4.  The Mills regime

 

 

By 1930, every city outside the deep South with a Black population over 60,000 had produced an important band:  from Washington came Ellington; from Baltimore, Chick Webb.  Memphis had produced Jimmie Lunceford, while Luis Russell and Louis Armstrong found stardom in Chicago.  The Missourians hailed from St. Louis, and New York nurtured a profusion of Black talent, led by the bands of Fletcher Henderson and Charlie Johnson.

So an important evolution in Afro-American musical form had occurred again and in much the same manner that characterized the many other changes within the tradition of Negro music. The form can be called basically a Euro-American one—the large (sweet) dance band, changed by the contact with Afro-American musical tradition into another vehicle for that tradition.  [Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Blues People, 159-160]

The growth of such an array of musical genius was not, however, accompanied by any loosening of the restrictions that confined Black musicians within the minor leagues of American show-business.  Hungry for fame and financial reward, these scions of the Black middle class were flung full force against the color line.

Among the first to make the big breakthrough to the white entertainment world was Louis Armstrong.  In the 1920s, Armstrong had become a musical figure of national importance.  His recordings by 1928 had established an improvisational style that would remain jazz’s main vehicle of expression for another twenty years.  He was a public sensation at Chicago’s Lincoln Gardens and at the Roseland ballroom with the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra in New York.  But Armstrong did not truly hit the big-time until he returned to Chicago in 1931 to find sponsorship under a white man with plenty of connections.  He was fond of repeating an expression from a bouncer in New Orleans: “This is my nigger.”  [Chris Albertson, Louis Armstrong, 24]

The first white man to manage Louis Armstrong was Johnny Collins, an impresario with gangland connections.  Under the aegis of Collins, Armstrong’s career burgeoned forth internationally.  Upon his return from Europe in 1935, Armstrong was offered a recording contract on the popular Decca label.  His new personal manager became Joe Glaser of the powerful Associated Booking Corporation, who built Armstrong’s career until his own death in 1969.

Glaser was one of a number of manager-bookers who enhanced their profits by marketing Black talent in the 1930s (along with Armstrong, he managed bandleaders Lionel Hampton and Andy Kirk). The largest bookers during the formative years of big-band jazz did not handle Black performers.  The Music Company of America (MCA, a.k.a. “the Star-Spangled Octopus”) catered to the largest common-denominator of American musical taste by marketing Guy Lombardo, Eddie Duchin, Horace Heidt, Xavier Cugat, Sammy Kaye, and Wayne King. Its largest competitor, the General Artists Corporation, booked the Casa Loma Orchestra, Bing Crosby, the Boswell Sisters, Jimmy Dorsey, Artie Shaw, Bob Crosby, Woody Herman, Glenn Miller, and Claude Thornhill (for a time, Armstrong and the Mills Brothers appeared on their roster).

The management and booking of Black talent, for a long time and to a remarkable degree, remained in the hands of Jewish businessmen.  We have already noted the role of the Shribman brothers in promoting Ellington in New England in the 1920s.  At the same time Moe Gale, the New York manager-booker who owned the Savoy Ballroom, was presenting Chick Webb, Teddy Hill, Willie Bryant and Erskine Hawkins.  Irving and Jack Mills built a musical empire on the careers of Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway.

Nowhere was this fact more apparent than it was in the area of music publishing.  The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), formed to collect royalties from music performed on stage, records, radio, etc., guaranteed Tin Pan Alley’s hegemony on those media and spearheaded the Jewish influence in American culture:

Out of the forty-one hits listed in Sigmund Spaeth’s Popular Music in America (1948) for 1930, seventeen were written by composers and/or lyricists with names recognizably Jewish (e.g., Harold Arlen, George and Ira Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Vernon Duke (ne Vladimir Dukelsky), Herman Hupfield, Vincent Youmans).  [H.F. Mooney, “Popular Music Since the 1920’s,” in The Sounds of Social Change, 186-7],

Taking an attitude reminiscent of the philosophy of the old-time Du Bois “militants,” an important segment of Black society assumed the stance of grooming their artists of superior talent for a “breakthrough” into the white cultural establishment.  Thus, not only Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson, but also Duke Ellington, to mention the biggest-name Black entertainers, were encouraged to move in the direction of a more “Europeanized” style of concert presentation.  As we shall see, Ellington, in in particular, dreamed of receiving the sort of adulation heaped by the white cultural establishment upon its “classical” elite.

At the same time, however, to this establishment Blacks were anathema.  The traditionalist critics of the 1920s—Daniel Gregory Mason, Dr. Henry van Dyke, Paul Rosenfeld—showed nothing but disdain and disgust toward jazz.  Their more liberal contemporaries—Paul Whiteman, H.O. Osgood, Gilbert Seldes, Edward Burlingame Hill—insisted it was the white man’s duty to “refine” jazz.  For a long period and with hardly any exceptions, one had to go to Europe to hear even a murmur of praise for jazz from the white critical fraternity. [Neil Leonard, Jazz and the White Americans, 134ff]

Unlike many in those days, Ellington was not in favor of surmounting this aspect of the Negro question by integrating Black orchestras out of existence.  In this it might be said that he was sympathetic to the ideas concerning Black enterprise put forward by Booker T. Washington.  John Hammond, in his autobiography, reveals this attitude to have been a factor in the dispute which later grew between them:

Duke had, I felt, an old-line point of view of the Negro’s ability to survive in a white commercial world.  Understandably, he wanted to safeguard the position he had won for himself in that world at the expense, perhaps, of racial solidarity.  Mine was an idealistic point of view, I realize, but because of it I felt more warmly toward some bandleaders than I did toward Ellington.  I also knew that the real enemy was not the leaders like Ellington and Noble Sissle, who compromised in order to crack the racial barriers which prevailed.  It was rather the segregated society which created all-black and all-white bands in an art form where color should never have been a criterion at all.

I can remember arguing with Duke about my efforts to create mixed bands.  His point was:  Why help the white bands by filling them with black players, thereby threatening the survival of the Negro bands?  I know that Ellington felt that white bandleaders were trying to steal the Negro’s music, as well he might have, for not only were his musicians stolen, but also his tunes and even the sound of his band, to the extent that was possible.  I disagreed with this. [John Hammond and Irving Townsend, John Hammond on Record:  An Autobiography, 136]

Ellington, in short, was at that point in his career when it was absolutely necessary for him to have shrewd white management.  However we might speculate upon his fate as a musician without such management, it is certain that he could never have risen to his full stature, or that he would have developed as he did; if remembered today at all, he would most likely be recalled as an obscure Harlem pianist with some interesting orchestral ideas.  Taking Ellington’s future impact upon jazz into account, it may even be that jazz, as that term is generally used, would not have survived past 1930.  In this regard, it must be admitted that the extra-musical genius of Mills was as cardinal a factor in the evolution of jazz as the musical genius of Ellington.

By the 1930s, Irving Mills was no longer plugging away on the fringes of show business; in John Hammond’s words, he was “a conglomerate.”  With his brother Jack as president of Mills Music, his was a major name in the music publishing world, while at the same time the booker and manager of such attractions as Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, the Mills Blue Rhythm Band, the Will Hudson-Eddie DeLange band, Ina Ray Hutton, and other talent, both Black and white.  In the 1920s, Jack Mills had bought from Irving Berlin the Watterson, Berlin, and Snyder music catalogue, exclusive of Berlin’s own songs.  Using this as its basic inventory, Mills Music was established, with Irving Mills as vice-president and co-owner.  Each brother set up his own office to promote Black talent.

As a music publisher, Mills continued to enrich himself by the usual business methods of that profession.  His name, appearing either alone or as co-composer or lyricist, on others’ compositions enabled him to collect not only the publisher’s percentage of their earnings, but a composer’s royalty as well.  As Mercer Ellington explained, “It was the practice of publishers in those days.  If they were somewhere, as Duke Ellington said, and you wanted to get somewhere, you had to make a deal with somebody to get your first tunes out.” [interview, Chicago July 27, 1979]

Mitchell Parish, the lyricist for many popular hits, including some of Duke Ellington’s, sold his work outright to Mills.  George Bassman, the composer of “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You,” later Tommy Dorsey’s theme, sold that tune to Mills for twenty-five dollars and had to wait twenty-eight years to collect any of its royalties. [John Hammond On Record, 126]

In addition to Mills Music, Jack and Irving Mills owned and ran the publishing firms of Lawrence Music, Exclusive, and the American Academy of Music.  Around 1934, when Irving Mills wanted to establish ASCAP ratings for these new firms, he began the large-scale subsidization of recordings by bands under his management.  Although his costs were very low—he generally paid, in addition to studio and equipment fees, from fifty to seventy-five dollars for each arrangement, plus union scale for the musicians—he received in return statutory payments from the record companies to his publishing interests.  The recordings were also valuable to Mills over the long run, as they promoted his sheet-music sales and brought prestige and profit to the artists under his management.  All this was, in Hammond’s droll understatement, “an unbeatable arrangement for Irving.” [John Hammond On Record, 125]

Hammond, who early in his career was hired to edit the Mills house organ Melody News, declares flatly that Mills “was a man who saved black talent in the 1930’s, when there was no one else who cared whether it worked or not.” [John Hammond on Record, 132] As self-interested as Mills was, there is probably some basis to this statement.  The question of white paternalism aside, Mills spared no effort or expense on behalf of the Black bands under his management which he introduced to the white world.  In no instance is this truer than it was in the case of Duke Ellington.  He worked tirelessly as the band’s recording director, agent, publisher and promoter.  For in-person theater appearances, he invested lavish sums in the band’s uniforms and instruments.  Most important, and unlike nearly all other men in his position, he allowed Ellington and his musicians an unprecedented degree of choice in musical matters.  If, as Leonard Feather asserted, it was true that he “became known in the black press as Abraham Lincoln Mills,” there was perhaps some genuine respect behind the sarcasm. [Leonard Feather, introduction to The Great Music of Duke Ellington (Melville, NY:  Belwin Mills, 1973), 9]

Mills first approached Ellington with an offer to become the band’s agent for recording sessions and the promise of a recording contract with Columbia Records (Ellington, it should be recalled, had been restricted to the “race record” market).  Upon the success of Ellington’s 1926 recordings, the two men set up Duke Ellington, Inc., with Ellington and Mills each owning forty-five per cent of the corporation and Sam Buzzell, a lawyer, in possession of the remaining ten per cent. Ellington, in turn, was given a substantial share of some other Mills properties. [Ulanov, Duke Ellington, 58]

Ellington’s recollection of these early years with Mills were warm long after their association had ended.  The few lines devoted to Mills in Music Is My Mistress are almost idyllic:

He used to come to the Kentucky Club often, and one night he said he didn’t know what we were doing with our music, but he liked it and would like a chance to record some of it with our band. We jumped at the chance, and this was really the beginning of a long and wonderful association.  The procedure was usually the same.  “Have four numbers ready for recording at 9 A.M. tomorrow,” he’d say.  We’d do that, and he liked what we did, and interest grew.  It was a very good thing for us.  He had the contacts, and liked to write music—and play it, too…  We recorded for almost every existing label under different names:  Duke Ellington on Victor, the Jungle Band on Brunswick, the Washingtonians on Harmony, the Whoopee Makers on Perfect, Sonny Greer and His Memphis Men on Columbia, the Harlem Footwarmers on Okeh, and so on. [MIMM, 73]

Still other pseudonyms were used on recordings for Melotone, Oriole, and Cameo.  Victor, the largest recording company at the time, brought Ellington under contract in October of 1927.

In addition to the benefits resulting from increased recording activity, the band began to receive exposure on radio, at first by remote broadcasts from the Kentucky Club over small stations like WHN and WMCA.  In time, Mills was able to arrange, through Ted Husing of CBS, a series of network broadcasts.

As this media exposure greatly expanded Ellington’s audience, his bookings began to improve, both in quantity and quality.  Within two years’ time, new musicians attracted by his success swelled the orchestra’s size to twelve members.  In the process, a subtle change took place in the band’s format.  From a very informal “communal” organization, the Duke Ellington Orchestra emerged as a highly disciplined unit, with Duke Ellington as its star, its public personality.

Different men in the orchestra reacted in various ways to these changes.  Sonny Greer, for example. recalled the Mills regime as a time of luxury:

When anything pertaining to Ellington came up, [Mills] was there in person.  He didn’t send someone else out.  When he made the second [1939] European trip with us, he was so sick he had to have a doctor in attendance twenty-four hours a day, but he made it every step of the way.  [Sonny Greer, TWoDE, 69]

Sonny Greer

Otto Hardwicke, however, had misgivings.  He left the   Ellington organization in 1929 to take a variety of jobs, in New York and in Europe, before he returned to it in 1932.

When I rejoined the band it was just like I’d never left. Except this way, maybe.  It wasn’t our thing any longer.  It had become Ellington’s alone.  This was inevitable, I guess.  Ten years ago it was “We do it this way,” and “We wrote that.”  Now, the we was royal.  It seemed more inspiring, maybe more inspired, too, the other way, but I guess it had to come to this. You love the guy right on.  You have to admire him for all he’s accomplished.  You’ve got to be happy for him, he’s that kind of guy.

But in those early days, how we enjoyed what we did.  We were privileged to make suggestions.  If he liked it, or if he didn’t, he’d go along with it anyway.  Every man in the band had freedom of expression.  It was fun.  I don’t think money had much to do with it.  You made a living, that was it.  But the work—actually the work was a pleasure.  And then it was more or less like a family, even with the people who paid us.  We never liked making a change.  We shared in everything, like in some of those numbers we wrote where two or three contributed a part. [Otto Hardwicke, TWDE, 60]

Otto Hardwicke

 Years later, Mercer Ellington’s evaluation tended to agree with that of Hardwicke:

The relationship between Pop and the guys was obviously closer in 1933 than it was in later years.  They travelled together in the Pullman cars Irving Mills had gotten to take them around the country, particularly in the southern states.  They drank together, and they played cards together.  But whether they realized it or not, the reins were firmly in Pop’s hands.  The program or policy was increasingly determined by him-- which is not to say that he isolated himself from their world and interests. [DEiP, 67]

Irving Mills

Although his son was to cite the band’s entry into the world of big-time show business as the source of innumerable conflicts, and often open hostility, among the musicians, Duke Ellington himself viewed his career from that point on as one conquest after another.  For Mills, he seemingly had nothing but the highest praise.  Mills, he wrote,

(1)   insisted that I make and record only my own music;

(2)   got me into the Cotton Club, the RKO Palace, and the Black and Tan Fantasy movie;

(3)   had big fights with record companies to get the black artist into hitherto all-white catalogs;

(4)   fought with the Dillingham executives to have us play in concert with Maurice Chevalier;

(5)   achieved our entry into picture houses, which we pioneered for big bands regardless of race;

(6)   arranged our interstate tours of the South and Texas in our own Pullman cars;

(7)   triumphantly secured my entrance into ASCAP;

(8)   took us to Europe in 1933, where we played the London Palladium and met members of the British Royal Family on several occasions.

