The Ultramodernist Trajectory of Bob Graettinger
While playing with Stan Kenton’s orchestra at the Hollywood Palladium one night in 1941, bassist Howard Rumsey spotted a tall, gaunt teenager hanging around the bandstand. At intermission, the kid introduced himself. He was Bob Graettinger, and he had some arrangements with him. He asked Rumsey if Kenton would have a look at them. Kenton, who eagerly sought new talent, felt they were ambitious but amateurish. He told Graettinger to keep trying.
Six years later, having cut his professional teeth as saxophonist and arranger with bands led by Ken Baker, Benny Carter, and Bobby Sherwood, Graettinger approached Kenton again. His new arrangement, “Thermopylae,” presented to Kenton during a rehearsal in Hollywood, would eventually redefine big band modernism.
Kenton led the band in a reading of the work. Impressed, he hired Graettinger as an arranger. All of the music the young man eventually penned for Kenton encapsulated a sound the bandleader had been seeking since he formed the Progressive Jazz orchestra in 1945.
Remembered primarily for performing multi-instrumentalist Pete Rugolo’s arrangements, Kenton’s orchestra offered music that fused jazz with techniques from modernist classical music, particularly Stravinsky and Bartók. But Graettinger crafted sounds well beyond those styles. Contemporary composer Terry Vosbein described him as “the most avant-garde composer on the Stan Kenton composition and arranging staff,”creating arrangements that ultimately alienated loyal Kenton fans.
For Kenton, Graettinger’s music lay at the cutting edge of his mission. “I don’t think jazz was meant to continue as dance music,” Kenton told jazz critic Nat Hentoff in 1952. “What jazz is going to evolve into is an American style of—if I can use the word—classical music. And that’s what we’re trying to do.”
Kenton promptly recorded “Thermopylae” for a double-sided single alongside Rugolo’s Peanut Vendor in 1948. “It was dramatic, daring, and different,” biographer Carol Easton said of the score. “Tension exceeded release.” Robert Badgett Morgan, author of the only academic study of Graettinger’s music, noted a similar tendency. “The resultant atmosphere is totally depressive,” he wrote. “Occasional transparency, and, perhaps, counterpoint, would no doubt add resiliency to the texture, but there is neither. The 4/4 meter plods,” he says.
Though only 37 measures long, “Thermopylae” unfolds at a glacial pace. Harmonically, the score draws on a number of techniques from Debussy and Bartók. It opens with a two-measure introduction—sustained quartal chords in the saxophones, arpeggiated fourths in the guitar and piano, and a brass motive derived from the whole-tone scale—duplicating every second note of the piano arpeggio. The first section presents two short themes by the saxophones and then by the brass. The saxophone theme involves dotted rhythms and a scalar motive based on the octatonic scale. The middle section features the saxes in both solo and soli roles. This section culminates in three different diminished seventh chords played simultaneously by the saxophones, trumpets, and trombones.
Graettinger then scores a brief interlude: a saxophone soli drawn from both motives of the first theme in augmented rhythm. The trumpets repeat the solo alto saxophone’s material as a counter motive. The final section is a formal retrograde of the first section.
Critics gave “Thermopylae” a cool reception. Metronome magazine rated it a “C” and explained, “It’s well-disciplined playing but thoroughly composed and confused writing; the thing gets nowhere, very deliberately and dully; it adds up to a background, one that’s repeated, over and over.” DownBeat was similarly critical: “’Thermopylae’ is a moribund, impressionistic thing concerned only with mood—and a depressing one at that . . . these sounds are undistinguished and monotonous.”
However, Michael Levin, reviewing a Carnegie Hall concert in February 1948, complimented Kenton and “Thermopylae,”—particularly in Graettinger’s use of brass as a “secondary rhythm section.” Kenton himself wavered in his usual high praise for Graettinger’s talent. “I don’t know whether his music is genius or a bunch of crap!” he confessed to friends.
