Duke (61 page)

Alone in a Crowd, 1967–1974

D
UKE ELLINGTON WAS
never one to face bad news squarely. He preferred when he could to ignore it: “I don’t have time to get depressed. It wouldn’t help me any. What I don’t like doesn’t exist.” But there would be no turning away from the death of Billy Strayhorn, which left a hole in his life that could not be filled. “I’m writing more than ever now,” he told a reporter in 1968. “Billy Strayhorn left that big yawning void.” In truth, though, Ellington had stepped up his compositional activity years earlier in order to compensate for Strayhorn’s shrinking output. Nor would he take time off to recover from his loss. He couldn’t afford not to work and wouldn’t have known what to do with himself had he stopped. Instead he kept at it and tried not to think about the worst news of all, which was that if his musical heir could die, so could he.

Two months after the funeral, he left the road to play a monthlong engagement at Rockefeller Center’s Rainbow Grill, appearing not with the full band but a five-horn octet. With him were Cat Anderson, Lawrence Brown, Harry Carney, Paul Gonsalves, and Johnny Hodges, his principal soloists. The small band made a big impression on the critics. “It has the depth and timbre and revolving colors of the bigger group, but it is also looser and more intense, and the soloists have more space and time to roam in,” Whitney Balliett wrote in
The New Yorker
. Surviving air checks of the octet’s performances are not nearly so impressive sounding as that, though, and for Ellington the job seems to have been mainly expedient. He claimed to have taken it so that he’d have more time to compose, and the Rainbow Grill, to which he would henceforth return at least once a year, wasn’t big enough to accommodate the entire band, so seven of his men stayed home, thereby lowering the overhead substantially.

All fifteen, however, were on hand when Ellington started taping .
 . . And His Mother Called Him Bill
at the end of August. He had decided to pay tribute to Strayhorn by recording an entire album of his music for RCA. It was the first time since 1941 that he had featured his protégé’s compositions so extensively, and the result was a considerable achievement, the best-played studio album of his old age, in part because the program was chosen from the whole of Strayhorn’s output rather than consisting only of new work. In addition to classics of the forties like “Day Dream,” “Midriff,” and “Raincheck,” Ellington dredged up such lesser-known efforts as “Rock Skippin’ at the Blue Note” and “Snibor,” and he also recorded Strayhorn’s last two pieces, “Blood Count” and the slyly swinging “Intimacy of the Blues.” The final track was a hushed solo version of “Lotus Blossom” that he tossed off while the musicians were putting up their instruments at the end of a recording session. The engineers had the good sense to keep the tape rolling, and you can hear the men in the studio stop packing their horns and fall silent as their leader runs through the song that Strayhorn had loved to hear him play. It is an unutterably poignant moment. “When I got a copy the other day of the new album we did of Billy’s tunes, I couldn’t even look at it, let alone listen to it,” he later told a reporter. “I just threw it on the bed.”

In October his grief was made visible when NBC’s
Bell Telephone Hour
aired “On the Road with Duke Ellington,” an hour-long documentary directed by Robert Drew, a cinema verité pioneer who had spent part of the preceding year traveling with the bandleader. It is the most illuminating of Ellington’s TV appearances, though not because of anything that he said on camera. He had been watching his tongue for too long to let slip anything unexpected, and he sticks to his stock anecdotes throughout the show. What is revealing about “On the Road with Duke Ellington” is the everyday activity that the camera captures. We see Ellington surrounded by middle-aged ladies in an airport, chatting with Louis Armstrong in his dressing room, tinkering with a new composition in his hotel room, saying grace before he tucks into a room-service dinner of steak and grapefruit, and striding from the wings to play the dreaded medley for his adoring fans (“We hope that all of our compositions are among your favorites”). Time and again the camera lingers on the lined face of a man on the verge of extreme old age, one whose features are a map of disillusion. Drew’s off-camera narration is insightful: “Being on the road assures Duke Ellington of never really being alone. But it also provides a kind of isolation he needs to compose.” And though the women in Ellington’s life are never seen or mentioned, we watch as he reads through the funeral oration that he has just written for Strayhorn—and see him sitting alone in a pew at St. Peter’s a few days later, staring at his beloved friend’s coffin and listening to his own words being read out loud.

