Stanley and Helen Oakley Dance, Vista CA 8/16/82

To meet two of Ellington's closest confidantes, Stanley and Helen Dance, I traveled two hours from LA to their home in Vista, California, just west of San Diego.  It was my enormous good fortune to speak with both of them at once; I had expected to see Stanley only, but it was Helen who sparked most of our conversation, for nearly an entire afternoon.  She had been, from the mid-1930s, legendary as a writer, concert organizer, and producer.  From the mid-1930s on, largely due to her social position, she was able to became one of most important catalysts in all of jazz.  Stanley, of course, was one of the persons closest to Duke Ellington for the last fifteen years of Duke's life.  The series of recordings he produced for the British Felsted label remains unrivaled. He is largely recognized as the person who helped pianist Earl "Fatha" Hines resume his career in the 1960s.  Fittingly, it was Stanley Dance who delivered Duke Ellington’s eulogy in 1974.

 

From this point, it is best to let Stanley and Helen Dance tell their own stories.

 

 

 

STANLEY DANCE: (on his problems selling his most recent book)  I'd written another biography of a Black musician, and I thought that would be easy to sell.

I've had a difficult time, too.  I just had to decide to do it.  If it sells, that's fine, but I can't be going into this thing just for the money.

SD:  People think you make a lot of money at this.  You'll probably get a $5,000 advance, and that's about it.  The main thing is to find an audience, but the trouble is the young people in New York don't know anything about jazz, except for the guy at Oxford University Press.

Sheldon Meyer?  They sat on my manuscript for almost a year and then sent it back.  It was the manuscript I wrote as a master's thesis a year ago, because it didn't have as much as they'd like about Ellington's music.  That's a dilemma, because I'm not a musicologist; if I were, I'd probably do something like Gunther Schuller.  His second installment [The Swing Era] is due any time now.

SD:  He works sixteen to eighteen hours a day, so he has little time to write books.

 

It's thirteen or fourteen years overdue as it is.  But what can you say about Ellington's music without taking it bar by bar?

SD:  There is quite a bit to be said, apart from analysis.  When you get into analysis of the music, you're going to a different audience.  The average person who wants a biography does not want too much analysis where you've got to have musical illustrations.  That's a book really for musicians.  At the same time, you've got to show knowledge of what is important, what is the best of it.  You've got to develop a personal, fairly critical attitude.

To my mind, anything he does is of interest, because you know the man is kind of a genius.  You could look at something that you don't like and ask, "Why did he do this?  Why didn't he do that?"  I have a preference for what I call the hard core of his music.  The extended works and so forth were created for white people in particular.  They don’t mean much to me.  His true genius lay with the band pieces, which were superior to anything anybody else did.  The suites were marvelous, because when you call something a suite, immediately white people think, "Aha!  This is a serious piece of music."  But suites are supposed to have a common. theme.  Most of these were a series of different dances, but all of a sudden twelve or ten or eight pieces.  They could have been 78-r.p.m. records; they were separate compositions, really.  There were exceptions, like the New Orleans Suite or The Afro-Eurasian Eclipse.

Did Duke feel the same way?

SD:  Duke was a person who understood the nature of the business and the audience.  He was a very shrewd man.  He did many things because he knew what would get some good press reaction.  He knew what his audiences wanted, too.  The big thing I think everybody should stress is that he said over and over again that he needed a band to play his music, and the secret of hearing his music was keeping the band alive.  That fact determined many of the things he did.

His compromises were not on his best level.   He did play rock tunes, he did compromise only occasionally, but it was purely a matter of dollars.  That Mary Poppins thing:  we all thought it would turn out horribly, but musically, it came out well.  There's lots of excellent music on it. n I didn't particularly like that Bal Masque record.  That was done for the same reason:  survival, to keep the band running.

I was talking to Irving Mills yesterday.  He stressed that very much:  keeping the band together, keeping the same personnel.  He takes a lot of personal credit for that, the rules he laid down for the band.  It's difficult for me to say how powerful a force he was, compared to Duke.  But I get the impression that Mills pretty much ran the thing while he was in command.

SD:  Mills came into the picture about, what, 1928?

Nineteen twenty-seven, the Cotton Club.

SD:  At that time, a Black Bandleader had to have a white backer.  There's no question that, within that realm, Mills was divine.  He was gifted, and he had far more foresight than most of them.  He was extremely valuable to Ellington.  When you come up to the first long work, "Creole Rhapsody," he had the idea for that title.  "Rhapsody" sounds important.  That was Mills's idea.  I give Mills a lot of credit.  People say that Mills cheated Duke; well, I don't know.  Duke refers to him in Music Is My Mistress, that in the early days, he was indebted to Mills.

 

 

 

Irving Mills with Duke

Mills said he felt slighted by Ellington's reference to him, but I don't understand why.

SD:  He called me several times.  He was terrified that it would be much worse than it was.

There's nothing derogatory in there at all.  What did he expect?

SD:  He may have thought he deserved more credit.  What did Lawrence [Brown] say about Billy Strayhorn?

He called him a genius.  As a matter of fact, he didn't consider Ellington "in the same Auditiorium" as Billy Strayhorn.

SD:  This is where you have to be careful.  You've got to make your own judgment.  The point is that before Billy came and after he had died Duke still produced things, and after Billy died he seemed to be writing more than before.  I always think Billy was a crutch that Duke didn't really need.  He was a great talent, and he contributed a lot, but whether Duke leaned on him more than he needed, I don't know.

Another thing:  there are a lot of arrangements written by people like Dick Vance.  They're not important, but a good portion of the book did come from outside sources.  That record Columbia's just put out, The Girls Suite, some is obviously Duke and some are probably Billy's work.  I do know, for instance, that Suite Thursday, when that was written I was in Boston making records with Harry Carney.  I was there a week or ten days, and Duke was writing this down every day and taking it down to rehearsal in the afternoon and alter it.  By the time they got to Monterey, they premiered it, and then the record was made.  It was basically what I'd heard in Boston, and Billy Strayhorn wasn't even there.

