Duke (11 page)

“Dad” Cook, as his protégés called him, believed in the promise of what he called “developed Negro music” whose creators, putting aside “puerile imitation of the white man,” chose instead to draw on the untapped heritage of their own race. To this end he served as mentor to many younger men, including Sidney Bechet, James P. Johnson, and Ellington, who told of how

I got most of my instruction [from Cook] riding around Central Park in a taxi . . . he and I would get in a taxi and ride around Central Park and he’d give me lectures in music. I’d sing a melody in its simplest form and he’d stop me and say, “Reverse your figures.” He was a brief but a strong influence. His language had to be pretty straight for me to know what he was talking about. Some of the things he used to tell me I never got a chance to use until years later, when I wrote the tone poem “Black, Brown and Beige.”

It’s hard to imagine that Cook managed under such circumstances to do much more than offer him basic tips on composition and arranging, but Ellington was fond of quoting a piece of advice from the older man. “Dad, I don’t want to go to the conservatory because they’re not teaching what I want to learn,” he said. “You know you should go to the conservatory,” Cook replied. “But since you won’t, I’ll tell you. First you find the logical way, and when you find it, avoid it, and let your inner self break through and guide you. Don’t try to be anybody but yourself.”

Ellington was still trying to establish himself as a songwriter, and in the spring of 1925 he and Jo. Trent were invited to write several numbers for an all-black stage revue to be called
Chocolate Kiddies
. They were forced to work on the tightest of deadlines: “One day Joe [
sic
] Trent came running up to me on Broadway. He had a big proposition and there was urgency in his voice. ‘Tonight we’ve got to write a show,’ he said. ‘
Tonight!’”
Ellington knocked out five undistinguished tunes, only one of which, “Jig Walk,” outlived the show.
Chocolate Kiddies
was never seen in the United States—it was written for a troupe of black performers who toured Europe in the midtwenties—and seems to have done little to advance its composer’s career.

The Washingtonians, on the other hand, continued to receive favorable press notices for their performances at the Hollywood, which was renamed Club Kentucky in 1925 and transformed into what one contemporary columnist described as “a glorified interior of a southern negro cabin. Oil lamps flickered around the imitation stones and log walls, a mud-beamed ceiling crossed by rafters. Flower boxes along the small amber lighted windows.”
Variety
called them “the ‘hottest’ band this side of the equator” in April, and
Billboard
praised the band even more fervently eight months later: “Possessing a sense of rhythm that is almost uncanny, the boys in this dusky organization dispense a type of melody that stamps the outfit as the most torrid in town.” The following summer they left the club to tour New England, and a reporter for
The
Boston Post
hauled out the biggest gun of all, referring to the group as “the Paul Whiteman of Colored Orchestras.”

 • • • 

How good were the Washingtonians? Good enough to entice no less a giant of jazz than Sidney Bechet to play with them, though the irascible and sometimes unreliable clarinetist was too hard even for Duke Ellington to handle. After Bechet went missing for three days, Ellington demanded an explanation. “Where the hell have you been?” he asked. “I jumped in a cab and we got lost, and I just now finally found out where I was,” Bechet replied. That put an end to his stint with the Washingtonians, but his willingness to work with them at all means that they must have been more accomplished than the average jazz band of the day.

They were good enough to make records, too, for the Washingtonians cut ten 78 sides, the first recordings by the Ellington band to be released commercially, between November of 1924 and June of 1926. These sides are old-fashioned “acoustic” recordings that the group made by playing into a megaphone-like horn, and they are technically primitive by comparison to the up-to-date electrical recordings that other jazz musicians started cutting in the spring of 1925. To hear them now is to wonder what all the fuss in
Variety
and
Billboard
was about, since the Washingtonians sound like any number of other sprightly but rhythmically stiff-jointed dance bands of the midtwenties. “If one searches for embryonic Ellington elements,” says Gunther Schuller, “the pickings are very lean indeed.” Only two of the Washingtonians’ records are of songs written in whole or part by Ellington, and several of the charts appear to be based on stock arrangements. Even Bubber Miley’s growl-trumpet solos on “Li’l Farina” (named after a character from the popular
Our Gang
movie shorts) and Ellington’s own “Choo Choo (I Gotta Hurry Home),” the first of the band’s records to be issued, are only modestly interesting when heard in tandem with the playing that he would put on wax a few months later.

It may be, as some scholars contend, that the shortcomings of these records can be traced to the second- and third-rate songs that the Washingtonians recorded, and to the fact that several of their performances are based on written arrangements that the band may well have been sight-reading in the studio. “If the Washingtonians had been better readers, like Fletcher Henderson’s musicians, the results might have been more impressive,” Mark Tucker, an authority on Ellington’s early years, has written. Very possibly, but it is also true that Bechet, Louis Armstrong, James P. Johnson, King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, and Fletcher Henderson’s band had all managed by that time to make recordings of permanent interest that showed them at or near the peak of their abilities. Not so Duke Ellington. He was a reasonably seasoned twenty-seven-year-old professional when he recorded “Li’l Farina,” the last and best of the Washingtonians’ acoustic sides, in the summer of 1926, but had he been hit by a car on the way home from the recording studio, his name would be forgotten today. It took something more—and someone else—to propel him from the legion of faceless professionals into the ranks of the jazz immortals.

