Ellington’s
father, James Edward Ellington (known as J.E. or, more often, Uncle Ed, because
of his many nephews and nieces), seemed the epitome of genteel standards, and
his son often credited him as the source of many of his own attitudes. At the time of Ellington’s birth, his father
was employed as a butler by Dr. Cuthbert, a physician whose clientele included
members of the upper echelons of white society in Washington. J.E. later went into business for himself as
a caterer for Washington society functions, and was thereby able to keep his
family supplied with fine food. During
the war years he quit butlering altogether to rent out rooms in a fashionable
part of town, and he continued catering until he found a job with the Navy
Department working with blueprints. His
son was later to write of him:
J.E. always acted as though he had money, whether he had it
or not. He spent and lived like a man
who had money, and he raised his family as though he were a millionaire. The best had to be carefully examined to make
sure it was good enough for my mother.[1]
Ellington’s
mother, Daisy Kennedy, was the strongest early influence on her son’s
life. While J.E. had a reputation as a
hedonist, Daisy, the daughter of a Washington police captain, was “a woman of
rigorous moral principle, stiff-lipped and… prim of mien and manner.”[2] She was strongly church-oriented, a trait
that was to affect her son for most of his adult life, and she frowned upon
such things as the use of cosmetics.
Although
Ellington, with twenty-four aunts and uncles, grew up surrounded by a large and
closely-knit family, his only sister, Ruth, was not born until he was
sixteen. Consequently, he was [3]raised
in a way that is typical of an only child; he describes his boyhood as having
been “pampered and pampered, and spoiled rotten by all the women in the family.”
He grew up on Ward Place, “a very short block just at the beginning of
Washington’s northwestern section, where Negroes of the city were gathered in
greater numbers than in any other part of the city.”[4] Washington was, of course, very much a
Southern-style segregated city. In his
late teens, Ellington’s earnings as a fledgling musician enabled the family to
move farther northwest to 1212 T Street.
These early
years shaped attitudes in Ellington that became marked in later years. The issue of race seems to have been a
problem of which he was blissfully unaware:
“There was never any talk about red people, brown people, black people,
or yellow people, or about the differences that existed between them. I don’t remember exactly when, but I was
quite grown when I first heard about all that.”[5] Never having been conditioned to think of his
race as a handicap, Ellington was encouraged by his mother to consider himself
special and destined to achieve greatness:
“Do I believe that I am blessed?
Of course I do!... There have
been so many extraordinary and inexplicable circumstances in my life. I have always seemed to encounter the right
people in the right places at the right
time…”[6] Thus Ellington, very early in his life,
acquired a strong belief in the power of fate, a trait which must have inclined
him to become both religious and superstitious during the ups and downs of his
career.
Although
pushed by his mother into piano lessons at the age of seven, Ellington at first
showed little interest in music, at least until he discovered ragtime around in
his early teens and the seemingly magical sway pianists held with the young
ladies. Washington’s “professors” of
ragtime piano included, at that time, Clarence Bowser, Lester Dishman, Louis
Brown, Doc Perry and Louis Thomas. At
neighborhood “house hops” (rent parties) and in the local pool hall, Ellington
made the acquaintance of all these men and learned the nuances of their
finely-wrought styles. As he grew more
proficient at the keyboard he came to idolize, in particular, James P. Johnson,
the master of Harlem “stride” piano. The
story is told of Ellington’s having memorized “Carolina Shout” from a piano
roll, and then “cutting” the famous composer in a performance of that piece
during one of his appearances in Washington before America’s entry into the
war.[7] At about the same time Ellington worked as a
soda-jerk at the Poodle Dog Café, a job that inspired his first composition.
Ellington
was enrolled at Armstrong High School, where he earned no particular
distinction as a student. Armstrong was
regarded as “a kind of rough high school.
If you went there you were practically regarded as incorrigible.” There he was classed as an “industrial” or
“commercial” student, “which meant that you more or less specialized and were
not supposed to be equipped to carry the extra weight outside your particular
field.”[8] At
Armstrong Ellington developed an interest in drawing and painting he had held
since grammar school. Many years later,
he wrote revealingly of his memories of the school and its principal, Miss
Boston, who insisted on “proper speech”:
When we went out into the world, we would have the grave
responsibility of being practically always on stage, for every time people saw
a Negro they would go into a reappraisal of the race. She taught us that proper speech and good
manners were our first obligations, because as representatives of the Negro
race we were to command respect for our people.
This being an all-colored school, Negro history was crammed into the
curriculum, so that we would know our people all the way back. They had pride there, the greatest race
pride, and at that time there was some sort of movement to desegregate the
schools in Washington, D.C. Who do you
think were the first to object? Nobody
but the proud Negroes of Washington, who felt that the kind of kids we would be
thrown in with were not good enough. I
don’t know how many castes of Negroes there were in the city at that time, but
I do know that if you decided to mix carelessly with another you would be told
that one just did not do that sort of thing.[9]
In
his exhaustive study of Ellington’s early years, musicologist Mark Tucker takes
a close look at his earliest compositions, beginning with a tune originally called
“Poodle Dog Rag” but changed to “Soda Fountain Rag.” Tucker comments:
As a fledgling ragtime player still in high school,
Ellington was either too young or too inexperienced for [entertainment venues]
employment. Instead he played in school,
entertained at parties and dances sponsored by his peers, and joined other
musicians at informal sessions… Ellington
used to cut classes and play piano in the gymnasium. This earned him the wrath of teachers whose
students slipped out of classes to dance while Ellington played… Piano-playing made Ellington popular among
his classmates. And his stylish dress
and aristocratic airs inspired a friend to start calling him “Duke.”[i]
Just as the precise origin of “Soda Fountain Rag” is
elusive, so is a a sense of the entire composition. Instead of a “set” piece like James P.
