THINGS AIN'T: INTRODUCTION
When I began to look into the subject
of Duke Ellington in the late 1970s, Bob Koester, owner of the Jazz Record Mart
in downtown Chicago, told me that there could never be too much written about
Duke. While this may not be entirely true, at that time, just a few
years after Ellington’s death, there was a dearth of published information
about the man and his music. As the 1999
centennial of his birth approached, however, the trickle of books about
Ellington grew into flood, from pundits and professors alike, and the record
labels began cranking out box sets to chronicle his music.
Since that time, most books devoted
to Ellington have been directed to musicians and musicologists. The few biographies I’ve seen repeat the
hoary old myth that, after the Second World War, the quality of his music went
into a tailspin; writers still insist
that the early ‘40s—the so-called Blanton-Webster band—represented the pinnacle
of Ellington’s achievement; the rest of his career was a steep decline. One exception was the 2010 publication of
Duke Ellington’s America by Professor Harvey Cohen, in which the focus is
on America, as well as Ellington.
Cohen’s book presents a multidimensional version of Ellington, a man of
not only music but also of politics, economics, race, along with his complex
personal life. I have taken the same
approach for the past forty years.
My
primary aim is to examine the exploitation of Black musical culture in America
over the course of the past century. In
particular, since the most outstanding cultural contribution of Black American
culture has been in the field of music and related arts, I will restrict my
investigation to this area. I will
attempt to show that the origin, growth, and development of what is now an
enormously powerful entertainment industry, controlled almost exclusively by
whites, arose as the consequence of the cultural exploitation of Blacks.
Harold Cruse opens his discussion of “this same old,
ethnic-group war for cultural supremacy in American music” by citing the denial
of a special award for long-term achievement in American music to Duke
Ellington by the Pulitzer Prize Committee in 1965. This rejection of a man who for over forty
years had been “America’s greatest exponent of orchestrated jazz music and
composition,” which resulted in the resignations of Winthrop Sargeant and Ronald Eyer from
the music committee and the awarding of no prize at all in music that year, was
condemned by Cruse as evidence of “the undemocratic way the cultural machine in
America is run. Here was an affront to
the entire musical and cultural heritage of every Negro in America.”[i] Ellington’s public reaction to the incident
was to state, “Fate is being very kind to me; Fate doesn’t want me to be too
famous too young.” [New York Times, May 5, 1965, p. 49]
While the Pulitzer Prize committee’s explanation of this
decision was never made public, its attitude does serve to illustrate a number
of fundamental axioms concerning America’s cultural establishment. First among these would be the gross division
of culture into “serious” and “popular” categories. This phenomenon occurs as a natural result of
the market economy, wherein a work of art becomes a commodity and the artist’s
relation to it is primarily that of a producer for the market.[ii] Under these conditions, the artist must
choose either to market his or her product for the highest possible economic
return, which results ultimately in the mass debasement of culture prevalent in
America today, or to produce for a narrow circle of connoisseurs, with the
result that art becomes “more and more formless, personal, and individualistic,
culminating in Dadaism, surrealism, and ‘Steining.’”[iii]
In American culture, however,
the past century has revealed a parallel process, equal in significance to
these economic tendencies. As Cruse
elaborates,
The question of Ellington and the Pulitzer Prize is a
surface issue. The prize itself is not
really that important, but what lies behind the denial of the prize, is: a whole history of organized dduplicity and
exploitation of the Negro jazz artist—the complicated tie-in between booking
agencies, the musicians’ unions, the recording companies, the music publishers,
the managers, the agents, the theater owners, the nightclub owners, the crooks,
shysters, and racketeers. The Negro
creative intellectuals have to look into the question of how it is possible for
a Negro jazz musician to walk the streets of large cities, jobless and
starving, while a record that he cut with a music company is selling well, both
in the United States and in Europe. They
have to examine why a Negro jazz musician can be forced to pay dues to unions
that get him no work, and that operate with the same discriminatory practices
as clubs, halls and theaters. The impact
of the cultural tradition of Afro-American folk music demands that the
racially-corrupt practices of the music-publishing field be investigated.[iv]
Certain areas of the problem posed by Cruse have
already been investigated by writers on jazz, who, as a whole, have become
increasingly more knowledgeable, sophisticated, and sympathetic to the Black
musician who works under these circumstances.
