FLETCHER HENDERSON, COMPOSER: A COUNTER-ENTRY TO THE INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY OF BLACK COMPOSERS.

In writing about Fletcher Henderson for the International Dictionary of Black Composers (IDBC), I faced a challenge shared by many of that dictionary's contributors. The challenge was not simply to choose four compositions that best revealed my subject's work, as the IDBC guidelines required. It was the more basic challenge of deciding how to distinguish compositions among Henderson's wide-ranging activities as a creative musician. There is no doubt that Henderson had "substantial compositional impact" on the tradition he represents, to quote from the IDBC's criteria. But the term composition--with its overtones of singular artistic control and privileged aesthetic and legal status--fits only a small proportion of Henderson's creative work. Still, I wrote the entry because the IDBC's guidelines offered an interpretive frame that would help me hear Henderson's music in a different way. I wrote with an awareness that I was presenting a rather tendentious perspective on a musician for whom composing was never a central focus. Later, I revisited my Henderson entry when I was invited to deliver a brief talk at a symposium focusing on issues raised by the IDBC (Magee 1997). The result, expanded upon in this article, comprises a kind of reflective counter-entry to the IDBC.

Jazz historians agree that Fletcher Henderson was a major figure, but a survey of the literature reveals very little about his work as a composer. In The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz (Jazz Grove), Henderson is described as a "bandleader, arranger, and pianist." Even pieces with Henderson's byline and copyright credit, such as "Down South Camp Meeting" and "Wrappin' It Up," are identified there as "arrangements" (Collier 1994, 515). Jazz Grove reflects the accepted view of Henderson's work: his main contributions lay in his roles as bandleader and arranger. As a bandleader, Henderson is often hailed as a sharp-eared talent spotter, recruiting a group of young sidemen who went on to become solo stars, including Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins, and Benny Carter. As an arranger, he wins a place as a pioneer in writing music that spurred an entire band to swing, especially the band of Benny Goodman, for whom Henderson served as a staff arranger during the mid- and late-1930s. A discussion of Henderson's compositions usually appears in the context of arrangements and recordings. In jazz history, Fletcher Henderson's compositions are invariably considered part of a larger musical enterprise.

Writings centered on Henderson as a composer, then, appear as anomalies. Henderson was elected to the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers in 1948. For that, he earned an entry in the 1952 ASCAP Biographical Dictionary, which lists five compositions, including "Wrappin' It Up," a piece identified as an arrangement in Jazz Grove. The most complete documentation of Henderson's composing activity appears on six pages of Walter C. Allen's mammoth bio-discography Hendersonia. There, Allen presents ninety-seven titles in a "Chronological Listing of Compositions Credited to Fletcher Henderson" (and to "George Brooks," Henderson's pseudonym). But he also concludes that they comprise "only a secondary feature of his career" (Allen 1974, 539).

For most historians and musicians, the difference between a composition and an arrangement is straightforward and lies in the work's origins: a composition is an original work; an arrangement is a new version of an existing work. In jazz, though, the distinction often seems blurry. As one recent jazz history text puts it, "Jazz arrangers usually create so much new material for their arrangements that there is really no difference between arranging and composing" (Porter and Ullman 1993, 461). Eileen Southern complicates the distinction even further in her landmark text The Music of Black Americans, where the term composer applies to both the arranger and the soloist:

   In one sense all the leading jazz performers were composers as well as
   soloists; with their improvisations they shaped the basic themes into
   musical compositions.... In a more conventional sense, the jazz composer
   was the jazz arranger, who built the original theme into a musical
   composition before bringing it to the band rehearsal. His talent lay in
   writing music that fitted in with the style of the band and of the
   individual soloists. (Southern 1983, 392)

In this context, Southern treats Henderson as one of the "most eminent" of the hybrid figures she calls "composer-arrangers" (392). Meanwhile, in his encyclopedic survey The Swing Era, jazz historian Gunther Schuller preserves a distinction between the two figures. The following passage reads almost like a direct response to Southern's claim:

   But an arranger is not necessarily a composer. He is rarely creative in the
   full sense that fine composers are. Great composers, whether their names
   are Ellington or Beethoven, develop and expand their musical language,
   often to the extent that their late works seem barely traceable to their
   early ones. With arrangers that kind and degree of creativity is seldom
   considered desirable. Rather, they are required to be excellent craftsmen,
   rarely creative innovators. (Schuller 1989, 22)

The passage is fascinating for its rhetorical leaps from "composer" in the first sentence, to "fine composer" in the second, to "great composer" in the third, where longevity appears to be a factor along with genius. Indeed, Schuller's statement makes explicit an assumption about relative originality that seems to emerge in distinctions between composer and arranger: that the best arrangers aspire to the condition of the composer, who is the creator par excellence in Western music making.

