Duke (42 page)

Fortunately, several of the songs were recorded by the Ellington band, and one of the dance numbers, “Bli-Blip,” was commercially filmed after
Jump for Joy
closed, allowing us to see Marie Bryant and Paul White, her dance partner, in action. Their performance is delightful, as are Ivie Anderson’s 1941 recordings of “I Got It Bad (And That Ain’t Good)” and “Rocks in My Bed,” the only two songs from
Jump for Joy
that are still regularly performed today. Both are superior, and “I Got It Bad,” a poignant lament for lost love, would become one of Johnny Hodges’s best-remembered ballad features. Joe Turner also cut a no-nonsense combo-backed version of “Rocks in My Bed” for Decca that hints at what his stage performance may have been like, while a silent film shot by friends of the cast shows that the versions of some of the other songs that were recorded by Ellington for Victor match the stage action of the show closely.

What else can we learn from this cache of evidence, as well as the lyrics of the songs that went unrecorded? Except for “Bli-Blip,” “I Got It Bad,” and “Rocks in My Bed,” it appears that most of the vocal numbers were both musically lackluster and lyrically heavy-handed. The latter conclusion will surprise no one familiar with
The Cradle Will Rock
and
Pins and Needles
. For all Ellington’s determination to say everything he wanted to say “without saying it,” his collaborators were even more determined to pound home their antiracist message. On occasion the results are witty enough, as in “Sun-Tanned Tenth of the Nation,” the show’s opening number, which began with a rhyming prologue that was spoken from the pit by Ellington himself: “The punch that should be present in a colored show alas is / Disinfected with Magnolia and dripping with Molasses; / In other words: we’re shown to you thru Stephen Foster’s glasses.” Considerably less deft, however, is the title song, whose lyric celebrated the death of Uncle Tom: “All the hounds, I do believe, / Have been killed, ain’t you thrilled.” Worse still is the ham-fisted “I’ve Got a Passport from Georgia,” in which Paul White sang of his longing to flee the south for a place “where the signs read, ‘OUT TO LUNCH,’ not, ‘OUT TO LYNCH.’”

Such sentiments were very much to the point in 1941. “I’ve Got a Passport from Georgia” actually had to be cut from the show after White received threatening calls from people claiming to belong to the Ku Klux Klan. But good intentions and good art are not the same thing, and the incongruity in tone between Ellington’s swinging score and the sandwich-board oratory of his Popular Front collaborators may well have had something to do with the show’s failure to thrive. It didn’t help that so many different people were putting in oars. “We had too many chefs,” said Herb Jeffries. “I think at that time we had maybe seven different people who were financing the show . . . there was trouble and arguments.” Factor in Ellington’s reluctance to concentrate on the writing of the score and you have a recipe for turmoil.

Even those who loved the show understood that it was not all that it could have been. Norman Granz, who saw it
several times, offered what appears to be the most clear-eyed appraisal of what went wrong with
Jump for Joy:

It didn’t do very well at the beginning and so they brought Joe Turner in. So before Joe Turner, it was one Jump for Joy, and after it was another Jump for Joy. And I don’t know that Joe made all that much difference to the public, because inevitably the show did not work economically. . . . I would not have thought immediately that Jump for Joy made a social contribution. If you ask me about it now, I would say that it did. But I’m not so sure that it did have the impact that they had hoped that it might have initially, because the people that went to see the show already felt that way.

Ellington spoke proudly of
Jump for Joy
for the rest of his life, and he never stopped grieving over its failure to move to Broadway. “That killed me,” he told a friend. Five years later he took another run at the Great White Way, but once more he fumbled the ball, sabotaged yet again by his unwillingness to make the sacrifice of time and energy needed to turn a clever idea into a fully realized show. It would not be the last time that Daisy Ellington’s pampered son ran afoul of the gods of the copybook headings.

 • • • 

One good thing that Ellington got out of
Jump
for Joy
was the friendship of Orson Welles, who came to a performance with Dolores del Rio, his glamorous girlfriend of the moment, in tow. He sent a message backstage inviting Ellington to drop by his office at RKO the next morning to chat about making a film. Curious as to what the creator of
Citizen Kane
might have up his sleeve, Ellington showed up as requested and found himself in the presence of a human whirlwind. After offering to restage
Jump for Joy
and explaining in detail how he would have rewritten it, Welles changed the subject. “I want to do the history of jazz as a picture, and we’ll call it
It’s All True,
” he said. “I want it to be written by Duke Ellington and Orson Welles, directed by Duke Ellington and Orson Welles, music written by Duke Ellington. . . . You can start work today! You get $1,500 a week. Now there it is and if you don’t take it you’re a fool.”

Ellington succumbed on the spot, and the red carpet was rolled out: “A lot of research people were hired. I had fifteen million assistants, people of great significance in the literary field, and all that sort of thing. And Duke Ellington was the Number One everything in every department.” He had no idea that
It’s All True
was one of the biggest white elephants ever to charge through the streets of Hollywood, a multipart fictionalized quasidocumentary about whatever happened to interest Welles at the time. Since RKO’s executives had yet to figure out that the wonder boy of Hollywood was incapable of staying within a budget, they were willing to do whatever he wanted, and what he wanted at the moment was for Ellington to score a segment of
It’s All True
starring Louis Armstrong. Elliot Paul was working on a script based on
Swing That Music,
Armstrong’s autobiography. Once the press got wind of the possibility of an Armstrong-Ellington-Welles film, the great engine of publicity began to rumble, hiss, and spew out copy.

