V. RECAPITULATION AND CODA
This study has traced the rise, decline and resurrection, as
it were, of one African-American artist, Duke Ellington, but it has attempted
to balance his story against the economic, social and political background
which intrudes upon it at every turn. Without
this background, Ellington’s life cannot be portrayed fully, yet the image of
the man left us by most writers has been almost devoid of the often unpleasant
facts of existence for a Black genius trapped in a racist society.
It is for this reason that I’ve paid rather scant attention
to the subject of his particular musical genius, since other writers have
commented at length, and often perceptively, about it. A full assessment of what Ellington
represented musically is a tempting project in itself, but it was perhaps best
stated in a remark, attributed to Miles Davis, that all jazz musicians should
daily get on their knees to thank Duke Ellington. Their debt to Ellington, in a musical sense,
derives not so much from any direct influence he had upon his contemporaries or
descendants—Ellington was, as a pianist, bandleader, composer and arranger,
unique, although Charles Mingus and Thelonious Monk might be counted among his
progeny, as it does from his development of a new range of expression for Black
folk culture. Through Ellington,
particularly in its use of the chromatic scale.
Ellington, along with others of his generation, recreated
the African-American folk idiom into perhaps the most pervasive cultural force
of the past century. It has indeed
transcended nearly every geographical and political boundary on this
planet. Its sheer impact upon world culture
dwarfs the achievement of any European composer who ever lived. The role of Duke Ellington in establishing
this music was, of course, preeminent.
At the same time, African-American music has been rejected
consistently by the white cultural establishment. While its creators have been ruthlessly
exploited by the purveyors of popular entertainment, untold fortunes having
been wrung from jazz and its commercialized derivatives, it has never been
given its due recognition by the elite of “serious music.” Most of Ellington’s career was devoted to
gaining this sort of recognition, and many of his works, particularly those he
composed for performance at Carnegie Hall in the 1940s, must be considered in
this context. Of these, critic Stanley
Dance wrote,
The longer works and suites
offered Ellington opportunities to express himself more expansively and with
more freedom, to “put on” the audience playfully and, more important, to
proceed with a series of “social significance thrusts.” He was a subtle tactician engaged in warfare
all his life who those who cheated him in business whenever they could, and
those who discriminated against what he called “my people.” …
He walked, as it were, a musical
tightrope, a smile on one side of his face, a frown on the other.[1]
As his music was the expression, from his point of view, of
a complex set of contradictory social relations, we find the same forces
expressed in Ellington’s personality, both in the dapper aristocrat he appeared
to be in public and in the little-known character he adopted in private, which
some found unpleasant. To a remark, made
by one critic after Ellington’s death, that he was a vain and cunning man,
Dance replied,
Cunning, in the sense that he
was very shrewd, he certainly had to be, to fight powerful adversaries. Inevitably there were many who resented a
black musician attaining the position he did and commanding so much respect
throughout the world.
Another critic, detecting “a vein of snobbery” in Ellington,
caused Dance to comment that, in taking his music around the world, it was
necessary for Ellington to reciprocate the respect he received from heads of
state and others, because he felt “when they showed him respect he was gaining
respect for his race.”[2] There is at least a kernel of truth in this
judgment. It corroborates Mercer
Ellington’s observation of his father’s desire to be considered “a credit to
his race,” and was in fact the keystone of a social philosophy which seemed an
almost comic anachronism to the generation which grew up in the latter half of
Ellington’s career.
To his own generation, and to the Blacks who came of age in
the 1930s, Ellington was as much symbolic ideal as were Billy Eckstine and
Miles Davis in the following decades. Since
the symbology of success in America has always been a matter of finances, it
was perhaps Ellington’s acumen as a businessman, rather than his stature as a
musician, which garnered him such adulation at the zenith of his career as a
popular performer. Whatever success he
achieved in this regard, however, was done at considerable expense; Ellington
remained, to the end of his days, a “sharecropper” eating well at the white
man’s table.
Success was therefore a matter of compromises and
sacrifices. If Ellington was able to
utilize his superlative musical genius to offset the restrictions imposed upon
him as an artist, he was not so fortunate when it came to the role he wished to
play socially and politically. Ellington’s
espousal of racial pride, which in the context of the 1930s and ‘40s appeared
militant, and had to be curtailed. The
war was somewhat responsible for changing his persuasion, but he was shaken
more severely by the outright persecution inflicted upon him, both by the
government and by the Negro establishment, in the early 1950s.
