Duke (23 page)

Five months later, on June 11, Ellington and the band recorded a revised
Creole Rhapsody
for Victor that was two minutes longer than the original, meaning that it had to be issued on a twelve-inch 78, a format usually reserved for classical releases. As was his custom, he took apart the Brunswick version and put its sections back together in a different order, inserting new material along the way. In the second version, each section is played in a different tempo, a device that Ellington may have borrowed from
Rhapsody in Blue
(he also threw in a near-verbatim quotation from the Gershwin work).
Rhapsody in Blue,
like the other “symphonic jazz” scores performed by the Whiteman band, is as episodic as
Creole Rhapsody,
but because of its greater duration, the episodes are sufficiently long—and tuneful—to endow the piece with a modicum of solidity. The shorter sections and ever-changing tempos of the Victor version of
Creole Rhapsody,
by contrast, give it a hectic, overcrowded air, leaving an impression of incoherence that is at odds with the superior workmanship of the new material, some of which is as good as anything that Ellington ever wrote.

In neither version, however, does he show any understanding of how to organize an extended composition other than in the medleylike manner of Gershwin and Grofé. No underlying logic propels the collagelike sequence of musical events in
Creole Rhapsody.
Ellington simply staples the sections together, reiterating instead of developing them, and both versions straggle to a halt instead of coming to a satisfying conclusion. The effect, as with
Rhapsody in Blue,
is not unlike Donald Tovey’s acid description of one of Franz Liszt’s less successful tone poems as “an introduction to an introduction to a connecting link to another introduction to a rhapsodic interlude, leading to a free development of the third introduction, leading to a series of still more introductory developments of the previous introduction, leading to a solemn slow theme (which, after these twenty minutes, no mortal power will persuade any listener to regard as a real beginning), and so eventually leading backward to the original mysterious opening by way of conclusion.” Given the fact that Ellington had never before tried, so far as we know, to write a large-scale work and had not heard the classical models that could have shown him how to do so, it is a wonder that either version of
Creole Rhapsody
is listenable. In fact the best parts of both recordings are still a joy to hear. But his stubborn unwillingness to learn from the classics (unlike Gershwin, who studied them so carefully that he managed to write a full-length opera just eleven years after
Rhapsody in Blue
) forced him to fumble for wheel-inventing “solutions” to basic problems of musical architecture. This is why so little of the craft on display in “Old Man Blues,” whose repeating-chorus form Ellington understood in his bones, can be heard in
Creole Rhapsody
.

None of this prevented Irving Mills from selling
Creole Rhapsody
in a full-page
Variety
ad whose headline, “Duke Ellington: America’s New Vogue (A Different Kind of Music),” stressed the piece’s novelty. So did the stories that Mills planted in newspapers around the country, often accompanied by a photo of Ellington presenting a copy of the score of
Creole Rhapsody
to Paul Whiteman, who declared himself eager to perform the piece with his own orchestra: “Wild and barbaric as its rhythms may be, ‘Creole Rhapsody’ is musically correct in form and structure.” Touting
Creole Rhapsody
as a step forward for jazz fit into Mills’s promotional strategy, and it was true to boot. For all its structural weaknesses, and inferior as it was to Gershwin’s efforts in the same line, Ellington really had tried to do something new in jazz. Spike Hughes, who kept an eye on American jazz recordings in his column for
The
Melody Maker,
an English magazine for dance-band musicians, saw at once what he was up to: “
Creole Rhapsody
is the latest development of a form which Ellington has made his own. . . . It is, in fact, the first classic of modern dance music. The individual player is, for the first time, completely subservient to the personality of the composer.”

