Duke (28 page)

Like Barney Bigard before him, Stewart was skeptical about Ellington’s musical innovations: “To be absolutely truthful, I didn’t think much of the band when I joined, perhaps due to my receiving what I considered low pay. . . . Then, too, I didn’t like their tempos or the music they played.” It was Stewart who confessed long afterward to having “wanted to puke” when he first heard “Rude Interlude.” Not until he started playing with the band did the two men get on the same musical wavelength. But they saw at once that they were both cut from middle-class cloth, a fact to which Ellington later attested
:

Rex Stewart had been taught the responsibility of commanding respect for his race and to this end he maintained an offstage image very deliberately. It was a dignified, decent-sort-of-chap image, and he never strayed far away from it, so that he was always posing to some extent and never really relaxed. It is possible that tensions and conflicts came from this and were apparent in his music, but he was an exciting player who made a big contribution during the years he was with us.

More important, Stewart was a top-flight soloist, and with his arrival, all of the key voices that graced the band to the end of 1939 were now in place. In addition, he was also a talented writer who published two books, a memoir and a collection of essays called
Jazz Masters of the Thirties,
in which he displayed a sympathetic but keen eye for Ellington’s personal peculiarities. No other musician has added more to our understanding of what it was like to play in the Ellington band, as well as of what its leader was like personally.

As well as having lingering doubts about Ellington’s music, Stewart felt self-conscious about sharing a bandstand with men who wore handmade shoes and memorized their parts, and he was appalled by the high-stakes card games that they played on the train. Above all, it unnerved him that they habitually showed up late for gigs: “I can see them now, sauntering to the stand; the time is 8:40 and the band was scheduled to start at 8:30. Harry Carney is trimming a reed, Greer is about to finish setting up his paraphernalia. Some others are tuning up while Tricky Sam is heatedly making a point with Toby. Johnny Hodges is contemplating the scene, unsmiling and bored. . . . 8:59, there are a few scattered hand claps and Himself enters.”

Stewart soon realized that such one-downsmanship was the norm in the band, and that it could become flagrant enough for the public to take angry note. The bassist George Duvivier saw Ellington and Jimmie Lunceford pitted against one another in a battle of the bands, and could not understand why Ellington put up with the willful misconduct of his men:

I remember Ivie Anderson telling Duke, “You better tell your men to get on the stand on time tonight!” Well, Jimmie played his set, and by the time he finished there were only about six or seven of Duke’s men on the stand, ready to go. The crowd started drifting away, and there was nothing to hold them—just a clarinet and a trombone! By the time the whole band got on, they’d wasted half an hour, and soon it was time for Lunceford to play again. If you were going up against a band like Lunceford’s you had to come on full-force.

Part of the problem was that the band was riven by petty personal feuds. Stewart promptly found himself in the middle of one of his own, for Ellington favored him with solos as soon as he joined, which threw Cootie Williams into a snit. “We didn’t speak to each other for at least two years,” Stewart claimed in
Boy Meets Horn,
his posthumously published memoir. “I don’t think Cootie Williams ever forgave Duke for hiring Rex,” Sonny Greer said. Some of the tensions, however, must have been caused, or at least exacerbated, by Ellington’s touring schedule, which was so arduous that the journalist George Frazier claimed at one point that the band was about to break up: “Word is making the rounds that seven of Duke Ellington’s boys are soon to leave him—the entire sax section, Wellman Braud, and two others. . . . It’ll be a bad bringdown if that band of his splits.”

It didn’t, but a second bassist, Billy Taylor, joined late in 1934, and Braud quit the following March. The cost-conscious Irving Mills had tried to cut his pay when Taylor joined him on the stand. As Frazier reported, six other men threatened to walk out in protest, and Braud eventually quit in disgust. Five months later Ellington hired yet another bassist, Hayes Alvis, who played alongside Taylor until 1938. It was an unwieldy combination, but he wanted a fuller, more flexible rhythm-section sound, and electronic amplification was still primitive in the thirties, as was jazz string-bass technique itself. Braud was a strong player but not a modern one. It’s more than likely that Ellington had tired of his slap-bass style, though it would not be until 1939 that he found a virtuoso who could singlehandedly give him the sound for which he longed.

 • • • 

A few days after Braud’s departure, the band recorded “In a Sentimental Mood,” whose winding melody was appreciated by listeners and musicians alike, making it the fourth of Ellington’s songs (after “Mood Indigo,” “Sophisticated Lady,” and “Solitude”) to become a pop standard. The success of “In a Sentimental Mood” inspired him to spin one of his colorful how-I-did-it tales, in which he claimed to have written the song in a single sitting at a North Carolina dance in order to soothe “two chicks, one on each side of me. . . . That was written very spontaneously. One playing—zhwoop!—just like that.” As usual, though, he left out a key piece of information, which was that the first eight bars were written by Otto Hardwick, who can be heard playing them on the first recording of the song (whose working title was “Paradise”). Ellington added a bridge, harmonized the song, and scored it in a high-calorie style that set John Hammond’s teeth on edge. Hammond disliked “In a Sentimental Mood” so much that he panned it twice, claiming in
Down Beat
that it contained “hardly any of the old time Ellington sincerity and originality,” then upping the ante in his
Brooklyn Eagle
column: “I’m afraid I was too kind . . . I urge you to buy some of his older gems as an antidote.”

Even if “In a Sentimental Mood” was, as Rex Stewart said, “a community effort,” its doleful air was a direct reflection of Ellington’s state of mind. Daisy, his mother, had been diagnosed with cancer the preceding September. Not long afterward, the band recorded a blues called “Saddest Tale” on which Ellington chants an introductory couplet in a husky voice that sounds close to tears: “Saddest tale told on land and sea / Is the tale they told when they told the truth on me.” He must have known that the end was near. In March Daisy entered Detroit’s Providence Hospital for treatment, and Ellington rearranged his schedule so that he could spend as much time as possible with her. She died on April 27. Her body was taken back to Washington by train, after which Ellington sent three thousand flowers to her funeral and buried her in a thousand-pound iron casket that cost $3,500.

