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Tuesday, October 8, 2024

Henry Blankfort, Studio City, 8/13/82

Mr. Blankfort and I conversed outdoors, poolside on a patio in his backyard.  I found him extremely engaging, articulate, and eager to tell his story to someone of my generation.  During the course of our talk, I was introduced to his wife Sylvia, and from time to time his young grandson came out, whereupon Henry would ask him to find a cigarette for him.  I was a smoker at that time, and he didn't hesitate to take one of mine, insisting he was doing me a favor by taking it away from me.

Our conversation was leisurely, but organized, and we spent a good two hours together.

HB:  I suppose the way to begin is to start with Jump for Joy, which is how I first met Ellington.

DC:  I'd like to go back to before Jump for Joy.  You were a member of the Hollywood Theater Alliance.  Tell me about that first.

Yes, I was the director for the Hollywood Theater Alliance.  This was back during the Depression, 1939, and a group of writers and I were unhappy about the nation and the world, which is something inborn in writers, I guess.  We felt this town had an enormous amount of talent that had no opportunity.

I was in New York at the time, at a cabaret called TAC, the Theater Arts Cabaret.  We were open Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday.  It was really a showcase for people involved with theater.

Who were the members of TAC?

Oh, I don't know their precise names, but probably from the Theater Guild.   Most of these writers tried our space as a hangout, where they could come as sort of a club and, at the same time, give opportunity.

The people who started the Hollywood Theater Alliance, and then in New York with the Theater Guild and also the Civic Theater downtown.   And we thought we might do the same thing here:  not only a non-profit thing, but a less-profit thing.  We put in some bucks and rented a little place, just Saturdays and Sundays.  The people who performed would get the profits, if there were any.  We'd feed them and write them material for a week.  Each one of us put in money to get the set launched, and we rented a little place on Sunset Boulevard.

Most of the people who started the Hollywood Theater Alliance were left of liberal, and naturally their thinking took on a color taint.  Some of the people in the administration of this city did not like this, so we usually had a [police] Red Squad out here.

Am I correct in thinking this was not an organized [Communist] Party political thing, with a Party fraction behind it?

 


 




















Henry Blankfort, far right, confronts HUAC in Hollywood, 1951.




















































Henry Blankfort testifies before HUAC in Hollywood, 1951

























I.     L.A. Times Obit, June 22, 1993


Henry Blankfort; Screenwriter Was Blacklisted in McCarthy Era

Henry Blankfort, 90, a screenwriter who became a publicist after he was blacklisted during the McCarthy era died Wednesday in North Hollywood of cardiac arrest.  A native of New York, Blankfort moved to LA in 1936 and three years later became director of the Hollywood Theater Alliance, where he co=wrote its "Meet the People."  He wrote or co-wrote 25 screenplays, including "Tales of Manhattan" and "Double Exposure."  During World War II, Blankfort made military films for the Signal Corps.  His show business career ended after he refused in 1951to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which was seeking information about Communists in Hollywood.  

II.    Interview,  Studio City home, 8/13/82

Henry Blankfort spoke with me for two hours.  Throughout our conversation, he was articulate, remembered the past vividly, and was eager to tell me his story.  When I mentioned my earlier talk with Sid Kuller, Blankfort was surprised he was still alive and living in Beverly Hills.  He resolved to give Kuller a call. 

     A. Genesis of Meet the People, 1939

 HB was then the exec dir of the Hollywood Theater Alliance, described as "mostly a writers' hangout."  Evolved into a co-op to produce cabaret theater in LA, music and schtick comedy.  New York at the time had much more of this kind of entertainment.

Before MTP, the Alliance had conceived a play with the theme of fascism     

     B.  The Alliance was not exactly a non-profit.  It was a "less profit," out-of -pocket seed money.  The performers were paid with whatever the show took in.  Most of the Alliance's members were "left of liberal."  (Not an organized CPUSA fraction!). Meet the People was strongly influenced by their outlook.

When trying to open the show as a cabaret, they couldn't get a liquor license.  So MTP became instead a "variety show."  HB:  "tremendously successful... made me the executive director in charge of production."  The creative team included Jay Gornay,  H. Myers, for the music.  The entire cast contributed skits at the ? Theater.  The box office took in $24 on opening day.  The columnist Hedda Hopper denounced the show "attacked all our principles, but audiences gave it standing ovations." 

We continued talking about the Red Hunt, HUAC in the 1950s.  MTP had a decidedly anti-racist thrust and introduced a song whose lyrics quoted the Bill of Rights in the U.S. Constitution.  The show received bomb threats.  But it was so successful that it was able to perform in ever larger venues in LA, even opened in San Francisco and aimed for Broadway.  Initial stars were Jack Albert and Virginia O'Brien.

By the coincidence of O'Brien's having to leave the show, according to Blankfort, MTP was the very first show with a biracial cast, by the presence of the teen-aged Dorothy Dandridge (who would perform again in Ellington's show two years later).  Blankfort auditioned her privately, away from the rest of the cast, but she was frightened and did badly at first and wanted to leave the room.  
Blankfort followed her out and told her she'd been great.  After continuing private rehearsals, Blankfort announced to the rest that Dandridge would replace O'Brien and ignored those who feared how audiences might react.  Blankfort drove her home at night.  

Dorothy Dandridge's movie career began (soon after?) with a contract with MGM.

"Sensational hit":  The show kept changing sketches to remain involved in the issues of the day.  There was an election campaign skit, in which an actor with his back to the audience turns to reveal his rubber mask of FDR.  He goes on to perform a song, "The Same Old South."  The show began making money.  After touring a wider swath of Southern California, the show opened in SF.  Parts of the show were also performed at strikers' picket lines.**

MTP was the longest-running Hollywood theater attraction for many years.  The show spawned road companies and Actor's Lab classes.  Blankfort himself earned $150 a week and left his usual job as a screenwriter for a time.

MTP ran successfully in SF and Chicago, but in New York its competition included the huge hit Pal Joey (Rodgers & Hart?) starring Gene Kelly, and consequently MTP closed after a very short run.  In New York the critics regarded it as "outlanders from California invading the Bi9g Apple."  Once the company returned home, some had the idea of mounting a MTP number two, but Blankfort was uncomfortable with it.  In the end there was no serious intent about such a production."

But in the following year the Hollywood Theater Alliance conceived the idea of an all-Negro revue.  Their first intent didn't attain fruition, but the following year a series of circumstances brought JFJ to another Hollywood theater smash hit.

HB met Sid Kuller, who then lived in Beverly Hills, whose screen writing a few years earlier. had contributed to the controversial (?) film  Zero Hour.  After they had exchanged ideas, the pair organized the American Revue Theater to have another try at an all-Negro revue.  There was considerable support in the show business community.

Parenthetically, Blankfort was optimistic:  "I have a feeling the space program is going to bring peace to the world.  Nations, as they exist today, are a silly thing."

Blankfort supervised the entire production of JFJ.  


*The title sounds like it might have inspired some ditties in Jump for Joy a couple of years later.  Ellington's show was controversial in the same way.

**Answering an earlier question of mine about the direct involvement of the CPUSA, here remarked, 
"Moscow had nothing to do with it.  We went on to the subject of the Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939, specifically a cartoon of Stalin dancing with Hitler, each one hiding a dagger 


Friday, August 30, 2024

An Excerpt from “Twelve Essays in Critical Appreciation Concerning the Music of Duke Ellington”



 

Among the memoirs by persons who made the acquaintance of Ellington upon his first visit to England in 1933, one of the most interesting is that of Russell Woodward, penned at Cambridge in October of that year.  A book-length manuscript, excerpts from which were used in 1935 by the Associated Negro Press, most of Woodward’s twelve essays are devoted to analysis of Ellington’s compositions and the playing styles of his soloists.  The one included here, however, is a good example of the kind of impression Ellington made on the English.

The complete typewritten manuscript may be found in the Claude Barnett file of the library of the Chicago Historical Society.  The following text, except for minor typographical corrections, reproduces exactly the original manuscript.

 


The Eleventh Essay

Although these essays are critical rather than biographical, I feel impelled to include a personal note on the subject of the man who composes the music; and though the short essay which follows may seem out of place in an appreciation of his work, it is not intended to serve as mere “fan fodder.”  Its only purpose is to provide yet another viewpoint from which the music of Duke Ellington may be studied; If it fails in such purpose, then it must be condemned as irrelevant.

I enjoyed a great deal of Ellington’s company when he was in England.  Whether the pleasure was mutual I do not know, for the charm of the man is such that he could only silence the most effective of “Some of These Days.”  Most composers would have become embittered by such treatment, but not so the Duke.  He knows that variety shows provide the wherewithal to retain his orchestra.  That being so, he must make sacrifices in one direction and nurture his brain-children in his spare time.  It is to his eternal credit that he does it with good will.

Perhaps it is his humour which preserves him from bitterness.  His sense of humour is just right; not excessive, not irrevocably intellectual, not cruel.  His laughter is not reserved for the climax of an anecdote.  The humour of “Ducky Wucky” can only be fully appreciated when you have seen Ellington’s complete smile—complete in the sense that it is the expression of his inmost feelings.  He smiles sincerely.  His humour makes him tolerant, and only on two occasions have I known him to be vexed; one of them was when he was describing the relative amount of applause awarded to “Lazy Rhapsody” and “Tiger Rag” at a concert arranged specially for those interested in his music, and then his annoyance was directed, not against the audience but against the organisers of the concert who promised him a receptive audience and whose optimism was unjustified.  (I am afraid that we differed at that point:  my sympathies were all for the courageous “Melody Maker” people who must have suffered a painful disillusionment.)  The other occasion was when, after playing at a dance at Bolton, the driver of his car lost the way home and eventually deposited him in Liverpool at about six a.m.  Even that mishap did not perturb him very violently, and after he had slept he treated the matter as a joke.  “I can drive a car and I can read signposts, so I don’t see why I should have paid that guy to do it,” was his only remark.  He is the best tempered of men, and his indignation is only roused by circumstances which justify it.\

Jack Hylton meets the band


His activities as a composer excepted, he is inordinately lazy.  Whether this is inborn or an acquired habit of sleeping whenever an opportunity occurs in his most exacting life, I do not know; I suspect it is a combination of both.  Certainly, he is the nearest living approach to Rip Van Winkle, for there cannot be another man who can sleep for so long at a stretch.  Combined with an absolute lack of any time sense, this attribute has caused many anxious moments to his managers.  To refuse to admit the claims of the clock is from a worldly point of view sheer madness; Duke had to have his keepers.  Unfortunately, the “head-keeper” was no mean exponent of the art of sleeping either, and I well remember one particularly exciting morning when we had to catch the 11:40 train.  At 11:39 I had given up hope and relinquished the compartment, but half a minute later a white cap with Mr. Ellington underneath it came sauntering along.  Apparently at 11:30 he had been in bed.  I may add that he was staying at the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool, and that exchange station is right at the other end of town!

The characteristic which endears him to everyone is his modesty, for there is nothing sham about it.  He does not deprecate his own music, for as is right he believes in it, but he finds no pleasure in talking has succeeded.   Abuse “Sophisticated Lady” to the point of obscenity, and the reply will be, “You don’t like it?”; or praise “Old Man Blues” to the skies and the reply will be either, “Yes, Barney plays marvelously in that,” or “Look, what’s that building on the corner?”  Constructive criticism he welcomes, but he evades discussion of the points at issue.  From all members of his band, I have heard the same tribute: “The Duke’s a grand guy; he’s never changed.”  All the limelight and publicity leave him unspoilt.  He is so utterly natural, so absolutely devoid of affectation, that no success could harm him.  His interest in life, the people around him, and the little events of the day preclude any possibility of egotism.  His work takes up the remainder of his waking hours.

