Duke (71 page)

The gentle muted trumpet tone: “
The devices that enabled Whetsel to obtain his haunting, ethereal sound when muted were a pair of wooden ‘Solotone’ conical mutes, one glued inside the other” (Lasker, “Whetsel vs. Whetsol Plus Sundry Whetseliana”).
“Aural charisma”:
MM,
54.
“When he played the funeral march”:
Boyer, “The Hot Bach,” 230.
“His tonal character”:
DE, Harman interview, 1964.

“I really thought of him as a member of the family”:
Ellington, 26.
“Duke Ellington was like my brother”:
Balliett, “New York Drummers,” in
Reader,
489.
“Anybody who had been to New York”:
MM,
35.

“I always strove for delicacy”:
Balliett, “New York Drummers,” in
Reader,
488.
“Slushy”:
Lees, 54.
“We used to say”:
Ibid.
“Greer was not the world’s best reader of music”:
MM,
53.
“He used timpani and tomtoms a lot”:
Balliett, “New York Drummers,” in
Reader,
487.

“I built up so much of a reputation”:
MM,
33.
“I marvelled at his natural technique”:
H.G. [Henry Grant], “
Shuffle Along
a Great Success,”
Negro Musician,
June 1921, quoted in Tucker, 62.

“Half a dozen”:
DE, Harman interview, 1964. Grant’s daughters later said that DE took lessons twice a week (Tucker, 61).
“Duke had little direct contact”:
Ulanov, 195.
“If
serious
means European music”:
DE, “Why Duke Ellington Avoided Music Schools,”
PM,
Dec. 9, 1945, in
Reader,
253.
“I am not writing classical music”:
DE, “Certainly It’s Music!”
Listen,
Oct. 1944, in
Reader,
246.
“He lighted the direction to more highly developed composition”:
MM,
28.

“What I absorbed on that occasion”:
Ibid., 34.
“He was playing like James P.”:
Bushell, 21.
“I also tried to copy the spectacular manner”:
MM,
417.

Bechet appeared at the Howard Theatre in January of 1923:
Chilton, 56.
“My first real encounter”:
MM,
417. DE remembered first hearing Bechet in 1921, but Chilton’s account is based on contemporary documents.
“Bechet to me”:
DE, “The Most Essential Instrument,”
Jazz Journal,
Dec. 1965, in
Reader,
369.

“They had caught a Negro”:
Peter Perl, “Washington Race Riot of 1919 Gave Glimpse of Future Struggles,”
The Washington Post,
Mar. 1, 1999.
“Harlem, to our minds”:
MM,
36, 35.

“THE MUCH IMITATED RAGTIME AND JAZZ CLARIONETIST”:
Tucker, 81.
DE’s first trip to New York:
Late in life Sonny Greer told an interviewer that he and DE paid a short visit to New York in 1921 and shared a nightclub bill with the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, but there is no other evidence to substantiate this claim (Tim Weiner, “Keeping Time with Sonny Greer,”
Soho Weekly News,
June 15, 1979).
“It was another world to us”:
MM,
36.

“A kind of nice, almost arrogant manner”:
Nolan, 35.
“A good-looking, well-mannered fellow”:
Smith, 149–50.
“My strongest influence”:
DE, Harman interview, 1964.

“The two worlds”:
Calloway, 105–6. For a nuanced discussion of the response of the Harlem Renaissance writers to jazz, see Alwyn Williams, “Jazz and the New Negro: Harlem’s Intellectuals Wrestle with the Art of the Age,”
Australasian Journal of American Studies,
July 2002.

Thirty dollars a week:
Shapiro, 230.
“Sweet and straight”:
MM,
70.
“We had arrangements for everything”:
DE, “Jazz as I Have Seen It,”
Swing,
June 1940. Helen Oakley Dance later acknowledged in her oral-history interview that she ghosted this article, as well as the other pieces that were published in the same series in February, March, May, July, August, and September of 1940, parts of which were recycled in
MM.

“We had been playing”:
Stanley Dance,
The World of Swing,
53. No copies of this unique test recording are known to have survived (Steven Lasker, “Research on
Home,
”
DEMS Bulletin,
Dec. 1996–Feb. 1997).

“We were different in several ways”:
MM,
70.

“I had never made a lead sheet before”:
Ibid.
“He couldn’t really read then”:
Stanley Dance,
The World of Swing,
52.

The Hollywood:
For contemporary press reports about the Hollywood, see Steiner.
The owners resorted to arson:
Suspicious fires took place at the club in April and December of 1924 (Steiner, 16, 20).
“This colored band is plenty torrid”:
Abel Green,
New York Clipper,
Nov. 23, 1923, in
Reader,
22. Green is credited with having written the oft-misquoted
Variety
headline “STICKS NIX HICK PIX” (“Show Business: King James to the End,”
Time,
May 21, 1973).

Whetsel had gone back to Washington:
Sources dating back to the thirties claim that Whetsel returned to Washington to study medicine at Howard University, but to date no proof of his enrollment there has been found (Tucker, 293).