Johnson’s “Carolina Shout,” “Soda Fountain Rag” consists of a few musical ideas
that serve as a basis of improvised elaboration.[ii]
In
a 1968 film documentary, Ellington himself commented on “Soda Fountain Rag,” after
giving a brief demonstration in a hotel lobby.
“I can’t play it anymore,” he said,
It’s too hard. I
can’t finger it anymore.When I wrote it I was fourteen, and I only knew about
two numbers. And, of course, in those
days a great part of your piano playing was the way you sat down. This was a skill that was acquired by
standing all night long with the good piano playersm watching their approach to
the piano… There used to be some real
fancy kids, you know. He’d sit down at
the piano, take his handkerchief out, and dust off the keys.
And then the first note:
that’s the one. And you hit a
strange chord that nobody’d heard before—yaaang! And everybody—heeeyy! And then you would noodle a little bit, and
then sort of wiggle into tempo.[iii]
In
a similar vein, Ellington told a Canadian radio host, Byng Whitaker:
You see, when I was a kid I became interested in jazz and
ragtime a bit, and I got a lot of people to try and teach me around town, in
Washington. But I couldn’t learn
anything anybody taught me.
When I was sick and had to stay in the house a couple weeks,
and I finally came up with this under my hands.
So I learned to play the piano and composing, as you might call it,
after a fashion, if this is composing.
It all came out at one time.
I became interested [in the piano] when I went to high
school. I was about fourteen. Before then, of course, I had piano lessons
like all kids do, you know, the scales and stuff. I learned enough to play one half of the
piano at the church recital… I was at
the left hand; Mrs. Clinkscales, the teacher, played the upper half of the
piano. She took the major
responsibility, actually.
In
the same interview Ellington went on to demonstrate his second composition:
It was a thing called “What You Gonna Do When the Bed Breaks
Down.” It became very popular. Real parlor social music.[iv]
At
a convention in Detroit of the international Duke Ellington Study Group, Brooks
Kerr, the country’s most renowned Ellington aficionado and pianist, not only
demonstrated the same tune but also supplied the lyric of the first chorus:
[Ellington] became quite a popular guy in high school for
songs like this and topical lyrics, such as this. Duke's second piece was
called "What You Going to Do When the Bed Breaks Down." It's
very short, only sixteen bars long, but you can hear the first theme.
[Plays three choruses on his Cassio electric piano]:
Tried it on the table, tried it on the chair
Tried it on the sofa, but I didn't get nowhere.
What you gonna do when the bed breaks down?
You got to work out on the floor.
Kerr
went on to demonstrate another fragment called "Bitches Ball," a
stride piece similar to James P. Johnson's "Carolina Shout." It
can be heard briefly in the Beige movement of Black, Brown and Beige. The same fragment also may be heard in some
versions of "Cotton
Tail." It also comprises one of the pieces in a 1957 Columbia recording of "Piano
Improvisation in Four Parts."
Undated photograph of Ellington and group in Louis Thomas’s Cabaret, 901 R Street NW, Washington DC. Left to right: Sonny Greer, drummer; Bertha Ricks, singer; Ellington, piano; Sterling Conoway and wife, banjo.
One
area in which Ellington excelled at Armstrong was art. After school he would earn money painting
backdrops and scenery for the Howard Theater, and later he would turn this
talent into a lucrative sign-painting business.
Nevertheless, he turned down an art scholarship to the Pratt Institute
in
Brooklyn, which he had won in a poster competition sponsored by the NAACP, because by his last year in high school Ellington’s imagination was caught by the giddy atmosphere of the music scene.
The war had increased Washington’s demand for musicians to play at dances, social affairs and embassy functions, and in a few years, Ellington established a minor reputation, for himself as a pianist. His first professional job, for seventy-five cents, was at Northwest Washington’s True Reformers Hall, where he became a regular between 1917 and 1919. At that time, he appeared with a five- piece band that included Otto Hardwicke, later to become an Ellington sideman, on bass. He played briefly with, and was fired from, Russell Wooding’s thirty-four-piece orchestra, one of Washington’s more popular “commercial” Black bands. While studying harmony with Henry Grant, Ellington worked regularly as a relief pianist at the Abbott House, played at the Oriental Theatre, and gigged with pick-up bands led by Louis Thomas, Daniel Doyle, Doc Perry and Elmer Snowden at one-night engagements in cafes, lodge halls, and “house hops.” These bands, generally led by ragtime pianists, consisted mostly of reading or “legitimate” musicians playing a style of music far too conservative to be described as jazz.
Ellington
soon realized the financial advantages of booking his own band. Imitating a successful advertising technique
used by better-known bandleaders, he struck out on his own by taking out a
large ad in the local telephone directory.
His first regular band, dubbed The Duke’s Serenaders, included saxophonist Otto Hardwicke
on bass, trumpeter Arthur Whetsol (another future sideman in his famous orchestra) on
trumpet, Elmer Snowden on banjo, William Escoffery on guitar, the three Miller
brothers—Bill, Brother and Felix—and vocalist Jerry Rhea.
 |
Arthur Whetsol |
By 1919,
Ellington was the manager of five local bands, which netted him between $150
and $200 a week. Together with the
income from his sign-painting business, this enabled him to quit school and, in
July, 1918, to marry his fair-complected sweetheart Edna Thompson. Edna was classed as a “general” student at
Dunbar High School, a fact which indicated a certain social separation from
Ellington. In the words of their son,
Mercer Kennedy Ellington, born in 1919,
There were very different and significant levels in colored
society. The level my mother came from,
was considered above that of my father. It
was not just the caste system he referred to in Black, Brown and Beige. It was a system that esteemed intelligence
and different manifestations of mental prowess.
