The following are excerpts taken from, Duke (a Life of Duke Ellington) (Terry Teachout)
Duke Ellington was a pioneer in the early stages of the development of jazz. Being inspired by Rag-time as a youth, he went on to establish foundations that the Big Band era would stand upon for decades. Although, he would give no credit to any ‘classical’ contribution to his creativity, much of what he did was successfully merging the two disciplines of improvisation and orchestration into his works.
The author begins by summing up the kind of person Duke was known to be by his companions. “He was the most chronic of procrastinators, a man who never did today what he could put off until next month, or next year. He left letters unanswered, contracts unsigned, watches unworn, and longtime companions unwed, and the only thing harder than getting him out of bed in the afternoon was getting him to finish writing a new piece of music in time for the premiere. ‘I don’t need time,’ he liked to say. ‘What I need is a deadline!’ Nothing but an immovable deadline could spur Duke Ellington to decisive action…At the end of his life, he left behind some seventeen hundred-odd compositions… ‘As long as something is unfinished,’ he told Louis Armstrong, ‘there’s always that little feeling of insecurity. And a feeling of insecurity is absolutely necessary unless you’re so rich that it doesn’t matter.’”
“‘He wants life and music to be in a state of becoming,’ said the trumpeter Clark Terry…’He doesn’t even like to write definitive endings to a piece.’”
Ellington’s main goal in his music was to reveal the plight of the Black man in America. In one interview, he said, “I am expressing in sound the old days in the jungle, the cruel journey across the sea and the despair of the landing, and then the days of slavery. I trace the growth of a new spiritual quality and then the days in Harlem and the cities of the United States. Then I try to go forward a thousand years. I seek to express the future when, emancipated and transformed, the Negro takes his place, a free being, among the peoples of the world.”
“His compositions included portraits of pretty women, tap-dancing comedians, express trains, Shakespearean characters, and the unsung heroes of his long-despised race, and he made it sound as if writing them were simple: ‘I just watch people and observe life, and then I write about them.’”
“‘I work and I write. And that’s it…My reward is hearing what I’ve done, and unlike most composers, I can hear it immediately. That’s why I keep these expensive gentlemen with me.’ But maintaining a touring orchestra was for him not a luxury but a necessity. The band was his musical laboratory, the great good place where he experimented with new ideas, and he was incapable of functioning as a composer without its constant presence.”
“He preferred to hire musicians with homemade techniques that were different to the point of apparent incompatibility, then juxtapose their idiosyncratic sounds as a pointillist painter might place dots of red and green side by side on his canvas, finding inspiration in their technical limitations (‘With a musician who plays the full compass of his instrument as fast or as slow as possible, there seems, paradoxically, less opportunity to create’).
This was not always appreciated, however. “Jack Teagarden the greatest jazz trombonist of his generation, found it impossible to enjoy the Ellington band. ‘I never did like anything Ellington ever did,’ he said. ‘He never had a band all in tune, always had a bad tone quality and bad blend.’ What Teagarden meant, whether he knew it or not, was that the band had an unconventional tone quality.”
Billy Strayhorn summed up Ellington’s methods, “Ellington plays the piano, but his real instrument is the band. Each member of his band is to him a distinctive tone color and set of emotions, which he mixes with others equally distinctive to produce a third thing, which I call the Ellington Effect…to mold the music around the man.”
“Not only was Ellington inspired by the sounds and styles of his musicians, but he plucked bits and pieces from their solos and wove them into his compositions. Some of his most popular songs were spun out of melodic fragments that he gleaned from his close listening on the bandstand each night. ‘He could hear a guy play something and take a pencil and scribble a little thing…The next night there would be an arrangement of that thing the guy played. And nobody knew where it came from.”
Ellington “chose to keep…racing from town to town and sleeping with woman after woman, shoveling his songwriting royalties into the till in order to pay his expensive gentlemen salaries big enough to keep them riding on the band bus.” He was presented to the public as “a different kind of black man, fine-spoken and expensively tailored, a fellow whom broad-minded white folks could imagine introducing to their friends…Ellington himself was happy to play the game, for he saw his public image as a contribution to the welfare of his people. ‘Every time you walk out [on] the street and you’re exposed to a white citizen, you know…you’re acting in behalf of the race.’ That was why he never let his guard down: He knew that there would always be somebody looking.”
“Underneath his soigne exterior, Ellington was a self-centered hedonist who lived a nomadic existence in which everything was subordinated to his art- and, insofar as possible, his pleasure…After he died, Mercer found a handwritten note among his father’s papers in which Ellington summed himself up in three lapidary sentences: ‘No problem. I’m easy to please. I just want to have everybody in the palm of my hand.”
“He was at once deeply (if superstitiously) religious and a tireless philanderer who, in the words of an admiring friend, had the sexual appetite of ‘a romping, stomping alley cat.’ He pretended to be a devoted family man for the benefit of the ever-vigilant press, he deserted Edna, his first and only wife, later settling into a long-term relationship with a Cotton Club showgirl whom he chose not to marry (he never divorced Edna) and on whom he cheated as often as he liked.”