I can't discount a man who played with Duke for over thirty years.  Essentially, what he said was that Duke was gifted with a fine memory and that everything he wrote was stolen from his sidemen, a riff here and a riff there, combined into something new.

SD:  In the early days, you can see that was the case. The names that appear as joint composers:  there comes a time when it disappears altogether.  After Strayhorn gets in, you very seldom get author's credit given to someone else.  Have you talked with Louis Bellson at all?

I just missed him a year ago, but he comes through Chicago regularly.

SD:  I often meet musicians, just like yourself.  Of course, Cootie is still alive, but he won't talk unless you pay him $500.

I had a talk with him, but I didn't interview him on tape.  We had some coffee together.

SD:  One of the things that's happened is archives.  The Smithsonian people would pay $2,000.  Older musicians now want to be paid to do it.

You can't blame them.

SD:  No, you can't, especially when they’ve more or less out of the business.  When they were active, they would like to be interviewed by DownBeat.  It was valuable publicity, but once they've retired, you can understand why they'd want some money.

Speaking of reticence, Duke is not even approached by anyone around him.  In the foreword to The World of Duke Ellington he makes the cryptic remark that Helen and Stanley Dance would not reveal more than they ought.  What did he consider off-limits?  Was he thinking about his personal life?

SD:  No.  It just meant that he trusted us.  He knew we wouldn't anyway.

When I moved to this country about thirty years ago, he offered me a job.  I didn't want to work for him.  I knew a good deal about Ellington.  I was interested rather as you are.  I loved and was intrigued by him and his men.  I was very friendly with Johnny Hodges and Paul Gonsalves, and people like that.

That meant the world to me.  I'd do a lot of things for Duke, taking pieces from newspapers and so forth.  I kept his scrapbooks, and his career was covered very well.   got on top of that, and it wasn't too bad.  During the last fifteen years of his career, I did things for him.  I was useful to him.  There was never any feedback:  he asked me, and I said "yes."

I went on tour with him to South America, and we had a tremendous time.  I remember Russia:  I didn't want to go to Russia, because I was still aa British citizen.  While we were there, about 150 of the diplomatic service were gathered to spy on us.   And I was there on a British passport; I didn't know whether they would put me in jail while Duke had gone off.

There was another controversy at that time, about a film.  Somebody wanted to make a documentary about the Russian tour.

SD:  Yes, there was something going on.  The best pictures of the tour were taken by Time-Life.

You said you didn't make the Near East tour.

SD:  No, I didn't.  I wish I could remember the reason.  Ellington describes it in his book.  I put some of that together.

Ray Nance was deported during that tour, wasn't he?

SD:  There was some trouble.  He was a junkie.  I can’t remember all of it.

Would you mind talking about yourself?  Were you born in London?

SD:  That's the last place in the world I would want to be born!  That and New York.

You're not a big-city person.

SD:  I was from a little town in Essex, Braintree.  It was in the country. 

Were you raised to go into a particular profession?

SD:  My father was a businessman; he was like the mayor of this town.  He was quite brilliant.  His main business was a local import tobacco company.

When I was fourteen, I was sent to the local boarding school, but I was separated and sent to boarding school.  That quickly makes you take a little trouble with your work.  It was there that I got interested in jazz, because, by coincidence, there were three or four boys whose parents were big shots, director of what is now the EMI Colombian label for Okeh Records.  When they sent their kids to school, they knew all kinds of popular music.  The average kid would take one or two favorite records for a thirteen-week term.  These kids came back with all the pop records.

The result was that after six weeks I grew sick to death of songs like "When the Red, Red Robin Comes Bob-Bob-Bobbin' Along," that sort of song.  Gradually, they had a pile of records they didn't want to play, because they got sick of them.

Were any of them by English or American bands?

SD:  Yes.  There were a lot of American records. I’m talking about 1926, ’27, ’28.  But then I heard Jelly Roll Morton and his Red Hot Peppers, and Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Eddie Lang and Joe Venuti.  Nobody really cared for these records; they sounded weird to them.  But some of us were intrigued.  We had a boy named Leggett who had very thick lips:  we called him "Thick Lips Tom."  So every time he came into our room, we'd play "Thick Lips Blues" just to irritate him.

Gradually, we began to like these records, so by trial and error we began to listen to Lou.is Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton.  In 1932, some of us saw Louis Armstrong in London.

Fletcher Henderson?

SD:  I don't think we did.  Of course, we did like the Bix and Trumbauer things.

Was he at the Palladium?

SD:  No, I think it was at the Hogan Empire, which was a similar place.  Duke did his premiere at the Palladium.

That would have been the world's premiere vaudeville house.

SD:  Yes, it was that for a long time, even up until World War Two.

Duke was impressive at the Palladium.  I guess they played about forty minutes.  I remember Ivie Anderson sang "Stormy Weather."  By that time there were two magazines really devoted to jazz.  There was one called Rhythm and the other Audio.  These were written mainly for semi-pros, that guy who plays on a bandstand two nights a week.  There may have been some really devoted to professional musicians, but generally speaking, these were the two.  Anyway, these semi-pros supported the magazines, and there was discontent with this program at the Palladium, because the public wanted one thing and these semi-pros quite another.  So, there was a special concert at the Trocadero for musicians.  They had the first half planned for commercial music and the second for musicians.  

Anyhow, it was the biggest movie house in Europe.  It was a huge place.  That was the first true jazz concert in Europe.

In '37 I got acquainted with Helen for the first time.  I met her in a studio; I think she was recording for Bluebird.  Then we went to the Cotton Club.

At the time, you'd never met Ellington in person.  I don't imagine you were invited to any of the fancy parties!

SD:  None of them.

I was going to ask you about something by a Cambridge student named Russell Woodward.  At the time of Duke's visit, he accompanied him and wrote a series of twelve essays, most of them devoted to the band, its style and sidemen.  The manuscript was at the Chicago Historical Society, in the files of the Associated Negro Press.  They printed some of it.  It made for interesting reading, the impression Ellington made on English audiences.

