The Ellington Century by David Schiff

in the forefront of rhythmic propulsion, jazz critics single out “Cotton Tail” as an acme of swing, a groundbreaking rhythmic achievement that “changed the face of jazz.” 5 In “Cotton Tail” rhythm plays a formal role comparable to its function in Beethoven's symphonies.
    â€œ COTTON TAIL ”
    Did you ever hear that story about that rabbit in the briar patch? And they caught him and some shit what he was doing wrong. They said, “We'll fix you—we're going to throw you in the briar patch.” And the rabbit, “Oh, mister, please, please, don't throw me in there.” Yes! They threw him in there and he said, “You can all kiss my ass. That's where I wanted to be all the time!” Then he cut out, ya know. Well, that's the way it is.
    â€”Louis Armstrong
    The Ellington Orchestra first recorded “Cotton Tail” in Hollywood on May 4, 1940. The recording features the tenor saxophonist Ben Webster, who had joined the band just five months earlier. Webster's unusually spacious two-chorus solo started out as an improvisation but became a fixed feature; in Ellington's music improvisation was often the road to composition. The solo became Webster's signature tune, but it would remain largely intact in later performances of “Cotton Tail,” when Paul Gonsalves occupied the solo tenor chair. 6
    Throughout his career Duke Ellington worked synergistically with the members of his band. The taut structural logic of “Cotton Tail” is characteristically Ellingtonian, clearly related, as we shall see, to older Ellington charts based on “Tiger Rag,” but its effortless drive (and many of its notes) depend on two musicians who had recently joined the band: Webster and bassist Jimmy Blanton. Some listeners might also detect the influence of composer/arranger/pianist Billy Strayhorn (who joined the band a year earlier and was already Ellington's alter ego) in the fierce dissonances of some of the brass chords.
    Webster had worked with Ellington occasionally in 1935 and ′36 (he can be heard on recordings of “Truckin’” and “In a Jam”), but until his arrival in January 1940 the band had never had a regular tenor soloist to fill the gap between Johnny Hodges on alto and Harry Carney onbaritone. Now there were five reed players: Barney Bigard played clarinet and, when needed, second, nonsoloing tenor, and Otto Hardwick was a nonsoloing alto. Since the Ellington book was conceived for a four-man reed section, Webster at first had to create his own parts; it would have made sense, therefore, for him to compose (or propose) an entire chorus in which the five saxophones would play an improvisatory-sounding group solo, at once harmony and melody. 7 The reed section solo device descends from the clarinet trios in Don Redman's arrangements for Fletcher Henderson in the 1920s such as “The Stampede” of 1926 (and on Ellington's “The Mooche” of 1930) and in many Benny Carter charts in the 1930s (Webster had played with Carter). 8
    â€œCotton Tail” exists both as a thirty-two-bar head to be followed by improvised choruses and as a six-chorus composition in which the head serves as a frame. You can find the head in most fake books, though often in the key of Arather than the Bheard on Ellington's recordings. 9 “Cotton Tail” as a composition, not just the head, consists of six choruses of “rhythm changes” in Ba format that many bands of the time could have filled out without a written arrangement (as a head arrangement). However spontaneous it may sound it is not a head arrangement but a tightly compressed composition in which every note counts. Its phrase structure and scoring develop a dialogue of reeds and brass toward an escalating rhythmic and dynamic tension that reaches a high point in the “tutti” shout of the final chorus.
    In jazz parlance “rhythm changes” denotes a