IV. GOLDEN AGE AND AFTERMATH
WAR YEARS
The years 1939-1944 are widely regarded to represent the
pinnacle of Duke Ellington’s artistic achievement, and there is much to justify
this claim. The majority of the 1940
orchestra—Sonny Greer, Fred Guy, Joe Nanton, Juan Tizol, Harry Carney, Johnny
Hodges, Barney Bigard and Otto Hardwick—had been with Ellington for more than a
decade. Taken together as an ensemble,
as section players, and as individual soloists, this superb musical aggregation
represented the epitome of American musical talent. As the vehicle for Ellington’s musical
imagination, they had long been a formidable unit.
Changes in personnel over the intervening years had been
slight. Trombonist Larence Brown was
added in 1932; Rex Stewart, a renowned cornetist from Henderson’s band,
replaced Freddie Jenkins in 1934, while Wallace Jones took Arthur Whetsol’s
position as lead trumpet in 1937. The
most notable additions were Ben Webster (in the orchestra from l940 until 1943,
and again from 1948 to 1949), who, as the fifth member of the reed section,
established the tenor saxophone tradition in the Ellington orchestra; and bassist
Jimmy Blanton (from late 1939 until 1941, shortly before his death at the age
of twenty-one), who revolutionized the use of his instrument in jazz.
Most significantly, it was in 1939 that Ellington began his
association with Billy Strayhorn, whom he later described as “my right arm, my
left arm, all the eyes in the back of my head, my brainwaves in his head, and
his in mine.”[1]
Strayhorn was first engaged by Ellington as a writer of
lyrics, but after the orchestra’s return from its second European tour, in the
summer of 1939, he began to exhibit a prodigious talent for arranging and
composition, both alone and in collaboration with Ellington. Particularly during the years 1940 and 1941,
when ASCAP material was banned from the airwaves, Ellington was forced to rely
heavily on the work of Strayhorn (“Take the ‘A’ Train,” “Chelsea Bridge,” “Day
Dream,” etc.), along with that of Tizol and Mercer Ellington (“Things Ain’t
What They Used to Be”). Until
Strayhorn’s death, nearly thirty years later, the emotional affinity
between the two men was the basis of
perhaps the most remarkable partnership in jazz, one which had a large impact
on the range and scope of the Ellington orchestra.
Nineteen-forty was also the year of a major defection from
the Ellington organization, that of trumpeter Cootie Williams, who left to join
Benny Goodman’s orchestra late in that year.
In a 1967 interview, Williams explained:
I didn’t just jump up and
leave—I wouldn’t do that. Duke knew
about it and helped set everything up. He
got me more money, and I told him I’d be back in one year’s time. If Duke didn’t want it to be know like it
was, it wasn’t my place to tell. But
that Goodman band—I loved it.[2]
When, as agreed, Williams contacted Ellington in a year’s
time; Ellington advised him to take advantage of his name-exposure with Goodman
and to front his own band (which Williams did successfully for many years. He finally returned to the Duke Ellington
Orchestra inn 1962.) In the meantime, in
November, 1940, Ellington hired the uniquely talented musician and showman Ray
Nance from Chicago whose first night playing with the Ellington band was on
November 7, in Fargo, North Dakota, which coincidentally was a performance
recorded by a pair of amateur enthusiasts.
Until its release decades later, the Fargo recording became something
like the Holy Grail of jazz.
Judging by its recorded output on the Victor label from 1940
until the recording ban enforced by the American Federation of Musicians in
mid-1942, the Ellington orchestra of the early war years represented an
artistic standard unprecedented and unsurpassed in all American music. For the same period, however, accounts of
Ellington’s financial success vary somewhat.
One of them, citing Ellington’s habit of long delays in providing lead
sheets of his compositions to Robbins, with the consequent drop of sheet-music
royalties, estimates the band’s take at $2,500 a week, with an annual
box-office gross of around $200,000, netting Ellington no more than $30,000 a
year, which he quickly spent.[3] Of course, when these figures are set against
the earnings of the most popular white orchestras of the period (Kay Kyser
grossed some $1,200,000, while Glenn Miller made in the neighborhood of
$1,000,000), they sho0w how far Ellington was from the top echelons of show
business.
Mercer Ellington estimates the orchestra’s 1940 gross much
higher, at more than $1,000,000, but confirms the financial gap between it and
the earnings of popular white orchestras:
Bands like Vaughan Monroe’s were
probably grossing five times as much, and who knows or can say what was
happening with Benny Goodman? A
tremendous amount of money was being made by the big bands, and despite Pop’s
memory of the 1929 crash and other fiascoes, it looked as though everything was
on the up and up. Everything was going
wonderfully in the early ‘forties, so why worry about tomorrow?[4]
Richard
Boyer, who authored a series of in-depth articles on Ellington (“The Hot Bach”[5])
for The New Yorker in 1944, provided a more detailed picture of the
band’s income and expenses. According to
Boyer, the band earned nearly $1,000,000 over its twenty-year period of
existence, of which half came from royalties paid on its sale of twenty million
records, and another fourth from sheet-music royalties. For one-night engagements, Ellington
reportedly collected between $1,250 and $2,000, as much as $10,000 a week, “but
the band’s payroll and expenses are so heavy that he is fortunate if he breaks
even on the road. Sidemen in the
orchestra received between $125 and $185 a week, plus expenses; Ellington himself drew 000. William Mittler, who handled his financial
affairs. Much of Ellington’s financial
bind, wrote Boyer, was caused by his apparent lack of concern about money: “He
spends money lavishly, supports a good many hangers-on, lends money frequently,
gets it back infrequently, and is usually broke when pay day rolls around.”
In 1939, according to the same source, Ellington took in
$160,000, but the band was able only to break even. In 1940 he grossed $185,000, but the payroll
increased from $25,000 to $30,000. In
1941 he took in only $135,000 and ended up with a loss of $1,500. The following year saw an increase in the
band’s gross to $210,000, but Ellington netted only $4,000. During a six-month engagement at New York’s
Hurricane Club in 1943, Ellington lost $18,000, “but he figured it was a good
investment because of the Broadway address and the free radio time and
publicity.”
Whatever his financial disadvantages may have been, immediately
upon signing with the William Morris Agency Ellington continued to be booked in
prestige locations, like the Ritz Calton Roof in Boston and Chicago’s Hotel
Sherman. During the rather brief
existence of the Morris Agency’s band department, and later with Joe Glaser’s
Associated Booking Corporation, Ellington was managed by Cress Courtney, who
proved as resourceful as Ned Williams had been in boosting Ellington as a prestige
performer and in preserving the dignity of his name. William Morris, Jr., came to take a special
interest in this aspect of his career, and his efforts paved the way for the
orchestra’s 1943 debut at Carnegie Hall.
Buoyed by the optimism and enthusiasm engendered by his new
business arrangement, Ellington set out in 1941 to realize one of his fondest
ambitions, the writing of a successful Broadway musical. His efforts resulted in the score for Jump
for Joy, which opened at the Mayan Theatre in Culver City, California, in
June, 1941. The show, billed as a
“Sun-Tanned Revue-sical,” had as its major theme the demolition of racial
stereotypes. As Ellington explained,
In 1941 a team of scholarly Hollywood
writers decided to attempt to correct the race situation in the U.S.A. through
a form of theatrical propaganda. This
culminated in meetings at which the decision was made to do Jump for Joy,
a show that would take Uncle Tom out of the theatre, eliminate the stereotyped
image that had been exploited by Hollywood and Broadway, and say things that
would make the audience think. The
original script had Uncle Tom on his death bed with all his children dancing
around him singing, “He lived to a ripe old age. Let him go, God bless him!” There was a Hollywood producer on one side of
the bed and a Broadway producer on the other side, and both were trying to keep
him alive by injecting adrenalin into his arms![6]
For its time, such a production was a venture of the most
radical sort imaginable. The Show’s cast
and financial backers, in addition to being “top-bracket film people,” included
a number of figures who were prominent in the Hollywood left, chiefly the
Communist Party. Since most whites in
those days who were at all involved in the political defense of Black rights
were considered radicals ipso facto, it is not surprising that Ellington
would have been associated with Communists in a project as outspoken as Jump
for Joy. As we have seen,
Ellington’s sporadic involvement with the radical left had begun nearly a
decade earlier, and in the 1940s this relationship would culminate in the most
overtly political phase of his career. By
the end of that decade, as we shall further see, scores of his associates would
wind up on the show-business blacklist and before congressional inquisitors.
