Duke (27 page)

Not only were the private cars safer, but they eliminated the necessity to search for black-owned boardinghouses or local citizens who rented rooms (often at extortionate rates) to traveling musicians. The Pullman, by contrast, cost each musician five dollars a day, which was, Ellington noted, “cheaper than room rent.” Though there was nothing luxurious about their narrow berths, they were infinitely more comfortable than sleeping sitting up on a bus. They were more convenient, too, for the Ellington band traveled heavy: Ivie Anderson’s clothes filled three trunks, while six were necessary to house Sonny Greer’s drums, timpani, vibraphone, and other miscellaneous percussion instruments. As for Ellington, he required no fewer than five personal trunks, plus another custom-made container for his shoes.

Traveling by train suited Ellington in other ways. In addition to setting him apart from his sidemen—he slept not in a berth but in a roomette—it provided him with “mental isolation . . . Folks can’t rush you until you get off.” For a touring bandleader whose occupation forced him to compose on the road, such privacy was a must. Ruth Ellington remembered seeing her brother “in a [railroad] siding somewhere in Texas, the heat at 110, the sweat pouring off him on to a piece of manuscript paper on his knee, catching up on something he wanted to finish.” And he loved the ever-changing sounds of train travel, above all the train whistles: “Especially in the South. There the firemen play blues on the engine whistle—big, smeary things like a goddam woman singing in the night.”

It was natural for such homely sounds to find their way into his work, most famously in “Daybreak Express,” a jazz counterpart of Arthur Honegger’s
Pacific 231
that the Ellington band recorded in 1933, ten years after the Swiss composer produced his own exercise in musical onomatopoeia. Like
Pacific 231,
“Daybreak Express” is an orchestral tour de force that reproduces the sounds of high-speed train travel with uncanny, almost eerie accuracy. Barney Bigard marveled at the way in which Ellington was able to “take an ordinary situation and put it into some music . . . We’d all be up at night gambling and we’d hear the whistle blow as we went over a crossing. Duke would hear all the same things. The only difference was, we were playing poker and he was writing music about that whistling.” He would do so on many other occasions. Two years later, for instance, he wrote
Reminiscing in Tempo,
whose rock-steady rhythmic patterns, he explained, were “all caught up in the rhythm and motion of the train dashing through the South.”

Ellington also relished the respect that arose from his traveling in a private train car. He spoke of it often: “Many observers would say, ‘Why, that’s the way the President travels!’ It automatically gained us respect from the natives, and removed the threat and anticipation of trouble . . . we’ve never let ourselves be put into a position of being treated with disrespect.” His musicians appreciated it, too. As Sonny Greer noted with amusement, “The average one of them crackers down south, they never been inside a Pullman car . . . Ofays and everybody would come down, we were traveling like kings.” Even so, they never forgot that trouble was all around them. “I think it was in Alabama somewhere and we played in this theatre and it was strictly white, you know,” Bigard recalled. “So they decided, the manager decided to give one night to the Negroes. But the funny part about it . . . you could see their feet patting on the floor. No applause. They wouldn’t—they were afraid to applaud.” And on occasion Bigard and his colleagues were brought face- to-face with the realities of life in the Deep South:

It was a real rough town. I can’t remember the name, but anyway the cops would parade around the colored section because there was a ten o’clock curfew. You couldn’t be downtown after ten or they would take you in and beat the hell out of you. We didn’t know any better and we decided to walk back to the railroad station. There was about five of us and these cops stopped us and looked us over. One big cop looked us up and down and said, “Well. These niggers are different from the niggers down here.” They just let us go on about our business.
^¶¶¶¶

Not that they had to go all the way to Alabama to be mistreated. In 1944 Ellington told a reporter of an encounter with a St. Louis policeman who came up to him after a performance and said, sure that he was paying the composer a compliment, “If you’d been a white man, Duke, you would have been a great musician.” Ellington smiled blandly and replied, “I guess things would have been different if I’d been a white man.”

