Duke (3 page)

Despite the haste in which it was written, the score was littered with his fingerprints.
Black, Brown and Beige
was a compendium of Ellington’s musical language at its most advanced—now suavely lyrical, now earthily plainspoken, on occasion as dissonant as anything by Schoenberg or Bartók—as well as the embodiment of his feelings about what it meant to be black. At every stage in his career, he had written pieces illustrative of his belief that the black experience was a fit subject for a serious composer. Their titles chart the course of his racial pride: “Black Beauty,” “Creole Rhapsody,” “Echoes of the Jungle,” “Harlem Speaks,” “Sepia Panorama.” In 1939 he told the readers of
Down Beat,
“Our aim has always been the development of an authentic Negro music . . . Our music is always intended to be definitely and purely racial.” He felt the same way in 1943. “The Negro is not merely a singing and dancing wizard but a loyal American in spite of his social position,” he said to Howard Taubman. “I want to tell America how the Negro feels about it.”

What he had to say was more specific than was immediately evident to the audience, for he had chosen not to publish the scenario, much of it written in verse, on which
Black, Brown and Beige
was based.
In it he declared his theme to be the untold story of a suffering people: “Buried in the dark, uneasy conscience of Man / Lies the bright and glorious Truth / About your heritage.” At the end he made an even more suggestive proclamation about the nature of his own art:

And so, your song has stirred the souls

Of men in strange and distant places

The picture drawn by many hands

For many eyes of many races.

But did it ever speak to them

Of what you really are?

In Carnegie Hall he opted instead for mellifluous generalities, preferring to let the music speak for itself. It did so compellingly, if at times haltingly.
Black, Brown and Beige
was a patchwork, a not-quite-unified composition in which stretches of sustained musical argument were linked by transitional passages that sounded as though they’d been lifted from the score of a Broadway musical. It was clear that the last movement had been written too hurriedly, for its sections barely hung together. (One of them was a 1942 composition by Strayhorn called “Symphonette-Rhythmique” that Ellington renamed “Sugar Hill Penthouse” and shoehorned into the middle of “Beige” without bothering to give credit to his silent partner, a fact that did not become known until six decades later.) Yet
Black, Brown and Beige
was still an astonishing advance on the dance-oriented music of the other big bands of the Swing Era, so much so that Ellington’s own musicians found it hard to grasp. To take it in at a single hearing, much less to render fair judgment on what its composer had tried to do, was impossible, but every critic in town did his best, with results that ranged from reasonably perceptive to impenetrably dense.

The most favorable notice appeared in
Time,
which described
Black, Brown and Beige
as “one of the longest (45 minutes) and most ambitious pieces of tone painting ever attempted in jazz. Flavored with everything from Stravinskian dissonance to three-four time, it often seemed too ambitious. But there were stages of the emulsion that might appeal to any musician.”
The
New York Times
praised the band but was evasive about the piece: “It had many exciting passages, but it was in the shorter works like ‘Rockin’ in Rhythm’ and the familiar ‘Mood Indigo’ that the leader seemed most completely himself.” The other reviews, written by critics who normally covered classical music rather than jazz—the newspapers of New York had yet to start hiring jazz critics in 1943—were rougher. “It hardly ever succeeds . . . because such a form of composition is entirely out of Ellington’s ken,” Douglas Watt wrote in the
Daily News
. “There is almost no continuity to the piece, filled with false climaxes.” Robert Bagar, who covered the concert for the
World-Telegram
, said that
Black, Brown and Beige
was not “an in toto symphonic creation” but “a series of brief, air-tight compositions, all prettily tied together by modulatory bridges . . . Mr. Ellington can make some two dozen brief, air-tight compositions out of
Black, Brown and Beige
. He should.” Henry Simon of
PM
criticized “Black” along similar lines, saying that it “all but falls apart into so many separate pieces,” though he admitted to being impressed with “Brown” and felt that the work as a whole “showed . . . how well and how far Mr. Ellington has emancipated himself from the straight-jacket [
sic
] of jazz formulas.”