Jump for Joy, of course, was theatrical
dynamite. Its audience included “the
most celebrated Hollywoodians, middle class ofays, the sweet-and-low,
scuffling-type Negroes, and dicty Negroes as well… The Negroes always left proudly, with their
chests sticking out.”[7] Naturally, there were some who were not
pleased; Mercer Ellington recalled that there were “something like five ‘or six
bomb threats from people who threatened to do something to or harm people in
the show.”[8] As a result, the show’s material came to be a
sort of compromise, as writers and members of the cast revised it nightly. One of the numbers dropped was the opening of
the second act, with the intriguing title “I’ve Got a Passport from Georgia
(and I’m Going to the U.S.A.)” The
attempt was made to accommodate the sensibilities and inhibitions of all who
were involved in the production, as Ellington explains:
Anyone who attended those
backstage meetings for twelve weeks got a full college education in social
significance.[9]
The importance of Jump for Joy was
summarized by Avanelle Lewis Harris, a veteran of the theater and a member of
the show’s original cast:
The most exciting experience of
my life in the theatre was the opportunity to be a member of the cast in the
musical Jump for Joy. I did not
know how far ahead of its time it was until I read the script. It was the first legitimate show to be
created and produced on the West Coast. The
importance of its message caused a wave of enthusiasm throughout the cast,
which was well-aware of its controversial impact. Everything, every setting, every note of
music, every lyric, meant something. All
the sketches had a message for the world.
Tragedy was that the world was not ready for Jump for Joy.
How I remember the opening— “The
Sun-Tanned Tenth of the nation!” And the
finale of the first act was “Uncle Tom’s Cabin Is a Drive-in Now”:
There used to be a chicken shack
in Caroline
But now they’ve moved it up to
Hollywood and Vine;
They paid off the
mortgage—nobody knows how—
And Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a
drive-in now”[10]
Jump for Joy, playing to standing-room-only crowds,
was a great local success, yet it never reached Broadway, as its producers had
hoped; the show closed after only three months in Los Angeles (A 1958
production, with revamped songs and starring Barbara McNair, was staged
unsuccessfully in Miami Beach).
These facts
are hard to reconcile in the light of frequent claims over the years that the
show was “too advanced” and that the public was “not ready” for what it had to
say. The production’s popularity gives ‘
There were lines at the box
office when the show closed don because of panic in the company. The different people who contributed their
services to the show all owned a part of it and were to be paid off at a later
date. Suddenly the musicians’ union
demanded additional bonds to ensure payment of their people. The backers had their lawyers attach the box
office, so the flow of money that could have kept the show going was cut off
and everybody suffered.[11]
Indeed, there was cause to question the motives of the
American Federation of Musicians in this instance. Under the presidency of James C. Petrillo,
the union declared a long strike against the entire recording industry; the
only studio recordings permitted between August 1942 and November 1944 were
transcriptions recorded for the radio networks only, and V-Discs for the Armed
Forces.
In a sense, the American public generally “not ready” for
such a message during the war years. The
tenor of the times indicates that African Americans were more than ready to do
away with their inferior social status. This was still the era of segregated blood
banks, on the battle-front and the home front as well. As Blacks were widely considered “loyalty”
risks, the government lost few opportunities to harass the Negro press and to
spread poisonous propaganda. These were
years of lynchings in the South and riots in the North and on military posts. White liberals largely abandoned the Black
cause, with predictions of civil war if federal troops were used to end
segregation.
Ellington, perhaps because he was always inclined to couch
his social criticism in the most palatable form (“I think a statement of social
protest in the theatre should be made without saying it, and this calls for the
real craftsman”), was not long discouraged.
As he explained, “The feeling of responsibility that Jump for Joy had
aroused sustained itself, and one day William Morris, Jr., said, “I want you to
write a long work, and let’s do it in Carnegie Hall.”[12]
This opportunity was to be the fulfillment of Ellington’s
desire, expressed since the mid-1930s, to present a musical panorama of the
American Negro. The five-part suite he
had envisioned, tentatively titled Boola, Black. Fragments of his conception also had
appeared in some of his shorter compositions, such as “Ko-Ko” in 1940. With barely a month to spare, Ellington began
work in December, 1942, on the score of Black, Brown and Beige,
subtitled A Tone Parallel to the History of the American Negro.
With the single exception of Benny Goodman’s 1938 concert,
Ellington’s premiere on January 23, 1943, was the first genuine jazz concert to
play Carnegie Hall. The significance of
the occasion, of course, was contribution of Black Americans), yet even so, a
charitable pretext was necessary to secure the hall: all proceeds were to go to
the Russian War Relief.
The concert was preceded by months of publicity,
particularly in the Negro press, which culminated in the declaration of “Duke
Ellington Week,” January 17 through January 23, the night of Ellington’s
premiere. The New York Age
reported on a flurry of Ellington broadcasts and record programs, and enthused
over the “complete cooperation of the entertainment business, including both
[Ellington’s] sepia and white brother musicians.”[13] Carnegie Hall was “virtually sold out… with a
last-minute rush for the few seats which remain,” and the Age circulated
a rumor that Edward, the Duke of Windsor, whose acquaintance Ellington had made
in 1933, would be in attendance among the celebrities.
Twenty-five
celebrities, among the many who attended the performance, contributed $100 each
for special box seats. They included
Marian Anderson, Count Basie, Eric Bernay (Music Room), Saul Bornstein (Irving
Berlin, Inc., Mrs. James Cromwell, Max Dreyfuss (Chappell Music Co.), Moe Gale,
Mr. and Mrs. Benny Goodman, John Hammond, Daniel James (Ellington’s brother-in
law, Tempo Co.), Leonard Joy (RCA Victor Records), Jack and David Kapp (Decca
Records, Inc.), Jimmie Lunceford, Jack Mills (Mills Music, Inc.), Edward H.
Morris (Morris Music, Inc.), Richard F Murray (Paramount Music Corp.), Harold
Oxley, Lawrence Richmond (Music Dealers Service), Jack Robbins (Robbins Music
Corp.), Bob Russell and Herman Starr (Music Publishers’ Holding Corp.).[14]
Jazz critic Leonard Feather,
who at that time played a small role in Ellington’s concert preparations,
maintains that
It is not easy, decades
later, to summon the precise sense of fulfillment this night represented for
all of us who had long worshipped the Ellington genius. At last he was to be recognized as the giant
we had long known him to be: not in a
Harlem cabaret playing song scores, not in a Broadway theater teamed with pop
singers, nor in a ballroom satisfying dancers, but on America’s most renowned
concert stage, offering a program of his short instrumental masterworks and
introducing his empyrean extended concert composition.[15]And
The symbolic significance of the occasion could not be
missed. The platform upon which
Ellington was to expound his message was to be Carnegie Hall, the heretofore
sacred bastion of Western culture. His
audience was to be the elite of “serious” music, and his sponsors the liberals
of the racist “popular” music industry. From
the establishment’s point of view, Ellington was to be not only a symbol of
Black America’s “arrival,” but a token also of wartime unity and racial accord.
As the concert unfolded, it is necessary to imagine
Ellington lecturing his tuxedoed audience on the fundamentals of Black
culture. Introducing the “Black” segment
of Black, Brown and Beige, he announced to the arbiters of America’s
cultural taste,
Now comes our latest attempt, probably our
most serious attempt, and definitely our longest composition. However, in mentioning the length of Black,
Brown and Beige, we would like to say that this is a parallel to the history
of the American Negro, and of course it tells a long story. I hope that you will also take into
consideration the fact that in telling the story of the work song, for
instance, which is the first theme, we use it in its many forms. The work song is sung while you work, and of
course there’s a place for the song and then there’s a place to grunt, you
know, in the impact of your work.
