Duke (4 page)

The cornetist Rex Stewart, who spent eleven years with Ellington, never forgot the experience of seeing the Ellington Effect in full flower at a rehearsal in the forties:

I recall one occasion when he’d jotted some notes for the saxophones (Toby [Otto] Hardwick, Harry Carney, Ben Webster, and Barney Bigard) and each was given a part, but there was nothing for Johnny Hodges. Duke had the saxes run the sequence down twice, while Johnny sat nonchalantly smoking. Then, Duke called to Hodges, “Hey, Rabbit, give me a long slow glissando against that progression. Yeah! That’s it!” Next he said to Cootie Williams, “Hey, Coots, you come in on the second bar, in a subtle manner growling softly like a hungry little lion cub that wants his dinner but can’t find his mother. Try that, okay?” Following that, he’d say, “Deacon,” (how Lawrence Brown hated that nickname) “you are cast in the role of the sun beating down on the scene. What kind of a sound do you feel that could be? You don’t know? Well, try a high B-flat in a felt hat, play it legato and sustain it for eight bars. Come on, let’s all hit this together,” and that’s the way things went—sometimes.

Not only was Ellington inspired by the sounds and styles of his musicians, but he plucked bits and pieces from their solos and wove them into his compositions. Some of his most popular songs were spun out of melodic fragments that he gleaned from his close listening on the bandstand each night. “He could hear a guy play something and take a pencil and scribble a little thing,” the pianist Jimmy Rowles said. “The next night there would be an arrangement of that thing the guy played. And nobody knew where it came from.” This symbiotic relationship was important to Ellington’s success as a popular songwriter, since his prodigal gifts did not include the lucrative ability to casually toss off easily hummable tunes. He had to work at it, and sometimes he needed a little help. “More than once,” Rex Stewart recalled, “a lick which started out as a rhythmic background for a solo or a response to another lick eventually became a hit record, once Duke’s fertile imagination took over and provided the proper framework.” He took it for granted that such joint creations were his sole property, but if payment was unavoidable, he tried when possible to dole out modest flat fees rather than share with his musicians the publishing rights to (and royalties from) the pieces that he based on their “licks.” It was as much a matter of vanity as money, for Ellington preferred for the public to think that he did it all by himself. “It wasn’t
our
thing any longer,” Hardwick said when he returned to the band in 1932 after a four-year absence. “It had become Ellington’s alone. . . . Ten years ago it was ‘
We
do it this way,’ and ‘
We
wrote that.’ Now the we was
royal
.”

Could he have composed in a more traditional manner? Undoubtedly, if he’d applied himself to learning how to do so—and
Black, Brown and Beige
might well have been architecturally stronger had he tried. But Ellington knew little of the symphonic literature when he wrote
Black, Brown and Beige
, nor was he inclined to press his talent into other men’s molds, instructive though the experience might have been. He insisted that
Black, Brown and Beige
was not an attempt to write a “jazz symphony”: “To attempt to elevate the status of the jazz musician by forcing the level of his best work into comparisons with classical music is to deny him his rightful share of originality. . . . Ninety-nine per cent of the jazz people aren’t interested in symphony techniques at all.” In his case this was almost certainly true, though it fails to explain why he felt the need to write a forty-five-minute piece and perform it in Carnegie Hall, or to devote much of the second half of his career to composing a long series of jazz suites and other extended works, some scored for symphony orchestra (albeit by other hands). Most of the critics found them pretentious, but Ellington continued to turn out suites on a near-annual basis, and his unshakable devotion to the form caused some cynics to wonder whether he was trying to impress the classical musicians whose techniques he disdained.

