Duke (35 page)

Strayhorn occupied himself for the next six weeks by writing arrangements of “Lush Life” and “Something to Live For” for the Ellington band. The manuscripts survive and, according to Walter van de Leur, are indicative of his ability to comprehend what Ellington had been doing: “In an almost instantaneous assimilation of Ellington’s writing style, he scored both arrangements for specific voices in the orchestra, naming personnel (Bigard, Hodges, Tizol) on the manuscripts.” Then he screwed up his courage and went off to meet Ellington, though not before writing a swinging instrumental that was inspired by the subway directions to Harlem that the older man had given him. “Take the ‘A’ Train,” he later said, “was born without any effort—it was like writing a letter to a friend.”

He caught up with the band on January 23 at a theater in Newark and went backstage, where Ellington told him that he was hired: “I’m not going to let you go this time . . . I don’t have any position for you. You’ll do whatever you feel like doing.” He instructed Strayhorn to go to New York, where Mercer would book him a room at the Harlem YMCA. Two days after checking in, Strayhorn knocked on the door of the family penthouse on Edgecombe Avenue. Ruth, who noticed that he spoke French “like a native,” took to him immediately: “Billy established instantaneous communication with the family, it was as if he had always been there.” Mercer felt the same way, and the two young men talked all night. From then on Strayhorn only stopped by the Y long enough to change his clothes, after which he came back to the Ellington apartment. A few days later Mercer said, “What the hell are we paying all the rent [at the YMCA] for? Go get your shit and move it here.”

 • • • 

Not long after Ellington returned from the road, he gave Strayhorn his first assignment: “One day Duke sent me two pieces and he said, ‘Arrange these for a recording tomorrow at ten o’clock.’ So what could I do? I learned fast! . . . I couldn’t really arrange, but that didn’t really make any difference to him. That’s the only way I can explain how I managed to do those arrangements.” He stayed up all night writing charts for a small-group session at which Johnny Hodges cut “Like a Ship in the Night,” a forgettable pop song, and a pair of Ellington-Hodges originals, “Savoy Strut” and “Dooji Wooji.” Though there was nothing out of the ordinary about his arrangements, they were effective enough. Three weeks later, on March 21, Jean Eldridge, who sang briefly alongside Ivie Anderson during the first part of 1939, recorded “Something to Live For” with the full band. The arrangement was by Ellington, but Strayhorn sat in on piano, weaving a frilly obbligato in and out of Eldridge’s vocal. It was his professional recording debut, as well as the first time that his name appeared on a record label. What he felt when he was told that his song would be credited to “Ellington-Strayhorn” and that he would split the royalties with his employer is not known. More than likely the twenty-three-year-old novice was too overjoyed to think twice about it.

Two days after recording “Something to Live For,” Ellington and his musicians sailed for Europe, leaving Strayhorn behind. “I left him at my house with my son and my sister,” Ellington recalled. “While I was gone for six weeks, [he was] there going through my scores.” He was also writing “Day Dream” and “Passion Flower,” his first mature instrumental compositions, which would be recorded by Hodges in 1940 and 1941. While both numbers are rooted in Strayhorn’s earlier work, they show that his encounter with Ellington had widened his musical horizons—and that he already had a compositional voice of his own. “Passion Flower,” whose Ravel-like chromaticism is so extreme as to briefly dissolve the listener’s perception of a tonal center, is harmonically advanced in a way that was all but unprecedented in jazz. At the same time, both songs also show that Strayhorn, unlike Ellington, was blessed with the gift of tunefulness, though their opulently wide-ranging melodies (“Day Dream” opens with a bold upward leap of an octave) are conceived not in vocal but in idiomatically instrumental terms.
^******
Indeed, they may well have been written with Hodges’s playing in mind, since Strayhorn had now had the opportunity to work with him, and from then on the saxophonist, whose tone was compared by Charlie Parker to the voice of the coloratura soprano Lily Pons, would be his most favored soloist.

The only thing missing from Strayhorn’s toolbox was the ability to write fluently for the full band, and the fact that his new employer was temporarily absent from the scene made it possible for him to learn the craft of big-band orchestration by studying Ellington’s manuscripts. He modestly claimed that it took “a long time” for him to unravel their mysteries, but Ellington later spoke with wry amusement of his assimilative powers:

He had a good musical education but he had never had any writing experience—orchestration. So he looked at my things and decided, I suppose, that it all looked very simple, so when I came back he said, “I’ve been looking at your things and I think I could do some of that.” I said, “Yeah, all right, have a shot.”

Strayhorn started turning out vocal arrangements for Ivie Anderson, and within weeks Ellington “gave [him] charge of all the singers.” Around the same time he recorded his first solo, eight light-fingered bars à la Teddy Wilson on Cootie Williams’s “Blues A Poppin’,” a Williams original that Strayhorn had also arranged. After that he was put in charge of the small-group sides as well: “From then on, Duke did very little of the arranging for the small groups. Oh, he did a little, but he turned almost all of them [over] to me. You could say I inherited a phase of Duke’s organization.” Strayhorn’s new colleagues were impressed by his prodigious talent. “He got everything that Duke had and more,” Juan Tizol said. “Strayhorn learned. He already knew about it, by looking at the scores he learned a lot and started writing just like Ellington—I’m talking about his chords and so forth. Strayhorn’s writing was a little more sweeter, more sweet music than Duke’s.” They also found the studious young man likable once he started bar-hopping with Otto Hardwick and Sonny Greer, who fondly spoke of him as “a guy that everybody loved. . . . I never saw a man like that, could cabaret all night long and walk the chalk line. He was amazing. He got me so I hated to look at him. I used to say, ‘Man, how you do that?’ And he would laugh.”

