to cite here that Spike Lee used the recording in Malcolm X to soundtrack X’s pilgrimage to Mecca to undertake the hajj). The rhythm shifts to languid Ellington time for Hodges to play a solo of bluesy riffs and his trademark glissandos against the Arabesque voices of the ensemble.

After Hodges completes his improvisation, the bands begins its recession into the distance like Omar Sharif’s entrance in Lawrence of Arabia in reverse. Tizol gives one final shake of the tambourine and the piece as well as the suite ends—a further illustration of how Strayhorn and Ellington adapted Tchaikovsky’s score into something new and something entirely personal.

With December now here again, it’s good to hear this music again and revel anew in a high point—there were a lot of them—in the Strayhorn-Ellington partnership and a fascinating bridging of the gap between jazz and classical.