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 bookshelfthe 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.
a
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.
In 1983 the convention expanded exponentially, in general attendance and in the number of speakers and presenters, including Martin Williams, Dan Morgenstern, Billy Taylor, Sr; June Norton, Jimmy McPhail, Jerry Valburn (who presented an evening of Ellington films), Patricia Willard (on Jump for Joy and the recording to be issued on the Smithsonian label), Willis Conover, and an open discussion among Eddie Lambert (UK), Klaus Stratemann (Denmark), and Sjef Hoefsmit (Sweden).
Some of the Chicago delegation traveled to Chevy Chase, Maryland, to the home of sound engineer supreme, Jack Towers. Not only did we meet him personally; we also were treated to a tour of his basement sanctuary, where we viewed and heard the original sixteen-inch master of Ellington's Fargo recording from 1940.
Finally, I met a member of the Washington Ellington Society, Dr. Maurice Banks, who was a childhood friend of Mercer Ellington's and met Duke often. He was soft-spoken, polite, and took to me immediately. We visited each other over the coming years as good friends.
Author and curator of the Institute, Dan Morgenstern, Martin Williams, one of the world's most admired jazz writers. I don't remember much about Morgenstern's conference presentation, I still remember and agree with his opinion that the music forAnatomy of a Murder was almost too good for the movie.
Based in Washington, D.C., Willard started her career in 1949 as Duke Ellington's researcher, education collaborator, and public relations counselor. She also worked for several other major artists. She was historical consultant to the Duke Ellington Collection at the Smithsonian Museum of American History, the Library of Congress, the National Endowment for the Arts music program, Martin Williams and Billy Taylor's Kennedy Center jazz series and the National Jazz Service Organization. She has been a contributing editor to Down Beat and Jazz & Pop Magazine and a staff writer for JazzTimes. She has annotated more than a hundred recordings and has contributed articles and photographs in many magazines and journals internationally. In 2018 she became the first woman to be awarded the Jazz Journalists Association's Lifetime Achievement Award.
I got a chance to meet Alice Babs and her husband, Nils Lindberg. They invited me to sit with them, and for the few minutes we talked together they treated me like someone important, something I could never forget. I remember her telling me that Duke allowed her to choose the tunes for the 1963 Paris recording of the album Serenade to Sweden. I was pleased she chose "Take Love Easy" from Beggar's Holiday, as I was exploring that subject at the time. Later on she went before the attendees to introduce a video production of Ellington's Second Sacred Concert from 1967 in which she herself, of course, was a participant.
The video to be presented was recorded in a cathedral in Sweden. After remarking how little time she had to speak-- "Too much to tell; you could fill a book"-- Babs began her introduction by recalling her first glimpse of Ellington in Stockholm, during the band's European tour in 1939. She described that encounter as "the kick of my life."
In those years she was child a movie star, rather like a Swedish version of Hollywood's Judy Garland. From the age of thirteen, she had listened to every Ellington record she could find, but by the time her idol returned to Sweden in 1963, Babs, then in her forties, had retired from show business and started a family. Along the Scandinavian arc of his European tour, Ellington invited her to sing with the Orchestra on an upcoming Swedish television appearance. (The song they performed happened to be "Take Love Easy.")
the complete album
"I can't tell you how happy I am to be here; it's like a dream. And a dream it was also for me to sing with Duke Ellington. My wildest dream came true. You know, when your heart is full, your mouth wants to talk about it, and we all have parts of our hearts in Duke Ellington. There is so much to tell you about how I happened to work with him, I could fill a book and talk throughout my stay here. Of course, you must be wondering how a Swedish singer came to sing with Duke Ellington
"It started when I was a young girl. I collected his recordings, but the first two years, I was only thirteen, I didn't have money to buy them. So, I went to a shop; I heard them selling the records there, and I had permission to listen to many of the recordings. But two years later I started my career as a singer; I was fifteen then. The first concert I went to, at the concert hall in Stockholm, was Duke Ellington, and it gave me the kick of my lifetime. I had the nerve to say in interviews that it was my life's ambition get to sing with Duke Ellington. Can you imagine?
"Twenty years later, I was ready for it. It happened that a friend of mine who knew I was very fond of Duke Ellington's music was the producer of a program with the orchestra. She was going to do the choreography, and there were dancers from the Royal Opera, and I was chosen to sing with Duke Ellington.
