Duke (21 page)

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Between them, “Old Man Blues” and “Mood Indigo” sum up what Ellington had achieved by 1930, and point to where he would go from there. It is, one suspects, no coincidence that his oldest surviving musical manuscripts date from that year, for he must have known that he had come decisively into his own as a composer. Yet it is not hard to imagine “Old Man Blues” having been whipped up in the same impromptu manner that was described by a writer for
Metronome
who saw the Ellington band at work three years later:

The men take up their instruments, and the arrangement is started. Ellington takes the men by sections, first the reeds, then the trumpets, then the trombones, and gives each man his notes for four bars. The men play them singly, then as a section, with remarkable rapidity. Any necessary changes are made section by section; the men make suggestions and from time to time Ellington turns to the piano to trace out an idea. . . . Then they play it a sufficient number of times to fix it in their memories.

While the other sections are at work, Juan Tizol, the Puerto Rican valve trombonist, will have been busy with a score, taking down the arrangement as it is made for the other sections, sometimes writing down the trombone parts, sometimes indicating them sketchily, for elaboration later. . . .

Then Duke takes the score home with him, to see if any further refinements are possible. About noon the day after he went to work on the tune he has polished it to his satisfaction, sometimes entirely rewriting parts of it, and goes to bed.

On occasion, the article went on to say, Ellington wrote out entire compositions independent of the band, but the author implied that it was not his normal practice to do so. That must have been an exaggeration, since he was turning out too many charts for the Cotton Club shows to have created all of them in the rehearsal studio. One of Mercer’s first memories of his father was of hearing him at work in the middle of the night: “This is a man who came in at three or four o’clock in the morning and sat religiously at the piano and composed.” Yet there is plenty of circumstantial evidence indicating that in 1930 and for some time afterward, he continued to “write” pieces in face-to-face collaboration with his sidemen. No music stands are visible in the ballroom scene of
Check and Double Check,
and their absence was deliberate. To use music onstage, Ellington felt, was untheatrical, even square: “In the old days, you know, when you played on the stage, you just never brought music on the stage . . . I found out that guys memorize things that they heard much more quickly and much more easily than they did if they read it.” Nor are there any passages in “Old Man Blues” or “Mood Indigo” so technically involved that his players would have found them impossible, or even difficult, to pick up by ear.

The time came when it was impractical for Ellington to compose “on” the band (though he would always use it to edit and polish what he wrote in private). As he explained in 1956, “it . . . just got to be too damn much music.” But knowing that he wrote many of his best-remembered compositions of the Mills era by working them out on the piano in the presence of his musicians makes it easier to understand certain of their features, above all his informal approach to what classically trained musicians call “voice leading.” An untrained musician who harmonizes a melody does so by superimposing it atop a series of chords, in the same way that a singer might accompany himself by strumming casually on a guitar. Every chord is treated as a separate musical event, one of a collection of freestanding bits of musical color that are assembled in aurally logical sequences known as “chord progressions.” A musician who has studied counterpoint, by contrast, is trained to think of a chord progression not as a sequence of three- and four-note chords but as a stack of horizontal “voices” that are woven together contrapuntally to produce harmony. It becomes second nature for him to make each individual voice sound like a tune that is being sung out loud, avoiding wide leaps in favor of melodies that move smoothly from note to note in a stepwise manner.

Ellington, by contrast, claimed to have taken only a half dozen lessons in harmony and is not known ever to have studied counterpoint. Ignorant of the rules of classical voice leading, he worked out attractive-sounding chord progressions at the piano, then (at first) taught them to his musicians by rote. This explains why his part-writing is full of unmelodic angularities like the downward plunge in the third bar of the clarinet part of “Mood Indigo.” By the same token, his compositions are largely devoid of contrapuntal development, save for the rough-and-ready kind produced when two musicians improvise simultaneously. When he does pit two fully independent sectional voices against one another, as in the opening of
Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue,
the listener is taken aback. And because he had no training in counterpoint and played the piano, a chordal instrument, instead of a single-line wind instrument, he thought almost exclusively in terms of vertical harmony, not horizontal melody. Though he was able on occasion to squeeze out a well-turned melody, some of his best-known “tunes,” like that of the chorale in “Mood Indigo,” amount to little more than elaborations on the top notes of the chord progressions that he worked out at the piano, while others, like “I Got It Bad (And That Ain’t Good),” are purely instrumental constructs whose wide-ranging patterns, which fit easily under a pianist’s fingers, can be challenging for a singer to execute.

Don George, one of Ellington’s lyricists, shed light on his melodic deficiencies in this fascinating anecdote:

Duke had a strange way of composing. Most tune writers wrote the melody first, then worked out the chord structure behind it, but Duke wrote the chords and that was that. At first I felt as though I were feeling my way through a labyrinth and had forgotten to unwind the string behind me that would return me to the entrance; but gradually, through some form of musical osmosis, the words fell in the right places and lo! . . . we had a song.

To be a facile melodist is not a prerequisite of musical greatness. No more than Beethoven or Stravinsky was Ellington a natural tunesmith: His genius, like theirs, lay elsewhere. Over time he found a near-infinite number of ways to conceal this deficit, just as (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.” But it is impossible to write truly popular songs without also being able to write truly memorable tunes, and so it stands to reason that the charges of plagiarism that were to be leveled against Ellington in years to come would center not on his instrumentals but his hit songs, nearly all of which were collaborations with band members who did not always receive credit—or royalties—when the songs were recorded and published.