Schuller's statement makes it clear that the functional distinction between an arranger and a composer is embedded in a hierarchical distinction among kinds of musical creativity.(1) But what would happen if composer and composition were stripped of their more exalted connotations? In its first definition in The American Heritage Dictionary (1992), composition means "the combining of distinct parts or elements to form a whole." Composition in that sense becomes indistinguishable from arrangement. The American Heritage definition has the additional advantage of suggesting a musician's perspective on the issue. On the bandstand, everything was a "chart" or a "number." The Benny Goodman Collection at Yale University contains more than two hundred folders of parts and scores by Fletcher Henderson, most of them with numbers scribbled in ink marker, crayon, pencil--or all three. The numbers show no distinction between Henderson's "compositions" and his "arrangements."

Had the IDBC embraced the broader definition of composition, it might have solved several problems, but it would have created new ones, especially for the editors. Yet the distinction between composer and arranger, composition and arrangement, and their implied hierarchy, are precisely the kinds of differences that African-American music making itself continually challenges. For this "counter-entry," then, I've chosen three pieces to which Henderson made a significant creative contribution and which help to question the categories and challenge the rhetorical superiority of composition and composer. The pieces are "Wrappin' It Up," "Blue Skies," and "King Porter Stomp." Only "Wrappin' It Up" ranks as a composition within the IDBC guidelines. As arrangements of preexisting compositions, "Blue Skies" and "King Porter Stomp" could not be included in Henderson's compositional canon. Yet all three had a "substantial impact" and "circulated within performing repertories," in the words of the IDBC guidelines. In fact, although "King Porter Stomp" has the weakest link to Henderson's agency as a composer, it is the title most often linked to Henderson's name in histories of jazz.

Two more issues complicate Henderson's status as a composer. First, distinguishing Henderson's compositions from his other work was made more difficult when I examined how the principal performers of Henderson's work approached them. Benny Goodman demonstrated a lifelong commitment to Henderson's pieces by performing them hundreds of times in a bandleading career that spanned more than half a century. And in the decade before his death in 1986, Goodman winnowed his vast repertory down to a small canon whose core consisted of arrangements by Fletcher Henderson. With Henderson's charts, Goodman subjected his band to rehearsals of legendary length and intensity. In Goodman's hands, all of Henderson's scores--whether "compositions" or "arrangements"--were treated with a deep respect for unified phrasing, articulation, and dynamic shading, an attitude usually thought to be reserved for "composed" concert music.

In addition to how Henderson's pieces were played, there is also the issue of where they were played, for the IDBC's taxonomy classifies composers in part by the venues in which they worked. (For examples, some composers are composers of "concert music," which connotes certain kinds of venues and not others.) Here the boundaries between genres also begin to blur, because Goodman performed Henderson's scores in dance halls, on radio, in recording studios, in concert halls, and on television. From the standpoint of venue and audience, Henderson's work fits within several categories on the IDBC list. "Blue Skies," for example, was a popular arrangement in a jazz style, and Goodman performed it at social dances as well as in concert halls. When such contextual issues come into play, the only categories into which "Wrappin' It Up," "Blue Skies," and "King Porter Stomp" clearly do not fit are "Blues," "Gospel," and "Contemporary Pop."

These issues form the backdrop for the pieces on which I am focusing. Each illustrates a distinctive approach to big-band jazz in the swing era. And together, they serve to test and expand the notion of what it means to be a composer in African-American traditions.

When I considered how to write about "Wrappin' It Up" for the IDBC, I found it useful to call it a "swing composition." It is a work with a carefully constructed overall shape in which written ensemble passages frame and support solo improvisations. "Blue Skies" is Henderson's arrangement of a popular song by Irving Berlin. It too features a clear plan, in which Berlin's main melody is gradually effaced by swing variations, then brought back in full glory at the end. "King Porter Stomp" is an arrangement of a piano composition by "Jelly Roll" Morton. Using Morton's multistrain form, Henderson provided an expandable framework for improvisation.

