The History of Jazz (25 page)

“Once upon a time a beautiful young lady and a very handsome young man fell in love and got married. They were a wonderful, compatible couple, and God blessed their marriage with a fine baby boy.” Thus begins Ellington’s own account of his life and times, as presented in his autobiography,
Music Is My Mistress
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No doubt Ellington viewed his own life in storybook terms. But the elegance of his childhood was more a matter of the family’s self-image than a result of affluence or social position. His father, James Edward Ellington, had been working as a waiter when, two years before his son’s birth, he took on a position as a servant in the home of a Washington, DC, doctor. For two decades, throughout his son’s formative years, the elder Ellington stayed with this employer, moving up the ranks from coachman to butler. By all accounts, the father’s sense of fashion, bearing, and grandiloquent manner of self-expression were the model for his son’s later assumption of the high style. Ellington’s mother, Daisy Kennedy Ellington, came from a more successful family: her father was a police captain; pretty, cultivated, proper—she represented the establishment ideals to which her husband aspired. Family finances may have been modest, but once again the image was what mattered most. Duke recalled that his father always “acted as though he had money, whether he had it or not.”
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In this unusual household—servants’ quarters with the decorum of a feudal manor—a son, Edward Kennedy Ellington, was born on April 29, 1899.

An earlier Ellington child apparently died in infancy, and the mother now focused her undivided attention on Edward, as did much of the extended family. “I was pampered and pampered, and spoiled rotten by all the women in the family,” Ellington later remarked. But the coddling of the doting mother was tempered by her focus on providing a moral education and her determined view that her son was destined for special achievements—a view that he too came to adopt. “Do I believe that I am blessed?” he asked rhetorically in his autobiography. “Of course, I do! In the first place, my mother told me so, many, many times, and when she did it was always quietly, confidently.”
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Inculcated almost from the cradle, this sense of self-importance would become a defining element in Ellington’s character. Even in his youth, he amazed and irritated his cousins, announcing to them: “I am the grand, noble Duke.”
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Two pianos graced the Ellington residence, and both parents showed some skill at playing them. Before their son reached his tenth birthday he had received lessons from a local music teacher, aptly named Mrs. Clinkscales. From all indications, this early introduction to the piano made little impression on Ellington, and by his adolescence an interest in the visual arts had taken hold of him. He attended a vocational high school and contemplated a career as a commercial artist. Had he been a more dedicated student, Ellington might never have considered music as anything more than a hobby. Instead, his interest in school waned, and he left before earning his diploma. Despite his limitations as a pianist—by his own admission, he only knew three or four songs at the time—opportunities to perform, first among friends but soon for pay, were starting to come his way.

Although his parents’ idea of acceptable music stopped far short of ragtime and blues, the young Ellington had already grown familiar with these new styles. A Washington, DC, poolroom that he frequented was a gathering spot for the local rag pianists, and before long Ellington was learning various tricks of the keyboard trade from the best of them and substituting for the regulars at engagements. Around this same time, a high school music teacher, Henry Grant, invited Ellington to come by his house for private lessons in harmony. Duke’s musical education was also furthered by surreptitious visits to burlesque shows, where he learned not only popular music styles but also, one suspects, elements of showmanship.

Ellington’s musical education was proceeding on many fronts, but the Harlem stride style of pianism made the deepest impression on the youngster’s imagination. He studied the piano rolls of James P. Johnson and learned the stride master’s “Carolina Shout” note for note. When Johnson came to Washington, DC, Ellington performed it for him, and earned the older pianist’s encouragement. Rote learning, however, played only a limited role in the youngster’s musical education. Almost from the start, Ellington preferred writing his own compositions, and his zest for learning about music was never greater than when he could apply the pedagogical models at hand to his own efforts. Ellington’s later evolution as a jazz composer followed this same pattern: he preferred to learn by doing rather than by analyzing scores, attending classes, or reading textbooks on composition and harmony. Formal study, to the degree he pursued it, was undertaken to meet his practical needs as a composer, not as a means of assimilating abstract theory. And like all great autodidacts, Ellington may have learned more slowly than he might have with an organized regimen, but he eventually learned with a far deeper grasp of the practicalities of his craft than any textbook could have provided.

