Duke (30 page)

It didn’t help that Mills, preoccupied as he was with his publishing business and the other bands in his growing stable, was paying less attention to his senior client. Nor was it encouraging that Ned Williams, Mills’s resident publicity wizard, had left the firm in August of 1935, or that the Cotton Club closed its doors six months later, a victim of the lingering effects of the Great Depression and the Harlem race riot of 1935. Not only were white New Yorkers newly afraid to go slumming uptown, but fewer of them could now afford to drink overpriced champagne, in Harlem or anywhere else. They were more likely to stay home and listen to swing bands on the radio. But Ellington kept up the good work, and his orchestra, if anything, grew even better. “In the late 1930s we had a
great
band,” Sonny Greer proudly recalled. Instead of trying to catch the wave of the swing craze, he looked inward, following up
Reminiscing in Tempo
with a quartet of three-minute “concerti” that featured Barney Bigard, Lawrence Brown, Rex Stewart, and Cootie Williams. (This appears to be the first time that the term
concerto
was publicly used by a jazz composer to describe his own work.) “I’m more of a primitive artist in that I only employ the materials at hand,” he explained. “I always write for the men in the band. That has sustained us throughout. I’m not so much concerned with what the styles of the times are as I am with the styles and the capabilities of the men in our band.” The most successful of these pieces was “Echoes of Harlem,” recorded in February of 1936, which opens with a sinister-sounding growl-trumpet solo superimposed over a loping minor-key bass ostinato, followed by a gentler major-key open-horn theme. Though it is credited to Ellington on the record label, “Echoes of Harlem” was a collaboration with Williams, who wrote the first theme: “Duke got his name on the label. I didn’t mind.”

Ellington found yet another way to employ the materials at hand when his contract with the American Record Corporation expired and Irving Mills started his own record label. The new venture consisted of two lines, Master Records (whose releases cost seventy-five cents each) and the budget-priced Variety line (which sold for thirty-five cents). In order to build up a catalog quickly and cheaply, Mills launched a series of small-group releases played by combos that included groups that were drawn from the Ellington band. Though Ellington had made records that, like “Mood Indigo,” featured smaller lineups, he rarely presented such groups as part of his stage act. But Benny Goodman did, and the Goodman Trio, a racially integrated “band-within-the-band” that featured the black pianist Teddy Wilson alongside Goodman and Gene Krupa, became popular soon after it started cutting records for Victor, as did Tommy Dorsey’s Clambake Seven, which was launched the following year. It was Helen Oakley, a jazz-loving young publicist whose idea it had been for Goodman and Wilson to appear together, who suggested that Ellington do the same thing after she went to work for Mills (to whom Ellington had recommended her) in 1936.

In December Rex Stewart and His 52nd Street Stompers cut their first records for Variety, followed three days later by Barney Bigard and His Jazzopators. Johnny Hodges and Cootie Williams soon followed suit. “Nothing was ever planned, nor even dreamed up,” said Oakley, who produced many of these dates. “Duke would seat himself at the piano, confident and relaxed. . . . These sessions would grow like Topsy till in the early hours, suddenly time was up.” Cootie Williams, however, remembered it differently, explaining that “most of the small group recordings were rehearsed beforehand and not made up in the studio.” In addition to playing piano at the sessions, Ellington sketched out arrangements and turned some of his sidemen’s riffs into “tunes” for which he shared credit.
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He also laid claim to a sizable chunk of the royalties, which Oakley thought fair enough:

On these small band originals, if it were not for Duke’s ability to size up potential and shape sounds, many would have amounted to little. . . . This was understood, and the instrumentalists who were most often able to come up with an original concept for a memorable eight bars accepted as a matter of course a joint credit. It became an issue only in the event a hit was developed, and the primary composer came to consider he was due a greater share of the proceeds.

