Duke (55 page)

Ellington later said that Billy Strayhorn acted as his “consultant” on
Anatomy of a Murder
. In the event, though, Strayhorn ended up writing very little of the score, with which Ellington was solely credited, both on-screen and on the cover of Columbia’s soundtrack album. He seems to have composed much of the thematic material prior to watching the first rough cut of the film, basing it on his initial reading of the script, after which he turned his themes into lengthy “cues” that may or may not have been meant to be synchronized with the action. Probably for this reason, only a fraction of the score made it onto the soundtrack, and Ellington is not known to have participated in the process of “spotting” the music cues that were used. A lengthy main-title cue played under a credit sequence animated by the graphic designer Saul Bass, a sprinkling of character-sketching vignettes, a few between-scenes transitions: These sufficed for Preminger and Richard Carruth, the film’s music editor. No music of any kind is heard during the long courtroom scenes, nor is it used other than infrequently to underscore dialogue. On the rare occasions when music is heard in a dialogue scene, it gives the impression of having little to do with the action that it accompanies.

Since neither collaborator ever discussed the score in detail, it is impossible to know why Preminger used Ellington’s music as he did. Assuming that his motives in hiring Ellington were anything other than publicity-minded, he may have expected the composer to supply an urban-style subtext to the small-town backgrounds, thereby implying that sexual passion is as likely to be found there as in big cities. One of the most attractive cues, for instance, is a piece called “Flirtibird” that introduces Lee Remick, who plays Laura, a sexually provocative young woman whose husband (Ben Gazzara) shoots and kills the man who has just raped her. But we cannot know whether this was Preminger’s intention. All we know is what we hear on the soundtrack, a sparse, fragmentary musical background that is often theatrically naïve. In “Flirtibird,” for instance, Ellington echoes one of the oldest of film-music clichés, using Johnny Hodges’s glissando-laden alto-saxophone playing to hint at Laura’s apparent sexual availability.

Much of the score, especially “Flirtibird” and the main-title theme, a hard-driving blues in six-eight time that Ellington and Peggy Lee later turned into a pop song called “I’m Gonna Go Fishin’,” is compellingly listenable when heard in isolation from the film, which may explain why Preminger used so little of it on the soundtrack. “Music in pictures should say something without being obviously music, you know, and this was all new to me,” Ellington told Ralph Gleason. It was in any case an experiment that the director did not repeat, with him or any other jazz composer, nor was Ellington given the opportunity to work on another film of comparably high quality. Of the three subsequent feature films that he scored,
Paris Blues
(1961),
Assault on a Queen
(1966), and
Change of Mind
(1969), all are second-rate or worse. The bright promise of his initial venture into film scoring turned out to be a dead end.

 • • • 

By 1959 Ellington’s life had settled into an ever-changing yet ever-predictable pattern. He worked the festival circuit, cut two or three albums each year for Columbia, and appeared on TV whenever the opportunity arose. In between these activities, he crisscrossed the United States. Though the movie-house stage shows of the thirties and forties were now a thing of the past, Ellington and the band still played as many one-night stands and club dates as Joe Glaser could line up, and on occasion they sailed for Europe, there to play one of the tours that Norman Granz organized for them.

Granz had taken charge of the overseas bookings in 1958, bringing the band back to Europe after an eight-year hiatus. Notwithstanding their past skirmishes over Hodges and Ella Fitzgerald, Ellington was glad to do business with the promoter. “There was nothing special about it,” Granz said. “Duke wanted to tour. ‘How much?’ was the only question. I gave him the right answer.” He sent Ellington to three dozen different cities that fall, including Amsterdam, Berlin, Brussels, Copenhagen, Glasgow, Hamburg, Liverpool, London, Milan, Munich, Paris, Stockholm, and Vienna, and neither then nor later did he charge a commission for his services.
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While it was in his interest for the Ellington band to perform throughout Europe under his auspices, Granz was genuinely altruistic about jazz, and his activities had made him rich enough to act on his convictions, though he and Ellington never had a comfortable relationship. “I think my liking for Duke was as a fan probably more than as a human being,” Granz said after Ellington’s death. “In retrospect, I think I was maybe closer to the music than I was to Duke Ellington as a man.”