At the London Palladium


His faith in his own music is not a relative faith.  He never stops to consider whether it is worse than this or better than that.  His praise for the work of other composers is never affected by the fact that he himself is a composer.  One night when I was looking through some records in his dressing-room, I found, hidden between a Bach fugue and a Don Redman record, Spike Hughes’ “Sirocco.”  I turned to Duke and asked his opinion of it, and for the next few minutes I was regaled with a glowing eulogy of Hughes’ work in general and “Sirocco” in particular, a speech so sincere that it might have come from a young student of music.  It was from that moment that I realized his essential bigness, and I felt pity for the little critic who had, in abusing his music, called him “shoddy.”


          

So far only the lazy charm of the man has been mentioned; that is the side of his character which is discernable.   But behind these delightful attributes is a power which is felt subconsciously rather than discerned, the power of a great artist.  He strength of character needs no emphasis; it does not prod you in the stomach, for it does not require a focal point for its force.  He commands by suggestion, for on the vast majority of occasions his suggestions are obviously right; if they are not and it is explained to him why they are not, he agrees instantly.  That is how he rehearses his orchestra.  Command a man to do something and he may refuse; command his respect first, and a mere hint may be enough.  Only greatness can command that respect, especially among artists.

Sincerity in itself is not greatness, as the more extreme romantics would have us believe, but greatness is not possible without sincerity.  Ellington’s sincerity is a part of his life; when he says “Thank you,” he is grateful, for he is intensely of any kindness toward him.  It is that sincerity combined with a refusal to admit defeat which must have helped him out when jazz was scorned even more than is so today, and when only the inanities of “Rhapsody in Blue” were considered worthy of attention—presumably because it displays a great deal of misplaced cleverness and is “symphonic.”  It is that sincerity which has brought forth the best from his men, which as kept the orchestra together for an unprecedented length of time, and which at length has begun to reap its reward.  The music of Duke Ellington is the voice of a man, proud of his race, unaffected, far above the petty worlds of “commercial art” and hero worship, a man whose companionship elevates those with whom he associates toward his own level.  When I read again the lives of many great artists with their drink and their women, my regard for him is the greater.  It is a fine thing indeed when the artistic temperament exhibits itself as it does in the case of the Duke.  

Tuesday, August 20, 2024

THINGS AIN'T, RECAPITULATION AND CODA

 V.  RECAPITULATION AND CODA

 


This study has traced the rise, decline and resurrection, as it were, of one African-American artist, Duke Ellington, but it has attempted to balance his story against the economic, social and political background which intrudes upon it at every turn.  Without this background, Ellington’s life cannot be portrayed fully, yet the image of the man left us by most writers has been almost devoid of the often unpleasant facts of existence for a Black genius trapped in a racist society.

It is for this reason that I’ve paid rather scant attention to the subject of his particular musical genius, since other writers have commented at length, and often perceptively, about it.  A full assessment of what Ellington represented musically is a tempting project in itself, but it was perhaps best stated in a remark, attributed to Miles Davis, that all jazz musicians should daily get on their knees to thank Duke Ellington.  Their debt to Ellington, in a musical sense, derives not so much from any direct influence he had upon his contemporaries or descendants—Ellington was, as a pianist, bandleader, composer and arranger, unique, although Charles Mingus and Thelonious Monk might be counted among his progeny, as it does from his development of a new range of expression for Black folk culture.  Through Ellington, particularly in its use of the chromatic scale.

Ellington, along with others of his generation, recreated the African-American folk idiom into perhaps the most pervasive cultural force of the past century.  It has indeed transcended nearly every geographical and political boundary on this planet.  Its sheer impact upon world culture dwarfs the achievement of any European composer who ever lived.  The role of Duke Ellington in establishing this music was, of course, preeminent.

At the same time, African-American music has been rejected consistently by the white cultural establishment.  While its creators have been ruthlessly exploited by the purveyors of popular entertainment, untold fortunes having been wrung from jazz and its commercialized derivatives, it has never been given its due recognition by the elite of “serious music.”  Most of Ellington’s career was devoted to gaining this sort of recognition, and many of his works, particularly those he composed for performance at Carnegie Hall in the 1940s, must be considered in this context.  Of these, critic Stanley Dance wrote,

The longer works and suites offered Ellington opportunities to express himself more expansively and with more freedom, to “put on” the audience playfully and, more important, to proceed with a series of “social significance thrusts.”  He was a subtle tactician engaged in warfare all his life who those who cheated him in business whenever they could, and those who discriminated against what he called “my people.” …

He walked, as it were, a musical tightrope, a smile on one side of his face, a frown on the other.[1]

As his music was the expression, from his point of view, of a complex set of contradictory social relations, we find the same forces expressed in Ellington’s personality, both in the dapper aristocrat he appeared to be in public and in the little-known character he adopted in private, which some found unpleasant.  To a remark, made by one critic after Ellington’s death, that he was a vain and cunning man, Dance replied,

Cunning, in the sense that he was very shrewd, he certainly had to be, to fight powerful adversaries.  Inevitably there were many who resented a black musician attaining the position he did and commanding so much respect throughout the world.

Another critic, detecting “a vein of snobbery” in Ellington, caused Dance to comment that, in taking his music around the world, it was necessary for Ellington to reciprocate the respect he received from heads of state and others, because he felt “when they showed him respect he was gaining respect for his race.”[2]  There is at least a kernel of truth in this judgment.  It corroborates Mercer Ellington’s observation of his father’s desire to be considered “a credit to his race,” and was in fact the keystone of a social philosophy which seemed an almost comic anachronism to the generation which grew up in the latter half of Ellington’s career.

To his own generation, and to the Blacks who came of age in the 1930s, Ellington was as much symbolic ideal as were Billy Eckstine and Miles Davis in the following decades.  Since the symbology of success in America has always been a matter of finances, it was perhaps Ellington’s acumen as a businessman, rather than his stature as a musician, which garnered him such adulation at the zenith of his career as a popular performer.  Whatever success he achieved in this regard, however, was done at considerable expense; Ellington remained, to the end of his days, a “sharecropper” eating well at the white man’s table.

Success was therefore a matter of compromises and sacrifices.  If Ellington was able to utilize his superlative musical genius to offset the restrictions imposed upon him as an artist, he was not so fortunate when it came to the role he wished to play socially and politically.  Ellington’s espousal of racial pride, which in the context of the 1930s and ‘40s appeared militant, and had to be curtailed.  The war was somewhat responsible for changing his persuasion, but he was shaken more severely by the outright persecution inflicted upon him, both by the government and by the Negro establishment, in the early 1950s.

Before that time, Ellington had made gestures of patriotism.  Upon the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, for example, the Ellington orchestra played a long program of his compositions on the Blue Network (the predecessor to ABC) and was said to be “proud of the fact this was really the only American music heard on thee air that dreadful day.”[3]  Years before, he had broadcast all night from a Chicago Ballroom to keep the lines open for bulletins about the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby.

Thirty years later, however, this patriotism (now subsidized by the U.S. State Department)     appeared forced and was used to camouflage the oppression of Blacks in the United States.  Of his 1963 tour of Indian, for example, Ellington wrote,

At the press conferences, we would talk about jazz and, very often, the race situation in America.  Some of them wanted information, but others wanted to discuss it from a more provocative viewpoint, and then I would have to explain that the situation of the Negro in America was more complex than we had time to clarify, but I always told them that the Negro has a tremendous investment in our country.  We have helped to build it and we have invested blood in every war the country has fought, and this accounts for what has been happening.  “What is being done now?” they would ask, and I would reply that I was sure our leaders have strategy, but that if I knew it I wouldn’t be very bright to reveal it, to cast it around for publication, because it would help our opponents to put up an even more formidable resistance than they now have.  One man asked me, “Why hasn’t the Negro artist done more for the cause?”  That upset me and I said, “If you knew what you were talking about, you wouldn’t ask a question like that.”  I came back to him later, after I had cooled off a   bit, and explained that we had been working on the Negro situation and h his condition in the South since the ‘30s, that we had done shows[4], musical works, benefits, etc., and that the American Negro artist had been among the first to make major contributions.”[5]

Elsewhere, Ellington reported a similar skirmish abroad concerning the race question in America:

“The United States has a minority problem… Negroes are one of several minority groups, but the basis of the whole problem is economic rather than a matter of color.”

While my opponent is busily thinking, I give him another opportunity by introducing another subject.

“The United States has an extremely accurate news service and the press enjoys almost complete freedom,” I claim.  “Did you. Incidentally, hear about the five little girls who were burned up in that church down in Alabama the other day?”

“Yes”, he says with great triumph.

“Well, that was only a couple of days ago, and I’m not sure anybody else would have let such news get out that quickly if it had happened in their backyard.”

He has nothing to say to that, so I carry on:

“You have heard of the Reverend Martin Luther King, I’m sure.”

“Yes,” he says, with a measure of exultancy in his voice again.

“Let us say that he is the representative of an oppressed race of people…  When I saw him just before I left Chicago a few weeks ago, he was coming down Michigan Avenue.  I waved to  him, and in order for him to say hello to me, he had to have his chauffeur stop this long Cadillac.  An aide got out and opened the door, and two motor policemen in front of the car, and two more behind, had to stoop so that he could get out and shake hands with me. This is the way the man lives and travels who is representing that oppressed race, so the standards are not the same every place in the world. They vary according to where you are.”[6] 

Such incidents, repeated everywhere in the world Ellington traveled, contributed strongly toward the Uncle Tom image which would alienate his younger audience.  In many instances, he showed an astonishing lack of tact, as during his performance in 1969 at San Francisco State University, while the African-American students there were conducting a strike.  According to Ralph Gleason, Ellington’s $3,000 fee was “paid out of [university president S.I.] Hayakawa’s contingency fund, the initial $50,000 of which Chicago millionaire W. Clement Stone contributed.”  Members of the local Black Student Union and American Federation of Teachers grew concerned that Ellington “did not know where Hayakawa was at.”  Contrary to rumors that Ellington would endorse the BSU at his concert, his announcement attempted to skirt the issue: “This concert is totally dedicated to those of us who are determinedly dedicated to developing the Black Studies program.  This remark drew applause, but when Ellington, mentioned him as “our choreographer,” he was booed loudly.  At a reception after the concert, “a BSU member smarting from Ellington’s even mentioning Hayakawa, put the Duke down in plain terms.”[7]

In public during his last years, Ellington was a creature of the establishment, so much so that it is difficult to determine his feelings about major social issues.  In Mercer Ellington’s account, there was much more perception in his thought than he allowed the public to see:

  Like Martin Luther King, he was not so much interested in the race aspect per ce as in the consideration of minority groups, the downtrodden and deprived.  The idea of equality he held paramount, progressively so toward the culmination of his life. He equated the black situation  inn America with other troubled situations in the world, like that of the Arabs versus the Jews, or the one-time predicament of African Pygmies under Senegalese domination.  He watched with great interest the struggle for independence from Britain in the West Indies.