And, of course, after that comes the spiritual
theme, which is the second theme of the first movement. And today we find that the two are very
closely related, and so that naturally necessitates developing the two and
showing their close relationship.[16]
Lest his hearers fail to remember the purpose of the
event, Ellington reminded them, in his remarks to “Beige,”
The first theme of our
third movement is the inculcation, or the veneer that we chip off as we get
closer and find that all these people who making all this noise and responding
to the tom-toms are only a few people making a living. They’re backed, really, by people who—many
don’t have enough to eat or a place to sleep, but work hard and see that their
children are in school. The Negro is
rich in education, and it develops up until we find ourselves today struggling
for solidarity, but just as we’re about to get our teeth into it, our country’s
at war again. And, as before, we of
course find that the Black, Brown and Beige are right in there for the Red,
White and Blue. (At dress rehearsal at Rye, New York, High School, the
previous evening, Ellington was dissuaded from using a set of lyrics expressing
this sentiment.) [17]
The Carnegie ritual was the perfect apotheosis of the
liberal desire for Black social and cultural equality. After the concert’s intermission, actor
Dennis Morgan presented Ellington with a plaque bearing the names of thirty-two
musicians “from both sides of the musical tracks, who were anxious to break
down every line of musical snobbery.”[18] The list of illustrious names included
Leopold Stokowski, William Grant Still, Earl Hines, Marian Anderson, Paul
Robeson, Count Basie, Fritz Reiner, Eugene Ormandy, Morton Gould, Kurt Weill,
Aaron Copland, Paul Whiteman, Benny Goodman, Jerome Kern, Cab Calloway, Artie
Shaw and Max Steiner.
The reviews that ensued provided a fitting postscript
to this self-conscious exercise in social significance. The Negro press, as might be expected, waxed
ecstatic. Typical of its fervor was the
notice which appeared in the New York Age:
It was a great night for
Ellington, all agreed. That was the opinion in the press box, in the smoking
rooms and on the Dress Circle during intermission. But it was a greater night for Negroes in
America, for Edward Kennedy Ellington, who once entertained the customers in
Washington on a broken down piano… did a job for his race of which any race
might be proud. For three hours there
had been no ugly prejudice, no dividing line or second class citizenship, but
just the warm, human kinship, the understanding tribute given by hundreds of
people who were hearing the beauty conceived by a genius. And in “Black, Brown and Beige,” Duke
Ellington, recognized the world over, had used that genius to tell the world
that more than his fame, more than his wealth—is his consciousness that he is
proud to belong to a great race. The
Talmadges and the Bilboes, the Hitlers and Hirohitos wouldn’t have liked it one
bit.[19]
The second factor in this social equation was supplied
by the professional arbiters of “serious music,” who, by and large, continued
to look down their noses at Ellington’s temerity. Some of their commentary was downright
vicious. Douglas Watt opined in the Daily
News that “the concert, if that’s what you call it…
[showed that] such a form of composition is entirely out of Ellington’s
ken.”[20] Paul Bowles, classical music critic for the
Herald-Tribune, observed, “Nothing emerged but
a gaudy potpourri of tutti dance passages and solo virtuoso work,” and piously
declared that “the whole attempt to fuse jazz as a form with art music should
be discouraged.”[21] John Briggs of the Post sadly shook
his head: “Mr. Ellington had set himself a lofty goal, and with the best of
intentions he did not achieve it.”[22]
As early as 1934, Constant Lambert had pigeonholed
Ellington as “definitely a petit maître…
But that, after all, is considerably more than many people thought
either jazz of the coloured race would produce.”[23] Much of the criticism leveled at Ellington
tended to resurrect the back-handed compliment that Duke Ellington was a
talented miniaturist, a jazz composer who lacked the ability to create works of
concert length. Perhaps the solitary
exception to this way of thinking came from Dr. J.T.H. Mize, music director at
Rye High School, who championed Ellington in the pages of Orchestra World
and The Musician:
It was interesting to note
the reactions of the metropolitan critics.
The majority of them hit a new low in musical intelligence and critical
acumen. At least three of them might as
well have written their reviews in bed before the concert. Who do you think is interested in their
obvious prejudices? But that was not to
be expected of the dallying critics of the dailies…
The history of first
impressions is a notoriously dismal one, as witness the critics’ reaction to
first performances of Beethoven’s Eroica, Rosini’s Barber,
Tschaikowsky’s First Piano Concerto, Debussy’s La Mer, and Cesar
Franck’s Symphony. As one who
heard [Black, Brown and Beige] eight or ten times in rehearsal, and at
its “world premiere” at the Rye High School on the night before the Carnegie
Hall performance, I can say that with each hearing it assumed greater
significance, and I deem it the finest thing yet done in American music.[24]
Black, Brown and Beige received praise from
Henry Simon in PM, Irving Kolodin, Billboard and Variety
(“ELLINGTON, AT B.O. AND MUSICALLY, NIFTILY IN GROOVE AT CARNEGIE HALL
CONCERT”). The jazz press, Down Beat
and Metronome, was also sympathetic, but here too there was some
controversy, centered chiefly around a salvo fired by John Hammond in the People’s
Voice. In an article titled “Hammond
says Duke Is Deserting Jazz Music,” the critic confessed having discovered
“some penetrating wit and marvelous tunes” in Black, Brown and Beige,
but concluded that “Duke has neither the training nor the ability to weave them
together into a cohesive whole.”[25]
Not until the arrival of
bebop a few years later would the jazz press be so rife with animosity. Leonard Feather recalled that Hammond’s
remarks “led to a series of acrimonious exchanges in print between John and me,
in which I was as guilty of bias and poor taste as I had found him to be in
jumping to hasty conclusions in defending Duke and denouncing Hammond as I had
found him to be in jumping to hasty conclusions after a single hearing.[26] Of the arrogance of the establishment critics
a Metronome editorial (probably written by Barry Ulanov) fulminated,
Why does the daily press permit
writers to write on subjects they know nothing about, and then print those
writings as authentic criticism?... No
wonder the general public gets the wrong impression about jazz and its
musicians… The majority of the critics
wrote about the concert as if it were something way below their dignity. They sympathized little and understood
less. Jazz once again took a beating…
and… will continue to take a beating as long as such reactionaries continue to
pour forth such stupid, intolerable drivel.[27]
The true social significance
of Ellington’s Carnegie Hall debut, which demonstrated in a dramatic was the
changes in direction his career was taking, lay in the terms of an implied
exchange between the Black musician attempting to redefine the function of his
art and the cultural establishment, which found it expedient during the war to
promulgate the myth of racial equality in America. From this time forward, Ellington was to
occupy a position unique among Black show-business performers in trade, as it
were, for his willingness to put himself at the disposal of government
propaganda campaigns.
At the same time, the
critical reaction to Black, Brown and Beige indicated that the official
recognition given Ellington by one hand of the almost unanimously, it seemed to
render the verdict that Black music was to remain a “popular” art, fit only for
consumption by the untutored masses. The
commercial entertainment industry, meanwhile, had no tolerance for a music
which sought to escape the restrictions imposed by cabarets, dance halls and
the hit parade. Professor James L. Mack
summarized this dilemma succinctly:
Not only with reference to Black
musicians, but White ones also, the jazz musician lost the principle of what
his role was. He was an
entertainer. He descended not from the
great masses of the past, like all real musicians, but from the court
jesters. The more he started to ignore
this role and to look upon the music as a vehicle by which he expressed his
talent, the less he was appreciated. We
saw this in the late 30’s and early 40’s.
We came to a point where even the greatest jazz artist couldn’t play at
normal clubs because there was less and less of the entertainment value.[28]
It would be difficult, in
retrospect, to listen to Black, Brown and Beige, the subject of all this
controversy, without concluding that it was one of Ellington’s greatest
achievements and indeed, that it constitutes a landmark in twentieth-century
art. As it happened, however, after only
two concert performances one week apart in January, Black, Brown and Beige
entered its long period of dormancy. Following
the recording ban in 1944, Victor released recorded excerpts from the suite on
four twelve-inch discs: “Work Song,” “Come Sunday,” “The Blues,” and “Three
Dances). A version featuring lyrics by
Ellington and vocals by Mahalia Jackson, recorded in 1958 and performed at the
Newport Jazz Festival, deleted most of the original and concentrated on the
“Come Sunday” theme, as did the treatment performed in My People, a 1963
stage production. The full score was
never performed again by the Ellington Orchestra after 1943, and was completely
unavailable in recorded form until 1977, upon the release of the original
Carnegie Hall performance.