Henderson wrote "Wrappin' It Up" for his own band in 1934. Its theme embodies the thirty-two-bar ABAC popular-song form. The saxophones state the theme, with pointed brass punctuation. The theme statement is then followed by three choruses based on its form and harmony. The first two variations are solo choruses featuring alto saxophonist Hilton Jefferson and trumpeter Henry "Red" Allen. The final chorus presents Henderson's own orchestrated variation of the theme. This format represents an approach common to many swing-era arrangements: a first chorus stating the melody, a series of solo improvisations on the melody, and a final chorus featuring the composer-arranger's written variation on the melody.

But unlike the popular-song arrangements that dominated the big-band repertory, "Wrappin' It Up" was conceived as a jazz piece. The tune is more compelling for its rhythmic vitality than for its melodic beauty, and its darting, syncopated line is meant for instruments, not voices. In fact, many phrases of the melody bear a striking resemblance to figures that Louis Armstrong played in his solos with Henderson's band a decade earlier. The three-note, short-short-long figure in the first phrase of "Wrappin' It Up" was among the most common earmarks of Armstrong's style, as Gunther Schuller (1968, 94) has shown. And the syncopated double leaps that make up the tune's B section also recall an Armstrong solo formula. Armstrong's impact on solo jazz has been widely recognized; these musical figures, along with the blues inflections laced throughout the melody, offer a clear example of Armstrong's further impact on ensemble jazz. In short, the first chorus of "Wrappin' It Up" sounds like orchestrated, stylized Armstrong.

The two solos that follow the theme statement present a sharp distinction. Hilton Jefferson's sweet, limpid style recalls white saxophonist Frankie Trumbauer; underneath, Henderson's arrangement provides a backdrop of smooth, subdued long tones in the brass. In contrast, Red Allen's brash, bravura style in the next chorus recalls Armstrong and conveys a giddy excitement unique to Allen. Below Allen's solo, the saxophones play an active riff that constantly bubbles up to the surface to provide rhythmic and melodic counterpoint. Allen thrives on the interaction: both halves of his solo burst out of an orchestral crescendo, as if the whole band is raising him up on its shoulders.

The final chorus presents Henderson's variation on his own melody. Here the brass and reeds--now switching from saxophones to clarinets--engage in a dialogue of one-bar phrases. Out of this call-and-response passage, clarinetist Buster Bailey emerges for an eight-bar solo turn, backed by humming trombone chords. The ensemble joins in again, with the reedmen switching back to saxophones to play an elaborate variation of the melody. The brass reenter and the full ensemble drives to the final cadence, punctuated by a ringing octave from the piano.

While allowing space for improvised solos, "Wrappin' It Up" reveals the guiding hand of the composer from beginning to end. The introduction and first and last choruses are almost entirely written, and even during the solos, the underscoring interacts with the soloists and often rises up to take over the discourse, only to recede to the background and allow the soloist to continue. For their part, the soloists obviously thrive on the foundation Henderson provides. Saturated with blue notes, syncopation, and call-and-response figures, and harkening back to the solo style of young Louis Armstrong, "Wrappin' It Up" offers an elegant stylization of African-American musical practices within the big-band tradition.

Henderson adopts a similar approach in his 1935 arrangement of Irving Berlin's popular song "Blue Skies." The challenge here was not to conceive a new tune in an African-American idiom but, in effect, to African-Americanize a tune that utterly lacks black music traits. In the sheet music version of Berlin's song, the rhythmic style is deliberately straight, with only a slight flutter of syncopation at phrase endings. "Blue Skies" is a ballad that Berlin intended to have no relationship to jazz,(2) yet after Goodman recorded Henderson's arrangement in 1935, many band-leaders brought the tune into their repertories, including Artie Shaw, Earl Hines, and Tommy Dorsey.