Until his late teens, Ellington continued to view music as a sideline. But in 1918 he married Edna Thompson, whom he had known since childhood, and the following year their son Mercer was born. Now the responsibilities of supporting a family forced Ellington to think seriously about the career paths open to him. The goal of working as a commercial artist persisted for a period: Ellington even began a sign-painting business that allowed him to design dance posters and advertising materials. Around this same time he earned an NAACP scholarship to study art at the Pratt Institute in New York. Yet Ellington’s activities in music continued to blossom, and not just as a player. He began booking other bands, sometimes sending out several in a night, in addition to taking on his own gigs. By 1923, Ellington had established himself as a leading light of the Washington, DC, dance band scene, and had embarked on musical associations—with drummer Sonny Greer and saxophonist Otto Hardwick, among others—that would play an important role in his future. A less ambitious man might have remained content with this comfortable state of affairs. But Ellington, conscious of being marked for greater accomplishments, set his sights on making his name in New York. Together with Hardwick and Greer, he took a sideman’s job with a New York band, aiming to use it as a springboard to bigger things.

Rather than taking Manhattan by storm, Ellington and his friends scuffled for work in their new setting, and before long retreated to Washington. Chastened but not deterred, Ellington returned to sign painting and performing, but within months was drawn again to New York. Now he worked assiduously to advance his career on several fronts: he began auditioning songs for music publishers, expanding his network of New York contacts, and performing with a contingent of fellow musicians from DC who had also made the move to Manhattan. A chance encounter with singer Ada Smith, who would later enliven Paris nightlife under the name Bricktop, led to an engagement backing her at a Harlem nightclub. Within a short while, Ellington’s band (working under the name the Washingtonians) had moved to a downtown gig at the Hollywood Club near Times Square. The band would work at this location, which was renamed the Club Kentucky in 1924 (although typically referred to by Ellington and others as the Kentucky Club) for the next four years. At some point during this period, Ellington took over as nominal leader of the band.

Leadership is a relative concept in the often free-form world of jazz, and Ellington’s sidemen showed, more than most, a resistance to overt forms of control from above. Even so, Ellington soon began to demonstrate the genius for organizing and supervising that would come to distinguish his band from its peers. How much influence Ellington had on the choice of James “Bubber” Miley to replace the departing trumpeter Arthur Whetsel is unclear.
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Yet the move has all the marks of Ellington’s uncanny knack for finding the right individual to advance his own musical vision. Many other bandleaders would have passed on Miley. His technical facility was, at best, average; his gift for melodic improvisation, as evidenced by his knack for milking one or two notes for all they were worth, would have struck many as limited; his range was far from impressive. Yet Miley’s instinct for tonal color, for shaping a melody, for bringing a horn line to life was unsurpassed. As a stand-alone soloist he might have been several notches below an Armstrong or a Beiderbecke, but as the melodic voice for Ellington’s compositions, he would set the standard. And in one respect, Miley was superior to these more acclaimed players: in his mastery of the plunger and straight mute he was without peer. This South Carolina native, raised in New York, looked to the New Orleans stylist King Oliver for inspiration. Long after most of his contemporaries had adopted the more modern approaches of Armstrong and Beiderbecke, Miley maintained his allegiance to this early master of the muted cornet.

