Rhythmic Refrains: Counting Time through Duke Ellington and Fred Waller's Jazz Shorts

Abstract

In the 1920s and 1930s, Duke Ellington collaborated with several directors who narrativized his compositions for short films; Ellington's collaborations A Bundle of Blues (1933) and Symphony in Black (1935) with Fred Waller, Paramount's special‐effects man turned director, remain just out of step with the many other jazz shorts from the period. While synchronization was well‐utilized by the time Ellington and Waller's films were released, their films are notable for the absence of synchronized tap sounds. This absence gestures to a breakdown in the illusion of synchronization delivering knowable bodies, positioning the films as disruptive not only to the jazz short genre but to earlier sound film. This article meditates on the potential arising from the films’ failure of synchronicity to engage the audience in a “fugitive” mode of listening and viewing.

There is something about A Bundle of Blues (1933) and A Symphony in Black (1935), the jazz shorts directed by Fred Waller and composed by Duke Ellington, that drags and never quite lands. Tap dancers perform but the sound of their striking taps is notably absent; instead, shadows flicker on screen and we wait to hear a rhythm that we see but never comes. In Symphony, the sounds of the outside world are re-created as musical notes from instruments of the orchestra: a single, tight, reverberating drum accompanies the dropping of a sack full of sand and a body to the sidewalk, and the weight of dancers coming down on their taps is replaced by piano chords. Still, the music and the movement diverge. Sounds cannot quite keep up with their corresponding images and the rhythm that “ensures the continuity of Black culture . . . will be there when and if one returns for it,” remains misaligned.¹

Overall, the sounds of taps are seldom heard in the Ellington and Waller collaborations; thus, unlike previous lauded jazz shorts that relied on visual special effects, Symphony instead submerges movement both visually and sonically.² The absence of the dancers’ taps allows for a specific kind of listening that forgoes the promise of making race knowable through synchronized sound in favor of suspension. In this way, the film expresses the liquidity and porousness of jazz, as practiced through the visual arts. Liquidity and jazz aesthetics are knitted closely, as Toni Morrison asserts when describing Romare Bearden's jazz-inspired collages as having borders that are “not just porous they are liquid.”³ In a different context, Gilles Deleuze describes “liquid perception” as “a clairvoyant function . . . developed in water, in opposition to earthly vision: it is in the water that the loved one who has disappeared is revealed, as if perception enjoyed a scope of interaction, a truth which it did not have on land.”⁴ Deleuze's description of liquid perception here is tethered to the romantic distortion of French Poetic Realism, and his read of L'Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934) is productive; he poses that seeing through water can lead us to an awakening of sorts and that the in-between space (in L'Atalante, the barge serves as such, suspended in the in-between) emphasizes the unjustness of the land. He writes, “The water is the place where the center becomes mobile, ultimately is canceled out, comes undone and remakes itself elsewhere.”⁵ Thus, it is perhaps by withholding synchronization that Symphony, a kind of lantern show on film (as I will elaborate later), offers a mode of revealing something lost by destabilizing and relocating the center through liquidity and suspension. We can try to break down the dancers’ moves to identify the strikes and drags, but jazz deviates from standard time signatures, thus counting will always stray. So, where does synchronized sound go when it has no place to land? Perhaps an unheard rhythm demands a different kind of return or follow-up. This essay follows the rhythm made possible in this suspension.

Synching Up Black Sounds

Capturing jazz has preoccupied both the visual and aural technologies of film since the production of the first sound films, which were addressing the dual modernity of both the cinema of the 1920s and 1930s and of jazz as a musical genre (figs. 1–4). Indeed, both film and music scholars have noted the influence of jazz composition in film, specifically drawing parallels between the effect of musical call-and-response and cinema's shot-reverse-shot.⁶ At the time, adding sound in postproduction was a fairly new but common practice. Directors would film a dance sequence, often with a heavy, sound-proofed camera, and the dancers would later go into the studio to record the sound of the choreography. However, this emphasis on the synchronization of sound and image should not be confused with aural realism. The tap sounds rarely connected to the body on-screen since few film performers dubbed their own dances. Instead, Black dancers found work dubbing the taps for white dancers in musicals, a practice that simultaneously amplified and concealed Black labor.⁷ Thus, it is notable that, in the postproduction dubbed numbers of the time, sound could originate anywhere and everywhere. In the phantasmagoric Ellington-Waller collaborations, A Bundle of Blues (1933) and A Symphony in Black (1935), however, it seems to come from nowhere.