Families that had members who were doctors, lawyers, or teachers were
considered to be on a higher level than those whose members were mostly
servants and menials. They were the
families with people who saw to it that they could pay for their children’s
education.[v][10]
By the early
twenties, Ellington had outgrown the Washington entertainment scene and began
to aspire toward a professional music career in New York. The unprecedented opportunities which had
opened up in that city, now in full swing, inspired many young men of the Black
middle class, some of whom (e.g., Fletcher Henderson, Benny Carter, Colman
Hawkins, Jimmie Lunceford, Sy Oliver and Don Redman) were college-educated, to
settle upon jazz as a permanent career. As
a whole, the Black musicians of this class and generation revolutionized
American music. As one observer put it:
They were a remarkable group of men. Between 1925 and 1935 they created, in
competition, a musical tradition that required fine technique and
musicianship…; they bean to change the basis of the jazz repertory from blues
to the wider harmonic possibilities of the thirty-two-bar popular song; they
created and perfected the new ensemble style big-band jazz; they kept their
groups together for years, working until they achieved a real unity. They showed that jazz could absorb new,
foreign elements without losing its identity, that it was in fact capable of
evolution.[11]
Like these
men, Ellington entered jazz, after having trained in another profession,
because it proved profitable. Unlike
most of them, however, he never received advanced formal instruction in music
or attended a conservatory. The source
of his musical genius, which many white critics were later to attribute falsely
to the influence of European “classical” composers, lay in an entirely
different direction:
His early training in Washington had really been slight and
rudimentary. The greater part of his
knowledge was self-taught, by ear, and gradually acquired later by reading and
application. So far as learning to read
music was concerned, he was never exactly avid, although it was just a matter
of applying himself. He could sit down
and do anything he wanted to do. There
were many people in those days, of course, who went to schools to get a proper
education so that they would be recognized as being “able to do it”—being able
to read—and they would have considered it cheating to play a record and copy
what was on it—and do it just by ear. Ellington sat down and did that time and
again. He’d gradually figure out what
somebody had done, listen to the beat, and analyze the whole thing. How he ever learned the value and time you’d
give a note so that you could represent it on paper, I don’t know, but he was
able to do this without tutors or formal training. He finally wound up knowing how to write
music, although when he first went to New York, he could figure out only a
little bit.[12]
This lack of formal training, which nearly all musicians
would have considered a serious defect, was turned by Ellington into a positive
advantage, a means of breaking away from trite and sterile musical
formulas. Perhaps as a reaction against
his own unprestigious academic background, says Mercer, “Throughout his entire
life he had a disdain for formalized training.
Even when he was getting honorary doctorates right and left, he still
had a feeling that the concept of a scholar was somehow false.”[13]
In this respect, Ellington was rather singular among African
American musicians of his generation; his unorthodox approach toward
composition and arrangement continued well into his career as a famous
bandleader in New York. The reasons for
this derived from both circumstance and practicality:
Ellington did not do much writing in these formative years,
partly because many of the men in the band didn’t read well. The arrangements were on-the-spot “head
arrangements,” so there was nothing down on paper to copyright. Mercer
again explains:
Eventually he took books home, studied them, and learned a
whole lot more about notation himself. He
never really had anybody to help him. Will
Vodery and Will Marion Cook [the violinist-leader of the fifty-piece New York
Syncopated Orchestra] may have solved some technical problems for him, and
Willie “The Lion” Smith explained ideas and phrases that intrigued him…
The lack of formal knowledge set him on a way of creative
thinking that others hadn’t then approached.
Then he learned that there was a way to write it down and still have it
make sense. Yet after he learned to
write, he wrote in such a cryptic fashion that the average person couldn’t
figure out what he was doing…
He did things like this because there was a tremendous amount
of stealing in those days. Writers would
come to the Cotton Club with pads and pencils and openly jot down the ideas and
devices they heard… This was in self-defense until he could at
least get a record out of the music.[14]
Ellington’s musical conception, then, was a remarkably original one, absorbed
mainly by ear from the show-business world in which he functioned.
Before he
left Washington, this show-business influence was augmented by his discovery,
in the pit band at the Howard Theater, of percussionist Sonny Greer. Greer’s past musical experience had included
engagements with the white bands of Wilbur Gardner and Mabel Ross in New York,
and the musicians in Washington along with Ellington and Hardwick, to join
Wilbur Sweatman’s large orchestra in New York early in 1923, only to find
themselves stranded.
On their return to Washington, Greer approached banjoist Elmer Snowden and offered to join him for a New York job. Consequently, they, along with saxophonist Otto Hardwicke and trumpeter Arthur Whetsol, drove to the train station in Hardwick's broken-down car, the Dupadilly. They did make the station in time for their train to New York. They had expected Fats Waller to join them on piano, but he was nowhere to be found. The telegram they sent Ellington, asking him to fill in for Waller, proved to be the ticket to Ellington's musical career.
 |
| Wilbur Sweatman |
Sweatman’s
orchestra specialized in music of the theater-show variety, although it was
more adventurous than most at the time. The
leader, a sort of forerunner to Roland Kirk, would sometimes perform by playing
three clarinets simultaneously.
Apparently, he did not think particularly highly of Ellington’s
abilities, as he fired him after one week’s engagement at Harlem’s Lafayette
Theater in March.
Snowden's
band got a break when the club owner Clarence Williams invited them to New
York. As Sonny Greer told Whitney Balliett in 1974, at Greer's
suggestion they first went to New York on March 10, 1921, the three, joined by
trumpeter Arthur Whetsol and banjoist Elmer Snowden. In Greer’s words, “When we got there the
booker said he wanted names so the job collapsed." Greer introduced
the others to James P, Johnson, Luckey Roberts, and other musical luminaries in
Harlem. They were able to live on small events like rent parties until
they met Ada "Bricktop" Smith, who eventually got them a residency at
Barron Wilkins's club. Greer: "We played a lot of pool.
We survived.”
They
had to return to Washington but undertook another journey to New York in
1923. They found work for the next four years at the Kentucky Club at
Forty-ninth and Broadway. Greer described it as
a basement club, and if a revenue agent came around the
doorman stepped on a foot buzzer and the place turned into a church… Duke Ellington was like my brother, and I was
like his. He was once-in-a-lifetime, and I wish I had a third of his
personality. It overshadowed everybody else. He was sharp as a
Gillette blade.
Ellington
used the respite to absorb what he could of the New York musical scene,
particularly Harlem’s great piano stylists.
But he was soon flat broke, for the first and only time in his life. Forced to return to Washington, he regrouped
his band as a five-piece unit led by Elmer Snowden. In October of the same year, he returned to
New York at the behest of Fats Waller
for a job that never materialized. Together with Snowden, Greer, Whetsol and
Hardwick as the Washingtonians, he worked wherever and whenever he could.
Interviewed
by Stanley Dance many years later, Snowden recalled:
Louis Thomas had been down to Atlantic City and heard me and
Black Diamond. He had a kind of booking agency and a nightclub called the
Quaker City Jazz Club, and he took us to Washington. Duke Ellington was
being booked out of that office then and, although Louis was Colored, Meyer
Davis worked for him, too... Our band, Louis Thomas's band, went into the
Howard Theatre, playing from a box behind lattice work. We had Doc Perry
on piano, Otto Hardwick on sax, Diamond on drums, and I was playing
banjo...
The fellow who owned the New World [in Washington] also
owned the Paradise, the big club in Atlantic City, where Charlie Johnson and
the big entertainers worked... [He] sent for me in Washington to open a
new place called the Music Box on New York Avenue and the Boardwalk. So I
took Artie Whetsol and Otto Hardwick down. When the season was over, we
went back to Washington... [Pianist Claude Hopkins] wanted some musicians
and he naturally came to Washington to get them... Claude was a terrific
piano player, and he, Cliff Jackson, and a couple other piano players, used to
gang up on Duke, who knew only one or two numbers. Of course, he would
play this number he had written, Poodle Dog Rag, in half a dozen
different keys, and it was supposed to be a different song, but it was the same
thing in different tempos. Then Russell Wooding told him he'd hire him
for his band if he'd learn to play something besides that rag. The
Siren Song was popular, and he asked him to learn that. So Duke
worked on it all week and went out with the band. He was sitting up there
all night waiting to play The Siren Song, but they didn't call it
till nearly closing time!
Snowden
recalls Ellington at that time also painting signs in a basement art
studio. He still was working the soda fountain at the Poodle Dog Cafe,
hanging around with Snowden, Hardwicke, and Whetsol.
Ellington's
return to Washington brought him into contact with banjoist Elmer Snowden, who
happened to be working there at the time. According to Steven Lasker,
Along with
Arthur Whetsol, they travelled to New York in 1923 for a job that turned out to
be nonexistent. The singer Ada "Bricktop" Smith took a liking
to the group, who now called themselves the Washingtonians. Before long
they had a gig at Barron Wilkins' Exclusive club at 134th Street and Seventh Avenue. Barron’s then had the reputation of being the
swank “headquarters” for Bert Williams, Jack Johnson, Frank Fay and his theater
associates, Al Jolson and other New York celebrities. Ellington’s small repertory of tunes,
developed over months of playing at jam sessions, rent parties and odd jobs,
was well-received there. He vividly
recalled the night life at Barron’s:
They catered to the big
spenders, gamblers, sportsmen, and women, all at the peak of their various
professions. People would come in who
would ask for change for a C-note in half-dollar pieces. At the end of a song, they would toss the two
hundred four-bit pieces up in the air, so that they would fall on the dance
floor and make a jingling fanfare for the prosperity of our tomorrow. The singers—four of them, including
Bricktop—would gather up the money, and another hundred-dollar bill would be
changed, and this action would go jingling deep into the night. At the end of the evening, at 4 A.M. or maybe
6, when our bountiful patron thought we had had enough setting-up exercises
picking up halves, he would graciously thank us and wish us good luck. (Lasker,
32-3)
In
the meantime, Ellington was renting a room on Seventh Avenue whose owner,
Leonard Harper, was choreographing a show at a basement club called the
Hollywood Cafe. The club offered a tiny bandstand big enough for only six
players, a fact which, beginning in September of 1923, figured heavily on
Ellington and his band's creativity for the next four years.
That
same fall, Bubber Miley joined the band, and, as Ellington later commented,
"we forgot all about the sweet music." Miley's finely-honed
growl technique with the plunger mute which became the main identifier of what
came to be called Duke Ellington's "jungle style."
Otto
Hardwicke describes Miley as "a happy-go-lucky, moon-faced, slim, brown
boy full of gold teeth. Bubber loved to play... a master
showman... completely uninhibited... irrepressible." The
Washingtonians added a trombonist, John Anderson, who was soon replaced by
Charlie Irvis, the first of a succession of "growl" trombonists in
Ellington's orchestra at the onset of 1924.
Under the name Snowden’s Novelty Orchestra, the band
recorded on July 23 a version of “Home” that was rejected by Victor Records; on
October 18 they recorded for Victor another version, backed by “M. T. Pocket
Blues,” also rejected.[vi] The band’s earliest recordings to be issued,
after a short return from Washington, would not take place until the following
November, on the tiny Blu-Disc label.
The Washingtonians soon discovered that their lean
days were over. Their salary was a
modest fifty dollars a week, but their tips amounted to about $1,000 a night,
which was split nine ways; at a hundred dollars a day per musician, no one
complained. In addition to his
responsibilities as musical director of the band, however, Ellington was more
and more assuming command of the business end as well, so that by 1924, Snowden
was out and the Washingtonians looked to Ellington as their leader. The band, now six members, replaced Snowden
with guitarist Fred Guy, a New Yorker with a similar musical background.
The Washingtonians’ engagement at Barron’s quickly won
the respect of the musicians of Harlem, who spread their fame to the
club-owners downtown. That year jazz was
becoming established there, as the ODJB was hired for an engagement at
Reisenweber’s Restaurant and Fletcher Henderson began his years of glory at the
Club Alabam. By holding out the prospect
of even more money, the dancer and producer Leonard Harper persuaded Ellington
to move the band to the Hollywood Club, at Forty-ninth Street and Broadway
downtown.
The Hollywood Club, managed by Leo Bernstein, was
renamed the Kentucky Club after the first of several fires burned it to the
ground in 1924. It was a popular
after-hours rendezvous place for Broadway celebrities and the theater
crowd. The club attracted many white
musicians, especially from Paul Whiteman’s organization, and Whiteman himself
sometimes appeared to lay a fifty-dollar tip on the band. Barry Ulanov describes the Kentucky Club as
“the scene of tolerance and appreciation, of the breaking down of many racial
barriers for Ellington and company.”[vii][15] It would probably be more accurate to
describe it as the beginning of a new phase in Ellington’s career, one in which
his successful exposure before a white public led to his exploitation by and
for the white entertainment industry.
Probably lost forever are the recordings the band made
in 1923, including a July 26 rejected
test pressing for Victor, a major recording label, of “Home” by Snowden’s
Novelty Orchestra, and likewise on October 18 with rejected test recordings of
the same song and “M.T, Pocket Blues.”
A
dispute over money prompted Snowden to leave the band around February.
Sonny Greer: "It didn't take long before we thrust the leadership on
Duke. He didn't want it, but his disposition was better than ours.
He could keep us in line without doing too much. We were a pretty wild
bunch in those days, myself in particular." Snowden was eventually
replaced by Fred Guy, who remained in Ellington's band through the late 1940s.
By the following year, the band’s recording
opportunities began to expand: in all,
Wille Timner’s voluminous Ellingtonia 1ists sixteen sides issued between
November 1926. For the next
several years, this small ensemble recorded for a variety of such labels
(Perfect, Gennett, Blue-Disc, Pathe, Vocalion), either by themselves or
accompanying the singers Florence Bristol and Alberta Jones. When contractual obligations got in the way
of their ability to record, they invented pseudonyms, such as Jo Trent & The Deacons, Sonny & The Deacons, The Whoopee
Makers, Warren Mills and His Blues Serenaders, The Harlem Footwarmers, Six
Jolly Jesters, The Ten Blackberries, Harlem Hot Chocolates, The Washingtonians, and finally Duke Ellington & His
Washingtonians.
Aside from their poor sound quality, due to the
primitive acoustical recording method used until the advent of electrical
recording in 1925, most of these records are undistinguished and full of the
music-hall cliches of the period, and none of them could stand comparison with
the jazz classics recorded by King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, or Jelly Roll
Morton in the same years.
In more recent years, most critics have been either
negative or simply puzzled by these recordings.
Their assessment by Eddie Lambert is typical:
As a pianist, Ellington
started his career as a disciple of the Eastern “stride” school… On his sole surviving piano roll by
Ellington, “Jig Walk” (date unknown), as well as his on his early accompaniment
to vaudeville singers… he sounds a not
particularly distinguished practitioner of the style. On his early band records, too, rather
moderate solos in the stride fashion are common. From the late ‘twenties onwards Ellington’s
piano starts to fill a mo0re important role in the band… By the early ‘thirties Duke had subtilised
this process and from then on, his work is a perfect example of an ensemble
piano in the jazz idiom.[viii]
Critic Martin Williams explains further that the
stride style itself is orchestral and states his general appraisal of
Ellington’s pianism:
Ellington's very earliest recordings may seem to
preserve an inauspicious beginning for a major talent; they may make him seem a
jazz musician on the wrong track, even in danger of derailment; or in some ways
they make him seem no jazz musician at all. They are stiff rhythmically,
and they abound in the superficial jazziness of the period.[ix]
He adds that "[Ellington had] to learn to write directly for his horns
without taking the route through his keyboard."[x] Above all, the presence of Bubber Miley
elevates every side on which he played.
Williams, too, asserts Miley's dominance and Ellington's relative
weakness on their first two identifiable compositions and performances.
"Ellington's orchestral effects and secondary themes seem weak, out of
place, and perhaps affected by comparison."
Mark Tucker takes a more charitable view:
Critics have not always looked kindly on the
Washingtonians’ early recordings. In
light of what Ellington achieved in 1927 and after, his first efforts in the
studio have seemed slight. Peter
Gammond, for one, has complained that the Washingtonians sound like a white
band, that their arrangements show no signs of Ellington’s ”bold
orchestration,” and that the records from 1924 to 1926 are of “shady historical
interest,” giving “a tantalizing display of negative qualities, of a magic that
was not there.” Others have been less
severe than puzzled, as when Gary Giddins admitted, “[It’s] impossible to
explain how Ellington progressed from these inauspicious beginnings to his
first milestones, recorded in November of 1926 and 1927”, while Gunther
Schuller wrote, [These recordings] do not stand up in comparison to such
contemporary masterpieces of both orchestration and formal structure as Jelly
Roll Morton’s Black Bottom Stomp [September 1926] or King Oliver’s
recording of Froggie Moore [April 1923].”[xi]
Tucker notes also Schuller’s admission that Ellington’s age and lack of
experience tended to moot this comparison; he states further:
The key factor…
was the music recorded by Ellington.
