Duke (39 page)

No less unique was the way in which Ellington blended those timbres, a method known as “cross-section voicing.” Most Swing-Era arrangers kept the sections of the band separate, playing them off against one another in the call-and-response patterns that Fletcher Henderson (and, later, Benny Goodman) turned into a trademark of the period. Not Ellington, who habitually mixed the sections of his band together and voiced each individual section in ways that were no less unorthodox. Russell Procope, who joined the reed section in 1946, explained his voicing techniques as follows:

We don’t have a first saxophone player, or second saxophone player, or third saxophone player. We have things where anybody might be playing the lead. . . . Sometimes you have clarinet on top. Johnny Hodges plays quite a bit of lead, and there are some arrangements where he plays lead in the first half and I do in the second half. This is just one of the things that give variety. The people sitting there listening can’t put their finger on it, don’t realize exactly what’s going on, but they hear the difference.

All this notwithstanding, purely musical analysis alone cannot explain the Ellington sound, since the inspirations for so many of his compositions were extramusical. What he said about these latter pieces, of course, can never be taken at face value. Many of his best-known song titles, like “Harlem Air-Shaft,” were later shown to have been concocted after the fact, just as more than a few of his explanations of what a given piece was “about” were meant to tickle the fancies of musically uneducated listeners. Such was surely the case with the impromptu fable that he spun about “Mood Indigo”: “It’s just a little story about a little girl and a little boy. They’re about eight and the little girl loves the little boy. They never speak of it, of course, but she just likes the way he wears his hat. Every day he comes by her house at a certain time and she sits in her window and waits. . . . Then one day he doesn’t come.”

At the same time, though, it is wrong to suppose that he was cynical about these exegeses. He resorted to verbal description so often, and his descriptions were so pictorially specific, that it is safe to assume that he responded on a visceral level to such narratives, in much the same way that he converted visual images into music. He claimed, for instance, to have been inspired by the sight of the steel furnaces in Ohio and Indiana: “I think of music sometimes in terms of color, and I like to see the flames licking yellow in the dark and then pulsing down to a kind of red glow.”
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And the emotions that were triggered in him by his memories of nonmusical sounds were just as likely to find their way into his scores. “The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician,” he said in 1946. “Things like the old folks singing in the moonlight in the back yard on a hot night, or something someone said long ago.”

In the end, there can be no “explanation” of what happened to Ellington in 1940. The change in his music was a change in the man, and he was always reluctant to talk about such things, even to his closest friends. He was stimulated by Blanton and Webster, just as he was stimulated by his decision to break with Irving Mills and by the arrival in his life of Evie Ellis, but beyond that there is little to be said save for mere description. At the age of forty, he turned the key in the lock of youthful promise and attained true mastery of the composer’s art. How he did it was his secret.

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Throughout 1940 Ellington’s sidemen grew in stature alongside their leader, and Johnny Hodges was now universally recognized as one of the greatest of jazz saxophonists, an unquestioned peer of Coleman Hawkins, Benny Carter, and Lester Young. He continued to be featured prominently and regularly with the full band, most notably in “Warm Valley,” whose title, according to Rex Stewart, was an allusion to Ellington’s chief after-hours interest: “Once, we were riding a train to California and entered a succession of undulating, gently molded hills. When we reached a certain place, Duke remarked, “Look at that! Why, that’s a perfect replica of a female reclining in complete relaxation, so unashamedly exposing her warm valley.” Hodges also continued to make records with combos drawn from the Ellington band, and the dates that he led in 1940 and 1941, at which he cut Strayhorn’s “Day Dream” and “Passion Flower,” the ferociously swinging “Squaty Roo,” and a down-home blues with the wonderful title of “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be,” show him at the peak of his powers.

