Duke (31 page)

One journalist who watched him eat took careful note of what he ordered:

Duke, who is always worrying about keeping his weight down, may announce that he intends to have nothing but Shredded Wheat and black tea. . . . Duke’s resolution about not overeating frequently collapses at this point. When it does, he orders a steak, and after finishing it he engages in another moral struggle for about five minutes. Then he really begins to eat. He has another steak, smothered in onions, a double portion of fried potatoes, a salad, a bowl of sliced tomatoes, a giant lobster and melted butter, coffee, and an Ellington dessert—perhaps a combination of pie, cake, ice cream, custard, pastry, jello, fruit, and cheese. His appetite really whetted, he may order ham and eggs, a half-dozen pancakes, waffles and syrup, and some hot biscuits. Then, determined to get back on his diet, he will finish, as he began, with Shredded Wheat and black tea.

In addition to wearing a corset, Ellington wore his hair in a “conk,” a style created with a hair-straightening process that made use of hot lye. Straight hair, or “good hair,” was as highly valued by middle-class blacks of his generation as was light skin, and they were willing to endure much for it. Black newspapers were full of ads for products that promised to rid the user of “kinky woolly hair. . . . All hipsters in Harlem are using superior hair straightener.” No amount of shame was too much to bear in the quest for good hair. Every jar of Kongolene, one of the most popular hair-processing products of the day, was decorated with a logo on which the initials
KKK
were, fantastic as it may sound, clearly visible. Most of the top black bandleaders of the period, including Ellington and Cab Calloway, wore conks (Louis Armstrong and Lionel Hampton were prominent exceptions) long after the style had been repudiated by a new generation of politically conscious musicians. “We were against kinky hair in those days,” recalled the jazz trumpeter Joe Wilder. “We didn’t have better sense. . . . You know there was no pride in nappy hair in those days. We all wanted straight hair—we wanted people to think we had good hair.”

In time Malcolm X came to see the conk he had worn in his youth as an unnatural act of “self-degradation.” He wrote contemptuously of the practice in
The Autobiography of Malcolm X,
taking care not to mention Ellington (whom he admired) by name: “You’ll see the conk worn by many, many so-called ‘upper class’ Negroes, and, as much as I hate to say it about them, on all too many Negro entertainers. . . . I don’t see how on earth a black woman with any race pride could walk down the street with any black man wearing a conk—the emblem of his shame that he is black.” But Ellington would never stop straightening his hair, oblivious of the impression that it made on younger blacks for whom “good hair” was a badge of dishonor.

 • • • 

By 1937 Ellington’s recordings were so central to his career that Irving Mills produced a film short called
Record Making with Duke Ellington and His Orchestra
. A mini-documentary that explained how records were made, it shows the band rehearsing and recording “Daybreak Express” (“This is an express train, this is not a freight train,” Ellington tells his musicians). The film was intended to promote Variety Records, but by the time it came out in September, the label had shut down. Unable to strike a distribution deal with any of the existing European record labels, Mills decided that it wouldn’t be profitable enough to record the Ellington band on his own, so he relinquished most of the rights to his existing masters to the American Record Corporation, which then resumed recording Ellington for its Brunswick and Vocalion labels.

It was for Master that the band recorded “The New Birmingham Breakdown” and “The New East St. Louis Toodle-O” in March of 1937. Unlike the 1932 remake of “Creole Love Call,” these new versions of Ellington’s first two mature recordings are thoroughgoing recompositions, not spruced-up revisions, and the same is true of the two-part “New Black and Tan Fantasy” that he cut for Brunswick ten months later. In all three cases he offers a fresh perspective on a work of his youth: “East St. Louis Toodle-O” is slowed down to a near-crawl and augmented with tolling chimes and dissonant brass chords, while “Black and Tan Fantasy” is doubled in length by the addition of clarinet and baritone-sax solos and a Ravel-like background piano obbligato. In years to come these recompositions (some of the most intriguing of which were later to be crafted by Billy Strayhorn) would become more common, a sign not of flagging inspiration on Ellington’s part but of his lifelong desire for his music to remain in the “state of becoming” of which Clark Terry admiringly spoke. Even when revisiting the past, he lived in the present tense.

