Duke (13 page)

His approach to form was just as unconventional. Instead of putting together close-knit multistrain miniatures in the manner of the ragtime pianists from whom he learned his craft, Ellington treated the sections of his compositions as if they were separate pieces in a mosaic that could be rearranged at will. The Ellington band recorded “East St. Louis Toodle-O” several more times in 1927, and in the last of these versions, cut for Victor in December, Ellington restructured the composition, changing the order of the strains and the instrumental solos, a practice that became part of his composing routine. Later on he would bring unfinished, seemingly fragmentary bits of music into the studio, then shift them around on the spot until he arrived at a sequence that satisfied him.

Irving Townsend, who produced several of the albums that Ellington recorded in the fifties, described the latter process, which can also be heard on surviving rehearsal tapes:

Duke, to the bewilderment of people who have watched him record, writes and rehearses music in small segments, usually of eight measures and almost always without a written conclusion. His first studio rundowns of new music trail off as his musicians reach the end of a phrase at different moments and come to a limping stop. Then, knowing the length of each segment and how it sounds, Ellington proceeds to move his parts around. A typical example, although fictitious, of Duke’s final instructions for a performance might go as follows: “Start at letter C. Then go to A and play it twice, only the second time leave off the last two bars. These bars are the beginning of a sheet you have marked X. After X I’ll play until I bring you in at C again and you go out with letter D.”

As always, Ellington’s ear made his decisions, and to outsiders they could seem capricious. Even intimates found his jigsaw-puzzle approach to musical form to be arbitrary. After he dismantled and reassembled one of Billy Strayhorn’s pieces at a 1953 recording session, Strayhorn broke with his mentor, staying away from the band for two and a half years. But contrast lay at the heart of Ellington’s style, so much so that he elevated it to the status of a fundamental ordering principle, one that he went so far as to claim as an attribute of his race: “You know how the negroes are. They pass quickly from the extremes of joy to gloom and back again. There must be the same quality in pure negro music.” This, too, can be heard in “East St. Louis Toodle-O,” in which the contrast between Miley’s minor-key solo and the major-key strain with which it is juxtaposed is the first known example of one of Ellington’s stylistic fingerprints.

Not only is “East St. Louis Toodle-O” an epitome of much that was to come in his music, but the 1926 recording is so well played as to indicate that the Washingtonians must have been performing the piece regularly. According to Sonny Greer, it was one of the band’s signature numbers: “People heard it and said, ‘Here they come!’” Ellington, who always knew a good thing when he heard it, responded by making “East St. Louis Toodle-O” his radio theme, playing it nightly for years to come. While “Birmingham Breakdown,” a dance tune cut at the same session, was not nearly so impressive, it also represented a vast improvement over the feeble records that the band had previously been making. But “East St. Louis Toodle-O” is one of the most completely realized jazz recordings of the midtwenties, a performance worthy of comparison with such classics of early ensemble jazz as Jelly Roll Morton’s “Black Bottom Stomp” or Fletcher Henderson’s “The Stampede,” both of which had been cut only a few months earlier. When Jimi Hendrix heard it for the first time, he was so struck by Miley’s solo that he sought to duplicate its tonal qualities by using a “wah-wah” pedal to alter the timbre of his electric guitar. In 1973 Steely Dan recorded the same piece in an arrangement that sounds at home alongside such rock songs as “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” and “Monkey in Your Soul.”

 • • • 

The artistic success of the Ellington band’s first electrical recording session was no fluke. Over the next twelve months, the group recorded a total of ten original compositions and four songs by other writers. Three of the originals, “Black and Tan Fantasy,” “Creole Love Call,” and “East St. Louis Toodle-O,” became permanent parts of Ellington’s repertoire. That’s a high batting average for anyone, and still more impressive for a young musician whose previous work had shown so few signs of what was to come.

“Black and Tan Fantasy,” cowritten with Bubber Miley and first recorded in April of 1927, starts out with a tune that might well have been known to Daisy Ellington. Miley borrowed it from “The Holy City,” a sacred song by Stephen Adams published in 1892, changing the first four bars of Adams’s refrain from major to minor and stretching them into a twelve-bar blues chorus. (Miley told a friend that the song was a spiritual that his mother had sung to him when he was a boy.) The blues theme is followed by a slippery-sounding major-key alto-saxophone theme played by Otto Hardwick in his sexiest manner, a contrast that Ellington must have engineered. Then comes a string of major-key blues choruses by Miley, Ellington, and Nanton, with Miley sputtering furiously and Nanton playing the first of his eerie-sounding “talking” solos to be preserved on record. At the end Ellington deals a new card, a four-bar coda in which Miley and the band intone the solemn theme from the slow movement of Chopin’s
Funeral March
sonata, a tune to which generation after generation of English-speaking children have sung the mock-serious words
Pray for the dead and the dead will pray for you.