So did Percy Grainger, the celebrated Australian pianist-composer, who invited the Ellington band to perform for his students at New York University in October of 1932. Grainger, an authority on English folk song who was far more inclined than most of his classical-music contemporaries to take popular music seriously, was giving a series of lectures at NYU called “A General Study of the Manifold Nature of Music.” Already interested in the improvisational elements of jazz, he had recently discovered Ellington’s music, apparently by reading about it in R. D. Darrell’s record column, and was fascinated by its pastel instrumental colors and lush harmonic language. They reminded Grainger of the music of Frederick Delius, an English composer who had lived on a Florida plantation in his youth and sought in his compositions to evoke his memories of the black spirituals that he heard there, infusing them with the modern harmonies of Grieg and Debussy. Grainger decided to devote an entire class to Ellington, whom he introduced to his students with a flourish: “The three greatest composers who ever lived are Bach, Delius and Duke Ellington. Unfortunately Bach is dead, Delius is very ill, but we are happy to have with us today The Duke.” He then went on to praise the “high emotional and technical qualities” and “rhapsodic improvisation” of Ellington’s music as the band played musical examples for his bedazzled students.

It’s not known whether Grainger and Ellington specifically discussed
Creole Rhapsody,
but it would be surprising if the work was not mentioned, since Whiteman and his band played it three months later at Carnegie Hall as part of their “Fifth Experiment in Modern Music,” a series that was inaugurated in 1924 with the Aeolian Hall performance at which
Rhapsody in Blue
was premiered. Ellington’s piece shared the bill with Ferde Grofé’s
Tabloid,
a forgotten piece of program music about a newspaper city room whose unorthodox instrumentation stole the show (“Four typewriters, a revolver, a machine-gun, an emergency wagon siren, a policeman’s whistle and the clack of telegraph keys were used for realism”). Though
Creole Rhapsody
went unmentioned by the critic of
The
New York Times,
who probably knew nothing of its composer, an excerpt was heard in a Paramount short released in August of 1933 that featured the bands of Ellington and Cab Calloway and the Mills Blue Rhythm Band, all of them managed by Irving Mills, who praised his most famous client on camera: “When I first heard him, he was conducting a little five-piece orchestra up in Harlem. Today he is acclaimed by music authorities both here and abroad as the creator of a new vogue in music.”

That was the next-to-last hurrah for
Creole Rhapsody
. After broadcasting it over the BBC during his first European tour, Ellington appears to have dropped the work from his regular repertoire, though he is known to have performed it on occasion as late as 1940 and made a point of including it in a list of favorite recordings that he compiled for
Down Beat
to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of his Cotton Club debut. In 1960 he and Lawrence Brown taped a wistful duet version of a theme from
Creole Rhapsody
that Ellington titled “Creole Blues,” but it languished unheard in Columbia’s vaults for years. Reporters rarely bothered to ask him about
Creole Rhapsody,
and Ellington, who liked to pretend that the past had never happened, saw no reason to remind them of the piece. It had served its purpose, and that was that.
^††††

 • • • 

Two weeks after recording the first version of
Creole Rhapsody,
Ellington turned over the bandstand of the Cotton Club to Cab Calloway and went on his first national tour, a yearlong marathon that took him to Baltimore, Boston, Buffalo, Chicago, Cleveland, Denver, Des Moines, Detroit, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Minneapolis, Omaha, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Washington, and other stops on the Paramount-Publix movie-house circuit. A full-page ad in
Variety
hailed his departure, bragging of “continuous sensational, nightly turn-away of crowds” at the Cotton Club. It was Ellington’s first taste of the exhausting manner in which he was to spend the rest of his life, and it is doubtful that he would have gotten through the tour in one piece without the help of Richard B. Jones, who had just joined the Ellington organization as band boy and general dogsbody. Rex Stewart described Jones, who was known to the musicians as “Jonesy” and would be immortalized in the title of Ellington’s 1934 recording of “Stompy Jones,” as “Duke’s A number one chargé d’affaires . . . the greatest prop man, valet and light-board operator that any traveling band ever had. Jonesy was untiring, alert and utterly devoted to the band, especially to Duke.”

Thanks to the tour, the broadcasts, the records, the film appearances, and the work of Irving Mills, Ellington was about to become a star. Up to then his celebrity, though real, had been substantially regional. Prior to 1930 his name had appeared only fifteen times in stories printed in the national edition of
The
Chicago Defender
. From then to the end of 1935, it would appear in 284 different articles. But no amount of acclaim could offset the effects of the Great Depression, which had laid waste to the record business. American record sales plummeted from sixty-five million in 1929 to ten million in 1932.
Variety
announced the news with a story whose double-decker headline sent chills down the spines of musicians from coast to coast: “RCA Victor Unloading Stars/Must Buy Up Fat Contracts.” One of the stars who was unceremoniously unloaded was Ellington, who cut a half dozen sides for Victor in June of 1931, then went for eight months without releasing a record.

