SOMETHING TO INSERT INTO THE PREFACE (from 1984 presentation)
Much remains to be done in the study of Duke Ellington. For some people, this might not be so obvious. After all, as much or more has been said about Duke than nearly any other jazzman, I think it's fair to say that we are indebted to the pioneers of Ellington scholarship who have over the years contributed their own insights into Ellington's awe-inspiring career,
But it's equally fair to say that all of these works together-- the biographies, the musical analyses-- only begin to examine the many meanings of Ellington's career. To one degree or another, all of them fall short of revealing the whole of Duke Ellington, however excellent or even indispensable some of them may be. In other words, the book on Duke Ellington has not been written, nor is it likely to be written for some time to come.
I used to think I was the one to write such a book. I'm afraid I'll have to be a bit more modest about what I'm doing, for various problems I'll name as they come up. When such a book does come, it will have to be written not by a single person, but perhaps by a committee of talented people in different disciplines. Their task will be one of formidable scope.
The process by which I arrived at Duke was a circuitous one, a rather strange and involved one, as it would have to be for someone my age. In the late 1960s, I began a gradual transition from rock 'n' roll to the likes of Archie Shepp, Ornette Coleman, and Sun Ra. From there, it has been a case of looking back ward, where Duke Ellington could hardly fail to attract my attention. There is a seductive quality in his work that is hard to resist.
Nevertheless, it was unlikely then that a person of my age would take to Ellington's music, nor is it likely that it will become any easier for generations following mine. You might call this the musical miseducation of youth; in the United States particularly, the laws of economics in the music business, or just the inevitability of change in styles. The Ellington Era is now firmly in the past, despite the talents and efforts of many to preserve it as America's "classical" music.
To state that more positively, the vast territory of Ellingtonia a field most rewarding to the historian, who makes it his business to uncover the past. As historians, however, our obligation to be thorough is imperative. At this late date, more than fifty years after Duke Ellington's death, the obstacles confronting us are very real.
The Ellington historian's subject is a career that spans fifty years and almost every venue north of the South Pole. At the same time, our opportunity to talk directly to the survivors of the Ellington Era-- the veterans of the Cotton Club, of the Trocadero in London, the Regal Theatre in Chicago, and so on-- is vanishing rapidly, day by day and year by year.
Added to this is the historian's responsibility to bring a new perspective to the events he narrates, He has to know what he's looking for, be able to interpret it within a larger context, and balance his meticulous research in a satisfactory way.
We're well past the point where we need another broad rehash of Ellington's life and the celebrated milestones in it. Yet there is much more to be discovered in Ellington's multi-dimensional life, if we choose a perspective outside the boundaries of jazz.
from what we read, the collective portrait of Ellington in print is confusing and contradictory. The literature tends toward one of two extremes: Music Is My Mistress, with its avalanche of names and places, presents its author as a man with an insatiable appetite for the applause of the entire world, setting forth on a career of conquest, titles, and awards, against the barriers of musical category. This is the side of Ellington most fully explored in the 1940s by Barry Ulanov, the author of the first Duke Ellington biography. Writing much in the fashion of Dr. Sidney Finkelstein, Ulanov was explicit about the social roots of musical categories, and he presents Duke and his orchestra as a product of specific social forces, from Washington, D.C. onwards.
At the other extreme, we have another Duke Ellington entirely, a man who lived on some pinnacle in the realm of Art, a god who had no interest in monetary matters. Ellington himself often said as much, never mind the intrusions of wars, revolutions, and depressions. To be sure, this was a side of Ellington, but it is misleading to accept it wholly. We need to views Ellington in all of his dimensions: musical, social, racial, political, economic, and so on, to learn the lessons his life holds for the twenty-first century.
Ellington's music is central, of course, but we must think of it as the expression of a personality, actually a collective personality of a most unique kind, shaped, as all of us are, by forces of the here and now. Too often, the Ellington we meet between the covers of a book is a man of no dimension broader than music. We get a sanitized version of Ellington, the Ellington of the publicity machines, the magazines, the Voice of America, and the State Department.
Surely, there is a real Duke Ellington, a human being of many self-contradictions, a man of many mistresses, who has a story more fascinating and enlightening than even he knew.
II. ORIGINS
from Stanley Dance, The World of Swing, New York: Da Capo, 1974, 2001.
Elmer Snowden, 47f.
Louis Thomas had been down to Atlantic City and heard me and Black Diamond. He had a kind of booking agency and a nightclub called the Quaker City Jazz Club, and he took us to Washington. Duke Ellington was being booked out of that office then and, although Louis wass Colored, Meyer Davis worked for him, too... Our band, Louis Thomas's band, went into the Howard Theatre, playing from a box behind lattice work. We had Doc Perry on piano, Otto Hardwick on sax, Diamond on drums, and I was playing banjo...