SD: I think I I remember the name.  I think Sinclair Charles sent a copy to me.  I didn't think it was publishable; I don't think it is today.  Have you read the one R. D. Darrell wrote in Phonograph?

I've been unable to find it.

SD: I’ve got it somewhere.  It's worth quoting, because people don't realize what the first sixth months of DownBeat meant.  There was very little intelligent criticism.  I used to read Orchestra World.  It was useful:  it told you who the bands were and where they were playing.  They even had record reviews, but there was no conception of what was good.  In England there was a guy called Edgar Jackson, who was a sort of doyen of jazz critics.

I always thought it was Spike Hughes.

SD:  Spike was later.  Spike was very good, but Edgar Jackson years had been writing stuff.  Bubber Miley’s solos were “negroid” and “crude.”  Those were actually adjectives he used.  A lot of English viewpoint was dictated by white musicians.  It was all about white musicians like Paul Whiteman and Rd Nichols.  Jackson and many more of them really liked Red Nichols more than Tricky Sam.  It wasn’t really ‘til Spike Hughes began to write record reviews that we got any first-class criticism.  On the other side of the pond, John Hammond began to write.  John wrote better than anyone.

When did Leonard Feather begin his career?

SD:  Leonard Feather started out about 1933 or ’34; he was very white in his opinions.  Panassier began to write in France, and that was good, because his columns were mostly about Black bands.

At any rate, you made a visit here.

SD:  I came here in 1937.  Duke was playing at the downtown Cotton Club.

Wasn’t that the year of “Caravan”?

SD:  I think they recorded “Caravan” in ’36.

Tell me about the show.

SD:  All I remember is Duke and five or six others onstage, and that when the band began, Ivie Anderson appeared six times.  I really don’t remember much about the show; there were a lot of dancers and singers.  This is the thing I’m intending to do something about, because everybody likes the big halls.

You mean like Carnegie Hall?

SD:  But this isn’t it.  Duke had been going for fifty years.  Then people say the band was sloppy.  Well, of course it was sloppy when they were playing a dance in Oshkosh or somewhere.  Those were the nights when very often extraordinary things happened, because somebody isn’t on the stage, and somebody else takes his solo, and he might come up with something that Duke hears.

There have been a countless number of private recordings made, and they are extraordinary.

SD:  They are the bread and butter of musicians.  That’s where they’re most at ease and natural, and more or less enjoying themselves.  That’s what people always talk about:  the road and so forth.

At what point did you meet Ellington?

SD:  In 1937.  I’d gotten an introduction by way of my wife.  There was a magazine in France called Jazz Hot ; I worked for it and so did she.

While you were writing, how did you make a living?

SD:  In my father’s business.  You might have thought I had gone away to Africa or something!  Then I went to New York along with Helen.

She was working for Irving Mills at the time.

SD:  She was doing publicity, but primarily she was making all those small-group records for
Variety.  I was going to come back the following year, but I was in the Royal Observatory, which was trying to become part of the Air Defense.  That was the year of Munich and we were kind of frozen, but I did go over to Paris when Duke was there in 1939.

Was it done in a bomb-proof theater?

SD:  The Salle Pleyel?  I don’t think there was anything unusual about it.  It was a big place, but I don’t suppose it was bomb-proof.  It might have been at the beginning of the war, but certainly not by the end.  It was a big place.  It couldn’t have been bomb-proof.  I was going back to New York, but then the war came and cancelled it.

At any rate, I remember that on that trip, Rex Stewart made that record in France.  The studio had a sliding gate like a garage. I think Tommy Benton was supposed to play drums.  Anyway, they couldn’t find a drummer that morning.   Barney [Bigard] wanted me to play drums, but all they had was a military side-drum with one stick and one brush.  There I was, banging away on this tin drum, and they told me to stop! That date was where they met Django Reinhardt.

Were you travelling with the band then? Were you so familiar they asked you to sit in?

SD:  No, we just went over for this one date.  By this time I was getting to know the band fairly well.  They were all playing at night, so we would hang together during the day. Then Duke came back in 1948.

He arrived with only Ray Nance and Kay Davis then, because of the musicians’ union.  What British musicians backed him?

SD:  The Melvin Mitchell Trio. But that was because the American union wouldn’t allow British bands.  Americans always make it sound as though the British unions were bad, but actually it was the fault of the Americans.

I came over here in 1946.  I was in the service from 1939 to 1945.  I met Helen and visited her sister in Toronto.  I went back and forth to England a couple of times.  Helen and I were married in 1948.

At that time, were you still living in Essex?

SD:  Yes, Duke came to my home in Essex.  I knew him well enough that he offered me one of his ties.  Thids was the period when he still carried a big wardrobe; that was a thing of its time.  You could go in Duke’s dressing room and find ties that were all bright colors and garish, trying to find something conservative.  Actually, I picked out two.  He said, “Don’t you like more exotic ties?”  “Not where I live,” I answered.

It was around this time you developed a friendship.

SD:  I was able to have him in my house.  He went to Helen’s house; she a.nd her brother used to play cards with him.  When was it he played at Leeds?

Nineteen Fifty-eight.

SD:  By this time, we had got to know Gerald Lascelles, who was a jazz fan.  [to Helen:] What was the name of Gerald Lascelles’s brother?

HD:  The Earl of Harewood.

SD:  The other partner was an opera fan.  They were going to put on a festival at Leeds,,, but that got a very rough answer from Norman Granz.  So Gerald asked us if we could have a meeting with Duke to explain.  Duke asked, “Are you coming?”  So we came.  Helen knows more, because she did publicity.  But starting in 1959, from then on I was nearly always around Duke.

How long did you live together in England before coming here?

SD:  Twelve years, I think.

[The conversation changed to a discussion of a tape we both had of a seminar with Gunther Schuller in Chicago.]

SD:  That’s like the Duke Ellington Dance Society.  They talk and cackle all the way through the music.  I thought he [Schuller] made a good point, though, when he said Ellington’s music cannot survive by records alone.  I think that’s quite true.  People of our generation, of course, want the real thing.  We don’t really like recreations.

I can’t imagine a substitute for Ellington.

