Ellington's Lens as Motive Mediating: Improvising Voices in the Far East Suite

Abstract

Inspired by an Ellington quote about the influence of his Orchestra's 1963 tour on the composition of the Far East Suite, this article examines the inherently subjective process of translation between musical systems and between musical performances and discursive representations thereof. The two case studies—Anthony Brown's 1999 recording of a re-orchestrated Far East Suite with the Asian American Orchestra; and the “Far East Revisited Project,” an ongoing collaboration featuring the Tony Overwater Trio and the Calefax Reed Quintet—illustrate how Ellington's ideas about transcultural interaction relate not just to musical collaboration but also to the socio-cultural contexts in which musical performance is situated. Ellington's quote includes references to the binary of reflection and refraction, implying a lens metaphor through which I suggest these processes of translation can be discussed. Coupled with the instruments and media used in the case studies, this lens metaphor highlights the importance of technology in mediating both musical and discursive performance. Attention to these mediations requires a shift in research tactics, rooted in specific case studies in which the complex interrelationship between musical performances and their mediating discourses, cultures and technologies, is spun out using multiple methodological perspectives receptive to collaboration and re-interpretation. Inasmuch as Ellington's Far East Suite was composed over time and its individual movements varied and altered, this article calls for a wider scholarly acknowledgement and sensitivity to the ways in which music, musicians, and cultures develop over time and how continuing performances can map new (sometimes disjunct) associations onto the histories of individuals and their music. As such, the article closes positing this lens metaphor as a technology for jazz scholarship, which promotes and acknowledges the subjectivity of the researcher, the importance of context, and an emergent, improvisational stance that embraces the creative aspects of performing jazz studies research.