INTRODUCTION
I was a child of the '60s and therefore came of age during
the golden age of rock and roll. Three
currents at once drew me to jazz at the age of eighteen: a school friend with a
little collection of jazz recordings; my brother, an aspiring jazz trumpeter;
and, in my freshman year at Indiana University, the tutelage of Dr. David N.
Baker (later to become director of the Smithsonian Institution's jazz
program). It was in David's class I
first heard "East St. Louis
Toodle-oo," and my term paper on jazz bassists
inevitably led me to Jimmy Blanton; hence, my first Ellington album was Things
Ain't What They Used to Be, a compilation of Ellington small groups led by
Johnny Hodges and Rex Stewart in 1940 and 1941.
David Baker
My early jazz education was backwards, in the sense that my
first jazz heroes were contemporary masters of "free jazz": Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, John Coltrane,
and Archie Shepp, among others.
I was fortunate, in 1972-- my senior year at Indiana
University-- to attend a performance on
campus of Duke Ellington and His Orchestra.
I didn't really know what I was hearing:
I spent the first half of the show anxiously checking my wristwatch and
left during intermission to make a political speech. This was, after all, the impending revolution
Graduate studies led me in 1979 to join Chicago's Duke Ellington Society
(dubbed the Ray Nance chapter). Another
component in my Ellington education was"Dick
Buckley's Archives of Jazz," on WBEZ radio
nightly. At some point around this time, Buckley also devoted four to
Ellington recordings alone for four hours each Sunday afternoon.
On one
particular show, Buckley played a taped interview with Benny Aasland in New York, from
what was to become the first of many international gatherings of the Duke Ellington
Study Group.
Dick
Buckley doing what he did best
In
1979 or 1980 I interviewed drummer Louis Bellson at his gig at Rick's Cafe
Americain, at the Lake Shore Holiday Inn. Unfortunately, I didn't
tape the interview, but I do remember his utter enthusiasm when he recalled his
time with Duke. When I asked how he fared in the segregated South while
touring with the band, he replied sincerely, but ludicrously, that he was able
to pass as an albino.
A few
months later, in the Chicago Jazz Festival in the late summer, of 1981, Bellson
returned to perform in a quartet with his fellow Ellingtonian, Clark Terry.
To WBEZ radio host Neil Tesser, neither had a bad word to say about
Ellington.
By
that time I was attending Northeastern Illinois University's Center for Inner
City Studies in Chicago to earn a Masters in Education degree. Within two
years, I wrote a 250-page tome, saddled with the cumbersome title, THE
ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY AS EXPLOITER OF MUSICAL TALENT, AS REFLECTED IN THE
CAREER OF DUKE ELLINGTON.
Why
Ellington? My first serious interest in jazz had been Bud Powell, as I
was earlier deep into bop. The explanation was given in the thesis
itself: "By and large,...it must be said that the overwhelming
preponderance of [jazz] writing has been little more than a history of Black
failure in the American music business.... What we propose to do here is
examine America's cultural apparatus by focusing on the career of a Black
'success': Duke Ellington." My approach was close to that
of Harvey Cohen's Duke Ellington's
America (2010) : to give as much
attention to the social and political background as I did to Ellington himself. (Although
Duke was to declare countless times, "I live in the realm of art.
I have no monetary interests," I have never believed that.
Unfortunately, every human being has monetary interests.)
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from the copy of Ulanov's book I bought at Toad Hall |
In the
1970s, there were few books about Ellington. I began with Barry
Ulanov's 1946 biography of Duke (of most value for its
discography of Ellington’s early recordings) , Mercer Ellington's memoir, Duke Ellington in Person , and a few years later Gunther
Schuller's Early Jazz to give myself
a foundation, especially with the discography Ulanov appends to his
biography. There was also a book from the UK called Jazz on
Record, which contained extensive commentary on Ellington and
reference to over a hundred Ellington recordings on vinyl LPs. After
I'd achieved a basic understanding of my subject, I knuckled down to the real
work, finding primary sources.: news clippings, advertisements in library
stacks and microfilm reels. There was no inkling of even a home computer
in the 1970s.
Into
the 1980s my searches took me far and wide. I remember several visits to
Toad Hall in Rockford, a short drive from Chicago, to buy Ellington records,
and I found plenty, almost all 78-rpm. I bought a collection of four
discs on the Columbia label called Ellington Special and
a splendid double-twelve inch masterpiece, the original issue of Black,
Brown and Beige on RCA-Victor. I paid a small fee to have
perhaps a dozen shellack discs, recording's I never heard, copied to
cassettes on a big variety of labels to open up new vistas of Duke to me.
.
The
Chicago chapter of the Duke Ellington Society (dubbed the "Ray Nance
chapter by our unofficial leader, Don Miller). As far as my
listening was concerned, Don was indispensable; he had a sizeable collection of
Ellington records and was happy to make cassette copies for me.
"All
for the love of Duke"
"I
have only two heroes: Duke Ellington and Thomas Jefferson."
lived
alone in the Hyde Park area.