SD:  Well, other saxophonists can sound very much like Johnny Hodges.  But it’s not quite the same.

I don’t know how long Ellington’s music will last.  It could be in another thirty or forty years, nobody, except historians, will know his name.

SD:  Some of the songs will probably carry on.

HD:  Thirty or forty years on, people still talk about the Original Dixie Jass Band, and they’re bit really not worth the interest of posterity.  I imagine Duke’s name will last as long, because he was an innovator.

I read an article by Duke where he claimed that posterity is like a roulette wheel.

SD:  Everybody talks as though jazz will go on forever.  I never have thought that.  It will be played more ore less like Dixieland is today.  They’ll still know how to do it.  It will be like the Viennese waltz period.

I don’t imagine anything will last forever, not Beethoven, not Shakespeare.

[We return to the living room.]

I thought Don George’s book [Sweet  Man] was atrocious.  No one I’ve talked to who has any knowledge of Ellington at all had anything kind to say about this book.  It was worthless.

SD:  It would have been more interesting if he’d said something about writing lyrics for Duke.  He hardly mentioned that.

Just a little bit about “I’m Beginning to See the Light.”

SD:  I always thought he was quite a good lyricist, really.  A lot of people put him down.  They were quite pretty.

 

[Helen joins our conversation to share her memories of their early years in both countries.]

 

 

Please take me from Toronto to Irving Mills in New York.

SD:  You can get that out of Sally Placksin’s book.  It’s just out: American Women in Jazz.

HD:  She’s done a good job on the book:  information on all kinds of gals.  She’s done a lot of research; I think Eddie Durham helped.  Nothing like that had come before.

SD:  No, it’s original.

HD:  I first heard Duke in Detroit.  Then, when I was in Chicago, in those days there weren’t many people doing research on him.  He seemed to be interested in what I was writing.

Were you working for Mills at that time?

HD:  No, I wasn’t.  I owed my recommendation to Mills from Duke.  He had an eye out for talent; I don’t necessarily mean in my case, but he could read things in people and was always very charitable, very generous.  He always brought out the best in everyone, and not just who was in the band.  He was a very inspiring person; I remember his saying to Irving Mills, “You’ve got to hire this girl.”  Of  wWhen I was eight years old, I would hear things I liked that everybody else thought was terrible.  I was allowed to make only one choice.  What I asked for was Louis Armstrong.  [to SD]:  And, not Johnny Dodds, but Jimmy Noone?  I was writing for DownBeat, but I was also freelancing for the Chicago Herald-Examiner

You weren’t faced with the problem of making a living then?

HD:  I was, in the sense I had left home, and I was completely wrapped up in the kind of jazz that I liked.  That’s why I left home.

What was the turning point that pushed you in that direction?

HD:  From the beginning, when I was very small.  Families like mine could afford these big downtown record stores, where you could choose what to hear.  When I was eight years old, I would hear things I liked that everybody else thought was terrible.  I was allowed to make only one choice.  What I asked for was Louis Armstrong.

SD:  Living in Toronto, Helen also heard radio broadcasts from Chicago a lot, including Earl Hines.

HD:  You could catch Hines at the Grand Terrace or Claude Hopkins from New York.  So, by the time I was fourteen or fifteen, the only way I could find out anything was to go to parties.  My sister and I were debutantes, and now and then we would hear society bands, which were awful.  But every now and then, there would be an instrumentalist from Canada who would play outstanding solos, so I could talk to musicians of this kind, learn about the instruments, so that when I heard Benny Goodman on a record, I knew that was a clarinet.  In a little while, I established the facts for myself.  I was seventeen, and I was determined that was going to be my life.  There wasn’t anything in Canada, so I made my way to Detroit, and then to Chicago.

I just thought the world of Coleman Hawkins with Fletcher Henderson and McKinney’s Cotton Pickers, so I went to the Graystone Ballroom [in Detroit].  I was bitterly disappointed, because this was the big moment in my life to that point, but there was no Hawk.  He’d just gone to England, and I was heartbroken.

Lester Young had replaced him.

HD:  Yes, but Lester was very unhappy and didn’t belong there.  I was glad to hear the other musicians, but no Hawk.  I don’t think Benny Carter was in the band then.  Anyway, I went on to Chicago, where musicians were always playing, even if nobody knew who they were or where to find them, so it was hard to make a living.  I met Jess Stacy, Bud Freeman, George Wettling, Davey Tough; they were all playing, but they were scuffling.  Glenn [Burris] had just started passing out a music sheet on Randolph Street, just around the corner from the musicians’ union.  It was just two sheets of paper, four sides, passed out to the musicians on the street.  I said, “Glenn, why don’t you get to work and   put stuff in about these musicians?

What was he concentrating on?

HD:  He was just saying that Ted Weems was playing at the Blackhawk, things like that.  It was just a little trade sheet for musicians.

SD:  No criticism whatsoever.

Wasn’t it lurid in its early years?

HD:  Not yet.  Carl Conns brought that about.  Glenn was very nice to me and asked, ‘Do you want to write in it?”  This was my ideal.  I loved music, so whatever I could do that would enhance it and make it more available was good for the musicians.  It was selfish, too, because it was good for me.  So this is what I did, and it got to people like Squirrell Ashcroft.

  Tell me about Squirrell Ashcroft.  He was from one of the Ivy League schools, wasn’t he?

HD:  Yes, Princeton.  He was a very nice guy, and so were all the others in the Chicago Rhythm Club from Princeton.  They came from wealthy families, and their names were well-known.  And I knew   people in Toronto, so we had something in common.  They were genuine fans, but not quite in the way I was.  They weren’t exactly Dixieland fans.

SD:  It was that white Chicago jazz.

HD:  He did tend toward Jimmy McPartland and that sort of thing.  They were out for the music.  You can’t really classify Bud Freeman.

SD:  The Austin High Gang:  Frank Teschemacher, Joe Sullivan, they were all involved with it.  That was really their main thing, don’t you think?  Judging by what they continued to hear, year after year.

HD:  Maybe, by contrast, it was a little more Dixieland than it seemed at the time.  They liked Benny Goodman, too

SD:  Bix people.

