In This Case, Some Like It Less Hot

Donald Byrd can’t seem to get enough of Duke Ellington. The highly regarded choreographer has already done a version of “The Nutcracker” using the colorful Ellington arrangement. And now he’s created a new three-movement work--”In a Different Light: Duke Ellington”--to a score that assembles Ellington music ranging over five decades.

“I think I’m drawn to Ellington for the same reason I’m drawn to jazz,” Byrd says. “Because of the kind of creative thinking that gets realized in the music. I’m fascinated by how the lives of jazz artists get played out in their music; they’re complex people who create complex music. With Ellington there’s the popular, melodic side that’s so accessible. But there’s also a challenging side too, filled with dissonance.”

Donald Byrd/The Group will give “In a Different Light: Duke Ellington” its Los Angeles premiere--with a slight caveat--on Saturday at El Camino College’s Marsee Auditorium in Torrance. The caveat traces to the fact that a different version of the first movement, originally titled “The Shack,” was presented last summer at downtown’s California Plaza. The complete work to be presented at Marsee includes a different first movement, “Not The Shack.”

Why the shift? “The reason it has that title,” says Byrd with a chuckle, “is because Lincoln Center Out of Doors, which was one of the commissioners of the work, said, ‘You can’t do “The Shack” as part of the program when you do it here.’ The contract they gave me said basically that it would be a work in three parts, and one of them will not be ‘The Shack.’ So ‘Not The Shack’ seemed like a good title to me. It’s a reference to what’s not there, but not in terms of theme or subject matter.”

Which immediately raises the question of what is it that’s not there, if it’s not a change in theme or subject matter?

“A lot of it has to do with the nature of the movement,” Byrd says. “It’s risque. Basically [what’s going on in that part is] a burlesque show, and the sexual display in it is provocative. At one point the dancers strap on sexual accouterments and so forth. As I said, it’s a burlesque show, so it’s about being sexually provocative, and it just kind of raises issues that communities sometimes don’t want to deal with.

“When I discussed it with El Camino, [which is] among the work’s commissioners, they didn’t exactly jump with enthusiasm about doing ‘The Shack’ in that form. So I told them I would give them the ‘Not The Shack’ version. Of course I wouldn’t have done that if I didn’t think it works.”

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Still, it’s hard not to wonder about the change, especially since the movement already has been performed in Los Angeles. (Times critic Lewis Segal called it “a pithy reminder of the obsession with body parts in this culture,” but, he continued, it “ultimately betrayed its best ideas by staying at one level of parodistic overkill, never developing its collection of cliches beyond the obvious.”)

Tim Van Leer, executive director of El Camino College Center for the Arts, makes a distinction about the context of that performance. “[It] was done as a special project at California Plaza as part of their community discussion series. They did the presentation and then had Donald stay afterward for a talk-back session, looking at some specific kinds of performances that were controversial in nature, and asking the audience what they thought.”

At El Camino, Van Leer says, the concern was that the erotic nature of “The Shack” might undercut the impact of the complete work, especially in light of the way the college viewed the commission.

“We wanted everyone to look at the Ellington as a celebratory piece,” he explains. “We didn’t want people to get bogged down in one section and have it overshadow their thoughts about it. I also felt we wanted to have the piece available to everyone, rather than have to put ‘for mature audiences’ in the ads or the press releases.”

Given the fact that “Not The Shack” has also been included in other cities on the “In a Different Light” tour, Byrd sounds a bit wistful when he describes the musical difference between the two versions.

“My original concept [for the first movement],” he says, “was to use the Ellington pieces in arrangements by someone else other than Ellington--a band called Sex Mob--to bring a kind of raunchy approach to the music. So the sound of it is very different from ‘Not The Shack,’ which consists mostly of [recordings by Ellington] that he wrote for his first band in the late ‘20s and early ‘30s.”

As much as Byrd liked the contrast in styles, he’s also not entirely unhappy about having a version that keeps its focus on Ellington’s music as it was performed by him. The music, after all, was the inspiration for “In a Different Light.”

“I started out by immersing myself in his music,” he says. “That was the most challenging part, because there’s so much wonderful music. I had done no choreography at that point. The first thing I did was just try to identify what the pieces would be that I would use, and try to figure out how to put them together.”

That approach reflects Byrd’s modus operandi, which is to start out with a concept and let it blossom via intuitive reactions, allowing right brain and left brain to interact until the whole project comes together.

“It’s funny how that works out sometimes,” he says. “I was in Atlanta while I was putting the music together, and I went into this small record store in a mall right near the hotel. Amazingly, it specialized in jazz recordings, which I thought was kind of strange in downtown Atlanta, right next to the Hilton. But I found this Ellington recording with some tunes that I knew, but grouped differently. And the program notes said a lot about the different versions of some of the material. That was completely an accident, but encountering that record in such an unexpected, spontaneous fashion led me in a direction that I don’t think I would have gone otherwise.”

The direction that he did eventually go was toward a three-movement work that, almost of its own accord evolved into a kind of chronological look at Ellington, one that encompassed three periods.

“So the way it finally emerged as a complete work,” he says, “was with the opening movement ‘The Shack’--or ‘Not The Shack’--in which I was really dealing with the dance music aspects of Ellington; the middle movement, ‘Gentle Prelude,’ to deal with the quieter, more contemplative music; and then, in the last movement, to deal with the music from the latter part of his life when it was really about composing.”

In addition, Byrd always keeps in mind the mood that surrounds a performance.

“I try to think about how I want a work to progress as an evening. And, in picking through so many Ellington pieces, that was a big determiner of which tune I used in which section, and which section came where in the evening. Because what I was aiming for, and what I think audiences have felt, was to have them really go through a journey over the course of the evening with the dancers and with this wonderful music.

“I think some of the groupings were intuitive rather than a conscious sort of thing. But then after I got to a certain point, I realized that there was something to each of the sections, some sort of identity that was emerging.”

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Byrd started his company--Donald Byrd/The Group--in Los Angeles in 1977, moving to New York in 1983. He has studied at Tufts and Yale, the Cambridge School of Ballet and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Center. Among the more than 80 works he has created are “Prodigal,” “The Minstrel Show” and “Life Situations: Daydreams on Giselle” as well as choreography for Peter Sellars’ productions of Stravinsky’s “A Soldiers Tale” and Weill’s “The Seven Deadly Sins.”

In addition to his Ellington works, Byrd’s affection for jazz has surfaced in “Jazz Train” and a pair of projects with legendary jazz drummer Max Roach: “JuJu” and “We Commit: Max Roach in Germany.”

But his attraction to Ellington is still very much alive.

“I’d really like to do something with Ellington’s ‘Queenie Pie,’ ” he says. “It’s been tried a few times, but I’m fascinated by it and I’d like to do my own take on it.”

Though he wouldn’t say so himself, it’s not difficult to make analogies between the way Byrd works with his dancers and Ellington worked with his musicians. In both cases, it’s a blending of creative imagination and individual expression.

“What I try to do,” he says, “is to create a sense of improvisation, the feeling that what’s happening is being spontaneously invented at that moment. And I think that the real intricacy in my choreography is to encourage the performers to be engaged with each other, and by each other, with what they do--to stay in the moment, because that is an essential element in all performance art.”

One suspects that Ellington himself couldn’t have said it any better.

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“IN A DIFFERENT LIGHT,” Marsee Auditorium, El Camino College, 16007 Crenshaw Blvd., Torrance. Date: Saturday, 8 p.m. Prices: $23-$26. Phone: (310) 329-5345.