Two months after “On the Road with Duke Ellington” aired, Ellington and the band joined Frank Sinatra in the studio to tape
Francis A. and Edward K.,
their first and only joint project. Sinatra had talked about recording with Ellington as early as 1947 but somehow failed to get around to it when the two men were both at Reprise. Now they decided to go ahead. Since Strayhorn was dead and Ellington preferred not to write vocal charts, Billy May, a much-admired pro who had been working with Sinatra since the fifties, supplied the arrangements, which were intended, he said, to evoke the Blanton-Webster band. (Only one of the eight numbers, “I Like the Sunrise,” was composed by Ellington.) Though he had a knack for musical mimicry, May did not reckon with the state of Ellington’s present-day group. “That’s what I tried to write for, to go for [the Blanton-Webster] sound,” he later said. “But by 1967 it was completely gone, they had started to go to pot although they still had that distinctive sound.” He suspected the worst when he flew to Seattle in November to hear the band run through his arrangements: “We rehearsed them all afternoon and, Jesus, the rehearsal was terrible. They were all terrible sight readers in that band.” Ellington promised to play them on the job prior to the sessions, filling in the vocal parts on piano, but May knew as soon as he entered the studio in December that “they [had] never touched the charts again.” Even after rehearsing the arrangements, Ellington’s musicians could not play them nearly so well as the studio orchestras made up of first-call session men to which Sinatra was accustomed. In order to get the job done as efficiently as possible, May augmented the band with a handful of studio ringers, including Al Porcino, one of Hollywood’s top lead trumpeters, and two pianists, Jimmy Jones and Milt Raskin, who played some of Ellington’s keyboard parts. While Ellington’s men managed in the end to pull themselves together, the album that resulted, Johnny Hodges’s contemplative solo on “Indian Summer” excepted, was mostly lackluster, and Ellington made no mention of
Francis A. and Edward K.
in the Sinatra chapter of
Music Is My Mistress
.

May was right about the condition of the band, which had been in decline for the past few years. It was no longer a matter of good and bad nights: Ellington’s players, in particular his saxophonists, were now unable to execute his close-voiced block-chord ensembles with secure intonation. The deterioration was apparent on the live recording of the First Sacred Concert, and distressing patches of sour ensemble work can also be heard on
Far East Suite
and .
 . .
And His Mother Called Him Bill
. One of the reasons for the unsatisfactory playing was that the band’s veterans, like their leader, were growing old. A week after finishing
Francis A. and Edward K.,
four key players, Lawrence Brown, Harry Carney, Cootie Williams, and Sam Woodyard, simultaneously fell ill just prior to a three-week engagement in Reno. Benny Carter briefly sat in on lead alto, while Russell Procope covered for Carney by switching to baritone saxophone.

Ellington had other troubles on his mind. Earlier in the year Norman Granz had broken with him. After receiving one too many middle-of-the-night phone calls, the promoter fired off an angry, accusatory letter:

I’m really afraid that you’re using me not as a manager, but as a servant—and worse than that[,] you are so incredibly, foolishly selfish in the way you do it that I think not even a self-respecting manager would accept it. . . . I’ll be glad to give you whatever advice I can on any major issues that come up in your artistic life, but as far as sending your laundry out or wiring money to your friends, I don’t think I can do that again.

What Granz may not have understood was that Ellington was probably making some of those calls not because he needed help but because he longed for companionship and was too proud to ask for it. As the one-nighters grew more frequent and the long hauls longer, he used the telephone to fight off his loneliness. “I know he spent many despondent hours in motels,” Mercer said. “This was one reason why he would make long-distance calls at all hours of the night. . . . When I paid his hotel bills, I could always tell what he’d been up to.” He may have had himself in mind as much as the human race when he observed in his program notes for the First Sacred Concert that “everyone is so alone—the basic, essential state of humankind.”