The principle here—the immorality of man’s enslavement of man—and its inadmissibility took hold of his mind quite early on.  It was strengthened and authenticated by what he read in the Bible:  that man   should not suffer under another man’s hand.  He began to think more subjectively, seeing himself as a man placed in a subordinate position as a black man.  The idea that he should try to change what destiny seemed to have decreed grew in him, and stayed with him till the end.  Very often, and in many ways, he came out and stated honestly and definitely how he felt, but this was only with people he was close to and not for the record.[8]

Ellington was careful to insert clauses against segregated audiences in all his contracts.  In addition to Martin Luther King, he was known to admire Paul Robeson, Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X, but he deplored the various ideological, national and caste divisions among Blacks, insisting at the same time that “blacks in the United States should look on themselves as Americans primarily and should try to straighten things out within the family before going outside.”  As for himself, however, the raciaHisl struggle “was an area where Ellington never wanted to push himself to the front, never wanted esteem or to be considered heroic.  He preferred to be accused of doing too little than to be lauded as a great man helping his people when within himself he felt unable to do enough,”[9]

Ellington’s well-known aversion to communism is reported by his son to have been genuine and based on religious convictions (“He disliked anything the played down the idea of the church, and he knew that communism never tolerated any philosophy other than its own.”[10]), yet it is hard to escape the conclusion that his pronouncements on this subject were based, at least in part, of the fear of a repetition of the red-baiting which had scandalized his name and nearly terminated his career in 1950.  His professional association with radicals, including Communists, had been far more than casual, but whatever regard he had for them had to be sacrificed to create the image of Ellington as the ideal representative of his race.

In a sense, Ellington was prosaically typical of his race, at least according to the portrait of him drawn by his son, for his life seems a perfect case history for E. Franklin Frazier’s Black Bourgeoisie.  Indeed, the private life Duke Ellington exhibited traits that went beyond mere superstition, religiosity, or even mysticism, to what his son concedes was outright paranoia:

I firmly believe that from around 1950 onward Ellington began to develop a pronounced form of paranoia.  He blamed different things on different sets of people.  In world events, he believed prominent men were often influenced to act wrongly or indulge in reprisals by women somewhere in the background.  He’d take headlines and check back to prove his theory.  When something bad happened on the international level, he often saw the handiwork of people in powerful positions, communists, financiers, or both.  While he believed that communists worked ceaselessly to overthrow the power of the United States, he also held that capitalists worked exclusively for personal gain, something he considered true of unions as well.  The impact of their machinations on the society he lived in truly disturbed him…

In general, he adopted an uncritical attitude toward personal idiosyncrasies, so that where homosexuals were concerned he might have seemed part of their society, whereas in truth he never was.  But although he always claimed not to believe in categories, he was in fact both criticizing and categorizing when he ascribed certain troubles to what he called the Faggot Mafia.[11]

 It is striking that a man who is now considered the most successful musician in the history of jazz should have emerged with the psychology of a victim, which he of course was.  That same history since Ellington’s greatest creative years, perhaps in reaction against the “credit to the race” syndrome he typified, has produced a new set of musical heroes along with a new musical language, concomitant with the African-American’s reassessment of his cultural values.  All of them have faced the same social dilemma as Ellington, and regardless of their various cultural stances, they too have been victims.  The African-American dilemma in the arts will not be overcome until the racist society which nourishes it is abolished.



[1] Stanley Dance, liner notes to The Duke Ellington Carnegie Hall Concerts, January 1946.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ralph J. Gleason, Celebrating the Duke… & Other Heroes, p. 165.

[4] MIMM, pp. 308-309.

[5] Ralph J. Gleason, Celebrating the Duke… p. 165.

[6] Ibid., pp. 234-235.

[7] Ibid., pp. 184-185.

[8] Duke Ellington in Person, p. 181.

[9] Ibid., pp. 184-185.

[10] Ibid.

 

[11] Ibid., pp. 157-158.







THINGS AIN'T, IV. GOLDEN AGE AND AFTERMATH

 

IV.  GOLDEN AGE AND AFTERMATH 

WAR YEARS

 

The years 1939-1944 are widely regarded to represent the pinnacle of Duke Ellington’s artistic achievement, and there is much to justify this claim.  The majority of the 1940 orchestra—Sonny Greer, Fred Guy, Joe Nanton, Juan Tizol, Harry Carney, Johnny Hodges, Barney Bigard and Otto Hardwick—had been with Ellington for more than a decade.  Taken together as an ensemble, as section players, and as individual soloists, this superb musical aggregation represented the epitome of American musical talent.  As the vehicle for Ellington’s musical imagination, they had long been a formidable unit.

Changes in personnel over the intervening years had been slight.  Trombonist Larence Brown was added in 1932; Rex Stewart, a renowned cornetist from Henderson’s band, replaced Freddie Jenkins in 1934, while Wallace Jones took Arthur Whetsol’s position as lead trumpet in 1937.  The most notable additions were Ben Webster (in the orchestra from l940 until 1943, and again from 1948 to 1949), who, as the fifth member of the reed section, established the tenor saxophone tradition in the Ellington orchestra; and bassist Jimmy Blanton (from late 1939 until 1941, shortly before his death at the age of twenty-one), who revolutionized the use of his instrument in jazz.

Most significantly, it was in 1939 that Ellington began his association with Billy Strayhorn, whom he later described as “my right arm, my left arm, all the eyes in the back of my head, my brainwaves in his head, and his in mine.”[1]

Strayhorn was first engaged by Ellington as a writer of lyrics, but after the orchestra’s return from its second European tour, in the summer of 1939, he began to exhibit a prodigious talent for arranging and composition, both alone and in collaboration with Ellington.  Particularly during the years 1940 and 1941, when ASCAP material was banned from the airwaves, Ellington was forced to rely heavily on the work of Strayhorn (“Take the ‘A’ Train,” “Chelsea Bridge,” “Day Dream,” etc.), along with that of Tizol and Mercer Ellington (“Things Ain’t What They Used to Be”).  Until Strayhorn’s death, nearly thirty years later, the emotional affinity between   the two men was the basis of perhaps the most remarkable partnership in jazz, one which had a large impact on the range and scope of the Ellington orchestra.

Nineteen-forty was also the year of a major defection from the Ellington organization, that of trumpeter Cootie Williams, who left to join Benny Goodman’s orchestra late in that year.  In a 1967 interview, Williams explained:

I didn’t just jump up and leave—I wouldn’t do that.  Duke knew about it and helped set everything up.  He got me more money, and I told him I’d be back in one year’s time.  If Duke didn’t want it to be know like it was, it wasn’t my place to tell.  But that Goodman band—I loved it.[2]

When, as agreed, Williams contacted Ellington in a year’s time; Ellington advised him to take advantage of his name-exposure with Goodman and to front his own band (which Williams did successfully for many years.  He finally returned to the Duke Ellington Orchestra inn 1962.)  In the meantime, in November, 1940, Ellington hired the uniquely talented musician and showman Ray Nance from Chicago whose first night playing with the Ellington band was on November 7, in Fargo, North Dakota, which coincidentally was a performance recorded by a pair of amateur enthusiasts.  Until its release decades later, the Fargo recording became something like the Holy Grail of jazz.

Judging by its recorded output on the Victor label from 1940 until the recording ban enforced by the American Federation of Musicians in mid-1942, the Ellington orchestra of the early war years represented an artistic standard unprecedented and unsurpassed in all American music.  For the same period, however, accounts of Ellington’s financial success vary somewhat.  One of them, citing Ellington’s habit of long delays in providing lead sheets of his compositions to Robbins, with the consequent drop of sheet-music royalties, estimates the band’s take at $2,500 a week, with an annual box-office gross of around $200,000, netting Ellington no more than $30,000 a year, which he quickly spent.[3]  Of course, when these figures are set against the earnings of the most popular white orchestras of the period (Kay Kyser grossed some $1,200,000, while Glenn Miller made in the neighborhood of $1,000,000), they sho0w how far Ellington was from the top echelons of show business.

Mercer Ellington estimates the orchestra’s 1940 gross much higher, at more than $1,000,000, but confirms the financial gap between it and the earnings of popular white orchestras:

Bands like Vaughan Monroe’s were probably grossing five times as much, and who knows or can say what was happening with Benny Goodman?  A tremendous amount of money was being made by the big bands, and despite Pop’s memory of the 1929 crash and other fiascoes, it looked as though everything was on the up and up.  Everything was going wonderfully in the early ‘forties, so why worry about tomorrow?[4]

  Richard Boyer, who authored a series of in-depth articles on Ellington (“The Hot Bach”[5]) for The New Yorker in 1944, provided a more detailed picture of the band’s income and expenses.  According to Boyer, the band earned nearly $1,000,000 over its twenty-year period of existence, of which half came from royalties paid on its sale of twenty million records, and another fourth from sheet-music royalties.  For one-night engagements, Ellington reportedly collected between $1,250 and $2,000, as much as $10,000 a week, “but the band’s payroll and expenses are so heavy that he is fortunate if he breaks even on the road.  Sidemen in the orchestra received between $125 and $185 a week, plus expenses; Ellington   himself drew 000.  William Mittler, who handled his financial affairs.  Much of Ellington’s financial bind, wrote Boyer, was caused by his apparent lack of concern about money: “He spends money lavishly, supports a good many hangers-on, lends money frequently, gets it back infrequently, and is usually broke when pay day rolls around.”

In 1939, according to the same source, Ellington took in $160,000, but the band was able only to break even.  In 1940 he grossed $185,000, but the payroll increased from $25,000 to $30,000.  In 1941 he took in only $135,000 and ended up with a loss of $1,500.  The following year saw an increase in the band’s gross to $210,000, but Ellington netted only $4,000.  During a six-month engagement at New York’s Hurricane Club in 1943, Ellington lost $18,000, “but he figured it was a good investment because of the Broadway address and the free radio time and publicity.”

Whatever his financial disadvantages may have been, immediately upon signing with the William Morris Agency Ellington continued to be booked in prestige locations, like the Ritz Calton Roof in Boston and Chicago’s Hotel Sherman.  During the rather brief existence of the Morris Agency’s band department, and later with Joe Glaser’s Associated Booking Corporation, Ellington was managed by Cress Courtney, who proved as resourceful as Ned Williams had been in boosting Ellington as a prestige performer and in preserving the dignity of his name.  William Morris, Jr., came to take a special interest in this aspect of his career, and his efforts paved the way for the orchestra’s 1943 debut at Carnegie Hall.

Buoyed by the optimism and enthusiasm engendered by his new business arrangement, Ellington set out in 1941 to realize one of his fondest ambitions, the writing of a successful Broadway musical.  His efforts resulted in the score for Jump for Joy, which opened at the Mayan Theatre in Culver City, California, in June, 1941.  The show, billed as a “Sun-Tanned Revue-sical,” had as its major theme the demolition of racial stereotypes.  As Ellington explained,

      In 1941 a team of scholarly Hollywood writers decided to attempt to correct the race situation in the U.S.A. through a form of theatrical propaganda.  This culminated in meetings at which the decision was made to do Jump for Joy, a show that would take Uncle Tom out of the theatre, eliminate the stereotyped image that had been exploited by Hollywood and Broadway, and say things that would make the audience think.  The original script had Uncle Tom on his death bed with all his children dancing around him singing, “He lived to a ripe old age.  Let him go, God bless him!”  There was a Hollywood producer on one side of the bed and a Broadway producer on the other side, and both were trying to keep him alive by injecting adrenalin into his arms![6]

For its time, such a production was a venture of the most radical sort imaginable.  The Show’s cast and financial backers, in addition to being “top-bracket film people,” included a number of figures who were prominent in the Hollywood left, chiefly the Communist Party.  Since most whites in those days who were at all involved in the political defense of Black rights were considered radicals ipso facto, it is not surprising that Ellington would have been associated with Communists in a project as outspoken as Jump for Joy.  As we have seen, Ellington’s sporadic involvement with the radical left had begun nearly a decade earlier, and in the 1940s this relationship would culminate in the most overtly political phase of his career.  By the end of that decade, as we shall further see, scores of his associates would wind up on the show-business blacklist and before congressional inquisitors.