Alice Maurice identifies the process of early sound and synchronization as bound up in an involuntary “synesthesia” born from a fantasy for audiovisual “alignment.”⁸ Maurice writes,

That “voice” of racial authenticity, which includes the sound of Black music and the movements of Black dancing bodies, would lead to more roles for Black performers both in front of the camera and in the sound studio.¹⁰ Thus, the strikes and sounds of tap became markers of the exacting speed and precision of the abridged jazz short, and their absence was unusual—even for Waller and Ellington. For instance, in Dudley Murphy's collaboration with Ellington, Black and Tan (1929), the taps are sharp, and in Waller's work with Cab Calloway, Jitterbug Party (1935), dulled taps can be heard throughout the dance sequence. Waller's choice not to layer the sound that most sutures movement to body is one that disrupts not only the filmic realism of capturing live performance but also the imaging of Black rhythm. In both Bundle and Symphony jazz becomes an all-encompassing soundtrack, drowning out everything else, something like a sonic phantasmagoria, as I will suggest later, that overwhelms and refuses knowability.

The displacement of synchronized sound in Ellington and Waller's unique collaborations rearranges the expected alignment of cinematic jazz and movement and, as such, similarly rearranges the films’ expressions of Blackness in audio—an early promise of jazz, as a recorded musical genre. Indeed, there are missed steps throughout Symphony. The film becomes particularly dissonant in the last dance sequence, the “Harlem Rhythm” section, in which a group of dancers tapping languidly at one tempo share the frame with a superimposed soloist who keeps his own time, independent from the time of Ellington's composition and Waller's camera (fig. 1). As rhythm and the imaging of rhythmic time, the films offer what Eleni Ikoniadou describes as “a glimpse of the contingent phases of the event extending beyond the realms of the ‘here and now.’”¹¹ In other words, it is the form and composition of jazz that these films use as evidence of, and a vehicle toward, a kind of futurity and fugitivity that might only be accessed through a resistant way of listening—a resistance that emerges in Waller's and Ellington's experimentation with the sound of racial difference that, here, is already slipping.

In his meditation on the constitution of flesh and the violence of suturing sound, Andrew Navin Brooks asks, “What fugitive modes of speech might be transmitted by such unformed and un-organized voices? The task at hand is to attune the ear (and the flesh) to irreducible difference and develop a listening practice that attends to those voices animated by the force of fugitivity.”¹² In some ways, this is the work of the strangely situated form and content of the jazz short. Emerging as silent films waned and using the new sound technology of the time, these films were short enough to fit before mainstream feature films but long enough to convey and develop a complex narrative focus on the creative labor of jazz and Black cultural production. While the jazz short is inevitably read alongside the “soundies” of the 1940s, this comparison overlooks the in-between status of the former.¹³ Though the two evolved from intertwined technologies, jazz shorts were intended to be events screened by the masses, ephemeral as the feature films that they accompanied, while soundies were self-contained and meant to be a side experience in bars and nightclubs, like a visually and sonically looping jukebox that a viewer could easily return to. Foregoing this traditional rhythmic return, the jazz shorts vary in length, content, and tone, depending upon the studio and the affiliated artists. For that reason, they also don't fit squarely with the brief history of mainstream, all-Black-cast films produced in the 1920s and 1930s. While we can understand those features as belonging to two separate categories—those that depict life in the small-town South and those set in the urbane and often lurid jazz landscapes of the north—the jazz shorts, the first genre to regularly feature Black performers and all-Black casts, resist the linear progression of Black geography, sound production, or Black performance in film. Appearing before Hollywood feature films that rarely acknowledged Black lives, let alone Black presence in front or behind the camera, jazz shorts activate an unexpected acknowledgment of Black expressive culture and labor in close-up. As such, wandering through the phantasmagoric dance sequences in Symphony is fundamentally instructive, as this movement returns or follows-up differently, gesturing toward a process of listening that directs the audience elsewhere.