Before that time, Ellington had made gestures of
patriotism. Upon the death of President
Franklin D. Roosevelt, for example, the Ellington orchestra played a long
program of his compositions on the Blue Network (the predecessor to ABC) and
was said to be “proud of the fact this was really the only American music heard
on thee air that dreadful day.”[3] Years before, he had broadcast all night from
a Chicago Ballroom to keep the lines open for bulletins about the kidnapping of
the Lindbergh baby.
Thirty years later, however, this patriotism (now subsidized
by the U.S. State Department) appeared
forced and was used to camouflage the oppression of Blacks in the United
States. Of his 1963 tour of Indian, for
example, Ellington wrote,
At the press conferences, we
would talk about jazz and, very often, the race situation in America. Some of them wanted information, but others
wanted to discuss it from a more provocative viewpoint, and then I would have
to explain that the situation of the Negro in America was more complex than we
had time to clarify, but I always told them that the Negro has a tremendous
investment in our country. We
have helped to build it and we have invested blood in every war the country has
fought, and this accounts for what has been happening. “What is being done now?” they would ask, and
I would reply that I was sure our leaders have strategy, but that if I knew it
I wouldn’t be very bright to reveal it, to cast it around for publication,
because it would help our opponents to put up an even more formidable
resistance than they now have. One man
asked me, “Why hasn’t the Negro artist done more for the cause?” That upset me and I said, “If you knew what
you were talking about, you wouldn’t ask a question like that.” I came back to him later, after I had cooled
off a bit, and explained that we had
been working on the Negro situation and h his condition in the South since the
‘30s, that we had done shows[4],
musical works, benefits, etc., and that the American Negro artist had been
among the first to make major contributions.”[5]
Elsewhere, Ellington reported a similar skirmish abroad
concerning the race question in America:
“The United States has a
minority problem… Negroes are one of several minority groups, but the basis of
the whole problem is economic rather than a matter of color.”
While my opponent is busily
thinking, I give him another opportunity by introducing another subject.
“The United States has an
extremely accurate news service and the press enjoys almost complete freedom,”
I claim. “Did you. Incidentally, hear
about the five little girls who were burned up in that church down in Alabama
the other day?”
“Yes”, he says with great
triumph.
“Well, that was only a couple of
days ago, and I’m not sure anybody else would have let such news get out that
quickly if it had happened in their backyard.”
He has nothing to say to that,
so I carry on:
“You have heard of the Reverend
Martin Luther King, I’m sure.”
“Yes,” he says, with a measure
of exultancy in his voice again.
“Let us say that he is the
representative of an oppressed race of people…
When I saw him just before I left Chicago a few weeks ago, he was coming
down Michigan Avenue. I waved to him, and in order for him to say hello to me,
he had to have his chauffeur stop this long Cadillac. An aide got out and opened the door, and two
motor policemen in front of the car, and two more behind, had to stoop so that
he could get out and shake hands with me. This is the way the man lives and
travels who is representing that oppressed race, so the standards are not the
same every place in the world. They vary according to where you are.”[6]
Such incidents, repeated everywhere in the world Ellington
traveled, contributed strongly toward the Uncle Tom image which would alienate
his younger audience. In many instances,
he showed an astonishing lack of tact, as during his performance in 1969 at San
Francisco State University, while the African-American students there were
conducting a strike. According to Ralph
Gleason, Ellington’s $3,000 fee was “paid out of [university president S.I.]
Hayakawa’s contingency fund, the initial $50,000 of which Chicago millionaire
W. Clement Stone contributed.” Members
of the local Black Student Union and American Federation of Teachers grew
concerned that Ellington “did not know where Hayakawa was at.” Contrary to rumors that Ellington would
endorse the BSU at his concert, his announcement attempted to skirt the issue:
“This concert is totally dedicated to those of us who are determinedly
dedicated to developing the Black Studies program. This remark drew applause, but when
Ellington, mentioned him as “our choreographer,” he was booed loudly. At a reception after the concert, “a BSU
member smarting from Ellington’s even mentioning Hayakawa, put the Duke down in
plain terms.”[7]
In public during his last years, Ellington was a creature of
the establishment, so much so that it is difficult to determine his feelings
about major social issues. In Mercer
Ellington’s account, there was much more perception in his thought than he
allowed the public to see:
Like Martin Luther King, he was not so much interested in the race
aspect per ce as in the consideration of minority groups, the
downtrodden and deprived. The idea of
equality he held paramount, progressively so toward the culmination of his
life. He equated the black situation inn
America with other troubled situations in the world, like that of the Arabs
versus the Jews, or the one-time predicament of African Pygmies under
Senegalese domination. He watched with
great interest the struggle for independence from Britain in the West Indies.