“Bubber and I sat there with our mouths open”:
Bushell, 25. For a detailed explanation of how Miley and DE’s other brass players used the plunger, see Dietrich, 23–25.

“Our band changed its character”:
DE, “Jazz as I Have Seen It.”
“A sort of cooperative organization”:
Max Jones and Humphrey Lyttelton, BBC radio interview with DE, 1964, in
RIT,
47.
“A great, big, fat sound”:
Stanley Dance,
The World of Duke Ellington,
7.

Elmer Snowden’s departure from the band was involuntary:
“So Sonny . . . says, man, when you going to give us a raise. And the man said I just raised you. He had raised Elmer, give Elmer the raise and Elmer didn’t give it to the guys, so they fired Elmer and Sonny was supposed to take the job, Sonny said no, I don’t want the job. Give it to Duke” (Tom Whaley, oral-history interview).
“It didn’t take long”:
Burt Korall, “The Roots of the Duchy: Duke Ellington’s Drummer,”
Down Beat,
July 13, 1967.

“
He was rather a serious type
”
:
MM
, 109.

“There were no small bands”:
Stanley Dance,
The World of Duke Ellington,
65–66.
“We worked as one man”:
Korall, “The Roots of the Duchy.”

“Duke worked largely from head arrangements”:
John McDonough, “Reminiscing in Tempo: Guitarist Freddy Guy’s Ellington Memories,”
Down Beat,
Apr. 17, 1969, in
Reader,
483.
“We would just sit down at the piano”:
Jones and Lyttelton, BBC radio interview with DE, in
RIT,
33.

“New colors and characteristics”:
MM,
71.

DE studied informally with Will Marion Cook:
It has been speculated that DE may also have studied in Washington with Cook, who at one point was a neighbor to the Ellington family, but DE never claimed to have done so.
He studied violin:
Cook apparently claimed to have studied with Joachim, Brahms’s friend and colleague, but his biographer has found “no documentation” of his having done so (Carter, 19).
“A bit of composition”:
Ibid., 31.

“Developed Negro music”:
Cary B. Lewis, “Will Marion Cook,”
The Chicago Defender,
May 1, 1915.
Cook served as mentor to many younger musicians:
See Mercer Cook, “Will Marion Cook: He Helped Them All,”
Crisis,
Oct. 1944.
“I got most of my instruction riding around Central Park”:
MM,
337.
“He and I would get in a taxi”:
Boyer, “The Hot Bach,” 241. This gnomic passage contains the only piece of specifically technical advice on composition that DE is known to have received from Cook. For a discussion of what Cook may have meant when he told DE to “reverse your figures,” see Edward Green, “‘It Don’t Mean a Thing if It Ain’t Got That Grundgestalt!’—Ellington from a Motivic Perspective,”
Jazz Perspectives,
July 2008. (DE paid tribute to his mentor by quoting from Cook’s 1907 song “Bon Bon Buddy” in the introduction to his 1926 recording of “Li’l Farina.”)

“Dad, I don’t want to go to the conservatory”:
Hollie I. West, “Duke at 70: Honor from the President,”
The Washington Post,
Apr. 27, 1969.
“You know you should go”:
MM,
97.

“Jig Walk”:
DE’s band occasionally played “Jig Walk” in the thirties and forties, and it was recorded in 1944 by Pee Wee Russell, Joe Sullivan, and Zutty Singleton.

“A glorified interior”:
“John and the Missus,” “Wild Throng Dances Madly in Cellar Club,”
New York Mirror,
Apr. 15, 1925.
“The ‘hottest’ band this side of the equator”:
Variety,
Apr. 1, 1925, in
Reader,
23.
“Possessing a sense of rhythm that is almost uncanny”:
Billboard,
Dec. 5, 1925; Ibid.
“The Paul Whiteman of Colored Orchestras”:
Boston Post,
July 9, 1926, quoted in Tucker, 186.

“Where the hell have you been?”:
Bigard, 72. Bechet would later claim on various occasions to have recorded with the band, but DE denied it: “There was no recording session in 1924 (or any other year) with Sidney Bechet” (Chilton, 70).

The first recordings by the Ellington band to be released commercially:
DE also made a handful of recordings during the same period on which he can be heard playing piano for various singers, but they are, like the early band sides, of limited musical interest.
“If one searches for embryonic Ellington elements”:
Schuller, 321.

“If the Washingtonians had been better readers”:
Tucker, 170.

CHAPTER THREE
“ONLY MY OWN MUSIC”

SOURCES

Documents

A Duke Named Ellington,
TV documentary (WNET); Sonny Greer, oral-history interview, IJS; John Hammond, oral-history interview, Schomburg Center, New York Public Library; Louis Metcalf, oral-history interview, OHAM; Bob Mills, “Irving Mills,” www.redhotjazz.com/irvingmills.html; Irving Mills, oral-history interview, OHAM; George Wein, oral-history interview, EC.