The fellow who owned the New World [in Washington] also owned the Paradise, the big club in Atlantic City, where Charlie Johnson and the big entertainers worked... [He] sent for me in Washington to open a new place called the Music Box on New York Avenue and the Boardwalk. So I took Artie Whetsol and Otto Hardwick down. When the season was over, we went back to Washington... [Pianist Claude Hopkins] wanted some musicians and he naturally came to Washington to get them... Claude was a terrific piano player, and he, Cliff Jackson, and a couple other piano players, used to gang up on Duke, who knew only one or two numbers. Of course, he would play this number he had written, Poodle Dog Rag, in half a dozen different keys, and it was supposed to be a different song, but it was the same thing in different tempos. Then Russell Wooding told him he'd hire him for his band if he'd learn to play something besides that rag. The Siren Song was popular, and he asked him to learn that. So Duke worked on it all week and went out with the band. He was sitting up there all night waiting to play The Siren Song, but they didn't call it till nearly closing time!
long story short:
Snowden recalls Ellington at the time also painting signs in a basement art studio. He still was working the soda fountain at the Poodle Dog Cafe, hanging around with Snowden, Hardwick, and Whetsol.
Snowden's band got a break when the club owner Clarence Williams invited them to New York (1923?).
Duke Ellington and Sonny Greer had first gone to New York with Wilbur Sweatman, for only three weeks, and then found themselves stranded. Back in Washington, Greer approached Snowden and offered to join him for a New York job. Consequently, they, along with Hardwick and Whetsol, drove to the train station in Hardwick's broken-down car, the Dupadilly. They did make the station in time for their train to New York. They had expected Fats Waller to join them on piano, but he was nowhere to be found. The telegram they sent Ellington, asking him to fill in for Waller, proved to be the ticket to Ellington's musical career.
Steven Lasker, liner notes to Early Ellington: The Original Decca Recordings
(p. 32)
After Ellington's first, unsuccessful venture in New York, his return to Washington brought him into contact with banjoist Elmer Snowden, another Washingtonian. Along with Arthur Whetsol, they travelled to New York in 1923 for a job that turned out to be nonexistent. The singer Ada "Bricktop" Smith took a liking to the group, who now called themselves the Washingtonians. Before long they had a gig at Barron Wilkins' Exclusive club in Harlem.
In the meantime, Ellington was renting a room on Seventh Avenue whose owner, Leonard Harper, was choreographing a show at a basement club called the Hollywood Cafe. The club offered a tiny bandstand big enough for only six players, a fact which, beginning in September of 1923, figured heavily on Ellington and his band's creativity for the next four years.
(33)
In that same fall, Bubber Miley joined the band, and, as Ellington later commented, "we forgot all about the sweet music." Miley's finely-honed growl technique with the plunger mute which became the main identifier of what came to be called Duke Ellington's "jungle style."
Otto Hardwick describes Miley as "a happy-go-lucky, moon-faced, slim, brown boy full of gold teeth. Bubber loved to play... a master showman... completely uninhibited... irrepressible." Miley left Ellington in 1929 and succumbed to tuberculosis three years later.
The Washingtonians added a trombonist, John Anderson, who was replaced by Charlie Irvis, the first of a succession of "growl" trombonists in Ellington's orchestra at the onset of 1924.
A dispute over money prompted Snowden to leave the band around February. Sonny Greer: "It didn't take long before we thrust the leadership on Duke. He didn't want it, but his disposition was better than ours. He could keep us in line without doing too much. We were a pretty wild bunch in those days, myself in particular." Snowden was eventually replaced by Fred Guy, who remained in Ellington's band through the late 1940s.
(34)
After a second fire closed the Hollywood Cafe late in 1924, it was rechristened the Club Kentucky upon its reopening in March 1925. Later that year with lyricist Jo Trent, Ellington scored his first musical show, Chocolate Kiddies, which toured Europe with a Harlem band led by Sam Wooding.
In May 1926 the third of a series of suspicious fires burned down and closed the Kentucky Club. Henry "Bass" Edwards and Charlie Irvis left the band to be replaced by Mack Shaw and Joe Nanton on tuba and growl trombone, respectively.
While the band was on tour during the summer of 1926, Miley and Ellington conceived "East St. Louis Toodle-o, which was to become their theme for the next fifteen years, and "Black and Tan Fantasy," their first masterpiece (according to Brooks Kerr, Otto Hardwick claims to have written the secondary theme). The following September the band began its final season at the Kentucky Club. A few weeks later, the music publisher Irving Mills heard them for the first time, playing "Black and Tan Fantasy:"
"When I learned it was Duke's composition I immediately recognized that I had encountered a great creative artist.