Jump for Joy, of course, was theatrical dynamite.  Its audience included “the most celebrated Hollywoodians, middle class ofays, the sweet-and-low, scuffling-type Negroes, and dicty Negroes as well…  The Negroes always left proudly, with their chests sticking out.”[7]  Naturally, there were some who were not pleased; Mercer Ellington recalled that there were “something like five ‘or six bomb threats from people who threatened to do something to or harm people in the show.”[8]  As a result, the show’s material came to be a sort of compromise, as writers and members of the cast revised it nightly.  One of the numbers dropped was the opening of the second act, with the intriguing title “I’ve Got a Passport from Georgia (and I’m Going to the U.S.A.)”  The attempt was made to accommodate the sensibilities and inhibitions of all who were involved in the production, as Ellington explains:

Anyone who attended those backstage meetings for twelve weeks got a full college education in social significance.[9]

  The importance of Jump for Joy was summarized by Avanelle Lewis Harris, a veteran of the theater and a member of the show’s original cast:

The most exciting experience of my life in the theatre was the opportunity to be a member of the cast in the musical Jump for Joy.  I did not know how far ahead of its time it was until I read the script.  It was the first legitimate show to be created and produced on the West Coast.  The importance of its message caused a wave of enthusiasm throughout the cast, which was well-aware of its controversial impact.  Everything, every setting, every note of music, every lyric, meant something.  All the sketches had a message for the world.  Tragedy was that the world was not ready for Jump for Joy.

How I remember the opening— “The Sun-Tanned Tenth of the nation!”  And the finale of the first act was “Uncle Tom’s Cabin Is a Drive-in Now”:

There used to be a chicken shack in Caroline

But now they’ve moved it up to Hollywood and Vine;

They paid off the mortgage—nobody knows how—

And Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a drive-in now”[10]

Jump for Joy, playing to standing-room-only crowds, was a great local success, yet it never reached Broadway, as its producers had hoped; the show closed after only three months in Los Angeles (A 1958 production, with revamped songs and starring Barbara McNair, was staged unsuccessfully in Miami Beach).

 These facts are hard to reconcile in the light of frequent claims over the years that the show was “too advanced” and that the public was “not ready” for what it had to say.  The production’s popularity gives ‘

There were lines at the box office when the show closed don because of panic in the company.  The different people who contributed their services to the show all owned a part of it and were to be paid off at a later date.  Suddenly the musicians’ union demanded additional bonds to ensure payment of their people.  The backers had their lawyers attach the box office, so the flow of money that could have kept the show going was cut off and everybody suffered.[11]

Indeed, there was cause to question the motives of the American Federation of Musicians in this instance.  Under the presidency of James C. Petrillo, the union declared a long strike against the entire recording industry; the only studio recordings permitted between August 1942 and November 1944 were transcriptions recorded for the radio networks only, and V-Discs for the Armed Forces.

In a sense, the American public generally “not ready” for such a message during the war years.  The tenor of the times indicates that African Americans were more than ready to do away with their inferior social status.  This was still the era of segregated blood banks, on the battle-front and the home front as well.  As Blacks were widely considered “loyalty” risks, the government lost few opportunities to harass the Negro press and to spread poisonous propaganda.  These were years of lynchings in the South and riots in the North and on military posts.  White liberals largely abandoned the Black cause, with predictions of civil war if federal troops were used to end segregation.

Ellington, perhaps because he was always inclined to couch his social criticism in the most palatable form (“I think a statement of social protest in the theatre should be made without saying it, and this calls for the real craftsman”), was not long discouraged.  As he explained, “The feeling of responsibility that Jump for Joy had aroused sustained itself, and one day William Morris, Jr., said, “I want you to write a long work, and let’s do it in Carnegie Hall.”[12]

This opportunity was to be the fulfillment of Ellington’s desire, expressed since the mid-1930s, to present a musical panorama of the American Negro.  The five-part suite he had envisioned, tentatively titled Boola, Black.    Fragments of his conception also had appeared in some of his shorter compositions, such as “Ko-Ko” in 1940.  With barely a month to spare, Ellington began work in December, 1942, on the score of Black, Brown and Beige, subtitled A Tone Parallel to the History of the American Negro.

With the single exception of Benny Goodman’s 1938 concert, Ellington’s premiere on January 23, 1943, was the first genuine jazz concert to play Carnegie Hall.  The significance of the occasion, of course, was contribution of Black Americans), yet even so, a charitable pretext was necessary to secure the hall: all proceeds were to go to the Russian War Relief.

The concert was preceded by months of publicity, particularly in the Negro press, which culminated in the declaration of “Duke Ellington Week,” January 17 through January 23, the night of Ellington’s premiere.  The New York Age reported on a flurry of Ellington broadcasts and record programs, and enthused over the “complete cooperation of the entertainment business, including both [Ellington’s] sepia and white brother musicians.”[13]  Carnegie Hall was “virtually sold out… with a last-minute rush for the few seats which remain,” and the Age circulated a rumor that Edward, the Duke of Windsor, whose acquaintance Ellington had made in 1933, would be in attendance among the celebrities.

Twenty-five celebrities, among the many who attended the performance, contributed $100 each for special box seats.  They included Marian Anderson, Count Basie, Eric Bernay (Music Room), Saul Bornstein (Irving Berlin, Inc., Mrs. James Cromwell, Max Dreyfuss (Chappell Music Co.), Moe Gale, Mr. and Mrs. Benny Goodman, John Hammond, Daniel James (Ellington’s brother-in law, Tempo Co.), Leonard Joy (RCA Victor Records), Jack and David Kapp (Decca Records, Inc.), Jimmie Lunceford, Jack Mills (Mills Music, Inc.), Edward H. Morris (Morris Music, Inc.), Richard F Murray (Paramount Music Corp.), Harold Oxley, Lawrence Richmond (Music Dealers Service), Jack Robbins (Robbins Music Corp.), Bob Russell and Herman Starr (Music Publishers’ Holding Corp.).[14]

Jazz critic Leonard Feather, who at that time played a small role in Ellington’s concert preparations, maintains that

 

It is not easy, decades later, to summon the precise sense of fulfillment this night represented for all of us who had long worshipped the Ellington genius.  At last he was to be recognized as the giant we had long known him to be:  not in a Harlem cabaret playing song scores, not in a Broadway theater teamed with pop singers, nor in a ballroom satisfying dancers, but on America’s most renowned concert stage, offering a program of his short instrumental masterworks and introducing his empyrean extended concert composition.[15]And

 

 

The symbolic significance of the occasion could not be missed.  The platform upon which Ellington was to expound his message was to be Carnegie Hall, the heretofore sacred bastion of Western culture.  His audience was to be the elite of “serious” music, and his sponsors the liberals of the racist “popular” music industry.  From the establishment’s point of view, Ellington was to be not only a symbol of Black America’s “arrival,” but a token also of wartime unity and racial accord.

 

As the concert unfolded, it is necessary to imagine Ellington lecturing his tuxedoed audience on the fundamentals of Black culture.  Introducing the “Black” segment of Black, Brown and Beige, he announced to the arbiters of America’s cultural taste,

 

 Now comes our latest attempt, probably our most serious attempt, and definitely our longest composition.  However, in mentioning the length of Black, Brown and Beige, we would like to say that this is a parallel to the history of the American Negro, and of course it tells a long story.  I hope that you will also take into consideration the fact that in telling the story of the work song, for instance, which is the first theme, we use it in its many forms.  The work song is sung while you work, and of course there’s a place for the song and then there’s a place to grunt, you know, in the impact of your work.

 

 And, of course, after that comes the spiritual theme, which is the second theme of the first movement.  And today we find that the two are very closely related, and so that naturally necessitates developing the two and showing their close relationship.[16]

 

Lest his hearers fail to remember the purpose of the event, Ellington reminded them, in his remarks to “Beige,”

 

The first theme of our third movement is the inculcation, or the veneer that we chip off as we get closer and find that all these people who making all this noise and responding to the tom-toms are only a few people making a living.  They’re backed, really, by people who—many don’t have enough to eat or a place to sleep, but work hard and see that their children are in school.  The Negro is rich in education, and it develops up until we find ourselves today struggling for solidarity, but just as we’re about to get our teeth into it, our country’s at war again.  And, as before, we of course find that the Black, Brown and Beige are right in there for the Red, White and Blue. (At dress rehearsal at Rye, New York, High School, the previous evening, Ellington was dissuaded from using a set of lyrics expressing this sentiment.) [17]

 

The Carnegie ritual was the perfect apotheosis of the liberal desire for Black social and cultural equality.  After the concert’s intermission, actor Dennis Morgan presented Ellington with a plaque bearing the names of thirty-two musicians “from both sides of the musical tracks, who were anxious to break down every line of musical snobbery.”[18]  The list of illustrious names included Leopold Stokowski, William Grant Still, Earl Hines, Marian Anderson, Paul Robeson, Count Basie, Fritz Reiner, Eugene Ormandy, Morton Gould, Kurt Weill, Aaron Copland, Paul Whiteman, Benny Goodman, Jerome Kern, Cab Calloway, Artie Shaw and  Max Steiner.

 

The reviews that ensued provided a fitting postscript to this self-conscious exercise in social significance.  The Negro press, as might be expected, waxed ecstatic.  Typical of its fervor was the notice which appeared in the New York Age:

It was a great night for Ellington, all agreed. That was the opinion in the press box, in the smoking rooms and on the Dress Circle during intermission.  But it was a greater night for Negroes in America, for Edward Kennedy Ellington, who once entertained the customers in Washington on a broken down piano… did a job for his race of which any race might be proud.  For three hours there had been no ugly prejudice, no dividing line or second class citizenship, but just the warm, human kinship, the understanding tribute given by hundreds of people who were hearing the beauty conceived by a genius.  And in “Black, Brown and Beige,” Duke Ellington, recognized the world over, had used that genius to tell the world that more than his fame, more than his wealth—is his consciousness that he is proud to belong to a great race.  The Talmadges and the Bilboes, the Hitlers and Hirohitos wouldn’t have liked it one bit.[19]

 

The second factor in this social equation was supplied by the professional arbiters of “serious music,” who, by and large, continued to look down their noses at Ellington’s temerity.  Some of their commentary was downright vicious.  Douglas Watt opined in the Daily News that “the concert, if that’s what you call  it…  [showed that] such a form of composition is entirely out of Ellington’s ken.”[20]  Paul Bowles, classical music critic for the

Herald-Tribune, observed, “Nothing emerged but a gaudy potpourri of tutti dance passages and solo virtuoso work,” and piously declared that “the whole attempt to fuse jazz as a form with art music should be discouraged.”[21]  John Briggs of the Post sadly shook his head: “Mr. Ellington had set himself a lofty goal, and with the best of intentions he did not achieve it.”[22]

 

As early as 1934, Constant Lambert had pigeonholed Ellington as “definitely a petit maître…  But that, after all, is considerably more than many people thought either jazz of the coloured race would produce.”[23]  Much of the criticism leveled at Ellington tended to resurrect the back-handed compliment that Duke Ellington was a talented miniaturist, a jazz composer who lacked the ability to create works of concert length.  Perhaps the solitary exception to this way of thinking came from Dr. J.T.H. Mize, music director at Rye High School, who championed Ellington in the pages of Orchestra World and The Musician:

 