"But I was not in the business. I had three children and didn't want to tour. Then one day I got a phone call, and my friend, who had done an album with me, asked me, 'Would you like to do a program for tv with Duke Ellington?' He didn't hear a sound from me! I sat down, and after a while I was able to stand. 'Of course I would like to.' I was in the kitchen when he called, you know. "During one-and-a half year's time, I had been going to a professor to study, although I didn't really intend to go back to my career, because I was so fond of my family life. I didn't want to go away from my children, yet here I was again on the stage with Duke Ellington, '63.
"One month later he called me from Paris and asked me, 'On Monday, would you like to come to Lauren and make a recording with me?' It was Sunday in Sweden, and I said, 'I cannot come tomorrow, but three days later I was there, and a few days later we had the album ready. As you hear, it's small pieces written by Ellington that he gave me. He said, 'I will give you a background of four French horns, and we'll see what everything's like.' There was a lot of improvisation in it, and when he wanted me to sing up, he pointed this way, and when he wanted me to sing down, he pointed that way!
"Every time he came to Sweden I joined in, and it happened to be on his birthday in 1967. He said that Ella had to sing in Berlin, and he asked me, 'Would you like to come with me and do two concerts with me?' We had no rehearsals at all, and I made two concerts with him. I sang, which I also did in the theater program, 'Come Sunday,' and that was a song I also recorded with him. I think that it had grown in his mind that perhaps he could use me and my voice in Sacred Concerts, songs like 'Come Sunday' and Negro spirituals. I had already done that in churches in Sweden.
"In the same year he asked me, 'Would you like, in one year's time, to come to New York and sing in my Sacred Concert, which I'm working on." I really was ready for it at the time. It was the first Sacred Concert for me, but it was the second for Duke Ellington. And then there was another opportunity two years later, with many concerts in between. I don't want to talk too much, because I want to show the program, but that was the Sacred Concert number three. That was a long concert. It was only performed once, at Westminster Abbey.
"What can I say about the second Sacred Concert? When I first came to New York, it was eleven days before we had the premiere, but Duke Ellington was not in New York, so I began to be nervous. Two days later he came, and I had no songs, nothing. In Sweden, they had big papers about it, big columns and writeups. I was really very worried.
"Then, nine days before the concert, he invited me to his home. He played a little melody, and I immediately sang it. I'm going with my musical intuition, so I just sang it with memories of moments, my whole life. That was 'ching-ching-ching ching.' All the melody was not on paper: there were parts that he really wanted me to fill in, so I did what I felt like. And that was the case for many of the other songs; there were a few bars left where I could do whatever I wanted.
"That was so great! I really relished the thrill to be invited to do that, with my Maestro. You can't imagine. I'm still that little girl listening to his recordings, and then suddenly being invited to be his companion! I could never get over that, you know. I've been crying and I've been laughing today, and I've been enjoying it tremendously.
"But it's funny with us people. We always go back to where it started, and then I'm bringing all the things I have experienced. But why talk about it? Why don't we just listen to the sacred part of Duke Ellington? I'm sorry to say that there are many jazz fans who don't give this part of Ellington time enough. They close their doors to beautiful ballads. They are too afraid. The choir singing here in this concert of Duke Ellington sing in a more classical way than he was used to hear them. It's so pure, the music, crystal clear, and many of his thoughts in the lyrics are for eternity. He said to me, "Alice, sometimes I feel that I am God's messenger boy."
"So, let's listen now to this Sacred Concert from Stockholm, 1969."
In 1984, the annual convention of the Duke Ellington Study Group was held in Oldham, England. I couldn't make that trip, but I caught a break when it moved to Chicago in May,1985. The event took place over four days in May,1984, and was put together by Richard Wang, head of the music department at the University of Illinois in Chicago, assisted by members of the Ray Nance Chapter of the Duke Ellington.
Willis Conover, famed jazz representative for the Voice of America overseas, was present, as was Gunther Schuller. He too had received a copy of my 1980 thesis, but he'd had no time to read it. Mark Tucker, just lately out of the University of Michigan's college of music, talked about his as-yet unpublished study, which eventually resulted in his book, Early Ellington. (He was not impressed by my attempt at "Black and Tan Fantasy" between sessions on the piano at the conference dais.). John Steiner, along with his Chicago cohorts, spoke to the assembly as well.