It was an alarming development, one that called for a decisive response, and Mills, who was nothing if not decisive, responded by hiring Ned Williams to publicize the Ellington and Calloway bands. A mustachioed dandy who wore spats and carried a cane, Williams wrote a pair of advertising manuals that gave promoters the tools they needed to do the job of selling Ellington as a “class attraction” whose music was “accepted seriously by many of the greatest minds in the world of music.” They contained punchy catchphrases with which to salt local advertisements (“Primitive rhythms! Weird melodies! Amazing syncopations!”) and prewritten feature stories that could be, and often were, reprinted in toto by busy editors:

When Duke bends over the piano and his masters of melody begin fondling their instruments, one hears the very quintessence of physical Africa moving in sinuous and suggestive rhythms.

No other band is like Ellington’s and it is doubtful if any other band will be like it. Whatever number goes into the Ellington music mill must come out Ellington music. No such weird combinations, such unique and effective cross rhythms and countermelodies with strange and broken tempos are attempted by any other organization.

The manuals were so useful that phrases from their well-thumbed pages kept popping up in Ellington’s clips for years to come. But his fortunes had started to bounce back well before then, so much so that in December of 1931 he was able to present each of his musicians with a Christmas gift of $250 in cash ($3,500 today). In the same month, the readers of
The
Pittsburgh Courier
voted for him as their favorite bandleader.
Variety
reported that the band’s asking price was $5,000 a week, twice as much as Louis Armstrong. “As fast as he got the money, that’s how fast he spent the money,” Mills recalled. “If he knew he was going to wear four suits, he had four trunks with forty suits.” He was spending money so fast that it sometimes ran short. “When I got to high school, the garage bill was always late being paid, the car notes were far behind, the rent was paid late, and it was always a matter of coming through in the nick of time to continue to have ownership,” Mercer said. That would never stop him from buying what he wanted. To Ellington money was nothing more than a means to the end of living as he pleased and providing for his family. A carefree grasshopper in a world of anxious ants, he spent and gave away whatever he made, assuming that his talent would keep the cash flowing for as long as he lived, and in 1932 there seemed no reason for him to think otherwise. It was a nerve-racking year for America, where one out of four people was unemployed, but Ellington, like most successful entertainers of the day, viewed the Great Depression from a safe distance.

Another sign that the financial tide was turning came when Ellington resumed making records in February, this time for Brunswick. They were credited to “Duke Ellington and His Famous Orchestra,” not “Duke Ellington and His Cotton Club Orchestra,” signaling to the public that he was now a touring artist rather than the mere leader of a house band. Ellington’s third session yielded up yet another indication of his increased prestige: He cut a twelve-inch 78 on which the band backed Bing Crosby in a performance of “St. Louis Blues.” Crosby, who had quit the Paul Whiteman band two years earlier, was well on the way to becoming America’s number-one entertainer. Not only was his nightly CBS radio show immensely popular, but he was about to start shooting his feature-film acting debut, Paramount’s
The Big Broadcast,
whose success would make him (in Ellington’s words) “the biggest thing, ever,” a triple-barreled star whose films and radio broadcasts were as successful as his recordings. Crosby’s later reputation as an asexual crooner obscures the fact that in 1932 he was still a bona fide jazz singer and silver-screen heartthrob. He had learned the secret of swing from none other than Louis Armstrong, who proudly called him “the
Boss of All Singers,
” and in return Crosby gave Armstrong full credit for showing him the way: “I’m proud to acknowledge my debt to the Reverend Satchelmouth. He is the beginning and the end of music in America.” That Brunswick should have paired him with Ellington, and given them the extra elbow room of a twelve-inch 78, shows how seriously the bandleader was taken by his new record label.