Irving Mills, in short, was a man with plenty of initiative. He started out singing and plugging songs from nine to five; then he would go to the movies and sing with the slides; and after that he would go to dance halls and sing with a megaphone.  As his world expanded, his roles as manager and impresario became more important, but his roots were always in music publishing.  He went by ear and vibrations.  He could feel a song…  He was a clever man.[1]

By the end of 1927, Mills had arranged Ellington’s most important engagement up to that time by contracting for the band to appear at the Cotton Club on December 4 in a show written by Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields.  They were to stay at the Cotton Club, with one short break in 1930, until 1932.  The band found its first national fame under the name “Duke Ellington and His Cotton Club Orchestra.”  Mills paid its expenses out of his own pocket.[2]

The story of Ellington’s beginnings at the Cotton Club is now something of a jazz legend.  In 1927, the nightclub’s regular bandleader, Andy Preer, died; without him and his band, the Cotton Club Syncopators, lost their drawing power and were eventually fired.  Looking for a replacement band, manager Harry Block first offered the job to King Oliver’s Dixie Syncopators, then at the end of six years’ employment in Chicago.  In 1927, Chicago bands were in great demand at Harlem clubs, so the choice of Oliver, although his appeal had diminished greatly since Louis Armstrong’s departure a few years earlier, seemed natural enough.  Yet Oliver turned the offer down because he wanted more money, even though the Cotton Club paid the highest musicians’ wages in Harlem.  Block was forced to delay the opening of the new 1927 show until December 4.

It was the club’s songwriter, Jimmy McHugh, who recommended Duke Ellington, who was by then famous through his long engagement at the Kentucky Club.  Although Block preferred hiring a Chicago name band, he agreed to audition Ellington.  Despite elaborate preparations for the audition—the band had to expand from six to eleven pieces—Ellington arrived late for his performance.  As fate would have it, Block was also late, and he hired Ellington without having heard any of the other bands.  Immediately, Block signed a contract with Irving Mills.  There was only one remaining difficulty:  booker Clarence Robinson refused to release Ellington from his contract at Philadelphia’s Gibson Standard Theater in time for the Cotton Club’s opening.  Soon Robinson received a visit from some rather unsavory characters.  “Be big,” they told him, “or you’ll be dead.”  Thus was Duke Ellington launched at the Cotton Club. [Haskins, The Cotton Club, 44f]

Such methods of doing business were common in Harlem in those days.  Prohibition was responsible for organized crime’s move into the district; the Irish moved out, to be replaced by Italians, along with Dutch, German, Jewish and French mobsters.  Harlem became “the most profitable underworld business ever, until dope came along.”  Instead of discouraging white patronage, the presence of gangsters itself was another titillating ingredient of the sightseers’ Harlem adventure.  The chance to see “exotic” entertainment and to consume bootleg liquor drew whites by the thousands into Harlem.  The police in the neighborhood functioned mainly as a security force for the club district. [Haskins, 22-23]

The owner of the Cotton Club, Owney Madden, had been a gangster since before Prohibition.  Born in England, Madden came to America at the age of eleven; by the time he was eighteen, he was “Owney the Killer,” the leader of a faction of the Gopher Gang in Hell’s Kitchen.  To gambling, prostitution and similar rackets, Madden preferred holdups, burglaries, extortion and collections from corrupt politicians.  Although several murders were attributed by police to Madden, they could make nothing stick until 1912, when an attempt on his life led to gang warfare.  His imprisonment at Sing Sing in 1914 for the murder of mobster Patsy Doyle, forced Madden to lower his profile from then on, although in prison he was able to retain the control and leadership of his syndicate, which became involved with the operation of Harlem cabarets.

Even after his parole in 1923, Madden was seldom seen at the Cotton Club.  While he was in prison, his gang made a deal with heavyweight champion Jack Johnson’s Club Deluxe into a speakeasy seating up to 700 people.  The precise origin of the name Cotton Club is unknown, although it probably referred to the establishment’s whites-only admission policy and the intimations of the Old South present in its décor.  Madden’s gang outfitted the club with artificial palms, elegant fixtures and a wide menu that included “Harlem cuisine.”  All of the employees—busboys, waiters, cooks, syndicate people, hangers-on, and most of the entertainment—were imported from Chicago.

From the club’s beginnings, Madden managed his enterprise through his front men, chiefly Walter Brooks, who had brought Shuffle Along to the legitimate theater, and George “Big Frenchy” DeMange, a Madden aide who became secretary of the corporation formed to operate the Cotton Club.  The management adhered to a simple formula in setting its entertainment policy:  only whites were involved in production, staging, choreography, and set design, while only Blacks performed in the shows.  At the Cotton Club’s opening, the former included Lew Leslie, later to achieve fame from his by his Blackbirds on Broadway, as producer.  Jimmy McHugh, then known chiefly as the composer of the wartime ditty “Inky Dinky Parlez-Vous,” was hired as the resident songwriter.

Blacks hired to perform in the shows were required to conform to a rather peculiar set of standards that pandered to the expectations of their white audiences.  Chorus girls, for example, had to be of a “high-yaller” complexion, at least five feet-six, under twenty-one years old, and able to sing as well as dance; for male dancers, however, degree of skin color was not a criterion.  Andy Preer’s group, known in Chicago as the Missourians, was brought in for the Cotton Club’s grand opening in the fall of 1923:

The show was essentially an uptown version of the lavish Negro stage revues that were selling out theaters down on Broadway.  The Cotton Club customers had seen these revues and had come uptown to get a closer look.  The Cotton Club orchestra thus had to be a show orchestra, playing   to an audience that often had just left one of the top revues and wanted to hear music in the same slick, commercial style.  The Cotton Club girls were beautiful, glamorous, dressed in revealing costumes.  The songs were memorable. [Haskins, 35]

In the opening show, these songs included McHugh’s “I Can’t Believe that You’re in Love with Me,” “When My Sugar Walks Down the Street,” and “Freeze and Melt.”

Orderly decorum was demanded of the club’s guests. And it was enforced, whenever necessary, by bouncers especially selected by the management.  Except for beer (“Madden’s No. One”), most patrons brought their own liquor, although a deal could be made with a waiter or doorman for its procurement.  Black customers were excluded, at first, by high prices.  They were particularly discouraged from arriving in mixed parties with whites.  “Only the lightest-complexioned Negroes gained entrance, and even they were carefully screened.  The club’s management was aware that most white downtowners wanted to observe Harlem blacks, not mix with them.” [Haskins, The Cotton Club, 44]

Local police were regularly bribed to ignore the club’s violation of liquor laws.  When, in June, 1925, a federal court ordered eight Harlem clubs, including the Cotton Club, to close for violating the Volstead Act, Madden reopened by simply changing the front men in the club’s management.  Brooks was replaced by Harry Block, and Herman Stark, a former machine-gunner, became the new stage manager.  Lew Leslie was replaced by Dan Healy as producer, and this combination resulted in the Cotton club’s most memorable shows.

Like the revues staged by Ziegfeld, these shows relied on fast pacing as their chief ingredient.  According to Healy’s own description.

The show was generally built around types:  the band, an eccentric dancer, a comedian—whoever with a good voice…  And we’d have a special singer who gave the customers the expected adult song in Harlem. [Cited from Edward Jablonski, Harold Arlen:  Happy with the Blues; Haskins, The Cotton Club, 35]

Harry Carney

When Ellington arrived in 1927, this two-hour show was indeed fast-paced:  it consisted of fifteen acts and encores.  Other entertainers on the bill included Earl “Snakehips” Tucker, Edith Wilson (a schtick comedienne and singer of adult songs), and the dance team of Mildred and Henri.  Mercer Ellington, who was only eight years old when his father began his Cotton Club engagement, was able to recall his impressions:

The band was all the way at the back in the Cotton Club, in a shell, with a dance floor in front.  The dancers came and went through an entrance on either side of the shell out onto this raised dance floor.  The stage was set up to represent the Land of Cotton, with a plantation cabin, rows of cotton bushes, and trees that shot up when the show started.  On three sides of the floor were swinging garden gates, with primitive archways and vines over them, through which the public came up to the floor to dance.  The concept of the Cotton Club represented not the South of the aristocrats but the South of the Negro.  The people who came there wanted what they thought was the red-hot feeling of the South as depicted by Negroes.  No white acts could work there.

… They were usually packed with society and show-business people.  It was like an extra favor to Ellington to be allowed to have his family there, because the policy was basically Jim Crow in the early days.  I’d go with my grandfather and grandmother, and the management would give us a booth for one show.  I still remember the gorgeous lemonades I’d get to drink, but the show was so gigantic, so long, that before it ended I’d almost be falling asleep.  We’d get up and leave right afterward, and outside there would be long lines of limousines with chauffeurs.  It all made a big impression on me. [DEiP, 44-45]

The personnel of the Ellington orchestra at that time were a truly distinguished musical company.  In addition to Ellington, Greer, Hardwick, Miley, Nanton, and Guy from the years at the Kentucky Club, in 1928 the leader added Harry Carney and Rudy Jackson to the reed section; Louis Metcalfe, along with the returning Arthur Whetsol, joined the trumpet section, and Wellman Braud played string bass.  In 1928, Freddie Jenkins replaced Metcalf and young Johnny Hodges was added to enlarge the reed section to four players.  As formidable as these musicians’ talents were as individuals, they had been chosen because they fitted in with Ellington’s overall musical conception:  each musician, both by his strengths and his limitations, contributed in a unique way to the expression of ideas that were Ellington’s.

 It is a mark of his talent and vision as a leader that in these early days of his band, while he was learning to use the materials he had in hand, he let his musicians lead the way in forming the band’s style. It is evident both from the recordings and also from the statements of contemporary musicians that Ellington was very dependent upon his players at this stage, and that they knew it.  It is to Duke’s credit that he fostered a fierce pride and communal attitude in his band so that it took precedence over the individual contributions and feelings of its members. [Gunther Schuller, Early Jazz, 327]

Johnny Hodges

The long engagement at the Cotton Club afforded Ellington the opportunity to develop the full scope of his musical ideas.  From the great number of recordings he made during this period, Gunther Schuller has classified Ellington’s compositional output into several overlapping categories, each of which originated as a functional part of the shows at the Cotton Club.  For the dancers, Ellington was called upon to provide up-tempo flag-wavers, many of which were modeled after “Tiger Rag” (which itself was recorded in an extended, two-part arrangement in 1929):  “Double-Check Stomp,” “Ring Dem Bells,” etc., which can be traced back to earlier Ellington compositions, such as “The Creeper,” “Birmingham Breakdown,” and “Jubilee Stomp.”  Beginning with such prototypes as “Black and Tan Fantasy” and “The Mooche,” he developed a “jungle style” for the Cotton Club’s big production numbers, from exotica like “Arabian Lover” and “Japanese Dream” to “Jungle Jamboree,” “Rocky Mountain Blues,” “Harlem Flat Blues,” “Rent Party Blues” and many others.  Ellington also became a specialist in creating “blue” or “mood” pieces:  early examples like “Misty Mornin’” and “Awful Sad” were perfected by the 1930s, with the appearance of “Mood Indigo” and “Solitude.”  The band was, in addition, required to perform popular melodies; at first these were numbers written by other songwriters, but increasingly they were supplied by Ellington himself.  Finally, Schuller notes the appearance of a non-functional class of “abstract musical compositions” that combined facets of all the other categories (“Take It Easy,” “The Dicty Glide,” “Drop Me Off in Harlem,” “Creole Rhapsody,” etc., which by the 1940s were refined into such acknowledged masterpieces as “Ko-Ko,” “Concerto for Cootie,” and “Sepia Panorama”):  “They were not merely arrangements or arbitrarily thrown-together chains of choruses but disciplined musical creations which could be judged by standards of musical appreciation and analysis established for centuries in ‘classical’ music…” [Schuller, Early Jazz, 352]

… Within these categories, Ellington worked out specific musical ideas—a certain progression, a certain voicing, or a certain scoring—by repeating them in successive arrangements through a process of trial and error until he had found the best solution to the problem.  Then he would move on to tackle the next idea or problem.

Barney Bigard

[This] answers my original question:  how did Ellington, at first a musician with a decided leaning toward “show music” develop into one of America’s foremost composers?  It was precisely due to the fortuitous circumstance of working five years at the Cotton Club.  Tre, by writing and experimenting with all manner of descriptive production and dance numbers, Ellington’s inherent talent and imagination could develop properly.  A leader such as Fletcher Henderson who played exclusively for dances would have very little opportunity to experiment with descriptive or abstract, non-functional music for constantly changing acts at the Cotton Club In a sense required Ellington to investigate composition (rather than arranging) as a medium of expression, and fortunately he found in his band imaginative musicians who could help him develop and implement his ideas. [Schuller, Early Jazz, 339]

As critic Sidney Finkelstein summarized,

Ellington used musical materials that were familiar to concert-trained ears, making jazz music more listenable to them.  These, however, do not account for his real quality…  In his work all the elements of the old music may be found, but each completely changed because it had to be changed…  Ellington’s accomplishment was to solve the problem of form and content for the large band.  He did it not by trying to play pure New Orleans blues and stomp music rearranged for large bands, as Henderson did, but by re-creating all the elements of New Orleans music in new instrumental and harmonic terms.  What emerged was a music that could be traced back to the old roots and yet sounded fresh and new. [Finkelstein 1948]

It was precisely this latter factor that enabled Ellington’s music to make an impression upon the white public, as the dropping of the “race” category from his records confirmed.  As LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) observed,

This music could, and did, find a place within the main culture.  Jazz became more “popular” than ever.  The big colored dance bands of the thirties were a national entertainment and played in many white night clubs as well as the black clubs that had been set up especially for white Americans.  These bands were also the strongest influence on American popular music and entertainment for twenty years. [Jones 1963, 163]

Ellington’s audience at this time was not, of course, restricted to the patrons of the Cotton Club.  Ellington’s assessment of the engagement was that its significance lay in the national and international exposure the band received on the club’s radio wire.  In addition, Mills arranged for the group, at a salary of $1,500 a week, a spot in the 1929 Ziegfeld production Show Girl; the prestige of this job enabled them after wards to get almost $1,500 a night. [DEIP, 45]

 

In 1930 the Ellington Orchestra accompanied Maurice Chevalier at the Fulton Theatre (it was on this occasion that critic Brooks Atkinson sneeringly referred to Ellington as “the djin of din”), and in the same year it travelled to Hollywood to make its first film, Check and Double-Check, with Amos ‘n’ Andy.  In the meantime, Ellington hired Cab Calloway’s band to fill in at the Cotton Club.

As his opportunities thus expanded, so did Ellington’s musical ambitions.  This was a quality that Mills prized very highly, because he wished to present Ellington as a “prestige” performer (“He was always reaching toward a higher plateau for our music.”). [DEIP, 37] Consequently, Mills arranged for the orchestra to record its first extended composition, “Creole Rhapsody.”  The piece was recorded twice:  it covered both sides of a ten-inch Brunswick recording, made January 20, 1931; another version, recorded six months later for Victor, took up both sides of a twelve-inch disc.  At a time when all recordings except operas and symphonies were restricted to the three-minute time limit imposed by the capacity of a seventy-eight-r. p. m. record, Ellington’s recording was widely viewed as an unheard-of departure from the canons of jazz and caused some controversy.  Ellington recalled that “Irving almost blew his connection at both companies.”  This was not the last battle Ellington would have with regard to his place in the world of music and entertainment.

