IV. GOLDEN AGE
WAR YEARS
The years 1939-1944 are widely regarded to represent the
pinnacle of Duke Ellington’s artistic achievement, and there is much to justify
this claim. The majority of the 1940
orchestra—Sonny Greer, Fred Guy, Joe Nanton, Juan Tizol, Harry Carney, Johnny
Hodges, Barney Bigard and Otto Hardwick—had been with Ellington for more than a
decade. Taken together as an ensemble,
as section players, and as individual soloists, this superb musical aggregation
represented the epitome of American musical talent. As the vehicle for Ellington’s musical
imagination, they had long been a formidable unit.
Changes in personnel over the intervening years had been
slight. Trombonist Larence Brown was
added in 1932; Rex Stewart, a renowned cornetist from Henderson’s band,
replaced Freddie Jenkins in 1934, while Wallace Jones took Arthur Whetsol’s
position as lead trumpet in 1937. The
most notable additions were Ben Webster (in the orchestra from l940 until 1943,
and again from 1948 to 1949), who, as the fifth member of the reed section,
established the tenor saxophone tradition in the Ellington orchestra; and bassist
Jimmy Blanton (from late 1939 until 1941, shortly before his death at the age
of twenty-one), who revolutionized the use of his instrument in jazz.
Most significantly, it was in 1939 that Ellington began his
association with Billy Strayhorn, whom he later described as “my right arm, my
left arm, all the eyes in the back of my head, my brainwaves in his head, and
his in mine.”
Strayhorn was first engaged by Ellington as a writer of
lyrics, but after the orchestra’s return from its second European tour, in the
summer of 1939, he began to exhibit a prodigious talent for arranging and
composition, both alone and in collaboration with Ellington. Particularly during the years 1940 and 1941,
when ASCAP material was banned from the airwaves, Ellington was forced to rely
heavily on the work of Strayhorn (“Take the ‘A’ Train,” “Chelsea Bridge,” “Day
Dream,” etc.), along with that of Tizol and Mercer Ellington (“Things Ain’t
What They Used to Be”). Until
Strayhorn’s death, nearly thirty years later, the emotional affinity
between the two men was the basis of
perhaps the most remarkable partnership in jazz, one which had a large impact
on the range and scope of the Ellington orchestra.
Nineteen-forty was also the year of a major defection from
the Ellington organization, that of trumpeter Cootie Williams, who left to join
Benny Goodman’s orchestra late in that year.
In a 1967 interview, Williams explained:
I didn’t just jump up and
leave—I wouldn’t do that. Duke knew
about it and helped set everything up. He
got me more money, and I told him I’d be back in one year’s time. If Duke didn’t want it to be know like it
was, it wasn’t my place to tell. But
that Goodman band—I loved it.
When, as agreed, Williams contacted Ellington in a year’s
time; Ellington advised him to take advantage of his name-exposure with Goodman
and to front his own band (which Williams did successfully for many years. He finally returned to the Duke Ellington
Orchestra inn 1962.) In the meantime, in
November, 1940, Ellington hired the uniquely talented musician and showman Ray
Nance from Chicago whose first night playing with the Ellington band was on
November 7, in Fargo, North Dakota, which coincidentally was a performance
recorded by a pair of amateur enthusiasts.
Until its release decades later, the Fargo recording became something
like the Holy Grail of jazz.
Judging by its recorded output on the Victor label from 1940
until the recording ban enforced by the American Federation of Musicians in
mid-1942, the Ellington orchestra of the early war years represented an
artistic standard unprecedented and unsurpassed in all American music. For the same period, however, accounts of
Ellington’s financial success vary somewhat.
One of them, citing Ellington’s habit of long delays in providing lead
sheets of his compositions to Robbins, with the consequent drop of sheet-music
royalties, estimates the band’s take at $2,500 a week, with an annual
box-office gross of around $200,000, netting Ellington no more than $30,000 a
year, which he quickly spent. Of course, when these figures are set against
the earnings of the most popular white orchestras of the period (Kay Kyser
grossed some $1,200,000, while Glenn Miller made in the neighborhood of
$1,000,000), they sho0w how far Ellington was from the top echelons of show
business.