“To Ellington’s own musicians, he was a riddle without an answer, an unknowable man who hid behind a high wall of ornate utterances and flowery compliments that grew higher as he grew older. And while most of his sidemen admired his artistry without reservation, many of them also believed him to be unscrupulous and manipulative.”
He was born in Washington, D.C. in 1899 to parents who “belonged to the in-between caste that came to be known as the black bourgeoisie.”
“Duke Ellington was a spoiled child, and proud of it…He arranged his adult life in such a way as to reproduce as closely as possible the way that his parents had treated him as a boy.”
“Ellington spoke of the ‘wonderful feeling of security’ that he drew from his childhood churchgoing, specifically mentioning it in connection with the way in which Daisy’s praise had caused him to see himself as ‘very, very, special.’ He went so far as to say that her belief in his uniqueness had made him fearless.”
The piano was not a priority to Ellington until he was 14 years old, when he became influenced by ragtime music. He began to study it in his own way, and that year composed a ragtime piece of his own, the “Soda Fountain Rag.”
“In those days it was common for middle-class black parents to react with horror if their children took an interest in ragtime.” He had no real resistance from his parents, and saw music more as a hobby than a vocation…But Duke had talent as an artist, enough to win an NAACP-sponsored scholarship to New York’s Pratt Institute. In 1916 he played his first professional gig, and soon he was getting enough work to make him think twice about becoming a full-time artist.”
In 1917, he dropped out of school, and was further influenced musically by “The Original Dixieland Jazz Band.”
“The professional relationships that Ellington formed in the years after World War I lasted longer than most marriages. Sonny Greer, Otto Hardwick, and Arthur Whetsel, all of who played in the Duke’s Serenaders, spent most of the rest of their professional careers working with Ellington and were playing with him long after he left Edna.”
“Hardwick thought him ‘brilliant…and other remarkable thing about him is his passion for people. He’s warm-hearted, of course, but that’s not what I mean. He likes to manipulate. It’s not like using someone, it’s more like a game. Besides, what he does for you is beneficial. What he tries to get you to do- it’s good for you, if you do it.”
He and his group moved to New York City in 1923. “Harlem had replaced Washington as the unofficial capital of black America. It was a boiling cauldron of imaginative energy, and even its white neighbors were taking note of what would soon be dubbed the ‘Harlem Renaissance.’ The flourishing of the black middle class had everything to do with the emergence of this movement, which throughout its decade-long existence was mainly literary…Around the same time, Ellington started going to Tin Pan Alley, the neighborhood in lower Manhattan where sheet-music publishers were clustered, to sell songs that he wrote with Jo. Trent, a black lyricist.
“Ellington also studied informally with Will Marion Cook, whose story epitomizes the disadvantages under which turn-of-the-century black artists worked…His musical talent was so outstanding that he studied violin at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and Joseph Joachim’s Hochschule fur Musik in Berlin, and later on he also studied ‘a bit of composition’… at New York’s National Conservatory of Music with Antonin Dvorak, who was fascinated by spirituals and incorporated their melodic shapes into his New World Symphony. Unable to establish himself as a concert soloist because of his race, Cook chose instead to become a composer of popular music, collaborating in 1898 with Paul Laurence Dunbar on Clorindy: Origin of the Cakewalk, one of the first all-black shows to play on Broadway.”
In Cook’s dealings with Ellington, he said, “you know you should go to the conservatory…but since you won’t, I’ll tell you. First you find the logical way, and when you find it, avoid it, and let your inner self break through and guide you. Don’t try to be anybody by yourself.”
“The number of saloons in America had tripled between 1870 and 1900…It was in the Roaring Twenties that America slammed the door on the sedate way of the Victorian era and embraced the brash new world of ballyhoo… ‘In the twenties [people] could love, they could travel, they could stay up late at night as extravagantly as they pleased; they could think or say or write whatever seemed to them amusing or interesting.’ They could also go to cabarets and dance all night…The burgeoning popularity of jazz and jazz-influenced styles of music, which suited the high-stepping new styles of social dancing, was a natural outgrowth of this freedom.”
It was in this atmosphere that Ellington met Irving Mills, “a small, squat, hard-headed business man…with the naïve enthusiasm- and lack of humour- of the born, successful impresario.”
“Mills soon acquired a reputation for treating black songwriters decently.”
“From the outset of their association, Mills promoted Ellington both as a bandleader and as a composer, something that had never been done before in jazz…Mills said that he immediately recognized Ellington to be ‘a great creative artist- and the first American composer to catch in his music the true jazz spirit.”
Ellington, indeed was unconventional. “Instead of putting together close-knit multistrain miniatures in the manner of the ragtime pianists from who he learned his craft, Ellington treated the sections of his compositions as if they were separate pieces in a mosaic that could be rearranged at will…changing the order of the strains and the instrumental solos, a practice that became part of his composing routine. Later on he would bring unfinished, seemingly fragmentary bits of music into the studio, then shift them around on the spot until he arrived at the sequence that satisfied him.”
