Duke (17 page)

The best way to understand the musical course that Ellington was charting is to observe how he singles out specific kinds of musical numbers that he wants to learn how to write, then develops them into genres in which he will thereafter specialize. Just as 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. On occasion, though, the prototype was already so fully realized that it became, like “Black and Tan Fantasy” and “Creole Love Call,” a permanent part of the repertoire. In one such piece, which Ellington called “The Mooch,” he took the squirmy shimmying of the Cotton Club chorus line and made it into art.
^‡‡‡
A medium-tempo swinger that he later described as “a sex dance,” it opens with a slithery minor-key clarinet trio punctuated by foul growling from Miley, immediately followed by a major-key theme so full of big-city joie de vivre that only the closest of listeners will spot it as a twelve-bar “blues.” Next come a pair of instrumental solos and a duet, set first in the minor key and then in the major, followed by a reprise of the dark, ominous clarinet trio with which the piece opened. As they move from mood to mood, the six choruses of “The Mooch” paint a picture of urban debauchery that needs no dancers to tell its Hogarthian tale.

Such pieces struck the musicians as disorientingly daring. Bigard, whose tenure with King Oliver had not prepared him for Ellington’s off-center harmonies, had trouble adjusting to their demands: “There was always something going on to keep your mind busy . . . my mind was busy figuring out those strange chords that Duke kept putting behind me.” Freddie Jenkins was also disconcerted by the band’s “third class discords,” which he thought “odd.” But the bandsmen soon caught on to what their leader had in mind, as did the public. Slickly designed ads in the programs of Broadway shows touted the Cotton Club as offering “A Show That Rivals Broadway’s Best,” and in December it made its first fleeting appearance in
The New Yorker
’s “Tables for Two” column: “Also, anyone interested in jazz should go up and hear the orchestra at the Cotton Club.”
^§§§
A month later Victor signed Ellington, and though he continued to record for other labels under a variety of pseudonyms, this new relationship with America’s most prominent record label was a sign of his growing fame.

 • • • 

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. The band was initially heard on Wednesdays at eleven
P.M
., as well as in early-evening studio programs that aired on Mondays and Thursdays. Each thirty-minute broadcast consisted of eight songs, some of them current pop hits and others drawn from the club’s stage shows, though Ellington was also allowed to perform two or three of his own pieces on every show.

Ellington had been broadcasting locally since 1923, but his CBS debut marked the first time that his band was heard by a nationwide radio audience. How did a black dance band get onto a national radio network in 1929? Because the Columbia Broadcasting System was a fledgling venture that was still finding its way. William Paley, the new owner, had taken charge in January and was frantically searching for talent to throw up against such popular NBC series as
Amos ’n’ Andy
. Enter Ted Husing, who had just gone to work for CBS as a football announcer and was also a jazz buff who spent his off hours at the Cotton Club and other Harlem nightspots. Ellington remembered him as “a beautiful cat with an up-to-the-minute awareness then known as hip,” and Bigard called him “a real fan of [the] band.” It was at Husing’s behest that Paley agreed to put Ellington on CBS, with Husing serving as announcer. So far as can be definitively known, this was the first time that a jazz band made a national broadcast from Harlem, as well as the first time that any black band was heard in a regular network radio slot.

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.” This ignores the effect of the band’s recordings, nor are there any ratings figures available to prove how popular the broadcasts were. But the number of radio listeners in America jumped from sixteen million in 1925 to sixty million in 1930, and the effects of the new medium on the entertainment industry were multiplied still further by the coming of the Great Depression. Even if you could no longer spare seventy-five cents for the latest Victor record by Duke Ellington and His Cotton Club Orchestra, you could still hear the band for free on CBS. Anecdotal evidence, including references in newspaper articles, indicates that the broadcasts were helping to make the band more widely known outside New York. Ellington thought so: In
Music Is My Mistress
he says, “The engagement at the Cotton Club was of the utmost significance, because as a result of its radio wire we were heard nationally and internationally.” As Sonny Greer recalled it, the band’s suppertime broadcasts were so popular that “the people didn’t get anything to eat until we come off [the air]. Cats working all day, starved to death until we got off.”

