Duke (29 page)

But
could
he have done as they did? Or was Ellington now tied to his band-based method of composition? More skeptical listeners are likely to hear in
Reminiscing in Tempo
not tightly organized musical discourse but a pronounced tendency to wander from key to key. In addition to lacking the sure sense of harmonic direction that gives classical compositions their feeling of forward movement, Ellington did not understand how to develop the simplistic “themes” (an ascending two-note motif and a two-measure chromatic spiral that turns endlessly on itself) out of which the musical material of
Reminiscing in Tempo
is generated. Instead he repeats them over and over again, altering their harmonization and instrumentation and transposing them into a succession of keys. The piece’s apparent “unity,” such as it is, arises in large part from the fact that it is played, like the original
Creole Rhapsody,
at a single, unvarying speed.
^{†††††}

What we hear in
Reminiscing in Tempo,
in other words, is something in between true large-scale development and Ellington’s now-familiar “mosaic” method of composition, an impression confirmed by examining the manuscript. Though the record labels indicate that the piece is divided into four parts, the last section sounds as if it was tacked on as an afterthought. The manuscript reveals that this section was sketched and scored separately from the rest of the piece, and since it is not heard on any of the three surviving recordings of live performances of
Reminiscing in Tempo
that were given by the band in 1945 and 1948, it’s probable that Ellington wrote it in order to fill up the other side of the second of the two 78 discs on which the piece was first released by Brunswick.

None of this means that Ellington was congenitally incapable of teaching himself how to write architecturally sound pieces, merely that he did not do so. For all its formal indecisiveness,
Reminiscing in Tempo
is still a giant step forward from
Creole Rhapsody,
and there can be, as Max Harrison rightly says, little doubt that Ellington could have advanced still further. Was he inhibited by the example of George Gershwin, whose
Porgy and Bess
opened eighteen days after
Reminiscing in Tempo
was recorded? Perhaps, though it is more likely that his later reluctance to embrace the challenge of extended form arose from the critical response to
Reminiscing in Tempo,
which foreshadowed the similar controversy that erupted after the 1943 premiere of
Black, Brown and Beige
. It is highly suggestive that Ellington, according to Lawrence Brown, played
Reminiscing in Tempo
“practically every night” for a short time after the recording was made, then dropped it from the band’s active repertoire, thereafter reviving it only on such special occasions as his 1939 concert at the City College of New York.

Genius at work: A studio portrait shot in the thirties by advertising photographer Valentino Sarra. Ellington’s soigné image may have made John Hammond bristle, but to admirers like Ralph Ellison, it exemplified the racial pride that he endeavored to inspire in his fellow blacks

When Leonard Feather met Ellington in 1936, the composer downplayed
Reminiscing in Tempo:
“Duke assured me that he attached no enormous importance to the piece, which he said was written entirely on a train during a few hurried days of one-night stands.” But it seems more likely that he was so proud of it that he was unwilling to risk being taunted again by critics who failed to appreciate his musical courage. When a radio interviewer asked him four years later to name his “masterpiece,” his reply was unhesitating: “
Reminiscing in Tempo
. Because after it was completed, it gave me the most satisfaction of having accomplished what I set out to do.”

 • • • 

Of the unfavorable reviews of
Reminiscing in Tempo,
John Hammond’s was the most venomous. A rich, socially well-connected jazz buff, Hammond had briefly worked for Irving Mills and was now maneuvering to make a place for himself in the record business. Though he was, politically speaking, a man of the left, his main interest was in music, with racial justice coming a close second, and it makes more sense to think of him not as a cultural revolutionary but as an aesthete with political interests. Edmund Wilson, who knew Hammond in the thirties, described him as resembling “somebody who had modeled himself on Proust, then received an injection of Communism.” Before long he would be recognized as the producer who helped to make Count Basie, Charlie Christian, Benny Goodman, Billie Holiday, and Teddy Wilson famous. In 1935, though, he was mainly known as an outspoken critic who, like Spike Hughes, believed devoutly in black jazz—so long as it suited his straight-ahead preferences. In truth Hammond was not so much a critic as a bossy know-it-all with good but by no means infallible taste, and he was notorious for being self-confident far past the point of arrogance.
The New Republic
’s Otis Ferguson, a jazz critic of greater discernment and more generous disposition, put it pithily: “John won’t compromise on anything because he never learned to and he never learned to because he never had to.”

In 1977 Hammond published an autobiography in which he sought to give the impression of being frank about his “problems” with Duke Ellington, whom he called “a supreme jazz arranger and a great although limited composer” whose orchestra was “not all that a jazz band should be, particularly rhythmically . . . My biggest argument with him concerned his failure, certainly his inability, to get people up on a floor to dance.” He also suggested that the reason for this alleged inability was that Ellington had “lost contact with his origins,” cultivating an ersatz sophistication of manner that was mirrored in his music. That sounded condescending enough in 1977, but in 1935 it bordered on bigotry. At least one of Ellington’s sidemen, Rex Stewart, believed Hammond to be a racist: “John likes to play the boss man when it comes to niggers. If you’re black and don’t kowtow to him, he won’t have anything to do with you. As a matter of fact, he’ll even try to keep you from getting work.”