Irving Townsend related how the process worked, “Duke, to the bewilderment of people who have watched him record, writes and rehearses music in small segments, usually of eight measures and almost always without a written conclusion… ‘Start at letter C. Then go to A and play it twice, only the second time leave off the last two bars. These bars are the beginning of a sheet you have marked X. After X I’ll play until I bring you in at C again and you go out with letter D.”
It was Irving Mills who opened the door for Ellington and his band to begin playing at the Cotton Club. “In 1927 Harlem was a playground for white people who could afford to pay for liquor and sex- and who like having sex with black people, so long as they didn’t have to talk to them afterward…The Cotton Club, which billed itself as ‘the Aristocrat of Harlem’…was the best known and most expensive, as well as the one with the dirtiest pedigree. Owney Madden, the owner, was an Englishman of Irish parentage whose family had emigrated to New York’s Hell’s Kitchen when he was eleven yours old…He now ran one of New York’s most successful bootlegging gangs, investing his profits in Broadway shows like Mae West’s Sex (and, it was whispered, having a backstage affair with West herself.)
For Ellington, however, writing music for the Cotton Club shows played a pivotal role in his development as a composer. “The chief ingredient in the shows was pace, pace, pace!…The show was generally built around types- the band, an eccentric dancer, a comedian…And we’d have a special singer who gave the customers the expected adult song in Harlem.”
The clubs dancers were ‘protected’ and “Instead of fraternizing with the gangsters, they went out with the musicians (Sonny Greer and Fred Guy both married Cotton Club Girls). Madden, on the other hand, got along well with Ellington, and the two men often stayed up late after the shows to play bridge. ‘He loved Duke and loved me,’ Greer said. ‘And his influence was so powerful that we was always in the clear…I keep hearing about how bad the gangsters were. All I can say is that I wish I was still working for them. Their word was all you needed. They had been brought up with the code that you either kept your word or you got dead.’”
Many new musical developments happened in Ellington’s band, through the players he brought on board. The bass line, for example used to be played by a tuba, but Ellington used a string-bass with a ‘slap’ technique. And he had a trombone player that developed the ‘wah-wah’ sound from the bell of his instrument by using the rubber end of a plunger.
“The Cotton Club’s production numbers could be broken down into recognizable types, so did Ellington build his repertoire according to musical formulas, more often than not perfecting each successive formula in a ‘prototype’ work that would serve as the model for later pieces in the same genre.”
“In February of 1929 Duke Ellington got the second-biggest break of his life: CBS started broadcasting his Cotton Club performances from coast to coast….marked the first time that his band was heard by a nationwide radio audience…One scholar of American radio has called Ellington’s Cotton Club broadcasts ‘the first important national propagation of black music by a pop group’ and ‘the first encounters most white Americans had with black music.”
Their busy schedules became busier. “According to Freddie Jenkins, ‘We would be in the recording studio at seven A.M. and record until noon. In the afternoons we were making movie shorts, or doing a matinee at the Ziegfield, or rehearsing. Then we’d play a night show at the Ziegfield, be back at the Cotton Club at eleven and play until four A.M.’”
Irving Mills got Ellington and his group an arrangement with Hollywood to appear in a full-length film, a feature called Check and Double Check that starred Amos and Andy.
According to Ellington, his best composition was ‘Old Man Blues.’”
‘Old Man Blues’ and ‘Mood Indigo’ sum up what Ellington had achieved by 1930, and point to where he would go from there.”
“In Gunther Schuller’s words, ‘the parallel blocks of sound he favors so predominantly are handled with such variety that we, as listeners, never notice the lack of occasional contrapuntal relief…Ellington had achieved the perfect balance between composition and improvisation…This achievement is, of course, above all else, Ellington’s greatest contribution to the development of jazz.’”
“Paul Hindemith, a far more musically knowledgeable observer, went to the club around the same time and recorded his reactions in his diary. Hindemith was a devotee of jazz, ragtime, and American dance music but, like other European classical composers of his generation, knew them only from records and sheet music. Though he was hard to please, the Cotton Club did it; ‘There is not much besides a lot of scantily clad dark people tap dancing and singing, but it is all done with incredible verve. The orchestra played continuously for about three hours, the wildest I ever heard…The whole thing was really a rhythmic and tonal orgy, done with remarkable virtuosity.”
Duke Ellington’s influence went beyond that of the jazz world. His work has been studied seriously by such musicians of his day as Igor Stravinsky, George Gershwin, Paul Hindemith, and others. Ellington never felt that he was ‘on par’ with Gershwin musically, and knew his own limitations. He had always wanted to write a full-length Broadway musical, but could never pull off the larger musical structures like this successfully. Yet he remained true to his own unique musical contribution, largely being self-taught. It is evident that he had innate leadership abilities, and understood how to use them to ‘work through people.’