It must be said, however, that the overwhelming preponderance of this
writing has been little more than a litany of Black failure in the American
music business. Using as examples the
lives of such tragic figures as Lester Young, Charlie Parker, and Billie
Holiday, many have painted the jazz life as one of misery, squalor,
hopelessness, and self-destruction. I
propose to examine America’s cultural apparatus by focusing on the career of
the singularly successful Duke Ellington.
These writers have been almost
unanimous in proclaiming Ellington one of the supreme masters of
twentieth-century art. Many have written
along the lines set by Whitney Balliett in his expansive 1974 obituary:
During his fifty-year career, Ellington wrote and
recorded thousands of compositions,… maintained and shepherded his consummate
and inordinately expensive orchestra fifty-two weeks a year (it was his
palette, his sounding board, his heart) and repeatedly took his music up and
down the world. Like Jane Austen, he
ignored wars, politics, fashion and economics; music alone propelled him…
Ellington himself was as myriad as his music. It is doubtful whether more than a handful of
people knew him well, for, in his
genius fashion, he did not have the time or the patience to probe the human
condition. Indeed, he had, to an almost
immodest degree, all the means for
graciously keeping the world at bay.
These included a beautiful smile, a dapper, Technicolor way with
clothes, a courtly manner that became eloquent when he laid on one of his eighteenth-century
compliments, a deep, sonorous voice, a
limpid and elegant control of language,.. a handsome mien, and a
Navokovian mastery of parry and thrust.[v]
Such a portrayal is not
entirely accurate. As much as Ellington
himself liked to insist, in his later years, “I live in the realm of art,” it
is simply not true to say that he did, or could, ignore the hard facts of
politics and economics of his life and times.
Moreover, the assertion that “music alone propelled him” is denied by no
less intimate an acquaintance of Ellington’s than his son Mercer:
He had… prepared himself to be a representative of the
United States in the years to come. First, his potential was shown by consistency
and success in his particular field.
Second, he demonstrated the possibility of a black man being successful
in the United States over a period of time that went far back. Third, he had become so renowned that when
they sent him to Russia, the
Russians had already heard of him. It
wasn’t as though they got him out of nowhere and were springing a new name on
the Russians. And there were only a few
people they could do this with…
The choice… was well taken, because Ellington, as a
black man, represented the United States well in going from one country to
another. Having him represent the black
portion of the country did not offend black people themselves. They did not feel that this was a man
so unintelligent or so flashy that he did not do them justice. To use a cliché, he was a credit to his
race. And he had gone about ach9ieving
this position persistently… [He]
worked at this till he became established as an ideal representative
of his country.[vi]
This remark touches upon a problem that is central to the career of
Ellington, and perhaps most other jazzmen (at least until recent decades): however interesting or important the content
of Black music may be, the central m motif in0 its history and evolution lies
in the struggle of its creators to achieve a modicum of recognition, for themselves
as Black men and women, from a hostile white cultural establishment. In this aim no Black musician has
succeeded. For all the clamor raised by
jazz critics over many decades, “successes” like Ellington have no more won
recognition for the Black creative genius than the numberless failures who died
unknown, impaled on the horns of the American Dilemma.
This is not to say that the establishment had no use of Ellington and
other Black musicians. The true irony of
the denial of the Pulitzer Prize to Ellington is perhaps best savored by
remembering that, within a year his orchestra was sponsored by the U.S. State
Department at the First World Festival of the Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal, as
a “cultural weapon” to counter Yevgeni Yevtushenko of the Soviet Union.[vii] In the last analysis, this was the calling
for which Ellington had groomed himself over a lifetime in show business; he
was similarly rewarded with “cultural ambassadorships” to the Middle East in
1963, to Europe in 1966, 1969, and 1971, to Latin America in 1968 and 1971, and to the Far East
in 1964 and 1972.[viii]
In exchange, as it were, for his
aid to the sagging image of American imperialism since World War II, Ellington
received, in addition to the aforementioned State Department subsidies, an
impressive array of official tributes.
The Johnson administration, in particular, seemed to offer him carte blanche to White House cultural affairs, while Nixon hosted his seventieth
birthday party and presented him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Most of his other honors and awards, a
complete list of which is appended to Ellington’s 1973 memoir Music Is My Mistress[ix]
, were likewise bestowed in the
1960s and ‘70s.
Close examination of this list, however, reveals a rather curious
pattern to Ellington’s numerous tokens of recognition. With the single exception of an honorary
degree from the historically Black Wilberforce University in 1949, Ellington
was ignored by the Negro establishment until well after the beginning of the
flood of accolades from white institutions.
