Duke (34 page)

Among musicians, Strayhorn’s name came to be as familiar as his bespectacled face, lazily self-mocking voice, and perpetually quizzical expression (Don George said that he looked like “a small, slightly burned, whole-wheat-toast owl”). In addition to “Take the ‘A’ Train,” they were aware that such celebrated Ellington recordings as “Chelsea Bridge,” “Day Dream,” “Johnny Come Lately,” “Midriff,” “Passion Flower,” “Raincheck,” and “Upper Manhattan Medical Group” were also written by the man known to his colleagues as “Swee’ Pea,” and that he and Ellington had collaborated more and more closely as the years went by.
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Yet it was still widely thought that he was a mere appendage to the master, a talented but derivative protégé and “aide-de-camp” (as Stanley Dance put it) who aped Ellington so sedulously that no one but them could tell their music apart. Irving Kolodin asserted in his program notes for the band’s 1943 Carnegie Hall concert that Strayhorn’s “assimilation of Ellington’s mannerisms and the expression of them in ideas of his own has progressed to the point where members of the band can’t be sure themselves whether a certain new creation is the work of Ellington or Strayhorn.” Barry Ulanov claimed that their work had “so great a similarity that it was more often than not impossible to tell who had written what.” More recently Wynton Marsalis has described Strayhorn as “a Duke Jr. of sorts,” going on to say that had the two men not been collaborators, “Duke might as well have sued him for plagiarism.”

Strayhorn himself spoke with amusement of the “whodunit game indulged in by the band,” perhaps because he knew that most of its members were well aware of who wrote what. In time, though, it came to be taken for granted that the question would remain permanently open, as Gunther Schuller contended in
The Swing Era:
“Strayhorn’s role in the Ellington canon will perhaps never be completely or precisely defined, especially in respect to the later years, when the two men’s talents and style did merge in a truly indistinguishable manner.” It was common well into the nineties for Ellington “experts” to credit him with pieces that Strayhorn had written in whole or part. On the rare occasions when critics commented on pieces that Strayhorn was known to have written on his own, their remarks were often studded with loaded adjectives. Schuller spoke of “a certain effeteness which was to mar much of Strayhorn’s work,” while James Lincoln Collier wrote in his 1987 Ellington biography that the two men’s collaboration had a negative effect on Ellington, encouraging his supposed tendency toward “lushness, prettiness, at the expense of the masculine leanness and strength of his best work.” Meanwhile, Ellington’s enemies used the younger man as a stick with which to beat their
bête
noire
, and Lawrence Brown actually claimed that Strayhorn was “the genius, the power behind the throne.”

Only a handful of perceptive outsiders had understood all along that Strayhorn was a major artist in his own right. Some of them, like Gil Evans, the master orchestrator of postwar jazz, were profoundly influenced by his example: “From the moment I first heard ‘Chelsea Bridge,’ I set out to try to do that. That’s all I did—that’s all I ever did—try to do what Billy Strayhorn did.” “I’d like to really know just what’s what in that little lab of theirs,” Quincy Jones wrote in 1959. “I’d like to know how much Billy is responsible for in Duke’s work these days. . . . I bet he orchestrates a lot of Duke’s things.” But it was not until researchers examined the two men’s manuscripts that the full extent of Strayhorn’s contribution to what he dubbed “the Ellington Effect” became a matter of record. Prior to that time he lingered on the near fringes of obscurity, and to this day he sometimes fails to receive his scholarly due.

Up to a point, Strayhorn wanted it that way. He shunned public appearances, and though he gave infrequent interviews in which he diffidently but firmly pointed out that “my playing and writing style is totally different from Ellington’s. . . . He is he and I am me,” he never bothered to explain the difference, much less insist on its significance. Though he wrote some three hundred compositions and arrangements for the Ellington band, he gave only one solo concert and released only one solo album in his lifetime. His name may have been prominently displayed on many (though by no means all) of the albums that the band released after 1956, but the fact that he and Ellington were jointly credited with such multimovement works as
Such Sweet Thunder
,
Far East Suite,
and the score for
Anatomy of a Murder
led most listeners to assume that Strayhorn was the junior partner in their creation. Ellington rarely failed to praise him from the bandstand and in interviews, describing him in a 1964 TV appearance as “one of the most important people in [the] group—very seldom seen in public appearances, but always heard.” Yet Strayhorn’s physical absence from the band’s performances meant that his soft-spoken assertions were drowned in the cataract of Ellington’s gigantic personality. Personally as well as musically, they were the oddest of couples, and their partnership was predestined to be productive—but dissonant.

