Foreword: "More Conversations with Duke," by Robert E. Johnson

By Robert E. Johnson

The annual Duke Ellington Study Group convention in Chicago, May 16-19,1984 brought together Ellington fans and scholars of all stripes:  Mark Tucker, Willis Conover, Gunther Schuller, Eddie Lambert...  It was also the first of two conferences in which I myself made a presentation.

On May 19, the final speaker was Robert E. Johnson (1922-1996), the former editor-in-chief  of Jet magazine, bringing the entire proceedings to a close.  His was a spirited, imaginative and reflective talk, which I reproduce here.

 

Ellington.  Even when you say the name, Duke is here.  I was struck by Willis's presentation, flattering Duke, but flattery:  that's Duke's forte.  He made a lot of flattery by his use of music when he was with us, and he left us a lot of flattery in music.

I've been fortunate to have known this man close-up as a journalist, because there weren't many journalists who can make that claim, that they, as journalists, were able to come close to Duke.  If there was any breed, any category of people Ellington did not embrace in his "four kisses" society, it was journalists.   And if you've read some things that have been written by journalists about Ellington, you could understand why he felt that way.  Ellington was the kind of person who really liked to be open and free, but had difficulty talking to the media, because for the most part, whenever he decided to do an interview, he very seldom recognized himself when it came out in print.  I think this is true of Michael Jackson, too.

I first met Ellington as a fan in 1944, as a sailor.  I served in the United States Navy at Treasure Island, in San Francisco.  I first met him person-to-person, face-to-face in 1948, as a journalist.  I began my journalism career working for the Atlanta Daily World.  I’m very fortunate to have known this man.  There are not many journalists who could make that claim.  I got a chance to meet with him and talk with him in 1953, until he decided to "move off the scene," as we knew him.

During those years, I can hardly recall only a few interviews that I was able to get from Duke-- "Maestro," I called him, and he called me "Ro-bear"-- He said, "Ro-bear, just bring your tape recorder and we'll record our conversation.  I don't feel like being interviewed."  We usually started in his dressing room and, after his performance, to his hotel, where there were sometimes parties with his friends.  Usually, the moments that I cherish most occurred in his dressing room, where he laid back flat on the floor with his feet on the wall -- he had a scientific explanation for it—and we’d turn on the tape recorder. Sometimes we'd sit for one or maybe two hours, and I'd say to him, "Maestro, I'm going to make a copy of the tape and send it back to you, because some of the things we’ve talked about will go into publication."  He would say, "Now Ro-bear, do you expect me to sit down and listen to an hour or two of every damn time we have one.  Why don't you pick out what you would like to use and go ahead and use it, because I trust you."

In some of the tapes, Ellington, as eloquent as he is with the King's English, sometimes would use non-theological lingo, and you would have difficulty extricating that from the flowery, pretty parts of the conversation.  Yet I think some of that kind of conversation was really essentially Ellington.  He would leave himself vulnerable; there were not many people Ellington would allow himself to become vulnerable to.

Even now, the Maestro is here, and he would say, "Ro-bear, gee, looking back on some of those tapes, you could get some good kiss-and-tell books out of them.  It seems that's what journalism is about these days."  But I would smile back and say, "Maestro, I'm not Milton Coleman, so what Milton Coleman did to Jesse Jackson, you would never have done to you.  Whatever we talk about in confidence, we'll keep it in confidence.”  But much of what Ellington and I talked about is a matter of public consumption, because it's just another type of dimension.  It would take everyone who's ever met Ellington to really talk about him.  If you really want to know him, that's what you would literally have to do:  get the universe to come in, because no one ever had a chance to really know this man.  You're talking about an enigma, wrapped up in one, and trying to extricate and untangle that and put it out is indeed difficult to do.  Sometimes when he was really trying to make himself vulnerable, he'd catch what he was doing.  Then he would turn it in a humorous way and say, "Gee, did I really say that?  Is that true?  Is that the way I really feel about that?  How are we going to treat that?" he would go on sometimes.

He meant a lot to me as a journalist, as a philosopher, as an educator, as a religionist.  I always like to use the term "libertarian" when it comes to Ellington, about the Four Freedoms.  I still think of Ellington in the present tense, because he was one of the freest in this universe in thought, because he had that way of trying never to be locked in his mind when he came to a bind.  He was in a certain stir about people who wanted to contain him, to categorize him and put him into certain compartments so they could deal with him.  His philosophy had a lot of transfer value for me about how to do the work I'm involved in.

I can think of one occasion when Esquire Magazine used to give out awards to soloists and bands.  For about a decade or more, Esquire would give out the awards, and the number one trumpeter would be Cootie Williams, number one baritone Harry Carney, number one tenor Ben Webster, later Paul Gonsalves, number one trombonist Lawrence Brown.  You could just go down the Ellington roster; it just dominated the Esquire and Down Beat polls.  One day I said to him, "Maestro, how do you get along with a band full of bandleaders?  Look at any one of these guys, because if he decided to leave,  he could start his own band." 

I remember him saying to me, "Ro-bear, when I was in Washington, I was a soda jerk, and I put a little group together and hit the road to see what we could do.  I decided something right there:  I wasn't going to let no son of a bitch give me ulcers.  I discovered that ulcers are not so much about what's eating you, but who's eating you."

He explained that by saying, "Whenever there are problems that are professional, you can solve them as a professional.  Personal problems are a little more difficult.  Say I'm writing some music, and the band's getting ready to discuss it.  Johnny Hodges looks at the sheet music and says, "That A-sharp should be a B-flat."  I said, "No, Johnny, that's A-sharp.  I'll ask Tom Whaley, who writes it out, ‘What is it?’  Tom says A-sharp.

“Johnny says, ‘I don't give a damn what Tom Whaley or anybody else says.  Hell, it's B-flat.’

“As of that moment I know I’m not having a professional argument.  Johnny Hodges is pissed at me about something; it’s personal.  So instead of arguing with Johnny Hodges, I’ll walk away and write music and make money for all of us.”