Mercer Ellington estimates the orchestra’s 1940 gross much
higher, at more than $1,000,000, but confirms the financial gap between it and
the earnings of popular white orchestras:
Bands like Vaughan Monroe’s were
probably grossing five times as much, and who knows or can say what was
happening with Benny Goodman? A
tremendous amount of money was being made by the big bands, and despite Pop’s
memory of the 1929 crash and other fiascoes, it looked as though everything was
on the up and up. Everything was going
wonderfully in the early ‘forties, so why worry about tomorrow?
Richard
Boyer, who authored a series of in-depth articles on Ellington (“The Hot Bach”)
for The New Yorker in 1944, provided a more detailed picture of the
band’s income and expenses. According to
Boyer, the band earned nearly $1,000,000 over its twenty-year period of
existence, of which half came from royalties paid on its sale of twenty million
records, and another fourth from sheet-music royalties. For one-night engagements, Ellington
reportedly collected between $1,250 and $2,000, as much as $10,000 a week, “but
the band’s payroll and expenses are so heavy that he is fortunate if he breaks
even on the road. Sidemen in the
orchestra received between $125 and $185 a week, plus expenses; Ellington himself drew 000. William Mittler, who handled his financial
affairs. Much of Ellington’s financial
bind, wrote Boyer, was caused by his apparent lack of concern about money: “He
spends money lavishly, supports a good many hangers-on, lends money frequently,
gets it back infrequently, and is usually broke when pay day rolls around.”
In 1939, according to the same source, Ellington took in
$160,000, but the band was able only to break even. In 1940 he grossed $185,000, but the payroll
increased from $25,000 to $30,000. In
1941 he took in only $135,000 and ended up with a loss of $1,500. The following year saw an increase in the
band’s gross to $210,000, but Ellington netted only $4,000. During a six-month engagement at New York’s
Hurricane Club in 1943, Ellington lost $18,000, “but he figured it was a good
investment because of the Broadway address and the free radio time and
publicity.”
Whatever his financial disadvantages may have been, immediately
upon signing with the William Morris Agency Ellington continued to be booked in
prestige locations, like the Ritz Calton Roof in Boston and Chicago’s Hotel
Sherman. During the rather brief
existence of the Morris Agency’s band department, and later with Joe Glaser’s
Associated Booking Corporation, Ellington was managed by Cress Courtney, who
proved as resourceful as Ned Williams had been in boosting Ellington as a prestige
performer and in preserving the dignity of his name. William Morris, Jr., came to take a special
interest in this aspect of his career, and his efforts paved the way for the
orchestra’s 1943 debut at Carnegie Hall.
Buoyed by the optimism and enthusiasm engendered by his new
business arrangement, Ellington set out in 1941 to realize one of his fondest
ambitions, the writing of a successful Broadway musical. His efforts resulted in the score for Jump
for Joy, which opened at the Mayan Theatre in Culver City, California, in
June, 1941. The show, billed as a
“Sun-Tanned Revue-sical,” had as its major theme the demolition of racial
stereotypes. As Ellington explained,
In 1941 a team of scholarly Hollywood
writers decided to attempt to correct the race situation in the U.S.A. through
a form of theatrical propaganda. This
culminated in meetings at which the decision was made to do Jump for Joy,
a show that would take Uncle Tom out of the theatre, eliminate the stereotyped
image that had been exploited by Hollywood and Broadway, and say things that
would make the audience think. The
original script had Uncle Tom on his death bed with all his children dancing
around him singing, “He lived to a ripe old age. Let him go, God bless him!” There was a Hollywood producer on one side of
the bed and a Broadway producer on the other side, and both were trying to keep
him alive by injecting adrenalin into his arms!
For its time, such a production was a venture of the most
radical sort imaginable. The Show’s cast
and financial backers, in addition to being “top-bracket film people,” included
a number of figures who were prominent in the Hollywood left, chiefly the
Communist Party. Since most whites in
those days who were at all involved in the political defense of Black rights
were considered radicals ipso facto, it is not surprising that Ellington
would have been associated with Communists in a project as outspoken as Jump
for Joy. As we have seen,
Ellington’s sporadic involvement with the radical left had begun nearly a
decade earlier, and in the 1940s this relationship would culminate in the most
overtly political phase of his career. By
the end of that decade, as we shall further see, scores of his associates would
wind up on the show-business blacklist and before congressional inquisitors.