Eddie Lambert, one of the UK's foremost Ellington experts, spoke the same day as I, directly before me. I had the pleasure of meeting him and his companion, Elaine Norsworthy, between sessions. It had been Eddie Lambert's Ellington entry inJazz On Record that had given me a great start collecting Ellington records, but he was surprised to hear that a relatively short piece could have impressed a jazz enthusiast halfway around the world. Eddie's presentation to the. convention concerned his findings leading up to the publication of hisDuke Ellington: A Listener's Guide in 1992.
Then it was my own turn to speak on the subject of Ellington's first visit to Chicago in 1931. (The audience couldn't see my knees trembling at the start, and they laughed at a joke I told while a reel of recording tape was replaced.) I began with the need of a multi-dimensional look at Duke's career and then proceeded with my account of Ellington's first visit to Chicago in 1931, built of clippings from the local press.
To Duke Ellington, Chicago in the 1950s meant the Blue Note. The archives of that legendary establishment, permanently archived at the Chicago Historical Society, reveal a partnership between Duke and the club's owner, Frank Holzfeind, that lasted over ten years. It culminated with the band's appearance there in 1955 was for six weeks. In 1956 and 1957, seven weeks. And before the Blue Note closed for the last time, the Ellington band played for a full eight weeks in 1959: that is, roughly one night out of every six the band resided at the Blue Note.
What else comes to mind concerning Chicago? Well, there was the Civic Opera House during the years of Ellington's "social significance" thrusts, as Duke put it. There was Ray Nance, and there still is the exquisite Kay Davis, both Chicagoans. There was the little-remembered bassist, Hayes Alvis, who was born and raised in Chicago. Freddie Guy died in Chicago tragically, in 1971. There was the Congress Hotel series from 1936, when we had the Mills organization and a young Toronto debutante named Hellen Oakley, and a bunch of traditional jazz nuts called the Chicago Rhythm Club, all working overtime to put the wind in Duke's sails in the mid-30s. The very first Ellington recording to originate outside a recording studio, as far as we know, was taken from the WMAQ and WENR broadcasts of the band playing in the Urban Room of the Congress Hotel. There was My People at McCormick Place in 1963, and sadly there was Duke's last public performance in DeKalb, just a few hours north of Chicago, on March 20, 1974.
We might also recall the magnificent records Duke waxed in Chicago. Imagine, if you will, Duke here in the Windy City getting in the mood to bring to perfections gems like "Rude Interlude," "Daybreak Express," "Solitude" in its very first recording, the furious "Ko-Ko," "Jack the Bear," Betty Roche singing scat on "Take the 'A' Train," and that's just to name a mere handful of the Ellington masterpieces that were recorded here in Chicago.
With all of that said, although Washington will always be Duke's birthplace, and New York became his home base and springboard, Chicago, quite simply, hosted his most glorious achievements. Period.
Perhaps the most glorious was Duke's first appearance here in 1931. It was part of his first theater tour away from the east coast. The 1931 edition of the Ellington band was already famous as the Cotton Club Orchestra, yet it was clearly on its way toward another incarnation altogether. This was, as recordings document admirably, a time of tremendous creativity for the band, still evolving toward what would be known as the Famous Orchestra of the '30s. Otto Hardwicke was temporarily out of the band, pursuing his own career. He would rejoin in 1932, and then Lawrence Brown would complete the trombone section, and there we would have the classic Famous Orchestra. Under the astute management of Irving Mills, the band took its first step in the hinterland of the Midwest, but this step was anything but tentative. Duke came strutting into Chicago with pomp and ceremony: look out Pops Armstrong, look out Fatha Hines.
The centerpiece of the Ellington band's Chicago debut included the beginning of the first three weeks of an eighteen-week contract to play movie theaters on the Midwest Publix circuit. This was, in fact, the second leg of the very first tour of picture-houses by any big band, Black or white, a fact that Duke credits to Irving Mills. At that date, the fact that the tour took place at all was a small miracle, for 1931 was a very bitter year for jazz in general and for Black jazz orchestras in particular. Variety wrote that year that "colored showbiz can shout at only a few spots. In all the other spots, it hasn't the strength to shout; it can't even whisper."
