Lawrence Brown, Los Angeles, July 31, 1982

N.B.:  The following transcription represents the first of a round of interviews of people connected with Duke Ellington I conducted on a family vacation in Southern California in the summer of 1982.  These interviews were intended to supplement my 1980 M.E. thesis with the turgid, but accurate, title The Entertainment Industry as Exploiter of Black Musical Talent, as Reflected in the Career of Duke Ellington.

Of the seven interviews I managed, only three recordings remain in my possession, the other two being Henry Blankfort, the producer of Jump for Joy in 1941, and authors/ confidantes Stanley and Helen Oakley Dance.  Of the others, I have a vivid memory of author and critic Leonard Feather’s anger when I approached the subject of Ellington’s politics, at which point I was nearly thrown out of his Studio City apartment.  My main recollection of Maurice Zolotow, the author of an excellent article on Jump for Joy, at a bistro on Sunset Boulevard is that he left me stuck with the bill.  Of Irving Mills, I recall his sorrow at losing important documents to poor storage conditions.

One interview I recorded, but somehow lost, was the one I conducted with Sid Kuller, a writer for Jump for Joy.  After sharing his thoughts about the show, Mr. Kuller unexpectedly produced a tape recording of songs created for the 1958 revival of the show in Miami Beach, starring Barbara McNair.  From that tape, I recorded directly the songs “Walk It Off,” “The Natives Are Restless Tonight,” and an updated version of the title song, none of which have been released. Kuller went on to relate his experiences with Ellington on his 1971 tour of the U.S.S.R.  Of course, I regret very much the loss of this recording.

Duke with Sid Kuller, 1941

My talk with Lawrence Brown took place while he was on his backstage job at the Century City production of Sophisticated Ladies, after its Broadway run had closed.  When I phoned to set up our interview, Brown sounded pessimistic, but I wasn’t quite prepared for his memories of Duke Ellington.

LAWRENCE BROWN:  I’m passing out parking tickets.  You see, they get a month’s rate parking, so to park they’ve got to produce the tickets.

How did you end up back in show business?

LB:  Mercer (Ellington], but he’s never really been out here, for this show.  He is the music man for the show.  This is a show made up of Ellington’s music, and he recruited the musicians who know Ellington’s music for the band.

Was he here to audition the musicians?

LB:  No.  Did you have any trouble getting down here?

No.  I just asked a security man, one level down below the Playboy Club entrance.  When I got lost, I just asked the security man and came down two flights of stairs.  I didn’t have any trouble recognizing you, though; you look the same as you did forty years ago.  You’re looking good.  You’ll be seventy-five in a few days, right?

 LB:  How did you know?  Helen Ennico [of the New York Duke Ellington Society]?

No, not on that particular subject, but she loves you.  She went on and on about wishing you a happy birthday.

LB:  I’ve never met her.

I haven’t, either.  I’ve just talked to her on the phone.  She’s quite a talker!  I may have seen her without knowing who she was, in Grant Park in Chicago during the jazz festival.  They have an Ellington night every year, and she must have been there a couple of years ago.

LB:  I think she must be a very good person.  You don’t find many who could take on her job.

Yes.  She’s retiring, but I’m sure she’ll stay in touch.

LB:  I have a lot of friends in the Duke Ellington Society; they’re quite an outfit.  They used to have them all over the country.

 Yes, there are about five.  There’s a functioning one in Toronto.  There’s another in Washington, D.C.  I belong to the one in Chicago, which was led by Marion Stevenson, but she packed up and left the organization pretty much up in the air.  Isn’t there one here anymore?

LB:  There hasn’t been one here in a long time.  I forget the name of the head of it.  There was one girl in it whose name you might know:  Pat Willard.

 Yes, I talked to her.  She’s writing a book; she seems to be thinking along the same lines as I am.

LB:  They’re all thinking along the same lines.  There’s nobody who knows Duke Ellington, and there is nobody allowed to put down the truth about him.  There’s nobody that knows.

Was he a master of disguise?

LB:  What’s-his-name in New York tried to tell the truth about him.  They squelched it.

Are you talking about Barry Ulanov?

LB:  Barry Ulanov.  I read his book, and he just hinted the truth.  They put the squelch on him, because it was uncomplimentary to Ellington.  I joined that band a week after Easter in 1932.  I never was a person to just get in and to the horn, because I didn’t just blow the horn.  I used to study what was going on.  In the old band, they used to do that kind of thing.  A lot of them just packed up their horns for the next gig.

I kind of got that feeling when I talked to you on the phone.  It seemed you don’t have a lot of cherished memories.  You sounded rueful.

LB:  The best thing about my years in this business was the experience of travel and meeting people all over the world.  I had a very deep dislike of Ellington.

You certainly stuck with it long enough.

LB:  Now you’ve got the best word.  The worst job.  They don’t pay you fair, and that’s for certain reasons.  I can tell you that I first stayed with it because I come from here.  I started to go back the first year, but if I had quit and gone back, the West would have viewed me as someone who couldn’t succeed.  So, I had to stay, whether I wanted to or not.

Perhaps if it hadn’t been Ellington’s band, it wouldn’t have mattered.

[Trumpeter Bill Berry passes by, and there is a brief break in the interview.]

LB: [Juan] Tizol did not get nearly what he was due, since his numbers were hits.  The first big thing was “Caravan,” and the next was “Perdido.”

But he’s still getting royalties, isn’t he?

LB:  He’s getting some royalties, but it should be much more.  There was a system:  say, you have a tune and I have a band.  If you want your tune published, I must be the one to publish it, so I must get a certain percentage of the tune.  Then somebody adds words, so that in the end your tune has about five pieces cut off.  You might get something, but not nearly the amount you should get.

And most of the time, these other four or five people belonged to one mastermind, the one who gets the most money, because he owns the others, the writers who are working for him.  In those days, this mastermind was Irving Mills.  As I said, I joined the band in ’32.  When I joined, I was doing very well in California.  I was at Frank Sebastian’s Cotton Club, playing all sorts of stuff.  Our band was playing in movies.

 Was this Les Hite’s band?

LB:  No, it was the Quality Serenaders.  Les Hite’s was the last band I worked for there.

All of the bands out here worked in the movies; if you didn’t get movie work at least one day a week, something was wrong.  In those days, cabaret scenes were a must in a picture.  The system was we worked for ten dollars an hour for every hour we were on the set.  It wasn’t like now, where you’d be; then there was no way of in a segment and sent on home.  Then, they’d shoot us over here, over there, and over there.  Our day started at nine o’clock and ended at four.  Now, if they called you at one o’clock, they still paid you from nine to four.  In the end, there was no test.  We made an awful lot of money then.

Were you actually on camera for any of this?

LB:  No, we were just on the set, and most of the time we weren’t even playing.  But we’d have to be very quiet:  then there was no way of separating film conversation from room noise, or whatever.

The reason I went with Ellington is, number one, I’d had a run-in, because Louis Armstrong was coming [Johnny] Collins.

The gangster.

LB:  We had rehearsals on Sunday afternoons and took picture for the papers.  Well, that Sunday was Easter Sunday.  My father was a minister, so I always went home to Pasadena and had dinner.  On Sundays we were off anyway.  I said, “Can’t we do that on Monday?  This is Easter Sunday, and I need to go home.”  Well, this guy Collins comes up and says, “Who is this guy?  Who does he think he is?  If he doesn’t want to make the thing, okay, we’ll get some fellow from the studio.”

He didn’t know these were the wrong kind of remarks to say to me; so I said to him, “Now, you do just that,” and that was the end of my relationship with Armstrong.  I left on a Tuesday, but earlier that week, Irving Mills came out to the Cotton Club, where I was working in a floor-show.  I was playing “Sweet and Lovely”—oh, no.  What was that number?  “Trees.”

