Can you hear the smell of dried fish cooking?

Appreciating Ellington's "Harlem Air Shaft"

Sketch for the fourth chorus of "Harlem Air Shaft"

Duke Ellington famously claimed that he packed his tune, "Harlem Air Shaft," with musical analogues of his memories of seeing, smelling, and hearing things channeled vertically through the middle of a Harlem apartment building.

Many observers say Ellington must have made up the claim long after he composed the tune, and musicologist Edward Green works to get to the bottom of this question. He examines the tune, measure by measure, in his article, "‘Harlem Air Shaft’: A True Programmatic Composition?" in the current issue of the Journal of Jazz Studies, published by the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University. This article provides way more than you may want to know about the matter, but you can read all about it at the open-access online journal. The journal and the institute's archives are available for non-commercial use under a Creative Commons license — which means I can reproduce this sheet music (above) without getting sued.

Green quotes Ellington from a New Yorker interview published on July 1, 1944:

"Take ‘Harlem Air Shaft,’ Duke said. "So much goes on in a Harlem air shaft. You get the full essence of Harlem in an air shaft. You hear fights, you smell dinner, you hear people making love. You hear intimate gossip floating down. You hear the radio. An air shaft is one great big loudspeaker. You see your neighbor’s laundry. You hear the janitor’s dogs. The man upstairs’ aerial falls down and breaks your window. You smell coffee. A wonderful thing is that smell. An air shaft has got every contrast. One guy is cooking dried fish with rice and another guy’s got a great big turkey. Guy-with-fish’s wife is a terrific cooker but the guy’s wife with the turkey is doing a sad job." Duke laughed. "You hear people praying, fighting, snoring. Jitterbugs are jumping up and down always all over you, never below you. That’s a funny thing about jitterbugs. They’re always over you. I tried to put it all the in ‘Harlem Air Shaft.’"

What do you hear in this tune? Use the comment feature to weigh in.

"Harlem Air Shaft" is one of my favorite Ellington tunes because of its rapid slideshow of brief, interlocking segments. Apparently I have never listened to it closely enough to understand exactly how the parts interlock, but Green has done this work for me. The tune takes the form of a book. The intro has a "table of contents" of three 4-bar segments, followed by three 32-bar "chapters" as promised. I have noticed that within the chapters, many exciting scenes unfold.

One way to "see" this music is to watch it being performed by a dance troupe: