II.
ELLINGTON: SOCIAL AND MUSICAL
ORIGINS
Edward
Kennedy Ellington was born in Washington, D.C., on April 29, 1899, a son of the
Black middle class as it existed before the World War I migration of Blacks
from the South. This class, which had
originated among free Blacks long before Emancipation, had developed social
traditions over many years in accord with its ideals of genteel demeanor and
gracious living, traditions that were worlds away from thee material conditions
and folk culture of the great majority of Blacks living in Jim Crow hells over
most of the South.
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
1914 and the seemingly magical sway pianists held with the young ladies. Washington’s “professors” of ragtime piano
included, at that time, Clarence Bow’sser, 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] Ellington wrote his first composition, “Soda
Fountain Rag,” around this time, while working as a soda-jerk at the Poodle Dog
Café.
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 thee 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]
The one area
in which Ellington did excel at Armstrong was art. After school he would earn money 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 inn Brooklyn, which he had won inn 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 Hardwick, 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 Hardwick
on bass, 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.
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,
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.[10]
Mercer
Kennedy Ellington was born in 1919. The
couple’s only other child died in infancy; Edna’s account of her marriage to,
and separation from, Ellington appears in the March, 1959, edition of Ebony.
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:
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- 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: “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:
Although Ellington was already established as a composer, he
did not do very much writing in these formative years because of the men in the
band who didn’t read well. The
arrangements were usually created orally, and I know that [Irving] Mills used
to complain when he had nothing down on paper to copyright. Pop would play the melody on the piano and
have Artie Whetsol learn it. Then he
played the second part, or let the second trumpet figure out his part from what
he’d heard. He’d play the background according
to what sounded right to him, and then assign notes from the piano for
different guys to play. 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. He would never let
them look at the scores if he could help it, and he knew certain people who came
to take advantage of new and creative writing.
Sometimes, the bigger the people who came to hear him, the less original
the music he played. 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.
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. 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.
The band’s
first big break came in the form of an old professional acquaintance from
Washington’s Oriental Theater, Ada “Bricktop” Smith. She managed to find a spot for the Washingtonians at Barron Wilkins’s 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.[15]
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.”[16] 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.
In any case,
there were 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, 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” tonal was the sole criterion of
musicianship. With Ellington they were
to become the essential ingredient of the “jungle style” that gave the band its
unique identity.
By late 1925
the band was making its first records, beginning with “I’m Gonna Hang Around My
Sugar.” For the next several years they
recorded for a variety of “race” labels (Perfect, Gennett, Blue-Disc, etc.);
when contractual obligations got in the way of their ability to record, they
were obliged to invent pseudonyms. For this reason the Ellington band, on its
early records, was known by almost as many names as there were record labels
(Duke Ellington’s Washingtonians, Duke Ellington and His Kentucky Club
Orchestra, Duke Ellington and His Orchestra, and later Duke Ellington and His
Cotton Club Orchestra, The Whoopee Makers, Warren Mills and His Blues
Serenaders, The Harlem Footwarmers, Six Jolly Jesters, The Ten Blackberries,
Harlem Hot Chocolates, etc., etc.,);[17]
Aside from
their poor sound quality, due to the primitive acoustical recording method used
until the advent of electrical recording in 1926, 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.
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.[18]
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, it played two weeks at the “Messin’ s a character
who could be called, “summers the band would play thee 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 popwent off with thee 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.[19]
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.”[20]
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, 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.[21]
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.”[22]
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 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.[23]
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 thje 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.[24]
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.[25]
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.[26]
[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]
Duke Ellington, p. 56.
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