Mills heard it and told me to come over to his table and asked, “How would you like to go with Ellington?”  I’d had offers from several other bands going East, but here I had money.

  Was Mills specifically looking for a trombone player?

LB:  No.  He was just visiting the club.

He just made a snap decision.

LB:  It was just one of those things.  I said to myself, “This is my chance to see the East.”  At that time, I’d just bought a new car.  I put it up on blocks, if you know what I mean, and parked it in the oil company’s garage.  I was crazy about cars, and this was a very fine car.  I said, “I’ll be back in a year, after I’ve seen New York.”  I didn’t care that much about New York.

 It must have meant something to you to join Ellington’s band at that point, which was about the highest in music you could aspire to.

LB:  I did not like Ellington’s band.  I did not like his music.  He’d come by the club once before, and they gave him a night at the Cotton Club.  With the leader of our band we went upstairs and heard it, and I thought, “This isn’t that great. What’s so great about it?”

To me, Fletcher Henderson had the best-playing band. But this stuff was weird.  I didn’t like it.

 It surprises me that Mills would choose you.  I wasn’t there, but you seem like such an odd choice for Ellington’s trombone section.

LB:  He had two men, Nanton and Tizol.  Nanton was a soloist, but Tizol didn’t solo at all.  Nanton could play that plunger, but he was not a good straight man.  When I came along, everything had a distorted tone.  I guess Mills was thinking they were going to need a third trombone anyway, because everybody was adding a third to the trombone section.

I went down to meet Ellington, and the first thing he said was, “Now, I never heard you but Mills said to get you.”  Mills ran the whole band.  He ran everything.  So, that was on a Wednesday.  The band was leaving on Saturday.  They traveled by train, so I went down to the station.  I didn’t have anything to hold me; I was single.  The trip was rather hard.  I caught a cold, and it wasn’t a good trip at all.

We went from Los Angeles to New York.  When we got to New York, I found out that I was the thirteenth man to join the band.  Then it came out that you couldn’t be a thirteenth man and play; you had to wait until he found another man!

That man turned out to be Otto Hardwicke, from Washington.  He’d been in Europe at the time.  So, I didn’t work from the time they left Los Angeles until they played the Pearle Theater in Philadelphia, six or seven weeks later.

Were you drawing a salary?

LB:  No.  That’s a funny thing; rent was $70 a week.  In the first place, they told me I was crazy.  I said, “I don’t like Ellington’s music.  I don’t know anything about it.  But I’m going to see the country, so I’ve got to be fair.”  I thought $70 a week ought to cover my expenses, but I drew money out of the bank and took traveler’s checks, put my car on blocks, and everything.  Then I find out you don’t get money until you work, and they paid $70 for a whole week.

Compared to what you were making, that was nothing.

LB:  That was the first shock.  I paid my own room rent, everything.  That’s the way Mills maneuvered.

Ellington really had nothing to say?

LB:  He had nothing to do with it.  After weeks of rehearsing, what did he have me do?  It was a stage show, and they had me playing a solo spot, plus playing the first trombone parts in the band.  Now, Ellington didn’t write any first parts.

You just made them up?

LB:  I wrote them in myself.  For weeks I did that, for nothing.

And they had berths on the train.  I found out the men had to pay a certain little charge for their berths, all the way from Los Angeles to New York to Hartford, Connecticut—by chair car—then back to New York for rehearsing.  I never got any money for rehearsals or anything else.  On my first check, they took out the amount for the berth and the chair cars up to Hartford.  So, you can see why from the first week on I hated these people.  I didn’t know anything about this.  Instead of the truth, they were telling lies and tricking me. 

What about the other members of the band?  Did it take a long time for you to become accepted?

 LB:  No, it was easy.  There was nothing extraordinary about them.  They were just musicians.  Some of them were outstanding musicians, like Cootie Williams, or especially Johnny Hodges.  They were extraordinary on their instruments.

For $70, I was doing four shows a day, playing parts and taking a solo spot in the show.  They put me in the spotlight.  They’d made a band arrangement of “Trees”!  I played that thing four times a day for $70.