Duke Ellington at the Piano

The first time we see Duke Ellington in Bundle and Symphony the artist is sitting at a piano, face turned away from the camera. At the time, it was a recognizable if not iconic image. In fact, Dudley Murphy's Black and Tan (1929) opens this way too, and in that film, we don't even see Ellington in profile until three minutes into the film. Yet, while Ellington plays the part of the composer again and again, in the film by Murphy, the musician seems bound to this familiar position. In Black and Tan, Ellington is a composer and his wife Fredi Washington dances at a nightclub to help to support his dreams. When she falls ill due to a genetic heart condition, she begs Ellington to play his composition, and through his music we are allowed into her dreams and interiority, in the space between life and death. In this rhapsody, the elements of liquidity, jazz, and multiplicity are there but, unlike the stuttering rhythm of Waller's Harlem dancers, the bodies are distinct, move sharply, mechanically, and are multiplied precisely. Synchronized choreographically and sonically, in Black and Tan we hear the strike of the taps. As such, Ellington's compositions offer full access to the diegetic world. In an early interview, Murphy, a noted auteur, stated, “I like doing Negro things. You have a chance for mood and fantasy and camera angles. Then, too, the Negro music is always interesting.”¹⁴ By making Black vision, time, and bodies examinable—particularly through the image of Washington, whose kaleidoscopic vision is organized in clearly demarcated time—the film renders the character's delirious experience of jazz as immersive and, ultimately, unsustainable.¹⁵ The film ends with alternating shots of Washington writhing and dying on the bed and a teary, murkier image of Ellington looking on. Thus, Murphy's experimentation is grounded in the belief that Black sounds can be dissected and borrowed. Not surprisingly, reviews from the time lauded Murphy's work as “novelty done with class.”¹⁶

Waller's Visual and Sonic Experimentations

Waller had a similar interest in documenting and filming popular music and was inspired to explore the thriving music scene and focus on not only jazz clubs but also Black theaters, churches, and studios; yet, for the prolific filmmaker best known as an inventor of realist and immersive cinematic experiences, being surrounded by the sound of Black cultural production does not appear to have always translated into an investment in synchronizing sound, image, and race. True, by the mid-1930s, Waller, who is credited for around two hundred of Paramount's shorts produced in the 1930s, moved from the Paramount special effects department to directing, focusing on photographic research that would evolve into Cinerama, a widescreen process that used three projectors, three cameras, and stereophonic (multichannel) sound.¹⁷ Insisting on the production of both immersive images and sounds, in 1937 Waller focused on realistic 3D sound. Waller's early experiments would ultimately lead to further manipulation of the screen; multichannel sound engineering designed to match sound to depth; and patents throughout the 1940s and 1950s that appear designed to close gaps between movement, body, and sounds on film.

And yet, with this well-known and documented interest in the places film sound and image land, Waller's asynchronous collaborations with Ellington initially seem discordant. Waller was well-versed in trick photography and special effects, but Bundle and Symphony do not rely on the trick of synchronicity or the sharpness of image and sound. Instead, the films call back to the softer outlined flickers of the old lantern shows, producing, and in some ways reversing, the expectation of how the “black screen” was understood to perform.¹⁸ The comparison to the lantern show might be understood as literal in Symphony's deployment of material and the switching out of black backgrounds (or screens) for white in the “Harlem Rhythm” sequence; this switch of background allows bodies to become “unmoored from the screen,” the superimposition, shadow dancing, and size distortion making it difficult for the delineation of space or time of day (figs. 7, 8, and 9).¹⁹ It's also worth thinking of the metaphorical echoes—indeed, Noam Elcott describes the lantern show as “an assembly place of ghosts” and calls upon the self-proclaimed inventor of the phantasmagoria Étienne-Gaspard Robertson's description of it as a sort of “passage from birth to death.”²⁰ Using the phantasmagoric “Harlem Rhythm” sequence as a passage, Symphony might have followed this narrative, but this possibility was short-circuited by the last-minute reordering of sequences, a decision to leave the loop of the phantasmagoria rather than maintain the somber ending Ellington intended. Together, Ellington and Waller's films lean toward the “magic” of the phantasmagoria that, as Tom Gunning explains it, relies in the “concealment of the apparatus” to conjure specter-like images from darkness.²¹ Yet, both Gunning and Deleuze suggest that what emerges from the phantasmagoria, as a structure that occludes sources and landing places, is a kind of truth we might find in water. Clearly capable of syncing the taps, Waller chose not to do so when collaborating with Ellington, and the result—the fantasy of racial suture submerged in an underwater aesthetic—is, indeed, one that overflows in all directions.