Oriental Theater, Downtown Chicago
All this was no small challenge, even to the formidable resources of Duke Ellington, Incorporated. The stark social realities of the Depression, which dictated the demise or decline of many superior bands, only to add still more luster to the fame of Ellington, and many more doors were to be opened for him during the run of the Chicago tour. The major engagements here included a week's booking at the Balaban and Katz Oriental Theater in the Loop with a matinee performance on February 13. According to the original Publix contract, the Ellington band was to spend the following two weeks playing at the Regal Theater, on the South Side.
In January, about two weeks before the tour hit Chicago, the contract was amended to include the B & K Uptown Theater on the opposite end of town for its final week in Chicago, and the Regal stay was shortened to a single week.
Apparently, there was one other important change in the Publix contract, for originally the shows in Chicago were supposed to import a portion of the Cotton Club's floor show, along with Ellington, to perform during the band's intermissions. Although Ellington's program at all three theaters included supporting acts similar to the Harlem fare, accounts from the Chicago papers of that time indicate that local talent filled out the remainder of the billing. Perhaps this was the basis for some of the premature speculation that Ellington was about to leave the Cotton Club permanently for the greener pastures of theater tours. The Publix contract reportedly carried a stipulation bearing more than four figures, so financially it was a very wise move for Ellington to have made at that time; at the same time, it seems the Cotton Club management was threatening cuts in the band's salary.
For its part, the Balaban & Katz chain had already earned a reputation for giving breaks to Black performers, and here, no doubt, Irving Mills sensed a golden opportunity. At the beginning of February, they cast the comedy team of Chilton and Thomas to head a stage production called Whirl of Luck at the Oriental, and from there until Ellington's premier, the show went to the Uptown Theater, and then out of town on a Publix tour. From their point of view, Ellington could generate the kind of interest that could yank B & K and Chicago out of the doldrums of the Depression.
The public in Chicago was well-acquainted with Ellington, from musicians to ordinary radio-listeners, a market that included just about everybody. The Mills office publicity, coupled with broadcasts from the Cotton Club, was largely responsible for the ever-increasing ballyhoo over Ellington. Moreover, many Chicagoans had already seen the band in its early film appearances, including the new Pathe studio revue then showing in town. Word of mouth, the most reliable of all publicity, had it that, at a theater in Boston the week before the Chicago opening, the audience gave the band a standing ovation lasting twenty-two minutes after the curtain went down on the show. The Bostonian audience, never known as the most demonstrative kind, continued to applaud until the picture was stopped and Duke came out for another bow.
With this kind of momentum, Duke Ellington, couldn't miss in Chicago. Many of the important components of what would become the standard Ellington p.r. sheet was already filling the local show-business columns. One such piece in the Chicago Defender, whimsical in tone and bearing a strange byline, "Anonymous Weineshenk.," may have been the first of a long line of capsule biographies of Duke. It dubbed Ellington the "the leading exponent of what is known as dirty and hot music," and chronicled.his rise from Washington salons to the pinnacle of celebrity at the Cotton Club, "one of the places Mayor Jimmy Walker takes visiting swimmers to see."
Duke's first recording of "Creole Rhapsody" appeared in January that same year, and this article may have been the first to reveal Ellington's intention to complete, in an extended form, his musical history of his race, an idea that was to occupy Ellington for many more years. Even at this date, there appeared in Ellington's career a dichotomy between serious art and popular success. He had been a popular success at least since "Mood Indigo" became the first of his hit songs.
The band's opening on Friday, February 13, kicked off an engagement that broke all the attendance at the Oriental Theater. For the matinee performance, as the theater opened its doors at 1:33, Chicagoans "pushed, shoved and thronged the entrance to get a peek at Harlem's king of jazz," some of them having stood in line for three hours in the February weather.
That phrase, "the Harlem king of jazz" was surely the brainchild of Ned Williams then doing B & K publicity and soon to become the heart of the Mills office's promotion of Duke Ellington. Ned's most obvious talent was his rapid-fire compression of images, phrases and slogans to gain an effect. His ad copy in the Chicago Tribune and the other big daily paperswas filled with such things as, "Today! The Hottest Music, the Most Sizzling Stage Show in the World!" "Come on! Get Hot! Get Happy!" "Harlem's Jazz King Blaring, Crooning, Burning Up the Stage with His Red-Hot Rhythms, Moaning Saxophones, Wailing Cornets, Laughing Trombones, Screaming Clarinets!" "Sensational Stars of Radio and Records in an All-Colored Jamboree, High Low-Down,Wild, Mad Dancing Girls!" "Low-down Hilarious Comedy! Blazing Blues Singers!" "Furious and Fast Stage Show, Hotter than Blazes!" All this and a movie, The Truth About Youth, starring Loretta Young, for thirty-five cents.