It’s too long a story.  You see, I’m a sane person.  I was all business, and a lot of times I would warn the band, like when we first came out here to do a picture.  They came here talking about union scale.  I said, “Hey, now they’re having a reduced rate, and at the end you don’t make as much as you think you’re going to get.  It was always cheap.

Then it comes time to go to Europe [1933].  Mills said that they didn’t know what we were going to see, that they were “experimenting.”  Lying like a dog.  He knew exactly what we were going to do.

 He had the itinerary all planned?  Let me backtrack for just a second.  Nineteen thirty-two was Ellington’s last year at the Cotton Club.  Did you perform in that band?

LB:  Yes, I was at the Cotton Club in a show called Stormy Weather and before that.

With Ethel Waters?

LB:  Yes, Ethel waters was in that show.

So, we got ready to go to Europe for $100 a week.  We had accumulated $375 of radio, where you play spots.  You’re supposed to get paid for spots on the air.   But they never paid us for this.  They just let it accumulate.  We were only going to be there four weeks.  We’d never seen Europe, and it cost thousands of dollars to go see Europe.  And old fool me said, “I’ll go, okay.”

Besides, every extra date that we played:  they’d said for every extra gig in Europe, uyou’d get $25, for each gig, dance, party, or whatever.

Was that the information you received before the tour?

LB:  No, that came up later.  We were never informed that far ahead.

We finally get together and go to Europe.  We were only supposed to be there four weeks and were to be paid—I forget whether it was $275 or $375 for the radio spots.  Mills got us out on the ocean in the middle of the boat for a meeting and says, “I might as well tell you now; you’re not going to get it.”  That’s the kind of junk they pulled.

And when we get over there, there’s only one show in the [London] Palladium a day, but then they have those old minds going ahead.  During those four weeks, we had so many extras, parties and dances, all kinds of extras.  At $25 a show, you’d think you had a lot of money coming, but they never paid you as you made them.  They’d save it all up for the end of the trip.  But then, at the end, he says he didn’t know about the taxes and all.  Lying like a dog.

Instead of paying you all that money, he wants to settle for an amount.  That’s the whole story.  He alienated Ellington into that same system.  Ellington used to be a nice fellow, who became one of the biggest crooks.  Every tune, everything done is not from his head.  He had a terrific memory.  Here comes a new tune, and at the dances he’d try it out.  Then each man that he wanted would take a few choruses, which were ad lib.

Which he would use for other tunes.

LB:  For instance, I played a solo on “Once in a While.”  Then in comes little Johnny Hodges and Harry Carney and we’d do what we called noodling, fooling around, making little countermelodies and things.  Here’s Johnny Going [hums “I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart].  What was that other tune?
[I hum “Never No Lament”]

LB:  That’s what I mean.  Now there’s three tunes; when you noodle on those three tunes, you get three more for each.  So, you wind up with any number of tunes, and they all came  from that one tune.

They say he wrote a thousand tunes.  Well, that’s a lot of crap.  Harry [Carney] didn’t do much, but Johnny Hodges and Cootie, and then comes along Ray Nance.  It all should have been an amalgamation of all these things.  But he was a mastermind:  No, you don’t do that.  Then you publicize the fact that here’s a “genius.”  No such thing in the world.

You’ve got to give him credit, now.

LB:  He had a terrific memory.  He never won any contest with other pianists.  He was a good   listener.

But to get that bunch of guys to work together, he had to have had something.

LB:  Those men worked together an awful lot, because they used to tell him what to do; he didn’t tell them.  They used to call him “the Phony Duke.”  I had another name for him:  “the Fabulous Fraud.”

He had a terrific personality, especially a genius for drawing women.  He could exploit any number of men, and he could exploit women.

In his music, he adored “The Lion.”  When he played, I could hear all the piano players he took it from.