One such hit was Juan Tizol’s “Caravan,” which was recorded at Bigard’s first session, then remade by the full band after the small-group version became a surprise success. The original label of Bigard’s recording of “Caravan” gave Tizol sole credit for the minor-key tune, but he sold his interest in the song to Irving Mills for $25, after which it was credited to “Mills-Ellington-Tizol.” According to the trombonist, he wrote the main strain and Ellington the bridge (which is, like so many of his bridges for other men’s melodies, functional to the point of forgettability). Ellington also wrote the arrangement, in which Tizol’s sinuous theme is supported by a two-to-the-bar bass line that swings, pendulum-like, between dissonance and consonance. For the full-band version he added strangely tilted treble piano chords and the exotic-sounding tom-tom obbligato by Sonny Greer that helped to make “Caravan” one of the band’s most enduringly popular numbers.

Studio-only combo performances were a regular part of Ellington’s recording program for the next five years. The results were uneven, in part because Mills often required Ellington’s men to record “doggy tunes” (Oakley’s phrase) that he published, nearly all of which were sung by then-obscure female vocalists about whom little is known today. But the best of these sides are classics of small-group jazz, and they are all the more treasurable for giving Ellington’s principal soloists a chance to hold forth at greater-than-usual length in casually structured settings that also allow Greer’s drumming to be heard with special clarity. Moreover, some of the later sides were nearly as popular as “Caravan,” and one of Hodges’s blues tunes, “Jeep’s Blues,” became a jukebox staple. “Corner after corner there were jukeboxes, and you could go forty blocks up Harlem and never stop hearing Johnny Hodges,” Oakley said.

As for Ellington, he used the series as a sketchbook in which he tried out new numbers that would sometimes, like “Caravan,” be turned into pieces for the full band. On occasion the transformation was radical: In 1938 Cootie Williams recorded “Have a Heart,” a bouncy swinger that was remade two weeks later as “Lost in Meditation,” a smooth-as-butter ballad feature for Lawrence Brown. Insofar as possible, Ellington tried never to let a good tune go to waste.

 • • • 

Listenable and profitable as the combo sides were, they were ancillary to Ellington’s long-term ambitions, one of which he confided to a reporter for
The
Chicago Defender
. He was, he said, working on an all-black musical: “The synopsis revolves around an unknown orchestra playing in a Georgia ‘gut-bucket’ with the typical hoi polloi. Then it moves with a complete simplicity of progression until this same orchestra ends in a Harlem hot spot surrounded by Broadway glamour. . . . Several movie producers are interested in the book.” Perhaps they were, but there is no reason to think that the show was (at least as yet) any less a figment of his imagination than the
African Suite
with which he had been teasing reporters since 1930. Of more immediate interest was his upcoming debut at the newly reopened Cotton Club, which had relocated to the Times Square area. Little had changed save for its address. The club still specialized in slick all-black floor shows (“50 SEPIAN STARS—50 COPPER COLORED GALS”) custom-made for the delectation of white audiences, and though the romance of a late-night voyage to Harlem was no longer part of the package, the Cotton Club remained a spot to which rich tourists and visiting celebrities who had heard little or no black jazz in person were ritualistically taken.

One of the latter was James Agate, the drama critic of the London
Times,
who was in town to review shows (and, like other gay white tourists who visited Harlem in the twenties and thirties, to indulge his taste for working-class sexual partners who were prepared to oblige him for a fee). Agate visited the club in May of 1937, two months after the Ellington band opened there, informing his readers that dinner and drinks for a party of three had cost him no less than five pounds, the approximate equivalent of $385 today. He was impressed, in a manner of speaking, by what he saw and heard:

This is the place to hear swing music as the negroes like it. What I personally think about it doesn’t matter; it stirs American audiences to frenzy. Duke Ellington conducts, presuming conducting is the word. A first-class cabaret follows. This takes place in a purplish penumbra, in which the dancers, naked except for diamond girdle and breastplate, are a twilit salmon-pink. They are extraordinarily attractive. . . . The waiters share the general frenzy; the very plates, as they are put before you, shimmy.