According to the review of the Friday opening show in the Defender, "The patient crowd was amply repaid by Duke, once they took their seats. Some of the little femmes, after grinding at their typewriters all day, relaxed under that beaming personality and smile that the Duke emulates. But more soo, thing than his smile was the music that he and his band dispensed. What rhythm, what harmony, what unison!"
Regal Theater, South Side
The Regal Theater Chorus opened the show with a strike-up-the-band dance routine. They then sang a special number, introducing the great Ellington. A second curtain ascended to reveal Duke under an amber spot, cuing the band into "Ring Dem Bells" and "Three Little Words," which they had performed in the feature film Check and Double Check the year previously. Then came a bit of magic: Ivie Anderson, aged twenty-five, was already a show-business veteran, having been a professional singer for ten years, both at home and abroad.
She had most recently worked as a featured attraction in Earl Hines's Grand Terrace Revue on Thirty-fifth Street, and she expected her current tryout with Ellington to last no longer than his Chicago booking. For eleven more years, Ivie was to spark the band's appearances with her verve, wit and dignity and would become a star in her own right, but nowhere would she move an audience more effectively than at the Oriental Theater on opening night. Recalling Florence Mills, Ivie gave her rendition of "I'm a Little Blackbird," and the cheering mob wouldn't let her go. It took four bows and a speech to get her off the stage in the opening show.
Third on the bill, Duke returned as an emcee with "If I Could Be With You." The reviewer wrote, "and the femmes sigh and close their eyes." Then, against lurid jungle scenery, the Regalettes come back to dance to Duke's arrangement of "Tiger Rag." They were followed in the fourth spot by the old vaudevillian dance team of Ford, Marshall and Jones. The Ellington band closed out the show with a set of Duke's own compositions: the mournful "Black and Tan Fantasy," with a blue klieg light full upon the entire band, and then the astounding "Old Man Blues" as a rousing finale.
Duke's opening on the South Side did not go without fanfare, either. For Friday, February 20, the Defender carried notice of a "monster parade to be held in Duke's honor," inviting "everyone with an automobile and a heart full of welcome for Duke Ellington." The throng stretched all the way downtown from the Regal Theater on Forty-seventh Street by noon. The matinee opening at the Regal was billed as the biggest in the history of that theater. Advance publicity, proclaiming Ellington's as "the only band in the world that plays jazz, with a primitive rhythm that thrills to the fingertips, with harmony blending soft, warm jungle melodies in perfect syncopation," was undoubtedly again the doing of Ned Williams.
I might add that some of Ellington's publicity in the Negro press directly reflected Black America's hunger for race heroes and champions it could call its own. One item in the Defender went so far as to depict Duke as a sort of Black Jack Armstrong. The article was slugged, "Duke Ellington Proves Mettle in Cotton Club Blaze." The story informed South Side readers how Ellington, "rushing in, loaded with pails of water, saved the chorus girls from a dressing room fire at the Cotton Club" showing "he could cool things down as fast as he could warm them up."
The band closed at the Regal Thursday night, February 26 and opened at the Uptown Theater the following day. The show there was essentially the same as the ones presented at the Oriental and Regal, except that the Ford, Marshall and Jones dance team was replaced by the Four Blazes. The week at the Uptown brought Duke's first Chicago stay to a fitting conclusion. The band would go on with its Publix tour to the Paradise, Tivoli, and Fisher Theaters in Detroit, before returning East for an engagement at the Brooklyn Paramount, but it was a different band than the one it had been three weeks before. Chicago was the origin of many new motifs in the Ellington story.
Henry Blankfort, 90, a screenwriter who became a publicist after he was blacklisted during the McCarthy era died Wednesday in North Hollywood of cardiac arrest. A native of New York, Blankfort moved to LA in 1936 and three years later became director of the Hollywood Theater Alliance, where he co=wrote its "Meet the People." He wrote or co-wrote 25 screenplays, including "Tales of Manhattan" and "Double Exposure." During World War II, Blankfort made military films for the Signal Corps. His show business career ended after he refused in 1951to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which was seeking information about Communists in Hollywood.