By foregoing the familiar relationship between rhythm and synchronicity codified in early sound film and releasing the moving body from the sound of dance, Ellington and Waller's collaborations not only suspend narrative but make it possible to practice following-up as part of the process of “fugitive listening,” a recognition of beats that never drop but are instead escaping, and an insistence on the acknowledgment of shadows.²² Reading Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, Brooks emphasizes fugitivity's “spirit of escape” and the undercommons as a space of refusal.²³

Indeed, in the 1930s, synchronicity already seems, to Ellington and Waller, like a broken system. Waller's 1937 patent application searches to address this inadequacy. His plans for a movie theater that surrounds and floods the audience with image and sound promises that “by producing binaural sound effects . . . sounds accompanying the action of a picture will appear to the Spectator to emanate from the source depicted.”²⁴ For Waller, the connection of cinematic bodies and sound was always a part of the cinematic illusion and sound itself had to be broken apart and funneled through different apparatuses to, at least fictively, return to the body. On the other hand, Franklin Cason Jr. notes that “Ellington liked to combine the visual with the aural” and points to Ralph Ellison's description of one of Ellington's live performances, which relied heavily on the visual.²⁵ The partnership between a sound-obsessed director who had created a solution for imaging synchronization and a musician who was innovating in sound/image relations happened at a precarious time. The technology that promised the dissolution of space between race and body and body and sound, ultimately, renders this knowledge unreliable and as much of a trick as the visual special effects. In strange sequences where rhapsody and dream melt into jazz clubs and spill back over into parlors, the sounds are always slipping away on low frequencies and space is rearranged by movement and dance. Thus, rhythmic movement is perpetually there and repeating, but the lack of synchronicity resists “policing and disciplining” experience.²⁶ As a result, the body is neither tied to the musical composition nor beholden to the narrative composition.

Composing the Jazz Shorts

The Waller-Ellington collaborations cry for close attention to their original modes of suspension in which Ellington's music and Waller's images are both spatially and temporally unaligned. A Bundle of Blues (1933) starts under the marquee of a jazz theater and moves through the lit hall. The first figure we see is Ellington, specifically the back of his head and his fingers on the piano. The orchestra joins him and the concert begins, going through a rendition of “Stormy Weather” to an upbeat number. When the soloist, Ivie Anderson, comes out to sing “Stormy Weather” she is wearing a floor length dress, sleek rather than ornate, sophisticated rather than obvious (fig. 5). Like Ellington, Anderson was well-known for her creative output, and as she sings, her synced voice is accompanied by dreamlike sequences. The film moves back and forth between the glamourous singer in an evening gown and shots of Anderson alone in a sparse cabin, wearing an ill-fitting robe, standing by a window, a broom in one corner and a rocking chair in another (fig. 6). We return to the jazz club and Anderson turns to leave; the orchestra continues without her, and the scene comes back to the abandoned cabin. A zigzagging animation bleeds down the image as a transition to different scenes of rain. As the transitions continue, bursts and animated music notes appear and a dissolve wipes across the screen as geometric cuts take its place. Although Anderson has left both the stage and the cabin, her singing continues, a disembodied narration of the country rain and a doomed love affair. In the next, more upbeat section, two tap dancers take the stage, but the sounds of their taps are curiously absent. Finally, the film ends abruptly on an image of the tappers, without the closure of being ushered back out of the club or even out of the song.

Similar to Bundle, Symphony in Black also opens just outside of Ellington's creative domain. It slips inside Ellington's studio, met with the back of his head and his hands. The trajectory is quite clear: this is the originator of the musical composition and the place where everything comes from and will return to, although even that narrative line will be reworked. Symphony runs a bit long for a short and is structured into four movements that are broken down even further. As Ellington sits at the piano, his compositions manifest into a dream state, and we wander through the symphony's musical movements, wherein the composer is sometimes only on the periphery, playing the piano and calling forth the plot as he creates. The narrative wanders dreamlike through the four sections of Ellington's composition: the first, “The Laborers”; the second, “A Triangle”; the third, the soundtrack to the funeral of a child in a church titled “Hymn of Sorrow”; and finally, the fourth movement, a quickly paced finale culminating in the “Harlem Rhythm” sequence. The film ends by briefly returning to Ellington smiling up at his orchestra, easing the audience out of the narrative. Notably, in Ellington's original composition, the “Harlem Rhythm” sequence was third and the film was to end in the “Hymn of Sorrow” with a somber dolly shot out through the aisle of the church, an upturned angled shot of the minister raising his hands as he leads his congregation, and a cut to Ellington in profile, arm raised, conducting his orchestra. But, because Paramount shorts seldom ended in tragedy, the studio changed the ending without Ellington's agreement.²⁷ Thus, the released version does not end where Ellington intended, with the stark contrast of the church. His musical composition, which might have ended narratively where the actual finale should be, is re-placed as a caesura. Finishing with the jazz club sequence doesn't take the sting out of the loss of a young Black life; instead, the reorganization of sections forces a kind of melancholy buoyancy that doesn't exist in either the film or the composition's linear forms. The phantasmagoria as passage from birth (or work, in the example of Symphony) to death doesn't quite come full circle, with nowhere to land visually or sonically. Instead, Symphony ends in a shadowy backroom of sorts as it places “Harlem Rhythm” as its concluding sequence. At the end of the film, thus rearranged, we see Ellington back on stage in tails but we never return to his studio, where he has dreamed both the live performance and the vignettes that accompany them—nor does the film end in ecstatic tragedy or the joy that Cab Calloway's Paramount shorts so often erupted into. Rather, it provides nonendings that are outside of narrative or rhythmic time, a tell that Bundle has already hinted at with the omission of dubbed taps.

