Duke (9 page)

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The professional relationships that Ellington formed in the years after World War I lasted longer than most marriages. Sonny Greer, Otto Hardwick, and Arthur Whetsel, all of whom played in the Duke’s Serenaders, spent most of the rest of their professional careers working with Ellington and were playing with him long after he left Edna. They admired him both as a man and as an artist. Greer described him as “sharp as a Gillette blade . . . I’ve never seen another man like him. When he walks into a room, the whole place lights up.” Hardwick thought him “brilliant,” though he spoke with amusement about Ellington’s character: “Another remarkable thing about him is his passion for people. He’s warm-hearted, of course, but that’s not what I mean.
He likes to manipulate.
It’s not like using someone, it’s more like a game. Besides, what he does for you is beneficial. What he tries to get you to do—it’s good for you, if you do it.” All three men did what he wanted, and profited from it. They were the first in the long line of musical individualists who hitched their wagons to his star.

Hardwick and Whetsel were U Streeters, and both of them had gone to Dunbar High, where they acquired the same patina of good manners that served their future boss so well, just as their playing had a surface sheen that became a valued part of his musical palette. Hardwick, born in 1904 and always called “Toby” by his friends, started out as a bassist but took up C-melody saxophone at Ellington’s urging, later switching to alto saxophone. His slick, slightly oily tone and smooth lip slurs are among the most memorable instrumental colors to be heard on “Black and Tan Fantasy” and “Sophisticated Lady,” and though Johnny Hodges, who had a more up-to-date style, was to replace him as the band’s star saxophone soloist, Hardwick’s playing in the reed section was always instantly identifiable. As for Whetsel, Ellington appreciated his self-discipline and loved the gentle muted trumpet tone and “aural charisma” that light up “Mood Indigo” and can be heard to lovely effect on any number of other Ellington recordings of the twenties and thirties: “When he played the funeral march in ‘Black and Tan Fantasy,’ I used to see great, big ole tears running down people’s faces . . . his tonal character has never been duplicated, it was such a fragile thing, nobody has really had his gentility, fragility.”

Of the three, Greer was closest to Ellington, so much so that Mercer “thought of him as a member of the family.” Greer felt the same way: “Duke Ellington was like my brother, and I was like his.” Born in New Jersey sometime around 1895, he was a pencil-thin dandy who had worked in vaudeville as a teenager and thereafter played the drums with a stick-twirling flash rooted in his early stage experience. He hustled in poolrooms when jobs were scarce, but his musicianship was sufficiently honed to keep him busy. Greer moved to Washington in 1919 and started playing as a relief man in the pit band of the Howard Theatre the following year. Ellington, who met him around that time, was impressed that he had worked in New York: “Anybody who had been to New York had the edge on us.” The two men started playing together not long afterward, and before long the association became permanent. Ellington’s loyalty outlived Greer’s ability, and though he finally nudged the drummer out of the band in 1951, he kept his old friend on the payroll for years afterward.

For all his crowd-conscious flamboyance, Greer’s main goal was to make his fellow musicians look good. “I always strove for delicacy,” he said. “I always tried to shade and make everything sound beautiful. It was my job to keep the band in level time, to keep slow tempos from going down and fast tempos from going up. Those things meant more to me than solos, which I rarely took.” A time came when his methods sounded outmoded to younger ears. Gene Lees called his playing “slushy,” while Johnny Mandel compared him invidiously to the drummers who followed him into the Ellington band: “We used to say that nobody but Sonny Greer, who had strange time, could play with that band. We did not foresee how good it would sound when Sam Woodyard or Louis Bellson was with it.” But they heard him in middle age, after years of drinking had gnawed away at his skill. “Greer was not the world’s best reader of music,” said Ellington, “but he was the world’s best percussionist reactor. When he heard a ping he responded with the most apropos pong.” Whitney Balliett’s description of his style has never been bettered:

He used timpani and tomtoms a lot, filling cracks and cheering the soloists. He used deceptive, easy arrays of afterbeat rimshots that drove the band while remaining signals of cool. He flicked cowbells to launch a soloist, and he showered everyone with cymbals. He sparkled and exploded, but his taste never faltered.