The two men soon forged a long-lasting mutual admiration society. Welles, in fact, is reported to have said that Ellington was the only genius he had ever known, save for himself. While this “quote” has the smell of press agentry, it is clear that each man spotted in the other a kindred spirit. Both were spoiled children who in adulthood took for granted that the rest of the world should and would accommodate their needs. Both had unlimited appetites for food and sex. Both knew how to spur their collaborators to unprecedented heights of inspiration—and would, if left to their own devices, take credit for everything those collaborators did. As well as being artists of the first rank, they were natural-born editors who were made to head up the kind of collective enterprise in which it is taken for granted that the job of the man at the top is to fuse the joint efforts of his underlings into a coherent whole, after which he “signs” the results himself. While the word
auteur
is not part of the vocabulary of jazz, it could just as easily have been coined to describe Duke Ellington as Orson Welles.

It’s hard to imagine how two such men could have successfully worked together, but their ability to do so was never put to the test. Welles was a man of violent but transient enthusiasms, and after he flew to Brazil in February to hurl himself into one of the other panels of
It’s All True,
an account of Rio de Janeiro’s annual carnival, “The Story of Jazz” was put on hold. Soon thereafter RKO figured out that Welles couldn’t be trusted with a checkbook, and Ellington’s employment was terminated: “I think I wrote 28 bars, a trumpet solo by Buddy Bolden which, of course, was to be a symbol of the jazz.
^{§§§§§§§}
It was very good, but Orson never heard it, and I can’t find it. I don’t know where it is. It was the only thing I ever wrote for the $12,500 I got.”

The demise of
It’s All True
and the closing of
Jump for Joy
were not the worst disappointments that Ellington suffered in 1941. Not long after
Jump for Joy
closed, tuberculosis finally felled Jimmie Blanton. Ellington “called doctor after doctor until [he] found out who the top people on TB were in Los Angeles,” then checked him into Los Angeles General Hospital. He was moved from there to a sanitarium near Pasadena, where the doctors decided that his case was hopeless. Jimmy Rowles recalled that the only decoration on the white walls of his tiny room was a picture of Ben Webster. The band left Los Angeles in December, leaving Blanton behind to await his fate. He was “replaced” by the talented Alvin “Junior” Raglin, a San Francisco–area bassist, but Blanton, as everyone knew, was irreplaceable.

Blanton died in July of 1942, by which time Herb Jeffries and Barney Bigard had also left the band. Bigard’s departure was particularly hard, for he had been with Ellington ever since the band had taken the Cotton Club by storm. The clarinetist still loved playing with Ellington, but he was tired of the demands of the road, which had grown still more demanding after Pearl Harbor:

Silly things like sleeping bad, eating bad, traveling in crowded trains, couldn’t get cabs when you needed them. . . . We used to have such bad accommodations on account they took the pullmans [i.e., the band’s private Pullman cars] away for the war effort. We traveled on the regular trains and it seemed like the whole country was on the move to someplace or another. The trains were always packed and jammed and lots of times we had to sit in the aisles.

Bigard was struck by the coolness with which his old colleague received his notice. “When I told him I was leaving he just looked at me and didn’t say a word,” he wrote in his autobiography. Nor did Ellington have much more to say to reporters who asked him how he felt. “‘He’s just leaving. That’s all,’ said Duke irritably, when asked for comment,”
Down Beat
reported. And the exodus was not yet complete: Ivie Anderson quit a month after Blanton’s death, going back to Los Angeles to run Ivie’s Chicken Shack, a restaurant that she had recently opened. The asthma from which Anderson had long suffered is usually given as the reason for her departure, though she said in a radio interview that she, too, was tired of the road, and Lawrence Brown heard that she quit when Ellington declined to give her a raise.

Life went on, just as it had when Cootie Williams defected to Benny Goodman’s band. Not even the coming of World War II, in which Ellington was too old to serve, wrought any immediate changes in his routine. But he was already demoralized by the fate of
Jump for Joy,
and he must have known that the near-simultaneous loss of Anderson, Bigard, and Blanton was an unsparing blow to the sonic identity of the ensemble that had spurred him to his greatest musical achievements. It makes sense that he was too upset by the loss of Bigard to want to talk about it. He knew that whatever triumphs the future held in store, Duke Ellington and His Famous Orchestra would never be again as they were.

12

“I DON’T WRITE JAZZ”

Carnegie Hall, 1942–1946

B
ARNEY BIGARD MADE
his last recordings with the Ellington band on June 26, 1942. He was replaced by Chauncey Haughton, a now-forgotten tenor saxophonist who doubled on clarinet and had worked with Cab Calloway and Chick Webb. It was the first time that Ellington accepted an inferior substitute for one of his prized soloists. Haughton’s hiring was a sign of the dilemma that his new boss was facing. If the music of the Blanton-Webster band is best understood as the culmination of Duke Ellington’s first twenty years of music-making, then he might have felt compelled to turn his back on its etched perfection. While he could have gone on writing flawless miniatures for as long as his inspiration held out, it was never his way to do the same thing over and over again. The failure of
Jump for Joy
, together with the fact that the instrument that he had so painstakingly assembled was starting to come apart, must have made him even less inclined to stick to his last. He would always crave new challenges, and now he embraced the biggest one of all, the challenge with which he had grappled with varying success for more than a decade: the problem of extended form.