Duke (50 page)

Not only was Bellson, in Ellington’s words, “the epitome of perfection,” but he was cheerful and modest, with none of the go-to-hell attitude of his new colleagues. Moreover, he also composed and arranged, a rarity among drummers, and did so well enough that Ellington added two of his pieces, “The Hawk Talks” and “Skin Deep,” to the band’s working repertoire. Though Bellson was briefly stymied by the fact that Ellington never wrote out parts for his drummers to play, he had no trouble catching on to the routine: “Duke gave me full credit for knowing what to do in the rhythm section. He said, ‘I had Sonny Greer, and now I have Louis Bellson. I want to hear Louis Bellson.’”

The new men jolted the rest of the band into action, and by May, when Ellington opened at Birdland, one of New York’s most prestigious jazz clubs, the results were plain to hear. In Willie Smith’s words:

For some reason or other, the band decided to wake up and really play. Great as they are, it’s very seldom you can get all those guys to want to play together at one time. Some spark got into them and for six months the band was unbelievable. It had so much fire and determination—every set, no lulls, no letdowns. People used to get up in the middle of a number at Birdland and start yelling.

Jack Tracy heard the band in Chicago that month and described it in
Down Beat
as “a powerful, rocking, enthusiastic bunch of musicians who bore absolutely no relationship to the drab band that played a February concert here at the Civic Opera.” George Avakian didn’t need to be told twice to get them into the studio at the earliest possible opportunity.
Ellington Uptown,
the resulting album, contained high-spirited performances of
Harlem,
“The Mooche,” “Perdido,” “Skin Deep,” and an extended version of “Take the ‘A’ Train” that featured a barn-burning Paul Gonsalves solo and a hip vocal by the recently returned Betty Roché, all of which showed the world what the arrival of Bellson and his friends had wrought.

Not long after the Great James Robbery, Ellington hired another stalwart individualist, this one poached from Count Basie’s trumpet section. Born in St. Louis in 1920, Clark Terry was, unlike most of Ellington’s older players, conversant with the new musical language of bebop. As personally disciplined as he was musically inventive, he was a superlative addition to the roster, though Ellington did not always use him to optimum effect, in part because Terry was reluctant to co-compose with him. Understanding as he did the financial implications of splitting his publishing rights with bandleaders or selling tunes to them outright, he had no wish to cut Ellington in on his royalties. But Terry admired the man and his music unreservedly and remained on board until 1959, and throughout that time his witty solos and secure ensemble work were highlights of the band’s performances and recordings.

Ellington took another giant step in 1951 by signing with Joe Glaser’s Associated Booking Corporation. Glaser had parlayed his friendship with Louis Armstrong, his first and most loyal client, into a multimillion-dollar business that over the years represented such black music stars as Billie Holiday, Lionel Hampton, Dinah Washington, and B.B. King. A famously coarse man, he had the arm-twisting savvy necessary to secure the bookings that the Ellington band needed in order to stay afloat at a time when most of the rest of the surviving Swing Era bands were fighting for their lives. He and Ellington would never be friendly, and while Glaser spoke respectfully of his new client in public, calling him “a fine, high-class genius,” he had different things to say about Ellington behind closed doors. On one occasion, George Wein claimed, Glaser referred to him as “that crazy nigger Duke Ellington.” But he knew how to do what had to be done, and that was enough for Ellington. In addition to finding steady work for the band, he let Ellington draw frequent cash advances on his Associated Booking account—he even made regular payments to Evie Ellis at one point in the sixties—thus ensuring that the bandleader would stay in debt to the agency, whose close ties to the Chicago mob were universally known in the entertainment world. Ellington understood what it meant to owe money to a man who, like Glaser, had worked for Al Capone, and as long as he did, he would never stray far from Associated Booking.