Timner: 16 side issued between November 1924 and October 1926
The Washingtonians
"Choo Choo" Blu-Disc
b/w "Rainy Nights"
Jo Trent & The Deacons
"Deacon Jazz" Blu-Disc
b/w Sonny & The Deacons
"Oh! How I Love My Darling"
Florence Bristol
"How Come You Do Me Like You Do?" Blu-Disc
mid-1925:
The Washingtonians
"Twelfth Street Rag" unissued
"Tiger Rag" unissued
September 7, 1925:
The Washingtonians
"I'm Gonna Hang Around My Sugar" Pathe
b/w "Trombone Blues"
c. March 18, 1926:
The Washingtonians
"Parlor Social Stomp" Pathe
March 30, 1926:
Duke Ellington& His Washingtonians
"(You've Got Those) Wanna-Go-Back-Again Blues" Gennett
b/w "If You Can't Hold the Man Youv Love"
June 21, 1926:
Duke Ellington &B His Washingtonians
"Animal Crackers" Gennett
b/w "Li'l Farina"
October 16, 1926:
Alberta Jones With the Ellington Twins
"Lucky Number Blues" Gennett
b/w "I'm Gonna Put You Right in Jail"
November, 1924:
Alberta Prime (Pryme?)
"It's Gonna Be a Cold, Cold Winter" Blu-Disc
Tucker, 172: Ellington gives Prime "a full-bodied accompaniment with rolled tenths in the left hand and octaves and melody doubling on the right."
b/w "Parlor Social De Luxe"
Tucker, 173: Sonny Greer is also present; Ellington's "hard-driving piano" and sound effects ; purports to recreate a rowdy Harlem rent party. "sounds like and impromptu performance."
The Washingtonians:
"Choo-Choo" Blu=Disc
Tucker, 171: from Louis Katzman's stock arrangement, but takes liberties. Bubber Miley gives a riveting performance.
b/w "Rainy Nights"
Ellington never recorded with the big blues stars. His singers were lesser lights in their time; today they are obscure. He accompanied two Albertas-- Prime and Jones-- but not Alberta Hunter... He and Hardwick helped Florence Bristol make her first record; it was also her last... But Ellington did accompany one singer, Irving Mills, who would soon prove a valuable contact.
Tucker considers Ellington as accompanist and as soloist respectively. 170-1:
In the mid-twenties, when Ellington made his first recordings with the Washingtonians, it was common for blues and cabaret singers to go into the studio and record sides intended for what was called the "race" market... The material tended to be either twelve-bar blues or syncopated pop songs that were made to sound like blues. Such sessions were aimed at selling not just records but sheet music. In this way black songwriters like Perry Bradford, Clarence Williams, Spencer Williams, Porter Grainger, Maceo Pinkard, and Jo Trent had an outlet for their wares, as did theeir white imitators (e.g., Irving Kahal and Sammy Fain in "If You Can't Hold the Man You Love."
Analysis of successive recordings on Pathe and Gennett reveals what Ellington has learned from other composer-arrangers, especially from Don Redman.
"More is less": What not to play becomes as important as what to play: finger-busting passages turn into throwaway cues and signature runs that clearly identify the pianist. Ellington never aspired to be the world's greatest pianist; he sought mainly to be the ideal accompanist. In either role, his playing style became immediately identifiable, almost inimitable.
The Ellington band explored the blues in all its hues and expanded the possibilities inherent in the simplest of chord patterns. Eventually, they became a blues band; even when not technically a twelve or sixteen-bar form, their music was saturated with blues changes, blues harmony, and blues feeling.
As a pianist, Duke Ellington had little desire to mimic the styles of other pianists. He strove rather to be an accompanist, and this was the role he filled to perfection in his career to come.
from The Memoirs of Willie The Lion Smith (Koch/BMG, 1968)
[Ellington is] a great modern pianist. Any time a guy can lead the band off, hit the signature note, wave them in, and tell them the cues. Some of the guys sit and wait for the band to come in. Not Ellington. Ellington's up here all the time; he's all over the joint. When it comes to his signature to modulate and go over to the next [key], he draws the band in, not the band him.
IV. THE MILLS REGIME
R. D. Darrell was one of the first among "serious" critics to recognize the magnitude of Ellington's achievement. In a series of articles written between 1927 and 1931 for Phonograph Monthly Review, he regularly touted Ellington's recordings, beginning with "East St. Louis Toodle-O." In 1932, he published an extensive examination of Ellington's "Black Beauty in disques:
Darrell, R. D. "Black Beauty," disques, 1932. TDER, 61
Music has become too complex. Few modern works can be heard ideally except mentally, poring over the written score. Popular music sounds the lowest depths with one man writing a tune, another harmonizing it, a third scoring it, and a fourth called in for the actual performance. And one's ears cannot be deceived as to the barbarous conglomeration of individualities, blurring or burying whatever fragrance or delicacy any one talent may have contributed. Ellington is of course the rare exception, but his work-- composed, scored, and played under one sure hand-- gives a glimpse of an Utopian age in music that seemed forever lost.
Highlight #2, TDER, 265, on the trip to Hollywood to play in the Amos and Andy film, Check and Double Check in 1930 and subsequent trips to make Murder at the Vanities and Belle of the Nineties.