It was interesting to note the reactions of the metropolitan critics.  The majority of them hit a new low in musical intelligence and critical acumen.  At least three of them might as well have written their reviews in bed before the concert.  Who do you think is interested in their obvious prejudices?  But that was not to be expected of the dallying critics of the dailies…

 

The history of first impressions is a notoriously dismal one, as witness the critics’ reaction to first performances of Beethoven’s Eroica, Rosini’s Barber, Tschaikowsky’s First Piano Concerto, Debussy’s La Mer, and Cesar Franck’s Symphony.  As one who heard [Black, Brown and Beige] eight or ten times in rehearsal, and at its “world premiere” at the Rye High School on the night before the Carnegie Hall performance, I can say that with each hearing it assumed greater significance, and I deem it the finest thing yet done in American music.[24]

 

Black, Brown and Beige received praise from Henry Simon in PM, Irving Kolodin, Billboard and Variety (“ELLINGTON, AT B.O. AND MUSICALLY, NIFTILY IN GROOVE AT CARNEGIE HALL CONCERT”).  The jazz press, Down Beat and Metronome, was also sympathetic, but here too there was some controversy, centered chiefly around a salvo fired by John Hammond in the People’s Voice.  In an article titled “Hammond says Duke Is Deserting Jazz Music,” the critic confessed having discovered “some penetrating wit and marvelous tunes” in Black, Brown and Beige, but concluded that “Duke has neither the training nor the ability to weave them together into a cohesive whole.”[25]

 

Not until the arrival of bebop a few years later would the jazz press be so rife with animosity.  Leonard Feather recalled that Hammond’s remarks “led to a series of acrimonious exchanges in print between John and me, in which I was as guilty of bias and poor taste as I had found him to be in jumping to hasty conclusions in defending Duke and denouncing Hammond as I had found him to be in jumping to hasty conclusions after a single hearing.[26]  Of the arrogance of the establishment critics a Metronome editorial (probably written by Barry Ulanov) fulminated,

Why does the daily press permit writers to write on subjects they know nothing about, and then print those writings as authentic criticism?...  No wonder the general public gets the wrong impression about jazz and its musicians…  The majority of the critics wrote about the concert as if it were something way below their dignity.  They sympathized little and understood less.  Jazz once again took a beating… and… will continue to take a beating as long as such reactionaries continue to pour forth such stupid, intolerable drivel.[27]

 

The true social significance of Ellington’s Carnegie Hall debut, which demonstrated in a dramatic was the changes in direction his career was taking, lay in the terms of an implied exchange between the Black musician attempting to redefine the function of his art and the cultural establishment, which found it expedient during the war to promulgate the myth of racial equality in America.  From this time forward, Ellington was to occupy a position unique among Black show-business performers in trade, as it were, for his willingness to put himself at the disposal of government propaganda campaigns.

At the same time, the critical reaction to Black, Brown and Beige indicated that the official recognition given Ellington by one hand of the almost unanimously, it seemed to render the verdict that Black music was to remain a “popular” art, fit only for consumption by the untutored masses.  The commercial entertainment industry, meanwhile, had no tolerance for a music which sought to escape the restrictions imposed by cabarets, dance halls and the hit parade.  Professor James L. Mack summarized this dilemma succinctly:

Not only with reference to Black musicians, but White ones also, the jazz musician lost the principle of what his role was.  He was an entertainer.  He descended not from the great masses of the past, like all real musicians, but from the court jesters.  The more he started to ignore this role and to look upon the music as a vehicle by which he expressed his talent, the less he was appreciated.  We saw this in the late 30’s and early 40’s.  We came to a point where even the greatest jazz artist couldn’t play at normal clubs because there was less and less of the entertainment value.[28]

 

It would be difficult, in retrospect, to listen to Black, Brown and Beige, the subject of all this controversy, without concluding that it was one of Ellington’s greatest achievements and indeed, that it constitutes a landmark in twentieth-century art.  As it happened, however, after only two concert performances one week apart in January, Black, Brown and Beige entered its long period of dormancy.  Following the recording ban in 1944, Victor released recorded excerpts from the suite on four twelve-inch discs: “Work Song,” “Come Sunday,” “The Blues,” and “Three Dances).  A version featuring lyrics by Ellington and vocals by Mahalia Jackson, recorded in 1958 and performed at the Newport Jazz Festival, deleted most of the original and concentrated on the “Come Sunday” theme, as did the treatment performed in My People, a 1963 stage production.  The full score was never performed again by the Ellington Orchestra after 1943, and was completely unavailable in recorded form until 1977, upon the release of the original Carnegie Hall performance.

Aside from the fact that Ellington frequently revised the scores of his older material, Leonard Feather ventures the opinion that Black, Brown and Beige in its entirety was dropped from his repertoire

 Because he was still smarting at the cruel insensitivity of the critics who had lambasted him…

In the euphoria that surrounded the [Carnegie Hall] concert and its aftermath I was all but unaware of Duke’s reaction to the negative reviews, so convinced was I that Black, Brown and Beige represented a giant step forward in the evolution of jazz.[29]

 At the orchestra’s second Carnegie Hall concert appearance in December, Ellington presented New World A-Comin’, a twelve-minute concerto for piano and orchestra.  Composed after the band’s Hurricane Club engagement, during a four-week run at the Capitol Theater with Lena Horne, the piece was an extension of the thematic material which had informed Black, Brown and Beige and was analogous to the final section of the unfinished Boolah, which purported to speculate upon the future of the Black race.  Inspired by and titled after a book by Roy Ottley, which anticipated an improvement in the Negro’s lot after World War II: “In spite of selfish interests,” the book concluded, “ a new world is a-coming with the sweep and fury of the Resurrection.”  Ellington visualized this new world “as a place where there would be no war, no greed, no categorization, no nonbelievers, where love was unconditional, and no   pronoun was good enough for God.”[30]

Under the management of Cress Courtney, the six months of free airtime afforded by the Hurricane Club engagement had preserved Ellington’s preeminent position in the entertainment world, increasing the orchestra’s price nearly four times to $5,000, or $4,000 plus a sixty per cent privilege.  Nevertheless, because its members were Black, the Duke Ellington Orchestra could not obtain a regular radio sponsor.  According to one observer, “Duke thought that winning the war would change this and much more.  When he was working at that time on a composition called New World A-Coming, he liked to repeat the title and then say, ‘And I mean it.’”[31]

In spite of its much shorter length, this new composition was denounced by the critics just as vehemently as its predecessor had been.  It did manage to stay in the band’s repertoire and was recorded as late as 1970, with the Cincinnati Orchestra, conducted by Erich Kunzel.

The entrance if Ellington into the concert field came as the result, not only of social pressure emanating from the music establishment, but of economic necessity as well.  During the war years, to be sure, he appeared before the public as a rather gaudy embodiment of Black success:  “ He has forty-five suits, and more than a thousand ties, the latter collected in forty-seven states of the Union and seven European countries, and his shoes, hats, shirts, and even his toilet water are all custom-made.”  His 1,100 records had sold some twenty million copies, and he had composed 1,200 compositions, many of which had been praised by composers as esteemed as Stokowski, Grainger, Stravinsky, and Milhaud.[32]  Around this time, too, Ellington began to spurn the label “jazz,” referring to his music first as “Negro folk music,” and in later years as “the American Idiom, or the Music of Freedom of Expression.”[33]

As an astute businessman, Ellington undoubtedly was quick to realize that, with the onset of war, the appearances of large jazz ensembles in dancehalls, nightclubs and theaters were beginning to diminish, that the days of the “big band era” were numbered.  Critic Stanley Dance, his friend and confidante, wrote:

 The move to the concert hall and the changes that ensued were inevitable.  They grew out of the practices of the Thirties.  Bands and ballrooms were in big trouble because of World War II, and concerts offered the possibility of welcome new venues and, indeed, an artistic stimulus…

Ellington, undoubtedly the wisest and most intelligent person in the business, had always been quick to size up the potential in a situation—and to act.  In retrospect, one can see that his timing was perfect in 1943.  All the writing that had been done about jazz in books and magazines—not to mention the publicity hopes—along with the extended public exposure to it on radio, had created a big and enthusiastic audience, one that was often idolatrous, but not always noticeably hip.  The extended works had prestige value, an air of ambition and serious endeavor that three-minute   

For seven years Ellington presented his “social significance thrusts” to audiences at Carnegie Hall and Each year he would produce a new extended work, often based upon a racial theme:  in 1946 came the Deep South Suite, the Liberian Suite in 1947, and Harlem in 1950.  Other extended works from the same period were lighter exercises designed to satisfy the musical sophisticates in his audience:  Perfume Suite (1944), A Tonal Group (1946), and The Tattooed Bride (1948).

His ambition to serve as a spokesman for Black aspirations was well illustrated in the 1943 announcement of his collaboration with lyricist Otto Harbach on a ditty, unfortunately lost to posterity, titled “Did You Mean It, Mr. Lincoln?”  Publisher Jack Robbins said that the song would “go a long way in developing racial awareness.”[34]  At the same time, however, Ellington did not consider it prudent to risk his career by voicing his ideas other than musically.  Richard Boyer wrote of this private conflict in 1944:

Duke sometimes thinks that it is good business to conceal his interest in American Negro history.  He doubts that it adds to his popularity in Arkansas, say, to have it known that in books he has read about Negro slave revolts he has heavily underlined paragraphs about the exploits of Nat Turner and Denmark Vesey.  In public he usually sets his beige-colored face in a grin as wide as possible…

New acquaintances are always surprised when they learn that Duke has written poetry in which he advances the thesis that the rhythm of jazz has been beaten into the Negro by three centuries of oppression.  The four beats to a bar in jazz are also found, he maintains in verse, in the Negro pulse.  Duke doesn’t like to show people his poetry.  “You can say anything you want on the trombone, but you gotta be careful with words,” he explains.[35]

  Ellington was aware of the explosiveness of such sentiments in the 1940s.  His prestigious concert appearances were still rare occasions, and between them, at one-night engagements across the country, he was still beset by the usual indignities afflicting Black musicians.  One such incident took place late in 1943, when it was arranged for the orchestra to give a recital at Camp Robert Smalls, a segregated portion of the Great Lakes Naval Training Center.  A great deal of friction existed between Black sailors and their white officers, who, one sailor remembers, habitually referred to the Blacks as “you people.”  Additional resentment was generated when, apparently at whim, the commanding staff moved Ellington’s performance to a nearby white base.[36]

Although the incident, because of wartime secrecy, was not widely known, it came to the attention of a number of Black leaders.  However sympathetic to Ellington they may have been, they chose not to intervene, as a letter to Ellington from Claude Barnett of the Associated Negro Press makes clear:

When I talked with you the other day, I did not realize how much of an imbroglio the Camp Robert Smalls engagement had caused.  I had no more than hung up before Variety called me.

This note is merely to say that I am not particularly involved.  If I could do a good turn for the colored boys out there and give more of them a chance to see and hear you and other colored bands, I was willing but I do not wish to get into any controversy over matters which do not concern me.

It does not appear to me that Commander Peabody has been as considerate of those who sought to work with him as he might have been but that is his problem and perhaps disadvantage.

What I wanted you to know is that I would not presume to interfere in your affairs.