Basically, that’s the way Duke tried to deal with conflicts, in his own organization or wherever, always tried to be a professional, and when it’s personal, try to avoid it and try to avoid ulcers.

Of course, Ellington was probably the world’s top practicing physician without a license.  He used to amaze me.  At first, I approached Ellington’s home remedies with a great deal of trepidation.  But I finally got into Ellington’s medical bag, and some of that stuff really worked for people who were not Duke Ellington, because he had his remedies and prescriptions.  On the major things, he relied upon a doctor, and sometimes he would have to fly around the world, for a seizure or any kind of major problem.

Ellington was a philosopher who talked a great deal about life.  One of the things he always said to me, “Ro-bear, life is a gift.  What do you do with it?  You use it.  You can’t take it to the bank and put it in a safe-deposit box.  When you feel you’ve got all the money you want, you’ve got your career where you want it, and then go to that safe-deposit box and pull it out and say, ‘Now I’m going to live it.’  See?  You have to do this every day.”

After the seventieth birthday concert that President Richard Nixon gave to him—When I say “Nixon,” in my community, the name raises a lot of emotions.  I don’t want to talk about Nixon as a political person; I want to talk about what he did for Ellington, and some personal things with me, because I did travel to Russia and Iran with him, and a number of countries as a journalist.  But when he, the President of the United States paid tribute to Ellington on his seventieth birthday, it was really the first time the United States of America really recognized where the crowned heads and royalty around the world had known this man, revered and honored him.

And so, this was great.  Afterwards, I said to him, “Maestro, you’ve hit the big seven -o.  The President in the big house has laid it on you.  I guess there’s nothing left for you to do but retire.”

“Retire? Retire to what?” He asked me the question.  I scratched my head to think of a place to retire to.  “Probably one of those New York studio jobs where you can sit down and just write.  Or maybe go to Hollywood and just write.”

He’d say, “Ro-bear, you know my music.  I would die in a studio.  We’d get nothing accomplished.  People and things, sights, sounds:  that’s where I get my music.  And retirement?  Death is retirement.”

But now I’d say, “Maestro, we’re still listening to your music,” and he hasn’t really retired yet.

Duke talked about parenting.  That was a funny scene, because that’s a sensitive chord, when you talk about his wife or his mother, about the family.  Edna:  he’d rather not talk about it.  He’d rather not talk about parenting.  He said, “You know, Ro-bear, virtually my whole life, I’ve been my mother’s son.  I could probably say more about her parenting me than my own parenting of Mercer.”

We had this conversation at Ravinia.  I remember Mercer came in while we were taping our own talk.  He was bringing in the report on the band receipts, money and this kind of thing.  Duke said, “I need a little more money to go somewhere.”

Mercer said, “No, I’ve got you on a budget.  I already gave you money for this period of time.  I know you’re going to spend it on friends and this and that.”  Duke said, “Listen to this cocksucker here.  He’s got all my money and telling me what and how he’s going to give it to me, and what I’m going to do with it.

“But, you know, Mercer’s the best thing that ever happened to me.  He’s pretty tight-fisted now.  Hell, I don’t even know what he’s doing with it; he may be stealing it.  But if he’s stealing it, it stays in the family, and that’s more than I can say about what happened previously.”

Mercer was the best thing that ever happened to his dad, in the last decade or so of his life.  It was a beautiful relationship between these two men.  It was at some points adversarial, but not much from Duke, because I don’t think Duke really wanted to be a real father.  He was a different kind of man.  He listened, but he jokingly would say it was easier for himself to attract women, because Mercer had all that white hair.  “He looks like the daddy; I look like the son.”  But Mercer would measure out his fair portion, and Duke survived because he had a friend.  Mercer was the best thing that ever happened to his dad, in the last decade or so of his life.  It was a beautiful relationship between these two men.  It was at some points adversarial, but not much from Duke, because I don’t think Duke really wanted to be a father.

I was always fascinated by his ideas on education.  I wonder what would have happened if he’d been on the board of education of a high school, or college, or university.  Some of his notions were rather unorthodox; trying to deal with a kid wandering around, trying to find himself, he’d say, “Give him a little rope until he makes up his mind what he wants to do.  Education never begins until that moment you decide what you want to do, and then go in pursuit of that.  Then you become educated.”

There was a lot to be said about such an approach.  I remember when I was a student at Morehouse College in Atlanta, when George Washington carver came on one occasion to give a lecture about education.  He said, “Learn to do what you know you should and have to do, even though you don’t want to do what you shouldn’t ought do.”  That had the ring of Ellingtonia to me, so those things to me served to validate George Washington Carver’s, even though he needs no validation.

I understood when I was angry at my daughter.  My youngest daughter, Janet, was studying flute and did pretty well.  She had started in grade school, and by the time she was in eleventh grade, she became lead flautist in an all-city orchestra.  She received a summer scholarship to the University of Kansas in Lawrence.  She had recorded with the orchestra, the marching band, the swing band, and so on.

I had the recording of Ellington’s “Black Swan,” with Norris Turney’s beautiful flute solo, and I put it on just to play it. Janet came into the room and started listening.  I just walked out of the room, and the next thing I knew, I heard it recycled, all over again, and then a third time, “Black Swan.”  She then left the room to pick up her flute, went back to listening.  I got my tape recorder and, without her knowing it, put it on the floor. “

I took the tape to Duke and said to him, “Maestro, my daughter heard your ‘Black Swan” and got her flute, and this is what she was trying to do with it.”  I put it on, and he said, “She plays like that?  She plays pretty well.  I’ll tell you what I want you to do, Ro-bear:  when I get to Ravinia, I want her to do the solo for me.”  Johnny Hodges was in the room listening and said, “I’ll give her a gift of a new flute.  She probably likes the one she has, but I’ll get her a new one,” from whatever company that made his alto saxophone.

So, I was bursting with pride.  I got home to Janet and said, “I got you a date with the Duke at Ravinia.”  She asked, “What for?” and I said to play “Black Swan.”  She said, “Daddy, you know I can’t play “Black Swan.”  I said, “Yes, you can.  I taped it."  Then I pushed the button to play it.  She got angry with me.  "I didn't know anything about this!"