But the bandleader would continue to champion Graettinger’s music, going as far as to record an entire album dedicated to two suites, City of Glass and This Modern World. Both works show Graettinger moving well beyond the thorny textures of contemporary progressive big band arrangements. Dissonances abound, and the composer drew upon techniques derived from Joseph Schillinger’s compositional system.
Graettinger worked on City of Glass for over a year, having learned Schillinger’s rhythmic and pitch system from Russell Garcia at the Westlake School of Music. He used a complex graph notation to score his ideas. These densely packed scores involved various hues of blue, green, red, and orange to reference the orchestration. Maynard Ferguson’s trumpet was given its own color: a vibrant red. He placed numerals, symbols, and hieroglyphics in the squares that, as Easton says, were only decipherable to him. Some sources claim that copyist Clinton Roemer transposed the music to score paper, with the notes corresponding to Graettinger’s graphs. But critic Irwin Chusid and Robert Morgan claim that Graettinger himself transcribed the graphs into standard notation. “They would otherwise have been unplayable,” Chusid said of the music.
After he had completed City of Glass, Graettinger explained his compositional process to Art Pepper. “He drew a city, coming into the city, with colors, on the graph paper,” the saxophonist recalled. “As you would approach the city, there wouldn’t be much, occasionally a little sign or something, and the sign would be just so many squares of color, condensed, like a block of sound. Then as you approached the city, more and more things would happen—more notes, more colors. When it was daytime, it would be bright colors, depicting the whole city—buildings and trees and sidewalks and people.”
Pepper goes on to note that “Graettinger didn’t just write for a band, or for sections; he wrote for each individual person, more or less like Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn did. It was also very difficult to play, because you were independent of the guy next to you. If you got lost, you were dead, because there was no way to figure out where you were at.”
Around 1950, Pepper had no way of knowing that his career as a brilliant alto saxophonist was about to go off the rails. His seemingly innocent flirtation with drugs would eventually lead to addiction, and years later, a nine-year stint in San Quentin. Years later, in the 1960s, Pepper remembered how Graettinger had captured his sound as “mournful” and “very sad…very introverted,” and “he told me that a time when I was still young and everything was going great. And the way he described my sound is exactly the way my life went.”
Graettinger remarked that he heard this music as a sequence of shifting shapes and colors. City of Glass unfolds as a series of jagged cluster chords. The second movement involves the families of instruments layering lines above one another, never quite mixing together. Just as Pepper stated, the instruments work as individual voices. Pizzicato strings, guitar, saxophones, and brass retain independence. There are hints of a groove, but the rhythm never materializes.
That changes in the third movement, where brass and timpani punctuate the rhythmic swing. The Ivesian layering returns in the final movement, where the figures seem to take on different tempos. Wild, radiant dissonances at the end capture the colors of a sunset. Here, Graettinger is ultimately a painter of scenes.
Kenton’s Progressive Jazz orchestra premiered City of Glass at the Chicago Opera House in the summer of 1948. Graettinger nervously conducted. The audience sat stone-faced and, as Easton wrote, were “baffled, confused, and silent” over what they had heard. Easton describes the scene: “After a long frozen moment, Stan jumped up from the keyboard, gestured for the musicians to take a bow, and turned to the audience with both arms raised, indicating that what they had heard was something great, and it was over.”
Listeners have been just as baffled by the work ever since. Kenton offered the following apology: “The way to listen to City of Glass is to sit alone or with someone you have an especially good rapport with, and have a few tastes first. You’re not supposed to understand it. It’s fantasy. You experience it with your subconscious.”
Lee Gillette, a producer at Capitol Records, even pushed recording the suite without hearing it. “As Stan’s producer, I was his representative, so I’m the one that had the big battle with the people upstairs,” Gillette told Carol Easton. “Nobody understood City of Glass. Why were we going to pour money down the drain to promote something like that? My arguments always were, ‘I think Stan has proven himself up to now; I don’t think we should stand in his way! He may not have had all million records sellers, true, but he certainly was making a big dent in the music industry.’”
The desire to make his music as modern as possible pushed Kenton to record Graettinger’s This Modern World, a loose assembly of pieces collected in a suite.