Aside from the fact that
Ellington frequently revised the scores of his older material, Leonard Feather
ventures the opinion that Black, Brown and Beige in its entirety was
dropped from his repertoire
Because he was still smarting at the cruel
insensitivity of the critics who had lambasted him…
In the euphoria that surrounded
the [Carnegie Hall] concert and its aftermath I was all but unaware of Duke’s
reaction to the negative reviews, so convinced was I that Black, Brown and
Beige represented a giant step forward in the evolution of jazz.[29]
At the orchestra’s
second Carnegie Hall concert appearance in December, Ellington presented New
World A-Comin’, a twelve-minute concerto for piano and orchestra. Composed after the band’s Hurricane Club
engagement, during a four-week run at the Capitol Theater with Lena Horne, the
piece was an extension of the thematic material which had informed Black,
Brown and Beige and was analogous to the final section of the unfinished
Boolah, which purported to speculate upon the future of the Black
race. Inspired by and titled after a
book by Roy Ottley, which anticipated an improvement in the Negro’s lot after
World War II: “In spite of selfish interests,” the book concluded, “ a new
world is a-coming with the sweep and fury of the Resurrection.” Ellington visualized this new world “as a
place where there would be no war, no greed, no categorization, no
nonbelievers, where love was unconditional, and no pronoun was good enough for God.”[30]
Under the management of Cress Courtney, the six months of
free airtime afforded by the Hurricane Club engagement had preserved
Ellington’s preeminent position in the entertainment world, increasing the
orchestra’s price nearly four times to $5,000, or $4,000 plus a sixty per cent
privilege. Nevertheless, because its
members were Black, the Duke Ellington Orchestra could not obtain a regular
radio sponsor. According to one
observer, “Duke thought that winning the war would change this and much more. When he was working at that time on a
composition called New World A-Coming, he liked to repeat the title and then
say, ‘And I mean it.’”[31]
In spite of its much shorter length, this new composition
was denounced by the critics just as vehemently as its predecessor had
been. It did manage to stay in the
band’s repertoire and was recorded as late as 1970, with the Cincinnati
Orchestra, conducted by Erich Kunzel.
The entrance if Ellington into the concert field came as the
result, not only of social pressure emanating from the music establishment, but
of economic necessity as well. During
the war years, to be sure, he appeared before the public as a rather gaudy
embodiment of Black success: “ He has
forty-five suits, and more than a thousand ties, the latter collected in
forty-seven states of the Union and seven European countries, and his shoes,
hats, shirts, and even his toilet water are all custom-made.” His 1,100 records had sold some twenty
million copies, and he had composed 1,200 compositions, many of which had been
praised by composers as esteemed as Stokowski, Grainger, Stravinsky, and
Milhaud.[32] Around this time, too, Ellington began to
spurn the label “jazz,” referring to his music first as “Negro folk music,” and
in later years as “the American Idiom, or the Music of Freedom of Expression.”[33]
As an astute businessman, Ellington undoubtedly was quick to
realize that, with the onset of war, the appearances of large jazz ensembles in
dancehalls, nightclubs and theaters were beginning to diminish, that the days
of the “big band era” were numbered. Critic
Stanley Dance, his friend and confidante, wrote:
The move to the concert hall and the
changes that ensued were inevitable. They
grew out of the practices of the Thirties.
Bands and ballrooms were in big trouble because of World War II, and
concerts offered the possibility of welcome new venues and, indeed, an artistic
stimulus…
Ellington, undoubtedly the
wisest and most intelligent person in the business, had always been quick to
size up the potential in a situation—and to act. In retrospect, one can see that his timing
was perfect in 1943. All the writing
that had been done about jazz in books and magazines—not to mention the
publicity hopes—along with the extended public exposure to it on radio, had
created a big and enthusiastic audience, one that was often idolatrous, but not
always noticeably hip. The extended
works had prestige value, an air of ambition and serious endeavor that
three-minute
For seven years Ellington presented his “social significance
thrusts” to audiences at Carnegie Hall and Each year he would produce a new
extended work, often based upon a racial theme:
in 1946 came the Deep South Suite, the Liberian Suite in
1947, and Harlem in 1950. Other
extended works from the same period were lighter exercises designed to satisfy
the musical sophisticates in his audience:
Perfume Suite (1944), A Tonal Group (1946), and The
Tattooed Bride (1948).
His ambition to serve as a spokesman for Black aspirations
was well illustrated in the 1943 announcement of his collaboration with
lyricist Otto Harbach on a ditty, unfortunately lost to posterity, titled “Did
You Mean It, Mr. Lincoln?” Publisher
Jack Robbins said that the song would “go a long way in developing racial
awareness.”[34] At the same time, however, Ellington did not
consider it prudent to risk his career by voicing his ideas other than
musically. Richard Boyer wrote of this
private conflict in 1944:
Duke sometimes thinks that it is
good business to conceal his interest in American Negro history. He doubts that it adds to his popularity in
Arkansas, say, to have it known that in books he has read about Negro slave
revolts he has heavily underlined paragraphs about the exploits of Nat Turner
and Denmark Vesey. In public he usually
sets his beige-colored face in a grin as wide as possible…
New acquaintances are always
surprised when they learn that Duke has written poetry in which he advances the
thesis that the rhythm of jazz has been beaten into the Negro by three
centuries of oppression. The four beats
to a bar in jazz are also found, he maintains in verse, in the Negro
pulse. Duke doesn’t like to show people
his poetry. “You can say anything you
want on the trombone, but you gotta be careful with words,” he explains.[35]
Ellington was aware of the explosiveness
of such sentiments in the 1940s. His
prestigious concert appearances were still rare occasions, and between them, at
one-night engagements across the country, he was still beset by the usual
indignities afflicting Black musicians. One
such incident took place late in 1943, when it was arranged for the orchestra
to give a recital at Camp Robert Smalls, a segregated portion of the Great
Lakes Naval Training Center. A great
deal of friction existed between Black sailors and their white officers, who,
one sailor remembers, habitually referred to the Blacks as “you people.” Additional resentment was generated when,
apparently at whim, the commanding staff moved Ellington’s performance to a
nearby white base.[36]
Although the incident, because of wartime secrecy, was not
widely known, it came to the attention of a number of Black leaders. However sympathetic to Ellington they may
have been, they chose not to intervene, as a letter to Ellington from Claude
Barnett of the Associated Negro Press makes clear:
When I talked with you the other
day, I did not realize how much of an imbroglio the Camp Robert Smalls
engagement had caused. I had no more
than hung up before Variety called me.
This note is merely to say that
I am not particularly involved. If I
could do a good turn for the colored boys out there and give more of them a
chance to see and hear you and other colored bands, I was willing but I do not
wish to get into any controversy over matters which do not concern me.
It does not appear to me that
Commander Peabody has been as considerate of those who sought to work with him
as he might have been but that is his problem and perhaps disadvantage.
What I wanted you to know is
that I would not presume to interfere in your affairs.
Hope it all works out smoothly.[37]
Another incident, cited in Boyer’s article the following
year, illustrates graphically the extremes suffered by Ellington’s musicians,
their Carnegie Hall honors notwithstanding.
On the second day of an engagement in St. Louis, during a break between
sets the men found it impossible to order lunch anywhere near the theater. As soon as they went back onstage, still
hungry,
the curtain rose, and from the
white audience out front there came a burst of applause. The crowd cheered, whistled, and stamped its
feet. As the curtain was going up, the dejection on the faces of the players
vanished, and as swiftly as an electric light is switched on, it was replaced
by a look of joy. The music blared, Duke
smiled, threw back his head, and shouted “Ah-h-h!” Rex Stewart took off on a solo that was
greeted with fervor, and as he bowed, the musician next to him muttered out of
the side of his mouth, “Bend, you hungry fathead! Bend!”
Everything was flash and brightness until the curtain came down. Then the joy was switched off and there was
just a group of angry, hungry Negroes arguing their right to food.
“Can’t we eat in our own
country?” Rex Stewart said.
“And my son is in the army!”
another man said.
“Are we prisoners or something?”
Harry Carney asked…
Band manager Jack Boyd was finally able to arrange for food
to be sent in. After the show
Boyd was in a saloon overlooking
the stage door when a man in the band came out and got into a taxi.
“Did you see that?” asked a
woman on a stool at the bar.
“See what?” Boyd asked.
“See that nigra get in that
cab?”
“Well, he’s a pretty nice
fellow. He’s a member of the Ellington
band. Some people think that he’s a very
great artist.”
“A very great artist? Well, I don’t know what you think, but I
always say that the worst white man is better than the best nigra.”
Duke tries to forget things like that, and if he
doesn’t quite succeed, he pretends he does.