Nine of the early sides were pop songs in which the band mostly followed
written parts or a set routine. The
remaining instrumental by Ellington, “Parlor Social Stomp,” was a pre-planned
arrangement that offered individual players little freedom—or at least they
chose not to exercise that freedom.[xii]
In
the mid-twenties, when Ellington made his first recordings under a variety of
names and circumstances, it was common for blues and cabaret singers to go into
the studio and record sides intended for what was called the "race"
market... The material tended to be either twelve-bar blues or syncopated
pop songs that were made to sound like blues. Such sessions were aimed at
selling not just records but sheet music. In this way black songwriters
like Perry Bradford, Clarence Williams, Spencer Williams, Porter Grainger,
Maceo Pinkard, and Jo Trent had an outlet for their wares, as did their white
imitators (e.g., Irving Kahal and Sammy Fain in "If You Can't Hold the Man
You Love."
For Ellington’s first session as a leader,
in November 1924, on "It's Gonna
Be a Cold, Cold Winter" Ellington alone accompanied a blues singer named Alberta
Prime. At the same session the two were joined by Sonny Greer for two takes of
“Parlor Social De Luxe,” featuring both Prime and Greer on vocals. The sides
were coupled by the Blu Disc label, a tiny entry into the lucrative “race”
market. Neither Prime nor Ellington’s
other singers on these early dates, Alberta Jones and Florence Bristol, could
be considered stars. Tucker observes
that, “Ellington] and Hardwick helped Florence Bristol make her first record;
it was also her last... But Ellington did accompany one singer, Irving
Mills, who would soon prove a valuable contact.”[xiii]
Tucker
notes further that Ellington gives Prime "a full-bodied accompaniment with
rolled tenths in the left hand and octaves and melody doubling on the
right." On the other tune recorded
with Prime, "Parlor Social De Luxe," Sonny Greer is also present. With
Ellington's "hard-driving piano" and sound effects, the tune purports
to recreate a rowdy Harlem rent party. As Tucker observes, the recording sounds
like an impromptu performance.
Of
far more interest are the band’s instrumental recordings, particularly those
featuring Bubber Miley. There had been
important personnel changes during the band’s residency at the Kentucky
Club. Trombonist Charlie Irvis and
trumpeter Bubber Miley, who replaced Whetsol when the latter returned to
medical school in Washington, were added to the lineup late in 1924. Between 1918 and 1921, both of these men,
along with trumpeter June Clark of the Henderson organization, had pioneered a
new style of brass playing in New York.
Irvis, Miley, and Joe “Tricky Sam” Nanton, who was to replace Irvis in
1926, emulating aspects of King Oliver’s style, became expert in the use of the
plunger mute, and each of them developed a distinctive voice on his
instrument. For years they had been
criticized by conservative musicians for whom a “legitimate” tonality was the
sole criterion of musicianship. With Ellington
and Miley they were to become the essential ingredient of the “jungle style”
that gave the band its identity.
It
follows that, of the Ellington band’s recordings in its earliest years, those
that included Miley are by far the most interesting. As The Washingtonians, a sextet that included
Miley, trombonist Charlie Irvis, saxophonist Otto Hardwick, along with the
rhythm section of Ellington on piano, Fred Guy on guitar and Sonny Greer on
drums recorded in November 1924 the coupling of “Choo Choo (Gotta Hurry Home)
and “Rainy Nights,” for the tiny Blu Disc label. Tucker observes that the band plays Louis
Katzman's stock arrangement with a few liberties, but that Bubber Miley’s
riveting performance makes these recordings memorable. Again, on June 21, 1926, Miley appears, this
time with a larger group of nine, including Joe “Tricky Sam” Nanton on trombone
as Miley’s equivalent with the plunger mute, growl technique. The two tunes recorded were “Animal Crackers”
and “Li’l Farina,” a reference to a character in the Little Rascals films, and
it is Miley who makes the most lasting impression. It was not until
late 1926 and early 1927 that Ellington was to create, in his archetypal
collaborations with Bubber Miley, his first recorded masterpieces: “East St.
Louis Toodle-oo,” “Black and Tan Fantasy,” and “Creole Love Call.” Ellington’s contribution toward their
excellence lay more om the ensemble backgrounds he composed than in his rather
perfunctory piano playing, but one is struck above all by the beauty and
originality of Miley’s trumpet work.
After his departure from the band in 1929, no other musician would
exercise an influence comparable to Miley’s upon Ellington’s musical thinking.[16]
While
the band was on tour during the summer of 1926, Miley and Ellington conceived
"East St. Louis Toodle-o, which was to become their theme for the next
fifteen years, and "Black and Tan Fantasy," their first masterpiece
(according to Brooks Kerr, Otto Hardwick claims to have written the secondary
theme). The following September the band began its final season at the Kentucky
Club. A few weeks later, the music publisher Irving Mills heard them for the
first time, playing "Black and Tan Fantasy," "When I learned it
was Duke's composition,” he later wrote, “I immediately recognized that I had
encountered a great creative artist.”
Ellington learned that sometimes knowing what not to
play is as important as what to play: Over his first few years in the
Washingtonians, finger-busting passages were transformed into throwaway cues
and signature runs that all-the-more-clearly identify the pianist. Furthermore,
it is clear early on that Ellington if never aspired to be the world's greatest
pianist, he did seek to be the ideal accompanist, an aim he soon achieved.
In either role, his playing style became immediately identifiable and almost
inimitable.
As if to settle the matter of whether or not Ellington
knew how to play, his mentor Willie “The Lion” Smith opined, laying proper
emphasis on his role within the orchestra,
He’s a great modern
pianist. Any time a guy can lead the band off, hit the signature note,
wave them in, and tell them the cues. Some of the guys sit and wait for
the band to come in. Not Ellington. Ellington's up here all the time;
he's all over the joint. When it comes to his signature to modulate and
go over to the next [key], he draws the band in, not the band him.[xiv]
More than any other idiom, the Ellington band throughout
its years explored the blues in all its hues and expanded the possibilities
inherent in the simplest of chord patterns. Eventually, they became a
blues band; even when not technically a twelve or sixteen-bar form, their music
was saturated with blues changes, blues harmony, and blues feeling.