Hope it all works out smoothly.[37]

Another incident, cited in Boyer’s article the following year, illustrates graphically the extremes suffered by Ellington’s musicians, their Carnegie Hall honors notwithstanding.  On the second day of an engagement in St. Louis, during a break between sets the men found it impossible to order lunch anywhere near the theater.  As soon as they went back onstage, still hungry,

the curtain rose, and from the white audience out front there came a burst of applause.  The crowd cheered, whistled, and stamped its feet. As the curtain was going up, the dejection on the faces of the players vanished, and as swiftly as an electric light is switched on, it was replaced by a look of joy.  The music blared, Duke smiled, threw back his head, and shouted “Ah-h-h!”  Rex Stewart took off on a solo that was greeted with fervor, and as he bowed, the musician next to him muttered out of the side of his mouth, “Bend, you hungry fathead!  Bend!”  Everything was flash and brightness until the curtain came down.  Then the joy was switched off and there was just a group of angry, hungry Negroes arguing their right to food.

“Can’t we eat in our own country?” Rex Stewart said.

“And my son is in the army!” another man said.

“Are we prisoners or something?” Harry Carney asked…

Band manager Jack Boyd was finally able to arrange for food to be sent in.  After the show

Boyd was in a saloon overlooking the stage door when a man in the band came out and got into a taxi.

“Did you see that?” asked a woman on a stool at the bar.

“See what?” Boyd asked.

“See that nigra get in that cab?”

“Well, he’s a pretty nice fellow.  He’s a member of the Ellington band.  Some people think that he’s a very great artist.”

“A very great artist?  Well, I don’t know what you think, but I always say that the worst white man is better than the best nigra.”

Duke tries to forget things like that, and if he doesn’t quite succeed, he pretends he does.  An hour after the show, Duke was introduced to a policeman who said enthusiastically, “If you’d been a white man, Duke, you’d  been a great musician.”  Duke’s smile was wide and steady as he answered quietly, “I guess things would have been different if  I’d been a white man.”[38]

 

 

NADIR AND RESURRECTION

 

The postwar years witnessed in the Ellington Orchestra a series of significant, and often dislocating, changes in band personnel.  Barney Bigard, the inimitable clarinetist, departed in 1942, eventually to be replaced by Jimmy Hamilton, a musician almost his opposite stylistically.  The following year, the orchestra lost valve-trombonist Juan Tizol, heretofore the rock of the trombone section.  Rex Stewart left in 1945, and Joe “Tricky Sam” Nanton died in 1946; both of these men were, in a certain sense, irreplaceable.  Ben Webster’s tenure with the band was brief, and Fred Guy’s retirement in 1947 signaled an end for the guitar in Ellington’s band.

 

Certainly, the players who replaced these men were more than able musicians.  Over the next few years they were to include trumpeters Harold “Shorty” Baker, Taft Jordan, William “Cat” Anderson, Al Killian and others; trombonists Claude Jones, Wilbur De Paris and Tyree Glenn; saxophonists Al Sears and Russell Procope; and a plethora of vocalists (Ivie Anderson had left in 1942) including Betty Roche, Joya Sherrill, Marie Ellington (no relation to Duke), Kay Davis and Al Hibbler.  The loss of his famous soloists, however, meant that Ellington had to face less devoted and less receptive audiences, and again he found his most formidable competitor to be his own past.

 

Although the new recruits were often exceptional talents, as Mercer Ellington admitted, “these were near sounds, but not the real heavy, individual sounds people had come to expect.”[39]  During the war years, sin p. 190.ce there could be no foreign tours, the orchestra was restricted to repeated circuits around the United States.  As the decade progressed and attendance in ballrooms began to diminish, Ellington was often forced to accept less desirable engagements.  Then too, after the war jazz performances in a concert setting became rather commonplace, Norman Granz’s Jazz At The Philharmonic series being the most notable example.  As Ellington was to recall later:

 

By 1950 everybody was giving concerts, and even a concert at Carnegie Hall no longer had the prestige value it had in 1943, but our series there had helped establish a music that was new in both its extended forms and its social significance.[40]

 

Ellington’s lowest ebb came in 1951, with the firing of Sonny Greer and the almost en masse defections of Tyree Glenn, Al Sears, and his outstanding soloists Lawrence Brown and Johnny Hodges.  Many reasons have been advanced for this debilitating exodus, including musical disagreements, personal squabbles, and simple fatigue from the rigors of a musician’s life.  Producer Norman Granz also confessed playing a role by tempting musicians out of the Ellington fold.[41]

Whatever the impact of all this upon Ellington, the really crucial events of this period happened not within the orchestra, but as a result of social and political pressures from the outside.  Perhaps more than anything else, the political turmoil of America in the early 1950s nearly destroyed Ellington’s career.

 

The rightist offensive which culminated in the McCarthyite hysteria of the 1950s began its momentum in 1947, and its first target was the show-business industry.  The onset of the Cold War was accompanied by the efforts of the U.S. Government go purge the various propaganda media, particularly motion pictures and television, of any dissidence in the face of America’s crusade against communism.   The official investigative bodies were abetted in this endeavor by private individuals who, profiting handsomely from the moral cowardice of the entertainment industry, established an effective blacklist against persons accused of harboring radical sympathies.  The result of this intensive campaign was to paralyze whatever intelligence and creativity existed in entertainment for a decade to come.

The purge produced an extensive list of victims, among whom were many who had been associated with Ellington.  Screenwriter Henry Blankfort, who had produced Jump for Joy a decade earlier, was identified by his own brother as a Communist, was blacklisted through the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in 1951.  Many of Ellington’s associates from his 1947 Broadway venture, Beggar’s Holiday, were effectively blacklisted from the new medium of television.  As HUAC began to spread its net in the 1950s, it began freely to impugn the names of many persons connected with Russian War Relief, the sponsor of Ellington’s 1943 Carnegie Hall debut.

 

Nineteen fifty-five became a vintage year for the red-baiters and blacklisters upon HUAC’s publication of the first edition of its Cumulative Index to Publications of the Committee on Un-American Activities.  The volume consisted of a long list of names, arranged alphabetically, of those persons mentioned, by way of hearsay or otherwise, in numerous HUAC hearings from 1938 until 1954.  The new names it “exposed” proved a goldmine for the show-business red-baiters; as one historian of the period put it: “Thus Aware Inc. [one of several leading red-hunting companies of the day] and Vincent Hartnett could charge for a report on the radical backgrounds of Gladys Cooper and Duke Ellington, Charles Laughton and Jane Pickens, Xavier Cugat and Bela Bartok, Pavel Tchelitchew and Zero Mostel.”[42]

 

Ellington’s name in the updated version of the Cumulative Index, published in 1968, indicated three “offenses” he had committed against Western civilization.  The first reproduced a lengthy list of show-business sponsors, including Ellington, of a musical benefit for the Artists’ Front to Win the War at Carnegie Hall in 1942.[43]  In the second, his name was dropped by radio and television writer Allen E. Sloane in HUAC testimony concerning an unnamed song lyricist who had “collaborated with Duke Ellington on very, very popular songs,” and who “if not a Commjunist, followed closer to it than anybody could by outright joining the party.”[44]

 

The third, and most interesting, reference was the inclusion of Ellington’s name, among hundreds of others, on a list of supporters of a 1950 document known as the Stockholm Peace Appeal.[45]  The appeal was simply a statement condemning the use of nuclear weapons:

 

 We demand the outlawing of atomic weapons as instruments of intimidation and mass murder of peoples.  We demand strict international control to enforce this measure.

 

We believe that any government which first uses atomic weapons against any other country whatsoever will be committing a crime against humanity and should be dealt with as a war criminal.[46]

 

Drafted in Stockholm in March, 1949, the document became the basis of a campaign launched by the World Peace Congress in April of that year.  The American Communist Party began a drive to collect five million signatures in support of the Stockholm Peace Pledge, including an intensive effort to garner the endorsement of prominent Blacks.  With the onset of the Korean War in June, 1950, the petition ran into frenzied opposition from the mass media.  The Black press joined the general orgy of redbaiting; an editorial from the Pittsburgh Courier was typical:

 

It is unfortunate, in the present frame of mind of most loyal Americans, that a number of Negroes could be induced to endorse this anti-American petition, and it is even more deplorable that a man of the stature of W.E.B. DuBois should agree to serve as head of the Peace Information Center and superintend the gathering of these signatures.

 

It is true that the overwhelming majority of the world’s people want peace, but they also want freedom; and most of those people able to think know that the peace desired by the USSR is that of the slave pen under the Red Flage…

 

Fortunately the loyalty of colored citizens is so well-known and well-established that a handful of Negro signers to a Moscow-inspired petition will not threaten race relations even   in a time of intense anti-Soviet feeling; but the appearance of widely-known Negro names among the signers is disquieting.[47]

 

The May 31, 1950, issue of the Daily Worker reported Duke Ellington’s endorsement of the Stockholm Peace Appeal and quoted him as saying, “It is quite unimaginable that people should think of using the A-bomb…  It is essential to defend peace.”[48] For some months previously, the Ellington Orchestra had toured Europe.  When he returned to the United States, Ellington denied the authenticity of both the signature and the quotation.  In an interview for a New York daily, he condemned

“Negro leaders …  who signed the World Peace Appeal and who urged their people to do likewise.” The enraged composer and bandleader blew up.  “I threw the guy out when he asked me to sign up.”

 

The record shows that Ellington has singularly avoided any tie-ups with Red-front organizations which often seek out big names as sponsors.  “I never allow these Communists to exploit me,” he said.[49]

 

Throughout the month of August, the Daily Worker continued to repeat its claim that Ellington had signed the petition, despite his denial and a threat to initiate a lawsuit against “those who are trying to defame my name and reputation.”  In its September 30, 1950, issue, the rightist New Leader rushed into print a cover story by Duke Ellington (most likely drafted by his brother-in-law, Daniel James), entitled “No Red Songs for Me.”  An editor’s preface to the article portrayed Ellington’s career as

 

 That of the pure artist, totally unconcerned with political—or even cultural or racial—movements of any kind.  It remained for the Communists to seize upon this utterly apolitical past, and to try to besmirch and exploit it for their own despicable ends.[50]

 

In September, the editorial commentary continued, both the Daily Worker and the literature of the Stockholm movement continued to list Ellington among the signatories.  A New Leader reporter, sent to the Peace Information Center in New York to inquire about the matter was allegedly told by the person in charge that “Using his name was an error on our part,” and that the names of signers received from Paris prior to the Center’s opening had not been checked for authenticity.  It was promised that Ellington’s name would be removed “after we use up the literature in print.”

 

Fulminating against the failure of the “Communist defamers” to correct their errors instantaneously, the editors expressed their sympathy for “the many artists, and others, who are being daily duped and exploited by the Communists and do not know how to fight back,” and hooped that Ellington’s article would “set the perfect example.”

 

According to Ellington’s own account of these events, in the spring of 1950, while in Stockholm, he received a proposed script from Orson Welles for a musical adaptation of Faust.  While in a private dining room of the Grand Hotel, he was interrupted during a work session by a student who asked, “if he could interest me in signing a paper.”  Annoyed, Ellington listened to the man explain that he wanted him to “join with millions of other people in opposing the atom bomb.”  Finding it ludicrous “that people signing a piece of paper could dictate to two nations who have atom bombs,” Ellington claimed that he asked the man to leave, never having seen a piece of paper to sign.  It was upon his return to the United States, he continued, that he first received word that his name was being used on the Stockholm propaganda.

 

What followed was not simply a denial of support for the Stockholm Peace petition, but a total repudiation of the social awareness that had informed his work for over twenty years:

 

 As anyone knows who has followed my career, movements of a political nature—Stockholm movements or Moscow movements—have never been a part of my life.

 

And I never sign petitions.  Not even petitions circulated by bona fide Negro organizations.  Such matters are just not in my line…

 

What burns me up, most of all, is that they have me leading “millions of Negroes” in this thing.  My answer to that is this:  I might be great, but I’m not that great.  I don’t lead anybody but myself.