“Very protective but controlling”: Billy Strayhorn and Duke Ellington in the forties. The brilliantly gifted, unapologetically gay composer of “Lush Life” and “Take the ‘A’ Train” shunned the spotlight of publicity but was never able to come to terms with his capricious mentor’s reluctance to give him full credit for his work

Ellington publicly spoke of his reliance on Strayhorn as early as 1946: “Billy sits in the control room at all Ellington record sessions to give final okays or turn masters down. Duke respects his taste above all others and lives by it musically.” Later on he called Strayhorn his “favorite human being,” and in
Music Is My Mistress
his praise was unstinting:

He was my listener, my most dependable appraiser, and as a critic he would be the most clinical, but his background—both classical and modern—was an accessory to his own good taste and understanding, so what came back to me was in perfect balance. . . . We would talk, and then the whole world would come into focus. The steady hand of his good judgment pointed to the clear way that was most fitting for us. He was not, as he was often referred to by many, my alter ego. Billy Strayhorn was my right arm, my left arm, all the eyes in the back of my head, my brainwaves in his head, and he in mine.

Few, however, noticed that Ellington’s compliments were couched in terms of what Strayhorn had done for him. No more than the critics did he try to disentangle their work, which necessarily meant that Strayhorn’s musical style was swallowed up in the all-encompassing “we” of Ellington’s supercharged prose. It was not until after Strayhorn’s death in 1967 that the Ellington band recorded an entire album of his compositions, and only long after Ellington’s own death seven years later did musicologists answer the question that had come to be asked with steadily increasing intensity: Who wrote what?

It took nearly as long for anyone to acknowledge in print that Strayhorn was a homosexual, though it had been a wide-open secret among his friends and colleagues. That came in 1981, a decade and a half before the first biography of Strayhorn, David Hajdu’s
Lush Life,
saw print. Six more years went by before the first full-length study of his music, Walter van de Leur’s
Something to Live For,
was published. By then such noted jazz artists as Joe Henderson, Fred Hersch, and Marian McPartland had recorded albums of his music, and soon afterward a PBS documentary drew further attention to his life and work. But even now, few jazz fans are fully aware of the extent of Strayhorn’s contribution to the book of the Ellington band, and while his sexuality is no longer secret, fewer still understand what drove him to stay in the shadows his whole life long, or what it cost him to do so.

 • • • 

William Thomas Strayhorn was born in 1915 in Dayton, Ohio, the third of six surviving children of a working-class couple. James, his father, moved repeatedly in order to find a job, ending up in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, where he worked in the city’s steel mills, later becoming a common laborer. In 1926 the Strayhorns moved to a racially mixed neighborhood in the city proper. Frustrated by his inability to make a better living, James started drinking to excess and soon grew violent. Lillian Strayhorn, his mother, responded by drawing closer to the fragile child, who was born with rickets and had to be nursed with care. To shield him from his father’s wrath, she sent him away to stay with his paternal grandparents, who lived in North Carolina. The boy’s grandmother, a church pianist, gave him informal lessons on the instrument, with which he fell in love. Upon returning to Pittsburgh he went to work at a local drugstore as an errand boy, clerk, and soda jerk, using his salary to buy an upright piano: “I started to study and the more I learnt the more I wanted to learn.”