The band was by no means confined to the Kentucky Club
shows during this time. In addition to
appearances at the Flamingo, Harry Richman’s, and Ciro’s, in summers the band
would play the Charleshurst Ballroom in Salem, Massachusetts, and other New
England locations, where it was booked by Charlie Shribman. His opportunities thus expanding, and with
his hands tied by his musical responsibilities, Ellington was sorely in need of
a farsighted and reliable manager.
He had learned this lesson early from his years in
Washington. In those days he shared the
tasks of promotion and booking with a man known as Black Bowie, so named
because he was darker than the rest of Ellington’s crowd. Mercer Ellington remembered him as a
character who could be called, “depending on your perspective… a schemer, an idea man, a dreamer, or a
hustler.”
After the gig was over,
and no matter who was in the group, he and Pop went off with the lion’s share
of the proceeds and split it between them.
From then on… Duke Ellington began to realize the
significance of the interplay between management and artist and the necessity
for it… Through the years he had a
respect for this relationship. There was
a kind of line beyond which he would never let management pass, but there
always had to be someone to herald his coming.[17]
In his first hard-luck days in New York, Sonny Greer
obtained jobs for him. Later he would
always have people going to parties and cabarets to “talk up” the name of Duke
Ellington (a practice known around Harlem as playing the “sawdust trail”). Ellington had prepared himself for this sort
of enterprise by involving himself with the world of hustling and “sporting,”
both in Washington and New York. “His
mastery of this developed as a parallel until he was no longer a hustler but a
businessman. The same kind of principles
are found in what is considered legitimate business.”[18] At the
same time, Ellington was always mindful of the values of advertising, of “snob
appeal,” to enhance his orchestra’s career.
As his compositions began to attract notice, Ellington
was also forced to face the problem of selling them outright to whatever
publishers he could interest. Already
some of them had taken advantage of him and become rich from the financial
reward that should have been his:
During my first few
months in New York, I found out that anybody was eligible to take songs into
the music publishers on Broadway. So, I
joined the parade and teamed up with Jo Trent, a nice guy who was familiar with
the routines of the publishing world. He
liked my music and he was a good lyricist, so he took my hand and guided me
around Broadway. We wrote several songs
together and auditioned every day in one publisher’s office or another and, as
was normal had practically no success, until one day when we demonstrated a
song for Fred Fisher.[19]
Fisher bought the song for a fifty-dollar advance, and
the duo continued to write and peddle tunes in this way. In 1924 they wrote, in one night, the entire
score for the show Chocolate Kiddies for a $500 advance from Jack
Robbins. The show never played Broadway,
but its Berlin run that year made Robbins “a millionaire, a lord of music.”[20]
In those days, such practices of the publishers were
common, as they still are. But because
music publishing was then so tightly controlled by a handful of Tin Pan Alley
firms, it was much easier for publishers to extract enormous profits from
composers, particularly those composers who were Black. They also exercised a great deal more control
over the manner in which songs could be played.
Fletcher Henderson was a case in point. Although his orchestra, in John Hammond’s
words, was a “band of elite musicians” who seldom lacked employment (he
frequently performed for white audiences at the Roseland Ballroom in New York
opposite Jean Goldkette’s band, it made nowhere near the amount of money that
was earned by well-known white orchestras.
If Henderson made many poor recordings, it was because publishers
dictated how his tunes were to be played.
Publishers would normally pay for a song’s arrangement and then pay to
have it recorded. They did not allow
liberties to be taken with those musicians, such as a jazzman might take. Because Henderson was playing, in some
measure, for a white public, most of what he recorded was popular dance-music,
with all its cliches intact. Seldom was
an eight-bar break allowed for a solo by Coleman Hawkins or Charlie Green to
identify the group as a jazz orchestra.[21]
Thomas “Fats” Waller was one of many Black composers
who were shamelessly exploited by greedy publishers. In 1929 Waller sold all his rights to the
entire Hot Chocolates score—twenty songs, including “Ain’t Misbehavin’,”
“Black and Blue,” etc.—for the sum of $500, giving up all his income for the
twenty-eight years of the copyright. His
son, Maurice Waller, also claims that “On the Sunny Side of the Street,” a hit
song attributed to Jimmy McHugh, was one “Dad had sold… for a few bucks when he
was broke back in the ‘20s.” He makes a
similar implication about McHugh having stolen “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love.” After Waller’s death in 1943, a lawyer, with
Ed Kirkeby (Waller’s manager and later biographer) formed the C.R. Publishing
Company and,
As Dad’s copyrights
expired, they were transferred to the company.
Under the law, these copyrights should have been renewed by members of
the immediate family. The renewals pick
up the money and go.
It was a mess that
dragged on for years and was still in litigation in 1977. But the courts ruled that the agreement
signed in 1950 by our family and Kirkeby is null and void. All of his life my father felt he was cheated
by greedy publishers, and now in death he was being cheated again.[22]
After
a second fire closed the Hollywood Cafe late in 1924, it was christened the
Club Kentucky upon its reopening in March 1925. Later that year with
lyricist Jo Trent, Ellington scored his first musical show, Chocolate
Kiddies, which toured Europe with a Harlem band led by Sam Wooding. In May 1926 the third of a series of
suspicious fires burned down and closed the Kentucky Club. Henry
"Bass" Edwards and Charlie Irvis left the band to be replaced by Mack
Shaw and Joe Nanton on tuba and growl trombone, respectively.
