Duke (20 page)

Mills’s efforts on behalf of Ellington, if not tireless, were both masterly and assiduous, and he proved his worth again in August, when he arranged for the band to go to Hollywood to appear in a full-length film, a feature called
Check and Double Check
that starred the most popular radio comedy team in the world. Forty million Americans tuned into NBC every weeknight to hear
Amos ’n’ Andy,
a show in which two white men, Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, played a pair of black sharecroppers who had come north from Georgia to Chicago to seek their fortune. Black listeners had divided opinions about
Amos ’n’ Andy,
but everyone else loved it, and the program’s success made a film version inevitable. RKO signed up Gosden and Correll, who donned blackface to appear in
Check and Double Check,
a makeshift expedient that fooled no one. (When
Amos ’n’ Andy
was adapted for TV two decades later, the characters created by the two men were played by black actors.) So, too, did the lighter-skinned members of the Ellington band, who were ordered by the studio to wear dark makeup for a ballroom scene, a stipulation that was covered as news by the black papers. Juan Tizol recalled it with boiling indignation: “They made me and Barney a lot darker and they gave us the cold cream and so forth, when we were through, to go there and wash it off and take all that stuff off. Oh, it was awful.”

Though
Check and Double Check
received indifferent reviews and did only middlingly well at the box office, Ellington and his musicians were paid $27,500, the equivalent of $356,000 today, and their Victor recording of “Three Little Words,” a song written for the film by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby, was their biggest hit to date. As for the ballroom scene, in which they perform Ellington’s “Old Man Blues,” it is a priceless souvenir that shows the viewer how the band looked onstage in 1930. Undoubtedly at Mills’s insistence, the men were dressed in tuxedoes and required to do nothing other than make music, and if Freddie Jenkins’s scene-stealing antics now seem obtrusive, they do nothing to lessen the impression that he and his colleagues are craftsmen, not comedians.

The dignity with which the Ellington band is pictured in
Check and Double Check,
as in
Black and Tan
before it, was part of Mills’s strategy of “selling Ellington” to whites. It would be maintained in his other film appearances of the thirties, which ranged from band-oriented shorts like
A Bundle of Blues
(1933) to guest spots in such features as
Murder at the Vanities
and Mae West’s
Belle of the Nineties
(both 1934). At a time when Hollywood was turning Louis Armstrong into a clownish savage garbed in leopard-skin outfits, Ellington wore sleek evening dress and led a band of polished professionals. He is never treated as a figure of fun—not even when he’s having fun, as in the “Rape of the Rhapsody” sequence of
Murder at the Vanities,
in which the band muscles its way in on an overripe orchestral rendition of Liszt’s Second Hungarian Rhapsody and sets the room to swinging. (Note the solo by the handsome gent at the piano, who grins sexily as he flings his hands around in his best rent-party style.)

Not long before
Check and Double Check
was filmed, Cab Calloway, who played the Cotton Club while the Ellington band was in Hollywood, met its leader for the first time. His account of their meeting deserves to be quoted at length:

Duke was more than suave. He had something special and he carried it with him all the time. He was a handsome, almost shy-looking man, with his hair brushed straight back and a thin mustache. He wore loose-fitting comfortable clothes, and he was almost always smiling. But mostly it was that air of self-assurance that got to me.

Ellington had every reason to be self-assured. The records that he cut in 1930 are proof of it. But his films tell another part of the same story, one that is almost as important.

 • • • 

“Old Man Blues,” which was recorded for Victor in Hollywood that August, just before Ellington returned to New York and the Cotton Club, brought to a close what Gunther Schuller has called the band’s “‘workshop’ period.” Unlike the up-tempo showpieces that preceded it, most of which consisted of strings of solos bookended by nondescript theme choruses, “Old Man Blues” (whose underlying harmonies are borrowed from Jerome Kern’s “Ol’ Man River,” written three years earlier) demonstrates that Ellington now knew how to fuse written ensembles and improvised solos into fully integrated musical structures. While the piece itself, a thirty-two-bar tune cast in standard AABA pop-song form, is in no way elusive, the arrangement is still full of surprises. After an eight-bar vamp-till-ready introduction, it gets under way not with the customary full-band theme statement but with an improvised duet by Tricky Sam Nanton and Barney Bigard, followed by an even more startling change of key. Only then do the trumpets proclaim the fanfarelike theme, which gives way to a sequence of solos by Harry Carney, Johnny Hodges, and Freddie Jenkins superimposed on an instrumental background that changes from phrase to phrase. Observe, for instance, how Ellington plays a thrusting stride-piano obbligato behind the first and last parts of Carney’s solo, then lays out on the song’s minor-key bridge as Nanton and Juan Tizol move in with a sly “wah-wah” riff.
^¶¶¶