The point is that she just got cold feet and would not play that part, and her daddy never got a chance to say, "I have a daughter who played with Duke Ellington."  That young lady is a lawyer; she did not go into music.  But this is what Ellington said:  Don't try to mold them in your direction.  Let them find what they want to do, and then let them do it.

I never got tired of talking to Maestro about his musicians, how well he knew them individually.  Most bandleaders would pass out sheet music to the musicians and rehearse.  They would want to hear an alto or a baritone, just the instruments.  But Ellington was listening to men, and he would talk about them.  That always amazed me; I don't know if he told them some of the things he told me about them.  He felt the best way to honor an individual was to respect that individual, to listen to him.

His own role was discovering talent. He always felt if a person had one talent and worked at it full-time, he had more regard for him than one who had ten talents, who would give you ten one day, eight another day, some days three, and some days, you don't even know that he'll show up.  The consistency of that one talent was something he gloried in and felt good about.

 He always tried to gauge his musicians so that he would know what day he's going to get three, what day he'll get five.  Of all the people in his band, Johnny Hodges; you didn't know what talent on any one day or given performance, because sometimes Johnny-- Rabbit-- would walk on the bandstand while the band was playing.  I've been at performances when Rabbit would put his alto on the piano, and he'd listen to the intermission pianist and wouldn't play.

 

But Ellington was never offended.  He had a nice way of dealing with things like this.  I remember one occasion, not in Chicago but somewhere, he said to Johnny, "The people love you and want you to play 'All of me.'  They've heard the recording of it."  He tried to flatter him, but he didn't respond, so Ellington picked another soloist, Lawrence Brown.  I think that rubbed Johnny the wrong way.  Ellington had a way of handing solo parts to various musicians.  Sometimes you wonder why he'd do that.

 

You really have to listen to the members of the Ellington band to hear and appreciate them.  But I had problems with this, because sometimes we would talk, and I didn't know whether he was putting me on.  For example, we were talking about "Take the 'A' Train" once, and I asked him who he liked best on trumpet on the "'A' Train."  He waffled and said, "Whoever's playing it.  Who's your favorite soloist?"  I said my favorite soloist was Taft Jordan.  Then he asked me, "Did you ever hear Ray Nance play it?"

 

I said, "Yep."

 

"Did you ever listen to Cootie play it?"

 

I said, "Yep."

 

"Did you ever hear Clark Terry play it?"

 

"Yep."

 

"Did you ever hear Shorty Baker play it?  Did you ever hear Willie Cook?"

 

I said, "Yep."

 

"But Ro-bear, you never heard anybody but Taft Jordan.  When these guys get up to play it, you never hear it, because you're only listening to Taft Jordan, so you're being unfair."  I thought about that for a while.  Whenever I asked who his favorite soloist was, he'd say, "Whoever I'm listening to," because that's who he's paying attention to.

 

I asked him once about his male vocalists.  "Maestro, you've had Hibbler, you've had some male vocalists, but why the dry run through here?"  He said, "It's hard to get a male vocalist, and I'll tell you why, because Billy Eckstine has fucked up about ten generations of male vocalists.

Everybody wants to sound like Mr. B.  So, I just rely on my instrumentalists to take care of my solo responsibilities."

 

The Maestro was always attentive, listening to his musicians.  I had the pleasure of attending a number of recording sessions and just watched the guy work.  Here in Chicago, he recorded at Universal Studios the album Will the Big Band Ever Come Back?  On this day, he was rehearsing a song and had Mercer out, conducting the band.  Ellington said, "Hold it, hold it, hold it!" and walked over to Jimmy Hamilton and said, "What have you got against finishing with the rest of us?"

 

Jimmy said, in effect, "Look, Duke:  you've crowded all these notes in this measure, give me this tempo, and you expect me to play them and get there on time with everybody else."  Duke said, "Oh, so that's what's bothering you, all those notes in the measure.  I'll tell you what:  why don't you leave some of them out?  Pick out the pretty ones, the ones you like."  Then he went out and gave the downbeat.  Afterwards, he went over to Jimmy and said, "Hey, you picked out the pretty ones!"    To see this man motivate and work his individual musicians was just a pleasure I envied myself, because I had no business going there.

 

But for Ellington, above all else, the basis was religiosity.  I don't mean this in any formal sense.  My assessment is that Ellington feared God, illness, death, especially the fear of God.  He wasn't a fanatic about it.  He didn't go out to proselytize or convert.  If you could talk to him you would know that. The very last conversation I had with him in life was in Chicago, before he left to play his Sacred Concert in England.   He had just finished his book, Music Is My Mistress, and he wanted a book party at Johnson Publishing.  I talked to my publisher, Johnny Johnson, about it.  He looked forward to that; he would finish his book, and we would have some little part in this.

 

I said, "Maestro, why don't we have lunch, and we'll talk about it."  He said, "No, Ro-bear.  I'm trying to finish up my Concert of Sacred Music, which I'll do when I leave here."  I said, "Maestro, I remember talking to Dr. W.E.B. DuBois on one occasion.  He never made an apology for using the best thought ever uttered on this subject matter.  For example, 'The problem of race is the problem of the Twentieth Century.'  He expressed that thought many times, and when he stole it from himself, it wasn't plagiarism.  Maestro, you've written a lot of sacred music, and you could borrow some of what you've done, and the people would never know the difference."

 

He said, "But Ro-bear, you can't jive God.  I've got to stick with it.  I have no problem with that, because I'm writing new music.  If it hadn't been for that, I would have the time, but I have to write this new music."  That's what Ellington was, because of his religiosity and his God and his feeling.

 

 Politically, Ellington was a great libertarian.  He didn't talk about race, because he tried to make statements in his music:  "What Color Is Love?"  He was a universal man who looked upon human beings, rather than as Jews or gentiles, blacks or whites, Mexican or Spanish, and so on.  They were all God's children.  But he knew the reality of what he'd lived and what he could do.   

