Duke (51 page)

Ellington knew what was happening to the band—and to himself. “It’s tough to have to compete with yourself,” he told Ralph Gleason in July. “I’m not old enough to be historical, and I’m too young to be biographical. . . . To think that 25 years ago I had the good taste to select Bigard, Tizol, Braud, Carney, and the rest! But today I’m just a young bandleader starting out again.” More than ever before, he acknowledged his despair to friendly journalists like Gleason and George T. Simon: “It’s getting to be more a business than an art, isn’t it? ‘Dance music’ is now little more than what we have always called the ‘business man’s bounce.’ We’re getting instructions on how to play for dances from heads of college prom committees. They like medium dance tempos . . . not too loud.” Unable to lift himself out of the doldrums, he settled for one-nighters, mediocre recordings, and sporadic TV appearances. A month after bemoaning his fate to Gleason, he was the mystery guest on
What’s My Line?,
a CBS game show whose blindfolded panelists sought to guess the contestants’ occupations. With his conk glistening under the hot stage lights, he dodged their questions in a breathy, outrageously phony voice, doing his best to look as though he were having fun. (Arlene Francis: “Would you consider yourself an actor?” Ellington: “I have been mistaken for an actor, yes.”)

He sought attention where he could get it, at one point stooping to publish an article in
Ebony
called “Sex Is No Sin” in which he assured his readers that “pure, clean and wholesome sex” was one of God’s finest inventions:

I want to tell you what I think the sex act is. I think it is like a lovely piece of music, conceived quietly in a background of mutual affection and understanding, made possible by instincts which lean toward each other as naturally as the sunflower slowly turning its lovely face to the sun. I think it is an aria of the sex symphony; an aria which begins beautifully certain of its rightness, moves with that certainty to a distinct tempo of feeling, sings itself happily, steadily, working, working, to a screaming, bursting climax of indescribable beauty and rapture and then throbs, spent and grateful in a re-dedication for the next movement of its perfection.

To his fellow musicians he remained a giant, and the younger generation held him in the same regard as did his contemporaries.
Thelonious Monk Plays the Music of Duke Ellington,
a 1955 album devoted to the avant-garde pianist’s splintery, not-quite-clumsy recastings of such familiar songs as “Mood Indigo” and “Sophisticated Lady,” showed how well the boppers appreciated Ellington’s innovations, just as his own “New Piano Roll Blues,” recorded with Max Roach in 1950, had shown how his angular dissonances prefigured those of Monk. Ray Nance remembered playing a Monk record for him one day in 1948: “Duke was passing by in the corridor, and he stopped and asked, ‘Who’s that playing?’ I told him. ‘Sounds like he’s stealing some of my stuff,’ he said. So he sat down and listened to my records, and he was very interested. He understood what Monk was doing.”
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The public, however, had lost interest in Ellington, and so had the critics. He didn’t even place in
Down Beat
’s 1955 critics’ poll, whose big-band category was led by Count Basie. The two great survivors of the Swing Era, long the friendliest of rivals, had dealt with changing musical times in totally different ways. Unable to rely on the steady stream of songwriting royalties that made it possible for Ellington to meet his payroll, Basie coped by briefly touring with an eight-piece combo, then launching under Norman Granz’s auspices a reorganized “New Testament” band that specialized in blues-based arrangements by Neal Hefti and Ernie Wilkins whose streamlined, danceable simplicity was as suited to the optimism of the Age of Eisenhower as was the devil-may-care insouciance of Frank Sinatra’s postwar singing style. Ellington’s records, by contrast, were selling worse than ever, and a look at the list of songs that topped the
Billboard
singles chart in 1955 shows that the caravan of mass taste had left him far behind. The pop tunes that Americans favored in 1955 included “The Ballad of Davy Crockett,” “Cherry Pink (and Apple Blossom White),” “Mr. Sandman,” “Rock Around the Clock,” “Sixteen Tons,” and “The Yellow Rose of Texas.”

Capitol dropped him in May, and in June he was reduced to playing a two-month stint at Elliott Murphy’s Aquacade in Flushing Meadows, accompanying an ice show whose tinselly background music required him to add a string section and a harp to his regular lineup. Ellington actually relinquished the piano bench to an anonymous performer hired by the contractor, playing only on his greatest-hits medley. It was, Mercer said, the low point of his career: “It looked like he might not be able to continue to help other people, relatives and friends, as he had throughout his life. He had some glorious moments during these hard times and he was successful artistically, but it wasn’t bringing in much coin of the realm.”

A year later he was the best-known bandleader in the world.

14

“I WAS BORN IN 1956”

Crescendo in Blue, 1955–1960

D
UKE ELLINGTON’S SECOND
ascent to the pinnacle of fame began when, shortly after the Aquacade gig, Johnny Hodges disbanded his now-struggling combo and returned to the fold. Four years on the road had left the master saxophonist weary of the chicken-today-feathers-tomorrow life of a second-tier bandleader: “I had to scuffle, and when you scuffle you can’t play what you like, but when you are famous and popular you can. . . . It was a whole lot of work but it was a whole lot of headache too.” So Norman Granz devised a face-saving deal under which Hodges would be allowed to make solo albums for Clef, the promoter’s own record label, without first obtaining Ellington’s approval. With his usual shrewdness, Granz also stipulated that in return for allowing Hodges to record with Ellington, the band would agree to cut an album for Clef—two if Ella Fitzgerald, another Granz artist, were to take part. The concession, which Ellington probably assumed would turn out to be purely hypothetical, seemed a modest enough price to pay, and Hodges rejoined the band in August, once more becoming its most prominently featured and highly paid member. Not only was his greatness as an improviser undiminished, but his presence in the ensemble restored to Ellington’s musical palette a color without which the band had not sounded the same. In addition the reed section became stable again after his return, and it stayed that way: Hodges, Harry Carney, Paul Gonsalves, Jimmy Hamilton, and Russell Procope played alongside one another for the next thirteen years.