Jump for Joy, of course, was theatrical
dynamite. Its audience included “the
most celebrated Hollywoodians, middle class ofays, the sweet-and-low,
scuffling-type Negroes, and dicty Negroes as well… The Negroes always left proudly, with their
chests sticking out.” Naturally, there were some who were not
pleased; Mercer Ellington recalled that there were “something like five ‘or six
bomb threats from people who threatened to do something to or harm people in
the show.” As a result, the show’s material came to be a
sort of compromise, as writers and members of the cast revised it nightly. One of the numbers dropped was the opening of
the second act, with the intriguing title “I’ve Got a Passport from Georgia
(and I’m Going to the U.S.A.)” The
attempt was made to accommodate the sensibilities and inhibitions of all who
were involved in the production, as Ellington explains:
Anyone who attended those
backstage meetings for twelve weeks got a full college education in social
significance.
The importance of Jump for Joy was
summarized by Avanelle Lewis Harris, a veteran of the theater and a member of
the show’s original cast:
The most exciting experience of
my life in the theatre was the opportunity to be a member of the cast in the
musical Jump for Joy. I did not
know how far ahead of its time it was until I read the script. It was the first legitimate show to be
created and produced on the West Coast. The
importance of its message caused a wave of enthusiasm throughout the cast,
which was well-aware of its controversial impact. Everything, every setting, every note of
music, every lyric, meant something. All
the sketches had a message for the world.
Tragedy was that the world was not ready for Jump for Joy.
How I remember the opening— “The
Sun-Tanned Tenth of the nation!” And the
finale of the first act was “Uncle Tom’s Cabin Is a Drive-in Now”:
There used to be a chicken shack
in Caroline
But now they’ve moved it up to
Hollywood and Vine;
They paid off the
mortgage—nobody knows how—
And Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a
drive-in now.”
Jump for Joy, playing to standing-room-only crowds,
was a great local success, yet it never reached Broadway, as its producers had
hoped; the show closed after only three months in Los Angeles (A 1958
production, with revamped songs and starring Barbara McNair, was staged
unsuccessfully in Miami Beach).
These facts
are hard to reconcile in the light of frequent claims over the years that the
show was “too advanced” and that the public was “not ready” for what it had to
say. The production’s popularity gives ‘
There were lines at the box
office when the show closed don because of panic in the company. The different people who contributed their
services to the show all owned a part of it and were to be paid off at a later
date. Suddenly the musicians’ union
demanded additional bonds to ensure payment of their people. The backers had their lawyers attach the box
office, so the flow of money that could have kept the show going was cut off
and everybody suffered.
Indeed, there was cause to question the motives of the
American Federation of Musicians in this instance. Under the presidency of James C. Petrillo,
the union declared a long strike against the entire recording industry; the
only studio recordings permitted between August 1942 and November 1944 were
transcriptions recorded for the radio networks only, and V-Discs for the Armed
Forces.
In a sense, the American public generally “not ready” for
such a message during the war years. The
tenor of the times indicates that African Americans were more than ready to do
away with their inferior social status. This was still the era of segregated blood
banks, on the battle-front and the home front as well. As Blacks were widely considered “loyalty”
risks, the government lost few opportunities to harass the Negro press and to
spread poisonous propaganda. These were
years of lynchings in the South and riots in the North and on military posts. White liberals largely abandoned the Black
cause, with predictions of civil war if federal troops were used to end
segregation.
Ellington, perhaps because he was always inclined to couch
his social criticism in the most palatable form (“I think a statement of social
protest in the theatre should be made without saying it, and this calls for the
real craftsman”), was not long discouraged.
As he explained, “The feeling of responsibility that Jump for Joy had
aroused sustained itself, and one day William Morris, Jr., said, “I want you to
write a long work, and let’s do it in Carnegie Hall.”
This opportunity was to be the fulfillment of Ellington’s
desire, expressed since the mid-1930s, to present a musical panorama of the
American Negro. The five-part suite he
had envisioned, tentatively titled Boola, Black. Fragments of his conception also had
appeared in some of his shorter compositions, such as “Ko-Ko” in 1940. With barely a month to spare, Ellington began
work in December, 1942, on the score of Black, Brown and Beige,
subtitled A Tone Parallel to the History of the American Negro.
With the single exception of Benny Goodman’s 1938 concert,
Ellington’s premiere on January 23, 1943, was the first genuine jazz concert to
play Carnegie Hall. The significance of
the occasion, of course, was contribution of Black Americans), yet even so, a
charitable pretext was necessary to secure the hall: all proceeds were to go to
the Russian War Relief.