 

Jump for Joy was probably the great statement he made on race.  I once asked him, "Do you ever go out to shows on Broadway?  Leslie Uggams has a show on called Hallelujah, Baby.  Did you see it?  What did you think of it?"

 

He said, "Damn, in Jump for Joy we buried Uncle Tom in the first movement.  To see this cotton-pickin', braids, and this kind of crap back on Broadway.  I was shocked.  Things I hate-- Oh, did I say that?  Oh, Leslie baby, you were given your talent, and you were exquisite in the way you used it.  Love you madly for that."  The first observation was what Ellington really felt, and he felt that way about what was really going on in the Black community.

 

We had some laughs about that.  One of those papers, The Afro-American, had made a cartoon of Duke sitting at the piano.  He had a bandanna on his head, and his song was, "We ain't ready yet."  Much of what Ellington had been talking about was the concept that Blacks should get some economics together, millions of dollars, and cooperating in joint ventures together, in order to enhance their respect in the community.

 

He said, "You know, Ro-bear, there was a time I could come to the South Side and shake hands with umpteen Black millionaires." This was now in the '70s.  "Now, I shake hands with your boss, John Johnson and Percy Julian and maybe a couple of others, then I just run out of hands. "Now when I go to the South Side to visit some longtime establishments, I find they're all gone downtown.  'Integration' is what they call it.  Is that all that integration is about?  If it is, I can't understand it.  That kind of integration doesn't make sense.  If your music is a commodity, and it's worth selling on the market, then it seems to me the community should cross over and make you a millionaire."  Duke lamented that some of the leadership in the Black community had taken that way.

 

He mostly was apolitical, but he came out once in a while.  When Barry Goldwater was running for President of the United States, and he made a statement about "extremism in defense of liberty is no vice," Ellington said to me, "Did you hear that guy?  Did you hear what he said?  The last time I heard talk like that, six million Jews died.  We can't have somebody like that as President."   He didn't ask me to erase that.

 

Ellington was the kind of guy who, if you got to talk with him and know him as a journalist, would say, "How come you all ask the same question?  Do you all have a big meeting and say, 'Ellington is going to be on tour.  If you meet him in Stockholm, ask him this; if you meet him in New York, ask him this; if you meet him in Atlanta, ask him this.'  You all ask the same questions, and you find yourselves repeating yourself.  I have enough trouble writing music and dealing with people.  I feel like I'm twenty-five years ahead of everything and everybody musically.  But there are things that I've forgotten or left in the trunk, or people have just learned it and start requesting it, so I have to play it. That's one of the reasons I keep my band together.  When I write, I can always hear it come right back to me."

 

To me, Ellington represented all that is, in terms of a human being.  He's so human; he's so great with so much that had personal transfer value, and a lot of what he talked about I liked to share with our readers.  They read it in Ebony, they read it in Jet, and we had a publication called Negro Digest.  Sometimes he said, "Why don't you give me a pen and let me write the article, without the interview?"  And he'd write some pieces for us.  Some of the articles we treasure most from our files were articles that Ellington sat down and wrote himself.  We also cherish a lot of interviews we did.

 

But the man himself taught me a lot about life and living.  When we started talking about eating-- food-- that to me was probably the most humorous and yet the most unorthodox, most meaningful conversations we had.  Ellington would violate the format:  he would start with a dish of ice cream and work his way back to the main course.

 

Another reason we got along was that he knew he wasn't a banker, and he wouldn't be keeping banker's hours.  If you, as a journalist, could stay up until three or four in the morning and be alert-- yes, you can do a lot of talking and get a lot of stories that way.  But Ellington would say, "Ro-bear, when we wake up, we've got to get a good meal.  This may be the last one before we finish our gig."  There's a lot to be said for that.  Whatever time you wake up, get your best meal, because you may or may not have the time, depending on your profession.  He said, "You know, the real luxury in this business would be able to find time for three meals a day and eight hours of sleep.  That's a luxury."

 

I don't know if the Maestro ever achieved that in his lifetime, especially eight hours of sleep, because part of the time he wanted to sleep his music was waking him up.  He'd have the urge to write.  I'd think, "You could wake up tomorrow morning and write it down."  He said, "It doesn't work that way.  Whenever the musical idea comes, you have to write it down, or you'll lose it.  I've lost a lot of songs, saying I would get to it tomorrow morning."

 

Imagine Ellington losing a song, as many songs that he wrote.  This man represented to me, as a journalist, probably the greatest experience I've had, the pleasure of knowing this guy.  To document and perpetuate and extend what he gave a lifetime doing is really commendable.  He's almost ready to slip off the coils of mortality, just long enough to enjoy our recessional, and then return to immortality, where he exists and will exist forever.

 

6. Lawrence Brown, Los Angeles, July 31, 1982

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, JULY-AUGUST 1982

HELEN ENNICO, of TDES in New York, gave me all the contact information I needed for my journey to Southern California in the summer of 1982, from Patricia Willard to Stanley Dance.

 B.  Leonard Feather, at his home,  Sherman Oaks, CA

    1.  mic set-up in his living room.  We sat on armchairs, my Dad seated a few feet away.

    2.  for about half an hour we spoke in generalities:  BB&B controversy, John Hammond, etc.  

    3.  I had come prepared with FBI records, notes on Duke's 1950 European tour and his signature on the antiwar Stockholm Peace Petition, Ellington's lawsuit against the CPUSA and article in the right-wing The New Leader.  When I raised questions about DE's subsequent reaction to the Red Scare, Feather became defensive; after another 15 minutes, he was shouting at me and practically threw me out

DE'S SON-IN-LAW?  Daniel James, probably wrote the New Leader piece.

Duke with Sid Kuller, 1941

C.    Sid Kuller, at his home in Beverly Hills

    1.  revival of Jump for Joy, at Miami Beach's Copa City, Jan. 20-Feb. 8, 1959 

        a.  large cast, including singers Barbara McNair, Timmie Rogers (accompanied by a vocal trio and full choir on "Show 'Em You Got Class."

        b.  Timner:  "It appears that one entire show in the time span... was recorded live for the Columbia label; however, nothing has been released as yet [1996?].