Lawrence Brown

Juan Tizol

Publicity was another means by which Mills attempted to raise Ellington’s stature.  For this purpose, he hired Ned Williams as Ellington’s press agent in the summer of 1931.  In 1928 Williams had worked in this capacity for New York’s Silver Slipper Club, where Dan Healy produced a revue starring Ruby Keeler.  At this time, he had occasion to see Ellington perform at the Cotton Club.  In 1930 Williams joined the advertising department of the Balaban & Katz theater chain in Chicago, where he was assigned to promote shows at the Oriental, United Artists, and Tivoli theaters.  At the Oriental, where he was associated with manager Leo Salkin and Joe Glaser, Williams met Irving Mills during an Ellington engagement.  When the Depression caused Balaban & Katz to cut Williams from its staff, Mills put him in charge of an ambitious promotional campaign involving the orchestras of Ellington, Cab Calloway and a third unit to be called the Mills Blue Rhythm Band.  Although he was hired at $150 a week, Williams never received this salary during his seven years with Mills; as of September, 1931, half of his income came from Duke Ellington, Inc., and the other half was drawn from Cab Calloway, Inc.; the portion from Mills Artists never materialized.

Editing Melody News for Mills was only one of Williams’s duties.  Jack Mills informed him privately that he was to convince Irving to cut back on some expenses, like the redecorating of his offices; at that time, Mills occupied two floors of a building on West Fifty-fourth Street in New York, near the headquarters of Variety.  Mills Music was on the second floor, while Mills Artists took up the smaller third floor.  Irving Mills had a penchant for lavishly decorating his offices with murals—he called them “muriels”—of “terrible depictions of Harlem scenes.” [John Hammond and Irving Townsend, 126]

Ned’s first real project, however, was to put together an advertising manual for Duke Ellington.  Inasmuch as Cab Calloway was already known as “the Hi-de-highness of Ho-de-Ho,” Williams spent much of his time trying to come up with a similar catch-phrase for Ellington; “the Aristocrat of Harlem,” the result of his efforts, was soon dropped as unnecessary.

Freddy Jenkins

Cootie Williams

Freddy Jenkins

Although his responsibilities in the Mills organization were to expand greatly over a period of time—he became general troubleshooter, office and personnel manager, booker, road manager, etc.— Williams’s primary concern remained the promotion of Duke Ellington, a task to which he devoted himself without reservation.  When, for example, he worked to put together a committee to welcome Ellington back to Washington, for his first theater engagement there, Williams found himself in a room with the leading citizens of Washington’s Black community, which included the kingpins of the numbers racket along with businessmen, bankers, lawyers, and doctors.  Mercer Ellington recalled humorously that

Ned was the only ofay in what grew to be a considerable crowd of important personages, but when the conversation got on to the subject of racism and white prejudice, the chairman gaveled for silence and said, “Mr. Williams, I apologize for the trend of the conversation, but we want you to know we really consider you one of us. [DEIP, 36]

In the years to come, the efforts of Ned Williams would have a profound effect on the career of Duke Ellington.  It was Williams, for instance, who took writer Wilder Hobson to the Cotton Club to hear Ellington, resulting in Hobson’s highly influential article in Fortune in 1933.  It was also Williams who provided entry for Ellington to the offices of thee rich, including such people as Winthrop Rockefeller and Oscar Hammerstein, in order to obtain financial backing for theatrical productions.[3]  Williams, in fact, was responsible for much of the headway Ellington was to make in the white entertainment business in the 1930s.

Rockin' in Rhythm

The years following the 1929 stock market crash were very difficult for Black jazz musicians.  The Depression, coming on the heels of the radio boom, signaled the collapse of the American recording industry.  Of some seventy or eighty record labels active in the mid-1920s, by 1931 there were exactly four left.  Perhaps the greatest casualty of the entire industry was the “race record.”  Always a marginal operation, the recording of Black jazz was no longer considered profitable in the U.S., although in Europe, particularly England, these records were still in great demand. [Hammond, “An Experience in Jazz History, 49]

 The British critics reserved their highest praise for the music of Ellington.  One of them, Constant Lambert, wrote that

The real interest of Ellington’s records lies not so much in their colour, brilliant though it may be, as in the amazingly skillful proportions in which the colour is used.  I do not only mean skillful as compared with other jazz composers, but as compared with so-called highbrow composers.  I know of nothing in Ravel so dexterous in treatment as the varied solos in the middle of the ebullient Hot and Bothered [recorded in 1928] and nothing in Stravinsky more dynamic than the final section.  The combination of themes at this moment is one of the most ingenious pieces of writing in modern music. [Constant Lambert, Music Ho!, 214-215]

It was Lambert who, by comparing Ellington to Frederick Delius, fostered the widespread notion that he had been influenced by that English impressionist composer.  In addition to being false, this attribution is typical of much jazz criticism, as Schuller points out, in that it “implies a piece of jazz music is not very good until it can be equated with some accepted European compositions.” [Early Jazz, 347] Whatever influence Ellington may have received from European symphonic music was absorbed indirectly, as we have shown.

Rex Stewart

However racist the Europeans were in this respect, they were relatively unencumbered by the sort of hysterical Jim-Crowism prevalent in the American entertainment business.  When, for example, in 1929 Irving Mills attempted to put together a twenty-four-piece orchestra, including Ellington’s band and members of the white Mills Hotsie Totsie Band, for the recording of a medley from Blackbirds of 1928, he was summoned to a board meeting by the executives at Victor to be chastised for “mixing the races.”  Although Mills won that particular fight, the incident serves to underline the degree of segregation of the American entertainment industry:  if Black musicians could not be heard on record playing alongside whites, it is not difficult to imagine the reaction that would have occurred had they been seen together in public performance. [Feather, introduction to The Great Music of Duke Ellington, 9]

Still more striking is the degree to which Black musicians were ignored in the publications of the music trade.  By the late 1930s there were only three monthly magazines devoted to the band field.   Orchestra World was little more than a puff sheet.  Down Beat, published in Chicago and originally edited by ex-musicians Carl Cons and Glenn Burrs, specialized in lurid and sensational headlines.  After his tenure with Mills, Ned Williams gave the magazine a more respectable image by including such feature writers as John Hammond, Marshall Stearns, Charles Edward Smith, George Hoefer, Dave Dexter, Dixon Gayer, Mike Levin, and John S. Wilson.  Metronome was less sensational and devoted space to music instruction columns.  Its staff included Barry Ulanov, Leonard Feather, Barbara Hodgkins, Peter Dean, Bob Bach, Johnny Stulzfuss, Dick Gilbert, Doron K. Antrim (the 1935 editor), and George T. Simon.  These publications had a combined circulation in the late 1930s of around 50,000. [Simon, The Big Bands, 21-22]

Ivie Anderson

Almost from its beginnings, American writing about jazz had the earmarks of a cult phenomenon.  Charles Edward Smith, whose 1930 Symposium article, “Jazz:  Some Little Known Aspects,” took as its point of departure the differentiation of “real” jazz from its commercial derivatives, stimulated interest in collecting jazz records with his 1934 article in Esquire, “Collecting Hot.”  As the rarity of jazz discs increased their prices, small businesses were set up in the form of collectors’ societies.  At first, these were generally centered in New York; records were sold at auctions at the Hot Record Exchange, and Milt Gabler’s Commodore Music Shop became a meeting place for collectors.  By the mid-1930s, “hot clubs” in New York, New Haven, Chicago, Cleveland, Boston, and Los Angeles combined to form the United Hot Clubs of America, led by Marshall Stearnes and John Hammond.   The organization distributed jazz reissues provided by the large record companies to Gabler and others.  The business activity of such collectors’ societies soon demonstrated that a market for jazz existed in America, which convinced the large companies to close their back-files to the hot clubs.  By 1940, these companies began to re-market jazz classics by Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Bix Beiderbecke, Fletcher Henderson, King Oliver and others, and small independent labels like Commodore and Blue Note were established to supplement the very few new jazz records these companies issued. [Leonard, 134ff]

Although Duke Ellinngton’s tenure at the Cotton Club provided him a great measure of economic security in the early years of the Depression, he lost a lot of money in the stock market crash and through his extravagant spending habits.  He was, in Mercer Ellington’s words, “supposedly an important man, but without money.” [DEiP, 47] 

Nevertheless, he continued to travel in exclusive circles.  The titles of some of his tunes (e.g., “Wall Street Wail,” “Dicty Glide”) indicated that he was not preoccupied with financial worries.  At the same time, Mercer Ellington reports,

…he had an encounter with high society and its prejudices.  His attentions had been invited by a Park Avenue socialite, but they were resented by her relatives, who managed to involve the police in discouraging the affair. [DEiP. 48]

If, by 1932, Ellington was having trouble paying his bills and rent on time, he still managed to provide a comfortable existence for his family.  In the worst year of the Depression, he was spending as lavishly as ever, as when he bought a sixteen-cylinder Pierce-Arrow for his parents.  Mercer recalled that in school his expensive clothes provoked animosity from poorer children.  (Both Mercer and Ellington’s sister Ruth attended public schools in New York.  Ellington “had thought about private schools, but had come to the conclusion that he didn’t like their product. The people who came from them.” [DEiP, 50f.]

In another respect, however, the early thirties were a very difficult period for Ellington.  One writer dubbed those years the “years of the locust in jazz,” as that music was crowded out of the entertainment field by the “Mickey Mouse,” “cheese,” and “toy” music performed by such large white orchestras as    Guy Lombardo’s.

By the late twenties, the taste for jazz was beginning to wear off in American audiences…  Chick [Webb] and [Ben] Pollack and [Andy] Kirk worked in comparative obscurity, and though Henderson and Ellington had audiences of some size, and Jean Goldkette and McKinney, in their Detroit headquarters, won some support for jazz, the big trend seemed to be to another kind of music. [Ulanov, DE, 126f]

The pressures of the popular music industry had always exercised a certain sway over jazz orchestras.  Beginning around the end of the 1920s, they also produced an effect upon jazz lyrics:

Before 1928 jazz lyrics reflected the life of the Negro subculture.  Usually they were frank statements of fundamental human problems and feelings, uninhibited utterances of joy, humor, love, sensuality, anger, sorrow, pain.  They found expression in simple, salty language, concrete figures of speech, and strong rhythms.  Such lyrics allowed jazz singers to improvise easily and to evoke deep feelings in some listeners.  But after 1928 jazz lyrics exemplified the traditional inclination of Americans to divorce music from practical affairs.  A shallow idealism replaced the realism of early lyrics.  Tin Pan Alley words were full of superficial philosophizing and manifestations of escapism…

Obliged to use vapid Tin Pan Alley material, a Louis Armstrong or a Fats Waller deliberately changed the meaning of songs by adding and subtracting words and syllables, by altering pitch, stress, and rhythm, and by making facial and bodily gestures…  While the original words spoke of   love, the performer At times, he communicated emotion by deliberately garbling the words, or he used his voice as a musical instrument in order to sing “through” the lyrics in scat (nonsense) syllables which left only the framework of the verse. [Leonard, Jazz and the White Americans, 118f]

One reason for this transformation lay in the self-censorship procedures adopted by broadcasters and music publishers.  Another, probably more fundamental, reason was that the white public resisted any vocal style which was recognizably Black (with exceptions like Armstrong, who was considered something of a “novelty” singer.  Before the 1950s rhythm-and-blues explosion, Black singers “had to make a deliberate choice between white and Negro markets because the divergent tastes of the two audiences prohibited all but the most versatile singers from appealing to both. [Charles Gillette, “The Black Market Roots of Rock,” in SoSC, 275]  The marketing practices of the large record companies, reduced to a handful during the Depression, helped ensure these rigid standards of popular taste.

At the same time, those jazz orchestras which were in a position to enter the white market were obliged to bow to its conventions.  The sort of free-wheeling, collective improvisation that had characterized the New Orleans ensemble gave way to tight orchestral arrangements, more sophisticated harmony and the removal of “harsh” jazz timbres.  Academic musical training became more of a norm among jazz musicians.  As their ties with recording companies and booking agents increased, the size of the jazz ensemble itself grew, and its instrumentation became more standardized.  Fletcher Henderson’s orchestra, for example, grew from ten men in 1922 to fourteen in 1924; Ellington’s expanded from six at the Kentucky Club to eleven at the Cotton Club to fifteen by the mid-1930s; Count Basie’s organization, nine pieces as a local band in and around Kansas City, was enlarged to thirteen in 1935, upon its contracts with Decca and MCA. [Leonard, 20f.]

Irving Mills, of course, was Ellington’s mentor in this regard.  Mills and his business associates often managed to have Ellington perform second-rate, and worse, material on records and in the Cotton Club revues.  As Ellington began to compose his own popular songs, Mills was also able to exercise his influence.  Most often, he simply trimmed and tailored Ellington’s material to fit the time-limit imposed by the recording studio, but, according to Mills’s own admission, his motives were more mercenary than artistic:

 When the band got to play big theaters Duke started “dressing up” the stage show, and Irving got piqued.  “I remember telling him to cut out that stuff because it wasn’t his style.”  “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing” was the way Irving recalls telling Duke to get back into his swinging brand of jazz. [Feather, TGMoDE, 7]

Although nothing was ever said publicly, either by Ellington or Mills, to indicate that their relationship was less than amicable, there is much evidence that suggests Ellington was increasingly restive toward the end of his first stay at the Cotton Club.  His “Creole Rhapsody” experiment notwithstanding, by 1931 Ellington’s compositional output was restricted to standard popular-song fare.  Aside from that extended work, and in marked contrast to his prolific recorded output of previous years, he recorded only four songs that year.  Although these records— “Limehouse Blues,” “Echoes of the Jungle,” It’s Glory,” and “The Mystery Song”— represented a consolidation of Ellington’s musical knowledge and set a new standard for the performance of orchestrated jazz, there is no doubt that Ellington’s ambitions lay elsewhere.

Although jazz had been in existence less than twenty years, it had already developed, in its synthesis of various musical conventions, a recognizable tradition of its own.  By the early 1930s, the first generation of jazz greats was already passing from the scene, to be replaced by younger men of the Black middle class, Ellington included.  The music of this new generation bore the stamp of their social ambitions, especially their desire to elevate the status of Black culture in American society:

Jazz was reaching toward new artistic goals and a broader social acceptance…  The hellion audience of the gangster-ridden “jazz age” gave way to an audience characterized by a more personal, deeper involvement with jazz.  The speakeasy was replaced by the college campus; and more people saw in jazz a form of musical expression, rather than merely a wild new form of exotic entertainment.  Although jazz was still primarily associated with social dancing, a significant minority of jazz buffs who regarded jazz as a new art form, was beginning to emerge…

But most importantly, by the early 1930s jazz had developed to the point where it had a history of its own and could point to its own traditions.  And so, too, for the first time the cleavage between the advancing “modernists,” like Ellington and saxophonist Lester Young, and traditionalists, like the “Chicago style” players, began to make itself felt. [Schuller, Early Jazz, 356f.]