The NAACP’s Spingarn Medal was not awarded to Ellington until 1959, nor
did the Association honor him again until 1970.
Ellington did not receive his honorary degree from historically Black
Howard University until 1971, nearly five years after he had been recognized by
Yale, which went on to establish a
fellowship program in Ellington’s name.[x] So few were the tokens of recognition from
the Black establishment that one could justifiably call them exceptions proving
the rule that Ellington was at odds with the Black bourgeoisie, his own social
class from birth, virtually throughout his long career. I will explore the reasons for this rift at
some length, as they were several and complex, but one should remember that,
over the years when it had been fashionable for Black society to honor Neegro
“firsts,” the genius and achievement of Duke Ellington, a “first” many times over and quite possibly
the last of a magnitude we will live to witness, was recognized little and
late.
The attitude of the Black establishment toward Ellington is typified by
the obituary run in the Chicago
Defender, which terms him
America’s “most passionate and consummate syncopated music composer.” (The adjective “syncopated” must have been
chosen with some care; the editors thereby have eliminated Ellington from
consideration as a “serious” composer.)
The Defender, moreover, seemingly could find no better
way to honor Ellington than by a backhanded and superfluous comparison to the
European masters:
[Ellington was] the
Beethoven of jazz music.
For the first time
in modern religious history, the church welcomed symphonic projection of
syncopated jazz with the same reverence accorded to a Bach’s cantata or
Handel’s mass.
Ellington succeeded
in doing for American jazz what the Bohemian composer Anton Dvorak essayed to
do for the Negro spirituals in his celebrated New World Symphony. Both obtained their objective, which was to
extend the circumscribed limits of their genre into formal classical sphere for
a more sensitive, a more critical audience.[xi]
The obituary ends with the prediction (somewhat hopeful, one senses)
that “with his death, the era of syncopated jazz slips into the shadows of
history.”[xii]
Such an inept assessment of Ellington’s significance lends credence to
the diatribe leveled against the Black establishment by Cruse more than a
decade earlier:
The Afro-American
writer, actor, artist, etc., has succumbed almost completely to middle-class
values of art, living, and thinking. The
Afro-American middle class has no real love for art, racial or most cases a stepping-stone to middle class
living, which involves adopting the white artistic standards in the fields in
which they aspire, the better to cross the racial bridge. Hence racially conscious writers, actors,
directors, dancers, painters, etc., can expect no financial support from the
Afro-American middle class in furthering racial art in any form. These aspects—class and economic—of
Afro-American culture suggest an approach that has not been given serious
study.[xiii]
Fundamentally, then, the cultural dilemma faced by Ellington was no
different than any faced by any other Black creative intellectual of his
generation. Set apart from the class and
people from which he had originated, yet never fully accepted by the white
world in which he came to earn his living, Ellington created an image, a
persona, that was, in essence, neither white nor Black. His charm, flamboyance, sophisticated wit,
and ultimately his music all belonged to a world removed from the upheaval and
strife of America during the last century.
Certainly, he wished to avoid political issues, yet his very preeminence
as a cultural figure demanded that he become a political figure of sorts. Small wonder that he appeared an enigma or
paradox to even his closest associates.
Rex Stewart, who had played in Ellington’s orchestra for eleven years,
could discover nothing in the Ellington persona but contradiction piled on
contradiction.[xiv] In his own brief foreword to Stanley Dance’s The World of Duke Ellington, the maestro notes cryptically,
Stanley is well
informed about my activities and those of my associates. He has been part of our scene for a long
time, maybe longer than he cares to remember.
However, I am sure he has not revealed more than he ought!
He and his wife,
Helen, are the kind of people it is good to
have in your corner, the kind of people you don’t mind knowing your
secrets. In other words, they are
friends—and you don’t have to be careful with friends.[xv]
Ellington was indeed secretive about his private opinions, and the
researcher seeking to uncover them is forced to consult sources long-forgotten
and obscure. The better-known books and
articles about him, seemingly dazzled by the Ellington persona, rarely
penetrate behind the man’s carefully constructed public image. The first full-length Ellington biography,
written by Barry Ulanov in 1946, depicts its subject as something of a
crusading champion of Negro art; Ulanov’s ignorance of many important details
concerning Ellington’s private life leads him to several conclusions that are
patently false. Derek Jewell’s
book, published in 1977, while
better-informed and more up-to-date, fares little better. Stanley Dance’s 1970 collection of
interviews, already cited here, gives a more rounded picture but suffers from a
lack of focus. Only the biography
written by Mercer Ellington, written after his father’s death, allows Duke to
be seen off hiss pedestal. Perhaps the
biggest disappointment in this regard is Ellington’s Music Is My Mistress, an
immensely entertaining autobiography, laden with memorabilia, which, in
Mercer’s words,
…contains scarcely
an ill word about anyone. People who
expected him to spill the beans on the music business didn’t know him very
well. He didn’t forget those who had
cheated or abused him, but if he never entirely forgave, he didn’t let memories
sour his life.[xvi]
The task of presenting a more candid and realistic portrayal of
Ellington is perhaps made easier if we first examine the development of the
Black show-business milieu that nurtured him.