In any other band, Hodges would have been the undisputed star of the show, but the entire Ellington band was a murderer’s row of soloists, each of whom was determined to rise to the occasion in 1940, none more than Ben Webster. An enthusiastic and inspirational ensemble player, Webster hit the bull’s-eye whenever he stood up to solo, be it on a dreamy ballad like “All Too Soon” or a damn-the-torpedoes swinger like “Cotton Tail,” the hurtling variation on “I Got Rhythm” with which he would always be identified.
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Underneath it all Blanton, Ellington, Fred Guy, and the consistently underrated Sonny Greer churned away, supplying the propulsive rhythmic impetus that turned every up-tempo tune into a stampede.

The only members of the Blanton-Webster band whom the public did not view as stars in their own right were Fred Guy, Otto Hardwick, Wallace Jones, and Herb Jeffries, Ellington’s new male singer. While Jeffries had worked with Earl Hines, it was his brief film career that was his main claim to fame when he joined Ellington. On tour with Hines in the Deep South, he saw “hundreds of tin-roofed theaters, segregated for blacks only. They played white cowboy pictures because there were no black cowboys in the movies. . . . I felt that we could do better, that we could provide heroes for youngsters.” When he came to Los Angeles, he seized the opportunity to star in a series of all-black singing westerns in the style of the “horse operas” of Gene Autry. The first, released in 1938, was
Harlem on the Prairie,
billed as “A Gene Autry Epic Under Cork,” followed by three sequels, one of which,
The Bronze Buckaroo,
gave Jeffries his nickname. Today these films, which were shot on the lowest of budgets, look laughably inept, but in the late thirties they were more than popular enough with black audiences to make him a decent catch for Ellington. As yet unformed as a vocalist, he found his niche when Ellington and Strayhorn heard him imitate Bing Crosby one day. “That’s it! Don’t go any further. Just stay on Bing,” they told him, and he developed into a “black Crosby” whose croony singing pleased his boss but sat somewhat uncomfortably alongside Ivie Anderson’s tart style.

The Ellington band was now so cohesive a performing unit that it even managed to survive the loss of one of its most illustrious veterans. In November Cootie Williams went to work for Benny Goodman, performing with the Goodman sextet and playing featured solos with the full band. As Williams remembered it, Ellington took the news calmly, telling him, “Well, go ahead on. You’ve got a chance to make some money. And make a name for yourself.” He even negotiated Williams’s contract with Goodman, getting the trumpeter $200 a week (a whopping $168,000 a year in today’s dollars). It was whispered among Ellington’s sidemen, however, that Williams decided to leave the band when he asked for and failed to get a raise. According to Rex Stewart, “All white musicians in name bands earned more than we did and Cootie would move into the white pay schedule with Benny Goodman. Nevertheless, I especially prayed that Coots and Duke would come to terms, especially as we had heard that the amount involved was only 25 dollars a week.”
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Williams remembered it differently. “Duke knew about it, and helped set everything up,” he later said. “He got me more money, and I told him I’d be back in one year’s time. . . . If Duke didn’t want it to be known like it was, it wasn’t my place to tell. But that Goodman band—I loved it. It had a beat and there was something there that I wanted to play with.” In addition, the orderly Williams had grown tired of his colleagues’ lack of discipline. Sonny Greer, he said, would “get drunk and fall off the drums and things like that. That was no good for me.” And he admired Goodman for the lack of racial prejudice that led him to hire Lionel Hampton, Teddy Wilson, and (later) Charlie Christian, making him the first white leader of a racially integrated big band: “He’s just Goodman, not one way with this man and another way with someone else. The same with everyone. I think I was happier in music the first year I was with him than I ever was.”

Whatever his reason, Williams’s decision flummoxed jazz fans everywhere. Not only was it still rare in 1940 for black instrumentalists to work with white groups, but Williams, who had been with Ellington for more than a decade, was seen as an indispensable cog in the band’s machinery, a supremely versatile artist who played plunger solos and gleaming lead-trumpet parts with interchangeable ease. Raymond Scott, the eccentrically innovative composer of “Powerhouse” and “Dinner Music for a Pack of Hungry Cannibals,” marked the occasion by recording a lament called “When Cootie Left the Duke,” while
Down Beat
reported that Williams “was almost in tears” on his last night with the band. But Ellington, distressed though he was by losing so valued an old hand, had no intention of being thrown off his stride. No sooner did Williams give his notice than Ellington found a replacement who, if he was not quite equal as a soloist to his predecessor, would bring something to the band that the sober-sided Williams never even tried to supply.