It was true that Ellington’s audiences were growing whiter, and that they continued to do so. As Cootie Williams noted, “Our type of music wasn’t really for black people . . . While we were on tour we were playing for white audiences. The rich, upper class of blacks would come but mostly we would be playing for whites.” But Hammond, who had already expressed strong reservations about the band’s deviations from the narrow path of danceability, made the mistake of supposing that there was only one way to play jazz—or to be black. Piqued by Ellington’s refusal to do what he wanted, he now let fly with a vengeance, publishing an article in
Down Beat
called “The Tragedy of Duke Ellington, the ‘Black Prince’ of Jazz”:

The real trouble with Duke’s music is the fact that he has purposely kept himself from any contact with the troubles of his people or mankind in general. It would probably take a Granville Hicks or Langston Hughes to describe the way he shuts his eyes to the abuses being heaped upon his race and his original class. . . .

Consequently Ellington’s music has become vapid and without the slightest semblance of guts. His newer stuff bears superficial resemblance to Debussy and Delius without any of the peculiar vitality that used to pervade his work. The Duke is afraid even to think about himself, his struggles and his disappointments, and that is why his Reminiscing is so formless and shallow a piece of music.

To criticize Ellington for remaining aloof from “the troubles of his people” was, of course, ridiculous. Even if he was fortunate enough to be able to ride a private Pullman car, a black musician who toured the Deep South couldn’t help but see those troubles up close day after day. But it was even more ridiculous for Hammond to suppose that Ellington’s worldly success had any effect on his music, much less to suggest that he would have written better pieces had he exposed himself to “the seamier side of existence.” No doubt Hammond would have preferred that he write a twelve-bar blues about the martyrdom of the Scottsboro Boys, not a tone poem inspired by the death of his mother. But Ellington wasn’t that kind of musician, any more than Ravel was that kind of composer or Renoir that kind of painter. Like them, he was an impressionist, an artist who dealt not in ideas but images, and the life that he portrayed in sound, related though it was to the world around him, was his
inner
life. As Cézanne put it, his goal was “not to paint the subject but to ‘realize’ sensations.” He looked, listened, and felt, then transformed his feelings into music. That was what he had done in
Reminiscing in Tempo,
whose failings, such as they are, have nothing to do with the quality of his feelings, much less their subject matter.

In addition to being simple-minded, Hammond’s review was an unforgivably personal assault, and it brought about a permanent break between the two men—but not before its author revealed himself to be at least as much of a poseur as he thought Ellington to be. In April of 1936 the band spent a month performing in the Urban Room of Chicago’s Congress Hotel, playing half-hour-long “rhythm concerts” three times each week. Helen Oakley, one of Ellington’s white friends, witnessed at one of these concerts what Barry Ulanov called a “curious encounter between Duke and one of his severest critics.” The critic, who was almost certainly Hammond, spoke loftily of “an artiness which pervades all of [Ellington’s] writing today.” Then the band played a piece that he liked. “That last thing you played,” he said. “Exquisite. The real Duke.”

Neither Ellington nor Oakley told him that it was
Reminiscing in Tempo
.

8

“SWING IS STAGNANT”

Diminuendo in Blue, 1936–1939

I
F YOU NEVER
read anything about yourself, then you’ll never read anything bad,” Duke Ellington said. Few artists who profess such a credo are high-minded enough to live by it, and Ellington, who read his clippings closely, was no exception. He knew what John Hammond had written about him, though he also knew that the critic’s tirade would have little measurable effect on his record sales. It was a different story when
Variety
published an article in January of 1936 that cited his orchestra as one of a number of “bands who fail to impress [college students] noticeably.” Four years later
Down Beat
reported that America’s top white bandleaders were pulling in twice as much money as their black counterparts. The subtitle of the piece said it all: “Negro Leaders Could Make More Money Running a Rib Joint.” Now that whites had their own bands to admire, they had less time for Ellington. So did Hollywood:
Symphony in Black
was the last film of this period in which he received the meet-the-great-artist treatment to which Irving Mills had accustomed him. The spotlight had shifted to Benny Goodman, who appeared in a pair of big-budget feature films,
Hollywood Hotel
and
The Big Broadcast of 1937,
that featured his band prominently. Meanwhile, Ellington made
The Hit Parade,
a flimsy B movie shot in 1937 at Republic, a second-tier studio, in which he shared screen time with the pretty-boy society pianist Eddy Duchin. Not until the forties would he be employed again by a major studio, or given the chance to host a network radio show.