3

“ONLY MY OWN MUSIC”

With Irving Mills, 1926–1927

T
HE NINETEENTH AND
twentieth centuries butted up hard against one another on January 16, 1920, the day that the Volstead Act took effect and the sale, manufacture, and transportation of alcohol became illegal in America. Nobody knew it yet, but Prohibition was the last gasp of the shaky reign of the genteel tradition in middle-class American life. In many places that “tradition” was already more a matter of appearances than anything else—the number of saloons in America had tripled between 1870 and 1900—and the weary doughboys of the American Expeditionary Forces had put a further dent in what was left of it when they sailed home from Europe at the end of World War I and found themselves dissatisfied with the lives they’d left behind. Those who had once hewed steadfastly to the old ways now knew that they could never resume them, and everybody else seemed to know it as well, starting with the men who wrote one of the hit songs of 1919:

How ’ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm,

After they’ve seen Pa-ree?

How ’ya gonna keep ’em away from Broad-way;

Jazzin’ a-’round,

And paintin’ the town?

How ’ya gonna keep ’em away from harm?


The answer was that you couldn’t. That didn’t stop the teetotalers from trying, but by 1926 everyone with eyes and ears knew that they had failed. It was in the Roaring Twenties that America slammed the door on the sedate ways of the Victorian era and embraced the brash new world of ballyhoo. Not only were men drinking, but so were women—and they were doing it in public. Speakeasies, unlike old-fashioned saloons, welcomed their custom and hired dance bands to encourage them to return. Edmund Wilson, one of the keenest observers of the period, wrote with nostalgia of the social freedom of that crazy decade: “In the twenties [people] could love, they could travel, they could stay up late at night as extravagantly as they pleased; they could think or say or write whatever seemed to them amusing or interesting.” They could also go to cabarets and dance all night, and because enforcement of the Volstead Act was so lax, they could get drunk, go home with a stranger, and laugh about it, or try to, the next day.

The burgeoning popularity of jazz and jazz-influenced styles of music, which suited the high-stepping new styles of social dancing, was a natural outgrowth of this freedom. So was the rise of the advertising business. In
H.M. Pulham, Esquire,
published in 1941, John P. Marquand tells the story of a Harvard man who comes home from the war shaken to the core by the sights and sounds of trench combat, stops off in New York, and takes a job on Madison Avenue, where he plunges into an affair with a bright young career girl who is happy to sleep with him without benefit of clergy. It was that kind of time. Americans had more money to spend and longed to be told how and where to spend it, and other Americans obliged them. Not only did Harry Pulham, Jay Gatsby, and George Babbitt need music to dance to, but they needed someone to sell it to them—and that was where Irving Mills came in.

Born on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in 1894 to a family of Russian Jews, Mills was the kind of man for whom the word
go-getter
might have been coined. Spike Hughes, a British composer-critic who worked briefly with him in the thirties, called Mills a “small, squat, hard-headed business man . . . with the naïve enthusiasm—and lack of humour—of the born, successful impresario.” He got into the music business by working as a song-plugger, a singing salesman who pitched newly published tunes to music storekeepers and potential performers. In his 1930 study of Tin Pan Alley, Isaac Goldberg spoke of “the arts of persuasion, intrigue, bribery, mayhem, malfeasance, cajolery, entreaty, threat, insinuation, persistence and whatever else he has” that were employed by the song-pluggers of the day. It also helped if they had loud voices, and Mills’s nasal baritone, which sounded as though he had a megaphone built into his throat, qualified with room to spare.

In due course Mills became a publisher in his own right, teaming up with his brother Jack in 1919 to start Jack Mills Inc. (later renamed Mills Music Inc.). Their first hit was “They Needed a Song Bird in Heaven, So God Took Caruso Away,” a lachrymose tribute to the recently deceased tenor. A year earlier Mamie Smith had recorded “Crazy Blues,” whose success triggered a nationwide passion for blues and blueslike songs, which the Mills brothers started buying by the carload. They had little choice, for the established songwriters whose output they longed to publish had already signed with other houses, leaving Irving and Jack with no alternative but to develop new talent. It was their willingness to work with black artists that eventually opened the door to lasting success. Another consequence of this willingness, Irving recalled, was that other publishers “looked down on me. They said, ‘Geez, he fools around with niggers.’” But whatever his private feelings about blacks—and he appears never to have said anything offensive about them as a group—he knew that there was money to be made from their music, explaining, “I figured I might as well corral something so that I could have control of something . . . a dollar don’t care where it’s from, whether it’s black [or] green.”

Mills soon acquired a reputation for treating black songwriters decently, though he and his brother were as guilty of the usual sharp practices of the trade as were their colleagues. Regardless of their color, he always offered novice tunesmiths flat fees for their efforts. If they declined to accept cash on the barrelhead, he or a member of his staff would “suggest” improvements to their songs, then take a cowriting credit, thereby cutting the firm in for a bigger slice of the resulting royalties. Mills, who was musically illiterate, nevertheless insisted that his contributions to the songs for which he took partial credit had been substantial, and there may have been something to his claim. Duke Ellington thought so, or at least said so: “He could feel a song. He’d take a good lyricist, tell him, ‘Now this song needs something right here,’ and the cat would go over it, and it would come out perfect.” Late in life (he died in 1985) Mills said that he “title[d] all the tunes” that he published, specifically mentioning Ellington’s “Mood Indigo.” He also claimed to have come up with the title of “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing).” In addition, his staffers supplied lyrics for instrumental numbers, thus entitling the firm to an even larger cut. But there were times when his contributions to the songs that appeared under his name were notional at best. According to Henry “Red” Allen, the New Orleans–born trumpeter who worked with him in the thirties, “A guy would record his own tune [for Mills], then, when the record came out he’d look at the label and find out that he had a co-composer, maybe even two, who hadn’t added or altered a single note, yet they all took even shares. It was all part of the music business in those days.”
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