Duke (97 page)

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Another song known to have been sung at the club was Andy Razaf’s “Kitchen Man,” recorded in 1929 by Bessie Smith: “His frankfurters are oh, so sweet / How I like his sausage meat.”

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Later on Otto Hardwick dubbed him “Jeep,” after the character in the
Popeye
comic strip.

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The piece is known today as “The Mooche,” but Ellington originally spelled the title without a terminal “e,” thereby intending to suggest (in his words) “a certain lazy gait peculiar to some of the folk of Harlem.” It was copyrighted as “The Mooch,” and is still identified as such on sheet music. The title, however, was spelled “The Mooche” on 78 labels when it was first recorded in 1928, and the alternate spelling, like that of “East St. Louis Toodle-O,” is now in universal use.

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The premiere of George Gershwin’s
An American in Paris
was reviewed in the same issue of the magazine, whose critic called the jazz-influenced work “a charming combination of urbanity and naïveté—really a highly desirable blend in a young composer.” The word
jazz
appears nowhere in the review.

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In a pop song written in AABA form, the contrasting eight-bar B strain is known to musicians as the “bridge” (or, alternatively, the “release”).

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Even when he shared credit for a song instead of buying it outright, though, Ellington extracted the maximum profit from the deal, a lesson that he learned from Irving Mills. In Clark Terry’s grudgingly admiring words, “If he liked [a song] he’d explain that, in order to record it, he would have to make himself half-composer. But what you didn’t realise was that he was going to publish it too—he had his own publishing company. First of all, publishing-wise, half belongs to the publishing company, so he’s already got half of it. Now he’s half-writer of it as well, so whack! There goes another bit, and he’s got six bits and you got a quarter!”

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In 1969 Ellington turned some of the themes from
Creole Rhapsody
into a rock-and-roll piece called “Neo-Creole” that he later incorporated into his score for the film
Change of Mind
.

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Ellington had been allowed to supply a score of his own for his sixth Cotton Club show, “Blackberries of 1930,” but none of the songs was successful and the experiment would not soon be repeated.

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It was more than just a sop to Hughes’s vanity for the Ellington band to have performed “Sirocco.” He was a jazz composer of distinction, the first anywhere to be influenced by Ellington, and he had traveled to the United States earlier in 1933 to record several of his pieces with an all-star band whose members included Henry “Red” Allen, Benny Carter, Sid Catlett, and Coleman Hawkins. “Sirocco,” recorded in England the previous year, bears the unmistakable stamp of Ellington’s own “Mystery Song.” (Hughes’s other jazz recordings include the first cover versions of Ellington’s “Misty Mornin’” and “The Mooche,” both made in 1930.)

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The only member of the band who was unfazed by the Deep South was Ivie Anderson. “Being a woman, naturally, she felt that she could get away with things and that no one would harm her or hit her,” said Herb Jeffries, who joined the band in 1939. “And of course, when she was in the south, you had to be very careful with her, if you got out of line with her, she’d tell you off, you know, she’d tell a redneck off in a minute, especially if he used that word [nigger], you know, I mean she didn’t care.”

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“Boy Meets Horn” was originally called “Stew Burp” and, later, “Twits and Twerps,” a pair of titles that drolly suggest the sound of Stewart’s half-valved notes.

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It’s interesting to consider the possibility that
Reminiscing in Tempo
might have been influenced by the music of Delius, which Ellington had heard for the first time after visiting England in 1933. Given the fact that Delius’s rhapsodic scores are not known (to put it mildly) for their architectural rigor, it stands to reason that a jazz composer who, like Ellington, was largely unfamiliar with the classical literature might well have been swayed by Delius’s approach to musical form.

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Over the years Hodges would prove to be Ellington’s most fertile source of songworthy melodic fragments. Oakley described him as “an absolute song factory.” Once he caught on to what his employer was up to, though, he insisted on being paid for his contributions. “Come out of the kitchen,” he growled when he caught Ellington turning one of his riffs into a tune that was recorded in 1938 as “Hodge Podge.” (The song was jointly credited to both men on the resulting small-group recording.)

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Whetsel was replaced by Wallace Jones, who served as the band’s lead trumpeter until 1944. Though he rarely soloed, Jones was required to play Whetsel’s high-register ensemble part in “Mood Indigo,” and Mercer Ellington claimed that doing so “was what drove [him] into becoming a funeral director! . . . He had nightmares and cold sweats about it.”

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It was Otto Hardwick who dubbed him “Swee’ Pea,” a nickname that came from the character of the same name in the Popeye comic strip, an adorable baby who was thought by the members of the band to resemble Strayhorn. (He was also called “Strays” and, in his earliest years with the Ellington band, “Weely.”)

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Except for Ella Fitzgerald, even the most talented singers found Strayhorn’s songs elusive, and still do. Frank Sinatra, one of his greatest admirers, tried unsuccessfully to record “Lush Life” in 1958. Surviving outtakes from the session show that it was the chromatically twisting melody of the chorus that defeated him.

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Surviving live recordings of Ellington’s 1940 pieces demonstrate their musical economy. Whenever he opens up a chart to make additional room for solos, its total effect is diminished (though the solos are always interesting in their own right).

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Williams was not the only member of the band to furnish the uncredited melody for a 1940 composition that later became a hit song. The same thing happened with “Never No Lament,” whose main theme, a Johnny Hodges riff, was turned by Ellington and Russell into “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore.”