An hour after the show, Duke was introduced to a policeman who said
enthusiastically, “If you’d been a white man, Duke, you’d been a great musician.” Duke’s smile was wide and steady as he
answered quietly, “I guess things would have been different if I’d been a white man.”[38]
NADIR AND
RESURRECTION
The postwar years witnessed in the Ellington Orchestra
a series of significant, and often dislocating, changes in band personnel. Barney Bigard, the inimitable clarinetist,
departed in 1942, eventually to be replaced by Jimmy Hamilton, a musician
almost his opposite stylistically. The
following year, the orchestra lost valve-trombonist Juan Tizol, heretofore the
rock of the trombone section. Rex
Stewart left in 1945, and Joe “Tricky Sam” Nanton died in 1946; both of these
men were, in a certain sense, irreplaceable.
Ben Webster’s tenure with the band was brief, and Fred Guy’s retirement
in 1947 signaled an end for the guitar in Ellington’s band.
Certainly, the players who replaced these men were
more than able musicians. Over the next
few years they were to include trumpeters Harold “Shorty” Baker, Taft Jordan,
William “Cat” Anderson, Al Killian and others; trombonists Claude Jones, Wilbur
De Paris and Tyree Glenn; saxophonists Al Sears and Russell Procope; and a
plethora of vocalists (Ivie Anderson had left in 1942) including Betty Roche,
Joya Sherrill, Marie Ellington (no relation to Duke), Kay Davis and Al
Hibbler. The loss of his famous soloists,
however, meant that Ellington had to face less devoted and less receptive
audiences, and again he found his most formidable competitor to be his own
past.
Although the new recruits were often exceptional
talents, as Mercer Ellington admitted, “these were near sounds, but not
the real heavy, individual sounds people had come to expect.”[39] During the war years, sin p. 190.ce there
could be no foreign tours, the orchestra was restricted to repeated circuits
around the United States. As the decade
progressed and attendance in ballrooms began to diminish, Ellington was often
forced to accept less desirable engagements.
Then too, after the war jazz performances in a concert setting became
rather commonplace, Norman Granz’s Jazz At The Philharmonic series being the
most notable example. As Ellington was
to recall later:
By 1950 everybody was
giving concerts, and even a concert at Carnegie Hall no longer had the prestige
value it had in 1943, but our series there had helped establish a music that
was new in both its extended forms and its social significance.[40]
Ellington’s lowest ebb came
in 1951, with the firing of Sonny Greer and the almost en masse
defections of Tyree Glenn, Al Sears, and his outstanding soloists Lawrence
Brown and Johnny Hodges. Many reasons
have been advanced for this debilitating exodus, including musical
disagreements, personal squabbles, and simple fatigue from the rigors of a
musician’s life. Producer Norman Granz
also confessed playing a role by tempting musicians out of the Ellington fold.[41]
Whatever the impact of all
this upon Ellington, the really crucial events of this period happened not
within the orchestra, but as a result of social and political pressures from
the outside. Perhaps more than anything
else, the political turmoil of America in the early 1950s nearly destroyed
Ellington’s career.
The rightist offensive which
culminated in the McCarthyite hysteria of the 1950s began its momentum in 1947,
and its first target was the show-business industry. The onset of the Cold War was accompanied by
the efforts of the U.S. Government go purge the various propaganda media,
particularly motion pictures and television, of any dissidence in the face of
America’s crusade against communism. The official investigative bodies were abetted
in this endeavor by private individuals who, profiting handsomely from the
moral cowardice of the entertainment industry, established an effective
blacklist against persons accused of harboring radical sympathies. The result of this intensive campaign was to
paralyze whatever intelligence and creativity existed in entertainment for a
decade to come.
The purge produced an
extensive list of victims, among whom were many who had been associated with
Ellington. Screenwriter Henry Blankfort,
who had produced Jump for Joy a decade earlier, was identified by his
own brother as a Communist, was blacklisted through the House Committee on
Un-American Activities (HUAC) in 1951.
Many of Ellington’s associates from his 1947 Broadway venture, Beggar’s
Holiday, were effectively blacklisted from the new medium of
television. As HUAC began to spread its
net in the 1950s, it began freely to impugn the names of many persons connected
with Russian War Relief, the sponsor of Ellington’s 1943 Carnegie Hall debut.
Nineteen fifty-five became a
vintage year for the red-baiters and blacklisters upon HUAC’s publication of
the first edition of its Cumulative Index to Publications of the Committee
on Un-American Activities. The
volume consisted of a long list of names, arranged alphabetically, of those
persons mentioned, by way of hearsay or otherwise, in numerous HUAC hearings
from 1938 until 1954. The new names it
“exposed” proved a goldmine for the show-business red-baiters; as one historian
of the period put it: “Thus Aware Inc. [one of several leading red-hunting
companies of the day] and Vincent Hartnett could charge for a report on the
radical backgrounds of Gladys Cooper and Duke Ellington, Charles Laughton and
Jane Pickens, Xavier Cugat and Bela Bartok, Pavel Tchelitchew and Zero Mostel.”[42]
Ellington’s name in the
updated version of the Cumulative Index, published in 1968, indicated
three “offenses” he had committed against Western civilization. The first reproduced a lengthy list of
show-business sponsors, including Ellington, of a musical benefit for the
Artists’ Front to Win the War at Carnegie Hall in 1942.[43] In the second, his name was dropped by radio
and television writer Allen E. Sloane in HUAC testimony concerning an unnamed
song lyricist who had “collaborated with Duke Ellington on very, very popular
songs,” and who “if not a Commjunist, followed closer to it than anybody could
by outright joining the party.”[44]
The third, and most
interesting, reference was the inclusion of Ellington’s name, among hundreds of
others, on a list of supporters of a 1950 document known as the Stockholm Peace
Appeal.[45] The appeal was simply a statement condemning
the use of nuclear weapons:
We demand the outlawing of atomic weapons
as instruments of intimidation and mass murder of peoples. We demand strict international control to
enforce this measure.
We believe that any
government which first uses atomic weapons against any other country whatsoever
will be committing a crime against humanity and should be dealt with as a war
criminal.[46]
Drafted in Stockholm in March, 1949, the document
became the basis of a campaign launched by the World Peace Congress in April of
that year. The American Communist Party
began a drive to collect five million signatures in support of the Stockholm
Peace Pledge, including an intensive effort to garner the endorsement of
prominent Blacks. With the onset of the
Korean War in June, 1950, the petition ran into frenzied opposition from the
mass media. The Black press joined the
general orgy of redbaiting; an editorial from the Pittsburgh Courier was
typical:
It is unfortunate, in the
present frame of mind of most loyal Americans, that a number of Negroes could
be induced to endorse this anti-American petition, and it is even more
deplorable that a man of the stature of W.E.B. DuBois should agree to serve as head
of the Peace Information Center and superintend the gathering of these
signatures.
It is true that the
overwhelming majority of the world’s people want peace, but they also want
freedom; and most of those people able to think know that the peace desired by
the USSR is that of the slave pen under the Red Flage…
Fortunately the loyalty of
colored citizens is so well-known and well-established that a handful of Negro
signers to a Moscow-inspired petition will not threaten race relations
even in a time of intense anti-Soviet
feeling; but the appearance of widely-known Negro names among the signers is
disquieting.[47]
The May 31, 1950, issue of the Daily Worker reported
Duke Ellington’s endorsement of the Stockholm Peace Appeal and quoted him as
saying, “It is quite unimaginable that people should think of using the
A-bomb… It is essential to defend
peace.”[48]
For some months previously, the Ellington Orchestra had toured Europe. When he returned to the United States,
Ellington denied the authenticity of both the signature and the quotation. In an interview for a New York daily, he
condemned
“Negro leaders … who signed the World Peace Appeal and who
urged their people to do likewise.” The enraged composer and bandleader blew
up. “I threw the guy out when he asked
me to sign up.”
The record shows that
Ellington has singularly avoided any tie-ups with Red-front organizations which
often seek out big names as sponsors. “I
never allow these Communists to exploit me,” he said.[49]
Throughout the month of August, the Daily Worker continued
to repeat its claim that Ellington had signed the petition, despite his denial
and a threat to initiate a lawsuit against “those who are trying to defame my
name and reputation.” In its September
30, 1950, issue, the rightist New Leader rushed into print a cover story
by Duke Ellington (most likely drafted by his brother-in-law, Daniel James),
entitled “No Red Songs for Me.” An
editor’s preface to the article portrayed Ellington’s career as
That of the pure artist, totally
unconcerned with political—or even cultural or racial—movements of any
kind. It remained for the Communists to
seize upon this utterly apolitical past, and to try to besmirch and exploit it
for their own despicable ends.[50]
In September, the editorial commentary continued, both
the Daily Worker and the literature of the Stockholm movement continued
to list Ellington among the signatories.