One reason for Ellington’s dissatisfaction with the Cotton Club arrangement was financial.  Mercer Ellington opined, “The Cotton Club was very beneficial to him at one stage of his career, but later it became a handicap.  The syndicate that ran it gave him a contract with options, so that as his popularity increased he couldn’t always take advantage of lucrative outside dates.” [DEiP, 41]

 This impatience over the business end of his affairs occurred in spite of the fact that Ellington earned $60,000 dollars in 1932.  More important, perhaps, was the fact that he began to chafe in the role of cabaret artist to which the Cotton Club had consigned him.  During that same year, noted one observer,

[T]he life began to pall…  He became moody…  He frequently claimed that life was nothing but a racket, and he felt that he had things to say in music but that the commercialism of his trade was so overwhelming that he was not permitted to say them.  I’d bring something I thought was good to the music publishers,” he recalls, “and they’d ask ‘Can an eight-year-old child sing it?’…  I didn’t see why I should try to do something good.  I thought I’d stop writing.  Music publishers would come around with little tunes and say, ‘If you’ll put your name on it, we’ll make it our Number One plug.’  If something bad was plugged, it would go over better than something good that wasn’t.  I felt it was all a racket.  I was on the point of giving up.”  [Boyer, “The Hot Bach,” TDER, 242]

Ellington’s commercial success, in short, had become a trap.  To a Black musician whose true metier was innovative composition, America offered almost nothing in the way of either recognition or opportunity.  One important exception to this rule was a concert performance for Ellington in 1932 at Columbia University, sponsored by the composer Percy Grainger.  Another significant engagement, in December the same year, was Ellington’s benefit performance for the Scottsboro defense at the Rockland Palace in New York.  Arranged by John Hammond at the behest of William L. Patterson of the International Labor benefit featured Ellington in a solo role, along with appearances by Benny Carter’s orchestra, Miriam Hopkins, Tallulah Bankhead, and fifteen-year-old Martha Raye (a Mills protegee) in her singing debut. [Hammond,  JHoR, 84f.]

Discouraged by the treatment jazz received in the United States, a number of Black musicians elected to travel to Europe, where they found both the public and the critics more receptive.  Louis Armstrong first crossed the Atlantic in the summer of 1932.  His performance at the London Palladium, fronting a pick-up band of British musicians, drew mixed reactions from the audience, many of whom walked out of the theater, but by the time of his second European tour the following year, Armstrong found the public more congenial toward his style of playing.

Ellington’s decision to quit the Cotton Club and travel to Europe came partly as the result of glowing reports brought back by Otto Hardwicke upon his return to the band n 1932.   Hardwicke had led his own band in Paris in 1928 and had appeared briefly in units led by bassist John Ricks and Noble Sissle before returning to New York in 1929.  Apparently, he and Ellington were able to convince Irving Mills that Europe was an appropriate direction for the orchestra to take, and on June 2, 1933, along with other performers from the Cotton Club, they set sail for England aboard the Olympic.

In retrospect, it is difficult to imagine the emotions of the musicians embarking for Europe, whose culture had always been slavishly revered by Americans.  As Americans, they no doubt expected to be received as barbarians, and as Blacks they had already become accustomed to this sort of treatment in their own country.  Mercer Ellington maintains,

It is necessary to think of what it meant to a black band to be going to Europe at that time.  Other jazz musicians had gone before and had brought back reports, but it was still like stepping into unknown territory, especially for the less sophisticated members of the band.  Individually, each had his pride and had developed a mask and an attitude with which to confront the everyday animosities and condescensions of whites in his own country.  So the band was probably not too upset when they ran into problems with hotel accommodations in England.  London was still the heart of an enormous empire, and colonial prejudices had made themselves felt there. [DEiP, 58]

To help pave the way for Ellington's European arrival, the foremost English bandleader and critic Spike Hughes visited New York to see him off.  Much of his ballyhoo was borrowed directly from Ned Williams's press kit:

So many times I have thanked my stars to have been born a European, proud in the knowledge that our dear old bankrupt continent has the sense to appreciate good music when it hears it without having to wade through a mass of tasteless hokum first.

(Hughes, in the same piece, objects to the presence of Lawrence Brown in the trombone section:  "too smart or sophisticated to be anything but out of place" in Ellington's orchestra, a view he shared with his American counterpart, John Hammond, with whom Hughes was close.)  ["Impressions of Ellington in New York," Melody Maker, May, 1933.  (TDER, 69)]

The following month, after Ellington's arrival in the United Kingdom, Hughes again borrowed from the Ned Williams playbook, proclaiming again Duke Ellington "the Aristocrat of Harlem."  He also claims Europeans had a far greater appreciation for Duke Ellington and His Orchestra than Americans and tries to put the music into perspective:

...Jazz is not, and never has been, a brainchild of Tin Pan Alley.  It is the music of Harlem gin mills, Georgia backyards, and New Orleans street corners-- the music of a race that plays, sings and dances because music is its most direct medium of expression and escape. Duke Ellington alone has brought this music out of the semi-twilight of small night clubs into the broad daylight of the outside world. [Hughes, "Meet the Duke," London Daily Herald, 6/13/33; TDER, 72]

 

Of the band's first performance at the London Palladium in 1933, Ellington later wrote, "This was a night that scared the devil out of the whole band, the applause was so terrifying-- it was applause beyond applause.  On our first show there was ten minutes of continuous applause.”

Amid all the fanfare created by the British press over Ellington, it was indeed curious that not a single London hotel was willing to board “eighteen negroes.”  Some controversy was caused when the Express, asking “Is it possible for a negro to find accommodation in a first-class hotel in London?”, sent its representative along with a West African to the better hotels, where they were met with refusals.  One hotel clerk was quoted as saying, “We can put him up for one night if he is well-behaved.”  Another opined, “There are blacks and blacks.  The type with flat noses and crinkly hair have less chance of securing rooms than any other type.”  Eventually Ellington was booked at the Dorchester (a columnist explained, “He is not very black.  He is a master of harmony.  He wears a brown suit and a yellow tie that harmonise with his skin.”), while the rest of the band was quartered in various Bloomsbury hotels and rooming houses. [Ulanov, DE,

The extraordinary campaign of advance publicity for Ellington’s stay in London was arranged by Jack Hylton, the British bandleader and promoter who, in association with Mills, set up the orchestra’s engagement at the world’s most prestigious theater, the London Palladium.  In contrast to Armstrong, who had made little impression on the London pundits, Ellington seemed to capture the imagination of the British, who regarded him as a genteel curiosity.  The London Evening Standard described him as the “hot gospeller of crazy jazz music and Haarlem [sic] rhythm,” while Cedric Belfrage, in the Sunday Express, wrote, “This band, consisting of America’s eighteen hottest rhythm boys, all of whom are negroes, is considered by experts to be the finest hot-cha turnout west of Land’s End.”[4]

The real object of the media’s fascination with Ellington seemed to be the novelty of seeing a Black man appear as a genteel aristocrat.  Another editorial by Belfrage, this time in the Manchester Dispatch, in response to a forty-five-minute BBC broadcast financed by Hylton and his associates, illustrates this:

 Ellington, you know, is no ordinary negro jazzist.  His advance press agent describes him as “well-educated and gentlemanly in his bearing.” Spike Hughes writes to me from New York declaring that “Ellington and Walt Disney seem to be the only great men that America has produced without the help of the Jews.”[5]

Most Britons reacted favorably to the Ellington orchestra’s BBC broadcast, which included performances of “East St. Louis Toodle-oo,” “Lightnin’,” “Creole Love Call,” “Old Man Blues,” “Rosse Room,” “Limehouse Blues,” “Best Wishes,” a Blackbirds medley, “Sophisticated Lady,” “It Don’t Mean a Thing,” and a series of popular tunes, including “Mood Indigo.”  Predictably, there was some dissent.  Of the broadcast, the Manchester Guardian wrote that the music “would be more bearable if the words were not so stupid and if the ideas which exist vaguely behind it were not so pathetically crude.  [Ulanov, Duke Ellington, 138]

Some readers found occasion after the broadcast to voice their resentment over the importation of American musicians, Blacks in particular, at the expense of British musicians, and some were incensed over Percy Grainger’s comparison of Duke Ellington to Bach and Delius.  Out of all this controversy, the British press had a field day; a great deal of copy and photography was devoted to Ellington in such London papers as the Daily Express, Daily Herald, Sketch, News-Chronicle, Evening Standard, and Sunday Referee.

The orchestra performed at the London Palladium on July 16.  Ellington’s own recollections of the show, forty years later, were full of elation, but he also noted his dilemma in trying to please both the public and the critics:

We had a terrific reception at the Palladium.  Ivie Anderson broke it up every time with “Stormy Weather”; Bessie Dudley danced and shook to “Rockin’ in Rhythm”; and we played “Ring Dem Bells” and “Three Little Words” to tie up with the Amos ‘n’ Andy movie.  We always got a good response to “Mood Indigo,” too.  But the “jazz” critics were not satisfied, and we had to give a special concert one Sunday in the largest cinema in Europe, the Trocadero at the Elephant and Castle.  It was organized by the Melody Maker, a music magazine, and the audience was almost entirely composed of musicians, who came from all over the country.  We were to avoid “commercial” offerings on this occasion, and apparently we lived up to expectations, because Spike Hughes, the foremost critic at that time, didn’t criticize us at all.  Instead, he criticized the audience for applauding at the end of solos in the middle of numbers!  That’s how serious it was. [MIMM, 83f]

Indeed, the sheer diversity of his audience had to have been a perplexing problem for the rest of Ellington’s career, being as it was a direct reflection of the ambiguity of his role as both “serious” artist and “popular” entertainer.  This question was explored at some length by an American commentator:

After laying all that “non-commercial” music on the Britishers in the first half of the concert, they found that the average man on the street, the man who plunked down the tickets at the Trocadero Cinema in London, was really not any more able to receive or willing to receive the Ellington compositions of that period than were the people of this country.  They laughed when Tricky Sam Nanton played his growl choruses, and they laughed when Cootie Williams played his growl choruses, and they said Spike Hughes came out and lectured them on how to listen to the music.  He became known as the “hot dictator” because of that.

But Duke decided, “All right, if they don’t want to hear that, then we’ll go back to our regular program.” … I have always imagined that Duke’s experiences in England in 1933 probably had much to do with the way he handled audiences and critics from that time on.  He found that the elite society in England dug the band.  They thought of American jazz as an art form, and the thought of the Ellington band as the peak, the epitome, the highest point of that art form.  But they had only heard the band on record, and when they had an opportunity to hear it in person, they heard things they weren’t really prepared for, and the critics kind of blasted them…  So Duke made a quick adjustment at the intermission of that concert and went back to his “commercial” music, and it’s a problem I guess he had to face always, from that time on, with all things considered. [Buckley, WBEZ Chicago broadcast, April 30, 1978]

One member of that audience at the Trocadero, incidentally, was Stanley Dance, later a close associate of Ellington’s, who, in Mercer Ellington’s words, “does not believe that any jazz artist or group ever had such an impact on an English audience, before or since, as the Ellington band did on that occasion.” [DEiP, 59f.]  The audience was impressed not only by the orchestra’s music and program, but also by its demeanor and dress, which included cream suits, orange ties and brown shoes to complement their tan skins.

Ellington’s engagement at the Palladium continued for two weeks, after which the orchestra spent three more weeks traveling and performing for audiences the length and breadth of the country.  “We were absolutely amazed,” Ellington recalled, “by how well-informed people were in Britain about us and our records.  They had magazines and reviews far ahead of what we had here, and everywhere we went we were confronted with facts we had forgotten, and questions we couldn’t always answer.” [MIMM, 84]

Ellington’s following in England ranged from ordinary commoners to lords; a cocktail party given in his honor by Lord Beaverbrook, the owner of an influential London newspaper, included as guests both the Duke of Kent and the Prince of Wales.  So impressed was Ellington by their attention that, apparently, he was willing to overlook the degrading, racist treatment meted out to him and his sidemen in other quarters.  Years later, he was to write of the people of London as “the most civilized in the world”:

Their civilization is based on the recognition that all people are imperfect, and due allowance should be and are made for their imperfections.  I have never experienced quite such a sense of balance elsewhere.  What is cricket, and what is not, is very well understood by everybody.  And hysteria is something you may sometimes hear about there, but you never are exposed to it except at a very great distance.  Self-discipline, as a virtue or an acquired asset, can be invaluable to anyone. [MIMM, 140]

From the British critical establishment, Ellington drew mixed reactions.  The Times condemned his Palladium performance as “not an orgy but a scientific application of measured and dangerous stimuli,” and the Daily Mail commented in a similar vein. [cited in Ulanov, Duke Ellington, 138]

  Among the “serious” music critics, Ernest Newman termed Ellington “a Harlem Dionysus drunk on bad bootleg liquor,” while Constant Lambert defended him as “the first composer of real character to come an expression of the sorrow of the Black race [Ulanov, 142], while a political columnist for the Daily Herald, titling his piece “Hannen Swaffer Listens to the SOUL OF A NEGRO,” enthusiastically described Ellington’s plans for a five-part suite delineating the history of the American Negro:

If only I can write it down as I feel it.  I have gone back to the history of my race and tried to express it in rhythm.  We used to have, in Africa, a “something” we have lost.  One day we shall get it again.  I am expressing in sound the old days in the jungle, the cruel journey across the sea and the despair of the landing.  And then the days of slavery.  I trace the growth of a new spiritual quality and then the days in Harlem and the cities of the States.  Then I try to go forward a thousand years.  I seek to express the future when, emancipated and transformed, the Negro takes his place, a free being, among the peoples of the world. [Jewell, Duke: A Portrait of Duke Ellington, 52f.]

Upon the orchestra’s departure from England, Ellington recorded a short interview with Percy Mathison Brooks for broadcast on BBC radio, entitled "A Souvenir of Ellington's First Visit to England 1933":

Brooks: (after Ellington plays a few bars of "Mood Indigo:”) Hold it, Duke, hold it.  Surely, that's not the way you're feeling.  I thought you'd have something more lively to say than that.

Ellington:  Well, I don't know that I'm feeling altogether cheerful.  Certainly, everything has been so fine and people so nice, I ought to be feeling good.  This is really mt farewell, and you can take it from me that I don't want to go.

Sure, I know how you feel.  But you're not done yet, and after all, it's only going to be a case of auf wiedersehen, isn't it?

I hope so.  Just as soon as possible, we will be back again.  If it doesm''t turn out to be an annual trip, I'll be the most disappointed man in the world.

Is that because you've discovered how well your work is known and appreciated around here?

Largely, I suppose. Although I must say it has been embarrassing at times to be asked the most analytical questions about work I have nearly forgotten by now.

Well, you’ll have to write some new numbers.  And by the way, have you got any in mind?

Yes, I have.  I want to write a “rude” song.  This was accidentally suggested by Mrs. Constant Lambert, who referred to our little melancholy tune as “Rude Indigo.”  All I need now is the balance of the title to go with “rude.”

I’ll have to leave that to you.  Incidentally, everybody’s anxious to know which of your own compositions is your favorite.

That’s a difficult one to answer.  The things I’ve liked best I’ve often left on the shelf, but of my published and recorded numbers, I think I like “Mood Indigo” best.

Do you think your music will ever become divorced from the ballroom and find a permanent home in the concert hall?

Yes, inevitably, but perhaps not in this generation.  It is the youngsters of these days who will make up the audiences of the future, and they have no prejudices of which they must rid themselves.