Each piece was a kind of miniature concerto. “A Horn” showcases showcased French hornist John Graas. “Some Saxophones” showcases featured the playing of Bob Cooper, Bud Shank, Bert Caldwell, Herb Geller, and John Rotella. while “A Cello” features focused on Gregory Bemko. “A Thought” and “An Orchestra” featured the entire ensemble. “A Trumpet” cast the spotlight on a then upcoming superstar, Maynard Ferguson.
Ferguson had joined Kenton’s Innovations Orchestra on January 1, 1950. One of the orchestra’s first recordings to feature the high-note trumpeter was the Shorty Rogers composition “Maynard Ferguson.” The arrangement and its dazzling soloist were featured in Kenton’s television debut on the Ed Sullivan Show on December 3, 1950. A video clip from that performance shows the young Ferguson in superb command of the high register and lyrical capabilities of his instrument.
It seemed natural that Graettinger would try his hand at writing for the trumpeter. But in “A Trumpet,” Ferguson’s horn is given an angular, almost atonal melody set off by a bop-laced middle section. The scale figures Graettinger notated for Ferguson had a personal touch: they were taken from the trumpeter’s own warm-up routine, which Graettinger had heard on countless occasions backstage before performances.
The orchestral forces accompanying “A Trumpet,” and all of This Modern World showcase the brash dissonances and orchestral forces that had become a Kenton specialty.
This Modern World was never performed in concert, but it was recorded for a Graettinger-focused LP that featured the composer’s magnum opus, City of Glass.
Criticism was again cool. John Letweiler, in his book The Freedom Principle: Jazz After 1958, said that This Modern World is “a cold world, cruel in the distant, pure beauty of its saxophone sections, the weight of its low brass, and the nerve-racking high extremes of its trumpet passages…the threat conveyed by Graettinger’s beauty is no less dangerous for its distance and indifference, because it is a threat to our very sanity.”
Nat Hentoff of DownBeat was similarly unimpressed, calling Graettinger’s score “melodramatic Wagnerism.” Kenton’s embrace of Graettinger failed to sell records; City of Glass only sold about ten thousand albums. Graettinger shrugged it off, quipping that he used the pages of DownBeat as toilet paper.
Today, commentary on Graettinger’s music has remained largely unchanged. He is still considered a wild eccentric and composer of heavy, pretentious music that few claim to understand. Irwin Chusid summarized: “For those who seek relaxation and pleasure from music—which is to say, most people—Graettinger is chloroform in the cocktail.”
Graettinger left Kenton when the leader disbanded the Innovations Orchestra for financial reasons in 1952. Carol Easton reported that Kenton would still occasionally take Graettinger out for a meal. “Bob would get juiced [i.e., drunk],” Kenton said, “and he’d say, ‘What time is it?’ I’d say, ‘It’s three a.m.’ He’d say, ‘Do we have time to go down and look at the ocean?’ I’d drive him down to Santa Monica, and he’d sit there and look at the ocean for a while. And then I’d take him home.”
At the time of his death in 1957 at age 33, Graettinger was working on a Suite for Strings and Winds, which he never completed. Kenton and Rugolo were the only musicians to attend his funeral in Ontario, California.
Obituaries were scant, and neither Down Beat nor Metronome printed notices of his death.
But Graettinger’s music has attracted some attention, particularly from advocates of Third Stream music. Gunther Schuller called Graettinger “a complete original.” Werner Herbers, oboist and leader of Amsterdam’s Ebony Band, has conducted Graettinger’s compositions and arrangements in concert and recorded two albums of the composer’s music. Gert-Jan Blom, leader of Holland’s Beau Hunks Orchestra, said, “Graettinger’s music is something of a ‘sound barrier’—you have to break through at high velocity. But once you’ve done that, you’re in a completely new sonic landscape, governed by strange laws and aesthetics. It requires some adjusting for old-fashioned auricles, but boy!—is it rewarding.”
Easton summarized Graettinger’s music as a window into his lonely life.
“I live above the timberline where nothing grows,” Graettinger told Lois Maddon. It could have been his epitaph.
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