Ellington’s next major personnel move confirmed the new, unusual direction he envisioned for the band. When trombonist Charlie Irvis departed in 1926, Ellington brought in Tricky Sam Nanton. As with Miley, the choice of Nanton would have been far from obvious to most bandleaders. His facility with the slide was limited, and his range was constrained. Yet, again like Miley, Nanton was a master of the dirty tone and could make his horn talk in a language that was almost human. Already the pattern of Ellington’s future direction could be seen in embryonic form. At this point in his career, Ellington could not afford to hire star soloists—although he tried, for a while, to keep Sidney Bechet in the band—so he compensated by employing the most distinctive stylists he could find. The end result was a band that may have offered little in the way of virtuosity, as measured in cold metronomic terms, but boasted an excess of character. Ellington’s own piano style fit in well with this approach. It may have lacked the polished execution of a Waller, the dazzling speed of a Tatum, the soft swing of a Basie, or the riveting electricity of a Hines; but for sheer variety and exoticism, in its surprising twists and turns, the Duke’s pianism was nonpareil. This preference for the unusual would remain a calling card of Ellington’s music over the next several decades.

Almost from the start, listeners were drawn by the novelty of these new sounds. The earliest known review of the band, dating from 1923, praises Miley’s ability to exact “the eeriest sort of modulations and ‘singing’ notes heard.” Another reviewer cited Miley as “responsible for all that slow, weird music.”
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However, the initial recordings of the band only hint at the originality of Ellington’s conception. As early as the spring of 1926, Ellington’s ambitions could be seen in his choice to augment his small working band with additional players for record sessions; but the music still primarily reflects influences from other quarters—from Oliver, from Henderson, from the New York sweet bands. But with the November 1926 recording of “East Saint Louis Toodle-oo,” a more vibrant and original conception jumps to the fore. A foreboding progression of block chords, voiced for saxophones and tuba, sets up the opening theme, which is played by Miley with magnificent guttural intensity. The emotional level diminishes with the entrance of the second theme, a lighthearted bit of derivative syncopation, but the overall impact of the piece is powerful. True, various conventional devices of the day can still be detected—the shift from an ominous minor melody to a rag-inflected major theme was a stock-in-trade of the stride school; the solos, outside of Miley’s, are merely workmanlike—but the sense of a new stylistic direction for the Ellington band can be clearly heard.

“Black and Tan Fantasy,” from April of the following year—the first of three Ellington versions of this composition recorded in 1927—represents a second stage in the evolution of this new sound. Once again Miley’s trenchant mute work over a minor theme is used to fullest effect, but the contrasting melody in major is a strong lyrical statement, several notches above the tepidly swinging second section of “East Saint Louis Toodle-oo.” The atmosphere of this composition is, if anything, darker still than the earlier piece—so much so that the band closes with a fitting allusion to Chopin’s “Funeral March.” Miley’s solo work is superlative, and it is not going too far to suggest that his various performances of this composition represent classic statements in the history of jazz trumpet playing, worthy to stand alongside the more celebrated contributions of Armstrong and Beiderbecke. His mastery of tone remains the defining quality of his artistic vision, and gives a human quality to his music, beyond the scope of written scores to convey; yet this virtue tends to draw attention away from his ingenuity in melodic improvisation. Even when notated, when engraved in the dull medium of black notes on a page, his solos here retain a penetrating vitality despite the absence of the evocative growls and moans of his recorded delivery. His role in most histories of jazz—in essence, playing attendant lord to Ellington’s Hamlet—does not do full justice to his achievements.

In “Creole Love Call” from the following year, Ellington displays a more ruminative side of his musical personality, crafting one of the first substantial statements in a long series of meditative tone poems from the prewar years—others include “Mood Indigo,” “Solitude,” and “Prelude to a Kiss”—many of which would become permanent staples in the band’s repertoire. But even in the subdued atmosphere of “Creole Love Call,” Ellington’s fascination with exotic sounds takes precedence. Singer Adelaide Hall joins the band and contributes a plaintive wordless vocal that, at moments, takes on a rough edge comparable to (and likely inspired by) Miley’s mute work. The scoring, although understated, adds to the melancholy flavor of the piece, and is especially noteworthy for Ellington’s varied use of call-and-response exchanges.