INTRODUCTION

“Fate is being kind to me.  Fate doesn’t want me to be too famous too young.”

--Duke Ellington, May 1, 1965[i]

 

According to jazz writer and producer Nat Hentoff, concerning the non-awarding of a Pulitzer Prize in music for the year 1965, "Having considered no composer worthy of this year's prize, the secret three-man jury had recommended to the advisory board that a special citation be awarded Duke Ellington for the vitality and originality of his total productivity through nearly four decades.  The recommendation was rejected.  In the resultant dissonance, two members of the by then not so secret jury (Winthrop Sargeant and Robert Eyer) resigned and raucous fanfares were exchanged between the mutinous jury and the board."

"Sometime later,” Hentoff continued, “still rolling through the land in a series of one-nighters, Ellington was reflecting on fate and prizes...  'What else could I have said?' the Duke asked rhetorically.  'In the first place, I never do give any thought to prizes.  I work and I write.  And that's it.  My reward is hearing what I've done, and unlike most composers, I can hear it immediately.  That's why I keep these expensive gentlemen with me.'"  He went on to complain, "Jazz [is] like the kind of man you wouldn't want your daughter to associate with."

Two years later the critic Harold Cruse, in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, opened his discussion of “this same old, ethnic-group war for cultural supremacy in American music” by citing the same circumstance.  This rejection of a man who for over forty years had been “America’s greatest exponent of orchestrated jazz music and composition,” 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.”[ii]

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.[iii]  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, 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.’”[iv]

 

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 duplicity 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.[v]

 

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.

 

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 Nabokovian mastery of parry and thrust.[vi]

Such a portrayal is not entirely accurate.  As much as Ellington himself liked to insist, especially in his later years, that he had no monetary interests and lived 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 achieving this position persistently… [He] worked at this till he became established as an ideal representative of his country.[vii]

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 motif in 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 truly 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.[viii]  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.[ix]

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[x] , 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 in Washington, his own birthplace, until 1971, nearly five years after he had been recognized by Yale, which went on to establish  a fellowship program in Ellington’s name.[xi]  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 Negro “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 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.[xii]

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.”[xiii]

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 otherwise.  When Negro individuals enter the arts, particularly the performing arts, art becomes in 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.[xiv]

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 far 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.[xv]  In his own brief foreword to Stanley Dance’s The World of Duke Ellington, the maestro himself 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  

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.[xvi]

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 false conclusions.  The book was written without Ellington’s knowledge or consent, but it does manage to tell Ellington’s story up through the war years.

No other biography or serious study of Ellington appeared until the “Giants of Jazz” series in the UK produced a slim volume by G. E. Lambert on Duke Ellington in 1958, and another twelve years elapsed before the publication of The World of Duke Ellington, Stanley Dance’s 1970 collection of interviews, which remains an important resource.

Though it was written chiefly for its advance on royalties, Duke Ellington’s own 1973 autobiography (cleverly put together by Dance from fragments by Ellington written in hotel rooms, restaurants and all other places he was able to sit down), Music Is My Mistress, is an essential document, immensely entertaining and laden with memorabilia, which, in Duke’s son 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.[xvii]

The British critic Derek Jewell published an Ellington biography in 1977, but only the account written by Mercer Ellington himself, published the following year, allows Duke to be seen off his pedestal and remains essential reading.

Books about Ellington in the 1980s were few and far between.  One interesting memoir was Barney Bigard’s, With Louis and the Duke:  The Autobiography of a Jazz Clarinettist (OUP, 1986, six years after Bigard’s death)  Lyricist Don George’s Sweet Man:  The Real Duke Ellington (1981), however, fails to disclose his working relationship with Elllington on such popular standards as “I’m Beginning to See the Light” and more, but instead turns into an account of Duke’s bedroom adventures.  The highly anticipated biography by James Lincoln Collier, Duke Ellington (1989), drawn from secondary sources and perhaps the first to promulgate the opinion that, following its so-called Blanton-Webster period in the early 1940s, Ellington’s orchestra and creativity went into a steep decline.  Sadly, this idea has become received wisdom by pundits thereafter.