"There is a tape circulating among collectors, which contains some of the material listed..."

        c.  during our interview, Kuller played 3 tunes from his own cassette tape:  I was able to hear an updated "I Got it Bad," Barbara McNair and Timmie Rogers on "The Natives Are Restless Tonight," and another song I can't remember.  To my everlasting regret, I lost my own recording of the interview, including the songs.

    2.  Kuller with DE&HO touring the Soviet Union, 1971

        a.  hostility of USSR govt?

        b.  students from Patrice Lumumba University call Harry Carney a "nigger."

The following transcription represents the first of a round of interviews of people connected with Duke Ellington I conducted on a family vacation in Southern California in the summer of 1982.  These interviews were intended to supplement my 1980 M.E. thesis with the turgid, but accurate, title The Entertainment Industry as Exploiter of Black Musical Talent, as Reflected in the Career of Duke Ellington.

Of the seven interviews I managed, only three recordings remain in my possession, the other two being Henry Blankfort, the producer of Jump for Joy in 1941, and authors/ confidantes Stanley and Helen Oakley Dance.  Of the others, I have a vivid memory of author and critic Leonard Feather’s anger when I approached the subject of Ellington’s politics, at which point I was nearly thrown out of his Studio City apartment.  My main recollection of Maurice Zolotow, the author of an excellent article on Jump for Joy, at a bistro on Sunset Boulevard is that he left me stuck with the bill.  Of Irving Mills, I recall his sorrow at losing important documents to poor storage conditions.

One interview I recorded, but somehow lost, was the one I conducted with Sid Kuller, a writer for Jump for Joy.  After sharing his thoughts about the show, Mr. Kuller unexpectedly produced a tape recording of songs created for the 1958 revival of the show in Miami Beach, starring Barbara McNair.  From that tape, I recorded directly the songs “Walk It Off,” “The Natives Are Restless Tonight,” and an updated version of the title song, none of which have been released. Kuller went on to relate his experiences with Ellington on his 1971 tour of the U.S.S.R.  Of course, I regret very much the loss of this recording.

 

David Baker 

I was fortunate in 1972, my final 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, however:  I spent the first half of the show anxiously checking my wristwatch and left during intermission to make a political speech.  The revolution could not wait, and besides the important music was being created by Miles, Trane, Ornette, and their cohorts.

 

 

 

 

 

 

My talk with Lawrence Brown took place while he was on his backstage job at the Century City production of Sophisticated Ladies, after its Broadway run had closed.  When I phoned to set up our interview, Brown sounded pessimistic, but I wasn’t quite prepared for his memories of Duke Ellington.

LAWRENCE BROWN:  I’m passing out parking tickets.  You see, they get a month’s rate parking, so to park they’ve got to produce the tickets.

How did you end up back in show business?

LB:  Mercer (Ellington], but he’s never really been out here, for this show.  He is the music man for the show.  This is a show made up of Ellington’s music, and he recruited the musicians who know Ellington’s music for the band.

Was he here to audition the musicians?

LB:  No.  Did you have any trouble getting down here?

No.  I just asked a security man, one level down below the Playboy Club entrance.  When I got lost, I just asked the security man and came down two flights of stairs.  I didn’t have any trouble recognizing you, though; you look the same as you did forty years ago.  You’re looking good.  You’ll be seventy-five in a few days, right?

 LB:  How did you know?  Helen Ennico [of the New York Duke Ellington Society]?

No, not on that particular subject, but she loves you.  She went on and on about wishing you a happy birthday.

LB:  I’ve never met her.

I haven’t, either.  I’ve just talked to her on the phone.  She’s quite a talker!  I may have seen her without knowing who she was, in Grant Park in Chicago during the jazz festival.  They have an Ellington night every year, and she must have been there a couple of years ago.

LB:  I think she must be a very good person.  You don’t find many who could take on her job.

Yes.  She’s retiring, but I’m sure she’ll stay in touch.

LB:  I have a lot of friends in the Duke Ellington Society; they’re quite an outfit.  They used to have them all over the country.

 Yes, there are about five.  There’s a functioning one in Toronto.  There’s another in Washington, D.C.  I belong to the one in Chicago, which was led by Marion Stevenson, but she packed up and left the organization pretty much up in the air.  Isn’t there one here anymore?

LB:  There hasn’t been one here in a long time.  I forget the name of the head of it.  There was one girl in it whose name you might know:  Pat Willard.

 Yes, I talked to her.  She’s writing a book; she seems to be thinking along the same lines as I am.

LB:  They’re all thinking along the same lines.  There’s nobody who knows Duke Ellington, and there is nobody allowed to put down the truth about him.  There’s nobody that knows.

Was he a master of disguise?

LB:  What’s-his-name in New York tried to tell the truth about him.  They squelched it.

Are you talking about Barry Ulanov?

LB:  Barry Ulanov.  I read his book, and he just hinted the truth.  They put the squelch on him, because it was uncomplimentary to Ellington.  I joined that band a week after Easter in 1932.  I never was a person to just get in and to the horn, because I didn’t just blow the horn.  I used to study what was going on.  In the old band, they used to do that kind of thing.  A lot of them just packed up their horns for the next gig.

I kind of got that feeling when I talked to you on the phone.  It seemed you don’t have a lot of cherished memories.  You sounded rueful.

LB:  The best thing about my years in this business was the experience of travel and meeting people all over the world.  I had a very deep dislike of Ellington.

You certainly stuck with it long enough.

LB:  Now you’ve got the best word.  The worst job.  They don’t pay you fair, and that’s for certain reasons.  I can tell you that I first stayed with it because I come from here.  I started to go back the first year, but if I had quit and gone back, the West would have viewed me as someone who couldn’t succeed.  So, I had to stay, whether I wanted to or not.

Perhaps if it hadn’t been Ellington’s band, it wouldn’t have mattered.

[Trumpeter Bill Berry passes by, and there is a brief break in the interview.]

LB: [Juan] Tizol did not get nearly what he was due, since his numbers were hits.  The first big thing was “Caravan,” and the next was “Perdido.”

But he’s still getting royalties, isn’t he?