Ellington’s style soon acquired a nickname. According to Greer, George Gershwin, a Cotton Club habitué and an admirer of Ellington’s compositions, referred to them as “jungle music” in conversation with Paul Whiteman. Whoever came up with the phrase, it stuck: The Ellington band billed itself as “the Jungle Band” on the label of the two-sided “Tiger Rag” that it cut for Brunswick in January of 1929, and soon Husing was using the tag on the air. Not long after that, Daisy and Ruth Ellington tuned in a broadcast at their Washington home. It was, Ruth said, the first time that they had heard Duke’s music since his move to New York, and what they heard startled them: “Here we were, my mother and I, sitting in this very respectable Victorian living room, my mother so puritanical she didn’t even wear lipstick, and the announcer from New York tells us we are listening to ‘Duke Ellington and His Jungle Music’! It sounded very strange and dissonant to us.” Whatever she thought of the music, Daisy must have been dismayed to hear the phrase
jungle music
used in connection with her son. In 1929 those were fighting words for middle-class blacks who prided themselves on having put their primitive origins behind them. The days of
Roots
were far in the future. But Ellington embraced the despised word: Between 1929 and 1932 he not only allowed it to be incorporated into his publicity but wrote and recorded three compositions, “Jungle Blues,” “Jungle Nights in Harlem,” and “Echoes of the Jungle,” whose titles make reference to the heritage of which he was so proud. “Oh, we’ve been African all the way back,” he assured a reporter four decades later.

By then, though, Bubber Miley, the co-inventor of jungle music, was no longer around to play it with Ellington. Miley’s last recording session with the band was on January 16, 1929, after which Cootie Williams replaced him. He had been missing sessions as early as April of 1927, and the reason for some of his absences was almost certainly that he was too drunk to play. While Miley was not the band’s only drinker, he and Otto Hardwick seem to have been the only ones who let it interfere with their duties. “Bubber was temperamental,” Ellington said in 1944. “He liked his liquor. He used to get under the piano and go to sleep any time he felt like it.” Barney Bigard put it more directly:

Their drinking never hurt their music, but what bugged the rest of us was that every time some big-shot who could help the band would come down to the club, either one or two of them would be gone. Duke would get so mad that when they came back he would tell them, “Well, you all did a great job. We had some very important people in here to listen to you and you weren’t here. That’s great for the future of the band, isn’t it!” Finally, he got so disgusted with them that he got rid of both of them by making life so unpleasant that they quit.

Could the fact that the band was now making three coast-to-coast network broadcasts every week have played a role in Ellington’s decision to part ways with Miley? Paul Whiteman eased Bix Beiderbecke out of his band around the same time for a similar reason: Beiderbecke’s alcoholism made it impossible for him to cope with the unrelenting demands of Whiteman’s broadcast schedule. If Miley had controlled his drinking well enough to function effectively on the bandstand and in the studio, Ellington would have continued to look the other way. He was, after all, an enthusiastic drinker in his own right, and took a tolerant view of the excesses of his sidemen: “Liquor drinking among the musicians was done from the gladiator perspective, in just the same way as when they challenged each other on their instruments . . . all our horn blowers were lushies.” Early on he formulated the managerial credo to which he hewed throughout his life and which he shared with his musicians whenever their behavior got out of hand: “Look, fellows. I thought everyone knew I am
not
a disciplinarian. I hired you because you are superb in your field and I want you with me because of that fact. Apart from being excellent musicians, you are all
men,
so govern yourselves accordingly.” But it was one thing to have a few too many and another thing altogether to miss gigs or skip recording dates. In the end there was too much at stake: Miley had to go, and that was that. He died three years later, six weeks after his twenty-ninth birthday, and though Ellington mourned the trumpeter’s passing, he never admitted to any second thoughts about firing his friend.