A New Leader reporter, sent to the Peace Information Center in
New York to inquire about the matter was allegedly told by the person in charge
that “Using his name was an error on our part,” and that the names of signers
received from Paris prior to the Center’s opening had not been checked for
authenticity. It was promised that
Ellington’s name would be removed “after we use up the literature in print.”
Fulminating against the failure of the “Communist
defamers” to correct their errors instantaneously, the editors expressed their
sympathy for “the many artists, and others, who are being daily duped and
exploited by the Communists and do not know how to fight back,” and hooped that
Ellington’s article would “set the perfect example.”
According to Ellington’s own account of these events,
in the spring of 1950, while in Stockholm, he received a proposed script from
Orson Welles for a musical adaptation of Faust. While in a private dining room of the Grand
Hotel, he was interrupted during a work session by a student who asked, “if he
could interest me in signing a paper.” Annoyed,
Ellington listened to the man explain that he wanted him to “join with millions
of other people in opposing the atom bomb.”
Finding it ludicrous “that people signing a piece of paper could dictate
to two nations who have atom bombs,” Ellington claimed that he asked the man to
leave, never having seen a piece of paper to sign. It was upon his return to the United States,
he continued, that he first received word that his name was being used on the
Stockholm propaganda.
What followed was not simply a denial of support for
the Stockholm Peace petition, but a total repudiation of the social awareness
that had informed his work for over twenty years:
As anyone knows who has followed my career,
movements of a political nature—Stockholm movements or Moscow movements—have
never been a part of my life.
And I never sign
petitions. Not even petitions circulated
by bona fide Negro organizations. Such
matters are just not in my line…
What burns me up, most of
all, is that they have me leading “millions of Negroes” in this thing. My answer to that is this: I might be great, but I’m not that
great. I don’t lead anybody but myself.
The Communists make out a
big case about the way Negroes are treated in America. But…
there is somebody in every country whom somebody else doesn’t like. Every
nation has its minority. I, personally,
fare far better as a member of my minority than any member of any other
minority I’ve ever seen in any country. And
I’ve been around quite a few countries in my time, which goes back a long time.
Sure, the situation of the
Negro isn’t what it should be. I think I
know that better than the Communists.
But the position of the Negro in America and the position of the
Communists are no more related to each other than “The Blessed” and “The
Damned.”
I’ve never been interested
in politics in my whole life, and I don’t pretend to know anything about
international affairs. The only
“communism” I know is that of Jesus Christ.
I don’t know any other.
As for war, during the
last war I had a radio program every Saturday which sold bonds for the United
States Treasury for the purpose of helping to defeat Germany, Japan and
Italy. In the next war—if there is one,
God
The issue of whether or not Ellington actually signed
the Stockholm petition has long since been forgotten and, like the other
phobias of its time, is of little importance.
What remains is a statement as self-abasing as any confession wrung by a
congressional tribunal. It clearly
suggests that the political fear which seized the entire entertainment industry
in the early 1950s was a factor in the decline of the Ellington
organization. At the very least, one
must wonder how purely coincidental was the desertion, within a matter of
months, of so many of his sidemen.
It might also be instructive to question the motives
of those jazz critics who, for many years after this episode, attempted to
destroy Ellington’s career. It was a
credit to Ellington’s courage that he persevered in spite of all the calumny,
adding such modernists to the band as Paul Gonsalves, Clark Terry and Louis
Bellson. The jazz press, however,
continually portrayed Ellington as a relic from the past. In 1951 a Down Beat writer went so far
as to call for Ellington’s retirement, and two years later Ralph Gleason
lamented, “One of the favorite indoor sports of jazz aficionados in recent
years has been to complain about the Ellington band.”[51]
In 1958 the influential French critic
Andre Hodier judged Ellington to be “creatively dead,” and even as late as 1963
Gleason was able to point out “plenty of examples in jazz of educated and
articulate cannibals whose main purpose regardless of their posture, is to chop
down and devour great artists like Erroll Garner and Duke Ellington.”[52]
The African-American press, which for some years had
cooled noticeably toward Ellington, suddenly erupted against him in the late
fall of 1951. A parade of shrill
headlines, which continued for months, was initiated by the appearance of an
interview with Ellington by Otis N. Thompson in the November 10 St. Louis Argus. Thompson’s interview was titled “’We
Ain’t Ready,’ Duke Declares,” and in the version circulated by the Associated
Negro Press to Black papers around the country, is here reproduced:
Declaring with pointed
emphasis, “We ain’t ready yet,” duke Ellington, world famed orchestra leader,
declared last weekend that the fighting being carried on by some Negroes in an
effort to gain integration is a “silly thing.” Said the Duke, with reference to segregation,
”It’s something nothing can be done about.”
The remarks were made in
Ellington’s dressing room backstage at Convention Hall [St. Louis] during the
intermission at the matinee performance of the “Biggest Show of ’51.” The Duke was approached for a statement about
the incident in Atlanta when Negroes learned a few minutes before curtain time
that they would have to use a side door to Municipal Auditorium there to see
the “Big Show.” Atlanta citizens were
highly indignant and many walked away.
It was Ellington’s
expressed opinion that “This thing about Negroes sitting anywhere they want
to,” is so much bunk. He used stronger
language to get his point over and much of his suavity seen from an audience
was lost as he intimated that Negroes knew the law and might as well stay in
their place.
“What does it get
us?” If you go South, don’t you have to
sit in the rear of the street car?”
According to Duke the
fighting being carried on by some people is getting us nowhere. He could see no particular progress over the
last few years and question the “good it’s doing us” to get one or two people
in a few white schools or certain jobs.
Several times during the
conversation he referred to “those people” but would call no names. He did mention the Richmond, Va., incident
when the Richmond NAACP picketed the Mosque theatre where he played to a
segregated audience. The same thing
happened to Marian Anderson and it was Duke’s impression that it didn’t make
much sense in light of the fact that segregation laws existed there.
“Besides, who’s eligible
to boycott Marian Anderson?” he asked. As
he prepared to return to the stage he said, “No, we ain’t ready yet… Get together one hundred million dollars and
then we can do something…”[53]
The newspaper which made the most noise of all was
probably the Baltimore Afro-American, which levelled two blasts at
Ellington in its issue of December 1, 1951.
The first of these, an editorial headlined “Duke Ellington’s Views on
Jim Crow Shock Nation,” printed quotations from the Thompson interview and
expressed disbelief that this was “the same Duke Ellington” who, on behalf of
the National Committee to Abolish the Poll Tax, had in 1944 described that evil
as “the most important issue since Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves.” The article concluded that “the civil rights
battle was getting “under [Ellington’s] skin,” that he had “deserted the ranks
of those fighting for first class citizenship.”
On the same page appeared an article alleging that “in
most cases when Duke ‘came to the aid of colored people’ through such
organizations as the NAACP, it was Duke and not the NAACP or colored people who
usually ended up with the most aid.” Citing
a benefit performance Ellington had given for the NAACP the previous January,
the article labelled Ellington’s reported donation of $13,000 to the civil
rights organization a lie: the NAACP
received only $1,500 after expenses, the story read, while Ellington received
“a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of publicity and good will in the nation’s
capital of show business.” (In fact, a
letter from Henry Lee Moon, NAACP Publicity Director, in the December 15, 1951 Afro-American,
set the net profit of the organization at $3,129,89, to which Ellington
promised an additional contribution of $3,000.)
Never before had such vile epithets been seen in print against
Ellington:
…Since he is booked
through a white agency, and most of the places in which he is booked are
controlled by white people, he speaks like these white people want him to
speak, without considering that what he might say may be like sticking a knife
into the ribs of the colored people who made him.
And believe you me,
colored people “made” all the top colored performers today, whether they will
admit it or not
After reading Duke’s
statement that “We aren’t ready,” one can only conclude that Duke, like so many
others of our great artists, has succumbed to the theory that it is better to
live on his knees in show business than to die on his feet in a job where he
can work and maintain his self-respect and that of his people.
And like a dying man
clutching at a straw, when he is told that his people are going on ahead
without him if he clings to that theory, he stews in his own juice and cries:
“We ain’t ready.”[54]
In the ensuing weeks, the Afro-American printed
a deluge of correspondence from its readers denouncing Ellington. Not until December 15, two weeks after the
appearance of the original charges, did the paper give Ellington a chance to
reply. The rebuttal, in the form of an
ANP release dated December 3, was run on the front page alongside a column
giving the final word to Argus reporter Otis Thompson, who continued to
insist upon the accuracy of the interview that started the furor.