Around the time that Hodges resumed his chair, Ellington found a drummer capable of filling Louis Bellson’s shoes. Sam Woodyard, born in New Jersey in 1925, was a self-taught player without any big-band experience—he had been working in a trio led by the jazz organist Milt Buckner—and at first glance he seemed an unlikely successor to the impeccably trained Bellson. Woodyard, who could not read music, later admitted to having been “scared” about the prospect of working with a band known for its complicated charts. But Ellington liked rough diamonds, and his playing was forthright in a way that meshed well with the recent arrival of rock and roll. Like Bellson, he had a relaxed and agreeable personality, and Ellington guided him through the repertoire with verbal rhapsodies that made his musical desires explicit: “Play four bars introduction, Sam, sixteen bars of exoticity, and then swing the bridge.” Whenever he wanted Woodyard to get funky, he asked the drummer to “get in the alley” or “put the pots and pans on,” a reminder of how he looked to his men to supply the down-home feel that had never come naturally to him. While Woodyard emulated his predecessor by playing “Skin Deep” and switching to a double-bass-drum kit, Ellington esteemed him in his own right for his ability to swing hard without swamping the rest of the band: “No crash bang, never overpoweringly loud, volume just where it should be—in there.” He also worked well with the bassist Jimmy Woode, who had joined the band early in 1955. The two men became a superb rhythm team whose sympathetic interaction inspired Ellington, who in turn responded with some of the best piano playing of his middle years.

Ellington brought the band into New York’s Café Society in January. Nat Hentoff took immediate note in
Down Beat,
proclaiming “the end of the recent slump in the Ellington orchestra,” crediting Hodges and Woodyard with the renascence and describing the new ensemble as “the most under-rated band in the country.” More important,
Time
covered the drummer’s arrival in an unsigned review of the Café Society engagement that declared the band to be “practically reborn,” thanks mainly to Woodyard: “When the band appeared bored with a number, he seemed to get under and shove—and the band came alive.” The only thing still missing was Billy Strayhorn, and Ellington was determined to lure him back as well.

Strayhorn showed up at Café Society for the band’s opening night. “I talked to Edward,” he told the friend who accompanied him there. “He would like me to be more engaged again. He asked me what sort of project I would like to do.” Later that evening Ellington introduced him to Irving Townsend, a producer at Columbia Records, and proceeded to ladle the syrup of flattery all over his amused protégé: “Mr. Townsend, you’re so fortunate to have come tonight because you have the pleasure of meeting the wonderful man I told you so much about, Mr. Strayhorn. Mr. Strayhorn has many wonderful, wonderful ideas for recordings, and if Mr. Strayhorn has an idea, it must be truly wonderful.” Prompted by George Avakian, Townsend suggested that the band team up with Rosemary Clooney, then one of America’s most successful pop singers, who was far more musically accomplished than was generally realized. In 1955 she was known for her hit records of brainless dialect songs like “Come on-a My House” and “Mambo Italiano,” none of which she chose—Mitch Miller, her producer, was the guilty party—and all of which she hated. Avakian longed to make a high-class album with her, and the result was
Blue Rose,
a fabulously well-sung collection of tunes written by Ellington and Strayhorn but arranged by Strayhorn alone (though the two men shared credit for the charts). One instrumental, “Passion Flower,” a feature for Hodges, was also included. According to Clooney, “Having ‘Passion Flower’ on there was sort of a wink, an inside thing to those in the know that this was basically Billy’s record.”

In February the band, which was still without a recording contract, cut a pair of albums for Bethlehem, a small jazz label, called
Historically Speaking—the Duke
and
Duke Ellington Presents . . .
The first one was devoted in part to new performances of old pieces, some of them indifferent (the French jazz critic André Hodeir dismissed the remake of “Ko-Ko,” played much faster than the 1940 studio recording, as “a hideous copy which makes a mockery of [Ellington’s] own masterpiece”) and others remarkable (Ray Nance’s plunger solo on “East St. Louis Toodle-O” is as ear-catching as that of Bubber Miley thirty years earlier). Also included was “Upper Manhattan Medical Group,” a harmonically adventurous new piece by Strayhorn that was, once again, credited to Ellington on the record label. Though the second album, which consisted mainly of standards, was less interesting, it helped persuade listeners who had yet to hear the band live that the press was not overstating the effects of the hiring of Woodyard and the return of Hodges and Strayhorn.

What Ellington now needed was a medium-size publicity coup, one that, like the Great James Robbery, was big enough to prove that his expensive gentlemen were earning their salaries again. Instead he got the break of a lifetime—and came heart-stoppingly close to blowing it.

 • • • 

The first Newport Jazz Festival, which took place in 1954, was a two-day-long outdoor jazz festival held in an enclave of inherited wealth, most of whose residents knew roughly as much about jazz as they did about black people, and underwritten by a pair of socialites who knew plenty about jazz and were willing to put their money where their taste was. It was also a rip-roaring success that drew thousands of paying customers, most of them anything but rich, who flocked from far and wide to hear Ella Fitzgerald, Erroll Garner, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, Gene Krupa, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Gerry Mulligan, and George Shearing. By the time that George Wein, a Boston nightclub owner whom Elaine and Louis Lorillard had hired to produce the festival, was making ready to return to Rhode Island for the third summer in a row, he was in no mood to waste time on a relic like Duke Ellington.