The trickle of books about Ellington grew into a flood at the approach of Ellington’s centennial in 1999.  Foremost was Mark Tucker’s groundbreaking Ellington:  The Early Years (1991), followed by his editorship of the indispensable The Duke Ellington Reader in 1993.  John Edward Hasse’s, Beyond Category:  The Life and Genius of Duke Ellington (1995) drew on the material available from the Smithsonian Institution.  Although many other books were directed toward musicians exclusively.  One happy exception was Eddie Lambert’s Duke Ellington:  A Listener’s Guide (1998), a volume of over four hundred pages of learned commentary.

Since the turn of the century, books about Duke intended for the general reader have been sporadic but sure.   A. H. Lawrence’s Duke Ellington and His World:  A Biography (2001) avails itself of interview with Ellington’s surviving family and associates.  Terry Teachout’s much-heralded Ellington biography (2014)sadly turned out to be a a hatchet job along the lines of James Lincoln Collier’s twenty-five years previously.

The best Ellington biography post-centennial was Harvey G. Cohen’s masterful Duke Ellington’s America (2010), which puts equal emphasis upon Ellington and the changing social, political, and technological background against which he appeared.  At present, there are at least three new books devoted to Ellington available, which is a very good thing.

Ellington’s greatest gift to us, his recordings, did not cease to appear upon the Maestro’s death.  On the contrary, there have appeared posthumously recordings that probably were produced during his lifetime, and even now “new” Ellington recordings continue to come forth.

The present volume divides Ellington’s career into periods, along with the social, cultural, and economic context in which it developed, which is itself straightforward enough, but at this point the origins and development of this book, a kaleidoscopic look at Duke Ellington’s career and its significance.  Chapters 1, 2, 4, 10, 13 and 14—all greatly updated—constitute the contents of a long-ago thesis with the ponderous, but accurate title The Entertainment Industry as Exploiter of Black Musical Talent, as Reflected in the Career of Duke Ellington.  More specifically, Chapter 1 highlights the great changes on the American cultural scene between 1899 and 1923.    Chapter 2 examines Ellington’s beginnings and early career, while the fourth chapter probes his rise to international acclaim under the aegis of manager and publisher Irving Mills (1927-1939).  In particular, I 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 tenth chapter the so-called Blanton-Webster band of the early 1940s, coupled with the arrival of composer/ arranger Billy Strayhorn, regarded by many as Ellington’s artistic peak, is 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.  Chapter 13 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.  His remarkable comeback, beginning with the orchestra’s legendary performance at the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival and continuing through the 1960s is the subject of Chapter 14, along with my own  appraisal of Ellington’s contribution to world culture and an assessment of the meaning of his late transformation into an Honored Person.

Chapters 6, 11, 12 and 16 are all previously published articles, written between 1987 and 2023.  A third component, of interviews, formal presentations, and unpublished manuscripts, is represented by chapters 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 15 and 17.  Finally, beginning at the Preface, is a continuing account of my own pursuit of the Maestro and the people and places I encountered along the way.

 

 

 

 

 

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[i] Nat Hentoff, “This Cat Needs No Pulitzer Prize.” New York Times Magazine, September 12, 1965, pp. 64-66.

[ii]Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York:  William Morrow, 19670, p. 107.

[iii] Christopher St. John Sprigg [Christopher Caudwell], Studies and Further Studies in a Dying Culture (New York:  Monthly Review, 1971), p. 45.

[iv] Ibid., p. 47.

Cruse, Crisis, p. 110.

 

[vi] Cruse, Crisis, p. 110.

 

[viii] Whitney Balliett, “The Talk of the Town,” The New Yorker, June 10, 1974, pp. 31-32.

[ix] Mercer Ellington, with Stanley Dance, Duke Ellington in Person:  An Intimate Memoir (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1978), pp. 152-153.

[x]Frank Kofsky, Black Nationalism and the Revolution in Music (New York, Pathfinder, 1970), p. 10.

[xi] Duke Ellington, Music Is My Mistress (Garden City NY, Doubleday, 1973).

 

[xiii]Ibid., pp. 476 ff.

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

[xv]“Duke, Master Composer,” Chicago Defender, May 28, 1974.

[xvi]Harold Cruse, Rebellion or Revolution? (New York, Morrow, 1967), pp. 58-59.

[xvii]Rex Stewart, Jazz Masters of the Thirties (New York:  MacMillan, 1972).