That seems logical enough.  And now, there’s just time for you to say goodbye.

No, I refuse to say goodbye.  Au revoir is the word that comes from the bottom of my heart.

 

Among “serious” music critics in his own country Ellington was almost never considered.  The sole exception was R. D, Darrell, a regular contributor to Phonograph Monthly Review, who regularly touted Ellington’s recordings, beginning with “East St. Louis Toodle-oo.”  In 1932, he published in disques an expansive critique of Ellington’s “Black Beauty,” in which he complained,

Music has become too complex.  Few modern works can be heard ideally except mentally, poring over the written score.  Popular music sounds the lowest depths with one man writing a tune, another harmonizing it, a third scoring it, and a fourth called in for the actual performance.  And one's ears cannot be deceived as to the barbarous conglomeration of individualities, blurring or burying whatever fragrance or delicacy any one talent may have contributed.  Ellington is of course the rare exception, but his work-- composed, scored, and played under one sure hand-- gives a glimpse of an Utopian age in music that seemed forever lost.  [Darrell, TDER, 61]

*

John Hammond

 

Oddly enough, the jazz critics who had done the most to establish Ellington’s reputation in England, Spike Hughes and John Hammond, had both somewhat cooled toward his music by 1933.  Hughes, who had been one of the few critics to admire “Creole Rhapsody,” began to judge more harshly some of Ellington’s newer material, particularly the song “Sophisticated Lady.”  After his visit to America in the spring of that year, explained another British critic, Hughes “came back annoyed at the way Americans had turned ‘sophisticated’ into a vogue word, misusing it in every conceivable situation.  Ellington’s maudlin recording of Sophisticated Lady…  reflected fashionable New York values too nakedly for Hughes’ taste.” [Charles Fox, “The Nineteen-thirties,” in Duke Ellington:  His Life and Music, 85f.]

Hammond was another critic who came to prefer the Ellington band of an earlier period.  Like Hughes, he objected to the addition, in 1932, of Lawrence Brown to the Ellington trombone section.  To Hammond, the “sophisticated” playing of Brown signified a lessening of “the intensity his music had had in the early days,” [JHoR, 137] and he professed to favor the more “uninhibited” soloists in the Henderson and Bassie bands over Ellington’s tightly-controlled arrangements, not surprisingly, as Hammond’s own career was closely associated with those two bands.  Hammond expressed unhappiness with those British critics who hailed Ellington as a “new Delius,” and a significant composer of serious music when, in fact, he was a jazz composer, a tribute he certainly should not have been ashamed of.” [ JHoR, 139]

From England, the Ellington orchestra traveled to Paris for three concerts at the Salle Pleyel on August 22 and 29, and at the Casino at Deauville on August 30, which drew the attention of musicians all over Europe.  They made the acquaintance of Hughes Panassie and Charles Delaunay, the leading French jazz critics, as well as jazz writers from Netherlands (De Jazzwereld), Belgium (Music), Switzerland (Jazz), and Germany (Musik Echo).  Mercer Ellington recalled that in Paris,

as in England, the guys were amazed by the seriousness with which their work was studied and by the fans’ familiarity with it.  Here were people, speaking a foreign language, who could nevertheless hum, whistle, or sing quite accurately the phrases of their solos on records they had nearly forgotten!  This was respect and knowledge of a kind they seldom encountered at home, at least from white folks.  The affection and admiration they received more than balanced whatever prejudice and surviving ignorance on racial matters that they met. [DEiP, 61]

The French musicians, in particular, were enchanted by Ellington’s orchestral voicings and by his use of the band’s instrumental resources.  They had come to regard him as the original inspiration for the work of such famous European composers as Ravel, Honegger, Milhaud, and Ibert.  A glowing tribute appeared in La Revue Musicale, written by Henri Prunieres, who held a position among classical critics comparable to that of Ernest Newman of the London Times.

Much of the idolatry heaped upon Ellington by the Europeans tended, in fact, to reinforce the prevalent American stereotypes about Blacks, and not a few European intellectuals viewed his musical ideas in a somewhat self-serving manner.  The critical debates they inspired must have been a source of both puzzlement and comedy to Ellington’s musicians, as one commentator noted many years later:

In the field of jazz there is an exceptionally wide discrepancy between the art as practiced and the art as the writers write about it.  The performance sweat, and may even rehearse, for every effect p. 48.to developing their techniques.  The writers present them as simple children of nature who blow their primitive souls out through their horns.  The performers, most of whom spent the era of prohibition working in night clubs, know the world not only in terms of music but in terms of Mickey Finns and bouncers.  The writers, who consider themselves intellectuals, range all the way from surrealist poems in Paris to Yale graduates on Fortune.  Negro jazz musicians, who have found it best to take no part in the peculiar caprices of the white world, usually have nothing to say when they are told that there is a difference of opinion about whether they were the first surrealists, as is maintained in France.  They view such assertions as just one more example of an inexplicable order which simultaneously gives them adoration and Jim Crow. [Boyer, 48]

Nevertheless, the European tour made a deep and lasting impression.  In the countries of Europe it signified the emergence of a vital new art form and inspired countless musicians.  It gave jazz, nearly dead in America from the effects of the Depression, a new lease on life and symbolized a new standard of dignity for the Black artist.  Upon Ellington’s men in particular, it left an indelible imprint:

I think this must be regarded as the first major ambassadorial tour by a jazz group, and the band returned to the United States with a new confidence in itself.  Other musicians and groups had been to Europe before, but they had not succeeded in elevating the status of the music significantly.

One way or another, on this trip Ellington’s composure, wit and innate dignity had “commanded respect”—to use a phrase he always liked—in the two most sophisticated capitals of the world, London and Paris. [DEiP, 61]

Consequently, as Ellington himself would later write, “We sailed home on the Majestic in a glow that was only partly due to cognac and champagne.” [MIMM, 85]  Both he and Irving Mills were quick to realize the American merchandising potential of the band’s European success, and the efforts of Ned Williams were turned to the task of elevating Ellington’s artistic stature in the eyes of the American public, both white and Black.

The first fruit of this publicity campaign greeted the orchestra upon its arrival in New York in the form of a lengthy article by Wilder Hobson in the August, 1933, issue of Fortune.  Entitled, “Introducing Duke Ellington,” Hobson’s piece was directed primarily toward businessmen who, although novices in the appreciation of jazz, were potentially interested in the profit and prestige the music could generate.  The article, beginning with a chic gloss of contemporary jazz argot, described Ellington as the ‘idol of the jazz cult” in Europe and cited a number of studies by Europeans, including Robert Goffin’s Aux Frontieres du Jazz, “which makes such American jazz apologists as Gilbert Seldes and Carl Van Vechten seem positively unlettered.” [Hobson, Fortune, August 1933, 47]

From this point, Hobson’s article provides a long, literate, perceptive profile of Duke Ellington, beginning with a discussion of the etymology of the word "jazz" (suggesting its "lecherous origins").  The term means different things to different people:  To some, "jazz" is all music that isn't "classical"; beyond this, there is the debate between "hot" jazz versus "tin pan alley." Hobson chooses the music of Rudy Valee as a representative of the latter category.  “He resembles Guy Lombardo, Russ Columbo, Bing Crosby, and various other radio and tea-dancing idols....  Mr. Ellington and his orchestra offer rich, original music, music of pulse and gusto, stemming out of the lyricism of the Negro and played with great virtuosity.  Ellington's music is jazz; it is the best jazz.”

Hobson notes Ellington's recent European tour and quotes some of the negative reviews:  London Times, "Mr. Duke Ellington...  is exceptionally and remarkably efficient in his own line...  And the excitement and exacerbation of the nerves which are caused by the performances of his orchestra the more disquieting by reason of measured and dangerous stimuli."

Hobson notes also the positive reviews Ellington received overseas and the Belgian critic Robert Goffin's book, Aux Frontiers du Jazz.  He quotes from the book, "Duke a attient la pinacle de la gloire."

He also takes note of Ellington's current U.S. tour schedule and the variety of his venues; Ellington's appearance on Broadway opposite Maurice Chevalier; Hollywood movies, Ziegfeld's Show Girl, etc.  Goes into Irving Mills management, Ellington's large ($250,000) yearly gross earnings, but notes they are considerably less than white entertainers' earnings.

[Ellington] is assisted in his theatrical tours by feature singers such as Ivie Anderson and dancers like the gelatinous "Snake Hips" Tucker.  These performers plus the band constitute the highest grade Negro entertainment, which always has a market of its own.

Having whet his readers’ interest in Ellington as the latest vogue in European culture, Hobson continued in a more practical vein, by describing the demand for Ellington in American theaters, college dances, clubs, and Hollywood:

All of which means that Ellington is a commercial success.  Cleverly managed by Irving Mills, he has grossed as much as $250,000 a year, and the band’s price for a week’s theatre engagement runs as high as $5,500. [Hobson, 48]

Ellington was described as “a robust, well-poised Negro of Paul Robeson’s stripe,” and his orchestra, along with Ivie Anderson, “Snake Hips” Tucker and the rest of the entourage, was said to “constitute the highest grade Negro entertainment, which always has a market of its own.” [Hobson, 48]

Hobson also takes note of Ellington's current U.S. tour schedule and the variety of his venues; Ellington's appearance on Broadway opposite Maurice Chevalier; Hollywood movies, Ziegfeld's Show Girl, etc.  Goes into Irving Mills management, Ellington's large ($250,000) yearly gross earnings, but notes they are considerably less than white entertainers' earnings.  The remainder of the piece examines Ellington's private residence on Sugar Hill in Harlem, his family, and the experiences of his youth.

Hobson’s thesis seemed to be the same as that explored previously by European critics:  to distinguish “hot” music (i.e., true jazz) from its popular imitators.  Much of the article is therefore devoted to a mixture of history and mythology, beginning with Buddy Bolden in New Orleans and continuing through Louis Armstrong, the ODJB, Bix Beiderbecke, Frank Trumbauer and Jack Teagarden, whose approaches are contrasted with those of Paul Whiteman, Bing Crosby, Rudy Vallee, Ben Pollack and the Casa Loma Orchestra, who enjoyed the bulk of white patronage.  Hobson, stressing the primacy of improvisation in jazz, wrote disapprovingly of these white bands and asserted that

Since it seems to be congenitally impossible for Negro dance musicians to play straight, it is not surprising to find that jazz survives most vigorously today among the race which gave it birth. [Hobson, 91]

The article’s treatment of Ellington (“the first figure in jazz today,” “a veritable prince of pulsation”) was informative, if not altogether accurate.  Hobson, for example, cites the ODJB as Ellington’s earliest inspiration, and clarinetist Barney Bigard is named as one of the original Washingtonians.  It emphasizes Percy Grainger’s comparison of the composer to Bach and Delius and praises the caliber of Ellington’s musicians, recordings and compositions:

His conceptions are miniatures; and in the titivating mysteries of rhythm, tone color, and interweaving voices, Ellington is an adept. [Hobson, 92]

Hobson was not the first to pin the “miniaturist” label upon Ellington as a composer, which for many years remained a rationale for excluding him from the ranks of “serious” composers.  At the same time, the article mentions Ellington’s ambition, first publicized in the British press, to present “a negro musical show to be produced next season by John Henry Hammond, Jr.,” consisting of a suite in five parts, tentatively entitled ‘Africa,’ ‘The Slave Ship,’ ‘The Plantation,’ ‘Harlem’— the last being a climactic restatement of themes.” [Hobson, 95] Anticipating the premiere of Black, Brown and Beige by nearly a decade, Hobson must have astounded his readers by predicting Ellington’s Carnegie Hall debut.  The remainder of the piece examines Ellington's private residence on Sugar Hill in Harlem, his family, and the experiences of his youth.

An immediate result of Hobson’s article was to encourage Irving Mills to elevate the status of the Ellington Orchestra by seeking bigger financial backing.  Neither did Mills ignore the electrifying effect of Ellington’s new prestige upon his Black audience.  Ellington’s financial and artistic success in the white world, particularly in Europe, had made him a symbol of race progress, at least within certain sectors of the Black middle class, and by the mid-1930s the Black press was making an undisguised attempt to portray him as a “race leader.”

Early in 1935, for example, when plans were afoot for an unfulfilled second European tour, Claude Barnett, the president of the Associated Negro Press (ANP), convinced two members of Ellington’s organization to serve as exclusive publicists of his syndicate.  To singer Ivie Anderson, who had been instructed to act, by means of a series of letters from Europe, as an informal correspondent.  Barnett wrote,

You will be able to make folk conscious of the sort of people you contact over there, the questions they ask, their reaction to a group of colored folk and the colored folk’s reaction to them. [Barnett. February 26, 1935]

With Anderson, trumpeter Arthur Whetsol was to share these duties by doing the heavier reportage:

The remarkable calibre of the men whom Duke has gathered about him impressed me very much during my brief visit back stage.  It is easy to understand the excellent impression which you have made upon people of various strata in the cities which you have visited.  To that extent you will undoubtedly be ambassadors of the race, in a sense, while you are abroad.  That very fact should provide material which will be of interest to folk back here.  I visualize the development of a greater interest in the organization than has ever been known before when it went on a similar pilgrimage, through the medium of your writings. [Barnett. February 26, 1935]

In his bon voyage letter to Ellington, Barnett expressed the hope the relation established between the ANP and his orchestra “eventually may be a business arrangement of some sort.” [Barnett, February 26, 1935]  In such a cordial atmosphere, neither man could have foreseen the deterioration of Ellington’s relationship with the Black press which was to bring them together, under far unhappier circumstances, nearly twenty years later.

*

Directly after the band’s return in 1933, Ellington played the Chicago Theatre in the midst of that city’s Century of Progress Exposition.  After that, Ellington’s career took a new turn as the band traveled to Dallas for an engagement at the Majestic Theater.  “I had always resisted propositions to tour the South,” Ellington explained, “but Irving Mills came up with an attractive offer to play the Interstate Circuit of theatres and picture houses all through Texas.”