Duke Ellington’s drive and business acumen enabled him
to avoid the sort of financial problems that plagued nearly every other Black
musician of that day; he did it by winning the sponsorship of a far-sighted
white man who became both his manager and his publisher. Irving Mills was no stranger to Ellington
when he “discovered” his orchestra playing “Black and Tan Fantasy” at the
Kentucky Club in 1926:
My initial encounter with
Irving Mills occurred during my first six months in New York. He was known as the last resort for getting
some money by those who had been peddling songs all day without success. I first heard of him second hand, and one day
I joined a group of five or six songwriters. The personnel varied, but they
would get together, each with a lead sheet of what they considered rather
ordinary blues under his arm, and head for Mills Music. The procedure, they explained, was to sell
those blues outright to Irving Mills for fifteen or twenty dollars. It was very simple—no hassle. Just give him the lead sheet, sign the
outright release, pick up the money, and go. This happened nearly every day. I am sure some of them, after many of these
visits, sold the same blues turned around.
There is no telling or any way of knowing just how many Irving Mills
amassed, but it was a good way for us to end the business day.
Later on, Irving Mills
recorded one of those blues he had bought, released it, and had a big hit. The irony of it was that the cat who wrote it
blew his top, completely forgetting the fact that he had sold this same old
blues who knows how many times? “The
lowdown so-and-so only gave me twenty dollars,” he complained.[xv][23]
Mill’s 1926 encounter with Ellington, however, took
place under a different set of circumstances, and it was to prove Ellington’s
chance of a lifetime. As Barry Ulanov
wrote,
When Mills stepped in,
accident and chance stepped out; big business took over and the rise of the
Ellington orchestra was made inevitable.
That with this rise should also come serious disillusionment for the men
in the band, a deepening sense of personal and collective tragedy which has
never left these brilliant musicians, that, too, was inevitable.[24]
Ellington had reached the first major turning-point in
his career. Under the tutelage of Irving
Mills he was to enter the Promised Land of American show-business.
[1]
Duke Ellington, Music Is My Mistress (MMIM hereafter) (New
York: Doubleday, 1973), p. 10.
[2]
Barry Ulanov, Duke Ellington, p. 3.
[4]
Barry Ulanov, Duke Ellington, p. 3.
[5]
MIMM, p. 12.
[6]
Ibid., p. 15.
[7]
Barry Ulanov, Duke Ellington, p. 6.
[8]
Mercer Ellington with Stanley Dance, Duke Ellington in Person, pp. 9-13.,
[9]
MIMM, p.17.
[10]
Duke Ellington in Person pp. 9-10.
[11]
Hsiio Wen Shih, “The Spread of Jazz and the Big Bands,” cited in LeRoi Jones,
Blues People, p. 160.
[12]
Mercer Ellington and Stanley Dance, Duke Ellington in Person, pp. 19-20.
[13]
Ibid., p.26.
[14]
Ibid, pp. 42-43.
[15]
Duke Ellington, p. 36.
15. Mercer Ellington and Stanley Dance, op. cit,,
pp. 42-43..
[16]
Ibid., pp. 279 ff.
[17]
Duke Ellington in Person, p. 14.
[18]
Ibid., p. 15.
[19]
MIMM, p. 70.
[20]
John Hammond, “An Experience in Jazz History,” p. 47.
[21]
Maurice Waller and Anthony Calabrese, Fats Waller (New York: Schirmer, 1977).
[22]
Ibid.
[23]
MIMM, pp. 72-73.
[24]
Duke Ellington, p. 56.
[i]
Mark Tucker, Duke Ellington: The
Early Years. Urbana and
Chicago: U. of Illinois, 1991, p. 41.
[ii]
Ibid., p. 34.
[iii]
On the Road with Duke Ellington, Robert Drew, dir., 1975.
[iv]
From a CBC interview of Duke Ellington, ca. 1960.
[vi]
Mark Tucker, Duke Ellington: The
Early Years, 90, 105, 261.
[viii]
Eddie Lambert, in Jazz on Record, 77.
[ix]
Martin Williams, "Form Beyond Form," (chapter 10 of The Jazz
Tradition, TDER, 402 ff.)
[x]
Ibid.
[xi]
Mark Tucker, op. cit., 168f.
[xii]
Mark Tucker, op. cit., 169f.
[1] Duke
Ellington, Music Is My Mistress (MMIM hereafter)
(New York: Doubleday, 1973), p. 10.
[2] Barry
Ulanov, Duke Ellington, p. 3.
[4] Barry
Ulanov, Duke Ellington, p. 3.
[5] MIMM,
p. 12.
[6] Ibid.,
p. 15.
[7] Barry
Ulanov, Duke Ellington, p. 6.
[8] Mercer
Ellington, with Stanley Dance, Duke Ellington in Person, pp. 9-13.
[9] MIMM,
p.17.
[10] Duke
Ellington in Person pp. 9-10.
[11] Hsiio
Wen shih, “The Spread of Jazz and the Big Bands,” cited in LeRoi Jones Blues
People, p. 160.
[12] Mercer
Ellington and Stanley Dance, Duke Ellington in Person, pp. 19-20.
[13] Ibid.,
p.26.
[14] Ibid,
pp. 42-43.
[15] Ibid.,
p. 64.
[16] Duke
Ellington, p. 36.
[17] Ibid.,
p. 36.
[18] Ibid.,
pp. 279 ff.
[19] Duke
Ellington in Person, p. 14.
[20] Ibid.,
p. 15.
[21] MIMM,
p. 70.
[22] John
Hammond, “An Experience in Jazz History,” p. 47.
[23] Maurice
Waller and Anthony Calabrese, Fats Waller (New
York: Schirmer, 1977).
[24] Ibid.
[25] MIMM,
pp. 72-73.
[26] Steven Lasker, liner notes for
Early Ellington: The Original Decca
Recordings, p. 34.
[xiii]
Mark Tucker, Ellington: The Early
Years, 173
[xv][xv]
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