The best-known example is “Sophisticated Lady,” one of his most popular ballads, recorded in February of 1933. Whenever he was asked about the song, he would trot out a variation on this well-worn anecdote:

We were playing in Chicago. In between the shows, in the theater, I used to go up in a room that they had—I think it was the pit-orchestra leader’s room and he had a piano—and I was up there and writing something.

I said, I have to write a thing to capture a real sophisticated lady, you know, one who is traveled and learned. And I took as an example some friends of mine whom I knew at that time, who were school teachers in Washington. These kids were very, very sophisticated. They used to fly off to their weekends around the country and summer in Europe.

The part of the tale that he conveniently neglected to tell was that he did not write the song’s “sophisticated,” elaborately chromatic melody. It was a joint creation of Otto Hardwick and the trombonist Lawrence Brown, who joined the band in 1932. “I had a theme which I played all the time which is the first eight bars,” Brown said. “And Otto Hardwick played . . . the release.” Ellington turned these melodic fragments into a song by splicing them together, then harmonizing them. The label of the first recording of “Sophisticated Lady” credited all three men, along with Irving Mills. But Ellington offered Brown and Hardwick what the trombonist later described as “the terrific check of $15” ($250 apiece in today’s dollars) for all their rights in the song. They took the money, and when “Sophisticated Lady” was copyrighted and published in May, their names had vanished from the credits, never to be seen again.

The way in which “Sophisticated Lady” and “Mood Indigo” were written came to be common practice for Ellington. “I mean, like if anybody stood up and took a solo, you know, and he heard something that [the musician] made playing that [Ellington] liked, he’d tell them, ‘Play the solo. Play it again,’ until he got it,” Bigard explained. “When he got it, then that’s it. Then the next thing you know there’s a tune coming out of it.” According to Freddie Jenkins, Ellington would share credit with the musician whenever “the piece didn’t require too much work to fit the band.” In other cases, though, he took it for granted that he deserved the lion’s share of credit for such “collaborations”: “There are many instances where guys have come in with four bars or eight bars and said, ‘Hey, this is a good lick!’ And I’d say, ‘Yeah, it is a good lick, let’s make something out of it.’ Then you take it home, arrange it up, add what needs to be added to it and it comes up a number.” It was exceptional for him to take sole credit for songs whose melodic material, like that of “Sophisticated Lady,” was wholly the work of other men.
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His usual custom was to write the bridge to a song whose main theme came from a member of the band (as was the case with Juan Tizol’s “Caravan” and Johnny Hodges’s “Never No Lament,” which was later turned into “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore”) or to expand one of their favorite licks into an instrumental composition, adding material of his own as needed (as he did with “Mood Indigo” and Cootie Williams’s “Concerto for Cootie,” which became “Do Nothin’ Till You Hear from Me”).

These magpielike borrowings troubled some of the borrowees more than others. Tizol, for one, affected to find them amusing: “Oh, he’d steal like mad, no questions about it. He’d steal that from his own self.” And Williams spoke benignly of the practice:

All of us used to sell the songs to him for $25. Some of the fellas, in later years, they sued him. But I didn’t do it. No, I believed in if I sold a person something and he paid for it, I didn’t believe in going back, you know, and saying I didn’t mean it that way. So I let it go. It was fun then. You know, I got a lot of experience doing things like that. And it was a pleasure, you know, to have the band to play your song. To have someone playing your song. That’s why we did it.

But certain of Ellington’s musicians, especially Brown and Johnny Hodges, felt cheated when a melodic fragment that they had sold for a pittance was turned by their boss into a hit song. Indeed, Brown saw the practice as a form of musical kleptomania and the Ellington band as a “factory” for the manufacture of collective compositions to which the leader signed his name alone. “Every man in there was a part of the music, the band, and everything that happened, and every successful move that the band made,” he said—and not just to interviewers, but to Ellington himself. “I don’t consider you a composer,” the trombonist told his boss early in their relationship. “You are a compiler.”

Clark Terry put the process in clearer perspective when he described Ellington as “a compiler of deeds and ideas, with a great facility to make something out of what would possibly have been nothing . . . perhaps even Barney would never have written down ‘Mood Indigo.’” And it was true: None of the many Ellington sidemen who went out on their own came remotely near approaching his success, nor did any of them write so much as one hit song. It took the mind of a composer to turn their fragments into full-blown creations. “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different,” T. S. Eliot wrote in
The Sacred Wood
. “The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion.” He could have been talking about Duke Ellington.

Billy Strayhorn said it best:

So this guy says you and he wrote it, but he thinks he wrote it. He thinks you just put it down on paper. But what you did was put it down on paper, harmonized it, straightened out the bad phrases, and added things to it, so you could hear the finished product. Now, really, who wrote it?

It was ever thus.

But the proof is that these people don’t go somewhere else and write beautiful music. You don’t hear anything else from them. You do from Ellington.

It should be remembered that Ellington’s financial sleight of hand was anything but unusual. Most of the top singers and bandleaders of the day insisted on being “cut in” on the royalties from the songs that they performed and recorded. But the difference was that unlike them, he was a great composer. So, too, were many of his sidemen great soloists, and some of the songs for whose melodies they were partly or wholly responsible became standards that are still performed throughout the world. Hence it
matters
who wrote “Mood Indigo” and “Sophisticated Lady,” not just because of the money but because Ellington was one of the supreme creative figures of the twentieth century. The nature of his genius is illuminated by knowing that he found it hard to write singable tunes (as opposed to instrumental pieces, which he turned out with unfailing facility) and that his later development as a composer was in part a response to this incapacity.