If that was what he hoped to do, then he had little choice but to do it his way. Ellington’s unorthodox methods evolved bit by bit and year by year, and by the time that he discovered their limitations, he had traveled too far down his own road to change course without a struggle. It was well within his power to familiarize himself with the structural techniques of the great classical composers, to learn how to write for string sections instead of hiring orchestrators, even to figure out how to write songs that drove the plot of a musical comedy rather than sounding as though they’d been written without prior knowledge of the script. (It was one of his biggest disappointments that he never succeeded in bringing a hit show to Broadway.) But accomplishing any of these goals would have taken more time than he cared to spare, and to do so he would have had to dismantle, either temporarily or permanently, the jury-rigged system that allowed him to keep his handpicked band on the road all the year round, playing his music as soon as he wrote it and pleasing paying audiences throughout the world.

So he chose to keep on being Duke Ellington, racing from town to town and sleeping with woman after woman, shoveling his songwriting royalties into the till in order to pay his expensive gentlemen salaries big enough to keep them riding on the band bus, cranking out shapeless suites whose inspiration varied widely, even randomly, from movement to movement, and passing the work of others off as his own. And—always—being a genius, a titan of modern music who to the end of his life could conjure high art out of thin air.

 • • • 

Though he carried himself like a prince of the realm, he was the son of a butler and the grandson of a slave. Washington, where Edward Kennedy Ellington was born in 1899, was one of America’s most segregated cities, but it also had a black middle class that was proud and self-aware. Ellington’s parents belonged to it, and their only son, a high school dropout whose regal demeanor belied his poor grades and seeming lack of interest in music, went out of his way to acquire its manners. For all his polish, it was his artistry, not his personality, that was the source of his enduring appeal. But it was the personality that made white people who might not otherwise have done so give him a second glance, and in time it opened doors of opportunity through which few other blacks had been allowed to pass.

Ellington’s surface qualities were exploited to the hilt by Irving Mills. “We wanted Duke to be recognized as someone more important,” Mills told an interviewer in 1984. By this he meant that the best way to position his client in a market full of talented black bandleaders was to present him to the world as a different kind of black man, fine-spoken and expensively tailored, a fellow whom broad-minded white folks could imagine introducing to their friends, even if they might not care to bring him home to meet their wives. Accordingly, Mills’s advertising manual stressed Ellington’s presentability as much as his talent: “He is as genial as he is intelligent, always creates a good impression upon newspaper people with whom he comes in contact and invariably supplies them with good copy for their stories.” Ellington himself was happy to play the game, for he saw his public image as a contribution to the welfare of his people. “Every time you walk out [on] the street and you’re exposed to a white citizen, you know,” he said, “you’re acting in behalf of the race.” That was why he never let his guard down: He knew that there would always be somebody looking.

A different kind of black man: With Rex Stewart and the band, Philadelphia, 1939. Ellington’s immaculately polished onstage appearance was one of countless manifestations of his lifelong resolve to “act in behalf of the race”

Over time Mills’s strategy paid off beyond either man’s wildest dreams. Long before Ellington died in 1974, he had become, after Louis Armstrong, jazz’s biggest celebrity, as well as the first jazz musician to be widely hailed as an artist of consequence—and not just by his fellow jazzmen, but also by such distinguished classical musicians as Constant Lambert, Aaron Copland, and Percy Grainger. Their praise gave his work a cultural legitimacy at which no posterity-conscious black artist would have been inclined to turn up his nose. Yet he was, like Armstrong, a popular entertainer whose music was meant to please a mass audience. Long before the Swing Era, his band was seen in films and heard on network radio, and long after most of the other bandleaders who followed him into the limelight faded into obscurity, Ellington continued to perform on network TV and girdle the globe, playing “Sophisticated Lady,” “Mood Indigo,” “Solitude,” “I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart,” and the other hits that had made him famous (if never rich). Twelve thousand people came to his funeral at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York City, his adopted hometown and the place that he loved best. By then his baggy eyes and sardonic flattery were almost as familiar to the mourners as his music.