“Creole Love Call,” recorded in October, is even simpler, consisting of six twelve-bar blues choruses in a medium tempo, four of which feature the same theme, a softly rocking riff that is first scored for a clarinet trio, then for the full band. Yet Ellington once again has a card tucked up his sleeve: In the first chorus, a woman’s voice is superimposed atop the clarinets, singing a wordless countermelody that sounds almost as though it is being played on a plunger-muted trumpet. The singer, a stage performer named Adelaide Hall who had made her Broadway debut in 1921 in Eubie Blake’s
Shuffle Along,
was sharing a theater bill with the Washingtonians when she heard them playing “Creole Love Call” as she stood in the wings. She started humming along with the band, and as soon as Ellington heard her, he left the piano and went backstage. “Adelaide, that’s what I’ve been looking for!” he said, then brought her out to sing the number with the band. They recorded it together a few days later.

The clarinet solo in “Creole Love Call” is by Rudy Jackson, who had previously played with King Oliver. Jackson, who shared composing credit for the song with Ellington and Miley, apparently neglected to inform his collaborators that he had stolen the song from his old boss. Six months later, not long after he left the Washingtonians, Oliver sent a stiffly worded letter to the copyright department of Victor Records:

I have recently listened to a recording by your company of “Creole Love Call,” played by Duke Ellington’s band.

Permit me to bring to your attention the fact that this number was written by me and copyrighted Oct. 11, 1923; #570230 under the title of “Camp Meeting Blues.”

The writer also recorded this particular number on the Columbia records and has collected royalties for same.

Will you, therefore, be good enough to forward me a contract covering “Creole Love Call” and should you desire further information, the same will be given, gladly.

It was nothing more than the truth: “Creole Love Call”
is
“Camp Meeting Blues,” restructured and rescored à la Ellington for a ten-piece band. Except for Hall’s wordless riff, all of the song’s thematic material, as well as Jackson’s “improvised” clarinet solo, had been lifted from Oliver’s 1923 recording. He had Ellington dead to rights, and only a technicality kept him from collecting royalties on “Creole Love Call” for the rest of his life: “Camp Meeting Blues” had been copyrighted under a different title, “Temptation Blues,” then renamed at the recording session. The change of title made the registration impossible to trace, leaving Oliver high and dry. It was a costly mistake, for not only did Ellington re-record “Creole Love Song” many times, but it later became part of the medley of hits that his band played at its public performances. But if Ellington (or, more likely, Jackson) plagiarized the material out of which “Creole Love Call” was made, it was what he did with what he stole that made the results his own. Not only did he spot the potential in Adelaide Hall’s impromptu backstage vocal, but he deserves full credit for deconstructing the constituent parts of Oliver’s 1923 version and turning them into a better-ordered whole. The opening clarinet riff, for instance, is not heard until the fourth chorus of “Camp Meeting Blues,” when it is played as a clarinet solo. It was Ellington, not Oliver, who saw the thematic possibilities of the solo, then added the transfiguring touch of Hall’s wistful voice.

Neither “Creole Love Call” nor “Black and Tan Fantasy” is as subtle, or as complex, as the compositions that Ellington would be turning out on a regular basis a few years later. But for all their bluesy simplicity, both pieces, like “East St. Louis Toodle-O,” also had a near-pictorial quality that bore little resemblance to the extroverted dance music that most other jazz musicians were performing in 1927. It was natural that they should have attracted the attention of commentators who were starting to notice the expressive potential of jazz. The first of these men to comment on Ellington in print was R. D. Darrell, one of the earliest American music critics to take recordings seriously and review them in the same way that other critics reviewed live performances. Though Darrell specialized in classical music, he had an ear for jazz, and in June of 1927 he started reviewing Ellington’s recordings for
Phonograph Monthly Review,
a Boston-based magazine founded the preceding October whose cover billed it as “An Independent American Magazine for Amateurs Interested in Recorded Music and Its Development.” Darrell, who knew nothing about jazz, started listening to review copies of Ellington’s early 78s by chance and came to the conclusion that he was “an orchestrator in the class of Ravel, Respighi and Strauss.”