Lloyd Miller and James K. Skipper attempted to sketch a broad overview
of the evolution of Black music, following the scheme put forward by the
sociologist Louis Wirth, by characterizing it as a succession of definite
developmental stages. The first of
these, which is the concern of my first chapter, the two authors call “pluralistic,”
which originated in the post-Emancipation period and culminated in the classic
blues performances of Bessie Smith and others, usually women. The distinguishing characteristic of this
stage was that it involved Black musicians performing for an almost exclusively
Black audience.
The long run of Ellington’s career serves to illustrate the
“assimilationist” stage, characterized by “a desire to join the dominant
group.” This was the hallmark of jazz in
the 1920s and ‘30s, as a reflection of the broadened horizons of Blacks
following their great northward urban migrations following the First World
War. It signified as well a different
sort of cultural relationship between Blacks and the white majority. Two further stages in the evolution of Black
music, “secessionist” (1940s) and “militant” (1960s) came to the fore after
Ellington had become established and rose to his full stature as a cultural
figure[xvii].
My remaining chapters will divide Ellington’s career into periods,
along with the social, cultural, and economic context in which it
developed. The second chapter will
detail Ellington’s social origins and musical antecedents in Washington and New
York (1899-1923) and will highlight the great changes on the American cultural
scene during this period. The third
chapter examines Ellington’s rise to international acclaim under the aegis of
manager and publisher (1927-1939); in particular, I will investigate the
consolidation of the American entertainment industry by giant corporations in
the 1930s, the operation of Harlem’s Cotton Club and similar establishments,
and the significance of Ellington’s first European tour in 1933.
In the fourth chapter, the next, “Blanton-Webster” band (augmented by
the arrival of Billy Strayhorn, who would write and arrange for Ellington’s
band until his untimely death in 1966), regarded by many as Ellington’s
artistic peak, will be discussed in the context of the dislocations forced upon
American society in (World War Two. Of
interest here will be Ellington’s change of direction under the management of
the William Morris Agency, resulting the staging of Jump for Joy in 1941 and
the presentation of Black, Brown
and Beige at Carnegie Hall in New
York in 1943. The latter part of the
chapter deals with the decline of big-band entertainment and the concomitant
eclipse of the Ellington organization (1950-1955). Ellington’s estrangement from the Black
bourgeoisie and his difficulties due to the McCarthyite hysteria of the 1950s
will also be detailed here.
The final chapter offers an appraisal of Ellington’s contribution to
world culture and an assessment of the meaning of his late transformation into
an Honored Person.
[i]Harold
Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: William Morrow, 19670, p. 107.
[ii]
Christopher St. John Sprigg [Christopher
Caudwell], Studies and Further Studies in a Dying Culture (New
York: Monthly Review, 1971), p. 45.
[iii] Ibid.,
p. 47.
[v] Cruse,
Crisis, p. 110.
[vii] Whitney
Balliett, “The Talk of the Town,” The New Yorker, June 10, 1974, pp.
31-32.
[viii]
Mercer Ellington, with Stanley Dance, Duke Ellington in Person: An Intimate Memoir (Boston, Houghton
Mifflin, 1978), pp. 152-153.
[ix]Frank
Kofsky, Black Nationalism and the Revolution in Music (New York,
Pathfinder, 1970), p. 10.
[x] Duke
Ellington, Music Is My Mistress (Garden City NY, Doubleday, 1973).
[xii]Ibid.,
pp. 476 ff.
[xiii]
Interview with Mercer Ellington, Chicago, July 22, 1979.
[xiv]“Duke,
Master Composer,” Chicago Defender, May 28, 1974.
[xv]Harold
Cruse, Rebelliion or Revolution? (New York, Morrow, 1967), pp. 58-59.
[xvi]Rex
Stewart, Jazz Masters of the Thirties (New York: MacMillan, 1972).
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