HD:  That’s right.  Anyway, I could see that Squirrell and company could be very useful in establishing a chain of popularity.  Benny had just had the “Let’s Dance” program from New York City, broadcast coast to coast.  It was the first time any big band was available:  real music out of a band, not just a small group.  You could hear Bunny Berrigan, Hymie Schertzer:  all of the musicians in that band were good, to the extent that they tried to make it, cross-country.

The music business then was very precarious.  Nobody had done that.  You had to play waltzes and hot tunes of the day and not make too much row.  Benny was trying to see if he could be “Benny Goodman.”  Even the office, MCA, didn’t realize they were gambling on something.  They thought he was like everybody else.

But the business was very precarious.  They fell flat, over and over.  They were booed when they came out.  We thought, if they don’t have a hit and make it, that was the end of it all.  Then people like Jess hit in Chicago.

SD:  This was before they had the big hit at the Palomar [Ballroom, in Los Angeles].

HD:  We didn’t know they’d had a big hit at the Palomar, just before they came to Chicago.

So everything seemed to change suddenly?

HD:  It depends.  Those broadcasts had been caught on the West Coast.  They didn’t know it then, but they had a following.

When they came to Chicago, I built it up in the Herald-Examiner, on the society page, as well as the music page.  I said to the Rhythm Club, “Now you’ve got a role to play.  Make a big success of whatever we do, and it will make news, and everybody will follow suit, and we’ll be a big success in Chicago.”  They all agreed and thought it was great.

But then I had to contend with Benny Goodman, and he was a character, very hard-headed.  Of course, it was all new to him.  We went into the Congress Hotel, the Joseph Urban Room.  I think there had been food poisoning there; anyhow, it had a bad reputation.  Mr. Kaufman, the owner, was naturallyh very pleased to have anyone help the hotel.

No one had ever given a concert; I said to Benny, “Let’s give a concert.”  Well, nobody had ever given a jazz concert.  That was a new concept here.  They’d given them over in England.

What was the Urban Room?  A supper club?

HD:  Yes, it was a ballroom for dinner and dance.  Benny thought the idea was ridiculous.  I said, “Make it a benefit.”  There was no money, because I didn’t want Benny to charge money, anyway.  I , asked, “If the union allows it, will you do it?”  I’d already fixed things up with the union, the way I did with Kaufman.  The Rhythm Club had never done anything where they sold lots of tickets.  You couldn’t get in, it was so crowded.  It was a big success.

Was John Hammond involved in this?

 HD:   No, but Hammond was very much involved with Goodman.

With that as an opener, and it was Easter Sunday coming up, I said to Benny, “Let’s get Teddy [Wilson].”  Teddy, Benny, and Gene Krupa had just formed the trio at Mildred Bailey’s house.  Their records were wonderful, but you couldn’t get away from Black and white together onstage.  I said, “If Kaufman agrees. Would you put them on as an intermission act?”  That’s exactly what we did, and it was sensational.  Benny saw that, musically, there was never anything better.  Then I organized a   party at my apartment for Duke and Benny, who had never met.  We brought Benny down to hear Duke.

What year was that?

HD:  That was in 1936, wasn’t it, Stan?  It was an Easter concert.

SD:  It must have been ’35.

HD:  Then we organized a concert for Fletcher Henderson.  The Rhythm Club would put on a concert every month, including Duke.  When Kaufman booked Duke Ellington into the room, it was a huge success, wonderful.

Had you got to know Ellington before this?

HD:  Yes.  I met Duke when he was playing the theater in Detroit; I can’t remember the name of the theater.  He was terribly nice, and that began our friendship.  This is incidental, but when he played Toronto, I had an older brother up there who also liked the music very much.  Between Duke and his then-companion Mildred Dixon, they’d come out to play bridge, and it became a friendship.

Wasn’t that the time the Rhythm Club gave him a bath towel?

Who made that presentation?  Barry Ulanov wrote that there was a lot of trouble finding someone to make the presentation.  A lot of jazzmen around town refused to do it, I imagine because of race.

HD:  Well, Barry must have got it all from me, because he wasn’t there.  I’d introduced Barry to Duke in New York.  Duke didn’t like his book at all, because he didn’t authorize it.

Was it something in particular about the book, or was it the idea of anyone writing his biography?

HD:  Without permission.  He didn’t have anything from Duke himself, because Duke didn’t know he was doing it.  In fact, for a little while I was in dutch, because I’d brought Barry into the picture.  I didn’t realize it either.  My memory is poor, but whatever Barry had, he got from me.

A review I read in the Daily News was titled “Africa in Tails.”  That says a lot about the attitude of those times.

HD:  One thing I want to say to you, just to go back in time and the circumstances in the context of the concert.  It made Time Magazine.  I think it was the cover, but it might not have been.

What was the Urban Room like?  Tables and chairs?  Dancing?

HD:  No dancing.  Everybody stood, and they introduced the program and the numbers.  Everybody, of course, was just terribly taken by the audience.  Stanley and I thought afterward, “What have we introduced to jazz?  Concerts instead of dancing?  Dancing is far better for jazz, because it has that beat:  let’s keep that beat going.

But anyway, that was rather marvelous.  Time said, “What about this?  Listening to jazz without dancing to it.”  That’s when Duke said to Irving, “You’ve got to give this girl a job.”

SD:  The job came about because there was a position to make records.  Mills told you he had a magazine called Melody News, didn’t he?

I’ve read about it.  John Hammond refers to it in his book.  He once wrote for it.

HD:  Hammond wanted to run anybody he was interested in, but nobody ran Duke; even Irving didn’t.

Was this the cause of bad feelings between Hammond and Duke?  Hammond never had anything positive to say about Duke.

 HD:  Oh, yes, of course.  Hammond eventually said that Irving Mills was a crook who took advantage of poor, innocent Duke.  Yes, he did take advantage, to the extent of making money, but Duke was a realist.  He knew he had to have an Irving Mills.  He said, “I have someone who is dedicated to me and helps to mold me into what I want to be.  I wouldn’t have gone anywhere without him.”

