TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword: Further Conversations with Duke, by Robert E. Johnson

Preface

1.Introduction

2.  Jazz Prehistory

3.  Ellington: Origins and Early Development

4.  Mercer Ellington, 1979

5.  The Mills Regime

6.  Lawrence Brown, 1982

7.   Shades of Gray   

8.  Ellington Meets Chicago, 1931

9.  Russell Woodward, 1933

10.  Golden Age

11.. Henry Blankfort, 1982

12.  A Crooked Thing

13.  Blue Note Memories 

14.  Nadir

15.   Resurrection

16.  Alice Babs, 1983

17.  Duke's People

18.  Stanley and Helen Dance, 1982

19.  Coda

Bibliography

Appendix:  recommended reading, recordings and filmography 

Preface

BLOOMINGTON, INDIANA

I was a child of the '60s and therefore came of age during the golden age of rock and roll.  Three currents at once drew me to jazz at the age of eighteen: a school friend with a little collection of jazz recordings; my brother, an aspiring jazz trumpeter; and, in my freshman year at Indiana University, the tutelage of Dr. David N. Baker (later to become director of the Smithsonian Institution's jazz program).  It was in David's class I first heard Duke Ellington's "East St. Louis Toodle-oo," and my term paper on jazz bassists inevitably led me to Jimmy Blanton; hence, my first Ellington album was Things Ain't What They Used to Be, a compilation of Ellington small groups led by Johnny Hodges and Rex Stewart in 1940 and 1941.

David Baker

 

My early jazz education was backwards, in the sense that my first jazz heroes were contemporary masters of "free jazz":  Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, John Coltrane, and Archie Shepp, among others. 

I was fortunate, in 1972-- my senior year at Indiana University-- to attend a performance on campus of Duke Ellington and His Orchestra.  I didn't really know what I was hearing:  I spent the first half of the show anxiously checking my wristwatch and left during intermission to make a political speech.  This was, after all, the impending revolution.

The process by which I arrived at Duke was a circuitous one, a rather strange and involved one, as it would have to be for someone my age.  In the late 1960s, I began a gradual transition from rock 'n' roll to the likes of Archie Shepp, Ornette Coleman, and Sun Ra.  From there, it has been a case of looking back ward, where Duke Ellington could hardly fail to attract my attention.  There is a seductive quality in his work that is hard to resist.

Nevertheless, it was unlikely then that a person of my age would take to Ellington's music, nor is it likely that it will become any easier for generations following mine.  You might call this the musical miseducation of youth; in the United States particularly, the laws of economics in the music business, or just the inevitability of change in styles.

CHICAGO

Stanley Dance:  "Look in your own back yard."

 

The Chicago chapter of the Duke Ellington Society (dubbed the "Ray Nance Chapter" by our leader, Don Miller).  As far as my listening was concerned, Don was indispensable; he had a sizeable collection of Ellington records and was happy to make cassette copies for me.  Beyond this, Don was a sparkplug for Ellington gatherings, locally and internationally, including one in Chicago in 1984.  He used to tell me, "I have only two heroes:  Duke Ellington and Thomas Jefferson" (I wonder what he was thinking when he saw my set of The Selected Works of V.I. Lenin).

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 Don lived alone in the Hyde Park area, near the University of Chicago.  He seemed to devote his entire life to the study of Duke Ellington, and the slogan he initiated, "All for the love of Duke," was taken up internationally as a battle cry in the 1980s.  He also used to tell me, "I have only two heroes:  Duke Ellington and Thomas Jefferson."  He called communists "red fascists," so I wonder what he thought when he saw on my bookshelf the three-volume Selected Works of  V. I. Lenin.  

At any rate Don became an international sparkplug for the advancement of Duke Ellington throughout the 1980s.

 

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It was also my great fortune to meet and forge a long friendship with Adrienne Alyce Claerbaut (nee Morris), who was the niece of Billy Strayhorn.  Over a great part of her life, Alyce has devoted herself to the cause of Strayhorn's music.