As in "Wrappin' It Up," Henderson's arrangement of "Blue Skies" consists of four choruses in a theme-and-variations format. Along the way, Henderson laces Berlin's melody with plenty of blue notes, syncopation, and call-and-response figures. As the arrangement progresses, Berlin's tune gradually disappears and Henderson's elegant written variations and the band's solo improvisations become new melodies over Berlin's chord progressions. But Henderson ends this arrangement with a striking climactic twist: in the last eight bars, he finally reveals the original melody--precisely as Berlin wrote it--in a fortissimo blast by the trombones, while the rest of the band plays a spiky countermelody against it. The overall effect, then, is not so much theme-and-variations but rather variations-and-theme, an effect enhanced by the familiarity of Berlin's original tune and thus an effect that only an arrangement of a widely popular song could make.

According to Loren Schoenberg, a former Goodman sideman who assumed leadership of the band after Goodman's death, "Blue Skies" was Goodman's "all-time Fletcher Henderson favorite." When Goodman had an arrangement he liked, he made a point of perfecting its performance. Schoenberg told Goodman's biographer Ross Firestone that, while rehearsing "Blue Skies," Goodman "made us keep going over and over those opening figures a countless number of times." The band was "playing the right notes," Schoenberg recalled, "but it wasn't playing them precisely the way he wanted them played, with the exact nuances of phrasing" (quoted in Firestone 1993, 447). For Goodman, "Blue Skies" was both a dance number and a concert piece, and that he chose it as part of the program for his famous Carnegie Hall concert in 1938 reveals how highly he thought of it.

"Wrappin' It Up" and "Blue Skies" may occupy distinct domains of musical activity--compositional and arrangement--but both reveal what are usually thought of as classic compositional virtues: balance and symmetry, a sense of logical progression, an overall shape. The improvised solos may change, but to alter that overall shape by adding more solos, for example, would obscure the shaping hand of the composer-arranger. While forbidding the inclusion of "arrangements" like "Blue Skies," the IDBC guidelines actually encouraged me to hear its dynamic "compositional" structure. In this instance, omitting "Blue Skies" from a survey of Henderson's compositions seemed distantly akin to omitting the Diabelli Variations from an article on Beethoven because the original tune was composed by someone else.

"King Porter Stomp" presents a different case and an interesting one because it is the title most closely connected with Henderson's name in the jazz tradition. Yet within the scope of Henderson's creative activity, it is the piece that bears the least resemblance to a composition in the usual sense. Unlike "Wrappin' It Up" and "Blue Skies," "King Porter Stomp" is a piece for "blowing" or "jamming," and its last section is commonly reiterated as many times as there are soloists to improvise on it.

"King Porter Stomp" began its life in the jazz tradition as a blues-inflected ragtime piano piece by Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton in the early 1900s. Morton played it for years before publishing it in 1924. The publication of a stock arrangement that year was the catalyst for a series of dance band recordings in the mid-1920s. Henderson made three recordings of "King Porter Stomp" between 1928 and 1933, and listening to them from a classicized perspective on musical composition is like hearing a sketch develop into a finished score. But the "sketch" in this case was worked out by Henderson and his sidemen in collaboration, and little if any of it was written down. In other words, in jazz parlance, "King Porter" was a head arrangement. By the time he broke up his band in 1934, Henderson had written down the arrangement and sold it to Goodman, whose performances and recordings turned the number into an anthem of the swing era. Pointing to the success it brought Benny Goodman and the attention it focused on big-band swing in general, Gunther Schuller (1968, 268) credits Goodman's version of "King Porter Stomp" with being "largely responsible for ushering in the swing era," and he claims the arrangement's final call-and-response chorus as "the single most influential ensemble idea" of the period.

How much of the sound and shape of this arrangement can be attributed to Henderson? Henderson's role in his most famous piece may have been less that of a creator than a transmitter and facilitator who wrote down one version of the head arrangement that his band had worked on for years, passing it along to Goodman, who in turn treated it as a fixed score with plenty of open space for improvised solos. Goodman's landmark 1935 recording of "King Porter Stomp" was the product of many musical agents working over a span of three decades. Yet Henderson's name is the one most musicians associate with "King Porter Stomp." The composer-pianist John Lewis, for example, wrote two pieces based on the chords of the third strain of "King Porter Stomp" ("Golden Striker" and "Odds against Tomorrow"), and I once asked him where the inspiration came from. Undoubtedly echoing the view of many musicians who came of age in the 1930s or after, Lewis said it was what Henderson did with the piece, not Morton or Goodman, that caught his imagination. "What made `King Porter Stomp' interesting to me was ... what Fletcher Henderson did. He recomposed the piece. That's what's important" (Lewis 1987). Yet the chord sequence on which Lewis built his pieces, of course, drew from Morton's work, not Henderson's.

