Duke (53 page)

The event last month . . . confirmed a turning point in a career. The big news was something that the whole jazz world had long hoped to hear: the Ellington band was once again the most exciting thing in the business, Ellington himself had emerged from a long period of quiescence and was once again bursting with ideas and inspiration.

In 1956 a
Time
cover was the coup of coups. With the sole exception of
The Ed Sullivan Show,
on which the Ellington band had yet to appear, no TV program came remotely close to rivaling its impact. Thanks to the combined effect of Newport and
Time,
the travails of the past decade melted away. Three days after the festival, Ellington teamed up with the New Haven Symphony Orchestra to play
Harlem,
New World A-Coming,
and a colorful new full-orchestra work called
Night Creature
that would become a staple of his symphonic appearances. On July 10 he entered into his contract with Columbia, signaling the start of a nonstop parade of creativity, his first prolonged period of compositional inspiration since the late forties. Not only was he writing around the clock, but the band was playing with renewed vigor and unanimity—though listeners with long memories noticed that it didn’t always look as good as it sounded. When Ellington returned to England in 1958, this time with the full band in tow, his friend Leslie Diamond, who had heard the band on its first European tour, was puzzled by the lackadaisical appearance and behavior of his musicians. “At the Palladium in 1933, they were all in tails—now they come on in crumpled suits, stained and shabby,” he told Ellington. “Your instruments used to be all silver or all brass-gold. Now they’re mixed up—you take them from whoever gives them to you free. And this habit you’ve slipped into of letting the musicians drift on one by one—why?”

Part of the difference was that Irving Mills was no longer around to tend to such things, and part of it was Ellington’s continuing unwillingness to ride herd on his men, or on himself. No matter how late the musicians were for a recording session, their leader would always be the last to arrive, smilingly saying, “Am I late? Oh, dear. What time is it anyway?” It was his way of reminding the prima donnas in the band who was in charge. “I mean, he made it very clear . . . that there was only one indispensable person in that whole orchestra, and that was Duke,” said Norman Granz. “If nobody else showed up, well, that’s okay. I’m the one.”

Irving Townsend, who had succeeded George Avakian as Ellington’s producer at Columbia, was as fascinated by his quirks as any of his previous colleagues and put some of them down on paper. It was Townsend who noticed that he never wore a watch, and that he preferred to see his friends and family individually rather than in groups: “Rarely were even his closest friends gathered with him at the same time. Seldom have I seen his relatives together in one room.” He was even more careful to be unavailable after hours to the members of the band, staying when possible in a different hotel. Long experience had taught him that the best way to interact with friends, family, and colleagues was on the phone: “Ellington at ease was Ellington once removed . . . every now and then the phone would ring between six
P.M.
and six
A.M.
A dark, sleepy voice would say, ‘Good morning. Did I wake you? I’m so sorry. What time is it anyway? What’s happening?’” That was why he preferred the anonymity of hotels to the comfortable chokehold of domesticity: “The secret of Duke’s security was constant movement. . . . A thousand hotel rooms, a thousand room-service waiters ready to push his breakfast table in on cue, a thousand loyal friends waiting to handle any local problems he might have: these made up the Ellington menage.”

Above all, he kept his eye on the future rather than the past. Though he took care to pacify his older fans by trotting out the dreaded medley each night, he preferred to think about the next piece, not the last one, in part because, as he explained to Townsend, “My loot comes from publishing. We have to make new things.” But his dislike of the past went further than that, so much so that some thought it close to phobic. A few months before he turned sixty, Townsend and Arthur Logan, Ellington’s personal physician and intimate friend, decided to mark the occasion by “gathering up everything ever written by him, making clean copies of it, and presenting to Ellington a complete set of Ellington in bound volumes.” They enlisted Billy Strayhorn and the trombonist John Sanders, who doubled, like Tizol before him, as one of the band’s regular copyists, to do the dirty work of taking his tattered manuscripts and turning them into fine copies, then assembled the results into a leather-bound presentation set that Logan gave to the great man on the great day. Afterward Logan told Townsend that Ellington “made polite noises and kissed us all . . . but, you know, the son of a bitch didn’t even bother to take it home.”

Was it that he hated to be reminded that he was on the brink of old age? In later years Ellington answered questions about his age by saying, “I was born in 1956 at the Newport Festival.” Strayhorn, however, saw it more as a matter of artistic priorities: “He not only doesn’t live in the past. He rejects it, at least so far as his own past accomplishments are concerned. He hates talking about the old bands and the old pieces. He has to play some of the Ellington standards because otherwise the audiences would be disappointed. But he’d much rather play the new things.”

Ellington himself explained his attitude in terms of marketing:

My competitors in the band business are not playing across the street. My competitors are the Duke Ellingtons of the 1940s and 1930s. Everybody wants me to play the way I always did. Macy’s [has] been in business 50 years, but they’re not selling the same stuff they did in 1920.

He knew, too, that he needed help in order to keep the assembly line running smoothly. While he had worked off and on with a number of talented composers and arrangers in the preceding decade, among them Jimmy Hamilton, Luther Henderson, Mary Lou Williams, and Gerald Wilson, Billy Strayhorn was still (as Dizzy Gillespie once described Charlie Parker) the other half of his heartbeat.
Time
had mentioned the younger man only in passing, but its story was accompanied by a photo captioned “The Duke & Family: Mercer Ellington and wife Evelyn, Duke, his sister Ruth, Arranger Strayhorn.” That said it all: Strayhorn was part of the family, and Ellington would do whatever was needed in order to get him back. After the cover story came out, the two men sat down to dinner at the Hickory House, Ellington’s favorite steak place, to hash out their differences. “He’s seeing stars again,” Strayhorn told his friends afterward. “He’s been seeing stars now since Newport. . . . He wanted to know what I want to do.” Ellington agreed to give Strayhorn equal credit for everything that they wrote together. Then he raised his glass of hot water and proposed a toast: “To Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn—to their new incorporation.”