Between them, Granz and Joe Glaser set a killing pace for Ellington and his men, one of whom summed up their life on the road with terrible brevity in
Time
’s cover story: “You go to the hotel, take a long look at the bed, go play the date, take another look at the bed and get on the bus.” The musicians put up with it because Ellington continued to pay them generous salaries—on occasion he even made them “loans” that would never be repaid—and studiously ignored their anarchic offstage behavior. Ellington stayed off the band bus, preferring to ride from gig to gig in Harry Carney’s car, but otherwise he pushed himself at least as hard as he did his players. He and Carney, whose good nature made him a boon companion, often traveled for four hundred miles at a stretch, with the saxophonist doing the driving and the composer the navigating. “He’s a very good man to have along,” Carney said of Ellington. “He sits in the front and he does a lot of thinking. He’ll pull out a piece of paper and make notes. We do very little talking, but if he thinks I’m getting weary he’ll make conversation so that I don’t fall asleep.”

Gordon Parks recorded a snippet of their conversation for posterity:

The three of us were approaching San Francisco early one morning after an overnight drive from Los Angeles. In the distance, the Golden Gate Bridge floated eerily in the dawn mist rising above the bay. Harry called Edward, who was asleep in the back seat. “Hey, Big Red, wake up and look over yonder. Looks like something you might want to write about.” Duke stirred awake, wiped his eyes and looked at the bridge. “Majestic. Majestic. Goddamn those white people are smart,” he mumbled and fell back to sleep.

Ellington still pretended to have a home life for the benefit of prying reporters. In March of 1957 he appeared on
Person to Person,
Edward R. Murrow’s celebrity talk show, to promote the upcoming CBS
telecast of
A Drum Is a Woman,
and his portion of the interview was shot in the elaborately decorated Upper West Side apartment that he shared with Evie. We see him exchanging idle chitchat with Murrow while seated at a white piano, showing off oil portraits of his parents, playing a snippet from
A Drum Is a Woman
on the phonograph in his music room, and introducing Mercer and Ruth to the viewers at home. But the impression of domestic stability created by their presence was deceptive, as much so as the fact that Ellington kept Evie out of sight throughout the program. The West End Avenue apartment was hers, not his, and so were the dinner parties that she threw when he was gone. “I just don’t have time to be a social cat . . . now all my time goes into music,” he told Nat Hentoff.

To that end he kept a vampire’s hours, flitting from hotel to hotel and room-service meal to room-service meal, all so that he could carve out of his crowded days and nights the privacy that he needed in order to compose. “You gotta be older to realize that many of the people you meet are mediocrities,” he had told Carter Harman. “You have to let them run off you like water off a duck’s back. Otherwise, they drag you down.” No one was allowed to do that to Ellington, not then and not ever. His refusal to submit to the ordinary demands of love and friendship necessarily made for a solitary life, solitary at times to a degree that bordered on the monastic. Not everybody understood the price that he paid for his single-minded dedication to his art—he seemed, after all, never to be alone—but John Voelker, who met him when
Anatomy of a Murder
was being shot in Michigan, viewed him through the clear eyes of a novelist and a judge and was struck by what he saw: “I gradually felt drawn to him, not because I savor disillusion, but rather because I sensed that, in his case at least, [his disillusion] masked great sensitivity and pride and even, however finely veiled, a vein of melancholy and loneliness.”

The melancholy, if that is what it was, is not on display in the many TV appearances by the band that have come down to us. In them one sees only the public Ellington, poised and content. The earliest surviving visual document of a complete concert, videotaped at Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw in 1958, lets us turn back the clock and see how Harlem’s Aristocrat of Jazz carried himself onstage, his mask securely in place. It’s an ordinary night for the band, perhaps a shade better than average: All the chairs on the stand are occupied, every necktie is tied, and though no one does anything all that surprising, the band takes care of business. The program is ordinary, too: Johnny Hodges plays “All of Me” and “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be,” Paul Gonsalves works out at length on
Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue,
the ASCAP medley is dished up in two installments, and a pair of Blanton-Webster classics, “Harlem Air-Shaft” and “Jack the Bear,” are trotted out for the benefit of local jazz connoisseurs. Ellington hasn’t much to say beyond assuring the audience that he loves it madly, preferring to sit in watchful silence at the piano, sprinkling each number with the “strange chords” that Barney Bigard had long ago found so disconcerting.

