The passage most stronoly sutrgests that compared to early airplanes, horse-drawn vehicles: required less continuous steering. were less inherently stable. could more safely tilt from side to side. were more difficult to control. AGT-B05 33 GO ON TO THE NEXT PAGE. Passage 111 singing mostly in a falsetto voice, and managed the group, booking their appearances and scheduling the rehearsals. He was a stickler for punctuality and preci- sion, for looking and sounding sharp, for taking the job 55 seriously. But not everyone in the group shared his commitment" his exasperation mourAted urAtil one day he quit. Pops decided to devote his time to a singing group that he could run from top to bottom, that would show up on time at every rehearsal, no questions asked. 60 Mostly, he wanted to sing because it was a crucial pait of his identity" since boyhood all he could remember was the pleasure singing brought him and his older brothers and sisters. When singing in the Trumpet Jubilees became a chore, he turned to his family. HUMANITIES: Passage A is adapted from the biography Duke.. A Lif8 of Duke Ellington by Terry Teachout (@2013 by Terry Teachout). Passage B is adapted from the biography I'll Take You Th8r8.' Mavis Staples, The Staples Singers, and the March Up Freedom's Highw8y by Greg Kol (02014 by Greg Kot)- Passage A by Terry Teachout What Duke Ellington sought and got fi.om his 'accuJnulation of personalities" was a loose, festive ensemble sound far removed from the clean precision of Benny Goodman's band. He had no interest in the 5 smoothly blended playing that leaders like Goodman, Jitnmie Lunceford, and Artie Shaw demanded from their groups. He preferied to hire musicians with home- made techniques that were different to the point of apparent incompatibility, then juxtapose their idiosyn- 10 cratic sounds as a pointillist painter'might place dots of red and green side by side on his canvas, finding inspi- ration in their technical limitations ("With a musician who plays the full compass of his instrument as fast or as slow as possible, there seems, paradoxically, less 15 opportunity to create"). That is why his charts never sound quite right when performed by other groups, however accomplished the individual players may be. It is also why a keen-eared virtuoso like Jack Teagarden, the greatest jazz trombonist of his (reneration, fouiid it 20 impossible to enjoy the Ellington"band. "I never did like anything Ellington ever did,, he said. "He never had a band all in tune, always had a bad tone quality and bad blend., What Teagarden meant, whether he knew it or not, was that the band had an unconventional 25 tone quality, one that had little in common with received ideas about how a big band ouoht to sound. Asked why he hired Al Hibbler when he already had a singer on the payroll, Ellington replied, "My ear makes my decision., To him, no other ear mattered. 65 "One night he came home early because the guys in tlie Trumpet Jiibilees didn't show up for rehearsal," Mavis says. "He was disgusted. He went into the closet in the living room and got a little guitar he had brought home from the pawnshop. It didn't have more than 70 three or four strings on it, but it was enough to get us started., Mavis, Pervis, Cleotha, and Yvonne sat in a semi- circle in front of their father on the beige carpet in their living room at 506 East 33rd Street. Pops hunched over 75 his $7 guitar and plucked a series of notes, assioning one to each of his cliildren. "People always ask, 'How do we get the sound we have?, And that came from my father-the sound he had with his family in Mississippi wlieii thcy saiig on 80 the gallery after dinner. He gave us [an E chord] and the pai.ts his brothers and sisters would sing. He would hit a note on his guitar and would say, 'Now, Mavis 4yo here,, a barltone pai't, because even then I had the"deepest voice. Pervis was second lead behind Pops because he 85 had the most experience, and he could hit those high notes like Michael Jackson later could. Cleedi had the high harmony. The first song he taught us was 'Will the Circle Be Unbroken.. 30 Billy Strayhorn. who saw Ellington's woi'king methods up close and understood them best, gave them a name in a 1952 article about his rnentor: "Ellington plays the piano, but his real instrument is the band. Each member of his band is to him a distinctive tone 35 color and set of emotions, which he mixes with others equally distinctive to produce a third thing, which I call the Ellington Effect., Sometimes he worked "on" his players as a choreographer makes a ballet 'on" his dancers, passing out or dictating scraps of music, then 40 shaping and reshaping them on the spot into a piece that would later be reduced to written form. Even a work that had already been notated was subject in the heat of the moment to total transformatÉon motivated solely by the whim of the composer. The goal, he explained, was 45 "to mold the music around the man," and the men around whom his music was so tightly molded rarely sounded more theinselves than when they were playing it. Questions 21-24 ask about Passage A.