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In 1939 Barnet went so far as to record an “original” composition called “The Duke’s Idea” in which he not only evokes Ellington’s orchestral style but imitates Johnny Hodges’s saxophone playing.

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Ellington was, like Olivier Messiaen, Alexander Scriabin, and Jean Sibelius, a synesthete: “I hear a note by one of the fellows in the band and it’s one color. I hear the same note played by someone else and it’s a different color. . . . If Harry Carney is playing, D is dark blue burlap. If Johnny Hodges is playing, G becomes light blue satin.”

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“Cotton Tail” is solely credited to Ellington, but Webster is thought to have both composed the tune and arranged the equally celebrated
soli
chorus played by the saxophone section, which he wrote during his tenure with Teddy Wilson’s band.

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Stewart also claimed that Ellington refused to pay Johnny Hodges extra for doubling on soprano saxophone, causing Hodges to stop playing the instrument with the band in 1941. Hodges, however, denied it: “I gave it up when Cootie Williams left the band. . . . I started having a lot of alto solos to play, and I figured they were responsibility enough.”

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Pins and Needles
, which ran for 1,108 performances on Broadway, was so beloved of the American left that Michael Straight, a wealthy American student at Cambridge University who later became a Russian spy, taught its best-remembered song to his Communist friends in England: “Sing me a song of social significance / There’s nothing else that will do.”

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Bolden, one of the legendary figures of early New Orleans jazz, would later figure in another of Ellington’s extended works, the 1957 TV special
A Drum Is a Woman.

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The word
jazz
appears only once in the liner notes to the 78 album of excerpts from
Black, Brown and Beige,
and it is not used to describe Ellington’s music: “He opened at a little Broadway spot called the Kentucky Club, and soon the city’s jazz enthusiasts were spreading glowing word of his band.”

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Far from having anything to do with Ellington’s stated conception, the harmonically recherché “Strange Feeling,” a vocal movement whose lyrics (“This strange feeling is seeping through my blood / This strange feeling is sleeping somewhere cuddled up inside me”) were also written by Strayhorn, seems to refer to his collaborator’s homosexuality.

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Elsewhere in the piece, Boyer notes that “Duke is six feet tall and weighs two hundred and ten pounds.” The former figure was accurate, the latter almost certainly on the low side, though Ellington lost a good deal of weight later in life.

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Anderson, who described himself as “highly strung,” was despised by many of his fellow musicians, so much so that he actually drove Rex Stewart out of the band. According to Clark Terry, the trumpeter was a kleptomaniac who “had a habit of staying on the bus at rest stops and pretending he was sleeping. Then when everybody got off the bus, he’d ransack [the band’s] things.”

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The great gypsy guitarist’s appearances were less eventful than they should have been. Hired as a guest soloist, he jammed with the band on standards and impromptu riff tunes, and Ellington wrote nothing new for him to play.

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He put it more earthily in an unpublished 1956 interview: “Writing for the symphony orchestra is a technique, you know. And rather than expose myself completely to all this shit, I mean, I just turn it over . . . I make a six-line score and give it to Luther [Henderson] and let him do it . . . with suggestions, you know.”

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Ellington was so adamantly opposed to Soviet Communism that when he toured the Soviet Union in 1971, he insisted for the first and only time that his musicians fly in the first-class section alongside their leader, thus demonstrating the advantages of capitalism, under which anybody with enough money to pay for a ticket could travel first class.

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Films taken in the fifties and afterward show that Ellington (like Vladimir Horowitz, Art Tatum, Thelonious Monk, and Bill Evans) played with flattened fingers, which produces a deeper, warmer sound.

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Ellington later returned the compliment. His 1953 trio recording of “Kinda Dukish” ends with a quote from Monk’s “52nd Street Theme.”

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Except for a number of still photos, the only surviving visual document of the telecast currently in circulation is a fuzzy black-and-white kinescope that fails to show how
A Drum Is a Woman
looked to the handful of viewers who were able to see it in color.

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It was on the 1958 tour that Ellington met Queen Elizabeth II in London. “Struck speechless” by her grace, he responded with one of his most elegant gestures, writing with Strayhorn a piece called
The Queen’s Suite
, then recording it and having a single copy of the album pressed for her alone.

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It was not Ellington’s first brush with the Oscars. The band had played for dancing at the 1934 Academy Awards banquet in Los Angeles.

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In exchange for Ellington’s services, Morris Levy, the owner of Roulette Records, struck a deal that allowed Count Basie, a Roulette artist, to appear on a 1961 Columbia album called
First Time! The Count Meets the Duke
on which the Basie and Ellington bands played together in the studio.

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The band, for instance, was paid $19,000 a week (roughly $100,000 in today’s dollars) for performing in Russia.

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Ellington’s own method for disciplining players who showed up drunk or high was to put them on the spot by making them play lengthy up-tempo solos. Once Gonsalves figured out the system, he would pretend to be drunk whenever he wanted to show off for a friend in the audience.

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Ellington was not the only artist of a certain age who embarrassed himself that Sunday night. Peggy Lee sang “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” while Edward Villella danced a solo to “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”

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It is interesting to speculate on what would have happened to
Black, Brown and Beige
if the critics who panned the Carnegie Hall premiere had instead encouraged Ellington to revise it as extensively as he did the First Sacred Concert. Had they done so, his subsequent composing career might well have taken a very different shape.