None of these men was known for his hot solos, yet another indication that the “jass” played by the Duke’s Serenaders was fairly innocuous sounding. Ellington says nothing in
Music Is My Mistress
about having listened to early jazz recordings, and except for a single encounter with James P. Johnson, he did not hear any of the foremost jazz instrumentalists of the day in person prior to 1923. What he knew about jazz was what he heard around him, and it’s unlikely that anyone who lived in Washington knew much more about it than he did. But if he was a one-eared prince in a kingdom of the deaf, he was also wise enough to know his limitations, and to do something about them. Having “built up so much of a reputation that [he] had to study music seriously to protect it,” he began studying harmony with one of the most accomplished classical musicians on U Street. Henry Grant was a pianist, conductor, and composer who taught at Dunbar (Hardwick and Whetsel played in his school bands) and led church choirs and neighborhood glee clubs. He helped found the National Association of Negro Musicians in 1919 and edited its journal,
The Negro Musician,
in whose pages he praised Eubie Blake, another of his pupils: “I marvelled at his natural technique and got my first lesson—an insight into the soul of an exponent of ‘Ragtime.’”

While Ellington could not have found a more suitable teacher, he was too impatient with book learning to take more than “half a dozen” lessons from Grant. During that time, he said, “I discovered that F-sharp is not a G-flat. That was the end of my lessons . . . because I found out what I wanted to know.” If this is true, then he stopped short of grappling with anything beyond the basics of elementary harmony, and he is not known to have listened to classical music other than occasionally at any time in the first half of his life. Barry Ulanov states flatly in his 1946 biography, written with Ellington’s cooperation, that “Duke had little direct contact with the main stream of traditional music,” and Ellington himself said repeatedly that he was not influenced by classical music: “If
serious
means European music, I’m not interested in that. . . . I am not writing classical music, and the musical devices that have been handed down by serious composers have little bearing on modern swing.” To be sure, he also said that Grant “lighted the direction to more highly developed composition.” But he never learned from Henry Grant or anyone else how classical composers use harmony to articulate and propel large-scale musical structures, and the day would come when his lack of that knowledge served him ill.

Ellington learned a more immediately useful kind of lesson when a friend played him a new piano roll by James P. Johnson. “Carolina Shout” was Johnson’s cheval de bataille, the showpiece with which he vanquished all comers at “cutting sessions” in Harlem. The version that he cut for QRS in the summer of 1921 allowed other pianists to copy it note by note by slowing down to a crawl the playback mechanisms of their player pianos. That was how Ellington learned the piece, and he learned it so well that he soon felt confident enough to play the piece for the master himself. The occasion was a Washington concert called “The 20th Century Jazz Revue” at which he and other local artists appeared alongside Johnson. Ellington’s fans insisted that he play “Carolina Shout” for the composer, who was sufficiently impressed to go club-hopping with his young admirer. It was a night that Ellington never forgot: “What I absorbed on that occasion might, I think, have constituted a whole semester in a conservatory.” From then on he studied Johnson’s playing so closely that Garvin Bushell, a saxophonist who heard him two years later, testified that “he was playing like James P.,” though there were other pianists to whose tricks he paid close attention: “I also tried to copy the spectacular manner in which Luckey Roberts lifted his hands high above the keyboard as he played.” Films of Ellington shot in the twenties and thirties show that he learned that lesson, too, though he never overdid it. In his showboating as in all other things, he took care to be tasteful.

He was, if anything, more impressed when he heard Sidney Bechet, who appeared at the Howard Theatre in January of 1923. It was, he said, his “first real encounter” with New Orleans jazz, and Ellington never forgot the “power and imagination” of the older man’s clarinet playing: “Bechet to me was the very epitome of jazz. He represented and executed everything that had to do with the beauty of it all, and everything he played in his whole life was completely original.” Bechet was the most advanced of all the early jazz soloists who made recordings by which we can gauge their prowess today. His performances of “Wild Cat Blues” and “Kansas City Man Blues,” cut for OKeh later that year, were not only as fluent and rhythmically secure as anything that Louis Armstrong recorded with King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, but were also formally coherent to a degree that Armstrong, for all his prodigious gifts, had yet to attain.

