MUSIC

UT scholars fill in Ellington's work

Jazz great left operatta undone at his death, but Austin experts prepare to bring it to stage.

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
AMERICAN-STATESMAN ARTS WRITER
Tuesday, April 14, 2009

University of Texas music professor Robert DeSimone has a photocopy of the title page of "Queenie Pie," Duke Ellington's unfinished opera and the only one he wrote. Ellington subtitled the work "An opera buffa," or comic opera, a clue about how he thought of his jazz musical tale of 1920s Harlem.

For DeSimone, who heads UT's Butler Opera Center, and his colleagues, UT professors and noted jazz musicians Jeff Hellmer and John Mills, that clue was just one of many to be considered as they tried to step into the jazz giant's shoes and finish a version of "Queenie Pie" as close as possible to what Ellington may have envisioned.

"It's a bit overwhelming project to take this on," said Hellmer, the director of jazz studies at UT. "But we've done our best to re-create Ellington's music."

The newly reconstructed "Queenie Pie" will premiere Friday at UT's McCullough Theatre with a student cast from UT and Huston-Tillotson University. A live recording is planned, with a CD set for release on UT's Longhorn Records, arguably the first commercial recording of a fully staged production of "Queenie Pie."

In an effort that stretched over two years, the three UT music professors also worked with 89-year-old Betty McGettigan, who collaborated with Ellington to write the opera's lyrics and is now retired in California.

Several years ago, McGettigan's representatives approached UT's Fine Arts Library about purchasing her "Queenie Pie" archival materials. Though the library couldn't accommodate McGettigan's request, music librarian David Hunter alerted his music school colleagues that "Queenie Pie" might be of artistic and academic interest.

Ellington began working on "Queenie Pie" in the early 1970s after PBS approached him to create a one-hour musical special. The opera's story follows a fictional Harlem beauty contest for hairdressers. Ellington conceived of the piece as a series of songs with spoken dialogue in between.

DeSimone said he considered what Ellington left of "Queenie Pie" to be "about 75 percent completed."

To sing the title role, the creative team tapped Austin-born Carmen Bradford, a noted jazz singer who attended Huston-Tillotson before singing with the Count Basie Orchestra for nearly a decade. Texan Keithon Gipson, an emerging New York-based cabaret and Broadway singer, will be the male lead.

Also marking the occasion, UT will host "Echoes of Ellington," a three-day scholarly conference on the composer's life and work, starting Thursday.

The proud Queenie Pie — a character modeled after Madam C.J. Walker, an early 20th-century cosmetician whose hair straightening product helped make her one of the first African American millionaires — is the beauty contest's reigning champion. But Queenie Pie's title is challenged by Café Olay, a young upstart from New Orleans. Through a fanciful dream sequence, Queenie Pie finds love in the arms of the king of a magical island, but only after she forsakes her ambitions.

Concert versions of the "Queenie Pie" music have been performed intermittently since Ellington's death in 1974. The Oakland Opera produced a more complete staging last year, but it lacked McGettigan's input and more than doubled the hourlong time frame that Ellington worked with, even adding extra Ellington songs and dialogue that weren't originally a part of the opera.

The UT creative team, however, stuck closely to the material Ellington left behind, drawing on their own research and McGettigan's recollections of her approximately five years working with Ellington.

For starters, DeSimone, Hellmer and Mills kept the opera to about an hour with only seven scenes, similar to the original intent. And while Hellmer and Mills used small portions of the material from the Oakland Opera adaptation, they otherwise used Ellington's extensive catalog of published works as inspiration to fill in the missing parts.

"Ellington had sketches for some parts (of "Queenie Pie"), or sometimes just a melody," but not many arrangements for an orchestra, said Hellmer, who will also lead the UT Jazz Orchestra on Thursday night in an all-Ellington concert featuring several historical Ellington works, including "Rockin' In Rhythm" and "Jack the Bear." "But we have plenty of examples of how Ellington wrote (big band arrangements) for other work similar to his music in 'Queen Pie.' "

Hellmer said it was clear that Ellington, whose lifetime oeuvre encompasses many jazz styles, had situated the music in the 1940s big band era with lots of swinging rhythms and bopping beats. In some cases, Hellmer said, Ellington made melodic references to some of his better-known tunes, such as "In a Mellow Tone" or his "New Orleans Suite."

DeSimone said he decided to give the opera the look of the 1920s musical reviews produced at the Cotton Club, the legendary Harlem venue, with the 16-piece big band arrayed on stage behind glittering stands and the cast in glamorous period costumes. Ellington left few materials about how he wanted the production staged.

For all the careful piecing of Ellington's fragmentary manuscripts, there are still a few holes in this re-created "Queenie Pie. "The plot is really a thin thread of a story," DeSimone said. "There's no real character development. And there's very little of an ending, though we arrived at one with McGettigan's insight."

But whether the story is nuanced or not, it's the music that will now get the limelight.

"This is about Ellington's extraordinary music," Hellmer said. "He was constantly painting pictures with his music."

jvanryzin@statesman.com; 445-3699