Strayhorn started taking private piano lessons, then studying music at his high school, the integrated Westinghouse High, which had a music program that included not merely an orchestra and a marching band but a swing band—the last of which he disdained. Instead he took classes in traditional harmony and counterpoint, becoming so accomplished that he was later allowed to teach the classes himself. In 1934 he played the Grieg Piano Concerto with the school’s senior orchestra. Even though he was black, Strayhorn was determined to make his mark as a classical composer. Later that year he wrote a concerto for piano and percussion, which was premiered at a school concert with Mickey Scrima (who later became Harry James’s drummer) playing the percussion part. Some of his friends said that it sounded like
Rhapsody in Blue
. That makes sense, for Strayhorn also hoped to become a Gershwin-style songwriter. His aspirations came into clearer focus when he heard Ellington play “Ebony Rhapsody” at a Pittsburgh stage show: “Something changed when I saw him on stage. . . . He had a chord which I have never discovered, I haven’t heard it since, I couldn’t figure this chord out. I went home after going to see this show at the Penn Theatre in Pittsburgh, and I couldn’t figure out what was in that chord, it was just wonderful.” In 1935 he wrote the songs and book for a twenty-minute musical called
Fantastic Rhythm
that he scored for a medium-size pit band, then expanded into a full-length show that was performed in several theaters in Pennsylvania and continued to be revived as late as 1944.

At the age of eighteen, Strayhorn wrote a song called “Lush Life,” the lament of a young man who has been dumped by his lover and now expects “to live a lush life in some small dive.” Despite certain verbal infelicities (he rhymes “awful” with “troughful”) and a world-weary pose, much of the lyric is technically impressive and sounds nothing like the work of a teenager. Strayhorn later described “Lush Life” as “a song most persons have to listen to twice before they understand it, and then lots of them don’t know what it’s about.” This suggests that his use of the word
gay
(“I used to visit all the very gay places”) may have been meant to signal that his unorthodox longings were no longer inchoate. Not only was the now-familiar alternate meaning of the word growing more common in homosexual circles, but it can also be found in Strayhorn’s second-best song of the thirties, a wistful ballad called “Something to Live For” in which the narrator longs for someone to make his life “gay as they say it ought to be,” a neatly turned internal rhyme that underlines its presence. While it is the music of “Lush Life” and “Something to Live For” that impresses present-day listeners more than their self-consciously precocious lyrics, the fact that he aspired to writing both words and music points to an ambition that was soon to serve him well.

In 1936 Strayhorn enrolled in the Pittsburgh Musical Institute, but withdrew in order to concentrate on popular music. It was around this time that he bought his first jazz record, a piano solo by Art Tatum, and was, like every other pianist before and since, stupefied by what he heard: “Everything he did made musical sense—every nothing became a something.” He then started a jazz combo of his own, the Mad Hatters, which made demo recordings on which he can be heard playing in a simpler style based on that of Teddy Wilson. After the Mad Hatters folded, he worked with other Pittsburgh bands. Years later he told an interviewer, “I had given no real serious thought to making music my career,” but his friends knew that it was time for him to get serious, and one of them arranged in December of 1938 for Strayhorn to meet Ellington backstage at the Stanley Theatre, where his band was playing a weeklong stand.

Strayhorn introduced himself by sitting down at a piano and playing “Sophisticated Lady” and “Solitude,” first in Ellington’s style and then in his own. After that he played and sang “Lush Life” and “Something to Live For.” The older man was impressed by his skill (not to mention his nerve) and charmed by his infectious laugh, of which a reporter later wrote that it “begins softly until it builds to a boiling bubble that leaves Billy, and usually any bystanders, completely bereft of speech.” The never-speechless Ellington suggested that Strayhorn try writing a lyric to one of his tunes, and Strayhorn hastened to comply: “Duke was very nice to me and let me stay in the theatre all next day working on the number.” Next he arranged a vocal chart for Ivie Anderson that she sang onstage. At the end of the week, Ellington offered him a job. “I would like to have you in my organization, but I have to find some way of injecting you into it,” he explained. Then he paid Strayhorn $20 for the chart, told him how to take the A train to his Harlem apartment, and sent him on his way with instructions to stand by and await his call.