“Raymond? He has perfect taste.” That was how Ellington described Ray Nance, a classically trained musician who also sang, danced, and played the violin exceptionally well, having taken up the instrument at the age of nine. Born in Chicago in 1913, he played trumpet for Earl Hines and Horace Henderson before joining Ellington. A short, ebullient extrovert who loved to cut up onstage so much that he acquired the nickname “Floorshow,” Nance was something of a cross between Williams and Freddie Jenkins, a fine soloist who also knew the value of showmanship. Like Williams, he was not a growl player, but he soon mastered the skill, and he proved his worth as a soloist on the first recording of “Take the ‘A’ Train,” to which he contributed an incisive two-chorus solo (the first muted, the second open) that became an integral part of Ellington’s later performances of the song. The critics turned up their noses at Nance. Harry Lim dismissed him in
Down Beat
as “a kid that [
sic
] has a lot of showmanship . . . but who just doesn’t meet the standard required by a band of Duke’s calibre.” But the public loved him, so much so that his name soon began to be featured in newspaper ads alongside those of Hodges, Stewart, and whoever happened to be singing with the band. In time Nance fell victim to narcotics, and in his later years he was said to subsist on “a diet of heroin and whiskey.” But in 1940 he was still young, strong, and dedicated to his new boss, and Ellington used his multiple talents wisely and well, turning what could have been a disaster into an opportunity.

Part of the Blanton-Webster band, photographed by William Gottlieb. From left: Ray Nance, Wallace Jones, Sonny Greer, Rex Stewart, Harry Carney, Otto Hardwick, Ben Webster, and Barney Bigard. (Not pictured are Ivie Anderson, Lawrence Brown, Fred Guy, Johnny Hodges, Herb Jeffries, Tricky Sam Nanton, and Juan Tizol.) This incomparable ensemble inspired Duke Ellington to compose such miniature masterpieces as “Cotton Tail,” “Harlem Air-Shaft,” “Jack the Bear,” “Ko-Ko,” “Never No Lament,” and “Warm Valley”

Nance replaced Williams a few days before the band arrived in Fargo, North Dakota, to play a dance at the Crystal Ballroom. Jack Towers and Dick Burris, a pair of talented young engineers, received permission from Ellington to record the event on a portable disc cutter, and the result is the first fully representative document of what the Ellington band sounded like in live performance. Not only is the sheer forcefulness of the playing astonishing—Greer in particular sounds like a different drummer—but the lustrous sound is closely similar in quality to what Victor’s engineers were capturing in the studio. Also present was Daniel Halperin, a local fan who left behind this description of how Ellington’s men looked while getting ready to play a gig:

Slowly they drifted in. Wallace Jones smiling, Lawrence Brown sophisticated and mean, Rex Stewart blowing strange noises on his shining cornet as he walked toward his seat, Otto Hardwick adjusting the support strap round his neck, Fred Guy disdainful in a shy way. Just then Carney stood up, looked around him, began to tap his foot and suddenly, without any warning whatsoever, the orchestra burst into full cry. . . . I felt cheated by the records to which we had been listening for so many months. They were nothing like this.

Ellington’s men were notorious for playing poorly on the bandstand when they were tired or hungover or, as was often the case, simply didn’t give a damn on a particular evening. Their harassed leader, who once likened his job to “what the scientists do in a mental institution,” resigned himself to the inevitability of bad nights, knowing (as did his musicians) that they soon would be followed by good ones. “I live for the nights that this band is great,” he told a member who was mystified by its inconsistency. “I don’t worry about the nights like what you’re worrying about. If you pay attention to these people they will drive you crazy. They’re not going to drive me crazy.” Fortunately for posterity, the Blanton-Webster band was at its very best at Fargo, and the proof of its transcendent greatness was preserved for all time.