Ellington had more than former glories on his mind in 1937. In September he recorded
Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue,
a six-minute-long composition that takes up, like the first version of
Creole Rhapsody,
both sides of a ten-inch 78. A few weeks later he wrote an article for
The
Chicago Defender
in which he discussed why he wrote the piece: “Like all of our compositions, ‘Blues Crescendo’ and ‘Blues Diminuendo’ concern themselves with capturing and revealing the emotional spirit of the race. That is why so many white musicians find them difficult to understand and in several cases, meaningless.” Part of what he may have had in mind was that
Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue,
unlike most of his recent compositions, was based on the twelve-bar blues, the most elemental of jazz structures—but writ spectacularly large. It consists of twenty-two consecutive blues choruses, interrupted only by a single brief modulatory passage. Not only are there no improvised solos in the piece, but there are no real themes, only a kaleidoscopic assemblage of riffs tossed back and forth between the sections of the band. When described as baldly as that,
Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue
sounds like a recipe for monotony. It is, in fact, Ellington’s most inspired large-scale work of the thirties, a piece that plays to all of his musical strengths and demands nothing that he is not capable of supplying in abundance.

Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue
starts in medias res
with two jumping choruses in the key of E-flat. Instead of stating a melody, the brass and reeds exchange antiphonal call-and-response figures so closely interwoven that the ear cannot tease them apart. Then Ellington moves smoothly through the keys of G, C, and F minor before settling on D-flat, at which point he starts to gradually lower the volume, introducing brief written-out obbligati by Cootie Williams and Harry Carney, followed by a quiet rhythm-section chorus that wraps up the first side of the record. He then switches back to E-flat and stays there throughout the second side. The four saxophonists pick up their clarinets and play a purring low-register riff that is answered by the trombone section. During the next twelve choruses, the volume stealthily increases as the musicians ascend by stages into their upper registers. The bomb goes off when, one minute before the end, a trumpeter (almost certainly Rex Stewart) tears loose from the section and plants a screaming solo on top of the fiery shout choruses that swing the piece to a close.

Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue
is a choice example of Ellington’s mosaic method of composition. Instead of the usual contrasting themes, he gives us a parade of cunningly varied blues riffs, just as the “structure” of the piece amounts to nothing more than a long diminuendo followed by a longer crescendo. Rather than flowing into and out of one another, the successive choruses are conceived as separate musical units that Ellington juxtaposes with an unerring sense of balance, scoring each one in such a way as to keep the listener in a constant state of surprise, nowhere more so than when the clarinets are heard for the first time. No less surprising are the four modulations in the first section, the last three of which are completely unprepared. This creates a sense of tonal instability balanced by Ellington’s decision to circle back to E-flat at the midway point and stay there throughout the second half of the piece.

For a time Ellington played
Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue
regularly, never to better effect than at the “Carnival of Swing” big-band festival held in May of 1938 on New York’s Randall’s Island, where it stopped the show cold. A correspondent for
The
Melody Maker
reported that three thousand members of the twenty-five-thousand-person audience stormed the stage toward the end of the performance: “A call was put in for extra policemen and the session was delayed about ten minutes.” The jazz critics who reviewed the recording were, predictably enough, less impressed.
Down Beat
went so far as to dismiss it as “nothing more or less than a series of old Ellington tricks neatly lined up with none too brilliant strategy.” But Aaron Copland admired
Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue
and said so in print, and it is instructive to read what America’s greatest classical composer thought of America’s greatest jazz composer:

The master of them all is still Duke Ellington. The others, by comparison, are hardly more than composer-arrangers. Ellington is a composer, by which I mean, he comes nearer to knowing how to make a piece hang together than the others. His recent Diminuendo in Blue—Crescendo in Blue . . . cannot be placed in the completely successful category with his “Mood Indigo” or the amazing “Clarinet Lament”—but they are far from being dull pieces nevertheless. (The end of the Diminuendo is particularly inventive.)

Ellington would long be troubled by the lack of a logical transition between the two halves of
Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue,
a structural flaw that he papered over in the forties by sandwiching a contrasting blues composition between the two halves of the original piece, creating what he called a “blues cluster.” It was, however, a makeshift expedient. Not until 1951 would he finally figure out how to lock together the first and second parts of
Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue
in a way that satisfied his ear—and his fans.