Spike Hughes: "Impressions of Ellington in New York" (1933), before the European tour.
Melody Maker, May, 1933. (TDER, 69)
paving the way for Ellington's European arrival, ballyhoo borrowed from Ned Williams's press kit:
So many times I have thanked my stars to have been born a European, proud in the knowledge that our dear old bankrupt continent has the sense to appreciate good music when it hears it without having to wade through a mass of tasteless hokum first."
objects to the presence of Lawrence Brown in the trombone section: "too smart" or "sophisticated" [Hughes's quotation marks]... to be anything but out of place" in Ellington's orchestra, a view he shard with John Hammond, with whom Hughes was close.
Spike Hughes, "Meet the Duke," TDER, 72 (London Daily Herald, 6/13/33)
published after Ellington's arrival in the UK: more Ned Williams ballyhoo: "the Aristocrat of Harlem." Hughes claims that Europeans had a far greater appreciation for Duke Ellington and His Orchestra than Americans.
...Jazz is not, and never has been, a brainchild of Tin Pan Alley. It is the music of Harlem gin mills, Georgia backyards, and New Orleans street corners-- the music of a race that plays, sings and dances because music is its most direct medium of expression and escape.
Duke Ellington alone has brought this music out of the semi-twilight of small night clubs into the broad daylight of the outside world.
Highlight #3, The band's performance at the London Palladium in 1933. Ellington: "This was a night that scared the devil out of the whole band, the applause was so terrifying-- it was applause beyond applause. On our first show there was ten minutes of continuous applause."
Wilder Hobson, "Introducing Duke Ellington," TDER, 93ff (Fortune, August 1933)
A long, literate, perceptive profile of Duke Ellington, beginning with a discussion of the etymology of the word "jazz" (suggesting its "lecherous origins"). The term means different things to different people: "jazz" is all music that isn't "classical"; "hot" jazz versus "tin pan alley."
Hobson chooses the music of Rudy Valee as a representative of the latter category. He
resembles Guy Lombardo, Russ Columbo, Bing Crosby, and various other radio and tea-dancing idols.... Mr. Ellington and his orchestra offer rich, original music, music of pulse and gusto, stemming out of the lyricism of the Negro and played with great virtuosity. Ellington's music is jazz; it is the best jazz.
Hobson notes Ellington's recent European tour and quotes some of the negative reviews: London Times, "Mr. Duke Ellington... is exceptionally and remarkably efficient in his own line... And the excitement and exacerbation of the nerves which are caused by the performances of his orchestra the more disquieting by reason of measured and dangerous stimuli."
Hobson notes also the positive reviews Ellington received overseas and the Belgian critic Robert Goffin's book, Aux Frontiers du Jazz. He quotes from the book, "Duke a attient la pinacle de la gloire."
He also takes note of Ellington's current U.S. tour schedule and the variety of his venues; Ellington's appearance on Broadway opposite Maurice Chevalier; Hollywood movies, Ziegfeld's Show Girl, etc. Goes into Irving Mills management, Ellington's large ($250,000) yearly gross earnings, but notes they are considerably less than white entertainers' earnings.
The remainder of the piece examines Ellington's private residence on Sugar Hill in Harlem, his family, and the experiences of his youth.[Ellington] is assisted in his theatrical tours by feature singers such as Ivie Anderson and dancers like the gelatinous "Snake Hips" Tucker. These performers plus the band constitute the highest grade Negro entertainment, which always has a market of its own.
*
"A Souvenir of Ellington's First Visit to England 1933," in two parts, 2:30
Ellington was recorded on BBC in an interview with Percy Mathison Brooks:
Brooks: (after Ellington plays a few bars of "Mood Indigo:) Hold it, Duke, hold it. Surely, that's not the way you're feeling. I thought you'd have something more lively to say than that.
Ellington: Well, I don't know that I'm feeling altogether cheerful. Certainly, everything has been so fine and people so nice, I ought to be feeling good. This is really mt farewell, and you can take it from me that I don't want to go.
Sure, I know how you feel. But you're not done yet, and after all, it's only going to be a case of auf wiedersehen, isn't it?
I hope so. Just as soon as possible, we will be back again. If it doesm''t turn out to be an annual trip, I'll be the most disappointed man in the world.
Is that because you've discovered how well your work is known and appreciated around here?
Largely, I suppose. athough I must say it has been embarrassing at times to be asked the most analytical questions about work I have nearly forgotten by now.
Well, you'll have to write some new numbers. And by the way, have you got any in mind?
Yes, I have. I want to write a "rude" song. This was accidentally suggested by Mrs. Constant Lambert, who referred to our little melancholy tune as "Rude Indigo." All I need now is the balance of the title to go with "rude."
I'll have to leave that to you. Incidentally, everybody's anxious to know which of your own compositions is your favorite.