Paul Hindemith, a far more musically knowledgeable observer, went to the club around the same time and recorded his reactions in his diary. Hindemith was a devotee of jazz, ragtime, and American dance music but, like other European classical composers of his generation, knew them only from records and sheet music. Though he was hard to please, the Cotton Club did it: “There is not much besides a lot of scantily clad dark people tap dancing and singing, but it is all done with incredible verve. The orchestra played continuously for about three hours, the wildest I ever heard. . . . The whole thing was really a rhythmic and tonal orgy, done with remarkable virtuosity.” He went back the next night for more.

We can hear some of what Hindemith and Agate heard, for the Mutual Broadcasting System started airing live performances from the bandstand of the downtown Cotton Club early in 1937. An off-the-air recording made on March 18 survives, and many more such “air checks” would be made in the next few years. While the band played as well in the studio as it did in public, the surging, unpredictable vitality of its best broadcast recordings is revelatory. Artie Shaw, another Swing Era bandleader whose live broadcasts, like Ellington’s, are often more exciting than his studio sides, explained the phenomenon this way: “When you’re playing in a recording studio and you’ve got a very good take, the record’s three minutes and fifteen seconds, so up to three minutes it’s perfect, the last fifteen seconds you’re going to be very cautious. You don’t want to lose that. . . . You tended to play safe toward the end of a recording. Whereas in radio you didn’t care. You played what you wanted to. It was going to disappear anyway.” In addition, Ellington’s off-the-air recordings document the band’s improvisatory approach to his compositions. The 1938 broadcast of “Echoes of Harlem,” for instance, is much slower than the 1936 full-band studio version, and also contains a longer trumpet cadenza. The air checks, like the alternate takes of the studio recordings, also provide insights into Ellington’s composing process, as in the case of “Serenade to Sweden,” a 1939 piece out of which he chopped a full-chorus piano solo before taking it into the studio.

What they cannot show us is how the band
looked
on the stand, a matter over which Ellington fussed endlessly and expensively. He was as sensitive to the colors of the clothes he wore onstage (and the stage lighting that set them off) as he was to the instrumental colors that he drew from the members of his band. Rex Stewart recalled a 1944 show at New York’s Roxy Theatre that was disrupted when “dress rehearsal revealed that none of [their] five sets of uniforms fitted the color scheme of this particular presentation . . . a rush order provided [them] with a sixth outfit—and double prices.” All known still photos of the Ellington band taken in the thirties and forties were shot in black-and-white, but Stewart’s description of the “unforgettable, show-stopping ensemble” that Ellington wore one night at the downtown Cotton Club hints at what we are missing: “Duke made his dramatic entrance attired in a salmon-colored jacket and fawn-gray slacks and shoes. The shirt, I remember, was a tab-collared oyster shade and his tie some indefinable pastel between salmon and apricot. The audience cheered for at least two minutes.”

Beneath it all he wore a corset, a useful tool for a performer whose appetite for food was as gargantuan as his appetite for sex. One of Ellington’s nicknames was “Dumpy,” and Tricky Sam Nanton paid awestruck tribute to his capacity: “He’s a genius, all right, but Jesus, how he eats!” Some of his best-remembered quirks had to do with food, such as his practice of wrapping up a leftover chop in a handkerchief or napkin, then tucking it in one of his pockets after a meal. It was a habit he had acquired in his early days, when food, like money, was harder to come by. “After a while, you eat in self-defense,” he told Whitney Balliett. “You get so you hoard little pieces of food against the time when there isn’t going to be any.”

Fashion plate: Duke Ellington in his dressing room at New York’s Paramount Theatre, photographed in May 1946 by William Gottlieb. In the thirties, he traveled with five trunks of clothes plus a separate trunk for his shoes. Ellington’s hair, as always, has been meticulously straightened, a look that he never abandoned, even after it became unfashionable among younger blacks