Phantasmagoric Suspensions

In Bundle, audial realism is sidelined in favor of an immersion through a sonic phantasmagoria. Experienced live, Ellington and his orchestra's performances might dull the sound of dancers tapping, but it would still be relocated elsewhere, maybe in the percussion section if we listened hard enough. Instead, in Bundle these sounds are gone, dissipated faster than we can register the movements of the dancers. Tap dancers Florence Hill and Bessie Dudley enter after the melancholy number “Stormy Weather” to perform for “Bugle Call Rag” (figs. 2, 3, 4). They strike hard with their taps, but the matching sound isn't quite there; instead, it's divorced from the dancers’ movement and left suspended as their strike is quickly lost to the orchestra. The dancers meet in the middle of the stage and what follows is less the partner tap sequences so well-known from the 1930s and rather two tappers who happen to briefly share a stage, one dressed in black and the other in white. They are dancers with different styles, one more fluid with straighter lines and posture, the other with stiffer motions but more flexibility, more generous with her smiles. They are both heavy tappers; they strike the floor hard, but after their original synced entrance we don't hear either of them.

Symphony takes this further: this sonic phantasmagoria—an overlap of the real, the fake, the alive, and the gone—is met with Waller's visual phantasmagoria and an insistence on the already slippery realism of filming live performances that gesture toward real spaces and histories while, at the same time, articulating their ephemerality. We return to Ellington after each section as he sets the rhythm, and the visual refrain shifts immediately. A couple watches a single dancer, Earl “Snakehips” Tucker, dressed all in white, onstage, and the sequence trades in shadows and superimposed images (fig. 7). The film enters the backroom of a nightclub: it's intimate, and it points to a liminal space, a space below superimposed images creating an amalgamation of backrooms and night life. There's the recognizable low angled shot of a couple in profile, and again, standing above them on stage, too close, as Waller's shots are prone to be, Tucker dances, enacting an isolation par excellence; his chest is still and his hips and everything below vibrate as he turns in a tight circle, face tensed. Tucker's nickname, “Snakehips,” is well warranted. Here, however, it's not about the fluidity of Tucker's hips; rather, fluidity comes with the superimposition of female tap dancers, far more relaxed and less precise than Tucker (figs. 1, 8, 9). The sensory-motor schema frays, is cut off, or perhaps, as sound and image dislodge from each other, they are jammed by what Deleuze might describe as a virtual image, a “pure recollection” existing in time but outside of consciousness, with the potential to evoke mental images in accordance with the requirements of a new present.²⁸

The four tap dancing showgirls emerge as shadows, dancing along with Tucker, but not really—Tucker's image body is superimposed, of different proportion, and, it feels like, at a different frequency. The dancers move asynchronously but still beside each other, and delicate wrists create shadows on Tucker's white pants as their feet stutter, legs never in sync. The flashy partnered hops that opened the film aren't present here. In this Deleuzean any-space-whatever, which here is a backroom of sorts—the kind of room where anything can happen—these dancers are not partnered but odd numbered, and the entire room seems like it's underwater.²⁹

