Duke (68 page)

SWEET, BRIAN.
Steely Dan: Reelin’ in the Years.
London: Omnibus, 1994.

SYLVESTER, ROBERT.
No Cover Charge: A Backward Look at the Night Clubs.
New York: Dial, 1956.

TEACHOUT, TERRY.
Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong.
New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009.

TERRY, CLARK, WITH GWEN TERRY.
Clark: The Autobiography of Clark Terry.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.

THIELE, BOB.
What a Wonderful World: A Lifetime of Recordings.
As told to Bob Golden, with a foreword by Steve Allen. New York: Oxford, 2005.

TORMÉ, MEL.
It Wasn’t
All
Velvet: An Autobiography.
New York: Viking, 1988.

TRAILL, SINCLAIR, AND GERALD LASCELLES, EDS.
Just Jazz 3.
London: Four Square Books, 1959.

———.
Just Jazz 4.
London: Souvenir, 1960.

TUCKER, MARK, ED.
The Duke Ellington Reader.
New York: Oxford, 1993.

———.
Ellington: The Early Years.
Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1991.

ULANOV, BARRY.
Duke Ellington.
New York: Creative Age, 1946.

VAIL, KEN.
Duke’s Diary, Part One: The Life of Duke Ellington, 1927–1950.
Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2002.

———.
Duke’s Diary, Part Two: The Life of Duke Ellington, 1950–1974.
Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2002.

VAN DE LEUR, WALTER.
Something to Live For: The Music of Billy Strayhorn.
New York: Oxford, 2000.

VON ESCHEN, PENNY M.
Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.

WASHINGTON, BOOKER T.
The Booker T. Washington Papers.
Vol. 12,
1912–14.
Edited by Louis R. Harlan and Raymond W. Smock. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1983.

———.
Up from Slavery: An Autobiography.
Edited by William L. Andrews. New York: W.W. Norton, 1995.

WEIN, GEORGE, WITH NATE CHINEN.
Myself Among Others: A Life in Music.
New York: Da Capo, 2003.

WELK, LAWRENCE, WITH BERNICE MCGEEHAN.
My America, Your America.
Boston: G.K. Hall, 1977.

WILDER, ALEC.
American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900–1950.
Edited and with an introduction by James T. Maher. New York: Oxford, 1972.

WILK, MAX.
They’re Playing Our Song: Conversations with America’s Classic Songwriters.
New York: Da Capo, 1997.

WILLIAMS, MARTIN, ED.
Jazz Panorama: From the Pages of
The Jazz Review. New York: Crowell-Collier, 1962.

WILLIAMSON, KEN, ED.
This Is Jazz.
London: Newnes, 1960.

WILSON, EDMUND.
Classics and Commercials: A Literary Chronicle of the Forties.
New York: Macmillan, 1950.

———.
The Thirties.
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980.

WILSON, SONDRA K.
Meet Me at the Theresa: The Story of Harlem’s Most Famous Hotel.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004.

WILSON, TEDDY, WITH ARIE LIGTHART AND HUMPHREY VAN LOO.
Teddy Wilson Talks Jazz.
London: Cassell, 1996.

WINER, DEBORAH GRACE.
On the Sunny Side of the Street: The Life and Lyrics of Dorothy Fields.
New York: Schirmer, 1997.

WRIGHT, LAURIE.
“King” Oliver.
Chigwell, Essex, UK: Storyville Publications, 1987.

WYATT, ROBERT, AND JOHN ANDREW JOHNSON, EDS.
The George Gershwin Reader.
New York: Oxford, 2004.

ZOLOTOW, MAURICE.
Never Whistle in a Dressing Room; or, Breakfast in Bedlam.
New York: E.P. Dutton, 1944.

SOURCE NOTES

ABBREVIATIONS

BS            Billy Strayhorn

DE            Duke Ellington

DEMS      Duke Ellington Music Society

EC            Duke Ellington Collection (Smithsonian Institution)

IJS            Institute of Jazz Studies (Rutgers University)

MM          Music Is My Mistress

OHAM    Oral History American Archive (Yale University)

Reader     The Duke Ellington Reader

RIT           Reminiscing in Tempo: A Portrait of Duke Ellington

All quotations from these sources are by DE unless otherwise indicated

PROLOGUE
“I WANT TO TELL AMERICA”

SOURCES

Documents

Edmund Anderson, oral-history interview, OHAM; Lawrence Brown, oral-history interview, IJS;
The Duke Ellington Carnegie Hall Concerts: January 1943,
sound recording (Prestige); DE, “
Black, Brown and Beige
by Duke Ellington” (typescript, n.d., EC); DE, unpublished interview with Carter Harman, 1964, EC; Ruth Ellington, oral-history interview, EC; Nat Hentoff, oral-history interview conducted by researchers for Ken Burns’s
Jazz
(transcript available online at www.pbs.org
/jazz/about/pdfs/Hentoff.pdf); Juan Tizol, oral-history interview, IJS.

Books

Bentley,
In Search of Theater;
Bigard,
With Louis and the Duke;
Büchmann-Møller,
Someone to Watch over Me;
Collier,
Duke Ellington;
Dance,
Duke Ellington;
Dance,
The World of Duke Ellington;
Mercer Ellington,
Duke Ellington in Person;
Ellison,
Living with Music;
Enstice,
Jazz Spoken Here;
Feather,
The Jazz Years;
Firestone,
Swing, Swing, Swing;
George,
Sweet Man;
Gleason,
Celebrating the Duke;
Hadlock,
Jazz Masters of the Twenties;
Hasse,
Beyond Category;
Houseman,
Front and Center;
Jewell,
Duke;
Lambert,
Music Ho!;
Mingus,
Beneath the Underdog;
Serrano,
Juan Tizol;
Stewart,
Boy Meets Horn;
Stewart,
Jazz Masters of the Thirties;
Terry,
Clark;
Ulanov,
Duke Ellington;
Vail,
Duke’s Diary, Part Two;
van de Leur,
Something to Live For;
Williamson,
This Is Jazz.