 • • • 

He could still count on the critics, though. Most of them sang his praises even when he was at less than his best, and one, Gunther Schuller, now wrote of him in a way whose consequences were both significant and lasting.

A classical composer and the longtime principal horn player of the Metropolitan Opera’s pit orchestra, Schuller was also a committed devotee of jazz—he played on Miles Davis’s
Birth of the Cool
sessions—who had been so “mesmerized” by the Ellington band when he first heard the group live in 1943 that he started transcribing its recordings note for note, thereby becoming one of the first musicians to take down Ellington’s arrangements by ear. In 1959 he published a long essay on Ellington’s early recordings that eventually became the basis for a full-scale survey history of jazz, the first part of which he brought out in 1968 as
Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development
. The climax of the book was a forty-page chapter called “The Ellington Style: Its Origins and Early Development” in which he analyzed Ellington’s pre-1930 music in close and informed detail. Other classically trained critics, Max Harrison and André Hodeir among them, had written penetratingly about Ellington, but never at such length, and the opening of “The Ellington Style” indicated the high seriousness with which Schuller took his music:

Duke Ellington is one of America’s great composers. At this writing his extraordinary creativity seems undiminished. In looking back over more than forty years of his career, we can only marvel at the consistency with which Ellington and his orchestra have sustained a level of inspiration comparable in its way to that of the major “classical” composers of our century.

The importance of
Early Jazz
was grasped at once.
The
New York Times Book Review,
for instance, called it “clear, thorough, objective, sophisticated and original . . . unparalleled in the literature of jazz.” All true—but the review was written not by a musicologist but by Frank Conroy, a novelist and part-time jazz pianist. On the other hand, it is hard to know to whom else the
Times Book Review
could have turned, since there were as yet no scholarly biographies of Ellington, or any other jazz musician. And while Conroy was right to say that
Early Jazz
was “unparalleled” in its field, he failed to point out that the book was the first full-length historical-analytic monograph about jazz to be written by a scholar with extensive performing experience. It was not that jazz had been overlooked by classical-music scholars. Wilfrid Mellers, for instance, had devoted an entire chapter to Ellington in
Music in a New Found Land,
his 1964 survey history of American music, describing him as “pre-eminent, if not unique, in preserving the authenticity of jazz while achieving, too, tenderness and sensitivity.” But in 1968 the “literature of jazz” was almost entirely the work of amateur enthusiasts, while academic jazz scholarship was rudimentary at best. This made it still more significant that a writer like Schuller should have chosen to place Ellington alongside Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton as one of his exemplary figures, the men whom he judged to be the key artists of early jazz.

What Ellington thought of Schuller’s book is not known. He probably never read it, since it had always been his view that close critical analysis “stinks up the place.” Besides, he was less interested than ever in reflecting on his past triumphs. He continued to write music every day, and to play it as soon as his copyists could put parts on the stands. He even traveled with a portable electric piano, enabling him to experiment with musical ideas at any hour of the day or night: “You know how it is. You go home expecting to go right to bed, but then on the way in you go past the piano and there’s a flirtation. It flirts with you. So you sit to try out a couple of chords, and when you look up it’s 7
A.M
.”

Indeed, one of his most important efforts was premiered mere months before the publication of Schuller’s book, and he was well pleased with it. Ellington’s Second Sacred Concert, which received its first performance in January at New York’s Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, was a considerable advance on its predecessor, for instead of knocking the piece together from existing works, he wrote its thirteen movements from scratch and believed them to be “the most important thing [he had] ever done.” Few critics went that far, but some of the Second Sacred Concert exhibits a degree of formal control that he had never before attained. A case in point is “Supreme Being,” the twelve-minute second movement, a quasisymphonic structure in which unpitched choral declamation is juxtaposed with sophisticated orchestral writing (though the paucity of memorable themes is, as so often in Ellington’s post-1950 music, a major defect).