 

The Communists make out a big case about the way Negroes are treated in America.  But…  there is somebody in every country whom somebody else doesn’t like. Every nation has its minority.  I, personally, fare far better as a member of my minority than any member of any other minority I’ve ever seen in any country.  And I’ve been around quite a few countries in my time, which goes back a long time.

 

Sure, the situation of the Negro isn’t what it should be.  I think I know that better than the Communists.  But the position of the Negro in America and the position of the Communists are no more related to each other than “The Blessed” and “The Damned.”

 

I’ve never been interested in politics in my whole life, and I don’t pretend to know anything about international affairs.  The only “communism” I know is that of Jesus Christ.  I don’t know any other.

 

As for war, during the last war I had a radio program every Saturday which sold bonds for the United States Treasury for the purpose of helping to defeat Germany, Japan and Italy.  In the next war—if there is one, God  

 

The issue of whether or not Ellington actually signed the Stockholm petition has long since been forgotten and, like the other phobias of its time, is of little importance.  What remains is a statement as self-abasing as any confession wrung by a congressional tribunal.  It clearly suggests that the political fear which seized the entire entertainment industry in the early 1950s was a factor in the decline of the Ellington organization.  At the very least, one must wonder how purely coincidental was the desertion, within a matter of months, of so many of his sidemen.

 

It might also be instructive to question the motives of those jazz critics who, for many years after this episode, attempted to destroy Ellington’s career.  It was a credit to Ellington’s courage that he persevered in spite of all the calumny, adding such modernists to the band as Paul Gonsalves, Clark Terry and Louis Bellson.  The jazz press, however, continually portrayed Ellington as a relic from the past.  In 1951 a Down Beat writer went so far as to call for Ellington’s retirement, and two years later Ralph Gleason lamented, “One of the favorite indoor sports of jazz aficionados in recent years has been to complain about the Ellington band.”[51]  In 1958 the influential French critic Andre Hodier judged Ellington to be “creatively dead,” and even as late as 1963 Gleason was able to point out “plenty of examples in jazz of educated and articulate cannibals whose main purpose regardless of their posture, is to chop down and devour great artists like Erroll Garner and Duke Ellington.”[52]

 

The African-American press, which for some years had cooled noticeably toward Ellington, suddenly erupted against him in the late fall of 1951.  A parade of shrill headlines, which continued for months, was initiated by the appearance of an interview with Ellington by Otis N. Thompson in the November 10 St. Louis Argus.  Thompson’s interview was titled “’We Ain’t Ready,’ Duke Declares,” and in the version circulated by the Associated Negro Press to Black papers around the country, is here reproduced:

 

Declaring with pointed emphasis, “We ain’t ready yet,” duke Ellington, world famed orchestra leader, declared last weekend that the fighting being carried on by some Negroes in an effort to gain integration is a “silly thing.”  Said the Duke, with reference to segregation, ”It’s something nothing can be done about.”

 

The remarks were made in Ellington’s dressing room backstage at Convention Hall [St. Louis] during the intermission at the matinee performance of the “Biggest Show of ’51.”  The Duke was approached for a statement about the incident in Atlanta when Negroes learned a few minutes before curtain time that they would have to use a side door to Municipal Auditorium there to see the “Big Show.”  Atlanta citizens were highly indignant and many walked away.

 

It was Ellington’s expressed opinion that “This thing about Negroes sitting anywhere they want to,” is so much bunk.  He used stronger language to get his point over and much of his suavity seen from an audience was lost as he intimated that Negroes knew the law and might as well stay in their place.

 

“What does it get us?”  If you go South, don’t you have to sit in the rear of the street car?”

 

According to Duke the fighting being carried on by some people is getting us nowhere.  He could see no particular progress over the last few years and question the “good it’s doing us” to get one or two people in a few white schools or certain jobs.

 

Several times during the conversation he referred to “those people” but would call no names.  He did mention the Richmond, Va., incident when the Richmond NAACP picketed the Mosque theatre where he played to a segregated audience.  The same thing happened to Marian Anderson and it was Duke’s impression that it didn’t make much sense in light of the fact that segregation laws existed there.

 

“Besides, who’s eligible to boycott Marian Anderson?” he asked.  As he prepared to return to the stage he said, “No, we ain’t ready yet…  Get together one hundred million dollars and then we can do something…”[53]

 

The newspaper which made the most noise of all was probably the Baltimore Afro-American, which levelled two blasts at Ellington in its issue of December 1, 1951.  The first of these, an editorial headlined “Duke Ellington’s Views on Jim Crow Shock Nation,” printed quotations from the Thompson interview and expressed disbelief that this was “the same Duke Ellington” who, on behalf of the National Committee to Abolish the Poll Tax, had in 1944 described that evil as “the most important issue since Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves.”  The article concluded that “the civil rights battle was getting “under [Ellington’s] skin,” that he had “deserted the ranks of those fighting for first class citizenship.”

 

On the same page appeared an article alleging that “in most cases when Duke ‘came to the aid of colored people’ through such organizations as the NAACP, it was Duke and not the NAACP or colored people who usually ended up with the most aid.”  Citing a benefit performance Ellington had given for the NAACP the previous January, the article labelled Ellington’s reported donation of $13,000 to the civil rights organization a lie:  the NAACP received only $1,500 after expenses, the story read, while Ellington received “a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of publicity and good will in the nation’s capital of show business.”  (In fact, a letter from Henry Lee Moon, NAACP Publicity Director, in the December 15, 1951 Afro-American, set the net profit of the organization at $3,129,89, to which Ellington promised an additional contribution of $3,000.)  Never before had such vile epithets been seen in print against Ellington:

 

…Since he is booked through a white agency, and most of the places in which he is booked are controlled by white people, he speaks like these white people want him to speak, without considering that what he might say may be like sticking a knife into the ribs of the colored people who made him.

 

And believe you me, colored people “made” all the top colored performers today, whether they will admit it or not

 

After reading Duke’s statement that “We aren’t ready,” one can only conclude that Duke, like so many others of our great artists, has succumbed to the theory that it is better to live on his knees in show business than to die on his feet in a job where he can work and maintain his self-respect and that of his people.

 

And like a dying man clutching at a straw, when he is told that his people are going on ahead without him if he clings to that theory, he stews in his own juice and cries: “We ain’t ready.”[54]

 

In the ensuing weeks, the Afro-American printed a deluge of correspondence from its readers denouncing Ellington.  Not until December 15, two weeks after the appearance of the original charges, did the paper give Ellington a chance to reply.  The rebuttal, in the form of an ANP release dated December 3, was run on the front page alongside a column giving the final word to Argus reporter Otis Thompson, who continued to insist upon the accuracy of the interview that started the furor.

 

In response to the “We ain’t ready” statement attributed to him, Ellington wrote, “I categorically deny having made any such statement,” and further asserted that “what has been published is the exact opposite of what I actually said.”  With reference to the NAACP boycott of Marian Andersson, he admitted having told Thompson

 

that I thought it was too bad that Southern colored people picketed only colored artists, but never protested when white artists came down to play to segregated audiences.  Since Southern colored people live in segregated conditions all year round, I continued, why do they wait for colored artists to come before putting on the demonstrations?

 

 

 

To the charge that he had called the civil rights movement “a silly thing,” and that “colored people were making no headway,” Ellington explained that he had meant “that colored people are not doing all they can to abolish segregation, and that much more can be done.”  He repeated his contention that “breaking down…  segregation is a full-time job” which “requires the full-time services of many more leaders than we have,” and that efforts ought to be made to amass a fund of 100 million dollars to sponsor “new legislation in every state” in order to abolish segregation.  Regarding the incident in Atlanta, Ellington insisted that legal contracts over which he had no control forced him to play to a segregated audience, and that “Refusal on my part to honor them…  would bring on suits for breach of contract, as well as other reprisals, the effect of which   would have been to put me out of the band business.”

 

While the accuracy of various points raised in his statement remains questionable, there is no doubt that Ellington felt deeply wounded by the allegation that he had turned his back upon Black people.  With genuine indignation he concluded,

First, it saddens me that the AFRO, with which I have always had friendly relations, did not accord me the courtesy of trying to get in touch with me or with any of my representatives, to check the facts or ask me for a statement of any kind…

 

Second, it saddens me also that people have rushed into print with things that conflict with my whole past record.  In my nearly thirty years in public life, no one has ever impugned my devotion to the fight for first-class citizenship.

 

Even my critics admit that I have given generously of my time, energy and talents to that fight.  If they think I have now gone back on all that, they don’t know me.  I am not the sort who makes speeches—or even statements of this kind.  Instead, as always, I stand on what I have done and will continue to do.

 

The public can rest assured that Duke Ellington, and every member of his organization, will always be in the forefront of any effort to combat segregation or any other form of racial or human injustice in the North or the South, in America or in any other country.[55]

 

The significance of this episode lies not in whether Ellington actually made the statements attributed to him, or even in what he may have meant by them if he were quoted accurately.  It is entirely possible that Ellington, momentarily angered by what he considered recklessness on the part of civil rights groups, would have expressed such sentiments.  Certainly, they were compatible with his aristocratic temperament and an archaic political philosophy which distrusted mass movements of any kind, particularly when they interfered with his ability to earn a living.  His attitude was clearly that of another, older generation of African-Americans, and it was perhaps for this reason that he had fallen out of favor with those who were pursuing the strategy of direct action.

 

In fairness to Ellington, it must be admitted that singling him out in such a fashion for a few off-the-cuff remarks he had made during an intermission, was an act of demagoguery and political opportunism.  It was the height of hypocrisy for Claude Barnett, the man responsible for publicizing the “we ain’t ready” story in the first place, to send a letter of consolation to Ellington:

 

Dear Duke:

 

Permit me to congratulate you upon your statement.  It was a clear, reasonable and effective document.

 

The position of the artist who finds himself hoisted upon the petard of the enthusiastic supporters of “down with segregation” is unfortunate.  He does not want segregation any more than those who howl do.  Indeed many of them have been entirely content with their lot in the past and don’t stop to try to work out some reasonable plan which will salvage the dignity of the artist and protect him financially as well.

 

I am glad you sent us the statement and we did the best we could by it.[56]

 

It would be years before the official representatives of African-American society would attempt a reconciliation with Ellington, and never again would there be the sort of cordiality that characterized his relations with the Black press in the 1930s.  The Claude Barnett file, in the archives of the Chicago Historical Society contains no further correspondence with Ellington after 1951.

 

In any event, the climb upward from this low point in his career was long and arduous.  Happily, 1952 marked the silver jubilee of Ellington’s show-business career, and many tributes from the entertainment world were soon forthcoming.  Early that year at Chicago’s Regal Theatre a committee of distinguished Americans honored him for his “outstanding contribution to world culture” and “significant worth to and championship of his race.”  Ellington was presented with a silver cigarette case inscribed with the names of Joe Louis, Jackie Robinson, Lena Horne, Nat “King” Cole, Mahalia Jackson, Sarah Vaughan and Billy Eckstine, which was presented on behalf of the committee by Alfred A. Duckett, the former Chicago Defender music critic who was now the managing editor of Tan Confessions.[57]

 

The November 5 issue of Down Beat, devoted to the celebration of Ellington’s twenty-five years in the band profession, included articles by Billy Strayhorn, Leonard Feather, Irving Mills, Ned Williams and Ellington himself, each reminiscing upon some aspect of the maestro’s past glory.  It was, by and large, a rather routine show-business salute; the names of numerous celebrities appeared along with their favorites among Ellington’s records, and the entire issue had something of the quality of an obituary   for a famous person.