That's a difficult one to answer. The things I've liked best I've often left on the shelf, but of my published and recorded numbers, I think I like "Mood Indigo" best.
Do you think your music will ever become divorced from the ballroom and find a permanent home in the concert hall?
Yes, inevitably, but perhaps not in this generation. It is the youngsters of these days who will make up the audiences of the future, and they have no prejudices of which they must rid themselves.
That seems logical enough. And now, there's just time for you to say goodbye.
No, I refuse to say goodbye. Au revoir is the word that comes from the bottom of my heart.
Constant Lambert on Ellington, TDER, 110 (from Music Ho! A Study of Music in Decline) 1934
The best records of Duke Ellington... can be listened to again and again because they are not just decorations of a familiar shape but a new arrangement of shapes. Ellington, in fact, is a real composer, the first jazz composer of distinction, and the first Negro composer of distinction.
"Mood Indigo": "exquisitely tired and four-in-the-morning"
calls attention to Ellington's mastery of the ten-inch, 78-rpm recording
Ellington's Response to Lambert, TDER 112 (from Philadelphia Record, May 1935)
Gama Gilbert:
Ellington is interviewed during an intermission; notes his effect on the English "musical intelligentsia"; his "discovery" deemed "the greatest British triumph since Dr. Livingstone's adventures in Darkest Africa." Ellington is compared to Bach and Stravinsky by Percy Grainger and others.
Ellington: "Hot damn! I guess that makes me pretty good, doesn't it?"
A black man feels [a] black man's music most, and that's what I want to write. My aim is not only to make jazz. It is to make new, unadulterated music expressing the character and moods of the Negro. It's hard for me to get other kinds of music. Take Stravinski, he has a terrific conception and he sure knows how to handle his material, but I really can't feel his music with my heart.
Ellington on Gershwin's Porgy and Bess-- and a Response from the Office of Irving Mills, TDER, 114 (1935-36, from Edward Morrow, "Duke Ellington on Gershwin's Porgy," New Theatre; Richard Mack, "Duke Ellington-- In Person," Orchestra World.
1.the cult of critical Negrophiles went into journalistic rhapsodies hailed it as a "native American opera" avowed it "typical of a "child-like, quaint" Negro people and declared it "caught the spirit of a primitive group... No one, however, thought to ask Negro musicians, composers and singers their opinions of the Gershwin masterpiece.
Ellington:
Grand music and a swell play, I guess, but the two don't go together-- I mean that the music did not hitch with the mood and spirit of the story... It does not use the Negro musical idiom. It was not the music of Catfish Row or any other kind of Negroes.
Ellington denies having the intention of creating an opera. Alludes to Symphony in Black: "In one of my forthcoming movie "shorts" I have an episode which concerns the death of a baby." ("Hymn of Sorrow")
Richard O. Boyer, "The Hot Bach," 1944 (TDER, 244-5)
Upon the death of his mother, Ellington fell into another deep depression. "He had always felt that he and his activities were the special concern of a benevolent God. In the face of this tragedy, he began to doubt it. It was then that he began wearing the little gold cross that always hangs about his neck."lg
1939 tour: England, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Norway) restored Ellington's faith after the loss of both his parents.
Rex Stewart says, "You have to be a Negro to understand why Europe is a different world. You can go anywhere, do anything, talk to anybody. You can't believe it. You are like a guy who has eaten hot dogs all his life and is suddenly offered caviar. You can't believe it.
Ellington, upon the band's return in 1939: "Things have happened to me in such a way as to prove religion to me. I have stood alone and had things come out all right. I'm certain religion gives you strength. It makes you feel that if you are God's son you are strong and don't have to worry."
John Hammond, "The Tragedy of Duke Ellington," TDER, 118 (Down Beat, November 1935)
controversy over "Reminiscing in Tempo"
Hammond: "complete sterility of this new opus," "the ideal example of what the modern composer, Negro or white, should avoid at all costs."
On Ellington:
Unpleasantness of any sort he flees from; he would greatly prefer not seeing the seamier side of existence... [Ellington] has been exploited in a way that is absolutely appalling... [for] the last eight years, he has received disgracefully little himself. (pot-shot at Irving Mills)
This salvo marked the beginning of a lifelong rift between Ellington and Hammond.
Highlight #4, TDER 266, Stockholm, 1939. On April 29, Duke's birthday, "I was awakened by a 16-piece band from the local radio station, which marched into my hotel room serenading me with 'Happy Birthday'." At the Concert House where the band performed, bouquets of flowers kept arriving and there were crowds gathered at his dressing room. "The whole audience rose to sing 'Happy Birthday' and there was a ceremony onstage, followed by a big banquet for the entire orchestra and numerous guests at the Crown Prince Cafe. It all brought a very glowing ending to our second European tour."
