WOODY HERMAN, IGOR STRAVINSKY

WOODY HERMAN
IGOR STRAVNSKY
Ebony Concerto

For those not familiar with the story of this piece, this article will add a lot ot your understanding of it. Another thing that this story doesn't mention is that the Ebony, In Ebony Concerto, had nothing to do with the clarinet but rather to Stravinsky’s acknowledgement of African Americans being the genesis of jazz

September 30, 1986|By John McDonough

  One of the most unexpected chapters in jazz history was written about 40 years ago when Woody Herman`s manager received an extraordinary phone call. It was from a music publisher who asked whether Herman would be interested in a work written especially for him by no less than Igor Stravinsky.

  The piece that resulted was the now-celebrated ``Ebony Concerto,`` and it will be on display Sunday at 7:30 p.m. when the current Woody Herman band plays Stravinsky`s short concerto in Orchestra Hall with Richard Stoltzman performing the clarinet part.

  ``A lot of people think I commissioned `Ebony Concerto,` `` Herman says.

``Actually I didn`t. I would never have been so presumptuous. It was supposedly a gift from him.``

 Actually, the concerto was initiated neither by Stravinsky nor Herman. It was Leeds Music Publishing Co. that first approached the composer as he was completing his Symphony in Three Movements in the late summer of 1945. But considerable discretion was essential.

``Columbia (Records) put out a story about its being a gift to the band,`` Herman recalls. ``But there was more to it. One day my attorney received a call from his attorney who said that Stravinsky`s financial condition was very poor at this point in his life. So he said that even though it was a gift, he felt it would be helpful if Mr. Stravinsky could receive a fee. So we paid him--I forgot exactly--about $1,000.``

  At one point Stravinsky almost abandoned the project entirely when a story appeared in the jazz press that Stravinsky and Herman were

``collaborating`` on a composition. The maestro was clearly sensitive to any suggestion that the writing was a shared task. Stravinsky`s attorney, Aaron Shapiro, soothed the offense.

  In a sense, however, it was a collaboration, though an unspoken one. The great master was almost totally unfamiliar with the language of the contemporary jazz band. So he wrote a clandestine note to Herman--signing in a pseudonym--requesting a representative sampling of the band`s records. Herman`s manager promptly sent him a batch, including ``Laura,`` ``Goosy Gander,`` ``Caldonia`` and ``Out of This World.`` Early in November, Stravinsky confided in a letter to a friend that he was ``unnerved . . . by my lack of familiarity with this sort of thing.``

  If Stravinsky was unnerved, Herman and his band were both intimidated and perplexed when Stravinsky finally delivered the third movement of the six-minute suite early in December. It was an edgy dialogue of snapping brass and saxophones separated by an andante movement that sustained the anxiety extablished in the first part.

 ``Grotesque,`` says Herman, describing his first reaction to the concerto. ``It was pure Stravinsky and had nothing to do with jazz. It contained the most grotesque fingerings I had ever seen, and it sounded extremely awkward no matter what you tried to do with it. I asked everyone for advice, and they all agreed it was the hardest. The challenge for him was to take this bastard kind of instrumentation and do something with it. I think he did very well, but we were now faced with the job of doing something with this piece.``

  Stravinsky himself rehearsed the Herman orchestra in the studio of New York`s Paramount Theater, where the band was playing five shows a day. (The score also included parts for oboe and French horn, which were added to the band for this piece.) The musicians came to the hall in suits and ties;

  Stravinsky appeared in baggy gray slacks, tennis shoes and a towel over his neck.

 ``We struggled for 1 1/2 hours with this score,`` says Herman. ``The guys were sweating and nervous trying to read 16th notes and rests. It was sheer reading, agony for guys like us who weren`t used to scores like that.`` The ``Ebony Concerto`` had its debut at Carnegie Hall in March, 1946. It was Herman`s first Carnegie Hall concert, and the concerto was conducted by Walter Hendl, Stravinsky`s choice. Herman played the clarinet and alto saxophone solo parts. There were a number of other concert performances, a Columbia recording session, and a flurry of satisfaction in the jazz world that it had been briefly embraced by the great Stravinsky, who died in 1971. Jazz would continue to court the kind of legitimacy accorded classical music. But by the late `40s, the ``Ebony Concerto`` had been retired from the Woody Herman book.

  This year it`s back, partly in celebration of Herman`s 50th anniversary as a bandleader and partly because of the enthusiasm of clarinet virtuoso Richard Stoltzman, who now handles Herman`s part. The band itself is another reason. 

``The young players today are so well trained,`` Herman insists, ``they can handle scores that we could never have coped with back in the `40s. When we brought the concerto out of the trunk last year and first played it, the band had it down in one or two run-throughs. We could focus on the nuances and interpretation now. In 1946 we were lucky if we could start and stop together. The musicians in my band today can play anything. Stoltzman was impressed. I think Stravinsky would be, too.``