In celebration of Pride month 🏳️🌈 all of my posts this month will feature the music of LGBTQ+ artists of the 78 rpm era! Today, we continue our showcase on composer and pianist Billy Strayhorn.
Chelsea Bridge is a composition inspired by the impressionistic paintings of James McNeill Whistler. Take a look at a Whistler painting such as “Nocturne in Black and Gold, the Falling Rocket” or perhaps more relevantly, “Nocturne: Blue and Gold – Old Battersea Bridge” to get an idea of the aesthetic spirit from which Strayhorn developed his stylistic motifs.
Chelsea Bridge has often been framed as classical in approach – most commonly compared with the work of French composer Claude Debussy. It stands out as something very different from the typical Ellington sound, though Ellington himself had been experimenting with a new styles of jazz composition influenced by modernistic classical music in works from the 1930s such as Mood Indigo or Reminiscing in Tempo.
While bebop would dominate jazz in the year’s after the war, the effect of Strayhorn’s work would go on to have a huge effect on the upcoming next generation of jazz artists who rose to prominence in the 50s and 60s.
Gerry Mulligan wrote, “When Strayhorn came on the scene, he just blew us away, because he was doing very complicated, sophisticated things, and they didn’t sound complicated to the ear at all – they sounded completely natural and very emotional. To bring all that complexity to bear and have it be so beautiful was something incredible to everybody who knew anything.”
Composer and arranger Gil Evans – who famously collaborated with Miles Davis on such exquisite records as Miles Ahead and Sketches of Spain wrote: “From the moment I first heard ‘Chelsea Bridge,’ I set out to try to do that. That’s all I did – that’s all I ever did – try to do what Billy Strayhorn did.”
The moody and melodic tones of Chelsea Bridge suggest a contemplative state of impressionistic moments. Childhood friend Mickey Scrima offered his explanation of what was called the Strayhorn Sound: “The guy went through a lot of shit in his life, from his father right on through school – the kids calling him a sissy, you know. He kept it all in and put on a big front that everything was fine, nothing bothered him. Then he sat down and wrote all that music with all that emotion. All his feelings came out in the music. That’s what made his stuff so incredible and different from Duke’s. It was great music, like Duke’s was, and it was so full of dark feelings.”
As Duke Ellington wrote in 1967 after Strayhorn’s passing: “God Bless Billy Strayhorn.”
Happy Pride! 🏳️🌈 🏳️⚧️
Recorded in Hollywood, California on December 2, 1941.
Released as Victor 27740.
Credits:
Duke Ellington – piano, director
Billy Strayhorn – arranger
Wardell Jones, Ray Nance – trumpet
Rex Stewart – cornet
Joe Nanton, Lawrence Brown – trombone
Juan Tizol – valve trombone
Barney Bigard – clarinet
Johnny Hodges – clarinet, soprano sax, alto sax
Harry Carney – alto sax, bass sax
Ben Webster – tenor sax
Fred Guy – guitar
Junior Raglin – string bass
Sonny Greer – drums
Sources:
Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn, David Hajou, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1996
Something to Live For: The Music of Billy Strayhorn, Walter van de Leur, Oxford University Press, 2002
Jazz and Ragtime Records (1897-1942), Brian Rust, 6th Ed.
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