1. getting acquainted; her 12-year old daughter.
2. "If you want to know Ellington, listen to the music; if
you want to know Strayhorn, listen to the words... longing and loss
3. visiting her in hospital (appendectomy?)
4. rehearsing "Lush Life" with her.
5. invited her to speak to my Honors class.
6. She has elected to devote the rest of her life to religion, but
her name still turns up on the Duke-LYM email list with pertinent comments and
announcements (she still keeps a hand in the Ellington game).
"Salute to Strayhorn": Interview with Bill Charlap and
Alyce Claerbaut
CA.
1979, I SPOKE WITH LOUIS BELLSON AT RICK'S CAFE AMERICAINE AT THE LAKE SHORE
HOLIDAY INN. GEORGE DUVIVIER WAS IN HIS TRIO. BELLSON'S
STORY ABOUT PASSING FOR "ALBINO" IN THE DEEP SOUTH.
1981
CHICAGO JAZZ FESTIVAL IN GRANT PARK: Bellson & Clark Terry were
interviewed after their performance (by Neil Tesser?)
**********************************************************************************
RETURN
TO CHICAGO, AUGUST 1982
Joe
Igo, Kenosha
John
Steiner, Kenosha
Tribune
obit: Howard Reich
John
Steiner, 91, widely regarded as the world's foremost authority on early Chicago
jazz, Died Saturday, June 3, 2001...
Mr.
Steiner, who was smitten with the music during the first great blossoming in
Chicago in the 1920s, amassed a unique personal collection of about 35,000
records plus sheet music, newspaper articles and related ephemera. The
collection will be housed in the Jazz Archive of the University of Chicago
Library... Born in Milwaukee and trained as a chemist at the University
of Wisconsin in Madison, Mr. Steiner nourished his emerging passion for jazz by
spending weekends in the nightspots of Chicago's South Side. Early on he
came to know key figures such as pianist Earl Hines and drummer Baby Dodds, and
befriended members of the fabled Austin High Gang (including cornetist Jimmy
McPartland and saxophonist Bud Freeman.
"He
would take the train down from Milwaukee or Madison and make it a weekend
in
Chicago,
absorb as much of the club scene as he could, then sleep in the train station,
recalled Richard Wang, professor of music at the University of Illinois at
Chicago.
"It
was through his contacts with so many musicians he was able to begin to build
his collection, and he was doing it in the 1930s, when most people were not
interested in this music and its history in Chicago," added Wang.
"Without
his research and appetite for Chicago music, we would be bereft information
upon which future histories of this music will be based. He was the
seminal figure in documenting the history of Chicago jazz."
Though
Mr. Steiner worked full time as a research chemist and, in the 1960s and '70s,
taught at UIC, he used his off-hours to document music in Chicago. In
1946, he dragged a portable recording machine to the Civic Opera House, climbed
the catwalk above the stage, dangled a microphone below and captured the DE
Orchestra on recordings that would not have existed without such efforts.
As
self-styled oral historian, he taped hundreds of hours of interviews, but the
exact contents of this will not be known for years, since U. of C. archivists
will have to catalog two truckloads of material.
"It's
a treasure-trove, said curator Gillespie, "but it's also a preservation
nightmare."
In the
1940s, Mr. Steiner promoted concerts featuring McPartland and Freeman, among
others, and with Hugh Davis started S&D Records to issue Chicago jazz
recordings. By leasing and, in 1949, purchasing the catalogue of the old
Paramount record label, Mr. Steiner was able to reissue historic recordings of
Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver, Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and Blind Lemon
Jefferson, among others.
Descriptive
summary of John Steiner Collection
471
boxes
contains
sheet music, articles, photographs, scrapbooks, correspondence, interviews,
ephemera, and publications
Steiner:
7/21/1908, Milwaukee - 6/3/2001, Milwaukee
at the
age of 12 he became the hat-check person at his father's music lodge in
Milwaukee
took
piano lessons at home and while at UWIS; also attended Axel Christianson's
music school
as a
teenager fixed his friends' radios and would hear a variety of music
his
aunt Juliana, who worked qat a music store, would bring home chipped
phonographs for him to listen
the
ODJB made an impression on Steiner early on
Steiner
was present at one of our Ellington Society gatherings when he gave me a
copy of Duke's "Jig Walk on an ancient-looking 78 rpm record; he held the
rights to that transcription of a piano roll from the 1920s. I recall
Dick Buckley being there, too, along with Henry Quarles, all the way from
Pewaukee, Wisconsin. Henry handed me a copy of an Index
to Music Is My Mistress, an eighty-two page
pamphlet by H. F. Huon, which was packed with useful information. I
wish it were still in print.
Within
a month of my sojourn in Southern California, along with other Chicagoans I
attended what turned out to be the second annual international Ellington
convention in Detroit (the first had been in New York the year prior). The
first Ellington experts I met were Brooks
Kerr and Jerry Valburn. Jerry was proud
to show me the Ellington logo he'd fashioned for one of his several record
labels.