Through the phantasmagoric and liquid asynchronicity of the Ellington-Waller collaborations we can see how suspended movement works to render the flickering and destabilized shadows of this jazz lantern show as emblematic of the liquid sight Deleuze theorizes. And although the play of shadows is common to early film, they appear less frequently in the jazz shorts from RKO and Paramount.³⁰ Waller borrowed his high contrast aesthetic from experimental films and used shadows in more dissonant sections: first in “The Laborers” on the stairs, another watery image, and then again in the “Harlem Rhythm” sequence. Here the shadows are murkier, and their originating sources could be located anywhere and not necessarily in the bodies on screen. In some ways this rerouting of sound away from the body might be read as contradictory to the way that Black sound was so often co-opted by white performers in dubbing as well as visually. While the black shadows of white subjects in early sound cinema are deployed to allow us to disregard “shadows . . . when their function is complete,”³¹ in Symphony they enable a fugitivity of return rather than erasure. This differs from the racial phantasmagoria that already existed in popular visual culture, particularly as practiced by Murphy.³² Ryan Jay Friedman has observed that Murphy used “expressionist formal distortion and phantasmagoria [as] particularly suited to the treatment of African American subjects, as if there existed a distinct black primitive interiority that could only be represented through an unconventional cinematic language.”³³ The phantasmagoria created by the “Harlem Rhythm” sequence is, instead, one that relocates immersion, delaying and denying suturing sound, contradicting itself even while it beckons with an excess of shadows, spilling over from the inside to the outside of the frame. Instead of making that vision seemingly inhabitable, it offers a liquid sight that trades on shadows, envisioning a suspension of Black time through unheard rhythm. Rather than making Blackness visually accessible through fervor and ecstasy as was recognizable at the time,³⁴ Waller's prowess in special effects and trick photography falls short and, in that failure, everything is lost in the water.

Liquid Truths?

What kind of truth does the liquid backroom of the “Harlem Rhythm” sequence yield, particularly as it's reordered to bracket the film instead of the serious funeral scene? Certainly not the kind of expected truth that delineates a body, often the goal of early synchronization. It may be that there's something inherent to the image of jazz, moving or not, that resists these kinds of rigid borders and must be acknowledged in the moving image—a permeability gestured to by the dancer's shadows. Throughout the sequence, we might read the shadows as cast into water and forcing a kind of multiplicity of the Black body that is familiar from the time period, but in this sequence the dancers are little more than shadows, because their figures double, multiply, and the last moment we have of them enforces the image of the simultaneous body, existing everywhere in multiplicity but not alike. Ultimately, the rhythmic refrain of their dance enables a space where various versions of temporality might account for not only the image but creative labor as well. Again, the issue is not simply that Waller couldn't sync taps but rather that he chose not to do so in these collaborations with Duke Ellington, as if a quantifiable temporality had already slipped away, leading to sequences that sever the fantasy of racial suture through visible yet unheard rhythms.

As Maurice notes, early sound technology is not just about “reproducing the real world (as cinema studies has often emphasized), but about re-creating the functions previously reserved for the human subject—re-creating movements, senses, perceptions, and memory.”³⁵ The “wholeness” that Maurice identifies as the aim of synchronicity, particularly when it comes to rendering knowable not only race but new technologies, seems to trouble Waller's work with Ellington.³⁶ There is something subdued about both films: in Bundle, it manifests when the taps are lost; in Symphony, it only becomes sharp in the shadows and drops. It makes sense that it is Ellington as composer and collaborator that disrupts and reroutes Waller's formal practice; rather than read the collaboration as another Hollywood iteration of subject and shadow, perhaps there's an acknowledgment that that formation is impossible when it comes to visualizing Ellington's music. In Waller's work, Ellington is situated as the main creative force not just sonically but visually as well. This purposeful disconnect that reflects jazz composition rather than film composition of the time may be part of the reason that audiences and reviewers didn't connect with Symphony. The visual and sound aesthetics call back not only to the awkward early attempts at synchronization but also to the absence of sound, evoking the in-between through formal qualities as well as gesturing toward the past.³⁷

The move toward the asynchronous may have catalyzed the opinion. At times, images and sounds seem to be coming from underwater; hazy, superimposed images and sound do not appear to originate with the performers but rather spring from a composition conversing around their bodies. If there is an elemental truth possible through liquidity and in the phantasmagoric sounds and images engendered from the Waller-Ellington collaborations, it is that Black rhythm, time, and sonicity resist being captured, stolen, and, ultimately, synched; in fact, they slip out of grasp—through multiple and conflicting visual and sonic rhythms, there for a moment and then dissipated. ^■■

Notes

Works Cited