I think Duke was absolutely right.  He was never really bitter about Irving Mills.  You know, we might laugh about how Irving put his name on everything, but Mills was a genius in his own way.

Was the relationship between the two relatively placid?

HD:  Yes.  Irving saw Duke as the greatest, sold him as the greatest, and knew there was genius in his ideas, and Duke thought that was fine.  Irving came up with lots of good ideas.  He bought a company out, just to establish his own record company to get the Ellington music going.  He bought Brunswick Records.

I talked to him yesterday.  He said the small-group records invariably outsold the big band.  He complained about the band’s “over-arrangement

I don’t mean to scapegoat John Hammond.  John was enormously successful at taking over people, and people did do what he suggested and became successful themselves.

You mean Fletcher Henderson, Billie Holiday…

HD:  Yes, all of them.  He even took over their personal lives.  But Ellington was a much bigger human being, a bigger personality, and a greater talent than he’d been dealing with.  Nobody pushed Duke around.  Nobody manipulated Duke.  Duke would never say so, but Irving knew it.

There was a line he would not cross.

HD:  So John said, “I’ll fix this.  I’ll write it publicly:  I’ll say, ‘Duke Ellington is being made a fool of by Irving Mills.  These are the facts,’ and so on.  Duke totally ignored the thing.  “Is it true?” he’d ask.  “Maybe Mr. Hammond has some inside track, because I’ve never known such circumstances.  I’m happy in our situation and doing very well.”  So John came up against a stone wall with that.

What was his motive?  Jealousy?

HD:  That was John’s personality.  He was a Svengali, or whatever you want to call it.

Sour grapes, I guess.

HD:  In a sense, yes.

SD:  John did nothing for Earl Hines or Louis [Armstrong], for that matter.  He couldn’t manipulate them.

HD:  Well, that’s past history.  That really moves us to New York.

We were in Chicago, at the Urban Room.

HD:  The thing was, Benny sent for me to come to New York; he wanted me to work for him.  He was very pleased by what had happened at the Urban Room.

Benny’s band was wonderful.  They had Bunny [Berigan].  It was a white band that was very good.  I was thrilled to work with him, because his music was so marvelous.  He said, “Come with me.”  I knew we would have an enormous success at the Pennsylvania [Hotel], so I was tempted.  But Benny’s a very difficult person to work with.  I knew the whole family and was fond of them.  I stayed with them in New York, but I wouldn’t work for Benny.

I thought Benny Goodman was from Chicago.

HD:  Yes, they were from Chicago, but they moved to New York.  They lived on Long Island, around the corner from Bunny.  Benny said, “Come and stay,” and I did, but I went to work for Mills.  To me personally, Ellington was the most meaningful thing there was.  I thought very well of Irving, too.  He was an instant-idea man.  I was like working for a little genius.  He needed only about three hours of sleep, and everybody in the office was liable to put in twenty-one hour days.  There was always something going on

He was also very generous with gifts and champagne.

SD:  Ned Williams told the story of how he’d buy up stocks of goods to give out at Christmas time.

There was something else I wanted to ask.  I got the impression from Hammond’s book that Mills’s office was decorated in a strange way with murals.

HD:  Yes, that’s right.  I think there were. There we all were working, using things we’d picked up here and picked up there.  Ned was a character himself, a very nice man and a very good newspaper man.  He took me under his wing.

So you got into the business of selling Duke Ellington?

HD:  No, not really.  I didn’t have to.  I was entitled to act as a critic and write things that were much harder than that.  But Ned put out that magazine, and it was a very good magazine.  There was no house organ-y thing about it.  I was also writing for DownBeat, so I came in as a critic, an independent critic of the Mills organization.

If you didn’t like something, you could say so.

HD:  Yes, but mind you, there were limits.  I was picked by a board.  Nowadays, you don’t have all that management stuff, but Irving did.  He’d have conferences with brain-trusts and lawyers.  On Mondays, everyone would sit at the round table.  Basically, the idea was to make money, but my role was to pipe up and say disruptive things, which I was allowed to get away with, because I was hired for that.  This proved there was liberty at the Mills office!

Every now and then, Irving would get ideas from me and other people, because, who knows?  “Give me some ideas.  I’ll tell you if I can do them or not.”  He gave me the recording thing, which was my idea of heaven.  I’d been doing some recording in Chicago for Brunswick.

SD:  Brunswick and Okeh.  I think they were joined by that time.

HD:  Anyway, I’d had some experience with recording.  And I definitely wanted to get in on that.  I didn’t want to be a big shot on the big label [Master]; that was going to have to make money.  So I wanted the Variety label.

I read that there was a party to launch those labels.

HD:  Yes.  That was a big break for me, because I was informed I was to be the hostess.  It was my party.

Was it given at your place?

HD:  No.  Stanley was there.  It was at the record studio.  It had everybody:  Basie had just come to town.  They were just out-of-town boys, just hitting the big time.  Anybody who was anybody was there.  We had Chick Webb, Benny…  I think Stanley has some of the photographs.

SD:  There was a spread in Life [Magazine], I think.

Yes.  “ Life Goes to a Party.” 

HD:  Yes.  I had Chick on drums, Duke at the piano, Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw on clarinet.  That’s what I mean about Irving: “Big deal, to hell with the cost.  I want a gorgeous party.”

"Life Goes to a Party":  Chick Webb, Artie Shaw, and DE.  Stanley Dance stands at the right of Chick Webb at the drums; Helen Oakley stands at Ellington's left.

 I was able to start up and put some groups together, but you're up against it, in a way.  Now they ask, “What can you do?”  Making records is not that easy, not for any of the groups. Where you know you've got something is a group that has been working together.  Now you know, like the small-band Basie records.  You have no worries there, but when you start working from scratch, with these and those ones, it's great for a jam session.  But when you put it on a record, you can't be sure that you can come up with the greatest.

Also, Irving might foist off a doggy tune at times.  He was in publishing and was buddy-buddy with other publishers and songwriters and song pluggers.  He had to subsidize all of these.  Bandleaders would take these songs on.