  When I first met her at her home, I briefly acquainted with her twelve-year-old daughter. on a subsequent visit, she laid a pearl of wisdom on me: "If you want to know Ellington, listen to the music; if you want to know Strayhorn, listen to the words," which were nearly always about longing and loss.  At one point, after I'd learned the tune, I rehearsed "Lush Life" with her for an occasion that did not materials.  But Alyce did take the time to talk about her famous uncle to an honors class I taught in the 1990s, for which I remain grateful.

Other members of the Ray Nance Chapter included Marian Stevenson and Betty Smith-Cortez.  Because she departed to the West Coast soon after our acquaintance, I never really got to know Marian, but over the years Betty became a valuable resource because of her former employment at Chicago's Blue Note jazz club in the 1950s. 

Although not strictly members of our chapter, very much within our orbit were two professors from the music department at the University of Illinois, Chicago, Drs. Richard Wang and Susan Markle.   Along with putting together a mini-jazz festival at the UIC Pavilion with a band that included guitar master Kenny Burrell and trombonist  Britt Woodman, they arranged a special session for the Ray Nance chapter to meet Burrell at one of the public library's conference rooms.

In 1979, I spoke to Louis Bellson between sets at Rick's Cafe Ameriacaine at the Lake Point Holiday Inn with a trio that included Geroge Duvivier on bass.  Bellson recalled touring the raciallly segregated American South as a member of the Ellington band.  Ellington was able to skirt the authorities by passing Bellson off as an albino.

At around the same time, after a set of performances dedicated to Duke Ellington in Grant Park,, as part of Chicago's annual Jazz Festival , I was directed to a hotel room, where I stood at the outside of a circle of listeners and heard singer Al Hibbler explain  how, early on, drummer Sonny Greer forfeited leadership of the band to Duke.  I was also able to interview drummer Hillard Brown, who briefly replaced Sonny Greer in Ellington's orchestra in 1944.  Another local interview was with  Irving Bunton, who had directed the choir in Ellington's 1963 show, My People.

Over the phone I was able to speak with R.D. Darrell,, the perceptive music critic who was among the first to recognize the immense genius of Duke Ellington.  I also chatted with singer Joya Sherrill,, who had enjoyed a long and fruitful relationship with Ellington.  She agreed with me thqt the manifold persona of Ellington was "larger than life."   Meanwhile, I enjoyed correspondence with jazz writer and impresario John Hammond and, most importantly with author Stanley Dance, who, for the last fifteen years of Ellington's life, was his close friend and confidante. 

John Steiner, who was widely regarded as the world's foremost authority on early Chicago jazz also became an important contact at his home in Kenosha, Wisconsin.  Now retired, Steiner had been a chemist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, but he nourished his passion for jazz by spending weekends in the nightspots of Chicago's South Side.  Early on he came to know key figures such as pianist Earl Hines and drummer Baby Dodds, and befriended members of the fabled Austin High Gang (including cornetist Jimmy McPartland and saxophonist Bud Freeman.  It was through his contacts with so many musicians he was able to begin to build his collection, and he was doing it in the 1930s, when most people were not interested in this music and its history in Chicago, He was the seminal figure in documenting the history of Chicago jazz."

In 1946, he dragged a portable recording machine to the Civic Opera House, climbed the catwalk above the stage, dangled a microphone below and captured the Duke Ellington Orchestra on recordings that would not have existed without such efforts.  As self-styled oral historian, he taped hundreds of hours of interviews.   Also in the 1940s, Steiner promoted concerts featuring McPartland and Freeman, among others, and with Hugh Davis started S&D Records to issue Chicago jazz recordings.  By leasing and, in 1949, purchasing the catalogue of the old Paramount record label, he was able to reissue historic recordings of Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver, Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and Blind Lemon Jefferson, among others.

Steiner was present at one of our Ellington Society gatherings when he gave me a copy of Duke Ellington's "Jig Walk" on an ancient-looking 78 rpm record; he held the rights to that transcription of a piano roll from the 1920s.  I recall Dick Buckley being there, too, along with Henry Quarles, all the way from Pewaukee, Wisconsin.  Henry handed me a copy of an Index to Music Is My Mistress, an eighty-two-page pamphlet by H. F. Huon, which was packed with useful information.  I wish it were still in print.