NOTES

DE left watches unworn:
“He never wore a watch” (Irving Townsend, “Ellington in Private,”
The Atlantic Monthly, May 1975).
“I don’t need time”:
Dance,
The World of Duke Ellington, 257.
Some seventeen hundred–odd compositions:
According to Jørgen Mathiasen, DE is known to have written at least 1,694 identifiable “works and pieces.” For a preliminary discussion of the complex problem of calculating the number of DE’s compositions, see Mathiasen, “Duke Ellington’s Production as a Composer,”
DEMS Bulletin,
Dec. 2004–Mar. 2005. DE told Brooks Kerr that he had written roughly five thousand compositions, but he did not keep a catalog of his works and it is impossible to know how he arrived at this number (Steven Lasker, “How Many Compositions Did Ellington Actually Write?,”
DEMS Bulletin,
Apr.–July 2005).
“As long as something is unfinished”:
George, 133.
“He wants life and music to be in a state of becoming”:
Nat Hentoff, “This Cat Needs No Pulitzer Prize,”
The New York Times Magazine,
Sept. 12, 1965, in
Reader,
367.

“Duke drew people to him”:
Richard O. Boyer, “The Hot Bach,”
The New Yorker,
June 24, July 1, and July 8, 1944, in
Reader,
240 (hereafter cited as Boyer, “The Hot Bach,” followed by the page number in
Reader
).

As early as 1930:
For a discussion of early interviews with DE in which he speaks of writing such a work, see Mark Tucker, “The Genesis of
Black, Brown and Beige,
”
Black Music Research Journal
(Fall 1993).
“
My African Suite
”:
Barry Ulanov, “The Ellington Programme,” in Williamson, 131.
“I am expressing in sound”:
Quoted in Collier, 216.
Swaffer compared Louis Armstrong to a gorilla:
Hannen Swaffer, “I Heard Yesterday,”
Daily Herald,
July 25, 1932.

“A suite in five parts”:
“Introducing Duke Ellington,”
Fortune,
Aug. 1933.
“The history of the American Negro”:
“Ellington Completes Negro Opera at Bedside,”
Down Beat,
Oct. 2, 1938.
DE completed only three extended works of any kind prior to 1943:
Creole Rhapsody
was recorded in two different versions in 1931,
Reminiscing in Tempo
in 1935, and
Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue
in 1937. He also arranged a two-sided “Tiger Rag” in 1929 and a two-part version of “Black and Tan Fantasy” in 1938, but these are not “extended” works in the usual sense of the word. Similarly,
Symphony in Black,
the score for a 1934 short subject subtitled “A Rhapsody of Negro Life,” was not a “symphony of Negro moods,” as it was described in the film, but a nine-minute suite based on three existing compositions by DE.
“The first jazz composer of distinction”:
Lambert, 187–88.

DE “definitely wasn’t direct”:
Ruth Ellington, oral-history interview.
“You hear fights, you smell dinner”:
Boyer, “The Hot Bach,” 235.
“Once Over Lightly”:
The first page of the MS. score of “Harlem Air-Shaft” (as the title appears on the original 78 label) is titled “Once Over Lightly” in DE’s hand, with “Harlem Air Shaft” added by Tom Whaley, the copyist. The piece was recorded for Victor as “Harlem Air-Shaft” on July 22, 1940, and Whaley began working for Ellington in 1941. (The actual date of composition is not known.) When the piece was played on a July 29 radio broadcast, the announcer referred to it as “Harlem Air-Shaft” and described it as “Duke Ellington’s own rhythmic impression of the themes and sounds heard in an apartment courthouse in Harlem.” Recording logs for the July 22 session use the title “Rumpus in Richmond” in place of “Harlem Air-Shaft.” A second piece recorded at the same session, originally titled “Brassiere,” was renamed “Rumpus in Richmond” prior to its 78 release. See Edward Green, “‘Harlem Air Shaft’: A True Programmatic Composition?”
Journal of Jazz Studies
(Spring 2011), and Brad McCune, “A Rose by Any Other Name,”
Down Beat,
June 7, 1962.
“Crotch warmers”:
George, 109.
“I knew you were here”:
Dance,
Duke Ellington,
5.

“He was furious”:
Anderson, oral-history interview.

“Sell Ellington as a great artist”:
“Irving Mills Presents Duke Ellington and His Famous Orchestra,” 1933 publicity manual (EC).

“You know, Stan Kenton can stand in front of a thousand fiddles”:
Ralph J. Gleason, “Duke Excites, Mystifies Without Any Pretension,”
Down Beat,
Nov. 5, 1952.
Previn compared him to Stravinsky and Prokofiev:
Gleason, 175.
“I just watch people”:
Aaron Bell, quoted in
Jazz Journal,
Mar. 1991, in
RIT,
323.

Mills passed up an opportunity to book DE into Carnegie Hall:
Anderson, oral-history interview. It was Anderson who claimed to have tried to persuade Mills to book DE there. See also Firestone, 213.
The band had since given full-evening concerts:
The most interesting of these performances took place at the City College of New York on Jan. 3, 1939. The ambitious program included
Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue,
Reminiscing in Tempo,
and the five three-minute “concerti” that DE had written for Barney Bigard, Lawrence Brown, Rex Stewart, and Cootie Williams. (A copy of the program is part of the collection of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.)
“I want you to write”:
MM,
180–81.