Henry Blankfort, far right, confronts HUAC in Hollywood, 1951.
The
Hollywood Theater Alliance was also responsible for Zero Hour. After Meet the People and before Jump
for Joy?
At around the same time as Meet the People. A professor who
is fired because of the hierarchy.
[director] Sidney Salkow was out here.
So was Albert Maltz.
Of the
Hollywood Ten.
Yeah. And they wrote Zero Hour.
It didn’t
have a successful run.
No. As a matter of fact, at the end of the second
act I posted a closing sign.
On opening
night?
Yeah, I smelled
it.
I have
something about another production by the Hollywood Theater Alliance, a thing called
They Can’t Get You Down, but by
that time you were gone.
Departed. And They Can’t Get You Down did not go up. Really, its main success was Meet the People,
number one. And I see, Eddie Eliscu,
one of the writers, has just written a show directed by his son, up north. It’s playing near San Francisco. My son, who lives up around San Raphael, read
the reviews. Brilliant, great
reviews. Eddie Eliscu is still writing
plays; how do these guys hang around? I
thought they were dead!
Getting back
to Ellington, was the person that you got to know very different from his
suave, sophisticated onstage persona?
No. He was a suave and sophisticated guy,
very much onstage all the time. A
wide-ranging imagination. The one
reservation I have about Ellington is that he never really did anything strong
for his people. I think there were a
number of reasons for this; one was his religiosity. Everything that happened was God’s will.
Do you mean
to say he was fatalistic about things like Jim Crow?
It wasn’t
fatalism. I’m an atheist. The God-fetish that too many people accept
isn’t fatalism, but there’s a meaning in it I just can’t understand, that there’s
some hand or some chemistry that’s the reason for all this. My own philosophy is I'm against anything that divides people. I think they're all manufactured, anyhow. Basically, to be very crass about it, most of it's bullshit. Those people are programmed to walk with bended knees, heads down. I've seen so much hypocrisy in the religious world, the misuse of people for personal benefit. What are there: fourteen hundred different religions?
But Duke didn't want any part of it.
No, Duke would never get involved. I think because of his talent and his personality, he was readily lionized in his successful days by the chic whites who would ask him to dinner to prove they had no prejudice.
In a sense, that was the basis of his whole career, at least one way of looking at it. In show business, he was the number one Black, the Negro who showed that the Negro could "make it" in show business.
Because of my involvement with Jump for Joy, I became one of the writers on Tales of Manhattan.
I don't know anything about that.
Tales of Manhattan was a major film. It had an interesting concept: it was the story of a tailcoat. It had Ginger Rogers and Eddie Robinson in it. [Charles] Laughton was in it, and Ethel Waters. Paul Robeson was in it, and my assignment was to do the section with Paul Robeson. Later on, they also put me on the Edward G. Robinson section. It was one of the big pictures of its day.
And history has a funny way of twisting about itself. When he [Robeson] and I were doing that part, there was bad segregation. His daughter is still alive. He sang at a show where his son and daughter were assigned the same seat one night. Can you imagine that? But his daughter did a book that lies: it says he didn't like his episode in Tales of Manhattan.Tales of Manhattan was made in the 1940s. Fortunately, there has been some change in Black attitudes. Paul had complete artistic control over his section. He even sent me a handwritten note, which said he was overjoyed. When he read my draft, he wrote in some comments.
Anyway, in the story the tailcoat with money in its pockets. lands on a little sharecropper's place. Ethel Waters, who plays his wife, believes it's from God. Robeson thinks that's bullshit; he wants to spend the money on tractors, and plows, and everything for this little community. She wants it for a church. He wins.
Another thing about Ellington: he was a great womanizer. When we were casting the show, he called me over and said, "I want to tell you something. There's a woman coming to your office," and he told me her name. We walked out of the office, and he had E.S.P. This is true!
There's a lady, Lena Horne. I was the first white man whose hand she shook, because she had intense dislike for whites and still carries it around. I read somewhere that she married Lenny Hayton because he was white, not because she loved him. But she learned to like him.