Dick
Buckley interview of Benny Aasland at the 1981 conversation in NY
described
Aasland's
"chiseled features" description
remembers
his thick Swedish accent: "Echoes of the "Yoongle"
Benny relates
the enthusiasm for jazz all over the world
He
said that he enjoyed "the entire spectrum of Ellington," not just the
Cotton Club band, the Blanton-Webster band or the Newport band.
I knew next to nothing about Brooks Kerr, save that he was
reputed to be a walking encyclopedia of Ellingtonia. He was a few years
younger than I, but from the age of 28 was totally blind due to a degenerative
retinal disease and glaucoma. He learned to play piano by assigning
colors in his mind for each key. He studied formally at nearby Yale
University and the Foote School. For
a few years in the 1950s, he took private lessons from Jean Brown and a
few years later worked with Russell Regain New Haven. Starting in 1964,
he studied for eight years with Sanford Gold, at the Dalton School, the Manhattan School
of Music, and the Juilliard
School in New York. At points along the way, Kerr
studied jazz with pianists Lucky Roberts and Willie
"The Lion" Smith.
Following Ellington's death in 1974, Brooks recorded an
album with Sonny Greer on the Chiaroscuro label, Soda Fountain Rag, and now in 1982 he
honored my request for New World A-Comin' at the grand
piano in the hotel lobby. For his presentation the following afternoon,
however, he used his portable Cassio electronic keyboard. He entertained
us with stories and demonstrated a couple of rarely-heard. post-"Soda Fountain
Rag" Ellington composition, first one titled "Bitches Ball" (a
fragment of which appeared in the final movement of Black, Brown and
Beige), and with lyrics the self-explanatory "Whatcha Gonna Do
When the Bed Breaks Down." Following
these, he proceeded to demonstrate the ribald lyrics of "The Boy in the
Boat," whose cleaned-up successor was Fats
Waller's famous "Squeeze Me."
Washington,
DC, 1983
*
In
1984, the annual convention was held in Oldham, England. I couldn't make
that trip, but I caught a break when it moved to Chicago in May,1985. Willis
Conover, famed jazz d.j. for the Voice of America overseas, was present, as
was Gunther Schuller. He too had received a copy of my 1980
thesis, but he'd had no time to read it. Mark Tucker, just lately
out of the University of Michigan's college of music, talked about his
still-unpublished study, Early Ellington. (He was not
impressed by my attempt at "Black and Tan Fantasy" between sessions
on the piano at the conference dais.). John Steiner, along with
his Chicago cohorts, spoke to the assembly as well. But the most
interesting talk of all was that of Robert E. Johnson, the former
executive editor of Jet magazine.
Through
his career as a journalist, Johnson became a longtime and intimate associate of
Ellington, as close to Ellington as anyone outside his family could be.
When speaking to Johnson, Duke always addressed him as
"Ro-Bear," in the French manner). His presentation, "More
Conversations with Duke,"concerned Ellington's opinions on almost
everything: journalists in general, as a parent, on education, his band
personnel, consistency, religiosity; as a "libertarian," on race; as
a role model, and finally the way he was portrayed by Johnson Publishers the
parent company of Jet.
Eddie
Lambert, one of the UK's foremost Ellington experts, spoke the
same day. I had the pleasure of meeting him and his companion, Elaine
Norsworthy, between sessions. It had been Eddie Lambert's Ellington entry
in Jazz On Record that had given me
a great start collecting records, but he was surprised to hear that a
relatively short piece could have impressed a jazz enthusiast halfway around
the world. Eddie's presentation to the. convention concerned his findings
leading up to the publication of his Duke Ellington: A
Listener's Guide in 1992.
Then
it was my own turn to speak on the subject of Ellington's first visit to
Chicago in 1931. (The audience couldn't see my knees trembling at the
start, and they laughed at a joke I told while a reel of recording tape was
replaced.) I began with the need of a multi-dimensional look at Duke's
career and then proceeded with my account of Ellington's first visit to Chicago
in 1931, built of clippings from the local press.
Rutgers
University Newark, Institute of Jazz Studies, 1986
Author
and curator of the Institute, Dan Morgenstern, Martin Williams, one
of the world's most admired jazz writers. I don't remember much about
Morgenstern's conference presentation, I still remember and agree with his
opinion that the music for Anatomy of a Murder was
almost too good for the movie.
presentation on Jump for Joy
Willard
herself reported the Ellington Conference 2016 in DownBeat magazine.
Willard
became the first woman to receive the
Klause
Stratemann's. Duke Ellington: Day by Day and Film by Film was
published in 1999.
3. Sjef Hoefsmidt
DEMS memorial to Eddie Lambert and Claus Stratemann
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Benny Aasland |
VI.
The 1990s forward
phone
call to Joya Sherrill in New York; her own lyrics to "Take the 'A'
Train." We agreed that Duke Ellington was "larger than
life."
"The Sound of
Jazz"
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 c
 |
| from the copy of Ulanov's book I bought at Toad Hall |
DEMS memorial to Eddie Lambert and Claus Stratemann
 |
| Benny Aasland |
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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