The collective presence of Bellson, Smith, Terry, and Tizol was so energizing at first that Ellington’s fans paid little mind to the departure of Al Hibbler, who left in September of 1951 to go solo. But the gas finally ran out, and by 1952 the critics were once more taking disapproving note. “No one could convince me in a thousand years that any band could have an ‘off night’ to this extent,” Ted Hallock wrote in
Down Beat
after a March concert in Portland, Oregon. Charles Mingus took him to task, firing off a letter to the magazine in which he called the review “vicious and certainly unwarranted . . . Hallock must not realize that there are many factors that can cause even the greatest band to bog down
one
night.” In truth the band really was having an off night, as live recordings made before and after the Portland concert reveal. But Hallock was right about its overall condition, as Willie Smith, who was used to the spit-and-polish professionalism of the Lunceford band, would later admit:

After about six months, they went back to their old habits, and I went with them. . . . Cat Anderson would sometimes lean over and tap me on the shoulder when someone got up to take a three-or-four-chorus solo. “Let’s go back and have a drink,” he’d say. “No, we can’t do that,” I’d answer, from force of habit and training. “Don’t worry, we’ll be back in time,” he’d say.

The problem was aggravated by the band’s grueling schedule, which had become harder to tolerate now that chartered buses replaced the Pullman sleepers that had long spared the musicians some of the rigors of the road. Just as important, though, the postwar heroin epidemic had lately infected Ellington’s band, which now contained a contingent of addicts led by Paul Gonsalves and Ray Nance that came to be known to insiders as the “Air Force.” Gonsalves took to falling asleep on the bandstand, keeping his mouthpiece in place and puffing out his cheeks in a futile attempt to conceal his condition.

Ellington found their behavior mystifying. Once he stood with Ralph Gleason in the wings of a San Francisco theater and watched as two of his trumpet players nodded off in midsong. “I don’t understand it at all,” he told Gleason, shaking his head bemusedly. “I’m a cunt man myself.” Yet he refused to put his foot down, explaining that “you have certain responsibilities as a human being. You don’t help a man by taking away his chance to practice his trade. He’ll be better off with the band than on his own somewhere. And besides, why make his family suffer?” His concern was sincere, though his reluctance to fire any of the band’s addicts had at least as much to do with his own temperament. “I seldom have the urge or fortitude to be a disciplinarian,” he said. “Nor do I have the impudence to be rude, or the gall or brass to demand
order
.” The band’s playing suffered accordingly, so much so that Willie Smith, fed up with his laxness, quit not long after the Portland concert.

 • • • 

Ellington’s reputation had already taken a hard hit from an unexpected quarter. In November of 1951,
The
St. Louis Argus
published a story by Otis N. Thompson, a black reporter, which quoted him as saying that blacks in America “ain’t ready yet” for desegregation and that efforts to bring it about by way of legal action were a “silly thing . . . It’s something that nothing can be done about.” According to the story, he questioned “the ‘good it’s doing us’ to get one or two people in a few white schools or certain jobs.” His approach to solving the problem of segregation? “Get together one hundred million dollars and then we can do something.”

These statements are not so far removed from what Ellington really thought about America’s racial problems, but Thompson, whose story was picked up by other black newspapers around the country, had deliberately framed the bandleader’s opinions in so contentious a way that the ever-touchy black community blew its collective stack. The response was so heated that Ellington was forced to issue a statement that was reprinted in many of the papers that had carried the original story:

What has been published is the exact opposite of what I actually said. . . . I told Thompson that I thought fighting segregation was not a part-time proposition, but a full time one and that little could be accomplished by working spare time. . . . Now, obviously, people can’t be expected to work fulltime on race problems without compensation. But if each one of us contributed $1 apiece three times a year, in two years we’d have almost $100,000,000 and then be able to go out and do a real job.

It was the coolly detached view of a successful man who was worldly enough to know that in America, money talks loudest of all—and when it came to segregation, Ellington believed only in the power of widely shared financial success to ameliorate the sufferings of his people. When it came to other political matters, though, he kept a low profile, and lowered it still further after the
Daily Worker
falsely claimed that he had signed the Stockholm Peace Petition, a Communist-organized undertaking to outlaw nuclear war that was widely supported on the American left (W. E. B. DuBois signed it). He sent a sharply worded telegram to the paper at once and followed it up with an article called “No Red Songs for Me” that was published in
The New Leader,
a prominent liberal anti-Communist journal whose managing editor, Daniel James, was then married to Ruth Ellington. In it he roundly declared, “The only ‘Communism’ I know is that of Jesus Christ. I don’t know of any other.”