I’ve heard him play just as a pianist, and he doesn’t sound like anybody else.  He’s instantly recognizable.  You know that it’s Duke when you hear him playing.  You don’t mistake him for someone else.  But, regardless of who gets credit, what a great body of work over fifty years!

By 1940, Ellington was no longer with Mills.  He went to the William Morris agency.

LB:  Then he had uncanny luck:  he got Billy Strayhorn.  Strayhorn was like manna from heaven.  He opened up here with “Lush Life.”  Ellington couldn’t begin to try and play it.  All he could do was listen.  But Strayhorn was a meek little person who had his little weaknesses. He allowed himself to be drawn into things.

 If you hear a tune like “Something to Live For,” the average person hears it, and it’s just a tune.  But that’s Strayhorn’s story.  He wrote lyrics to everything he wrote.  He was a genius.

 You’d use that term more for Strayhorn than for Ellington?

LB:  Not even in the same auditorium!  Strayhorn was a genius.  All this modernistic music in the Ellington band was Strayhorn.

Strayhorn would get called when Ellington was on the road.  “Hey, Swee’Pea, what could you send me for this piece?”  He was little kid.  Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer called on Strayhorn.

To take him away from Ellington?

LB:  Ellington would say to him, “You’re not ready; I’ll tell you when.

Did Strayhorn want to leave?

LB:  He would have gone, but he was so dominated by this man that he turned it down.  He knew ten times as much music as Ellington.

So, he was always in Ellington’s shadow.

LB:  Always.  You can hardly explain it.  It seems uncanny.

Do you know what I’m listening to now?  “Flamingo,” the old record with Herb Jeffries.  What an arrangement!

LB:  I’ll tell you about the arrangement.  “Flamingo” was a song from someone in New England.  Ellington didn’t care anything about it, so he had Strayhorn make an arrangement.  Strayhorn came with the body of the arrangement, but he had no introduction and he had no ending.  And, of course there were sections for soloists to come in.  I thought, “Tizol, It’s like Chloe [hums the first three notes of “Flamingo.”  “And Ray Nance, you answer [hums the nest three notes], and into the arrangement.

And that instrumental break in the middle is thrilling.  That was you, right?

LB:  Me and Johnny Hodges.  When we got to the end of it, I said, “Hey, look:  same type as the beginning [hums the final five notes].

Someone put it up as the sixth number in that record session.  Ellington didn’t think it would do anything, but it overshadowed everything.  Ellington like to died.  That’s the story of “Flamingo.”  Still, that arrangement has never been surpassed.  That was Billy Strayhorn from  ,0beginning to end.  Ellington didn’t write one bit of it, but he took credit.

It seems to me that, when you joined the band, critics jumped on you.  You were “too sophisticated.”

LB:  I did not like Ellington.  I had him figured from the beginning.  I’m from out here; I went to school in Oakland, San Francisco, Pasadena, all around here.  To me, the trombone should be played with beauty, just like any other instrument.  At that time, the trombone was nothing but a tailgate instrument.  They used to do these little parade sessions on Central Avenue [in Los Angeles], on the trucks advertising the big band bashes.  I wouldn’t do it.  I couldn’t play that way.

This is a beautiful instrument.  When I first came up, my first solo performances were for [evangelist] Aimee Semple McPherson’s temple out here.  On Mother’s Day Sunday, 6,000 were in the audience when they finally closed the doors.  It scared me to death.  I was petrified; I’d never seen 6,000 people.  Just me and the piano player.

 I think of you as an originator.  I hear a lot of you in Tommy Dorsey.  I don’t know what your relationship was, but I think of you as an originator of that type of playing.

  LB:  I played that way before Dorsey.  I knew Tommy Dorsey very well.  I went to his dressing room when he played the Capitol Theater in New York.  Another trombonist I admired was in Jimmy Dorsey’s band, Bobby Burns.  Later, I began to admire—a beautiful player, but I can’t think of his name.  He was on staff at CBS when I was there.

That was after you left Ellington the first time around.