 • • • 

Being a superstitious man, Ellington must have taken it for granted that triumphs must always be succeeded by tragedies. If so, then he would not have been surprised by how quickly the writing of
Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue
was succeeded by the death of his father. The two men had been spending more time together after Daisy’s death, and at one point Ellington paid his father $100 a week to accompany the band on the road as “social secretary.” But J.E. took to serious drinking, and by the time that he finally went to the Catskills to dry out, it was too late. His alcohol-weakened lungs were ravaged by pleurisy, and he died five weeks after his son recorded
Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue
. Ellington buried him in Washington in what the papers described as a “$5,000 casket” made of “hermetically sealed . . . hammered bronze.” He was fifty-eight years old.

Had father and son grown closer? Barry Ulanov claimed as much in his Ellington-vetted biography, but Mercer Ellington thought not. “For the most part, even though he would take him from time to time on the road with him, I think basically he did not like his father because J.E. had embarrassed his mother,” he told an interviewer years later. He was probably right. Though Ellington felt no obligation to be faithful to any woman, least of all his wife, he would have found it intolerable that his father felt the same way about his mother. It’s no surprise that he got over J.E.’s death far more quickly than that of Daisy: He was back on the road days after the funeral, and there would be no
Reminiscing in Tempo
to commemorate the passing of the man from whom he had learned the ways of the great world.

A month later Irving Mills marked the tenth anniversary of Ellington’s Cotton Club debut by placing a full-page ad in the trade papers in which he proclaimed, “The DUKE is still KING!” It was festooned with laudatory quotes from the illustrious likes of Glen Gray, Rudy Vallee, André Kostelanetz, Ferde Grofé, Abe Lyman, Victor Young, Leith Stevens, Xavier Cugat, and Leo Reisman (all of whom were white). Judging by his records, he was still perched on top of the heap, and he would soon commit some of his finest work to wax. In 1938 he recorded, among other things, “The Gal from Joe’s,” a two-beat shimmy that features Johnny Hodges in the drag role of a young lady of easy virtue; “Prelude to a Kiss,” perhaps the most poetic of his many studies in chromatic balladry; “Riding on a Blue Note” and “Stepping into Swing Society,” a pair of medium-tempo riff tunes in which he takes the musical formulas of the Swing Era and transfuses them with color and flair; “Battle of Swing,” a concerto grosso–style blues in which the full band plays jagged unison lines to which Barney Bigard, Hodges, Rex Stewart, and Juan Tizol respond in close harmony; “Old King Dooji,” a driving minor-key stomp that foreshadows “Ko-Ko,” the clinching achievement of his middle years; and such small-band gems as Hodges’s “Hodge Podge” and “Jeep’s Blues,” Williams’s “Delta Mood” and “Mobile Blues,” and Ellington’s own “Blue Light,” a crystalline musical etching in the manner of “Mood Indigo” whose main theme Lawrence Brown later claimed to have written.

While it is impossible to single out a recording from 1938 that is fully representative of Ellington’s late-thirties compositional methods, “I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart” says as much about what he could now do as anything else that he recorded in that year of grace. It opens with a four-bar rhythm-section introduction that sets a medium-slow walking tempo, at the end of which Hodges enters with the main theme, a swooping tune in which an octave-wide leap is balanced by off-beat syncopations. Hodges, Brown, and Harry Carney pass the melodic baton from hand to hand, alternately accompanied by “ooh-wah” brass riffs and choralelike reed harmonies. In the second chorus, the full band enters and restates the theme (one of Ellington’s favorite structural devices) in a warmly scored block-chord ensemble variation, with Bigard soloing on the bridge. Then the first half of the opening chorus returns, transformed this time into a “sumptuously velvety” twelve-bar coda (Gunther Schuller’s phrase) that fades down and out. Like “Old Man Blues” before it, this dancer-friendly ballad is structured so imaginatively that the casual listener is likely to overlook the resourcefulness with which Ellington has juxtaposed the instrumental colors on his palette.