The principle here—the
immorality of man’s enslavement of man—and its inadmissibility took hold of his
mind quite early on. It was strengthened
and authenticated by what he read in the Bible:
that man should not suffer under
another man’s hand. He began to think
more subjectively, seeing himself as a man placed in a subordinate position as
a black man. The idea that he
should try to change what destiny seemed to have decreed grew in him, and
stayed with him till the end. Very
often, and in many ways, he came out and stated honestly and definitely how he
felt, but this was only with people he was close to and not for the record.[8]
Ellington was careful to insert clauses against segregated
audiences in all his contracts. In
addition to Martin Luther King, he was known to admire Paul Robeson, Elijah
Muhammad and Malcolm X, but he deplored the various ideological, national and
caste divisions among Blacks, insisting at the same time that “blacks in the
United States should look on themselves as Americans primarily and should try
to straighten things out within the family before going outside.” As for himself, however, the raciaHisl struggle
“was an area where Ellington never wanted to push himself to the front, never
wanted esteem or to be considered heroic.
He preferred to be accused of doing too little than to be lauded as a
great man helping his people when within himself he felt unable to do enough,”[9]
Ellington’s well-known aversion to communism is reported by
his son to have been genuine and based on religious convictions (“He disliked
anything the played down the idea of the church, and he knew that communism
never tolerated any philosophy other than its own.”[10]),
yet it is hard to escape the conclusion that his pronouncements on this subject
were based, at least in part, of the fear of a repetition of the red-baiting
which had scandalized his name and nearly terminated his career in 1950. His professional association with radicals,
including Communists, had been far more than casual, but whatever regard he had
for them had to be sacrificed to create the image of Ellington as the ideal
representative of his race.
In a sense, Ellington was prosaically typical of his race,
at least according to the portrait of him drawn by his son, for his life seems
a perfect case history for E. Franklin Frazier’s Black Bourgeoisie. Indeed, the private life Duke Ellington
exhibited traits that went beyond mere superstition, religiosity, or even
mysticism, to what his son concedes was outright paranoia:
I firmly believe that from
around 1950 onward Ellington began to develop a pronounced form of
paranoia. He blamed different things on
different sets of people. In world
events, he believed prominent men were often influenced to act wrongly or
indulge in reprisals by women somewhere in the background. He’d take headlines and check back to prove
his theory. When something bad happened
on the international level, he often saw the handiwork of people in powerful
positions, communists, financiers, or both.
While he believed that communists worked ceaselessly to overthrow the
power of the United States, he also held that capitalists worked exclusively
for personal gain, something he considered true of unions as well. The impact of their machinations on the
society he lived in truly disturbed him…
In general, he adopted an
uncritical attitude toward personal idiosyncrasies, so that where homosexuals
were concerned he might have seemed part of their society, whereas in truth he
never was. But although he always
claimed not to believe in categories, he was in fact both criticizing and
categorizing when he ascribed certain troubles to what he called the Faggot
Mafia.[11]
It is striking
that a man who is now considered the most successful musician in the history of
jazz should have emerged with the psychology of a victim, which he of course
was. That same history since Ellington’s
greatest creative years, perhaps in reaction against the “credit to the race”
syndrome he typified, has produced a new set of musical heroes along with a new
musical language, concomitant with the African-American’s reassessment of his
cultural values. All of them have faced
the same social dilemma as Ellington, and regardless of their various cultural
stances, they too have been victims. The
African-American dilemma in the arts will not be overcome until the racist
society which nourishes it is abolished.
[1]
Stanley Dance, liner notes to The Duke Ellington Carnegie Hall Concerts,
January 1946.
[2] Ibid.
[3]
Ralph J. Gleason, Celebrating the Duke… & Other Heroes, p. 165.
[4] MIMM,
pp. 308-309.
[5]
Ralph J. Gleason, Celebrating the Duke… p. 165.
[6] Ibid.,
pp. 234-235.
[7] Ibid.,
pp. 184-185.
[8] Duke
Ellington in Person, p. 181.
[9] Ibid.,
pp. 184-185.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid.,
pp. 157-158.
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