We played four shows a day, and dances after the theatre several times a week.  The people had We made a lot of friends down there, and the climate and environment were conducive to the musical dreaming I most enjoy. [MIMM, 85]

The actual conditions endured by the orchestra could hardly have been as idyllic as Ellington’s portrayal would have us believe.  Only two years previously, what was to have been Louis Armstrong’s triumphant return to New Orleans was marred by a white announcer at the Suburban Gardens who declared to his radio audience, “I just haven’t the heart to announce that nigger on the radio.”  White Southerners could hardly have behaved more hospitably toward the suave and erudite aristocrat of Harlem, the latest sensation of the European salon.  Harry Carney, the band’s nonpareil baritone saxophonist, recalled their experiences in the South somewhat differently:

In the early days, when we travelled through the South we’d go by train.  We had two Pullmans—one for the band and one for our trunks and instruments.  We generally slept on the train, but if for some reason we couldn’t, we went to a colored hotel or to somebody’s house in the colored section—maybe a schoolteacher’s, a doctor’s, a minister’s— and we ate there, too.  Of course, all the places we played down there, the screaming and applauding and afterwards you’d have to go back across the tracks.  One jump I’ll never forget.  In 1933, we jumped from Paris, France, to Dallas, Texas, for a six-week theatre tour.  In Europe, we were royalty; in Texas, we were back in the colored section.  It was some adjustment, but we were young and we could take it. [cited in Balliett, “The Talk of the Town,” The New Yorker, June 1974, 33]

The Ellington Orchestra was the first Black band to undertake a complete tour of the Interstate Circuit.  News of their engagement in Dallas filled the local press, white and Black, and some of the white papers even broke the long-standing taboo against carrying pictures of Blacks by running Ellington’s photograph.  Most papers, however, ran cartoons to avoid using photographs, and the Dispatch compromised by printing a photo of Ellington’s hands poised above a piano keyboard, with the composer’s shadow in the background.  The accompanying caption read, “Dusky Player of Weird Melodies.” [Ulanov, DE, 153]

The adjective “dusky” was used frequently in the press in their coverage of Ellington, which outlined his New York career, his European tour and the comparisons to Bach and Delius.  Aided by enthusiastic reviews, Ellington broke the box-office records established by Cab Calloway, who had preceded Ellington at the Majestic the previous spring.  The band played two dances, one for whites and the other for Blacks, at the Ice Palace, and another at the prestigious Peacock Terrace in the Baker Hotel.  Ellington lived in an apartment on Caddo Street, while his musicians were quartered in private homes or apartments in the Black quarter of Dallas.

One Dallas paper ran an interview in which Ellington repeated his plans for a suite on the theme of Black l history.  He was quoted as saying,

I shall look into the future for the fifth and last movement, probably a hundred years from now, His and give a recapitulation, an apotheosis aiming to put the negro [sic] in a more comfortable place among the people of the world and a return to something he lost when he became a slave. [Ulanov, DE, 155]

Helen Oakley, at right next to Count Basie

The following year the band began to travel across America in chartered trains (“Many observers would say, ‘Why that’s the way the President travels!’  It automatically gained us respect from the natives…” [MIMM, 86]), and Ellington began a series of annual tours through the South.  It was during his 1935 tour that he received news of the death of the most important person in his life, his mother:

Dangling out there somewhere in a wilderness of the unknown, with no desire for adventure, where things and creatures that I neither saw nor heard were moving around…   My ambition and serious illnesses of sidemen Arthur Whetsol and Freddie Jenkins. Ad libbing away.  Soon there would be nothing.  I was not sure where I was.  After my mother passed, there was really nothing, and my sparkling parade was probably at an end… [MIMM, 86]

Upon the death of his mother, Ellington fell into a deep depression.  “He had always felt that he and his activities were the special concern of a benevolent God,” a commentator later wrote.  “In the face of this tragedy, he began to doubt it.  It was then that he began wearing the I’m certain religion gives you strength.  It makes you feel that if you are God’s son you are strong and don’t have to worry.”  [Boyer 1944, TDER, 244] 

 “His world had been built around his mother,” Mercer Ellington relates, “and the days after her death were the saddest and most morbid of his life.” [ DEiP, 68]  For years afterward, Ellington would go off on a drunken binge around the time of his mother’s death.  Derek Jewell reports that Irving Mills refused to advance Ellington $5,000 “to pay for his mother’s funeral in the style which he felt she merited,” [Jewell, 75] and Ellington’s financial problems were compounded over the next several years with the death of his father in 1937 and serious illnesses of sidemen Arthur Whetsol and Freddie Jenkins.  His family’s medical expenses drained his financial resources, and he accumulated a large debt on money borrowed, usually in the form of advances on royalties, to keep the band going.  In addition, Ellington participated in some ill-advised business deals and was known to lose as much as $50,000 over two or three months.

One indication of the confusion caused by the death of Ellington’s mother is provided by the text of an air-mail cable sent the following week by Ned Williams to Earl J. Morris of the Chicago Metropolitan News:

Please help me correct the impression arising from the story circulated by the ANP to all colored newspapers that Duke Ellington has cancelled all future engagements on account of the death of his mother…  The false impression that Duke is not travelling with the band has seriously affected his box-office receipts on a number of engagements and has cost him a lot of money unnecessarily. [Ned Williams to Earl J. Morris, June 5, 1935.  Claude Barnett file]

Williams sent a letter to Claude Barnett the following week, thanking him for his cooperation in the matter of Ellington’s publicity. [Ned Williams to Claude Barnett, June 11, 1935.  Claude Barnett file]

Although Ellington’s compositional activity was sharply curtailed at this time, his grief did manage to find expression in the elegiac Reminiscing in Tempo, which, when recorded later that year, ran a full four recorded sides, twice as long as Creole Rhapsody.  “This meant that Irving Mills had twice as much trouble with the record companies, who threatened to throw us out of the catalog!” [MIMM, 86] As became the pattern established concerning Ellington’s extended works, the critics (who, in Mercer Ellington’s words, were “mostly getting on Benny Goodman’s bandwagon”) did not receive it favorably.  John Hammond’s review of “Reminiscing in Tempo” in Down Beat called the piece “arty” and “pretentious,” while the English  Gramaphone reviewer, Edgar Jackson, could not understand it.  Leonard Hibbbbs was virtually the only critic who subjected the piece to extended musical analysis and concluded favorably.  [cited in Ulanov, DE, 165 ff]

John Hammond’s long-simmering feud with Duke Ellington, in fact, came to a boil with “Reminiscing in Tempo” in 1935.  Ellington’s most ambitious effort to date to write beyond the limitations of the three-minute single was a complete mystery to John Hammond, who by then had already staked out an array of Black talent for recording contracts and management.  Hammond scorned the “complete sterility of this new opus” and singled it out as “the ideal example of what the modern composer, Negro or white, should avoid at all costs.”  Of Ellington himself, he wrote, “Unpleasantness of any sort he flees from; he would greatly prefer not seeing the seamier side of existence.  In conclusion, Hammond went on to take a pot-shot at Irving Mills.  [Ellington] has been exploited in a way that is absolutely appalling… [for] the last eight years, he has received disgracefully little himself.” [“The Tragedy of Duke Ellington,” Down Beat, November 1935; TDER, 118] This salvo opened a lifelong rift between Hammond and Ellington.

The unique qualities of Ellington’s musical ideas had, by the middle of the decade, set him apart from the mainstream of American popular music.  We have already observed the process of centralization of control in the music industry, and in the 1930s by the Hollywood film industry as well.  This centralization resulted in a rigid vertical concentration of both:  every facet, from publishers to record manufacturers, became linked to Broadway theaters, movie studios and broadcast networks, and the various factors of production—talent, reputation, copyright, distribution and promotion— were distilled into a few huge combines.  A progressively smaller number of executives was given more and more control over the choice of material to be distributed.  One of the entertainment cartels, for example, the Radio Music Company, had as its chairman E.C. Miils of the National Broadcasting Network and included on its board of directors M.H. Aylesworth (the president of NBC), David Sarnoff (executive vice-president of RCA), E.E. Shumaker ((president of Radio Victor Corp.), and the presidents of  Westinghouse, the Roxy Theater chain, and presidents of distributors and publishers like RKO,  Leo Feist, Inc., Westinghouse, the Roxy Theater chain and Carl Fischer.

Owning or controlling affiliates in almost every phase of the entertainment business, the men in charge sought above all a standardized product which they could sell through every medium to as many people in as many places as possible.  To be fully exploitable, music now had to be suitable not only for dance halls, the stage, and phonograph records (all of which could cater to minority tastes), but also for radio and films, which reached the general, nationwide audience. [Leonard, 104]

Consequently, the changes forced upon jazz format and lyrics resulted in the division of the entertainment market into both the mass audience and a few small, peripheral audiences operating outside the mass market, including jazz, blues, country and western, gospel, and union and radical genres.  With the increasing rationalization of the music industry, with its demand for homogeneity of product and its mass-market formulas, there came a conscious effort to put jazz into the background of the American musical picture.

The segment of the industry hit hardest by the Depression was the phonograph record business:  by the end of World War II, there were only four major companies (Capitol, Columbia, Decca and Victor) left in the popular recording field.  In 1949 these four companies owned all but seven of the sixty-three records listed on the weekly Billboard “Top Ten” charts for that entire year.

A major factor in revitalizing the American record market during the depression was the side-scale introduction of juke boxes, which accompanied the repeal of Prohibition in 1933.  Initially placed in the newly reopened bars and night clubs, juke boxes were increasingly i9nstalled on restaurants and stores soon provided a large market for record manufacturers.   They became valuable as a promotional vehicle, and in the mid-1930s Billboard and Variety began publishing sales charts based upon juke box sales returns, which provided the industry a measurement of market trends.  Despite the fact that in 1936 more records were imported from England than were manufactured in the United States, the industry detected an upswing.  The pattern of investment within entertainment shifted from music publishing to records, and from the late 1930s until World War II the growth of the record business closely paralleled the expansion of the juke box market:  by 1939 there were some 255,000 machines in operation, utilizing thirteen million records. [Schicke, 99ff]

The temporary decline of the American record market was thus used to advantage by a handful of entertainment empires, some of which by this time were international in scope.  Black talent, for the most part, was completely cut off from the mass market.  As the small record companies that had catered to the Negro market in the 1920s were wiped out and the larger companies curtailed or eliminated their race catalogues, the influence of Black jazz—the foundation of American popular music— came to be minimal in the entertainment industry.

Black recording artists who are today recognized as having been seminal influences in American music were scarcely able to make a living.  In 1939, for example, Billie Holiday was making $100 a week when she could find work.  John Hammond recalled that

In those days, black bands, except for Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway, didn’t make any money.  The most these bands ever got paid was seventy or eighty dollars, and maybe twenty dollars a side a record.  And they weren’t getting paid any royalties on their records. [cited in Spitz, “Superstars Are Made, Not Born,” Chicago Tribune, January 15, 1978]

In many cases, Black talent sold for much less.  Hammond notes that after 1928, in part because they were composed of non-union musicians, Columbia and Victor recorded a great number of jug and washboard bands.  “They may have been paid a jug of gin.  They were utterly and completely exploited.” [Hammond, “An Experience in Jazz History,’ 58]

At the same time, the musical territory heretofore identified as Black, especially the big-band “swing” style created by Fletcher Henderson, was now being taken over and exploited profitably by whites.  Watching his own superb orchestra disintegrate for lack of money, Henderson himself sold arrangements, for $37.50 each, to Benny Goodman, who in Paul Whiteman fashion used them to become “King of Swing” and a millionaire.

As this style became predominant in American popular music, its highest-paying jobs, positions in the studio orchestras on the radio networks, became the exclusive property of a clique of white musicians.  Many of these musician celebrities made a show of liberality toward their black colleagues, but guarded closely the social line of demarcation between them:

At the Nest Club, or the Lenox Club the [white and Black] musicians were on close terms, but the relationship ended when the white musicians went back to their Times Square hotels. [Jones, Blues People, 164]

Hence, the actual creators of big-band swing were not allowed to reap its benefits.  The jazz magazine polls of the late 1930s were nearly all-white, and most of the few Blacks who did receive recognition in n the swing world—Teddy Wilson, Lionel Hampton, Cootie Williams, Charlie Christian and Roy Eldridge, to name a few—were able to do so because they had been hired by Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, or Gene Krupa.

Many in the Black middle class, apparently out of a conviction that popular music was beneath its dignity, paid scarce attention to this problem.  An article by Shirley Graham DuBois (“Spirituals to Symphonies”) in a 1936 issue of Etude serves to reveal the extent to which Negro leadership had become enmeshed in their utopian romance with European culture.  Devoted to the works of such Black symphonic composers as Florence B. Price, William Dawson and Nathaniel Dett, the article concludes, as Thomas J. Anderson summarized,

We stood on the threshold in 1936 of a renaissance period in which Black artists would move into the society and greatly enrich the cultural heritage of the country.  It is ironic that some thirty-three years later we’re still standing on that threshold and, in fact, I think the case can be made that we have actually slipped back in terms of position.  Instead of America’s music being vitalized, in the last thirty-three years it has taken the road of imitation and is basically a poor imitation of European music, lacking in rhythmic imagination, harmonic intensity, and also tends to be overintellectualized. [Anderson et al, “Black Composers and the Avant-Garde,” Black Music in Our Culture, 63f]

With this continuing cultural default on the part of the Black bourgeoisie, jazz musicians received little Black patronage, at least in terms of their recorded output.  Record buyers during the Depression tended to be older and more conservative than the record-buying public of today.  Selling at between thirty-five and seventy-five cents, records were considered a luxury items; a sale of fewer than 20,000 considered hits in the mid-1930s.  Consequently, the market for Black jazz, with Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington almost the sole exceptions, was very restricted.  The radio networks’ censorship of both lyrics and orchestration of jazz was especially severe.

With Benny Goodman’s use of Fletcher Henderson and Teddy Wilson as arranger and pianist, respectively, there came a certain liberal relaxation of recording standards, but Goodman invariable “polished” his performances to conform to the standards of European rendition, as a comparison between the Henderson and Goodman bands will illustrate.  Goodman, in fact, later hired the white arranger Eddie Sauter in order to achieve a more “symphonic” sound, and by the 1950s attempted to become known as a progressive.  As one commentator observed,

Seen in retrospect, the very popular orchestral tendencies of the entire period between 1920 and 1950, from Paul Whiteman down to the progressive and “west coast” movements which looked back at him with scorn, reflected the demand of the urban middle class for a highly refined, quasi-“classical” jazz. [Mooney, “Popular Music Since the 1920’s,” 183]

The late 1930s saw the appearance of the white swing bandleader as a new type of culture-hero who enjoyed a social status and public adulation far beyond that of his counterparts of the 1920s.  Most of them, including Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Glenn Miller, Claude Thornhill, Will Bradley and Charlie Spivak, were able to launch very lucrative careers by leaving their privileged jobs as network studio musicians, where they had grown tired of playing mundane arrangements for singers.

Once these bandleaders had established a national audience, they had little trouble attracting lavish sponsorship for network radio broadcasts, a luxury not extended with any regularity to Black orchestras.  This network exposure was very important, especially if it involved a prime-time slot on CBS and NBC, and competition was intense.  Bandleaders curried the favor of the top radio announcers, and in turn music publishers curried the favor of the top bandleaders.  Even more than records, radio was the most valuable medium to exploit songs.

During the same period, Hollywood also opened its doors to the big-name white swing bands.  Some of the big-band features released in the late 1930s were Hollywood Hotel, featuring Benny Goodman; Dancing Co-ed, with Artie Shaw; Ball of Fire, with Gene Krupa; Winter Wonderland, with Woody Herman; Las Vegas Night and The Fabulous Dorseys, with Tommy Dorsey; and Swing Fever, with Kay Kyser.  During the summer of 1941, Charlie Barnet, Tommy Dorsie, Woody Herman, Harry James, Sammy Kaye, Gene Krupa, Glenn Miller, Alvino Ray, and Jack Teagarden were all residing in Hollywood, along with Duke Ellington and Jimmie Lunceford.  A recording ban ordered by the American Federation of Musicians in 1942 lured still more bands to Hollywood, and it was not until 1944 that Hollywood ended its spate of band pictures. [Simon, The Big Bands, 66ff]

The prototypical white bandleader was the “King of Swing,” Benny Goodman, in whom, as one writer put it,

economics and art, profit and psychology, hot jazz and guilt motives become indivisible.  Jazz was about to take its most significant stride away from the Storyville legend.  It was about to capture the middle-class adolescent heart.  And it did so through the agency of a musician who had [in 1932] amended his practice routine to dovetail with the national unemployment figures. [Benny Green, The Reluctant Art, 65]

Goodman’s career was closely associated with that of John Hammond, whose over-riding professional aim seems to have been the integration of Black musicians into the American musical mainstream.  The collective guilt motive of the musical establishment was well-expressed in Hammond’s remarks to a university symposium in 1972:

While working for the British, Hammond was able to get Benny goodman’s first recording band together.  “I’ll never forget that session because I was trying to get Benny to use Coleman Hawkins and other great jazz musicians who were around.  But Benny was worried.  ‘John, you know I worship these guys, but if I play with Negro musicians I’ll never get another job on the radio.’”  Consequently, their first session they had featured only white performers.