So you’re always stuck with doggy tunes, and especially in jazz, you’ve got these lyrics, and you have to find somebody to sing them.  I had certain singers, like the Palmer Brothers, who sounded something like the Mills Brothers, or Hot Lips Page to throw the song at, and they'd say, “Okay.”  And there were certain people who could play these tunes in their own way, and it came out jazz.  Of course, it had nothing to do with what the publisher thought he was going to hear.

I spoke to Duke and I spoke to Irving: “Let’s do little bands.”  The men I liked most in the band were Johnny Hodges, Cootie Williams, Harry Carney, and Tricky Sam, as musicians and also as people.  This is what you want to hear.  Any time you hear any one of those musicians, with the rest back there, it gels.  That's it.  You’d always have a tremendous recording session.  At first, Duke said, “I won’t throw my precious pearls before swine,” because he was used to giving them perfect settings.  But Duke saw farther ahead than anybody else, and he said to Irving, “Let’s see what the idea does.”

It was a transition period, really.  When you take a talent that's aware of everything that is inside him, that has to expand and move forward.  Things that he knows about, but you and I don't know about.  We don't know what's driving him, but he does.  But when he does something [new] the public and fans are all going to hold him down.  We're all going to say to him, 'Oh no, that's not what you were meant for.  You're too close to your own talent.  Listen to us.  We'll tell you where to go and what to do."

Irving Mills once wrote an article in DownBeat with the headline, “I Split with Duke When Music Started Side-tracking.”

HD:  There he was, picking up on what the critics had said.  On the whole, Irving was one who didn't.  Irving wasn't in the picture in later days, but if Duke had said to Irving ,”'I want to do a Sacred Concert,” Irving would have said, “Do a Sacred Concert.”  Everybody else would say 'Don't.'  Irving would have said 'Do it.  Let's see what happens.”

Actually, several months went by, and I was champing at the bit.  The whole idea was to do Johnny and Cootie, and Johnny and Cootie together.  But he would put it off, and do what was possible before coming to the big stars.  And by the time he came to things like "Jeep's Blues," everybody in Harlem knew it.  It was booming out of the juke boxes.  Everywhere you moved there was a big haze of Johnny Hodges.  It was really wonderful.  And, of course, Cootie.  It was the making of those things that was absolutely marvelous.  To my mind, the records were marvelous.  In those day   s, that was the best Ellington you could hear, don’t you think, Stan?

SD:  Irving Mills considered some of the big band sides overloaded.  There’s some truth in that, because, remember they made “The New Black and Tan” and “The New Birmingham Breakdown,” and they were a little big in the head at times.  I don’t know what Duke was trying to do.  On the small-band sides, there were only four leaders:  Rex, Barney Cootie, and Johnny. 

But not Harry.

Harry wasn't really a soloist.

HD:  That's what I mean.  Duke could really see the nuances, and that's why people idolized him. Carney was a marvelous musician, even though he couldn't play like he couldn't play like Cootie or Johnny.  But he didn't even know it, because of the way Duke handled it.  Everybody got so much to play, and Carney got so much to play.  It was just an education, with Duke at the piano.  The guys didn't have the faintest idea of what they were.  It was beautiful, I can remember.  It was just an education.  Duke was at the keyboard, but nobody else had the faintest idea of what they were going to do.

And then the big band things.  Duke would just come in; it was cold.  All this marvelous mu8sic would come out of him.  They were knit together like a fountain at the keyboard and all these little fountains around him.  He just took all those beautiful threads.  At first the guys might be worried, but in time they were not, because Duke was always able to create parts for them.

You saw him as a galvanizing force?

HD:  You couldn't have known.  He was absolutely unique.  You may get a Lawrence Brown not to cooperate, but that was a personal thing.  But Duke was just so sky-high above.  It was extraordinary; he just had them in his pocket.  It didn't how difficult the guys were.  Duke's musicianship would just put everyone in awe of him.

SD:  He started with musicians who didn't seem to fit the band.  He had Tizol.  And then later you take somebody like Al Sears.  He replaced Ben Webster, but Duke brought out his talent.

H.D.  Ben really reached his maturity then.  In a sense, Duke was part of each one of them.  He wrote parts for them that brought out things they didn't know they had.  Ben used to fight his instrument. He hadn't found himself technically.  He was a very temperamental guy, A brilliant emotional guy.

And Duke never said anything to anybody.  They found themselves with him.  They fought now and then, but whatever they were trying to do, Duke knows it even if they don't know themselves.  From the piano he pushes them right into that thing they were trying to arrive at.

The period you're describing sounds like a happy time for them.  But later on, was there more conflict in the band?

SD:  Not as much as you might think.  When I moved here there were factions within the band.  Johnny and Barney were not talking, but that didn't mean anything.

HD:  Everybody in the band knew that it was like belonging to a very unique club.  They were honored to be in it.

SD:  I couldn't talk about a period other than the last fifteen years.  The band inevitably declined.  There were so many departures.  But generally speaking, it was a happy band. 

HD:  I'd like to get back to that experience of the small groups, just to show you how it did happen.  It happened on a bigger scale with the big band:  there was nothing ever written for that either.  Duke would come in, and they didn't know what kind of number.  Duke might have heard Johnny do something the night before.  It might have been only two bars, but it was probably four.  He would start up the tempo on the keyboard, and everybody's listening.  Then Cootie would noodle or do something.  Everybody was waiting to see where Duke was going.  He'd say, "Hey Rab, remember?"  And he just played that little phrase.   And then deadpan Johnny would start blowing.  Now everybody knew what was going to happen.  He'd picked out a little pearl, something that Johnny does, and he's going to give it a setting.  They're all going to make it.

That's extraordinary.

HD:  If anybody wondered where they were going, he'd stay on the piano.  It's being put together, the first chorus.  After that they decide whether Johnny or Cootie should take the second chorus, or whether they should split it.  And that was that.

And the next one would be totally different.  He'd start way down in the bass, and then he'd say, "Put it in the gutter."  And then the third one, maybe it's going to be a little soulful.  He'd say, "Carney, I want a bottom."  And before you know it, you've got four wonderful records in no time, remember Stan?