LB:  He’s getting some royalties, but it should be much more.  There was a system:  say, you have a tune and I have a band.  If you want your tune published, I must be the one to publish it, so I must get a certain percentage of the tune.  Then somebody adds words, so that in the end your tune has about five pieces cut off.  You might get something, but not nearly the amount you should get.

And most of the time, these other four or five people belonged to one mastermind, the one who gets the most money, because he owns the others, the writers who are working for him.  In those days, this mastermind was Irving Mills.  As I said, I joined the band in ’32.  When I joined, I was doing very well in California.  I was at Frank Sebastian’s Cotton Club, playing all sorts of stuff.  Our band was playing in movies.

 Was this Les Hite’s band?

LB:  No, it was the Quality Serenaders.  Les Hite’s was the last band I worked for there.

All of the bands out here worked in the movies; if you didn’t get movie work at least one day a week, something was wrong.  In those days, cabaret scenes were a must in a picture.  The system was we worked for ten dollars an hour for every hour we were on the set.  It wasn’t like now, where you’d be; then there was no way of in a segment and sent on home.  Then, they’d shoot us over here, over there, and over there.  Our day started at nine o’clock and ended at four.  Now, if they called you at one o’clock, they still paid you from nine to four.  In the end, there was no test.  We made an awful lot of money then.

Were you actually on camera for any of this?

LB:  No, we were just on the set, and most of the time we weren’t even playing.  But we’d have to be very quiet:  then there was no way of separating film conversation from room noise, or whatever.

The reason I went with Ellington is, number one, I’d had a run-in, because Louis Armstrong was coming [Johnny] Collins.

The gangster.

LB:  We had rehearsals on Sunday afternoons and took picture for the papers.  Well, that Sunday was Easter Sunday.  My father was a minister, so I always went home to Pasadena and had dinner.  On Sundays we were off anyway.  I said, “Can’t we do that on Monday?  This is Easter Sunday, and I need to go home.”  Well, this guy Collins comes up and says, “Who is this guy?  Who does he think he is?  If he doesn’t want to make the thing, okay, we’ll get some fellow from the studio.”

He didn’t know these were the wrong kind of remarks to say to me; so I said to him, “Now, you do just that,” and that was the end of my relationship with Armstrong.  I left on a Tuesday, but earlier that week, Irving Mills came out to the Cotton Club, where I was working in a floor-show.  I was playing “Sweet and Lovely”—oh, no.  What was that number?  “Trees.”

Mills heard it and told me to come over to his table and asked, “How would you like to go with Ellington?”  I’d had offers from several other bands going East, but here I had money.

  Was Mills specifically looking for a trombone player?

LB:  No.  He was just visiting the club.

He just made a snap decision.

LB:  It was just one of those things.  I said to myself, “This is my chance to see the East.”  At that time, I’d just bought a new car.  I put it up on blocks, if you know what I mean, and parked it in the oil company’s garage.  I was crazy about cars, and this was a very fine car.  I said, “I’ll be back in a year, after I’ve seen New York.”  I didn’t care that much about New York.

 It must have meant something to you to join Ellington’s band at that point, which was about the highest in music you could aspire to.

LB:  I did not like Ellington’s band.  I did not like his music.  He’d come by the club once before, and they gave him a night at the Cotton Club.  With the leader of our band we went upstairs and heard it, and I thought, “This isn’t that great. What’s so great about it?”

To me, Fletcher Henderson had the best-playing band. But this stuff was weird.  I didn’t like it.

 It surprises me that Mills would choose you.  I wasn’t there, but you seem like such an odd choice for Ellington’s trombone section.

LB:  He had two men, Nanton and Tizol.  Nanton was a soloist, but Tizol didn’t solo at all.  Nanton could play that plunger, but he was not a good straight man.  When I came along, everything had a distorted tone.  I guess Mills was thinking they were going to need a third trombone anyway, because everybody was adding a third to the trombone section.

I went down to meet Ellington, and the first thing he said was, “Now, I never heard you but Mills said to get you.”  Mills ran the whole band.  He ran everything.  So, that was on a Wednesday.  The band was leaving on Saturday.  They traveled by train, so I went down to the station.  I didn’t have anything to hold me; I was single.  The trip was rather hard.  I caught a cold, and it wasn’t a good trip at all.

We went from Los Angeles to New York.  When we got to New York, I found out that I was the thirteenth man to join the band.  Then it came out that you couldn’t be a thirteenth man and play; you had to wait until he found another man!

That man turned out to be Otto Hardwicke, from Washington.  He’d been in Europe at the time.  So, I didn’t work from the time they left Los Angeles until they played the Pearle Theater in Philadelphia, six or seven weeks later.

Were you drawing a salary?

LB:  No.  That’s a funny thing; rent was $70 a week.  In the first place, they told me I was crazy.  I said, “I don’t like Ellington’s music.  I don’t know anything about it.  But I’m going to see the country, so I’ve got to be fair.”  I thought $70 a week ought to cover my expenses, but I drew money out of the bank and took traveler’s checks, put my car on blocks, and everything.  Then I find out you don’t get money until you work, and they paid $70 for a whole week.

Compared to what you were making, that was nothing.

LB:  That was the first shock.  I paid my own room rent, everything.  That’s the way Mills maneuvered.

Ellington really had nothing to say?

LB:  He had nothing to do with it.  After weeks of rehearsing, what did he have me do?  It was a stage show, and they had me playing a solo spot, plus playing the first trombone parts in the band.  Now, Ellington didn’t write any first parts.

You just made them up?

LB:  I wrote them in myself.  For weeks I did that, for nothing.

And they had berths on the train.  I found out the men had to pay a certain little charge for their berths, all the way from Los Angeles to New York to Hartford, Connecticut—by chair car—then back to New York for rehearsing.  I never got any money for rehearsals or anything else.  On my first check, they took out the amount for the berth and the chair cars up to Hartford.  So, you can see why from the first week on I hated these people.  I didn’t know anything about this.  Instead of the truth, they were telling lies and tricking me. 

What about the other members of the band?  Did it take a long time for you to become accepted?