The Parting of Ellington and Irving Mills, TDER, 140 (from Melody Maker, 5/39)
While the Ellington orchestra was en route home from their second European tour on the Ile de France, the split was announced, along with the news that Duke had signed a management contract with the William Morris Agency and the Music Corporation of America (MCA), wherein he came under the personal management of Willard Alexander. "The circumstances under which Ellington and Mills are parting are too much a matter of hearsay at the moment to warrant recounting."
Irving Mills, "I Split with Duke When Music Began Sidetracking," Down Beat 1952 Silver Jubilee issue (TDER, 274-5.
When I withdrew from my managerial relationship with Duke, it was because I sensed that Duke had fallen into a different attitude toward his music and was taking off in what I thought was the wrong direction. ["Reminiscing in Tempo"] never should have been released. It was one of the points [at] which Duke lost touch with the huge, loyal following that loved genuine Ellington music.... His mistake was turning from the idiom... to the concert works to which he has practically confined his writing in recent years.
VIII. GOLDEN AGE
War Years
Harvey G. Cohen, Duke Ellington's America
"One possible reason for the [Carnegie Hall] shown a was to provide publicity for the Ellington orchestra during the Petrillo ban, which, because of a union dispute, kept bands from recording from 1941 to 1942 [sic] and reduced the Ellington orchestra's presence in the popular music marketplace." (206-7)
Cohen, 214:
There is a sadness and frustration expressed in the unpublished scenario that [Ellington] never voiced in public. The reception of the work would have definitely been altered had critics possessed the document upon [Black, Brown and Beige's] premiere. Perhaps the reason it never came out was that, by 1943, Ellington had already witnessed the lack of financial support given to projects that overtly (if humorously) challenge Jim Crow and celebrated little-known African and African American history; ... in 1943, the script probably would have aroused resistance, Ellington sought to avoid such reactions.
Ellington's original plan was the opera he'd had in mind for over a decade, with a protagonist named Boola.
footnote: The Brown and Beige scenario went through numerous drafts, some or all of which are filed at the Smithsonian: AC/ NMAH/SI
Ellington's lyrics included
("Come Sunday")
Came Sunday. With all the whites inside
The church, their less fortunate brothers
Emerged from everywhere to congregate
Beneath a tree. Huddle there, they passed
The Word of God around in whispers...
When the whites inside lifted voices
In joyous song...
The Blacks outside would hum along,
Adding their own touches... weaving melodic,
Harmonic, rhythmic patterns.
Thus the spiritual was born.
Highly emotional worshipping of God
In SONG." (p. 277)
("Emancipation Celebration"}
"They had earned the right to finish out
Their sorry lives unworried and at ease...
What now? 'You must go... You're trespassing here.'
'Get up and go!' But where?
... Nobody knows but Jesus...
'They set us free... but left us alone
To starve... to freeze... to die. (p. 222)
Duke Ellington, Down Beat Silver Jubilee, 1952 (TDER, 266)
The first night at Carnegie was the only time in my life that I didn't have stage fright. I just didn't have time-- I couldn't afford the luxury of being scared. Dr. Arthur Logan, an old friend and our personal physician, was standing around backstage handing out pills to everybody in the band. He even took one himself. He offered one to me and I refused it. I wasn't nervous-- not at all. But I did walk onstage without my music. Somebody signaled to me from the wings that they had it-- but I didn't need it anyway; I remembered it all!
Previews of the first Carnegie Hall concert, TDER, 155 (from Down Beat, 1/15/43)
Helen Oakley states the title of Ellington's opus only as "A Tone Parallel," "the latest and to date most significant work yet delivered from the pen of the famed Negro composer."
She notes Ellington's preference of a European audience, for its "keen interest in what we are attempting to do."
Unlike previous jazz performances at Carnegie Hall, Duke Ellington's will be "a serious program hailing the attention of Carnegie's customary patrons." The article goes on to describe the movements "Black," "Brown" and "Beige," apparently unaware of the title of the suite as a whole. She describes the rest of the program, singling out "Blue Belles of Harlem," an Ellington tune written much earlier for the bandleader Paul Whiteman.
Brian Priestley and Alan Cohen, "Black, Brown and Beige," TDER, 186ff
Cites Barry Ulanov 1933 interview, mentioning a "negro suite' in five parts, "from its source in the African jungle... [through] the future for the fifth and last movement, probably a hundred years from now, and give an apotheosis aiming to put the negro in a more comfortable place among the people of the world and a return to something he lost when he became a slave." This description "had much in it of the opera [Boola] he had been preparing for an even longer period."
The remainder of the article (originally from Composer 51, spring and summer 1974, winter 1974-1975) is an exhaustive musical analysis of the three movements, in turn.
"Black, Brown and Beige is not only a work of symphonic scale but, of all Ellington's extended compositions, the one most profitably influenced by symphonic devices."
Howard Taubman, TDER, 158 (from New York Times Magazine, 1/17/43)
takes the form of an interview with Ellington at his Harlem apartment.
