Duke (2 page)

Whether it was true or merely one of his rationalizations for doing whatever he wanted to do whenever he wanted to do it, Ellington lived by those words. Time and again he found himself bumping up against deadlines because of his reluctance to finish what he had started. More often than not his talent got him out of the holes he dug for himself, and when it didn’t, he counted on his charm to see him through. “Duke drew people to him like flies to sugar,” said Sonny Greer, one of his oldest friends and his drummer for three decades. He was well aware of how charismatic he was, and used his powers without scruple whenever he thought it necessary. Once in a while, though, he cut it too close for comfort, and in the frantic days and nights leading up to his Carnegie Hall debut on January 23, 1943, some of his colleagues began to wonder whether Harlem’s Aristocrat of Jazz (as his publicists dubbed him) had finally outsmarted himself.

As early as 1930 Ellington was telling reporters of his plans to compose a piece of program music about the black experience. “My
African Suite,
” he called it. “It will be in five parts, starting in Africa and ending with the history of the American Negro.” Sometimes he described it as a multimovement instrumental work, sometimes as an opera, but either way he made it sound as if the ink were wet on the page, and his serpentine way with words never failed to hypnotize even the most suspicious of interviewers into assuming that the curtain was about to go up. In 1933 Hannen Swaffer, an English columnist, published an interview in which Ellington spoke of the unwritten work so evocatively that you could all but hear it playing in the background:

I am expressing in sound the old days in the jungle, the cruel journey across the sea and the despair of the landing, and then the days of slavery. I trace the growth of a new spiritual quality and then the days in Harlem and the cities of the [United] States. Then I try to go forward a thousand years. I seek to express the future when, emancipated and transformed, the Negro takes his place, a free being, among the peoples of the world.

Swaffer was no friend of jazz, or of blacks—he had once compared Louis Armstrong to a gorilla—but he bought Ellington’s story hook, line, and sinker. “All this was said with a quietness of dignity,” he assured his readers. “I heard, almost, a whisper of prophecy.”

Many more journalists would prove as willing to take Ellington at his oft-repeated word. That same year
Fortune
told its readers that he was writing “a suite in five parts . . . With this suite in his repertoire, Ellington may some day make his Carnegie Hall debut.” In 1938
Down Beat
reported that he had finished work on a full-length opera about “the history of the American Negro.” The truth was less impressive. Not only had he written none of his
African Suite,
but he completed only three extended works of any kind prior to 1943, and the longest of them,
Reminiscing in Tempo,
ran for just twelve minutes, the length of the first movement of a symphony. Constant Lambert, the most perceptive of all the classically trained music critics to write about Ellington in the thirties, praised him as “the first jazz composer of distinction” and compared him to Ravel and Stravinsky, but he also acknowledged that Ellington was a “petit maître” whose best works were “written in what may be called ten-inch record form . . . Into this three and a half minutes he compresses the utmost, but beyond its limits he is inclined to fumble.” Even if his
African Suite
was anything more than a fantasy, how could a petit-maître manage to pull such a work out of his hat? Instead he kept on carving one three-and-a-half-minute cameo after another, and the only sign that he wanted to do something grander was his insistence on telling credulous reporters that he had either done so or was about to.

That was Ellington’s way. He talked not to explain himself but to conceal himself. Even Ruth, his adoring younger sister, said that he “definitely wasn’t direct. He wasn’t direct with anybody about anything.” Yet he talked so fluently and impressively that nearly everyone believed him, save for those who had reason to know better. In one of his most frequently cited verbal arabesques, he claimed that “Harlem Air-Shaft,” which he recorded in 1940, was a musical depiction of the sounds of black apartment life: “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.” It’s a splendidly quotable tale, so much so that one hates to point out that the composition now known as “Harlem Air-Shaft” started life as “Once Over Lightly,” a title that has nothing to do with life in a Harlem apartment house. Ellington talked with similarly seductive fluency when luring women into bed, drawing on an endless supply of the come-on lines that a friend of his dubbed “crotch warmers,” most of which appear on paper to be eye-rollingly florid (“I knew you were here because the whole studio was suddenly aglow with a turquoise radiance”) but which carried the force of iron conviction when spoken in his fine-grained bass-baritone voice.