The case of "King Porter Stomp" raises interesting questions in a discussion about composing in African-American traditions. Why is "King Porter Stomp" so closely linked to Henderson's name if he did not write it and played only a collaborative role in its arrangement for big band? Why is it the most famous and influential of the works he is credited for writing, when in fact his original contribution is more readily revealed in pieces like "Wrappin' It Up" and "Blue Skies"? "King Porter Stomp" receives only a brief mention in my IDBC article. But why should it not be recognized along with pieces that exhibit the more obvious compositional virtues of order and design? By allowing ample space for solo improvisation culminating in a climactic call-and-response chorus, does "King Porter Stomp" not embody several core African-American musical values? Indeed, is the very collaborative and changeable nature of "King Porter Stomp" not a perfect example of how African-American music undergoes transformation in a blend of aural and written tradition? In The American Heritage Dictionary's broadest definition of composition--"the combining of distinct parts or elements to form a whole"--and in the spirit of music making in the swing era as a whole, Henderson certainly seems to have been the composer of "King Porter Stomp."

In the end, however, perhaps "King Porter Stomp" does not need the IDBC to legitimate its merit, and the IDBC does not need "King Porter Stomp" for the same reason. My questions obviously challenge the conception and guidelines of the International Dictionary of Black Composers, but they would not have occurred to me if I had not written the entry on Henderson. Because of that, I believe that this dictionary, in its selection and presentation of material, will stand as a provocative work of interpretation as well as an objective document of information. The IDBC is sure to encounter the usual criticisms of the genre: too much coverage of this, not enough coverage of that, a manner of selection and presentation that reveals some debatable assumptions. But finally, I believe that its greatest contribution may lie as much in the questions it provokes as in the answers it provides.

(1.) Such a distinction helps explain the reputation of Will Vodery, who was an arranger and composer widely respected by musicians during his career, yet who fell into obscurity after his death (see Tucker 1996).

(2.) Berlin embraced jazz in the 1920s as eagerly as he had absorbed ragtime in earlier years. The songs that won him the moniker "jazz composer" in the popular press, however, would not have been ballads like "Blue Skies" but rhythm songs such as "Pack Up Your Sins" and "Puttin' on the Ritz," up-tempo songs spiked with syncopation and "secondary ragtime" effects. Yet "Blue Skies" too acquired a jazz aura after Al Jolson sang it in the landmark film The Jazz Singer (1927).

REFERENCES

Allen, Walter C. 1974. Hendersonia: The music of Fletcher Henderson and his musicians. Highland Park, N.J.: Walter C. Allen.

The American Heritage Dictionary. 1992. 3rd edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Collier, James Lincoln. 1994. Henderson, Fletcher (Hamilton, Jr.). In The New Grove dictionary of jazz, edited by Barry Kernfeld, 514-516. London: Macmillan Press, 1988. Reprint, New York: St. Martin's Press.

Firestone, Ross. 1993. Swing, swing, swing: The life and times of Benny Goodman. New York: W. W. Norton.

Floyd, Samuel A., Jr., ed. 1999. International dictionary of black composers. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn.

Lewis, John. 1987. Telephone interview with the author, March 26.

Magee, Jeffrey. 1997. Fletcher Henderson and the idea of the "Black Composer" Paper presented at A Symposium on the Composer in African-American Musical Traditions, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, September 25..

Porter, Lewis, and Michael Ullman. 1993. Jazz: From its origins to the present. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.

Schuller, Gunther 1968. Early jazz: Its roots and musical development. New York: Oxford University Press.

--. 1989. The swing era: The development of jazz, 1930-1945. New York: Oxford University Press.

Southern, Eileen. 1983. The music of black Americans: A history. 2nd edition. New York: W. W. Norton.

Tucker, Mark. 1996. In search of Will Vodery. Black Music Research Journal 16, no. 1:123-182.

JEFFREY MAGEE is assistant professor of musicology at Indiana University. He is working on a book tentatively titled Fletcher Henderson and Big Band Jazz, to be published by Oxford University Press.