After such slights, the publication in 1934 of Constant Lambert’s
Music Ho!: A Study of Music in Decline
must have seemed to him like a message in a bottle sent from another, better world. Lambert’s survey of the parlous state of modern music was the first English-language book in which Ellington’s work was discussed at length. No one who read it could doubt that the author had the highest possible regard for the man whom he called “a real composer . . . the first Negro composer of distinction,” exalting him above Stravinsky and Schoenberg. Not all of Lambert’s praise was equally astute, nor was it indiscriminate, but it is impressive how much he got right—and how early in Ellington’s career that he managed to do so. Among other things, he recognized that “the real interest of Ellington’s records lies not in their [instrumental] colour, brilliant through it may be, as in the amazingly skilful proportions in which the colour is used.” And though he pointed to Ellington’s inability to compose on a large scale as a fundamental limitation, he did not dismiss the results for that reason. On the contrary, Lambert suggested that Ellington’s gifts might be compromised were he to experiment with larger forms, arguing that while the first recording of
Creole Rhapsody
was effective enough in its own loose-jointed way, the longer version was “nothing more than a potpourri without any of the nervous tension of the original version. Ellington has shown no sign of expanding his formal conceptions, and perhaps it is as well, for his works might then lose their peculiar concentrated savour.”

Ellington was uncharacteristically tickled when a Philadelphia classical-music critic read him passages from
Music Ho!
“Hot damn!” he said. “I guess that makes me pretty good, doesn’t it?” As a rule he was suspicious of analysis of his music, especially when it was flossily written. He responded to one such rhapsody by saying, “May be something to it. But it seems to me such talk stinks up the place.” In common with other autodidacts, he distrusted the act of analysis itself, fearing that it might poison the wellsprings of his creativity by making him self-conscious:

If you take a beautiful flower and enjoy it, you can just look at it and smell it and whatever there is to it, but when you start pulling the petals off and then you get down to the veins and the stem and all that sort of thing . . . by the time you’ve gotten through that you say, “Well, gee. This is a beautiful flower!” It was.

Just as he knew how he wanted to talk about himself and his work, so did he know how he wanted to be written about, and he rarely gave an interview in which he failed to make the desired impression. When
The
Chicago Defender
profiled Ellington in the spring of 1934, every sentence hit the target: “Self-taught musically and fairly cultured as the result of planned reading, he considers himself a missionary in his particular effort—the popularization of Race music. This music, he says, ‘is 98 per cent emotional and cannot be written down on paper. It observes no conservatory laws, but smacks a little of the barber shop quartet and the mass singing of slaves.’” So, too, did
Symphony in Black: A Rhapsody of Negro Life,
a one-reel short costarring a very young Billie Holiday and directed by Fred Waller (later known as the inventor of Cinerama) that was filmed in New York starting in October of 1934 and released the following September. Though Ellington does not speak in
Symphony in Black
and is seen only briefly on-screen, the film succeeds in presenting him as a race-conscious composer who takes it for granted that the world will accept him on his own self-defined terms.

Symphony in Black
opens with a shot of a letter that is being delivered to the “Duke Ellington Studio”: “Dear Duke: Just a reminder that the world premiere of your new symphony of Negro Moods takes place two weeks from today.” We see Ellington seated at his piano, scribbling away at a manuscript, then performing onstage with his band (which was expanded to twenty-four pieces for the shoot). What follows is an album of semiabstract, artily photographed snapshots of Negro life: First hot, sweaty laborers shoveling coal and toting bales on the wharf, then a love-triangle scene in which Holiday sings a bluesy aria of grief, followed by a dance sequence featuring Bessie Dudley and Earl “Snakehips” Tucker. The film is accompanied by a nine-minute “symphony” whose four movements are titled “The Laborers,” “A Triangle,” “A Hymn of Sorrow,” and “Harlem Rhythm.” Gunther Schuller has called the film “a touching, highly atmospheric, ambitious quasi-documentary,” describing the score as “major” and comparing “A Hymn of Sorrow” to “Mahler and early Schoenberg.” In fact Ellington merely knocked together three older compositions, “Ducky Wucky,” “Saddest Tale,” and “Merry-Go-Round,” into a Broadway-style production number that is, if anything, even less structurally sound than
Creole Rhapsody
.

Considered as a work of art,
Symphony in Black
promises rather more than it delivers. But it was also a triumph of image-making, or would have been had anyone seen it. The film was not screened widely and, so far as is known, went practically unreviewed. Perhaps for this reason, Ellington makes no mention of it in his autobiography and never made a commercial recording of the score, which remains one of his least well-known efforts. Yet
Symphony in Black
shows how he wanted to be seen by the public, and how Irving Mills meant for him to be seen—as a man apart.