Daisy’s death plunged her son into a depression that Mercer Ellington later described in detail: “His world had been built around his mother, and the days after her death were the saddest and most morbid of his life . . . he just sat around the house and wept for days. Then you could be very sure he was drinking.” But after a few days of mourning, Ellington rejoined his band for three months of one-nighters that took them to Arkansas, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Texas, Toronto, Vermont, and Wisconsin. It was as though he were working to stave off despair.

Not long after Ellington and his musicians returned to New York, Benny Goodman’s band, which had been performing on the road to meager crowds, arrived at California’s Palomar Ballroom, where it reversed its sagging fortunes in a single stroke. “Let’s die playing our own thing,” Gene Krupa told his frustrated colleagues, and the young dancers at the Palomar exploded with enthusiasm when the band tossed aside the polite fare that it had been playing, tore into its hottest charts, and blew the house down. Historians credit Goodman’s stint at the Palomar with lighting the fuse that detonated what was soon to be dubbed the Swing Era. Throughout the decade to come, American popular music was dominated by big bands, most of them white, that played a jazz-informed brand of dance music tailored to the tastes of the teenagers born in the baby boom that followed World War I.

While some of these groups, Goodman’s in particular, were true jazz bands, the hard-charging up-tempo riff tunes in which they specialized (Goodman’s teenage fans called them “killer-dillers”) were simpler and more linear than Ellington’s thicker-textured scores. Irving Mills had long warned him of the dangers of getting ahead of his listeners: “I simplified most all the tunes. That’s why all of my tunes, you could sing—‘Solitude,’ ‘Sophisticated Lady,” ‘Mood Indigo,’ ‘Sentimental Mood.’ But nine tenths of everything he recorded you can throw in the wastebasket. They don’t sell . . . he’s made no money for anybody.” But he ignored Mills and wrote as he pleased, paying no heed to the change in the musical weather, and one month after Goodman played the Palomar, he recorded a piece that was more musically advanced than anything he had yet attempted.

“Unusual and interesting”: A 1935 promotional circular for
Reminiscing in Tempo
. Irving Mills shrewdly promoted Duke Ellington as a man apart from his fellow jazz musicians, a “class attraction” whose music was “accepted seriously by many of the greatest minds in the world of music”

On September 12 the band went into a New York studio to cut
Reminiscing in Tempo,
a thirteen-minute-long instrumental composition that took up all four sides of a pair of ten-inch 78s. Ellington wrote it during the string of one-nighters that followed Daisy’s death: “Every page of that particular manuscript was dotted with smears and unshapely marks caused by tears that had fallen.” The piece, he said, was a conscious attempt to pull himself out of the slough of “negation” and “destruction” into which he had descended: “Dangling out there somewhere in a wilderness of the unknown, with no desire for adventure, where things and creatures that I neither saw nor heard were moving around . . . My ambition was dribbling away. Soon there would be nothing. I was not sure where I was. After my mother passed, there was really nothing, and my sparkling parade was probably at an end.”

It should be recalled, however, that this extravagant recounting of remembered sorrow was written by an old man about an event that took place when he was thirty-six years old. Could he have meant it literally? Or was it retrospective posturing? “He always wrote what he felt,” Mercer Ellington said. “I don’t think he ever wrote in contrast to his mood. . . . The happy tunes were written during happy days and the sad things were written when he was feeling sad.” Yet
Reminiscing in Tempo
is not a Tchaikovskian outpouring of untrammeled grief but a reflective medium-tempo ensemble piece, and the way in which Ellington introduced it at a 1948 concert is at least as informative as what he said in
Music Is My Mistress:
“
Reminiscing in Tempo
was written originally to portray the mood of someone who has reflections. Some of them, of course, are very wonderful, very fine, very pleasant, and some, of course, are not very pleasant. But regardless of whether it’s laughter or tears, the tempo continues the same.” Moreover, the piece contains no improvisation (every solo is fully notated) and is noteworthy above all for the assurance with which its two simple themes are woven together across an unprecedentedly long time span. Never before had a jazz composer sought to work on so large a scale.

Judging by the fact that so many copies of the original 78 version remain in circulation today, it would seem that
Reminiscing in Tempo
sold well. Several publications ran favorable reviews, most notably
The
New Yorker,
whose critic was uncomprehending but enthusiastic: “It isn’t, as one might suspect, a medley of Ellington tunes, but a sort of improvisation with virtuoso bits from various instruments popping out. Unusual and interesting.” Spike Hughes, on the other hand, called
Reminiscing in Tempo
“a long, rambling monstrosity that is as dull as it is pretentious and meaningless.” Brunswick’s publicity department put together a four-page circular that acknowledged the critical controversy: “Whatever your musical opinion of this latest work in the modern idiom created by Duke Ellington—trailblazer in the new music—it will not be indifferent!” In later years a new generation of classically trained critics would embrace
Reminiscing in Tempo
. Gunther Schuller called it “one of Ellington’s greatest master strokes,” praising his “formal control” and comparing his harmonic language to that of “such other heady harmonists as Delius, Ravel, Rachmaninov, and Scriabin.” Max Harrison went further, arguing that it was “one of the best pieces he ever wrote” and lamenting Ellington’s failure to build on its promise: “
Reminiscing in Tempo
was, at least
in potentia,
the ‘great leap forward’ in his growth as a composer, and it suggests that he could have developed quite separately from any specific group of performers. That after all is what most composers do.”