Paul Bowles’s review in the
New York Herald Tribune
was unsparing, and his attack stung all the more because he was, unlike his colleagues, a classical composer of note:

It was formless and meaningless. In spite of Mr. Ellington’s ideological comments before each “movement,” nothing emerged but a gaudy potpourri of tutti dance passages and solo virtuoso work. (The dance parts used some pretty corny riffs, too.) There were countless unprovoked modulations, a passage in 5/4, paraphrases on well-known tunes that were as trite as the tunes themselves, and recurrent climaxes that impeded the piece’s progress.

Most of the jazz press put a happier face on the occasion. “Duke Kills Carnegie Cats! ‘Tone Parallel,’ Famed Soloists Slick, Click; Carnegie Kicked,” read the
Variety
-style headline over
Metronome
’s story about the concert, which was accompanied by a testy editorial called “Reactionary Reviewers” that dismissed the classical critics as “condescending” and “stupid.” Mike Levin of
Down Beat
struck a similar note in his review, but the headline hinted at his own reservations: “Duke Fuses Classical and Jazz! Stuff Is There . . . Needing Development to Attain New Art Form.” And there were plenty of dissenters, the most prominent of whom was John Hammond, a record producer–critic and a well-known skeptic when it came to the music of Duke Ellington, with whom he had had a public falling-out four years earlier. Now Hammond wrote a piece called “Is the Duke Deserting Jazz?” in which he claimed that Ellington had “alienated a good part of his dancing public . . . by becoming more complex he has robbed jazz of most of its basic virtues and lost contact with his audience.” He had said much the same thing about
Reminiscing in Tempo,
claiming in addition that Ellington’s biggest work prior to
Black, Brown and Beige
was “formless and shallow.”

Ellington’s public reaction to the reviews was unforthcoming: “Well, I guess they didn’t dig it.” Three decades later he described the Carnegie Hall concert as an “overwhelming success” in
Music Is My Mistress,
the autobiography in which he and Stanley Dance, his amanuensis, recounted his life and triumphs in language so circumlocutory that even his admirers found it hard to swallow. But at the time he had been worried about the likely response to
Black, Brown and Beige,
confessing his qualms to Helen Oakley in a preview of the concert that ran in
Down Beat
. He told her that he would have preferred to debut the work in Europe, believing as he did that European jazz fans were more receptive to “what [he was] attempting to do,” adding that it would be “a great disappointment to him and, he considers, a deterrent to the ambition of all progressing American composers” if “a sincere interest and an intellectual discernment are not notably factors of the New York audience reaction.”

To have unbent so far as to say such things to a journalist—even one who, like Oakley, was a friend—was both uncharacteristic of Ellington and indicative of his anxieties. Still more revealing was what happened next. The band repeated the Carnegie Hall program five days later at Boston’s Symphony Hall, and again the following month in Cleveland. The latter performance was the last time that Ellington played
Black, Brown and Beige
in its entirety. In 1945 he recorded eighteen minutes of excerpts for Victor, and until his death he performed snippets from the complete work, even recording a revised version of “Black” for Columbia in 1958. But never again did he permit the critics to hear his magnum opus from beginning to end. Too proud to expose himself a second time to their wrath, he preferred to leave it on the shelf.

 • • • 

If
Black, Brown and Beige
mattered so much to Ellington, then why did he wait so long to start writing it?
Because he had always worked that way, and always would. At times his disregard of the clock crossed the line into irresponsibility, as Norman Granz learned in 1957 when he recorded an album that teamed the composer and his band with Ella Fitzgerald. Ellington had agreed to write new arrangements of his best-remembered tunes, but he strolled into the studio all but empty-handed, forcing Granz to cobble together an album out of existing charts that were altered on the spot to accommodate Fitzgerald’s vocals:

We planned far in advance, but in the end Duke failed to do a single arrangement. Ella had to use the band’s regular arrangements. She’d do a vocal where an instrumental chorus would normally go. . . . Duke would ask Ella what key she was in and he would have to transpose and there would be a lot of furious writing to change the key. Then Ella would try and fit in and the band would get swept along by its own memories of just how it ought to play . . . Really, at one point she became so nervous, almost hysterical, that she began to cry. Duke went over to her and said, “Now, baby,” in his most gentle tones. “Don’t worry, it’ll all turn out fine.”