 • • • 

In addition to knowing how he wished to be portrayed by the press, Ellington now understood with absolute clarity how he wanted his band to sound, and a decade of backbreaking work had given him the compositional tools that he needed in order to make it happen. To be sure, he was expected from time to time to squander his gifts on standard-issue pop tunes, many of which were published by Mills. It speaks volumes about the music business that Ellington’s 1934 recording of “Cocktails for Two,” a song written for
Murder at the Vanities
that he arranged in a tongue-in-cheek style reminiscent of a society band, became one of his biggest hits. Yet rarely did the band enter a studio without cutting at least one memorable side.

Among the best of them is “Rude Interlude,” recorded a month and a half after the band returned from England. Ellington had told Percy Brooks that he decided to write a “rude song” after hearing Flo Lambert, Constant’s wife, mistakenly refer to “Mood Indigo” as “Rude Indigo.” What he meant by “rude,” it turned out, was a languorous nocturne whose slowly shifting harmonies hover in the air like low-lying clouds on a humid day. The darkly scored ensemble passages are punctuated by staccato piano chords placed as unpredictably as the orchestral explosions that bring
The Rite of Spring
to a shattering close. It was his most unusual piece to date, and some of his fellow musicians found it impenetrable, even offensive. “When I heard the record, I wanted to puke, it was so distasteful to me,” one of them said. Not so the open-eared Jelly Roll Morton, who thought it to be “a beautiful mood piece” and proclaimed that its composer was “on the right track musically because he wasn’t afraid to experiment.” Spike Hughes, by contrast, condescended to its composer: “Harmonically, like even the best in jazz, ‘Rude Interlude’ is child’s play to a hardened cynic like myself.” Ellington himself said that “Rude Interlude” “contained new departures in musical tempo and arrangement—some pretty daring departures . . . I offer it as my first contribution to what I sincerely believe is due to be the new form of ‘sophisticated jazz.’”

Yet his experimental turn of mind did not stop him from writing pieces that were as accessible as “Rude Interlude” was elusive. From the unpretentious two-beat swing of “Drop Me Off in Harlem” to the down-to-earth riffing of “Stompy Jones,” he made danceable music that was as well wrought as the most far-reaching of his musical experiments. He even contrived to toss off a hit song whose shapely tune was all his own:

We had arrived in a Chicago recording studio . . . with three numbers ready and a fourth needed. The band ahead of us went into overtime, which gave me an opportunity to do my fourth number. So, standing up, leaning against the studio’s glass enclosure, I wrote the score of “Solitude” in twenty minutes. After we played and recorded it the first time, I noticed that everybody in the studio was moved emotionally. Even the engineer had a tear in his eye.

“What’s the title?” somebody asked.

“‘Solitude,’” answered Artie Whetsol [sic], who had played so soulfully on it.

A “Mood Indigo”–style lament of hushed, almost hymnic solemnity, “Solitude” is also an example of Ellington’s unswerving determination to go his own musical way. “Such taboos as that you can’t use parallel octaves, you can’t use parallel fifths, you can’t let a seventh rise—he went to work on those right away, and proved they could sound good,” the well-schooled Mercer Ellington said in 1969. “Solitude,” whose first phrase ascends to a major seventh (the note on which the word
solitude
is sung in Eddie De Lange’s vocal version), then inches upward another half step, demonstrates how the self-taught Ellington had acquired the power to transform such academic solecisms into art.

It was to be expected that the ensemble heard on these now-classic recordings would sooner or later undergo changes, some of which were bound to be jolting. But well into the forties, Ellington almost never failed to use such changes to his advantage. Toward the end of 1934, for instance, Freddie Jenkins was stricken with tuberculosis and forced to leave the band, thus allowing Ellington to move Rex Stewart into the brass section. Stewart, who played the stubbier, mellow-sounding cornet instead of the more brilliant trumpet, was born in Philadelphia in 1907 but grew up in Washington, where he first met his future employer. Sufficiently chubby and round-faced to be dubbed “Fat Stuff,” he started out as an imitator of Louis Armstrong, whom he had replaced in Fletcher Henderson’s band. But Stewart’s curious ear soon led him to assimilate the harmonically oblique playing of Bix Beiderbecke, whom he heard in New York in 1926: “Didn’t sound like Louis or anybody else. But just so pretty. And that
tone
he got. Knocked us all out.” To their contrasting approaches he added his own “cocked-valve” technique, in which he played certain notes by pushing down the valves of his cornet partway, thus giving them the squeezed, foggy tone heard on “Boy Meets Horn,” the 1938 composition that would become his de facto theme song.
^*****
The result was a musical approach capable of piquing Ellington’s interest, and while it was rare for him to hire a musician who was well-known, it was under his leadership that Stewart united the disparate elements of his playing into a balanced style.