 

In December, another Duke Ellington salute was held in Chicago.  He received an award from the National University of Music, which established a scholarship in his name.  The festivities included a luncheon at the Johnson Publishing Company, which honored Ellington with lifetime subscriptions to Jet and Ebony, and a Silver Jubilee party held on the city’s West Side.[58]

 

To week television series starring Sarah Vaughan, he became embroiled in a battle with network executives over issues of what he called “independence” and “freedom from censorship,” forcing the cancellation of his plans for a television musical and an all-Negro revue.[59]

 

The early 1950s were also years of management conflicts, particularly with Norman Granz, with whom Ellington had never been on the best of terms.  Recording contracts were obtained with considerable difficulty and the various labels on which the orchestra recorded sometimes demanded stipulations to which Ellington was unaccustomed, concerning the type of music to be played.  After the expiration of his contract with Victor in 1945, Ellington recorded for a short period with the small label Musicraft (when the company folded, Ellington, as a major investor, lost a considerable sum of money), and with Mercer Records, a disastrous venture owned jointly by his son Mercer and Leonard Feather.  In Mercer’s opinion, “Having gone into the record business as a competitor with the majors didn’t do Ellington any good, and it was some time before he got back into their good graces.”[60]

 

 The Duke Ellington Orchestra was virtually the sole survivor of the trend in jazz that decimated that decimated the big bands in favor of small combos—even Count Basie was forced, for economic reasons, to reduce his orchestra to an octet in the summer of 1950.  Forced to accept the sort of engagements he could hardly have imagined in his glory days, by the middle of the decade, that he was on his last legs.  For the entire summer of 1955, the Ellington band played backing to the “Aquacades” show at Flushing Meadows, Long Island, formerly the site of the 1939 World’s Fair:  The orchestra was in a sorry condition:

 

Five men in the band, including Paul Gonsalves and Willie Cook, were temporarily dropped from the lineup because they didn’t hold cards with the right branch of the union.  A string section, an extra pianist, and two              girl harpists (doing water effects which went with the swimming angle of the show) augmented the thinned-out Ellingtonians.  It really did seem that the end might be in sight.

 

In later years Duke always evaded too many questions about the year of 1955.  The reason why he went to be a backing band to a summer show must have been primarily economic.  He hadn’t been drawing large audiences for some time.  Around the college circuit, which was now an important factor in jazzmen’s finances, the kids wanted small groups like those of Miles Davis and Dave Brubeck.  Norman Granz was concentrating increasingly on Oscar Peterson and Ella Fitzgerald.  Count Basie, too, was making a comeback and getting the dates which Duke was missing.  Duke was even left out in the cold by the aqua-show format.  They allowed a piano solo by him, and then his musicians took over with a house conductor in charge.[61]

 

The long-awaited new lease on life for the orchestra came unexpectedly in the summer of 1956 at the Newport Jazz Festival, then in its third year and still located on the Rhode Island playground for the American aristocracy, which hitherto had been entertained by symphony orchestras.  The band played its opening set lacking four of its musicians, and it met with little enthusiasm from the crowd.  It was nearly midnight when Ellington, now with all his musicians present, returned to close the show, and some of the huge crowd was already beginning to leave.

 

In an uncanny moment of inspiration, Ellington called the old numbers “Diminuendo in Blue” and “Crescendo in Blue,” an up-tempo showpiece he had devised in 1937.  When Paul Gonsalves stepped forward to improvise some transitional choruses between the two main sections of the score, people began to pay attention, stopping at the exits, popping their fingers and clapping on the offbeats.  Chorus after chorus of earthy blues came from Gonsalves’s tenor saxophone, and the response of the audience built rapidly to a frenzy, almost drowning the sound of the band.  Gonsalves finally quit after twenty-seven choruses before the Ellington ensemble returned for its “Crescendo,” a moment that made show-business history.

 

To this day, many jazz writers find little value in the performance of either the exuberant Gonsalves or the band, but to the crowd at Newport it was sheer magic, and through the cascade of publicity he received, the name of Duke Ellington again became golden.  His portrait on the cover of Time Magazine the following month seemed to certify his “rediscovery” by middle America.  The Ellington band was signed to a new contract with Columbia Records, where producer Irving Townshend apparently gave him free reign to record whatever project he chose, be they pop songs, extended suites from Shakespeare, or flights of fancy like A Drum Is a Woman, which was televised with a full cast in 1957.   Within a few years he was recording with symphony orchestras, gaining recognition from universities, attracting the interest of white clergymen with his series of Sacred Concerts in the mid-to-late 1960s.  Above all, beginning in 1963, he was representing the United States in international tours organized by the Department of State.

 

The Black establishment, too, began to mend its fences with Ellington.  He had perhaps always been somewhat an outsider to the Black bourgeoisie, but in this he was no different from any other African-American man choosing to make his living in jazz, this class’s traditional badge of shame.  The very presentation to Ellington of the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal, the highest honor the organization bestows upon distinguished Blacks, contained evidence of their mutual alienation.  John Hammond described the ceremony, in 1959, in which Arthur Spingarn himself, president of the NAACP, awarded the medal to Ellington:

 

 It was presented at a large banquet at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York, where Arthur spoke of Ellington’s many achievements and his many famous compositions, including “Mood Indigo,” “Black and Tan Fantasy,” and “Take the Train!”  Several of us in the audience shouted “Take the ‘A’ Train,” to no avail.  Duke was not only credited with Billy Strayhorn’s famous theme for the Ellington band, but the whole point of the title was lost.  No surprise.  The NAACP never was known for its knowledge or appreciation of jazz![62]

 

In the 1960s and ‘70s Ellington began to pursue his new career as an elder statesman and American cultural ambassador.  Whatever conflicts remained in his life, Ellington received a new, sanitized image to accompany this cultural preeminence, however short he may have fallen from the goals he had once coveted for himself, his music and his people.  However compromised his honors may have been, it can be said without irony that Duke Ellington died an Honored Person.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



[1] MIMM, p. 156.

[2] Interview in Stanley Dance, The World of Duke Ellington (Da Capo, 1970), p. 108.

[3] Derek Jewell, Duke:  A Portrait of Duke Ellington, p. 103.

[4] Duke Ellington in Person, p. 104.

[5] In Mark Tucker, ed., The Duke Ellington Reader (Oxford, 1993), pp. 214-252.

[6] MIMM, p. 175.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Interview with Mercer Ellington, Chicago, July 22, 1979.

[9] MIMM, pp. 175-176.

[10] Quoted Ibid.

 

[12] MIMM, pp. 180-181.

[13] Alfred A; Duckett, “Duke of Windsor May Attend Ellington’s Concert At Carnegie,” New York Age, January 23, 1943.

[14] Alfred A. Duckett, “Duke Ellington’s Concert At Carnegie Demonstrates Maestro’s Unique Genius,” New York Age, January 30, 1943.

[15] Leonard Feather, liner notes to The Duke Ellington Carnegie Concerts, January 1943 (Prestige P-34004).

[16] Duke Ellington in Ibid., recording.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Barry Ulanov, Duke Ellington, pp. 252-253.

[19] Alfred A. Duckett, op. cit.

[20] Cited in Leonard Feather, liner notes to The Duke Ellington Carnegie Hall Concerts, 1943 (Prestige).

[21] Cited in Barry Ulanov, Duke Ellington, p. 257.

[22] Cited in Leonard Feather, liner notes to The Duke Ellington Carnegie Hall Concerts, 1943 (Prestige).

[23] Constant Lambert, Music Ho!  A Study of Music in Decline, p. 215.

[24] “J.T.H. Mize Goes to Bat for Brown, Black and Beige [sic]:  Rye Music Educator Puts in One Good Lick for Ellington, and Two Better Ones Against the Critics,” Musician, December 1943, p. 159.

[25] Cited in Leonard Feather, liner notes to The Duke Ellington Carnegie Hall Concerts, 1943 Prestige P-34004..

[26] Ibid.

[27] Cited in Ibid., p. 19.

[28] Remarks following presentation by David N. Baker, Jr., “Indiana University’s Black Music Committee,” in Black Music in Our Culture,”

[29] Liner notes to The Duke Ellington Carnegie Hall Concerts, 1943.

[30] MIMM, p. 183.

[31] Richard O. Boyer, “The Hot Bach,” p. 60.

[32] Ibid., pp. 22-26.

[33] MIMM, p. 309.

[34] “Expect Ellington Song To Promote Racial Accord,” Norfolk VA Journal and Guide October 9, 1943, p.14.

[35] “The Hot Bach,” pp. 49-50.

[36] Interview with John Timmons, Navy veteran, Chicago, May 18, 1980.

[37] Claude Barnett to Duke Ellington, January 12, 1944.  Claude Barnett file.

 

 

[38] “The Hot Bach, pp. 42-43.

[39] Duke Ellington in Person, p. 105.

[40] MIMM, p. 190.

[41] Derek Jewell, Duke:  A Portrait of Duke Ellington, p. 115.

[42] Stefan Kanfer, A Journal of the Plague Years, (New York:  Atheneum, 1973), p. 250,

[43] United States House of Representatives, Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC hereinafter),  Investigation of Communist Activities, New York Area:  Parts VI-VIII (Entertainment) (Washington:  U.S. Government Printing Office, 1955), p. 2501 p. 3864.

[44] HUAC, Communist Methods of Infiltration:  Entertainment (Part I) (Washington:  U.S. Government Printing Office, 1954).

[45] HUAC, Report on the Communist “Peace” Offensive:  A Campaign to Disarm and Defeat the United States (Washington:  U.S, Government Printing Office, 1951), p. 130.

[46] “Moscow Decries Peace Sabotage,” New York Times, July 22, 1950, p. 4.

[47] “The Phony Peace Drive,” Pittsburgh Courier, August 26, 1960, p. 6.

[48] Cited in Duke Ellington, “No Red Songs for Me,” New Leader, September 30, 1950, p. 4.

[49] Unidentified clipping found in files of the Chicago Defender; external evidence would place it at about September 1, 1950.

[50] Ibid., p. 2.

[51] Ralph J. Gleason, Celebrating the Duke & Louis, Bessie, Billie, Bird, Carmen, Miles, Dizzy & Other Heroes (Boston:  Little, Brown & Co., 1975) p. 176.

[52] Ibid., pp. 200-201

[53] Associated Negro Press release, November 21, 1951, in Claude Barnett file.

[54] James L. Hicks, “Duke Benefit for NAACP Netted $1,000, Not 13 Gs,” Baltimore Afro-American, in Ibid, p. 5.to

[55] Duke Ellington and Otis N. Thompson, Jr., “Duke Ellington Says He Didn’t Say It; Reporter Insists That He Did,” Baltimore Afro-American, December 15, 1951, pp.1 ff.

[56] Claude Barnett to Duke Ellington, December 5, 1951, in Claude Barnett file.

[57] “The Duke of Ellington Honored by Host of Stars,” Associated Negro Press release, February 4, 1952, in Claude Barnett file.

[58] “Chicagoans Join in Duke Ellington Salute,” Associated Negro Press release, December 24, 1952 and ANP release, January 4, 1953, both in Claude Barnett file.

[59] “Duke Ellington Attacks TV, Then Signs for Show,” Chicago Defender, September 2, 1950, p. 27.

[60] Duke Ellington in Person, p. 99.

[61] Derek Jewell, Duke:  A Portrait of Duke Ellington, pp. 119-120.

[62] John Hammond on Record, p. 309.