SD:  Going along with what you said about Rabbit, later on, he would give a title to a song.  When we were doing a radio program and needed a theme, he called to Johnny and said, "Bring that thing up here."  We said, "What will we call it?"  Right then, Duke said, "Layin' On Mellow."  People were always fussing about those titles.  It was just a blues, and it didn't have an ending because it didn't need one.  Duke was always very casual about that.

HD:  And speaking of having fun, Duke had a great wit and joie de vivre with everybody.  When he'd hear someone come in with a bass, he'd work that left hand on the piano.  It’d be a very catchy thing.  I'd be up in the control room, and he'd look at me and say, "She left her mad money behind, and here she is, stomping home [stomps her feet].”  What was that? 

SD:  Something "Gal Blues."

HD:  That's just how it always was.

Who would finally title it?  Mills himself?

SD:  In those days, that kind of copyright filing was done efficiently.   It was actually bad and led to a lot of confusion.  Duke may write out something, but when he records it, it comes out entirely different.  Afterwards, when he started to make records for himself-- not Columbia or anybody else-- he'd just put them in what he called his "stockpile," and the title would get garbled up.  That's why some of them were titled twice.

For Piano in the Foreground,  he went off to Europe.  Columbia called up Ruth and said they didn't have   any titles on these.  Ruth called in me and Mercer, and we sat down and played them and put titles on them.  When Duke came back, he starts yelling, "What the hell are these stupid titles?"  But later he had to admit we’d done a good job.

HD:  But if you read perceptively the book Stanley did with Mercer, you’ll see Duke in his true dimensions and not interpret things that would be perceived by ordinary people.  You'd see he was filled with admiration, even when he was knocking Duke.

Duke stirred people up all the time, just for the fun of it and to see what would come of it.  Not to create mischief, not just ordinary things like ordinary people do.  In a variety of emotions and situations, to see what will come of it, and then he’d say, "I’ve got an idea."

SD:  Mercer said that he liked to manipulate people, and that was true.  He made a game of it, that was very likely creative from his point of view and yours.  You could do something you didn't know you could do.

HD:  People say, "Oh, he liked to manipulate people, dear, dear, dear."  You never knew what was going on with Ellington.  It was an enchanting, engrossing world, so you mustn't look at it like ordinary things.  This was no ordinary person, and it was no ordinary organization.

I don't know if either of you is in a position to know, but my impression, especially toward the end of his life, is that he felt like his life was a fairy tale, that God had given him a mission, and he was the king of the court.  Do you think I'm off the mark on that?

SD:  You have to see the hedonistic side of Duke's life but also a melancholy side.  When he was by himself, He had days of just sitting around.  He was sometimes melancholy.  He wasn't gay and cheerful all the time.

HD:  I think what he says, Stan, is quite true.  Certainly, he did think he was gifted by God, that he had a destiny. And he fulfilled his destiny.   He felt that God hadn't put any limits on him and he had a mission to do everything he could, go as far as he could.  As such, sure, there was a court around him.  He not only thought it, he lived it.

Did he feel alienated from the world around him?  I'm thinking of the student protests that I came up with.  Of course, he wouldn't have anything to do with Black nationalism or anything like that.  He was not of the world at that time.  He was a kind of anachronism.

HD:  No.  What you have to realize is that he had very strong racial feelings.  I know more about that than Stanley does, because when I came up with him, long before the student protests, we knew all about it.  Duke, like everybody else, was subjected to all kinds of humiliations.

SD:  Not when he got that degree from Yale.  The speech was all very funny.  So, “Take the ‘A’ Train,” “Mood Indigo….”

You mean somebody introducing him.

SD:  It was patronizing.

The White House was patronizing, too.

SD:  But everybody was thinking what a great honor this was for a Black jazz band.

HD:  If you look carefully into Mercer’s book, you’ll see.  When you say that Duke was an anachronism, not part of this world, it’s not true.  He knew everything that was going; it was a part of being Duke Ellington.  Malcolm X, everybody was close to Duke:  they understood Duke knew the role that he could play.  From Jump for Joy, which preceded all of that, the Deep South Suite, everything he ever did, I believe, had a comment.

I understand that, but I mean what an irony it was that he be identified with Richard Nixon, and in the public mind he always will be.

HD:  When he had his seventieth birthday, the President just happened to be Richard Nixon.  Prior to that, he’d been to the White House many times.

SD:  That really isn’t the point.  It had nothing to do with who the President was.  It was the fact that it was the President of the United States, no matter if it was Nixon or Ford or anyone else.

HD:  Well, people would look at it, as you say, as if he were associated with Nixon.  It just so happened that on his seventieth birthday, they had to find a way to honor him.

I mean, from Nixon's point of view, it was just such a transparent attempt to woo Black support, and Ellington fell right in with that.

HD:  No, he didn’t fall right in.  He resisted it by putting Nixon in his place, too, at the dinner.

SD:  Duke didn't resist it because of Nixon, because nobody was aware of the extent of Nixon's iniquity at that time.  Ultimately, Duke felt it was the President of the United States, not because he wanted to appear in support of the Republican Party.

HD:  Duke's reply to Nixon's speech was very good, very Ellington, from the heart.  Nixon had read a speech that I suppose had been written for him.  He said this was the true American Dream and mentioned that Ellington's father had buttled at the White House.  Duke got up and said, "How I feel today in this building might not be as great as you think, because of the gifts God gave me and the place He put me in life.  However, nothing much could happen to me in comparison with having the mother and the father that I had.  My feet never touched the ground, I was brought up amid such love and devotion, inspiration and beauty." 

SD:  He said, "There is no place I would rather be, except in my mother's arms.  While this is very nice, it doesn’t mean as much to me."

HD:  That was typical Nixon.

SD:  No, that's not fair, because you know what happened afterwards. Rather than thee ceelebrted concert pieces

HD:  I always hated him.

SD:  Yes, but Nixon that night made a very nice vaudeville emcee.  He was insincere, maybe.