"Ellington's most elaborate composition is an opera, still unproduced, called "Boola"... He has taken some of the music from this opera and turned it into a half-hour tone poem for his band, and he will unveil it at Carnegie Hall. It is called 'Black, Brown and Beige." Describes the three movements.
Black, Brown and Beige: the debate in Jazz (1943); TDER, 171. both published the May 1943 issue of Jazz:
John Hammond, "Is the Duke Deserting Jazz"?
"In the first half of his career as a bandleader, Ellington was content to be leader of the finest dance unit ever produced... Duke had a tremendous melodic gift, unequalled by any other popular composer of the day, and his band had a distinctive style that set it apart from any other in the land."
"In 1933 he finally took his band to England and started a new phase in his career." Hammond argues that the lavish praise heaped upon Ellington at that time went to his head and fueled his ambition to write "serious" music.
Leonard Feather rebuts Hammond, TDER, 173.
"I think it is a dirty rotten, lowdown no-good shame that somebody like John Hammond, who has done so much to eliminate race prejudice in music, should be so completely befuddled by personal prejudices himself." These "prejudices" are mostly motivated by Hammond's inability his inability to run Ellington's band and career, as he had Billie Holiday's, Count Basie's, and others. "Duke thought he knew better than Hammond how to run the Ellington band." Ellington and his music "will be remembered longer than the puny attempts to dictate to him or belittle him when the attempts at dictatorship fail.
(More than thirty years later, Feather apologized for this attack on Hammond.)
"The Hot Bach" Unit (1943-1949), TDER, 205 ff
editor's summary:
- continuing series of Carnegie Hall concerts annually through 1948, each featuring a new "extended" piece: New World A-Coming (12/43), Perfume Suite (12/44), Deep South Suite (1/46?), Liberian Suite (1947), The Tattooed Bride (1948).
- appearance of Boyer's "The Hot Bach" profile in The New Yorker.
- orchestra continued to play a varied series of venues throughout the war years, including long stays in New York's Hurricane Restaurant in 1943-4 and Club Zanzibar in 1945. Radio broadcasts were useful to Ellington during the recording bans levied by the AFM in 1943 and 1948.
- big changes in band personnel from the mid-'40s on.
- Ellington ended his recording contract with Victor in 1946; went briefly to Musicraft and then to Columbia (1947-1949).
Duke Ellington, "Ellington's Defense of Jazz," 208f.
(the articles appeared in consecutive issues of American Mercury in 10/43 and 1/44)
Sargeant: "The mistake of the fashionable jazz aesthetes has been to take jazz out of the simple sidewalk and dancehall milieu where it belongs and pretend that it is a complex, civilized art."
Ellington: concedes to some of Sargeant's observations on popular music generally. Cite's the dictionary definition of "music," then chides Sargeant for his assertion that jazz is incapable of deep, emotional expression. He argues the capacity of the simple blues form to move people, much as the simple sonnet form was able to achieve art of a very high order.
Richard O. Boyer, "The Hot Bach" TDER, 214 ff.
originally appeared as an extensive, three-part piece in The New Yorker, 6/24. 7/1, and 7/8/44.
One of the broadest and most perceptive documents on Ellington's career, this tripartite profile of Duke and his orchestra is one of the best ever published.
Part I. opens with an evaluation of Ellington in the context of the birth of jazz, whose history was largely within his own career. "Music of the Spheres" v. New Orleans brothel "entertainment."
"Ellington has, like most entertainers, a stage self and a real self."
"As the spotlight picks him out of the gloom, the audience sees a wide, irrepressible grin but, when the light moves away, Ellington's face instantly sags into immobility."
Boyer discusses the many themes Ellington would repeat throughout his career, e.g. wasting time arguing with a band member vs. using that time writing a hit song. Ellington's religiosity, eating habits (Nanton: "He's a genius, all right, but Jesus, how he eats!"), his interest in Black history, etc.
The article then follows the band through a Midwest tour by train; attends a card game among the band members, the differing roles of Ellington and Strayhorn. He describes a typical one-nighter:
In general, or so its members like to think, the more exhausted the Ellington band is, the better it plays. Ordinarily, the tempo at the beginning of a dance is rather slow; both players and dancers have to warm up to their interdependent climax. By midnight, both are in their stride.
Boyer gives vivid, detailed descriptions of the band members onstage.
Part II begins with observations on Ellington's personality, his calm, seemingly imperturbable demeanor. Boyer proceeds to explain the cooperative nature of the band in rehearsals and its process of creation, a dialogue with its leader at the piano. When disagreement crops up among the members
Duke, whom European music critics have called the American Bach, will resolve the debate by sitting down at his piano, perhaps taking something from each suggestion, perhaps modifying and reconciling the ideas of the two men, but always putting the Ellington stamp on the music before passing it on to the next part of the work in progress. Duke sometimes quotes Bach. "As Bach says," he may remark, speaking about piano playing, 'If you ain't got a left hand, you ain't worth a hoot in hell.'"