 • • • 

Ellington already had two big commissions on the horizon, a Shakespearean suite and a TV musical for CBS. Strayhorn was more interested in the first project and started composing music for it, but Ellington had promised Columbia that the band’s first album under its new contract would be the soundtrack of the program that the Theatre Guild had commissioned for broadcast on
The United States Steel Hour,
one of the many live-TV anthology series that dominated the Golden Age of Television. With production deadlines looming, the two men put aside Shakespeare and started writing
A Drum Is a Woman
, the latest of Ellington’s attempts to create a successful stage work.

“You feel the weight of the joy”: Rehearsing
A Drum Is a Woman
at CBS, 1957. Ellington’s frequent TV appearances on such popular programs as
The Ed Sullivan
Show
kept him famous long after big-band jazz had become unfashionable. Paul Gonsalves is seated immediately behind Ellington

A Drum Is a Woman
was to be a poetic allegory about the creation myth of jazz, narrated by Ellington himself. It was, he had explained in
Time,
derived from
It’s All True,
the abortive jazz-related film project that he and Orson Welles had discussed fifteen years earlier, and it would be as extravagant an affair as could be crammed into a TV studio. The cast included Carmen de Lavallade and Talley Beatty, two of the most admired modern dancers of the fifties, and three singers, Ozzie Bailey, Joya Sherrill, and the soprano Margaret Tynes, a member of the New York City Opera who was appearing with Harry Belafonte in an off-Broadway show called
Sing, Man, Sing
. Not only were all of the performers black, but they would be given a full hour of prime time to themselves, an unprecedented departure for network TV. Since CBS had commissioned
A Drum Is a Woman
to show off its experimental color-television system, the production budget was more than sufficient to Ellington’s purposes. “It will be the most ambitious thing we ever attempted artistically,” he told
The
New York Times
.

Ellington kept his word to Strayhorn, giving his partner full and equal credit for
A Drum Is a Woman
. The result, Strayhorn said, was their “largest hunk of collaboration . . . He wrote lyrics, I wrote lyrics. He wrote music, and I wrote music. He arranged, and I arranged.” The surviving manuscript material, however, indicates a more clear-cut division of labor, with Strayhorn writing most of the numbers that were accompanied by the full band. Ellington sketched out the small-group numbers in tandem with his soloists, and he also appears to have written most of the spoken narration, which left something to be desired when it came to clarity. Irving Townsend’s synopsis is as good as any:

It is an allegory paralleling the history of jazz . . . in which an elaborately fabricated drum is turned into a very sophisticated lady who travels from Africa to the Caribbean to New Orleans to New York City and finally to the moon, meeting in each place a simple man always named Joe, and touching him with her spell before leaving him for the next Joe.

The “sophisticated lady” in question goes by the semi-anagrammatic name of Madam Zajj. Ellington describes her in his narration as “an exciting, ornately stimulating seductress with patterns of excitement and the power to hypnotize and enervate the will toward total abandonment.” She is, in other words, a fantasy figure who embodies his own mixed feelings about women, and the explanation of her relationship to Carribee Joe that Ellington gave to
The
New York Times
indicates that whatever else he was, he was no feminist: “A drummer is a skin whipper. And a woman is definitely the most important accessory a man has.”

Unusually for Ellington, the music for
A Drum Is a Woman
was written and recorded before the work was staged. Marshall Jamison, the show’s producer, armed Paul Felton, Paul Godkin, and Willard Levitas, the director, choreographer, and designer, with advance copies of the album, telling them, “Do whatever the hell you want, because the thing doesn’t make any sense.” What came out of their joint labors was a mishmash whose “plot” recalls Marshall Stearns’s memories of one of the Cotton Club’s more lurid floor shows. Though the dancing was lively, the performers had to work in a cramped studio, and Ellington, who read his part from cue cards, sounded more than a little bit silly at times: “For every drum you hear, there’s a woman to see. Their gyrations accelerate to a frenzy.” Despite savory passages, among them Johnny Hodges’s luscious harp-accompanied waltz solo in “Ballet of the Flying Saucers” and Clark Terry’s trumpet cadenza in “Hey, Buddy Bolden,” an evocation of the legendary New Orleans cornet player, the score is too closely tied to the stage action and narration to be intelligible when heard on its own.
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Asked in 1966 which compositions of his had satisfied him the most, Ellington replied, “Of the big things,
A Drum Is a Woman,
and some of my early songs. They’re not big pop successes, you know, but in all of them you feel the weight of the joy.” Few others agreed. Jack Gould, the TV critic of
The
New York Times,
dismissed the work as “shrilly pretentious, lacking in compelling emotional intensity, or merely routine commercial numbers such as might be found in a night-club floor show for visiting tourists” and suggested that the members of the cast “were subjected to regrettably stereotyped roles.” Whitney Balliett, who had recently left the
Saturday Review
to become
The New Yorker
’s first full-time jazz critic, called
A Drum Is a Woman
“an almost embarrassingly flimsy affair, which failed both as a piece of light nonsense and as a true indication of Ellington’s abilities.”