LB:  Stop.  Listen to the words on this.  [We are silent as we listen to a performance of “Something to Live For” from the theater stage].

That’s the story of Billy Strayhorn.  In all those tunes, he talked about himself, his sorrows about not being the person he would like to have been.  You never realize that from his music, but there’s “Lush Life.”  They are Billy Strayhorn’s story.

It seems he was a very unhappy person.

LB:  In his heart, he was unhappy about being odd.  He was a genius.  I have a couple of tapes of the band that people have sent me.  Some of it is very modern, but he never got credit.  Just now, he’s getting a little bit of credit.  He did so much for Ellington.  Ellington didn’t do anything until shortly after he died.  All those lush arrangements were his.

It was never a case of Ellington’s learning from Strayhorn and applying it?

LB:  When he died, I was told he had stuff in his apartment like that.  He’d just write.  All he could do was write.  Where it all went, who knows?

Ellington was doing all these religious things.

 His Sacred Concerts.

LB:  He was a seducer of women and an exploiter of men.  That’s all he was.

The man seems in so many ways a self-contradiction, that being just one example.  The fact that he died intestate, not leaving a will, setting everyone at each other’s throats.  I think they’re still at each other’s throats, in his own family.

 LB:  His family is kind of weird.  Did you ever meet a member of his family?

 Only Mercer.  I’ve tried to get a response from Ruth, but I haven’t succeeded so far.

 LB:  Weirdest thing you ever saw.  I knew his mother and father.

Can you talk a little bit about his family?

LB:  I knew them, but about them I knew nothing.  But Mercer:  What a man tries to do and becomes good at, he should stay at.  Mercer was a terrific builder of little model airplanes.  But Ellington said, “No, there’s no future in that for you.  You’re coming with me.”  An egomaniac, that’s all he was.  So, Mercer went to Juilliard , and with that behind you, who’s going to say no?  To Ellington, people were only good for what he can use you for.  That was his true character.  That’s what he proved every minute of his life from then on.

You’re saying his image and his personality were poles apart.  Everything that’s been said or written about him is so much hogwash?

LB:  He ruined more people than you could ever imagine.  As I say, exploiter and seducer.

One more question.  It seems that for you and other members of the band, things came to a head around 1950.  Sonny Greer, yourself, and Johnny Hodges all left the band at the same time.  It couldn’t have been a coincidence that all three stalwarts of the band just packing up and leaving.

LB:  When we came back from Europe, there was too much pressure on me.  Ellington had become another Mills.

Mills had five big acts:  Ellington, Cab Calloway, Mills Blue Rhythm Band, Ina Ray Hutton, and Hudson-DeLange.  Any time he wanted to kill you, he’d say to club owners, “Look.  Do away with him, and I’ll get you five dates, and all of them will make you money.  Slick, very slick.  I could name a good big band that he ruined.  He was no good whatever.

I’d never dispute you about the way things were done.  Yet if it hadn’t been for Ellington, we wouldn’t be sitting here talking about your years with Duke Ellington.  They wouldn’t have happened.  Without Mills, you’d never have heard of Duke Ellington.  As a Black bandleader, he needed Mills.

LB:  Everybody tried to tell him, put this man down.  And finally, he did.

But we were talking about 1951, after Mills was out of the picture.

LB:  By that time, he’d learned all of Mills’s methods.

But in 1951, was it an accumulation of grievances, or something that happened right about that time, that caused you to say, “That’s it.  I’ve had enough, and I’ve got to walk.”?

LB:  I quit him three times:  I quit then, and I came back around ’60 and left again in 1970.  But there were a lot of other little things in between.

Sonny Greer had been with him from the beginning.

LB:  He fired Sonny Greer.  Sonny was drunk most of the time, so he couldn’t play.

Paul Gonsalves was the same, yet he never fired Paul.

LB:  He was the type of man who liked to say, “See what a nice guy I am?  I put up with that.”

 

IN ROTATION:

• James P. Johnson, Father of the Stride Piano (Columbia, 1921-1939)