Ellington kept on talking about his soon-to-be-completed tone poem–opera–symphony–suite for as long as he could get away with it. Then, in December of 1942, he stopped talking and started writing, announcing that the centerpiece of his Carnegie Hall program would be the premiere of what he now called
Black, Brown and Beige: A Tone Parallel to the History of the American Negro
. The concert, which took place six weeks later, was a celebration of his twentieth anniversary as a bandleader, and there were those, Ellington among them, who thought it far past time for him to appear at the best-known concert hall in America. Benny Goodman, after all, had played Carnegie Hall in 1938, and though three of Ellington’s top sidemen, Harry Carney, Johnny Hodges, and Cootie Williams, were featured at that concert, the humiliating fact was that the King of Swing had beaten Harlem’s Aristocrat of Jazz to the punch. Ellington, who was invited to sit in on piano with his own men and Goodman’s rhythm section, declined with thanks but came to the concert. “He was furious,” said a friend who saw him there. “He was just livid.”

The event brought Goodman reams of free publicity, not to mention vast amounts of highbrow réclame, a commodity that Ellington coveted fiercely. Irving Mills, the manager who was chiefly responsible for making him a celebrity, had gone to enormous trouble to promote him not merely as the leader of a black dance band but as a musical giant. The publicity manuals that Mills Artists Inc. sent out to the managers of the theaters and ballrooms that booked Duke Ellington and His Famous Orchestra explained that he was no ordinary jazzman:

Sell Ellington as a great artist, a musical genius whose unique style and individual theories of harmony have created a new music. . . . Ellington’s genius as a composer, arranger and musician has won him the respect and admiration of such authorities as Percy Grainger, head of the department of music at the New York University; Basil Cameron, conductor of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra; Leopold Stokowski, famed conductor of the celebrated Philadelphia Orchestra; Paul Whiteman, whose name is synonymous with jazz, and many others.

It was bold talk for a publicist, and it had the advantage of being true. No matter what Constant Lambert may have thought, Ellington was not the first jazz composer of distinction, but he was the first to write music that used the still-new medium of the big band with the same coloristic imagination brought by classical composers to their symphonic works. “You know, Stan Kenton can stand in front of a thousand fiddles and a thousand brass and make a dramatic gesture and every studio arranger can nod his head and say, ‘Oh, yes, that’s done like this,’” said André Previn, one of his best-informed admirers. “But Duke merely lifts his finger, three horns make a sound, and I don’t know what it is!” Nor were his innovations limited to the field of timbre. What set him apart was not his virtuoso command of instrumental timbre, but
how
he used it. Mere arrangers took pop songs and dressed them up in new colors and harmonies, but Ellington, though he recorded his share of catchy hits, was better known for the works in which he used the language of jazz to say things that it had never said before. Previn compared him to Stravinsky and Prokofiev, Percy Grainger to Bach and Delius, Ralph Ellison to Ernest Hemingway. Within the tight confines of a single 78 side, he spun “tone parallels” (a phrase that he coined) to every imaginable human emotion. He and the nine hundred musicians who passed through his band sang of joy and loneliness, passion and despair, faith and hope. His compositions included musical portraits of pretty women, tap-dancing comedians, express trains, Shakespearean characters, and the unsung heroes of his long-despised race, and he made it sound as if writing them were simple: “I just watch people and observe life, and then I write about them.”

It stood to reason that he should play Carnegie Hall, but Ellington claimed that Irving Mills had passed up an opportunity to book the band there in 1937, believing that the appearance wouldn’t bring in enough revenue to justify its expense. It had rankled ever since that Mills let such an opportunity to sell him as a great artist slip through his fingers. While the band had since given full-evening concerts at UCLA, the City College of New York, and Colgate University, all were too far off the beaten path of publicity to attract the attention of the press. The time had come to even the score, and William Morris Jr., Ellington’s new manager, meant to do the job right. “I want you to write a long work,” he told his client, “and let’s do it in Carnegie Hall.”