 LB:  No, it was easy.  There was nothing extraordinary about them.  They were just musicians.  Some of them were outstanding musicians, like Cootie Williams, or especially Johnny Hodges.  They were extraordinary on their instruments.

For $70, I was doing four shows a day, playing parts and taking a solo spot in the show.  They put me in the spotlight.  They’d made a band arrangement of “Trees”!  I played that thing four times a day for $70.

It’s too long a story.  You see, I’m a sane person.  I was all business, and a lot of times I would warn the band, like when we first came out here to do a picture.  They came here talking about union scale.  I said, “Hey, now they’re having a reduced rate, and at the end you don’t make as much as you think you’re going to get.  It was always cheap.

Then it comes time to go to Europe [1933].  Mills said that they didn’t know what we were going to see, that they were “experimenting.”  Lying like a dog.  He knew exactly what we were going to do.

 He had the itinerary all planned?  Let me backtrack for just a second.  Nineteen thirty-two was Ellington’s last year at the Cotton Club.  Did you perform in that band?

LB:  Yes, I was at the Cotton Club in a show called Stormy Weather and before that.

With Ethel Waters?

LB:  Yes, Ethel waters was in that show.

So, we got ready to go to Europe for $100 a week.  We had accumulated $375 of radio, where you play spots.  You’re supposed to get paid for spots on the air.   But they never paid us for this.  They just let it accumulate.  We were only going to be there four weeks.  We’d never seen Europe, and it cost thousands of dollars to go see Europe.  And old fool me said, “I’ll go, okay.”

Besides, every extra date that we played:  they’d said for every extra gig in Europe, uyou’d get $25, for each gig, dance, party, or whatever.

Was that the information you received before the tour?

LB:  No, that came up later.  We were never informed that far ahead.

We finally get together and go to Europe.  We were only supposed to be there four weeks and were to be paid—I forget whether it was $275 or $375 for the radio spots.  Mills got us out on the ocean in the middle of the boat for a meeting and says, “I might as well tell you now; you’re not going to get it.”  That’s the kind of junk they pulled.

And when we get over there, there’s only one show in the [London] Palladium a day, but then they have those old minds going ahead.  During those four weeks, we had so many extras, parties and dances, all kinds of extras.  At $25 a show, you’d think you had a lot of money coming, but they never paid you as you made them.  They’d save it all up for the end of the trip.  But then, at the end, he says he didn’t know about the taxes and all.  Lying like a dog.

Instead of paying you all that money, he wants to settle for an amount.  That’s the whole story.  He alienated Ellington into that same system.  Ellington used to be a nice fellow, who became one of the biggest crooks.  Every tune, everything done is not from his head.  He had a terrific memory.  Here comes a new tune, and at the dances he’d try it out.  Then each man that he wanted would take a few choruses, which were ad lib.

Which he would use for other tunes.

LB:  For instance, I played a solo on “Once in a While.”  Then in comes little Johnny Hodges and Harry Carney and we’d do what we called noodling, fooling around, making little countermelodies and things.  Here’s Johnny Going [hums “I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart].  What was that other tune?
[I hum “Never No Lament”]

LB:  That’s what I mean.  Now there’s three tunes; when you noodle on those three tunes, you get three more for each.  So, you wind up with any number of tunes, and they all came  from that one tune.

They say he wrote a thousand tunes.  Well, that’s a lot of crap.  Harry [Carney] didn’t do much, but Johnny Hodges and Cootie, and then comes along Ray Nance.  It all should have been an amalgamation of all these things.  But he was a mastermind:  No, you don’t do that.  Then you publicize the fact that here’s a “genius.”  No such thing in the world.

You’ve got to give him credit, now.

LB:  He had a terrific memory.  He never won any contest with other pianists.  He was a good   listener.

But to get that bunch of guys to work together, he had to have had something.

LB:  Those men worked together an awful lot, because they used to tell him what to do; he didn’t tell them.  They used to call him “the Phony Duke.”  I had another name for him:  “the Fabulous Fraud.”

He had a terrific personality, especially a genius for drawing women.  He could exploit any number of men, and he could exploit women.

In his music, he adored “The Lion.”  When he played, I could hear all the piano players he took it from.

I’ve heard him play just as a pianist, and he doesn’t sound like anybody else.  He’s instantly recognizable.  You know that it’s Duke when you hear him playing.  You don’t mistake him for someone else.  But, regardless of who gets credit, what a great body of work over fifty years!

By 1940, Ellington was no longer with Mills.  He went to the William Morris agency.

LB:  Then he had uncanny luck:  he got Billy Strayhorn.  Strayhorn was like manna from heaven.  He opened up here with “Lush Life.”  Ellington couldn’t begin to try and play it.  All he could do was listen.  But Strayhorn was a meek little person who had his little weaknesses. He allowed himself to be drawn into things.

 If you hear a tune like “Something to Live For,” the average person hears it, and it’s just a tune.  But that’s Strayhorn’s story.  He wrote lyrics to everything he wrote.  He was a genius.

 You’d use that term more for Strayhorn than for Ellington?

LB:  Not even in the same auditorium!  Strayhorn was a genius.  All this modernistic music in the Ellington band was Strayhorn.

Strayhorn would get called when Ellington was on the road.  “Hey, Swee’Pea, what could you send me for this piece?”  He was little kid.  Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer called on Strayhorn.

To take him away from Ellington?

LB:  Ellington would say to him, “You’re not ready; I’ll tell you when.

Did Strayhorn want to leave?

LB:  He would have gone, but he was so dominated by this man that he turned it down.  He knew ten times as much music as Ellington.

So, he was always in Ellington’s shadow.

LB:  Always.  You can hardly explain it.  It seems uncanny.

Do you know what I’m listening to now?  “Flamingo,” the old record with Herb Jeffries.  What an arrangement!

LB:  I’ll tell you about the arrangement.  “Flamingo” was a song from someone in New England.  Ellington didn’t care anything about it, so he had Strayhorn make an arrangement.  Strayhorn came with the body of the arrangement, but he had no introduction and he had no ending.  And, of course there were sections for soloists to come in.  I thought, “Tizol, It’s like Chloe [hums the first three notes of “Flamingo.”  “And Ray Nance, you answer [hums the nest three notes], and into the arrangement.

