"I never heard so musical a discord, such sweet thunder." So says Puck in William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. In 1956 Duke Ellington was performing with his orchestra in Stratford, Ontario and took the opportunity to propose to the Shakespeare Festival that he and Billy Strayhorn compose a Shakespearean suite to be premiered the following summer at the festival.

A few months later, Anahid Ajemian and her husband George Avakian, Duke’s producer at Columbia Records, were producing a concert series at Town Hall in New York entitled Music for Moderns, which involved musicians and composers from different genres performing on the same concert but not with each other.

He asked Duke to compose a new piece and premiere it for one half of one of the concerts. Ellington responded that he would love to perform, but he and Billy were too busy finishing composing their Shakespearean suite to write anything else. The Shakespeare Festival then agreed to permit Duke to premiere the suite in New York. The concert was an artistic success, but a financial disaster.

Of the twelve movements, only seven were performed (Duke hadn’t written the sonnets and Circle Of Fourths yet)—four by Ellington and three by Strayhorn. Two of Strayhorn’s had been written earlier and retitled. Pretty Girl became The Star-Crossed Lovers (Romeo and Juliet) and Lately became Half The Fun (Cleopatra). Ellington’s unfinished Fuzzy was reworked to become The Telecasters replacing the aborted Three Bitches And A Moor.

What began as The Shakespearean Suite was recorded for Columbia and retitled Such Sweet Thunder, which also serves as the title of the first movement. Although Strayhorn was extremely knowledgeable when it came to Shakespeare—he had several sonnets and scenes from the plays committed to memory, Ellington, on the other hand, needed some help and was given a set of synopses of the plays. Rather than describe the narratives of the plays, Ellington decided to base the music on Shakespearean characters, much in the tradition of his earlier musical portraits of real-life people like Black Beauty, Bojangles, Bert Williams, The Lion, and Satin Doll.

Originally entitled Cleo (for Cleopatra), Such Sweet Thunder describes Othello’s charm and uncontrollable jealous rage. Cleopatra was reassigned to the seductive Half The Fun. The only character to appear in more than one movement of the suite was Othello, who returns in Sonnet In Search Of A Moor, which most likely is due to Othello being the only Shakespearean character of African descent. Also, my guess is that Ellington, a lover of word play, couldn’t resist the pun (“a moor” and “amour”).

Puck, the character who gave us the famous lines “such sweet thunder” and “Oh what fools these mortals be!”, is placed in the more than capable hands of Clark Terry in Strayhorn’s Up And Down, Up And Down (I Will Lead Them Up And Down), which in its description of the romantic couples is musically reminiscent of Bartok’s Concerto For Orchestra, Second Movement, The Play Of The Pairs.

The working title of Madness In Great Ones was Hamlet. College student Hamlet feigns madness to trick his uncle into admitting that he killed Hamlet’s father to marry his mother and become king. Ellington’s portrait seems to not make sense, but as Hamlet tells us, “There’s a method to my madness”. It’s our job to figure out Duke’s method.

Personnel

Recorded NYC April 24, 1957

Reeds: Johnny Hodges, Russell Procope, Jimmy Hamilton (clarinet), Paul Gonsalves, Harry Carney

Trumpets: Cat Anderson, Willie Cook, Clark Terry, Ray Nance

Trombones: Britt Woodman, Quentin Jackson, John Sanders

Bass: Jimmy Woode

Drums: Sam Woodyard

Form

a                      8 bars

b                      8 bars

interlude #1   8 bars

a’                     8bars

c                      8 bars

interlude #2   6+5+4 bars

a                      8 bars

b’                     12 bars

c’                     8 bars

d                      12 bars

Coda               5 bars + vamp + 3 bars + vamp to fade