Ellington is said to have thought “Old Man Blues” to be his best composition yet, but “Mood Indigo,” recorded two months later by a seven-piece combo drawn from the band, is even more inspired, and unlike “Old Man Blues,” which was never played in later years, it became a permanent part of the band’s repertoire. A nocturne whose “exquisitely tired and four-in-the-morning” quality (in Constant Lambert’s phrase) he would evoke time and again, “Mood Indigo” opens with a three-part chorale intoned by muted trumpet, muted trombone, and low-register clarinet, the combination that André Previn had in mind when he marveled at how “Duke merely lifts his finger, three horns make a sound, and I don’t know what it is.” Then Barney Bigard steps out from the ensemble to play the tune, backed by the ticktock strokes of Fred Guy’s banjo and the steady walk of the rest of the rhythm section. Arthur Whetsel plays a delicate solo and Ellington ripples through a four-bar piano interlude, after which the chorale is repeated as the record spins to a close. Two months later the full band re-recorded “Mood Indigo,” but Ellington knew better than to tamper with the scoring of the introductory chorale. It is as simple and unforgettable as a proverb.

Ellington’s account of how “Mood Indigo” came to be written was one of the tales that he most enjoyed telling in later years:

We had a little six-piece date [not counting Ellington] in 1930 at OKeh. So we went down, and that night when I was waiting for my mother to cook dinner, why, I said, “Yeah, I need another number, I better scratch out something while I wait.” So I did the orchestration in fifteen minutes. . . . We recorded it, and that night at the Cotton Club, when it was almost time for our broadcast, Ted Husing, the announcer, asked, “Duke, what are we going to play tonight?” I told him about the new number, and we played it on the air, six pieces out of the eleven-piece band. The next day, wads of mail came in raving about the new tune, so Irving Mills put a lyric on it, and royalties are still coming in for my evening’s work more than forty years later.

Some of his anecdotal set pieces contain more truth than others, and while this one is basically true, there was more to the story of “Mood Indigo” than he cared to admit. It is entirely possible, for instance, that he broadcast the piece from the Cotton Club on the same day that he recorded it. “Mood Indigo” first appears in NBC’s logbooks on October 20, 1930, six days after the Harlem Footwarmers (one of the many pseudonyms used by the band when it recorded for labels other than Victor) first cut the song for OKeh. The log for the October 14 Cotton Club broadcast is incomplete, though, so that part of Ellington’s story may well be accurate. But Bigard pooh-poohed the rest of it, claiming to have written the second strain of the song by himself: “Duke once said in a piece in one of those magazines that he wrote ‘Mood Indigo’ while his mother was fixing breakfast or something. Don’t know how he did that. . . . Duke figured out a first strain and I gave him some ideas for it too. He wrote out a three-part harmony for the horns, we added my second strain and recorded it.” He, too, was telling the truth—up to a point. While the first two recordings of “Mood Indigo,” released by OKeh and Brunswick, initially credited the song to Ellington and Irving Mills, Bigard’s name was added to the labels when these releases were subsequently re-pressed. Thereafter it appears on all later recordings of the song, as well as on the sheet music, though Bigard received no royalties until he threatened to sue Ellington twenty-eight years later. (Bigard said in 1978 that he had initially accepted a flat fee of $25.)

Compounding the general confusion, the label of the first pressings of the Brunswick recording identifies the song as “Dreamy Blues,” not “Mood Indigo.” This alternate title is nowhere to be found on OKeh’s matrix card for the Harlem Footwarmers recording, which lists the song as “Mood Indigo.” Why the discrepancy? Ellington said on at least one occasion that the short-lived alternate title was Mills’s idea: “I wanted to call it ‘Mood Indigo,’ but Irving said that wasn’t commercial enough!” Mills, on the other hand, claimed that “Mood Indigo” was his title, while Bigard claimed it for himself, adding that he had no idea how the song came to be called “Dreamy Blues.”

Perhaps not, but Al Rose, a jazz buff who lived in New Orleans for much of his life, claimed that the second strain was written by Lorenzo Tio Jr., Bigard’s clarinet teacher, and that the song was known in New Orleans as “Dreamy Blues.” And Bigard later acknowledged that Tio had had a hand in writing the song:

My old teacher Lorenzo Tio had come to New York and he had a little slip of paper with some tunes and parts of tunes that he had written. There was one I liked and I asked him if I could borrow it. . . . It was just the second strain. There was no front part on what Tio gave me. I changed some of it around, for instance the bridge on the second strain, and got something together that mostly was my own but partly Tio’s.