Duke tells in his book, about Jump for Joy, that there were backstage discussions every night. Every time the curtain came down, there would be changes made.
Oh, all the time.
Tell me about that. Were there sharp disagreements? Were they political in nature?
Some of them were, like no dialect was political in nature.
How did these discussions usually play out? Were there conservatives or radicals among the cast?
Yes, like society. This was not quite true of Meet the People. There you didn't have anybody who was conservative, none. I was politicized through Meet the People, in an organizational way.
What about the backstage discussions in Jump for Joy?
Well, there were many of them.
Were certain sketches taken out by consensus?
These people became afraid when they got threats to blow up the theater, that kind of stuff. One thing I saw in the general cast, among the girls and fellows: some of them did become radicalized. They saw something happening, even to themselves. They began to understand, when you want to get your master's foot off your neck, you've got to take that goddamned foot and twist it. And it gave them a sense of pride.
There was a gal called Lomax who wrote for the Black paper called The Sentinel, a very brilliant writer with a very mordant pen, razor-edged. We opened against Cabin in the Sky, the stage version, the same night. She compared Cabin in the Sky to Booker T. Washington and Jump for Joy to Frederick Douglass. When I saw that review, that's all I wanted.
I can see how she would think that way.
I'd never met her, up to that time. The first time I saw her we fell in love. Fantastic. We kept in contact for a number of years, then she went abroad for a and became a columnist. There were too many of complaints from white people. She was ahead of her time. The thing in the past that bothers me most about Jump for Joy is the in the attitudes of reviewers that this was never recognized as a milestone in the theater.
Now, in a sense, too-- this was also true of Meet the People-- was Dorothy Dandridge. This would play down South, and there were attitudes among white actors, not in the cast, but within the Actors Guild. In the matter of my driving her home, her mother was black and honest with me, and she understood it. I could only suppose it; they lived it. She was afraid. Some might say it's being paranoid on the part of Blacks. It's actual. Dorothy went out when some white boys and girls threw tomatoes at her, and there were some episodes going into restaurants. For a while, my wife and I lived a very stormy life! We'd make reservations in restaurants, and we'd come in with Dorothy. "Sorry, sorry." I remember one night at the Brown Derby on Vine Street, I told the maitre-d' I'd piss on the floor. They called the cops, but we got a table.
We introduced her to one of the Nicholas Brothers-- Harold?-- She was married to him.
Later on in the Forties, you became quite a political activist. You have a cousin named Michael Blankfort?
He just died.
I'm sorry to hear that.
I'm not. He was an informer, on his own volition, too.
You're referring to the HUAC hearings that took place here thirty years ago?
He named two people, whom he had no knowledge about: me and his former wife.
As a result, did that bring you in front of the Committee?
Oh, no, no, no. I was at the bottom of the barrel, but I was there.
I've read your testimony, by the way.
It's one of the high points of my life.
Your message rings out, bold and clear.
Oh, I had a wonderful time.
Was Michael blacklisted?
For about ten minutes.
So he went on working, while you were blacklisted. You were out of the film business from that point on.
I did a couple of things under pseudonyms.
As in Woody Allen's movie, The Front?
Yes. I didn't mind keeping a double set of books. Of course, I'm involved with an aerospace education, on levels of all sorts, and they know all about me.
How did you get involved in that career, and when?
I live by serendipity. When I was blacklisted, I'd been doing quite well in the motion picture business. You lived up to everything you made in those days. I had to work! Oh, I sold door to door, all that kind of stuff, but I took it in stride. I wasn't bothered at all about being blacklisted, psychologically.
I don't know how to worry, you see. I simply don't: I'm retarded! It's funny; by a series of coincidences, I got a job with a company called Revell.
Model airplanes?
On my first day, I met the president. I didn't know who he was, and I got into a big argument with him. And he offered me a job! I didn't know who the hell he was. And six months later, I was a vice-president of the company. So many letters from kids came to me about those airplanes.
I talked to Patricia Willard a couple of weeks ago. She worked for you, is that right?
Yeah, I remember her taking up a lot of my time.
She's on a grant. She's working on an Ellington book, too.
From the Smithsonian, right?
From the National Endowment for the Arts or Humanities, I'm not sure which. That's what I should have done!
What are you going to do? A book?