In response to the “We ain’t ready” statement
attributed to him, Ellington wrote, “I categorically deny having made any such
statement,” and further asserted that “what has been published is the exact
opposite of what I actually said.” With
reference to the NAACP boycott of Marian Andersson, he admitted having told
Thompson
that I thought it was too
bad that Southern colored people picketed only colored artists, but never
protested when white artists came down to play to segregated audiences. Since Southern colored people live in
segregated conditions all year round, I continued, why do they wait for colored
artists to come before putting on the demonstrations?
To the charge that he had called the civil rights
movement “a silly thing,” and that “colored people were making no headway,”
Ellington explained that he had meant “that colored people are not doing all
they can to abolish segregation, and that much more can be done.” He repeated his contention that “breaking
down… segregation is a full-time job”
which “requires the full-time services of many more leaders than we have,” and
that efforts ought to be made to amass a fund of 100 million dollars to sponsor
“new legislation in every state” in order to abolish segregation. Regarding the incident in Atlanta, Ellington
insisted that legal contracts over which he had no control forced him to play
to a segregated audience, and that “Refusal on my part to honor them… would bring on suits for breach of contract,
as well as other reprisals, the effect of which would have been to put me out of the band
business.”
While the accuracy of various points raised in his
statement remains questionable, there is no doubt that Ellington felt deeply
wounded by the allegation that he had turned his back upon Black people. With genuine indignation he concluded,
First, it saddens me that
the AFRO, with which I have always had friendly relations, did not accord me
the courtesy of trying to get in touch with me or with any of my
representatives, to check the facts or ask me for a statement of any kind…
Second, it saddens me also
that people have rushed into print with things that conflict with my whole past
record. In my nearly thirty years in
public life, no one has ever impugned my devotion to the fight for first-class
citizenship.
Even my critics admit that
I have given generously of my time, energy and talents to that fight. If they think I have now gone back on all
that, they don’t know me. I am not the
sort who makes speeches—or even statements of this kind. Instead, as always, I stand on what I have
done and will continue to do.
The public can rest
assured that Duke Ellington, and every member of his organization, will always
be in the forefront of any effort to combat segregation or any other form of
racial or human injustice in the North or the South, in America or in any other
country.[55]
The significance of this episode lies not in whether
Ellington actually made the statements attributed to him, or even in what he
may have meant by them if he were quoted accurately. It is entirely possible that Ellington,
momentarily angered by what he considered recklessness on the part of civil
rights groups, would have expressed such sentiments. Certainly, they were compatible with his
aristocratic temperament and an archaic political philosophy which distrusted
mass movements of any kind, particularly when they interfered with his ability
to earn a living. His attitude was
clearly that of another, older generation of African-Americans, and it was
perhaps for this reason that he had fallen out of favor with those who were
pursuing the strategy of direct action.
In fairness to Ellington, it must be admitted that
singling him out in such a fashion for a few off-the-cuff remarks he had made
during an intermission, was an act of demagoguery and political
opportunism. It was the height of
hypocrisy for Claude Barnett, the man responsible for publicizing the “we ain’t
ready” story in the first place, to send a letter of consolation to Ellington:
Dear Duke:
Permit me to congratulate
you upon your statement. It was a clear,
reasonable and effective document.
The position of the artist
who finds himself hoisted upon the petard of the enthusiastic supporters of
“down with segregation” is unfortunate. He
does not want segregation any more than those who howl do. Indeed many of them have been entirely
content with their lot in the past and don’t stop to try to work out some
reasonable plan which will salvage the dignity of the artist and protect him
financially as well.
I am glad you sent us the
statement and we did the best we could by it.[56]
It would be years before the official representatives
of African-American society would attempt a reconciliation with Ellington, and
never again would there be the sort of cordiality that characterized his
relations with the Black press in the 1930s.
The Claude Barnett file, in the archives of the Chicago Historical
Society contains no further correspondence with Ellington after 1951.
In any event, the climb upward from this low point in
his career was long and arduous. Happily,
1952 marked the silver jubilee of Ellington’s show-business career, and many
tributes from the entertainment world were soon forthcoming. Early that year at Chicago’s Regal Theatre a
committee of distinguished Americans honored him for his “outstanding
contribution to world culture” and “significant worth to and championship of
his race.” Ellington was presented with
a silver cigarette case inscribed with the names of Joe Louis, Jackie Robinson,
Lena Horne, Nat “King” Cole, Mahalia Jackson, Sarah Vaughan and Billy Eckstine,
which was presented on behalf of the committee by Alfred A. Duckett, the former
Chicago Defender music critic who was now the managing editor of Tan
Confessions.[57]
The November 5 issue of Down Beat, devoted to
the celebration of Ellington’s twenty-five years in the band profession,
included articles by Billy Strayhorn, Leonard Feather, Irving Mills, Ned
Williams and Ellington himself, each reminiscing upon some aspect of the
maestro’s past glory. It was, by and
large, a rather routine show-business salute; the names of numerous celebrities
appeared along with their favorites among Ellington’s records, and the entire
issue had something of the quality of an obituary for a famous person.
In December, another Duke Ellington salute was held in
Chicago. He received an award from the
National University of Music, which established a scholarship in his name. The festivities included a luncheon at the
Johnson Publishing Company, which honored Ellington with lifetime subscriptions
to Jet and Ebony, and a Silver Jubilee party held on the city’s
West Side.[58]
To week television series starring Sarah Vaughan, he
became embroiled in a battle with network executives over issues of what he
called “independence” and “freedom from censorship,” forcing the cancellation
of his plans for a television musical and an all-Negro revue.[59]
The early 1950s were also years of management
conflicts, particularly with Norman Granz, with whom Ellington had never been
on the best of terms. Recording
contracts were obtained with considerable difficulty and the various labels on
which the orchestra recorded sometimes demanded stipulations to which Ellington
was unaccustomed, concerning the type of music to be played. After the expiration of his contract with
Victor in 1945, Ellington recorded for a short period with the small label
Musicraft (when the company folded, Ellington, as a major investor, lost a
considerable sum of money), and with Mercer Records, a disastrous venture owned
jointly by his son Mercer and Leonard Feather.
In Mercer’s opinion, “Having gone into the record business as a
competitor with the majors didn’t do Ellington any good, and it was some time
before he got back into their good graces.”[60]
The Duke
Ellington Orchestra was virtually the sole survivor of the trend in jazz that
decimated that decimated the big bands in favor of small combos—even Count
Basie was forced, for economic reasons, to reduce his orchestra to an octet in
the summer of 1950. Forced to accept the
sort of engagements he could hardly have imagined in his glory days, by the
middle of the decade, that he was on his last legs. For the entire summer of 1955, the Ellington
band played backing to the “Aquacades” show at Flushing Meadows, Long Island,
formerly the site of the 1939 World’s Fair:
The orchestra was in a sorry condition:
Five men in the band,
including Paul Gonsalves and Willie Cook, were temporarily dropped from the
lineup because they didn’t hold cards with the right branch of the union. A string section, an extra pianist, and
two girl harpists (doing
water effects which went with the swimming angle of the show) augmented the
thinned-out Ellingtonians. It really did
seem that the end might be in sight.
In later years Duke always
evaded too many questions about the year of 1955. The reason why he went to be a backing band
to a summer show must have been primarily economic. He hadn’t been drawing large audiences for
some time. Around the college circuit,
which was now an important factor in jazzmen’s finances, the kids wanted small
groups like those of Miles Davis and Dave Brubeck. Norman Granz was concentrating increasingly
on Oscar Peterson and Ella Fitzgerald. Count
Basie, too, was making a comeback and getting the dates which Duke was
missing. Duke was even left out in the
cold by the aqua-show format. They
allowed a piano solo by him, and then his musicians took over with a house
conductor in charge.[61]
The long-awaited new lease on life for the orchestra
came unexpectedly in the summer of 1956 at the Newport Jazz Festival, then in
its third year and still located on the Rhode Island playground for the
American aristocracy, which hitherto had been entertained by symphony
orchestras. The band played its opening
set lacking four of its musicians, and it met with little enthusiasm from the
crowd. It was nearly midnight when
Ellington, now with all his musicians present, returned to close the show, and
some of the huge crowd was already beginning to leave.