And that instrumental break in the middle is thrilling.  That was you, right?

LB:  Me and Johnny Hodges.  When we got to the end of it, I said, “Hey, look:  same type as the beginning [hums the final five notes].

Someone put it up as the sixth number in that record session.  Ellington didn’t think it would do anything, but it overshadowed everything.  Ellington like to died.  That’s the story of “Flamingo.”  Still, that arrangement has never been surpassed.  That was Billy Strayhorn from  ,0beginning to end.  Ellington didn’t write one bit of it, but he took credit.

It seems to me that, when you joined the band, critics jumped on you.  You were “too sophisticated.”

LB:  I did not like Ellington.  I had him figured from the beginning.  I’m from out here; I went to school in Oakland, San Francisco, Pasadena, all around here.  To me, the trombone should be played with beauty, just like any other instrument.  At that time, the trombone was nothing but a tailgate instrument.  They used to do these little parade sessions on Central Avenue [in Los Angeles], on the trucks advertising the big band bashes.  I wouldn’t do it.  I couldn’t play that way.

This is a beautiful instrument.  When I first came up, my first solo performances were for [evangelist] Aimee Semple McPherson’s temple out here.  On Mother’s Day Sunday, 6,000 were in the audience when they finally closed the doors.  It scared me to death.  I was petrified; I’d never seen 6,000 people.  Just me and the piano player.

 I think of you as an originator.  I hear a lot of you in Tommy Dorsey.  I don’t know what your relationship was, but I think of you as an originator of that type of playing.

  LB:  I played that way before Dorsey.  I knew Tommy Dorsey very well.  I went to his dressing room when he played the Capitol Theater in New York.  Another trombonist I admired was in Jimmy Dorsey’s band, Bobby Burns.  Later, I began to admire—a beautiful player, but I can’t think of his name.  He was on staff at CBS when I was there.

That was after you left Ellington the first time around.

LB:  Stop.  Listen to the words on this.  [We are silent as we listen to a performance of “Something to Live For” from the theater stage].

That’s the story of Billy Strayhorn.  In all those tunes, he talked about himself, his sorrows about not being the person he would like to have been.  You never realize that from his music, but there’s “Lush Life.”  They are Billy Strayhorn’s story.

It seems he was a very unhappy person.

LB:  In his heart, he was unhappy about being odd.  He was a genius.  I have a couple of tapes of the band that people have sent me.  Some of it is very modern, but he never got credit.  Just now, he’s getting a little bit of credit.  He did so much for Ellington.  Ellington didn’t do anything until shortly after he died.  All those lush arrangements were his.

It was never a case of Ellington’s learning from Strayhorn and applying it?

LB:  When he died, I was told he had stuff in his apartment like that.  He’d just write.  All he could do was write.  Where it all went, who knows?

Ellington was doing all these religious things.

 His Sacred Concerts.

LB:  He was a seducer of women and an exploiter of men.  That’s all he was.

The man seems in so many ways a self-contradiction, that being just one example.  The fact that he died intestate, not leaving a will, setting everyone at each other’s throats.  I think they’re still at each other’s throats, in his own family.

 LB:  His family is kind of weird.  Did you ever meet a member of his family?

 Only Mercer.  I’ve tried to get a response from Ruth, but I haven’t succeeded so far.

 LB:  Weirdest thing you ever saw.  I knew his mother and father.

Can you talk a little bit about his family?

LB:  I knew them, but about them I knew nothing.  But Mercer:  What a man tries to do and becomes good at, he should stay at.  Mercer was a terrific builder of little model airplanes.  But Ellington said, “No, there’s no future in that for you.  You’re coming with me.”  An egomaniac, that’s all he was.  So, Mercer went to Juilliard , and with that behind you, who’s going to say no?  To Ellington, people were only good for what he can use you for.  That was his true character.  That’s what he proved every minute of his life from then on.

You’re saying his image and his personality were poles apart.  Everything that’s been said or written about him is so much hogwash?

LB:  He ruined more people than you could ever imagine.  As I say, exploiter and seducer.

One more question.  It seems that for you and other members of the band, things came to a head around 1950.  Sonny Greer, yourself, and Johnny Hodges all left the band at the same time.  It couldn’t have been a coincidence that all three stalwarts of the band just packing up and leaving.

LB:  When we came back from Europe, there was too much pressure on me.  Ellington had become another Mills.

Mills had five big acts:  Ellington, Cab Calloway, Mills Blue Rhythm Band, Ina Ray Hutton, and Hudson-DeLange.  Any time he wanted to kill you, he’d say to club owners, “Look.  Do away with him, and I’ll get you five dates, and all of them will make you money.  Slick, very slick.  I could name a good big band that he ruined.  He was no good whatever.

I’d never dispute you about the way things were done.  Yet if it hadn’t been for Ellington, we wouldn’t be sitting here talking about your years with Duke Ellington.  They wouldn’t have happened.  Without Mills, you’d never have heard of Duke Ellington.  As a Black bandleader, he needed Mills.

LB:  Everybody tried to tell him, put this man down.  And finally, he did.

But we were talking about 1951, after Mills was out of the picture.

LB:  By that time, he’d learned all of Mills’s methods.

But in 1951, was it an accumulation of grievances, or something that happened right about that time, that caused you to say, “That’s it.  I’ve had enough, and I’ve got to walk.”?

LB:  I quit him three times:  I quit then, and I came back around ’60 and left again in 1970.  But there were a lot of other little things in between.

Sonny Greer had been with him from the beginning.

LB:  He fired Sonny Greer.  Sonny was drunk most of the time, so he couldn’t play.

Paul Gonsalves was the same, yet he never fired Paul.

LB:  He was the type of man who liked to say, “See what a nice guy I am?  I put up with that.”

 

IN ROTATION:

• James P. Johnson, Father of the Stride Piano (Columbia, 1921-1939)