I've sent a manuscript to a couple of publishers, who don't seem to be interested in my first draft, so I'm working on my second draft. One of them I interested was the Louisiana State University Press. The commercial publishers aren't interested in anything about Ellington, as far as I can tell.
You know, his book didn't sell too well. It wasn't a good book.
They gave him a huge advance. That's why he did it. It's very entertaining, if that's what you're looking for, but as far as telling what it's like to be a Black person in show business, it's worthless.
I see him as an example of all things are possible. I think a writer should bear more responsibility. What is your approach on the Ellington book?
There have been a lot of books about Ellington, but all of them are focused on his music. I want to see him in a larger context.
The exceptionalist idea comes into play: he's "exceptional." Not an example of what a human being can be.
I'm very involved with education in the ghettoes and barrios. I'm a volunteer teacher for the L.A. school district. They just gave a Golden Apple Award to Mayor Brown. I'm involved in aerospace education. I've always been interested in the learning process; I'm a dropout. I have no academic credentials, but I come from an academic family. My mother taught at Hunter College. My father was the in the first graduating class from the City Colleges of New York. My sister in New Jersey graduated from Cornell, and I had an older brother who went to N.Y.U. and another who attended Princeton, until the First World War broke out. There are many contradictions in me. When I was a kid, I wanted to go to military school; now I'm so violently against violence!
So, we began getting letters from these kids who were building these models, hundreds of letters, and I began thinking these little kits could be turned into learning tools. I read in the p.aper that there was to be a conference on aerospace education in one week, someone. This was in the 1950s; I was at Revell at that time. So, I strolled over to see what it was like. I sat through three days of this thing, and I met Wernher Von Braun and Willy Ley. I got into an argument.
A technical argument?
Technical? I didn't even know how a plane stays up in the sky! And they were so unsure of themselves, they thought I was a maven, someone with wisdom who could point out their lack of knowledge.
Now, an interesting thing about Meet the People: As time has gone on, first of all Nanette Fabray, some of that cast's participation is never mentioned. It's the same as saying you're a Communist. It's funny, these hidden fears we have in this so-called democracy.
Some of Duke Ellington's past has been hidden. I wrote the F.B.I. under the Freedom of Information Act. Were you with the Hollywood Democratic Committee?
Sure.
The F.B.I. says Duke Ellington was on the executive board. Does that mean anything?
It was just to support candidates. Roosevelt! But in those days, this was anathema.
There's a list of benefits: American Committee to Save Refugees; an Exiled Writers' Committee; the American Spanish Aid Committee. The F.B.I. marks these as involvement with the left. Plenty of people were blacklisted for much less than this.
I know that the F.B.I. was interested in Jump for Joy. Why, I don't know. That was in a period when mail was opened.
Did the show go off to other places when it left the Mayan Theater? I've seen mention of some "tabloid versions."
Oh, Sid was involved with that. They thought they could perform some acts in a nightclub. I remember a time when I got a phone call from Duke at four in the morning. He wanted to do a revival of Jump for Joy. Duke used to call at odd hours. Sometimes he wanted me to come to New York to revive Jump for Joy.
Well, they finally did revive it in Miami, unsuccessfully. And Kuller wants to revive it again.
I know it. I have this penchant for not thinking about the past. A day came when someone wanted to revive Meet the People. Well, the world's changed. Attitudes are different. They wanted to use some of the same songs that had been hits. The big hit from Meet the People was "A Boy and a Girl." Christ, that would be ridiculous today!
It's a period piece.
You see, what incites success for some of the old musicals inspires them, but we're on a different channel.
I sense that to reprise Jump for Joy, you'd really need the original cast and the Ellington band itself. It's a period piece, a success that can never be repeated. You'd need Ivie Anderson.
It still plays occasionally. There's a lyric in there about a glass of gin, somewhere.
"My man and me just gin some, and sin some,,."
Yes, gin some, sin some. That'd be crap today.
Still, something about it makes me cry.
It's a good song, musically. But it doesn't have the feeling of some of this rock music that's more contemporary.
I can't agree with that. Most pop music is crass commercialism and crap.
Have you heard "Take This Job and Shove It"? The kids who write today are like meteors. They go to the sky and come back again. I used to have a house on Beverly Boulevard, and there was a music agency in the place. Those kids, some of them in their twenties, driving around in their Rolls Royces, They had a hit song!