While
Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Duke Ellington Song Book
was an extreme case, it was far from atypical. Ellington composed as he lived, on the road and on the fly. He wrote his pieces in hotel rooms, Pullman cars, and chartered buses, then rehearsed them in the recording studio the next afternoon or on the bandstand the same night. He had little choice but to do so, for he was a professional wanderer who traveled directly from gig to gig, returning to his New York apartment, he said, only to pick up his mail. It would no more have occurred to him to take time off to polish a composition than to go on a monthlong vacation. Even if he had wanted to take a sabbatical to work on
Black, Brown and Beige,
the band’s touring schedule would have precluded it.

“I work and I write. And that’s it,” Ellington said. “My reward is hearing what I’ve done, and unlike most composers, I can hear it immediately. That’s why I keep these expensive gentlemen with me.” But maintaining a touring orchestra was for him not a luxury but a necessity. The band was his musical laboratory, the great good place where he experimented with new ideas, and he was incapable of functioning as a composer without its constant presence. A largely self-taught musician, he had never acquired the conservatory-bred facility that would have allowed him to write out a piece in his studio, bring it to rehearsal, and have his sidemen read it down note for note. He was himself a poor sight reader, as were some of his best-known soloists. “You couldn’t give him a piano part and say, ‘Play this piano part,’” recalled Juan Tizol, his valve trombonist. “He was not that type of player. He couldn’t play it.” Throughout his career he relied on staff copyists (of whom Tizol was the first) who could decode his quirky musical shorthand, transforming it into playable instrumental parts that were then performed by the “expensive gentlemen” for whom they had been handcrafted, a motley gaggle of ever-feuding troublemakers whose antics he viewed with wry resignation and a touch of pride: “There’s no attitude, no discipline, nothing. . . . Outrageous things happen, and then they come back and blow their ass off, play like angels, and I forget about it.” Even the music on their stands bore the nicknames by which they were known (Cootie, Rab, Tricky) rather than the names of the instruments that they played.

What Ellington sought and got from his “accumulation of personalities” was a loose, festive ensemble sound far removed from the clean precision of Benny Goodman’s band. He had no interest in the smoothly blended playing that leaders like Goodman, Jimmie Lunceford, and Artie Shaw demanded from their groups. He preferred to hire musicians with homemade techniques that were different to the point of apparent incompatibility, then juxtapose their idiosyncratic sounds as a pointillist painter might place dots of red and green side by side on his canvas, finding inspiration in their technical limitations (“With a musician who plays the full compass of his instrument as fast or as slow as possible, there seems, paradoxically, less opportunity to create”). That is why his charts never sound quite right when performed by other groups, however accomplished the individual players may be. It is also why a keen-eared virtuoso like Jack Teagarden, the greatest jazz trombonist of his generation, found it impossible to enjoy the Ellington band. “I never did like anything Ellington ever did,” he said. “He never had a band all in tune, always had a bad tone quality and bad blend.” What Teagarden meant, whether he knew it or not, was that the band had an
unconventional
tone quality, one that had little in common with received ideas about how a big band ought to sound. Asked why he hired Al Hibbler when he already had a singer on the payroll, Ellington replied, “My ear makes my decision.” To him, no other ear mattered.

Billy Strayhorn, who saw Ellington’s working methods up close and understood them best, gave them a name in a 1952 article about his mentor: “Ellington plays the piano, but his real instrument is the band. Each member of his band is to him a distinctive tone color and set of emotions, which he mixes with others equally distinctive to produce a third thing, which I call the Ellington Effect.” Sometimes he worked “on” his players as a choreographer makes a ballet “on” his dancers, passing out or dictating scraps of music, then shaping and reshaping them on the spot into a piece that would later be reduced to written form. Even a work that had already been notated was subject in the heat of the moment to total transformation motivated solely by the whim of the composer. The goal, he explained, was “to mold the music around the man,” and the men around whom his music was so tightly molded rarely sounded more themselves than when they were playing it.