What do these tracks (spoiler alert: that’s a clue) have in common? Robert Johnson’s ‘Honky Tonk Train Blues,Louis Jordan’s ‘Choo-Choo Ch’Boogie’, Louis Armstrong’s ‘2:19 Blues’, Bessie Smith’s ‘Trouble In Mind’, Count Basie’s ‘9:20 Special’, Thelonious Monk’s ‘Little Rootie Tootie’, John Coltrane’s ‘Blue Train’, the entire boogie-woogie movement and countless others? The short and obvious answer: trains.
Trains, railroads, their symbolism and imagery figure large in Black American history. During the 19th Century, slaves escaped U.S. Southern bondage using the ‘Underground Railway’, not a physical train but a clandestine passage of secret routes and safe houses to relative safety in the North. Following emancipation, real trains promised Black people a relief from Jim Crow laws, enabling migration from rural poverty to employment in northern industrial cities.
Until the mid-1950s, the most glamorous transportation in the U.S. was the long-distance Pullman sleeper. And, according to his book ‘The Jazzmen’ by Larry Tye, the indispensable Pullman porters, almost all Black, were key players in unionisation and the advancement of civil rights and, in many cases, the actual distribution of jazz and blues records in communities across the South.
One Pullman-inspired recording thunders ahead of the pack. Cue Edward Kennedy ‘Duke’ Ellington. Ellington was well aware that any Black musician travelling south of the Mason-Dixon Line and seeking a humble hamburger or accommodation, could be risking every kind of humiliation or even worse.
Ellington’s aversion to any form of unpleasantness was legendary. In his 1973 autobiography ‘Music Is My Mistress’, he recalled his elegant solution to the obstacle of ignorant bigotry: “To avoid problems, we used to charter two Pullman sleeping cars and a 70-foot baggage car. Everywhere we went in the South, we lived in them”. The luxurious Pullman cars provided a safe and comfortable insulated haven for his musicians and crew to sleep and dine cossetted by resident Pullman porters.
Evidently, railroad journeys criss-crossing the North American continent stimulated Ellington’s imagination and he could find inspiration where others might only find irritation. I like to picture the maestro, sometime around dawn in his private compartment, draped in a silk Sulka robe, fingers absent-mindedly tapping time to the insistent vibrations, superimposing invented melodies over the rhythmic steel wheels and riffs suggested by pounding pistons.
Atmospheric audible effects were there for the picking: melancholic whistles, tolling bells, clattering junction points, trestle bridges, echoing tunnels, the unexpected whoosh of a passing train, the screech of hot metal brakes, the sibilant hiss of steam under high pressure.
Then, in 1933, Ellington, the magician, conjured ‘Daybreak Express’, a multi-faceted tour-de-force, his representation of precision engineering and locomotive muscle gleaming with modernity, an avant-garde Art Deco masterpiece comparable to Manhattan’s Chrysler Building or the S.S. Queen Mary.
‘Daybreak Express’ is a remarkable two minute fifty-five second ride, thrumming with verve, excitement and technique skill performed by his incomparable collection of brilliant virtuosi, unmatchable by any other band on earth.
But ‘Daybreak Express’ is much more than a musical description of a train journey. In this single piece, Ellington demonstrated the ability of jazz music to embrace impressionism. Exceptional individual and section work deliver the thrilling sensation of high-speed technology, a complex machine hurtling down the line, an express expressed by the entire saxophone section’s finger-busting unison chorus (it’s rumoured that Ellington took advice from Sidney Bechet during composition) punctuated with emphatic wah-wahs from exuberant brass. And, at the end, the cooling down, the gradual release of steam and Freddie Jenkins’s stirring half-valve trumpet glissandi are touches of genius.
Postscript one: over a decade later, Ellington successfully revisited railroads with ‘Happy-Go-Lucky Local’ in 1946, from which Jimmy Forrest nicked the chuggy blues riff and called it ‘Night Train’, and even later, in 1958, the underestimated ‘Track 360’. And nobody need remind me that the Ellington Orchestra’s theme, ‘Take The A-Train’, composed by Billy Strayhorn in 1939, concerned a different kind of transport, a New York subway train and the quickest way to get Harlem.
And postscript two: according to Larry Tye’s book, ‘The Jazzmen’, while the band’s Pullman cars were parked at their railroad sidings, they’d be the venue for private concerts, performed by grateful musicians for the sole benefit of their appreciative Pullman porters. I fervently hope ‘Daybreak Express’ was on the programme.
One Response
Len – that is one of the most brilliant posts I’ve read on UKJN. Just captures and condenses that crucial cultural aspect of US railroad history, ties it in with its jazz connections, visits Duke’s well-documented life and love of railroad travel and gets to the heart of these stories in style. And what a track!