Hearing Bechet and Johnson must have persuaded Ellington that he would have to leave Washington to develop further as an artist. He knew that his hometown was no paradise. In 1919 Washington had been put to the torch by a four-day-long race riot in which white mobs, inflamed by rumors that a black man had raped the wife of a white navy man, came to U Street with murder on their minds. Carter G. Woodson, a dean at Howard University, recalled their coming: “They had caught a Negro and deliberately held him as one would a beef for slaughter, and when they had conveniently adjusted him for lynching, they shot him. I heard him groaning in his struggle as I hurried away as fast as I could without running, expecting every moment to be lynched myself.” Ellington is not known to have spoken of the riot—he never discussed such things—but no black man who lived through those four nights could ever again doubt that he, too, was at risk. Perhaps that was when he first considered the possibility of moving to New York, for by 1923 he was sure that he wanted to live there: “Harlem, to our minds, did indeed have the world’s most glamorous atmosphere. We had to go there . . . it was New York that filled our imagination.”

Opportunity knocked when the clarinetist Wilbur Sweatman, who had played in Washington the preceding year, sent Sonny Greer a telegram inviting the drummer to come to New York and join his band. Today Sweatman is remembered as a novelty artist who was famous for playing three clarinets simultaneously, but he was a genuinely talented instrumentalist whose 1916 recording of his own “Down Home Rag,” made two months before the Original Dixieland Jazz Band cut “Livery Stable Blues,” comes close to breaking free from the rhythmic constraints of ragtime. Greer was interested in the offer but told Sweatman that he would only come if Ellington and Otto Hardwick could accompany him, and the clarinetist agreed to hire them as well. The three men went to New York in February, and a few days later they were playing at Harlem’s Lafayette Theatre with Sweatman, who was billed as the “MUCH IMITATED RAGTIME AND JAZZ CLARIONETIST.” It was Ellington’s first trip to New York, as well as the first time that he had played on a vaudeville bill: “It was another world to us, and we’d sit on the stage and keep a straight face. . . . [Sweatman] was a good musician, and he was in vaudeville because that was where the money was then, but I think things were beginning to cool off for him, and soon we were not doing so well.”

Sweatman went back to the road, and Ellington and his friends stayed behind in Harlem. Unable to find jobs, they hung out with other musicians, foremost among them Willie “the Lion” Smith, a cigar-chewing braggart who ranked just below James P. Johnson in the pantheon of Harlem pianists. Artie Shaw, who got to know Smith in the thirties, described him as having a “kind of nice, almost arrogant manner . . . he just knew who he was, he knew what he was about.” Smith in turn remembered Ellington as a “good-looking, well-mannered fellow; one of those guys you see him, you like him right away . . . I took a liking to him and he took a liking to me.” Ellington responded by listening attentively to his new friend’s compositions, which were unlike anything being played by his contemporaries. Smith was one of the first stride pianists to dispense with the rigid left-hand accompaniment patterns that he and his colleagues had taken from ragtime, replacing them with melodic figures and classical-style ostinati that made his salonlike pieces, which bore such titles as “Echoes of Spring” and “Morning Air,” sound like a blend of late ragtime and the light classics. Ellington was more open than most of his fellow pianists to Smith’s approach. In 1939 he recorded a gracefully swinging evocation of Smith’s musical language called “Portrait of the Lion,” and a quarter century later he said that the older pianist had been his “strongest influence.”

As much as Ellington and his friends loved New York and its artists, they could not live there without work, so they reluctantly returned to Washington. But they had seen the promised land, and the next time that Duke Ellington went there, it would be for keeps.

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By 1923 Harlem had replaced Washington as the unofficial capital of black America. It was a boiling cauldron of imaginative energy, and even its white neighbors were taking note of what would soon be dubbed the “Harlem Renaissance.” The flourishing of the black middle class had everything to do with the emergence of this movement, which throughout its decade-long existence was mainly literary. Black poets, novelists, scholars, and intellectuals like James Weldon Johnson, Alain Locke, Claude McKay, and (later) Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston published articles and books in which they proclaimed the emergence of what Locke, the head of Howard University’s philosophy department, called a “new Negro” who had broken “the vital inner grip of prejudice” and was becoming “a collaborator and participant in American civilization.”