One thing that the Amsterdam concert dramatizes is the way in which the band’s working repertoire evolved over time. Though Ellington claimed not to be interested in the past, he usually took care to offer his fans a cross-section of older pieces. Nor did he simply fob them off with the medley. Except for the improvised solos, the versions of “Harlem Air-Shaft” and “Jack the Bear” that he performed in Amsterdam are note-for-note re-creations of the 1940 charts, played not pro forma but with enlivening enthusiasm (Clark Terry, for instance, steps into Cootie Williams’s slot on “Harlem Air-Shaft,” tossing off a solo full of twisty bebop triplets). In other cases, though, he played updated versions of his tried-and-true standards, some of which were written for specific occasions, while others had gradually assumed new shapes.

An example of the latter is “Rockin’ in Rhythm,” which started life in 1931 as a pleasantly raggy two-beat stroll whose “notey” reed-section melody sounds like an orchestrated piano solo. The live version recorded nine years later in Fargo, by contrast, reveals that the song had turned into a hell-raising free-for-all jam tune. In 1953 Ellington and his rhythm section recorded a trio number called “Kinda Dukish” that was based on “Rockin’ in Rhythm,” and by the time of the Amsterdam concert he was using it as an extended piano prelude to the older song. According to Mercer, Ellington started prefacing “Rockin’ in Rhythm” with “Kinda Dukish” in order to give delinquent musicians time to get to the bandstand: “The idea was for the audience to think that the band was waiting for Ellington to make up his mind what tune he wanted to play first. But he was actually waiting for the stragglers to take their chairs.”

The concert also shows that after five years of relative stability, Ellington’s men were playing extremely well. Not only would the reed section remain intact for another decade, but Quentin Jackson, John Sanders, and Britt Woodman had all been playing trombone together since 1954. Even if the band’s soloistic firepower was diminished, it was still a powerful performing unit led by the most individual musician in jazz. Granz was right: Ellington himself was sufficient unto the day thereof, and he continued to draw sustenance from the expensive gentlemen to whom he freely dedicated his life and songwriting royalties. “Watch him some night in the wings,” an unnamed sideman told Nat Hentoff. “Those bags under his eyes are huge, and he looks beat and kind of lonely. But then we begin to play, he strides out on the stand, the audience turn their faces to him, and the cat is a new man.”

Yet that, too, was a mask, one that Ellington had worn for so long that he could no longer pry it off, not even when the band that he had brought to Newport in 1956 started to come apart at the seams. When Cat Anderson, Quentin Jackson, John Sanders, and Clark Terry quit toward the end of 1959, followed soon after by Jimmy Woode, the accumulated momentum of the preceding three years was dispelled, and so was Ellington’s compositional vitality. Once he had found inspiration in new players, but by then few major soloists were willing to go out on the road with a big band. Sam Woodyard was the last incoming member of the Ellington band who succeeded in changing its collective style by the force of his example. A few first-class players came along after that, but never again did a musician as distinctive as Woodyard or Clark Terry join up—and it is not clear that Ellington wished to hire such players. According to the bassist Aaron Bell, who replaced Jimmy Woode in 1960, he would tell his men, “Characterize it for me. Play it the way you want.” But since World War II he had mostly been replacing his departing soloists with journeymen who evoked the sounds of days gone by instead of creating brand-new ones of their own. Even the best of them, like Shorty Baker or the trombonist Tyree Glenn, who played with Ellington from 1947 to 1951, were too often expected merely to imitate their predecessors, like replacements in the cast of a long-running Broadway show.

As for the handful of truly original musicians who had joined since the war, some of them, like Terry, felt creatively compromised by their presence in the band:

During my last couple of years with the band I began to wonder how much freedom I had to grow. I felt myself slipping away. . . . It suddenly dawned on me that you can sit in the Ellington band so long that you become too much a part of it. For all that seeming looseness of direction, Duke really runs things, and it seems to me that his main goal as a leader is to mold a man so fully into the Ellington way of playing that he finds it hard to pull away.