Underneath his soigné exterior, Ellington was a self-centered hedonist who lived a nomadic existence in which everything was subordinated to his art—and, insofar as possible, his pleasure. John Houseman, who worked with him on
Beggar’s Holiday,
his first Broadway show, was fascinated by his way of life, though he mistook it for passivity:

At the time I worked with him the Duke had abandoned all attempts to organize his own life. Between late-night engagements with his band, concerts, recordings, interviews, composing and other activities he had turned over the scheduling of his days and nights to his wife, his manager and other associates. They woke him up when it was time, fed him, laid out the right clothes for him, transported and delivered him on time for whatever engagement he was committed to, picked him up, changed his clothes, delivered him once more, fed him again and finally put him to bed. In this way, he explained, by ceasing to concern himself with time and space, he was able to preserve his energy and his sanity.

What Houseman did not see was that Ellington sought to exert the maximum possible amount of control over everyone in his life—by stealth. “What you need to do is wake up after two o’clock, make phone calls, but don’t move an inch,” he told Mercer Ellington. “Just lie flat on your back and phone, and tell everybody everything that has to be done, and lay all your plans without going out anywhere. . . . When you come downstairs you’ll have prepared your day, and you’ll be The Greatest!” After he died, Mercer found a handwritten note among his father’s papers in which Ellington summed himself up in three lapidary sentences: “No problem. I’m easy to please. I just want to have everybody in the palm of my hand.”

His selfishness was unswerving, though it did not exclude benevolence, if only on his own terms. “Ellington is the most complex and paradoxical individual that I’ve ever known . . . a combination of Sir Galahad, Scrooge, Don Quixote, and God knows what other saints and sinners that were apt to pop out of his ever-changing personality,” said Rex Stewart. He was at once deeply (if superstitiously) religious and a tireless philanderer who, in the words of an admiring friend, had the sexual appetite of “a romping, stomping alley cat.” He pretended to be a devoted family man for the benefit of the ever-vigilant press, he deserted Edna, his first and only wife, later settling into a long-term relationship with a Cotton Club showgirl whom he chose not to marry (he never divorced Edna) and on whom he cheated as often as he liked.

He was careful to keep his love life out of the papers, just as he tried never to show his vulnerability to anyone who might take advantage of it—but vulnerable he was, and would always be. While he believed that his music was (to use the phrase with which he described his favorite artists) “beyond category,” he was painfully conscious of the racial slights that beset him throughout his life, even after he became a star. He was enraged when he learned that he had been passed over for a Pulitzer Prize in 1965. “That night I saw him, he was furious, he was so angry,” Nat Hentoff recalled. “He said, ‘That’s another example of what it’s like to be black. They think European music, classical music is the only criterion for art.’” It says much about Ellington that though he knew better than to take to heart the opinion of a board of musically uninformed newspapermen, he still longed for a Pulitzer, the ultimate token of establishment approval, and was devastated when he failed to get it.

None of it showed. The rage, the humiliation, the unbridled sensuality: All were kept far from prying eyes. His fans saw only what he wished them to see, and nothing more. So did his colleagues. “I think all the musicians should get together one certain day and get down on their knees and thank Duke,” said Miles Davis. Yet to Ellington’s own musicians, he was a riddle without an answer, an unknowable man who hid behind a high wall of ornate utterances and flowery compliments that grew higher as he grew older. And while most of his sidemen admired his artistry without reservation, many of them also believed him to be unscrupulous and manipulative. On occasion one of them would chafe at his high-handedness and give notice. Even Johnny Hodges and Billy Strayhorn, the band’s two seemingly indispensable members, lost patience with him in the fifties and chose to wander for a time in the wilderness. But the wanderers (Hodges and Strayhorn included) usually returned to the fold sooner or later, knowing that the preternaturally sensitive settings that he created for his players made them sound better than they could ever have dreamed of sounding on their own. They were stuck with him and he with them, no matter how badly they behaved—and a few of them behaved badly enough to land in jail.