The concert was preceded by months of publicity,
particularly in the Negro press, which culminated in the declaration of “Duke
Ellington Week,” January 17 through January 23, the night of Ellington’s
premiere. The New York Age
reported on a flurry of Ellington broadcasts and record programs, and enthused
over the “complete cooperation of the entertainment business, including both
[Ellington’s] sepia and white brother musicians.” Carnegie Hall was “virtually sold out… with a
last-minute rush for the few seats which remain,” and the Age circulated
a rumor that Edward, the Duke of Windsor, whose acquaintance Ellington had made
in 1933, would be in attendance among the celebrities.
At the orchestra’s
second Carnegie Hall concert appearance in December, Ellington presented New
World A-Comin’, a twelve-minute concerto for piano and orchestra. Composed after the band’s Hurricane Club
engagement, during a four-week run at the Capitol Theater with Lena Horne, the
piece was an extension of the thematic material which had informed Black,
Brown and Beige and was analogous to the final section of the unfinished
Boolah, which purported to speculate upon the future of the Black
race. Inspired by and titled after a
book by Roy Ottley, which anticipated an improvement in the Negro’s lot after
World War II: “In spite of selfish interests,” the book concluded, “ a new
world is a-coming with the sweep and fury of the Resurrection.” Ellington visualized this new world “as a
place where there would be no war, no greed, no categorization, no
nonbelievers, where love was unconditional, and no pronoun was good enough for God.”
Under the management of Cress Courtney, the six months of
free airtime afforded by the Hurricane Club engagement had preserved
Ellington’s preeminent position in the entertainment world, increasing the
orchestra’s price nearly four times to $5,000, or $4,000 plus a sixty per cent
privilege. Nevertheless, because its
members were Black, the Duke Ellington Orchestra could not obtain a regular
radio sponsor. According to one
observer, “Duke thought that winning the war would change this and much more. When he was working at that time on a
composition called New World A-Coming, he liked to repeat the title and then
say, ‘And I mean it.’”
In spite of its much shorter length, this new composition
was denounced by the critics just as vehemently as its predecessor had
been. It did manage to stay in the
band’s repertoire and was recorded as late as 1970, with the Cincinnati
Orchestra, conducted by Erich Kunzel.
The entrance if Ellington into the concert field came as the
result, not only of social pressure emanating from the music establishment, but
of economic necessity as well. During
the war years, to be sure, he appeared before the public as a rather gaudy
embodiment of Black success: “ He has
forty-five suits, and more than a thousand ties, the latter collected in
forty-seven states of the Union and seven European countries, and his shoes,
hats, shirts, and even his toilet water are all custom-made.” His 1,100 records had sold some twenty
million copies, and he had composed 1,200 compositions, many of which had been
praised by composers as esteemed as Stokowski, Grainger, Stravinsky, and
Milhaud. Around this time, too, Ellington began to
spurn the label “jazz,” referring to his music first as “Negro folk music,” and
in later years as “the American Idiom, or the Music of Freedom of Expression.”
As an astute businessman, Ellington undoubtedly was quick to
realize that, with the onset of war, the appearances of large jazz ensembles in
dancehalls, nightclubs and theaters were beginning to diminish, that the days
of the “big band era” were numbered. Critic
Stanley Dance, his friend and confidante, wrote:
The move to the concert hall and the
changes that ensued were inevitable. They
grew out of the practices of the Thirties.
Bands and ballrooms were in big trouble because of World War II, and
concerts offered the possibility of welcome new venues and, indeed, an artistic
stimulus…
Ellington, undoubtedly the
wisest and most intelligent person in the business, had always been quick to
size up the potential in a situation—and to act. In retrospect, one can see that his timing
was perfect in 1943. All the writing
that had been done about jazz in books and magazines—not to mention the
publicity hopes—along with the extended public exposure to it on radio, had
created a big and enthusiastic audience, one that was often idolatrous, but not
always noticeably hip. The extended
works had prestige value, an air of ambition and serious endeavor that
three-minute
For seven years Ellington presented his “social significance
thrusts” to audiences at Carnegie Hall and Each year he would produce a new
extended work, often based upon a racial theme:
in 1946 came the Deep South Suite, the Liberian Suite in
1947, and Harlem in 1950. Other
extended works from the same period were lighter exercises designed to satisfy
the musical sophisticates in his audience:
Perfume Suite (1944), A Tonal Group (1946), and The
Tattooed Bride (1948).