 • • • 

The program that Ellington drew up opened with a new version of “Black and Tan Fantasy,” the 1927 composition in which he blended together the growling gutbucket trumpet of Bubber Miley, a Victorian religious ballad, and the funeral march from Chopin’s B-Flat Minor Piano Sonata, an exotic-sounding brew that put him on the map of early jazz. But most of the other numbers were written in or after 1940, the year in which the Ellington band reached the height of its collective creativity. “Ko-Ko,” “Cotton Tail,” “Jack the Bear,” “A Portrait of Bert Williams”: These were some of the now-classic pieces that he presented at Carnegie Hall, together with a half dozen others written by Mercer Ellington, his son, and Billy Strayhorn, a young composer-lyricist who joined the Ellington organization in 1939 and soon became his closest musical collaborator. The only tunes not by Ellington, Strayhorn, or Mercer were “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “Rose of the Rio Grande,” a specialty number long identified with the trombonist Lawrence Brown, one of Ellington’s most admired soloists. The band’s other stars all took turns in the spotlight as well, with the creamy-sounding alto-saxophone playing of Johnny Hodges making an especially fetching impression in Strayhorn’s “Day Dream.” Still, there was no question about who was standing at center stage. Everyone knew that it was Duke Ellington’s night to shine, and he knew it, too. Yet he had put off writing what was to be his crowning achievement until the last possible minute. He started work on
Black, Brown and Beige
in mid-December, and he was applying finishing touches to the forty-five-minute score on the day of the premiere.

Ellington began writing
Black, Brown and Beige
backstage at the State Theater in Hartford, Connecticut, where the band was sharing a bill with Frank Sinatra. Next came a string of dates in Connecticut, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Canada, and upstate New York, with Ellington working on the score along the way. The band returned to Harlem on January 15, then started to go over the still-incomplete piece at Manhattan’s Nola Rehearsal Studio, then as now a popular midtown rehearsal space for jazz musicians. Howard Taubman, the music editor of
The
New York Times
and a longtime fan, looked in on Ellington that week:

On the day of my visit to his apartment in Harlem he was still asleep at 1
P.M
. He had worked all the previous night, knocking off at 9
A.M
. Since the band had had a night off, Duke had spent it writing music for the Carnegie Hall concert. The piano was still in the corridor where it had been pushed so as not to disturb members of his family. Sheets of freshly written music were on the piano, under the telephone, in the living room. As we chatted, members of Ellington’s band drifted in, and from the kitchen they could be heard humming parts of the new score and arguing over how to do it.

On January 22, the night before the concert, the band gave a preview performance of the complete program at a high school in Rye, a suburb north of the city. Ellington’s friend Edmund Anderson, who had come to the dress rehearsal the previous day, saw Johnny Hodges running through “Come Sunday,” his solo spot in
Black, Brown and Beige,
“practically before the ink on the music sheets was dry.” While Anderson was thrilled by what he heard, others were doubtful. According to Barry Ulanov, Ellington’s first biographer, the consensus was that the new piece was “choppy” and hard to follow, perhaps in part because Ellington, who had yet to finish the score, was forced to rehearse it “piecemeal, section by section, sometimes in sequence, more often out of it.” Only Don Redman, the composer-arranger who had been Ellington’s opposite number in Fletcher Henderson’s band of the twenties, begged to differ. “You’re so wrong,” he told the doubters. But Ellington himself was unhappy enough with “Beige,” the last movement, to make a cut after the preview, dropping a win-the-war lyric (“We’re black, brown and beige / But we’re red, white and blue”) that was to have been sung at Carnegie Hall.

The three thousand ticketholders who packed the sold-out hall the next night applauded as Ellington was presented with a plaque citing his “twenty years of laudable contribution to music.” It bore thirty-two engraved signatures, including those of Stokowski, Marian Anderson, Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Aaron Copland, Benny Goodman, Earl Hines, Jerome Kern, Fritz Reiner, Paul Robeson, Artie Shaw, Max Steiner, Lawrence Tibbett, Kurt Weill, and Paul Whiteman, a veritable who’s who of American music in 1943. The audience responded no less enthusiastically to
Black, Brown and Beige
, clapping after every solo. But a recording of the concert reveals Ellington to have been audibly nervous, introducing the piece without his customary sangfroid. Small wonder: He had never in his life attempted anything as challenging as
Black, Brown and Beige
, and he had not given himself enough time for second thoughts, much less a second draft.