Cross-country train travel invokes the rhythms that inspired "Daybreak Express." Boyer recounts the Ellington band's complete itinerary for 1942, from one-night dance or theater engagements to weeks-long residencies in big cities, a very long list of venues indeed. Ellington himself is observed in a host of situations, sometimes discussing the origin of some of his famous tunes.
Part III compares the image of Ellington and his orchestra to the stereotyped image of Buddy Bolden's "attractive degeneracy" and the legend of Bix Beiderbecke drinking himself to an early death. When asked about it, Duke replied, concerning the sprees of his youth, "I should have kept a diary."
Of critics who compare his achievements in "columns of rococo prose" to the glories of ancient Greece and Rome, Ellington responds, "It seems to me such talk stinks up the place."
Black musicians look askance at jazz critics and the white world generally, viewing them as "an inexplicable order which simultaneously gives them adoration and Jim Crow."
Ellington: "I've had three educations-- the street corner, going to school, and the Bible. The Bible is most important. It taught me to look at a man's insides instead of the cut of his suit.
Boyer relates Ellington's knowledge of Black history, but publicly he "usually sets his beige-colored face in a grin as wide as possible," preferring to express his ideas musically. Ellington claims that the four beats to the bar in jazz "has been beaten into the Negro race by three centuries of oppression."
"The four beats to the 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 like on the trombone, but you gotta be careful with words,' he explains.
Duke Ellington made nearly a million dollars since beginning his career in New York but has spent it as he made it. To date, he has sold twenty million records and earned half a million in record royalties alone. In recent years, the band has played mostly one-night stands, dances, and concerts. The band makes between $1,250 and $2,000 a night, depending on attendance. They gross as much as $10,000 a week, but payroll, and travel expenses are heavy. The sideman receive between $125 and $185 a week, plus travel expenses. Ellington himself draws $600 a week, $250 of which is a spending allowance provided by William Mittler, the band's auditor.
"[Ellington] spends money lavishly, supports a good many hangers-on, lends money freely, gets iit back infrequently, and is usually broke when the weekly payday rolls around. " The band's overhead expenses have increased from year to year: in 1939 the band earned $160,000 only to break even. In 1942 they grossed $210,000 but netted only $4,000.
The band's 1943-44 Hurricane Club six-month engagement lost $18,000, but Ellington "considered it a good investment because of the Broadway address and the free radio time and publicity."
Duke Ellington's apartment was located at 935 St. Nicholas Avenue in Harlem. His "gold-and-blue rugs and tapestries from Sweden are modern. Boyer's final comments concern Ellington's new concert creation, New World A-Coming: "And I mean it," says Ellington.
"Interpretations in Jazz: A Conference with Duke Ellington" (Etude, March 1947) TDER, 255-8.
[In the editor's introduction: "Worthy of mention... is the news that Ellington had recently 'established an instrumental scholarship at the Julliard School of Music, the first living artist to do so.'"]
Ellington: "I was lucky, indeed, to begin when I did. But perhaps I should define my notion of luck; to me it means being at the right place at the right time and doing the right thing before the right people. If all four 'rights' are in good order, you may count yourself lucky."
Further along: "What, exactly, is jazz?" Here Ellington embraces the term, which he defines as freedom of expression in music. "Just as the classic form represents adherence to a structural standard, just as romantic music represents a rebellion against fixed forms in favor of more personal utterance, so jazz continues the pattern of barrier-breaking and emerges as the freest musical expression we have yet seen. To me, then, jazz means simply freedom of musical speech!"
Ellington insists on the essential American-ness of jazz. "We say that music is typically jazz, or typically American, if it follows no [particular ethnic] pattern at all! Even the Negroid element in jazz turns out to be less African than American... The pure African beat of rhythm and line of melody have become absorbed in its American environment."
Still further, concerning "Beige," the final movement of Black, Brown and Beige: "The opening themes of the third movement reflect the supposed-to-be-Negro-- the unbridled, noisy confusion of the Harlem cabaret which must have plenty of 'atmosphere' if it is to live up to the tourist's expectation. But-- there are, by numerical count, more churches than cabarets in Haarlem, there are more well-educated and ambitious Negroes than wastrels. And my fantasy gradually changes its character to introduce thee Negro as he is-- part of America, with the hopes and dreams and love of freedom that have made America for all of us."
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DEMS Bulletin 1996/1
Benny Aasland died April 27, 1996, eulogy by Sjef Hoefsmit
Mercer Ellington died February 8, 1996
DEMS Bulletin, 1997/3, October-November: "Personal Reflections"
Eddie Lambert died, aged 53.
Duke Ellington: A Listener's Guide. Scarecrow Press, published December 21, 1998
Klaus Stratemann died July 21, 1997, aged 45.
Duke Ellington, Day by Day and Film by Film. Scarecrow Press, 1992.
Sjef Hoefsmit died ? aged 54.
Gordon Ewing died aged 54.