His ambition to serve as a spokesman for Black aspirations
was well illustrated in the 1943 announcement of his collaboration with
lyricist Otto Harbach on a ditty, unfortunately lost to posterity, titled “Did
You Mean It, Mr. Lincoln?” Publisher
Jack Robbins said that the song would “go a long way in developing racial
awareness.” At the same time, however, Ellington did not
consider it prudent to risk his career by voicing his ideas other than
musically. Richard Boyer wrote of this
private conflict in 1944:
Duke sometimes thinks that it is
good business to conceal his interest in American Negro history. He doubts that it adds to his popularity in
Arkansas, say, to have it known that in books he has read about Negro slave
revolts he has heavily underlined paragraphs about the exploits of Nat Turner
and Denmark Vesey. In public he usually
sets his beige-colored face in a grin as wide as possible…
New acquaintances are always
surprised when they learn that Duke has written poetry in which he advances the
thesis that the rhythm of jazz has been beaten into the Negro by three
centuries of oppression. The four beats
to a bar in jazz are also found, he maintains in verse, in the Negro
pulse. Duke doesn’t like to show people
his poetry. “You can say anything you
want on the trombone, but you gotta be careful with words,” he explains.
Ellington was aware of the explosiveness
of such sentiments in the 1940s. His
prestigious concert appearances were still rare occasions, and between them, at
one-night engagements across the country, he was still beset by the usual
indignities afflicting Black musicians. One
such incident took place late in 1943, when it was arranged for the orchestra
to give a recital at Camp Robert Smalls, a segregated portion of the Great
Lakes Naval Training Center. A great
deal of friction existed between Black sailors and their white officers, who,
one sailor remembers, habitually referred to the Blacks as “you people.” Additional resentment was generated when,
apparently at whim, the commanding staff moved Ellington’s performance to a
nearby white base.
Although the incident, because of wartime secrecy, was not
widely known, it came to the attention of a number of Black leaders. However sympathetic to Ellington they may
have been, they chose not to intervene, as a letter to Ellington from Claude
Barnett of the Associated Negro Press makes clear:
When I talked with you the other
day, I did not realize how much of an imbroglio the Camp Robert Smalls
engagement had caused. I had no more
than hung up before Variety called me.
This note is merely to say that
I am not particularly involved. If I
could do a good turn for the colored boys out there and give more of them a
chance to see and hear you and other colored bands, I was willing but I do not
wish to get into any controversy over matters which do not concern me.
It does not appear to me that
Commander Peabody has been as considerate of those who sought to work with him
as he might have been but that is his problem and perhaps disadvantage.
What I wanted you to know is
that I would not presume to interfere in your affairs.
Hope it all works out smoothly.
Another incident, cited in Boyer’s article the following
year, illustrates graphically the extremes suffered by Ellington’s musicians,
their Carnegie Hall honors notwithstanding.
On the second day of an engagement in St. Louis, during a break between
sets the men found it impossible to order lunch anywhere near the theater. As soon as they went back onstage, still
hungry,
the curtain rose, and from the
white audience out front there came a burst of applause. The crowd cheered, whistled, and stamped its
feet. As the curtain was going up, the dejection on the faces of the players
vanished, and as swiftly as an electric light is switched on, it was replaced
by a look of joy. The music blared, Duke
smiled, threw back his head, and shouted “Ah-h-h!” Rex Stewart took off on a solo that was
greeted with fervor, and as he bowed, the musician next to him muttered out of
the side of his mouth, “Bend, you hungry fathead! Bend!”
Everything was flash and brightness until the curtain came down. Then the joy was switched off and there was
just a group of angry, hungry Negroes arguing their right to food.
“Can’t we eat in our own
country?” Rex Stewart said.
“And my son is in the army!”
another man said.
“Are we prisoners or something?”
Harry Carney asked…
Band manager Jack Boyd was finally able to arrange for food
to be sent in. After the show
Boyd was in a saloon overlooking
the stage door when a man in the band came out and got into a taxi.
“Did you see that?” asked a
woman on a stool at the bar.
“See what?” Boyd asked.
“See that nigra get in that
cab?”
“Well, he’s a pretty nice
fellow. He’s a member of the Ellington
band. Some people think that he’s a very
great artist.”
“A very great artist? Well, I don’t know what you think, but I
always say that the worst white man is better than the best nigra.”