Charles Melvin “Cootie” Williams, Miley’s replacement, was born in Mobile, Alabama, in 1911. Unlike his predecessor, he was a teetotaler: “With the Ellington band I drank Coca-Cola
only
.” A Louis Armstrong disciple, Williams had a big, burnished tone that he preferred not to cloak with mutes, and he didn’t know how to use a plunger: “I used to laugh when Tricky would start to blowing, you know. It sounded funny to me.” Ellington never asked Williams to play growl trumpet, but one night it hit him that he’d been hired to take Miley’s place and so had better deliver the goods: “He didn’t say nothing. Till he come to me, sitting up there playing, and he come to me and I said, ‘Well, this man hired me to play like that.’ So I kept on listening to Tricky. One night I had the plunger and I said, ‘Wah, wah.’ And I woke up everybody, and they said, ‘That’s it. That’s it. Keep on. That’s it. That’s it.’” Williams became at least as good a growler as Miley had been, and his Armstrong-inflected open-horn solos brought a bright luster to the band. Along with Arthur Whetsel, he also cracked the whip whenever he thought that his colleagues were failing to take care of business. “He didn’t want to throw his weight around, but by the time that he’d had enough, then he would explode,” Helen Oakley recalled. “And that would pull everybody together.”

Ellington would permanently add two more players (and a woman singer) in the next couple of years, but not until the end of 1934 did anyone else leave the band. After a long period of experimentation, he had found the men for the job, the ones who made it possible for him to do his best work, and it was no accident that the rest of the world now started to take note. In April the band shared a bill with the Marx Brothers at the Palace Theatre, America’s top vaudeville house, and
The
New York Times
commented on his music for the first time: “Then there is a first rate blackamoor band, come down from deepest Harlem to provide a series of jazz specialties that range from tepid to torrid.” A month after that, “Lipstick” discovered Ellington and wrote him up breathlessly in
The New Yorker:

Another thing that your most high-hat friends have recently discovered in a body is the Cotton Club in Harlem, which has a perfectly elegant revue that goes on at twelve-thirty and again around two o’clock. . . . I cannot believe that most of them realize that they are listening to probably the greatest jazz orchestra of all time, which is Duke Ellington’s—I’ll fight anyone who says different. It is barbaric and rhythmic and brassy as jazz ought to be; it is mellow as music ought to be. There are throbbing moans and wah-wahs and outbreaks on the part of the brasses, and it is all too much for an impressionable girl.

Seven weeks after “Lipstick” doffed her dainty hat to Ellington, Louis Armstrong made his Broadway debut singing Fats Waller’s “Ain’t Misbehavin’” in
Hot Chocolates,
an all-black revue that moved downtown from Connie’s Inn, where it had started life as a floor show. It was followed on July 2 by
Show Girl,
a big-budget backstage comedy produced by Florenz Ziegfeld that starred Ruby Keeler and Jimmy Durante and featured a score by George Gershwin and an appearance by Ellington and his musicians, who performed onstage in a nightclub scene, after which they rushed back to Harlem for the late show at the Cotton Club. Marietta Clinkscales came up from Washington one night to see her star pupil, who spotted her from the stage: “I came on and I could see her up in the balcony, up in the mezzanine, waving a handkerchief.”

According to Ellington, it was Will Vodery, Ziegfeld’s chief orchestrator, who got the band into the show: “Will Vodery got us the gig in
Show Girl
 . . . simply by mentioning my name to Flo Ziegfeld.” Unknown to the public at large, Vodery, like Will Marion Cook, was one of the era’s most accomplished black musicians, and Ellington claimed to have received “valuable lectures in orchestration” from him during the run of the show. Long after his name had faded from memory, Ellington would continue to praise him, declaring in a 1943 article about arrangers that Vodery’s “chromatic tendencies penetrated my ear, and are largely responsible for the way I think [about] music, even today.”