By the time of the second session, Goodman added Negro musicians.  This was at a time when Black and White musicians could not play together in public.  By 1935 he had been recording for two years, originally for the British, and then for Irving Mills.  Benny got a band together, first at the all-white Billy Rose Music Hall in New York, and then for Nabisco.  In 1933, after hearing pianist Teddy Wilson on the radio, Hammond sent saxophonist Benny Carter to send him to New York and got Benny Goodman and Teddy Wilson together in the recording studio in 1934 for Columbia Records’ “Moonglow”: 

We got a trio together with Gene Krupa which would pave the way through records for these three to play together live.  Benny was under contract to Victor, and I got Teddy to sign with Brunswick, and through these arrangements I managed to get Billie Holiday on records again…  Goodman was in the session because the only way Brunswick would let Teddy record with Benny for Victor was if he would return the favor for Brunswick, which he was doing.

This was the beginning of integration on records.  Before this, there were maybe only five or six times the Blacks and Whites had played together on recordings…   All of this was done secretly because the public wasn’t ready to see Blacks and Whites together.

In 1935 the Goodman Trio records sold more than the Goodman band’ records, and Goodman changed American tastes.  In the meantime, relationships between publishers and bandleaders changed, because Goodman had Fletcher Henderson do his arrangements.  “This was part of the deal for the National Biscuit Company radio show.  Benny had a budget for eight arrangements a week, and this is how he built his library.”

The first time the trio was allowed to appear live was at a concert of the Chicago Hot Jazz Society in 1936, at the Congress Hotel.  Everybody was scared.  The owner, a nice guy, said, “Gee, I don’t know if the public will take it.”  Of course, it was the biggest hit of the concert.  Benny was managed by MCA and they felt it would be rough.  “We’ll never be able to book a band with a Negro performer, you know.”  But Benny insisted, and they tried it.  Out of this came the quartet, and from that the sextet—guys like Tommy Dorsey, Charlie Barnett—and a lot of other big bands soon had one or two Negroes in the band.  I think Benny had as many as six.  It was a breakthrough, but only a start.  The record companies have done more I think than any other part of the amusement business to break down prejudice, but there’s a whole lot more to do. [Hammond, “An Experience in Jazz History,” 52f]

The American integrationist fantasy has seldom been stated so clearly.  By working with Goodman, the Black musician supposedly earned a distinction that no all-Black orchestra—neither Ellington’s, Henderson’s, nor Basie’s—could bestow upon him, and by employing Black musicians Goodman supposedly represented the American ideal of brotherhood.  According to this logic, jazz became something of a social crusade, demanding official recognition, and Goodman became, in the words of Benny Green, “the most effective bribe which jazz had to offer the musical Establishment.” [The Reluctant Art, 65]

The recognition came on January 16, 1938, in the form of a Benny Goodman concert at Carnegie Hall, heretofore the bastion of music’s “classical” elite.  Sponsored by theater impresario Sol Hurok, the concert featured the Goodman orchestra, including sidemen Gene Krupa, Harry James, Teddy Wilson, Ziggy Elman, Lionel Hampton, Jess Stacy and the rest, along with guest soloists Bobby Hackett, Harry Carney, Johnny Hodges and Lester Young.  Significantly, a portion of the performance was devoted to a pastiche of jazz history almost identical to the sort of displays given by Paul Whiteman the previous decade, with the rest of the program designed to show Goodman’s perfection of the idiom:

Goodman’s unusual combination of emotional purity and high-brow craftmanship became the bourgeois jazz enthusiast’s clincher in any disputes with his classical “betters” over the legitimacy of jazz.  Thus, through Goodman, real jazz for the first time captured a mass, white middle-class audience in America. [John McDonough, “Goodman at Carnegie Hall:  The class of ’38 Swings into ’78,” Chicago Tribune, January 15, 1978]

In order to achieve a popular breakthrough of comparable magnitude, Ellington obviously faced many more obstacles than Goodman, however preeminent his stature among Black musicians.  One person who aided him in this regard was the Canadian-born Helen Oakley, who was a friend of the Goodman family, but partial enough to Duke Ellington to work as his unpaid publicist.  Oakley was the president of the Chicago Rhythm Club and a writer for such jazz publications as Down Beat, Tempo, and Jazz Hot.

She joined the Mills organization in New York upon its acquisition of some old Brunswick recording facilities, which became the basis of two new record labels:  Master, for the full Ellington orchestra, and the cheaper Variety, to feature small Ellington units, nominally led by trumpeter Cootie Williams, clarinetist Barney Bigard, saxophonist Johnny Hodges and cornetist Rex Stewart.  With Mills, Oakley organized a lavish party and jam session to launch the new labels, inviting the Ellington orchestra, the Basie band, Chick Webb’s orchestra, soloists from other Mills bands and a host of other jazzmen, including Goodman, Artie Shaw, Milton Mezzrow, Frankie Newton and Billy Kyle.  In association with producer Milt Gabler, John Hammond, Marshall Stearns, Timme Rosenkrantz and writer Stanley Dance, she organized a huge publicity campaign for Mills.

The previous year, Oakley had readied Ellington to follow in Goodman’s footsteps by playing in the segregated Congress Hotel on Chicago’s Michigan Avenue during the spring of 1936.  An engagement at the South Side Regal Theatre that winter showed that Ellington’s popularity was undiminished among the city’s Black community.  The review of his opening night, in a Chicago Defender article titled “Chicago Really Turns Out To Hear Duke And His Band,” described Ellington as being

Greeted by the largest crowd of first nighters of the [Regal’s] winter season.  Indeed, t’was the largest crowd that has witnessed a Sunday showing at the 47^th street house since the picture “Hallelujah” played there several seasons ago. [Rob Roy, Chicago Defender, January 11, 1936]

The article went on to describe long lines of people waiting outside the theater in deep snow, causing Ellington to add a sixth show in order to accommodate the crowd.

The Congress Hotel performance was scheduled to take place in the Urban Room on May 8.  It was sponsored by the Chicago Rhythm Club, which was headed, along with Helen Oakley, by E.M. “Squirrel” Ashcraft, an amateur musician and scion of a wealthy suburban family.  The program included both an afternoon and evening performance by the Ellington Orchestra with Ivie Anderson, four dancing boys and members of the band in novelty routines.  It was to be climaxed by the Club’s presentation of a gold baton award.  Barry Ulanov asserts,

The Rhythm Club at first approached three well-known Chicago white jazzmen to make the presentation.  They all refused, singly and collectively.  The Club asked Eugene Stinson, who reviewed traditional music for the Chicago Daily News, to present Duke with his glittering stick.  Stinson was delighted.  He did it, at the first Concert night.  “I am aware of no race lines where genius is concerned.” [Ulanov, Duke Ellington, 169f]

The Congress Hotel engagement served to enhance Ellington’s stature as a Black artist.  Once again, the Chicago Defender waxed ecstatic, describing the event as “a blaze of glory…  one of the biggest [appearances] for the Harlem king in any season…  The appearance of thee Duke in the Congress marks the second time that a Race orchestra has played there.” [Rob Roy, Chicago Defender, May 16, 1936]  (The first, several years earlier, had been Fletcher Henderson’s.)

With the reopening of the Cotton Club in the fall of 1936, Ellington looked forward to a new extended period of steady employment and a chance to recuperate financially.  The old Harlem Cotton Club, a victim of the Depression as was the rest of the “Harlem Renaissance,” had closed its doors in February that year.  According to an Urban League figure, by 1934 eighty per cent of Harlem was on relief.  A general increase of warfare among gangsters, combined with a rise in militancy and anti-white resentment, culminating in the March 1935 Black uprising, had made Harlem an unattractive site in the eyes of the white public.  Consequently, the new Cotton Club was moved downtown to Broadway and Forty-eighth Street, at the heart of the theater district.

In former incarnations, the site had been known as the Palais Royale, which was succeeded by the Downtown Connie’s Inn.  In 1933, it was renamed the Harlem Club, with a policy of catering to Blacks; when that operation folded in 1935, it was rechristened the Ubangi Club, featuring a “pansy show.”  The lavish opening of the new Cotton Club featured entertainment by Bill “Bojangles” Robinson and Cab Calloway, with a music score by Benny Davis and J. Fred Coots, choreography by Clarence Robinson, and orchestration by Will Vodery.  The club’s average weekly gross was over $30,000.  The management no longer required a cover charge, since few Blacks crossed the 110^th Street “Mason-Dixon Line.” [Haskins, 113ff]

 

*

Returning to New York from some film assignments in Hollywood, Ellington’s arrival for the spring 1937 Cotton Club show was a spectacular triumph.  It was the first Cotton Club show for which all major musical numbers were written by Blacks, including Ellington, Andy Razaf, John Redmond and Reginald Forsythe.  Ellington’s big hit that year was “Caravan,” and along with his orchestra he brought Ivie Anderson and Bessie Dudley to the Cotton Club show.  In addition, the show featured Ethel Waters, singer George Dewey Washington and the debut of the Nicholas Brothers dance team.  Billed the “Cotton Club Express,” the show broke all previous receipt records.  Manager Herman Starks moved to extend the show’s run, and both Ellington and Waters agreed in mid-April to postpone previous commitments to assure the revue’s continuance until June 15. [Haskins, 119]

Returning for the spring 1938 “Cotton Club Revue,” Ellington wrote the entire musical score of thirteen songs.  His big hit that year, “I Let a Song Go Out of My Hearts” (written in collaboration with lyricist Henry Nemo) was for some reason not included in the show, but other tunes featured included “Braggin’ in Brass,” “A Lesson in C,” “Swingtime in Honolulu,” and “Posin’.” The show’s acts included Mae Johnson, Anise and Aland, Aida Ward, the four Step Brothers, the Three Chocolateers, the Peters Sisters, Rufus and Richard, and Peg-Leg Bates dancing to “Slappin’ Seventh Avenue with the Sole of My Shoe.”  Ellington’s thirty-ninth birthday was the occasion of a special broadcast to England via the BBC network.

Between the two Cotton Club shows, several Ellington engagements are noteworthy, as they reflected his stature among whites.  His appearance, in December 1938, at the Orpheum Theater in downtown Memphis made him the first Black attraction to play there since the days of Bert Williams and W.C. Handy.  As guest columnist for the Pittsburgh Courier, Ellington used the occasion to explain his views:

A new cycle of interest in colored entertainment is just starting.  More and more colored bands are taking their place on the screen, and this last season saw the first successful all-Negro radio, something to talk about.

All of these things are good for the race.  The man of color has a wealthy heritage.  His capacity for music and entertainment is an infinite one.

We long have passed the era when twanging a banjo, singing a spiritual and doing a shuffling dance were popularly supposed to be the extent of a Negro’s talent.  We don’t have to list all the outstanding musicians, performers and artists of the race to convince you of this point.

We must be proud of our race and of our heritage, we must develop the special talents which have been handed down to us through generations, we must try to make our work express the rich background of the Negro, something that our orchestra always has tried to do and constantly will strive to attain [cited in Ulanov, Duke Ellington, 190f]

An editorial in a Memphis Black newspaper was more skeptical:

Well, Sir, for the first time since Grant camped on Beale Street a cullud attraction will play the Orpheum…  Cullud folk, I understand, will be given not only the gallery but the balcony in which to sit.  In short, the Orpheum management apparently takes the position that now is a good time to see whether or not Memfus cullud folk will show any real appreciation for high class entertainment and better accommodations,,,  Here’s hoping that Ellington will crack the ice so wide that even the white folk of these parts will stand in line for more cullud attractions.  It’ll go far toward making Memphis the theatrical capital of the Mid -South, as it should be, for God’s chillun with their world of talent. [Ulanov, 192]

Perhaps inevitably, a certain ambivalence, even resentment, was beginning to appear in the Black press as it beheld Ellington paraded as a symbol of racial progress it knew to be illusory.  To many Blacks, Ellington, so heavily involved in the world of whites, may have seemed a questionable representative of the race.  The fact that the Greensboro, South Carolina, News  had called him one of the ten best American composers, or that Life had named him one of the “Twenty Most Prominent Negroes in the United States,” certainly could not have meant much to the Black man on the street.  In February, 1938, Ellington performed, at the behest of a committee assembled by the composer Vernon Duke, at a white-tie “High-Low” concert at the Viennese Roof of the swank St. Regis Hotel in New York.  At a time when many New York night clubs and restaurants excluded Blacks outright, and regardless of the controversy created around soprano Marion Anderson’s attempt to break the color bar, polite society’s acclamation of Ellington that evening demonstrated the extent of the social separation that existed between Ellington and most Black Americans.

A certain tone of animosity, however, was beginning to appear in the Black Press.  Negative comments often took the form of attacks upon Ellington’s relationship with Irving Mills, as for example, in a “Soap Box” column by Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., run in the November 17, 1936, Amsterdam News:

Duke Ellington is a musical sharecropper.  He has been a drawing account which has been stated to run around $300 per week.  At the end of the year when Massa Mills’ cotton has been laid by, Duke is told that he owes them hundreds of thousands of dollars…  When they finish totaling, there aren’t any profits…

Most of these conditions hold forth for the hi-de-ho master—Mr. Calloway occupying now the highest spot on the Rialto, his men earning under $100 per week.  Musical sharecroppers, that’s all…

Now take Jimmie Lunceford and his men. They, too, were musical peons.  Realizing this, they revolted.  Mills had them bound by contract.  They owed for their cabin, plot, mule and sorghum.  But the boys pulled a fast one—they decided to buy their contracts.