Yet he continued to deny any knowledge of how Brunswick 4952 came to be released, however briefly, as “Dreamy Blues,” disingenuously suggesting that “maybe the record company put the wrong label on the record . . . it was always ‘Mood Indigo’ to me and I ought to know.”

Whatever the explanation, the fact remains that as with “Creole Love Call,” Ellington may have been misled yet again by one of his own sidemen—and since he not only tried to deprive Bigard of credit for his contribution to “Mood Indigo” but succeeded in mulcting the clarinetist of a quarter-century’s worth of royalty payments, turnabout was fair play. In any case, his contribution to “Mood Indigo” was as indispensable as the role that he played in the transformation of “Camp Meeting Blues” into “Creole Love Call.” It was his introductory chorale that turned “Mood Indigo” from a song into a composition, one whose veiled, dulcet scoring, once heard, will always be remembered.

The story of “Mood Indigo” was complicated still further when, in 1931, Irving Mills turned it back into a song by adding lyrics: “You ain’t been blue / Till you’ve had that mood indigo.” The sheet music jointly credits Ellington, Mills, and Bigard with having written “words and music,” and no other collaborator was officially credited when the song was copyrighted on February 21, or at any later time. But Mitchell Parish, a Mills Music staffer who wrote the words to Ellington’s “Sophisticated Lady,” as well as such other standards as “Deep Purple,” “Star Dust,” and “Sweet Lorraine,” claimed that he did the same for “Mood Indigo”: “Ellington recorded it under the title ‘Dreamy Blues’ before I was asked [by Mills] to write the lyric—which I did without getting credit.” Ellington confirmed that Parish was the lyricist. “At the time he was signed with the company . . . and so they just bought him outright, and he was on a regular stipend, on a salary,” he said in 1962.

In one final turn of the screw, the popular crooner Gene Austin, who made the first vocal recording of “Mood Indigo” for Victor in August of 1931, allegedly told his wife years later that it was he, not Parish, who had written the words:

Duke was playing that tune one night in one of the [Harlem] clubs. Gene said, “Hey, Duke, I like that tune. Do you have lyrics to it?” The Duke said, “No.” Gene says, “I know you’re writing with Mitchell Parish. Have Mitch write some lyrics and I’d like to record it.” . . . They had delivered the music to his home address on Riverside Drive. There was no lyric. Gene hurried and wrote all the lyrics in the cab going down to the Victor company. I said, “Gene, why didn’t you call them on it,” and he said, “Oh, Lou, I’ve written a lot and was getting big royalties so I thought I’d let Mitch have the royalties,” letting others think Parish wrote them.

No matter who wrote “Mood Indigo,” it remains an imperishable classic, one of a handful of songs that come to mind whenever Ellington’s name is mentioned anywhere in the world. It was, he said, “our first big hit,” and he would remain indissolubly identified with it. When the Ellington band broadcast a radio tribute to Franklin Roosevelt after his sudden death in 1945, “Mood Indigo” was one of the songs that was performed. When
Time
put Ellington on its cover in 1956, the title of the story was “Mood Indigo & Beyond.” In March of 1931 Cab Calloway recorded one of the first cover versions by an American band, and the arrangement he used was a virtual carbon copy of Ellington’s big-band chart. Two years later the Boswell Sisters cut a close-harmony vocal version, one of twenty-eight other covers known to have been made between 1930 and 1939. As late as 1954, the Norman Petty Trio put “Mood Indigo” on the pop charts with a countrified version. Ellington would recycle its characteristic instrumental colors on numerous occasions, most notably in a 1940 composition called “Dusk” that is as poetic as “Mood Indigo” itself, and recorded the song in several dozen customized renderings ranging from a fifteen-minute “uncut concert arrangement” handcrafted by Billy Strayhorn to a down-and-dirty small-group performance in which the composer sat in with Louis Armstrong’s All Stars. Sidney Bechet, Tony Bennett, Rosemary Clooney, Nat “King” Cole, Perry Como, Floyd Cramer, Doris Day, the Dukes of Dixieland, John Fahey, Ella Fitzgerald, the Four Freshmen, Erroll Garner, David Grisman, Coleman Hawkins, Woody Herman, Lena Horne, Dr. John, André Kostelanetz, Jimmie Lunceford, Henry Mancini, the Mills Brothers, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Pérez Prado, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, Charlie Rich, Paul Robeson, Nina Simone, Frank Sinatra, the Singers Unlimited, even Debby Boone and Joe Jackson: All have sought to put their stamp on a song so redolent of its time and place that Brian De Palma included a performance of the original 1930 arrangement on the soundtrack of
The Untouchables
in order to establish the film’s period setting. It will be remembered as long as Ellington himself is remembered, and maybe even after that.