In an uncanny moment of inspiration, Ellington called
the old numbers “Diminuendo in Blue” and “Crescendo in Blue,” an up-tempo
showpiece he had devised in 1937. When
Paul Gonsalves stepped forward to improvise some transitional choruses between
the two main sections of the score, people began to pay attention, stopping at
the exits, popping their fingers and clapping on the offbeats. Chorus after chorus of earthy blues came from
Gonsalves’s tenor saxophone, and the response of the audience built rapidly to
a frenzy, almost drowning the sound of the band. Gonsalves finally quit after twenty-seven
choruses before the Ellington ensemble returned for its “Crescendo,” a moment
that made show-business history.
To this day, many jazz writers find little value in
the performance of either the exuberant Gonsalves or the band, but to the crowd
at Newport it was sheer magic, and through the cascade of publicity he
received, the name of Duke Ellington again became golden. His portrait on the cover of Time Magazine
the following month seemed to certify his “rediscovery” by middle America. The Ellington band was signed to a new
contract with Columbia Records, where producer Irving Townshend apparently gave
him free reign to record whatever project he chose, be they pop songs, extended
suites from Shakespeare, or flights of fancy like A Drum Is a Woman,
which was televised with a full cast in 1957.
Within a few years he was
recording with symphony orchestras, gaining recognition from universities,
attracting the interest of white clergymen with his series of Sacred Concerts
in the mid-to-late 1960s. Above all,
beginning in 1963, he was representing the United States in international tours
organized by the Department of State.
The Black establishment, too, began to mend its fences
with Ellington. He had perhaps always
been somewhat an outsider to the Black bourgeoisie, but in this he was no
different from any other African-American man choosing to make his living in
jazz, this class’s traditional badge of shame.
The very presentation to Ellington of the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal, the
highest honor the organization bestows upon distinguished Blacks, contained
evidence of their mutual alienation. John
Hammond described the ceremony, in 1959, in which Arthur Spingarn himself,
president of the NAACP, awarded the medal to Ellington:
It was presented at a large banquet at the
Roosevelt Hotel in New York, where Arthur spoke of Ellington’s many
achievements and his many famous compositions, including “Mood Indigo,” “Black
and Tan Fantasy,” and “Take the Train!”
Several of us in the audience shouted “Take the ‘A’ Train,” to no
avail. Duke was not only credited with
Billy Strayhorn’s famous theme for the Ellington band, but the whole point of
the title was lost. No surprise. The NAACP never was known for its knowledge
or appreciation of jazz![62]
In the 1960s and ‘70s Ellington began to pursue his
new career as an elder statesman and American cultural ambassador. Whatever conflicts remained in his life,
Ellington received a new, sanitized image to accompany this cultural
preeminence, however short he may have fallen from the goals he had once
coveted for himself, his music and his people.
However compromised his honors may have been, it can be said without
irony that Duke Ellington died an Honored Person.
[1]
MIMM, p. 156.
[2]
Interview in Stanley Dance, The World of Duke Ellington (Da Capo, 1970),
p. 108.
[3]
Derek Jewell, Duke: A Portrait of
Duke Ellington, p. 103.
[4]
Duke Ellington in Person, p. 104.
[5]
In Mark Tucker, ed., The Duke Ellington Reader (Oxford, 1993), pp.
214-252.
[6]
MIMM, p. 175.
[7]
Ibid.
[8]
Interview with Mercer Ellington, Chicago, July 22, 1979.
[9]
MIMM, pp. 175-176.
[10]
Quoted Ibid.
[12]
MIMM, pp. 180-181.
[13]
Alfred A; Duckett, “Duke of Windsor May Attend Ellington’s Concert At
Carnegie,” New York Age, January 23, 1943.
[14]
Alfred A. Duckett, “Duke Ellington’s Concert At Carnegie Demonstrates Maestro’s
Unique Genius,” New York Age, January 30, 1943.
[15]
Leonard Feather, liner notes to The Duke Ellington Carnegie Concerts,
January 1943 (Prestige P-34004).
[16]
Duke Ellington in Ibid., recording.
[17]
Ibid.
[18]
Barry Ulanov, Duke Ellington, pp. 252-253.
[19]
Alfred A. Duckett, op. cit.
[20]
Cited in Leonard Feather, liner notes to The Duke Ellington Carnegie Hall
Concerts, 1943 (Prestige).
[21]
Cited in Barry Ulanov, Duke Ellington, p. 257.
[22]
Cited in Leonard Feather, liner notes to The Duke Ellington Carnegie Hall
Concerts, 1943 (Prestige).
[23]
Constant Lambert, Music Ho! A Study
of Music in Decline, p. 215.
[24]
“J.T.H. Mize Goes to Bat for Brown, Black and Beige [sic]: Rye Music Educator Puts in One Good Lick for
Ellington, and Two Better Ones Against the Critics,” Musician, December
1943, p. 159.
[25]
Cited in Leonard Feather, liner notes to The Duke Ellington Carnegie Hall
Concerts, 1943 Prestige P-34004..
[26]
Ibid.
[27]
Cited in Ibid., p. 19.
[28]
Remarks following presentation by David N. Baker, Jr., “Indiana University’s
Black Music Committee,” in Black Music in Our Culture,”
[29]
Liner notes to The Duke Ellington Carnegie Hall Concerts, 1943.
[30]
MIMM, p. 183.
[31]
Richard O. Boyer, “The Hot Bach,” p. 60.
[32]
Ibid., pp. 22-26.
[33]
MIMM, p. 309.
[34]
“Expect Ellington Song To Promote Racial Accord,” Norfolk VA Journal and
Guide October 9, 1943, p.14.
[35]
“The Hot Bach,” pp. 49-50.
[36]
Interview with John Timmons, Navy veteran, Chicago, May 18, 1980.
[38]
“The Hot Bach, pp. 42-43.
[39]
Duke Ellington in Person, p. 105.
[40]
MIMM, p. 190.
[41]
Derek Jewell, Duke: A Portrait of
Duke Ellington, p. 115.
[42]
Stefan Kanfer, A Journal of the Plague Years, (New York: Atheneum, 1973), p. 250,
[43]
United States House of Representatives, Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC
hereinafter), Investigation of
Communist Activities, New York Area:
Parts VI-VIII (Entertainment) (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1955), p. 2501
p. 3864.
[44]
HUAC, Communist Methods of Infiltration:
Entertainment (Part I) (Washington:
U.S. Government Printing Office, 1954).
[45]
HUAC, Report on the Communist “Peace” Offensive: A Campaign to Disarm and Defeat the United
States (Washington: U.S, Government
Printing Office, 1951), p. 130.
[46]
“Moscow Decries Peace Sabotage,” New York Times, July 22, 1950, p. 4.
[47]
“The Phony Peace Drive,” Pittsburgh Courier, August 26, 1960, p. 6.
[48]
Cited in Duke Ellington, “No Red Songs for Me,” New Leader, September
30, 1950, p. 4.
[49]
Unidentified clipping found in files of the Chicago Defender; external
evidence would place it at about September 1, 1950.
[50]
Ibid., p. 2.
[51]
Ralph J. Gleason, Celebrating the Duke & Louis, Bessie, Billie, Bird,
Carmen, Miles, Dizzy & Other Heroes (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1975) p. 176.
[52]
Ibid., pp. 200-201
[53]
Associated Negro Press release, November 21, 1951, in Claude Barnett file.
[54]
James L. Hicks, “Duke Benefit for NAACP Netted $1,000, Not 13 Gs,” Baltimore Afro-American,
in Ibid, p. 5.to
[55]
Duke Ellington and Otis N. Thompson, Jr., “Duke Ellington Says He Didn’t Say
It; Reporter Insists That He Did,” Baltimore Afro-American, December 15,
1951, pp.1 ff.
[56]
Claude Barnett to Duke Ellington, December 5, 1951, in Claude Barnett file.
[57]
“The Duke of Ellington Honored by Host of Stars,” Associated Negro Press
release, February 4, 1952, in Claude Barnett file.
[58]
“Chicagoans Join in Duke Ellington Salute,” Associated Negro Press release,
December 24, 1952 and ANP release, January 4, 1953, both in Claude Barnett
file.
[59]
“Duke Ellington Attacks TV, Then Signs for Show,” Chicago Defender,
September 2, 1950, p. 27.
[60]
Duke Ellington in Person, p. 99.
[61]
Derek Jewell, Duke: A Portrait of
Duke Ellington, pp. 119-120.
[62]
John Hammond on Record, p. 309.
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