Slow Dancing to Ellington

Lately on Friday nights I go alone to a swing dance ballroom in one of downtown Baltimore's dicier neighborhoods to recapture my lost youth of 1938. It's a surprisingly diverse crowd, but certain demographics are clear. The female dancers are mostly beautiful and intelligent young women, many of whom drive from hours away to be there, while the male dancers are mostly the sad old men I'd prefer to avoid becoming.

For better or worse I hurt my back as I danced on Friday, so I ended up not able to dance except during the slow songs, and I found myself just listening to big band standards in a ballroom full of fantastic dancers, exactly the way this music was supposed to be listened to.

The experience is like a time warp from a different America - no matter how modern the shirts, you watch people dance to Ellington and Basie and you feel the exuberance of a country in its prime, with so much optimism for its future that how could this roar of energy not conquer the world?

Like so much great classical music, however much or little you like it, you haven't really given any piece of music a chance until you've heard it live. And no matter how white the band, when you hear Ellington's music, the sound picture with live dynamics and cleared away from all its compression and hiss, you realize that this is music as vital as anything in Haydn.

I use the Haydn metaphor deliberately. Like Ellington, Haydn thought of himself as a workman, not a genius, providing entertainment for a social order he dared not critique. And yet from his unique perch, he could innovate as many ornamentations of meaning as anything in Byzantium.

Like Stravinsky, Ellington is meant to be danced to, but like Stravinsky, the music works just as well as pure music. There are so many innovative chords in Ellington's music that I wonder if music theory has ever come up with names for some of his progressions. You can listen nearly as well without the context of dance, and yet the dancers makes it an entirely different experience.

All music can, I think, be divided into four elemental categories: song, dance, conversation, and painting. All music has qualities of all four, but while Ellington's music is primarily of the dance, when you hear a slow song like Mood Indigo, you feel as though you are in the middle of a sung painting.

And as I slow danced with a far too pretty woman I felt as though I was something intrusive about our intimacy. So beautiful was the music that I felt as though I should never dance a song that beautiful with someone whom you're not on intimate terms with. I remembered dancing to it in my college dorm room with a girl I had an on-again-off-again thing with - mostly off. She treated me like crap, but at least I have good memories like that.

Ellington has that dual meaning which only great art has. He's obviously had his many uses in moments of seduction, and yet works like Mood Indigo and I've Got It Bad speak just as well to loneliness and heartbreak. You go to things like this hoping to meet 'somebody,' and of course, there's nobody there. The sensible people 'your' age are busy at home with their kids, the 'insensible' are still getting drunk, and after 40, bars can be a profoundly sad place.

So I found myself sitting at a table alone, and yet again, listening to great music with just myself for company, and regretting it less than I thought I would.