Preposterous as the controversy seems today, it was no more of a joke than Ellington’s having been accused of being an Uncle Tom by a prominent black newspaper. Though he didn’t know it, the FBI still kept tabs on his activities—an absurdity in and of itself, since he despised Communism and his Popular Front days were over and done with. “You know why he was anti-Communist?” Mercer told an oral-history interviewer. “Because he was so religious, and anything that downed religion had to be wrong. Aside from that, he liked the idea of one day becoming rich.” He also believed that jazz and freedom were consubstantial, so much so that he recorded public-service announcements on behalf of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, the government-sponsored shortwave stations that beamed his music to countries where it was a crime to listen to jazz: “When people behind the Iron Curtain tune to Radio Free Europe for a jazz program, they are getting two things at once: the music they want to hear and a little exercise in individual freedom.”
^*********

For all his increasingly frequent skirmishes with the press, Ellington was still a man apart, and in November of 1952
Down Beat
commemorated the silver jubilee of his Cotton Club debut with an issue containing pieces by Strayhorn, R. D. Darrell, Irving Mills, and Ned Williams, accompanied by shorter tributes from a list of show-business figures that included Milton Berle, Arthur Fiedler, Jackie Gleason, Lionel Hampton, Harry James, Gordon Jenkins, Sammy Kaye, Peggy Lee, Mitch Miller, Cole Porter, and Frank Sinatra. Even Johnnie Ray, the teen idol whose hyperemotional singing style was a precursor of rock and roll, had warm words to say about Ellington. He was grappling with the future, too, filming a series of studio performance films for Snader Telescriptions that are now remembered as among the first “music videos” to be made for TV. But his men remained adrift, and when Louis Bellson quit in mid-1953, Ellington’s disappointment was palpable: “It’s going to be awfully difficult replacing him . . . He helped hold the band together as a unit with his drive and power.”

A few weeks earlier, Ellington had switched labels again and signed with Capitol Records, whose other artists included Nat Cole, Stan Kenton, Peggy Lee, Les Paul, and Frank Sinatra. What possessed him to walk away from Columbia and George Avakian? “I signed with Capitol,” he said, “because this firm is doing an excellent job of presenting all of its artists, particularly as it concerns exploitation.” In show business, the word
exploitation
means “publicity,” and Ellington felt that Columbia’s in-house publicists were selling him short. He told Avakian, “They [i.e., Capitol] need me more than Columbia does, and I think I will be better off.” While he hated to see Ellington go, Avakian knew he was right. “Ellington’s sales were relatively modest,” the producer said. “They were profitable, we were delighted to keep him on from the dollars-and-cents point of view, but we didn’t need him.”

Capitol had never had much luck with swinging big bands—it was a singer-oriented company—and Ellington’s two-year association with the label produced only two truly noteworthy recordings. “Satin Doll,” recorded at the band’s first session in April of 1953, was a supple, swaying riff instrumental to which Johnny Mercer, Capitol’s co-founder, later appended a lyric (“Cigarette holder, / Which wigs me”) that helped to make the tune a standard, the last of Ellington’s songs to attain that status and thereby earn a place in the dreaded medley. Even better was
The Duke Plays Ellington,
a small-group album recorded in the same month on which Ellington, accompanied only by Wendell Marshall and Butch Ballard, the band’s then-current bassist and drummer, plays a dozen compositions by himself, Strayhorn, and Mercer Ellington, in the process demonstrating the richness of tone and fully developed harmonic originality of his modernized postwar keyboard style, which had grown both simpler and infinitely more compelling since his youthful days as a stride pianist.
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It was the first time that he had featured his own playing at such length on record—he had always been reluctant to show off at the piano—and it would not be the last.

Ellington cut several other listenable sides for Capitol, one of which, Strayhorn’s “Orson,” also recorded in April, is thought by some scholars to be the casus belli that led to a complete break between the two men. As was his custom, Ellington arbitrarily chopped nearly two minutes out of the piece and rearranged its balanced structure on the spot. According to Walter van de Leur, “Though Strayhorn’s [immediate] response . . . is not known, these sessions mark the beginning of an unprecedented two-and-a-half year period during which he contributed virtually no new material to the orchestra’s repertory.” From then on the Capitol sessions grew more desultory, yielding for the most part only remakes, uninteresting vocal sides, and novelties like “Bunny Hop Mambo.”