Darrell’s reviews of Ellington’s records were the first to appear in any magazine—they may have been the first to appear anywhere—and the excitement with which he reported on his first hearing of “Black and Tan Fantasy” is still contagious:

Two unusually interesting records lead the Brunswick list, indeed are right in the forefront of the releases from all companies. The Black and Tan Fantasy . . . deserves perhaps the first prize; in it The Washingtonians combine sonority and fine tonal qualities with some amazing eccentric instrumental effects. This record differs from similar ones by avoiding extremes, for while the “stunts” are exceptionally original and striking, they are performed musically, even artistically. A piece no one should miss!

Darrell continued to write about Ellington for
Phonograph Monthly Review
until 1931, and his reviews were read by a small but vocal audience of aficionados in America and England. While his role in spreading the word about Ellington was soon forgotten and remained so until after his death, he was, so far as is known, the first music critic to recognize that jazz, which until that time had been primarily a soloist’s music, had now produced a composer of consequence. But record reviews, however prescient, did little to improve the lot of a working jazz musician in 1927, and one suspects that Ellington was more pleased to read Dave Peyton’s column in
The
Chicago Defender
that April. Peyton, a bandleader-journalist who took jazz seriously but liked it best when it was polite, assured his readers that Ellington was the “conductor of what leading judges have called the foremost jazz orchestra in America.” Peyton also mentioned that he was “a pupil of the famous Henry Grant,” a touch that must have pleased Ellington, and included a paragraph that would have given even more pleasure to Irving Mills: “Ellington insists that all his remarkable rhythms and harmonies would not be before so wide a public today were it not for Irving Mills of Jack Mills, Inc., New York music publishers.”

Stories like this one (which was picked up by the
New York Amsterdam News
and
The
Pittsburgh Courier,
two other top black weeklies) both fed and reflected the band’s growing reputation. So did the fact that Ellington and his sidemen were now recording for several different labels. On Vocalion they were billed as “Duke Ellington and His Kentucky Club Orchestra,” on Victor “Duke Ellington and His Orchestra,” on Brunswick and Pathé “The Washingtonians.” In addition to recording under multiple names, the band recorded multiple versions of Ellington’s most popular numbers: four of “East St. Louis Toodle-O,” three of “Black and Tan Fantasy,” two of “Birmingham Breakdown.” Most were basically identical to the originals. Was he re-recording these songs in order to polish them or merely to bring in more money? Either way, he would continue the practice throughout his career, tinkering with and—sometimes—improving the masterpieces of his youth long after he grew old.

All this was made possible by Irving Mills, who must have had a hand in the writing of Peyton’s column and was also, so he said, playing an active role in the band’s recording sessions:

Duke would have a skeleton of something when he came in the studio. I would time the tune and make suggestions and he listened. He had a high respect for what I’d do in the recording room. We never fought over an arrangement in the studio. . . . I created the balances. I cut out the arrangements. Whatever they did, I thinned it out. His music was always too heavy. He overarranged.

The trumpeter Louis Metcalf, who had joined the band in 1926, angrily recalled Mills’s meddling a half-century later: “We got a session down there, and we’re gonna play certain numbers. We’d get out there, and this guy Mills would change it all around. Mills was kind of a show-off cat. . . . Man, we had some arrangements, and then this monkey comes in, and that’s when everybody began to get down on Duke. They’d say, ‘How can you let this man louse up your band?’” But Ellington knew what Mills was doing for him, and Mills knew that he knew. Not only was the band making new records every few weeks and getting written up with steadily increasing regularity, but Mills was also publishing sheet-music versions and stock arrangements of Ellington’s compositions, an undertaking made more difficult by the fact that most of them were worked out on the spot in the rehearsal studio and on the bandstand rather than being written down in advance. Ellington, Mills said, “knew how to construct at the piano because the boys knew what he wanted. . . . But he didn’t leave anything [written] behind. It didn’t make any difference—we knew we could always get it after it was perfected by the whole band by taking it off of the records.” Mills would eventually publish simplified piano arrangements of dozens of Ellington compositions, ranging from “East St. Louis Toodle-O” and “Creole Love Call” to such recherché instrumentals as “The Mystery Song” and “Rude Interlude.” Transcribed from his records, they remain in print—and continue to sell.