Musical sharecropping just doesn’t sound right to this grandpappy’s son.  The Negro has sharecropped too long…  We don’t want any more paternalism on our job, we want a chance and a fair wage.  And we’ll take care of the rest. [cited in Haskins, 109f]

Similar sentiments were expressed by Porter Roberts in his “Praise and Criticism” column in the Pittsburgh Courier:

Rudy Vallee (a very fair white man to all regardless of color) made big time in 1928.  He is now worth over $2,000,000.  Duke Ellington made it about the same time and has EARNED something like $2,000,000—for somebody else…

No Negro writer has written the lyrics for any of Duke Ellington’s melodies since he has been under the Mills banner.  What’s the matter, Duke?  House rules? [Cited in Ulanov, ,Duke Ellington, 206]

This rancor appeared in the press in spite of Ellington’s careful cultivation of his media image.  Over the years, he had devoted a great deal of attention to his own publicity, and, as Mercer Ellington attests, was almost always successful in having things his way:

By 1938 Pop knew the importance of good press relations, how to get favorable comment and how to be omitted from the gossip columns.  He did this by a combination of methods.  Some people were    paid off to keep quiet; others were put on the payroll.  He would also place ads in the trade magazines for an appreciable amount of money so they wouldn’t write anything too bad for fear of losing a client.  This was a result of his experience gained in pool halls, where he had been shown how to manipulate people, and by now he had been coached by Irving Mills, one of the all-time masters.  From him he had learned how to handle situations of every kind. [DEiP, 77f]

Nevertheless, it is possible that Ellington became sensitive to the sniping from the press, for in 1939 he made the decision to end his association with Mills.  On the subject of this dissolution Ellington   was even more reticent than usually.  In Music Is My Mistress he stated simply that

He gave me his 50 percent of Duke Ellington, Inc., in exchange for my 50 percent of Mills-Calloway Enterprises, Inc.   We dissolved our relationship agreeable and, in spite of how much he had made on me, I respected the way he had operated.  He had always preserved the dignity of my name.  Duke Ellington had an unblemished image, and that is the most anybody can do for anybody. [MIMM, 89]

Ellington never wished to discuss the matter publicly, a few different accounts have appeared to speculate on the cause of separation from Mills.  Barry Ulanov wrote that Ellington had complained of “lack of attention,” and that one day he walked into Mills’s offices to examine the accounts of Duke Ellington, Inc.  As the story has it, Ellington spent an hour looking at the financial records of his recordings, bookings and tours, and then left, never to return. [Ulanov, Duke Ellington, 206]   Another biographer, Derek Jewell, insists that differences arose between Ellington and Mills concerning the general direction of Ellington’s career, especially over his desire to compose and perform extended works in a concert setting. [Jewell, Duke:  A Portrait of Duke Ellington, 75]

This interpretation is given credence by a 1952 article written by Mills himself, wherein he takes responsibility for the break:

When I withdrew from my managerial relationship with Duke, it was because I sensed that Duke had fallen into a different attitude toward his music, and was taking off in what I thought was a wrong direction.  For an example—not necessarily his best—let’s take his Reminiscing in Tempo.    It had many good things in it, and one of these days Duke will go back and extract the good things from it and use them to better advantage.  But that recording never should have been released.  It was on of the points which Duke lost touch with the huge, loyal following that loved genuine Ellington music.

I did not try to stop Duke, because I understood exactly what he was trying to do.  He was trying to break out of what he thought were bonds placed on his creative ability by the patterns in which he had been working.  Those of us who know and love the real Duke Ellington feel that his mistake was turning from the idiom, so well-exemplified by the five records I have selected as my favorites, to the concert works to which he has practically confined his writing in recent years.

But those of us who know and understand Duke, also know why it was important—even necessary—for him to try that path. [cited in Down Beat, November 1952]

Whatever his reasons may have been, Duke Ellington’s career entered a new phase when Ned Williams, who the previous November had resigned from Mills’s employ to form a public relations firm, introduced him to William Morris, Jr.  In addition to having the Willam Morris Agency handle his booking, Ellington signed a publishing contract with Jack Robbins, who agreed on a retaining fee of $100 a week for his future compositions.  By the following year, he would sever his ties with the Columbia Record Company to begin a new series of recordings for Victor.

The details of Ellington’s association with Mills have never been made public, although, from time to time, stories have circulated to indicate that it was not entirely pleasant.  It has been said, for example, that shortly before Ellington’s death, when Mills learned of his plans to publish an autobiography, “Mills telephoned several of Duke’s friends, asking in some anguish what the book would say about him.[6]  George Simon related the following story:

Some years ago I was invited by a friend to come with him to a party at Mills’s Hollywood mansion.  “I want you to notice one thing,” he said, “and that’s that huge expanse of red carpeting that covers the ground floor.”  That’s Duke’s blood. [Simon, The Big Bands, 192]

At the same time, however, most evidence suggests that their relationship remained amicable-- even close—long after their professional association had ended.  On his visits to the West Coast, Ellington was a frequent visitor at Mills’s estate, and Mercer Ellington insists that from his deathbed Ellington held daily telephone conversations with his former manager and publisher. [interview with Mercer Ellington, Chicago, July 22, 1979]

With the Second World War looming only months away, the Duke Ellington Orchestra undertook a second European tour, which took them to London, Paris and Scandinavia in another whirlwind itinerary, including a recording session led by cornetist Rex Stewart that included the legendary Belgian guitarist, Django Reinhardt.

The tour did much to brighten Ellington’s own outlook.  Near the end of the tour, in Stockholm on April 29, Duke's birthday, he later recalled, "I was awakened by a 16-piece band from the local radio station, which marched into my hotel room serenading me with 'Happy Birthday'."  At the Concert House where the band performed, bouquets of flowers kept arriving and there were crowds gathered at his dressing room.  "The whole audience rose to sing 'Happy Birthday' and there was a ceremony onstage, followed by a big banquet for the entire orchestra and numerous guests at the Crown Prince Cafe.  It all brought a very glowing ending to our second European tour." [Ellington, Down Beat, November 5, 1952, 1; TDER 266]

Indeed, while the Ellington orchestra was en route home from their second European tour on the Ile de France, Duke’s severing of relations was announced, along with the news that he had signed a management contract with the William Morris Agency and the Music Corporation of America (MCA), wherein he came under the personal management of Willard Alexander.  From England it was reported, "The circumstances under which Ellington and Mills are parting are too much a matter of hearsay at the moment to warrant recounting."  [“Irving Mills and Duke Ellington Sever Relations,” Melody Maker, May 6, 1939; TDER, 140]

In the same Silver Jubilee issue of Down Beat in which Ellington had shared his own recollections, Irving Mills described his parting with Ellington from his own perspective:

When I withdrew from my managerial relationship with Duke, it was because I sensed that Duke had fallen into a different attitude toward his music and was taking off in what I thought was the wrong direction. ["Reminiscing in Tempo"] never should have been released.  It was one of the points [at] which Duke lost touch with the huge, loyal following that loved genuine Ellington music....  His mistake was turning from the idiom... to the concert works to which he has practically confined his writing in recent years.  ["I Split with Duke When Music Began Sidetracking," Down Beat, November 5, 1952 (TDER, 274-5]

 

There can be little reason to doubt any of these accounts.  If they appear to be contradictory, it is because the relationship itself—indeed, the entire question of the Black American’s place in show business—was full of contradictions.  However Mills may have taken advantage of him, as he certainly did, to the end Ellington remained profoundly grateful for the unique opportunity Mills had given him.  Ellington’s career under Mills was a paradigm of the cultural contest between Black and white, and no one was more aware of this fact than Ellington.  His deepest conviction was that whatever success he achieved was a victory, not for himself alone, but for the entire Black race.  To Mills he owed the fact that he felt himself in a position to win from the white world recognition of the genius of his people.

---

[1] MIMM, p. 77.

[2] Richard O. Boyer, “The Hot Bach,” in Duke Ellington:  His Life and Music, ed. Peter Gammond (New York:  Roy Publishers, 1958), p. 75.

 

[4] Ibid., pp. 130-131.

[5] Ibid., p. 131.

[6] Derek Jewell, Duke:  A Portrait of Duke Ellington, p. 75.

---

[1] LeRoi Jones, Blues People, pp. 159-160.

[2] Chris Albertson, Louis Armstrong, (Alexandria, Virginia:  Time-Life Records, 1978), p. 24.

[3] H.F. Mooney, “Popular Music Since the 1920’s, in The Sounds of Social Change pp. 186-187.

[4]Neil Leonard, Jazz and the White Americans, pp. 134 ff.

[5] John Hammond and Irving Townsend, John Hammond on Record:  An Autobiography (New York:  Summit Books, 1977), p. 136.

[6] Ibid., p. 124.

[7] Interview with Mercer Ellington, Chicago, July 22, 1979.

[8] Interview with Duke Ellington by Jack Cullen, CKNW radio, Vancouver, B.C., October 30, 1962.  Transcribed from a recording, Varese International History of Jazz Series, c. 1976.

[9] John Hammond and Irving Townsend, John Hammond On Record, p. 126.

[10] Ibid. p. 125.

[11] Ibid., p. 132.

[12] Leonard Feather, Introduction to The Great Music of Duke Ellington, (Melville, N.Y., Belwin Mills, 1973), p. 9.

[13]  MIMM, p. 73.

[14] Sonny Greer, interview in Stanley Dance, The World of Duke Ellington (New York:  Scribner’s, 1970), p. 69.

[15] Otto Hardwick interview, in Stanley Dance, The World of Duke Ellington, p. 60.

[16] Duke Ellington in Person, p. 67.

[17] MIMM, p. 77.

[18] Richard O. Boyer, “The Hot Bach,” in Duke Ellington:  His Life and Music, ed. Peter Gammond (New York:  Roy Publishers, 1958), p. 75.

[19] James Haskins, The Cotton Club, pp. 44 ff.

[20] Ibid., pp 22-.23.

[21] Ibid., p. 35.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Cited from Edward Jablonski, Harold Arlen:  Happy with the Blues; quoted in James Haskins, The Cotton Club, p. 35.

[24] James Haskins, The Cotton Club, p.44.

[25]. Duke Ellington in Person, pp. 44-45.

[26] Ibid., pp. 64-65.

[27] Gunther Schuller, Early Jazz, p. 327.

[28] Ibid., p. 352.

[29] Ibid, p.339.

[30] Blues People, p. 163.

[31] MIMM, p. 82.

[32] Ibid.

[33] Duke Ellington in Person, p. 36.

[34] Ibid., p. 37.

[35] John Hammond, “An Experience in Jazz History,” p. 49.

[36] Ibid.

[37] Constant Lambert, Music Ho!  A Study of Music in Decline (London:  Faber & Faber, 1934), pp. 214-215.

[38] Early Jazz, p. 347.

[39] Leonard Feather, introduction to The Great Music of Duke Ellington, p. 9.

[40] George Simon, The Big Bands, pp. 21-22.

[41] Neil Leonard, Jazz and the White Americans, pp. 134 ff.

[42] Duke Ellington in Person, p. 47.

[43] Ibid., p. 48.

44 Neil Leonard, Jazz and the White Americans, pp. 118-119.

[45] Charles Gillette, “The Black Market Roots of Rock,” in The Sounds of Social Change, p. 275.

[46] Neil Leonard, Jazz and the White Americans, pp. 20-21.

[47] Leonard Feather, introduction to The Great Music of Duke Ellington, p. 7.

[48] Gunther Schuller, Early Jazz, pp, 356-357.

[49] Dukie Ellington in Person, p. 41.

[50] Richard O. Boyer, “The Hot Bach,” pp. 55-56.

[51] John Hammond and Irving Townsend, John Hammond on Record, pp. 84-85. 

[52] Mercer Ellington and Stanley Dance, Duke Ellington in Person, p. 58.

[53] Cited in Barry Ulanov, Duke Ellington, p. 134.

[54] Ibid., pp. 130-131.

[55] Ibid., p. 131.

[56] Ibid., p. 138.

[57] MIMM, pp. 83-84.

[58] Dick Buckley, WBEZ Chicago broadcast, April 30, 1978.

[59] Duke Ellington in Person, pp. 59-60.

[60] MIMM, p.84.

[61] (Ibid. p. 140.

[62] Cited in Barry UIanov, Duke Ellington, p. 138.

 

[64] Derek Jewell, Duke:  A Portrait of Duke Ellington (New York:  Norton, 1977), pp. 52-53.

[65] Charles Fox, “The Nineteen-thirties,” in Duke Ellington:  His Life and Music, pp. 85-86.

[66] John Hammond on Record, p. 137.

[67] Ibid., p. 139.

[68] Duke Ellington in Person, p. 61.

[69] Richard O. Boyer, “The Hot Bach,” p. 48.

[70] Mercer Ellington and Stanley Dance, Duke Ellington in Person, p. 61.

[71] MIMM, p. 85.

[72] Wilder Hobson, “Introducing Duke Ellington,” Fortune, August 1933, p. 47.

[73] Ibid., p. 48.

[74] Ibid.

[75] Ibid., p. 91.

[76] Ibid., p. 92.

[77] Ibid., p. 95.

[78]Claude Barnett to Ivie Anderson, February 26, 1935.

[79] Claude Barnett to Arthur Whetsol, February 26, 1935.

and we ate there, too.

[81] MIMM, p. 85.

[82] Cited in Whitney Balliett, “The Talk of the Town,” New Yorker, June 10, 1974, p. 33.

[83] Cited in Barry Ulanov, Duke Ellington, p. 153.

[84] Ibid p. 159.

[85] MIMM, p. 86.

[86] Ibid.

[87] Duke Ellington in Person, p. 68.

[88] Duke:  A Portrait of Duke Ellington, 75., ran a full

[89] Ned Williams to Earl J. Morris, 5 June, 1935, Claude Barnett file. Creole Rhapsody

[90] MIMM, p. 86.

[91] Cited in Barry Ulanov, Duke Ellington, pp. 165 ff.

[92] Neil Leonard, Jazz and the White Americans, p. 104.

[93] C. A. Schicke, Revolution in Sound, pp. 98-102.

[94] Cited in Robert Stephen Spitz, “Superstars Are Made, Not Born,” Chicago Tribune, January 15, 1978.

[95] John Hammond, “An Experience in Jazz History,” p. 58.

[96] LeRoi Jones, Blues People, p. 164.

[97] H.F. Mooney, “Popular Music Since the 1920’s,” p. 183.

 

[98] George T. Simon, The Big Bands, pp. 66 ff.

[99] Benny Green, The Reluctant Art (New York:  Horizon, 1963), p. 65.

[100] “An Experience in Jazz History,” pp. 52-53.

[101] Benny Green, The Reluctant Art, p. 56. S

[102] John McDonough, “Goodman at Carnegie Hall:  The Class of ’38 Swings into ’78,” Chicago Tribune, January 15, 1978.

[103] Rob Roy, Chicago Really Turns Out to Hear Duke and His Band,” Chicago Defender, January 11, 1936.

[104] Duke Ellington, pp. 169-170.

[105] Rob Roy, “The Duke Is Featured at the Congress,” Chicago Defender, May 16, 1936.

[106] James Haskins, The Cotton Club, pp. 113 ff.

[107] Ibid., p. 119

[108] Cited in Barry Ulanov, Duke Ellington, pp. 190-191.

[109] Ibid., p. 192.

[110] Cited in James Haskins, The Cotton Club, pp. 109-110.

[111] Cited in Barry Ulanov, Duke Ellington, p. 206.We dissolved our business relationship agreeably, and in spite of

[112] Duke Ellington in Person, pp. 77-78.

[113] MIMM, p. 89.

[114] Duke Ellington, p. 206.

[115] Duke:  A Portrait of Duke Ellington, p. 75.

[116] “I Split With Duke When Music Began Sidetracking,” Down Beat, November 5, 1952, p. 6.

[117] Derek Jewell, Duke:  A Portrait of Duke Ellington, p. 75.

[118] The Big Bands, p. 192.

[119] Interview with Mercer Ellington, Chicago, July 22, 1979.