Ellington witnessed the aftermath of Strayhorn’s first night on the town with the boys in the band, who lurched back to their train barely in time for an early-morning departure:

I was down in the station and here comes Strayhorn, this nice little schoolboy whom we had all looked down upon to look up at, and here he was, running drunk, and he’s got my hat on. So here comes Strayhorn juiced with my hat on, and Sonny Greer has been priming him for his entrance now because he’s got him juiced, and he comes over and he looks at me, Strayhorn looks at me, and he points his finger, and he says, “Hey, man, I don’t dig you!”

Ellington made his own feelings known by recording “Weely,” a musical portrait of Strayhorn, in October. While it is hard to see what this uninteresting riff tune has to do with its ostensible subject, the gesture was important in and of itself, since it clued in the listening public to the coming of a new colleague. But on the same day that the band recorded “Weely,” Hodges cut “Your Love Has Faded,” another of Strayhorn’s early ballads, which was remade two days later by Ivie Anderson and the full band. Even though Strayhorn had written the song for the Mad Hatters in 1937, the labels of both records credited it solely to Ellington. For Ellington as for Irving Mills, such credit hoggery was nothing new. For a shy young composer who was still coming out of his shell, however, it was more than just a matter of money. By withholding credit for his work, Ellington struck at Strayhorn’s as-yet-unformed sense of identity—and kept on doing so for years to come.

 • • • 

Ellington later assured innocent reporters that he and Strayhorn came to be so close that they finished writing each other’s pieces, a charade with which the younger man went along: “Every once in a while, [Ellington] calls me from some place I’ve never heard of, from some distant part of the world and says, ‘Billy, I’m working on a song, but I’m stuck, can’t finish it. Now, the first part goes like this: Bah bah bah bee boo bee bee bah bah bah bah bah boo. I want you to finish it for me.’” On rare occasions, always enforced by necessity, they collaborated face-to-face. Gordon Parks saw the two men finish writing a number together in a San Francisco hotel room after watching a late-night horror movie on TV:

At about one-thirty Edward switched off the television set. “That flick,” he said with a yawn, “was the worst. No other has aroused my imperial displeasure so thoroughly.” He picked up some manuscript paper and handed it to Strayhorn. “Gather up the genius, Swee’ Pea. The maestro is limp at the heels.” He then flopped down on the couch. Turning to me he mumbled wearily, “You are about to witness a remote and covetous collaboration between flower and beast.” Five minutes later he was snoring deeply. Strayhorn worked.

It was well past three when Strayhorn shook Edward’s shoulder. “Wake up, Monster. I stopped on C minor. Take it from there.” Edward rose slowly, yawned and stumbled over to the manuscript. Strayhorn took the couch.

“C minor. C minor. How indelicate of you, Pea. C minor.” Edward was mumbling himself back to consciousness. “Working with you is like tearing one’s heart in half. C minor. How dull. How unimaginative to awaken one and assign him to such an ordinary chord. C minor. You are a slaughterer of the innocent.” Strayhorn snored peacefully now. Edward worked. In a couple of hours he roused Strayhorn and they worked together. And so it went until the piece was finished at dawn.

No doubt it sometimes happened just like that, but only fifty-two surviving manuscript scores of pieces written or arranged by Ellington and Strayhorn between 1939 and Strayhorn’s death in 1967 are in the handwriting of both men. One of them, an Ivie Anderson–sung blues called “Rocks in My Bed” that was credited to Ellington but actually cowritten by him and Strayhorn, illustrates some of the differences in their compositional styles. As was customary when they worked together on a vocal chart, Ellington scored the purely instrumental portion, with Strayhorn supplying accompaniment for the singer. Johnny Hodges and Barney Bigard split the first two choruses, supported by full-ensemble block chords—but as soon as Anderson makes her entrance, Strayhorn takes over the helm and backs her with a written-out countermelody for the saxophones, followed by a root-and-branch reharmonization of the song. Throughout her two vocal choruses, the various sections of the band support Anderson with an unobtrusive web of contrapuntal lines. Such an approach was alien to Ellington, whose notion of “counterpoint” usually amounted to having one of his soloists improvise an obbligato to a full-band passage (as Bigard does in “Rocks in My Bed”).

Not only did Strayhorn think contrapuntally, but his harmonic vocabulary was nothing like that of his mentor. Extensive study of the music of the French impressionists had given him access to a chromaticism far more elaborate than Ellington’s homespun species, so much so that he was capable of unconsciously quoting
Valses nobles et sentimentales
, a work by Ravel that he had yet to hear, in the opening bars of “Chelsea Bridge,” the most advanced of the pieces that he wrote for the Ellington band in 1941. Having mastered the rules of classical voice-leading in his youth, Strayhorn used widely spaced open-position quartal harmonies, whereas Ellington, like the self-taught pianist-composer that he was, preferred closed-position triadic harmonies that fall naturally under a pianist’s hands (though his harmonic language soon grew more adventurous, possibly in response to Strayhorn’s example). Conversely, the blues had next to no place in Strayhorn’s output, just as his orchestral palette was brighter and more treble-weighted than the bass-dominated sounds favored by his older colleague, who never tired of finding new ways to sneak Harry Carney’s baritone saxophone into his voicings.

Above all, Strayhorn shunned Ellington’s ad hoc mosaic structures. His pieces develop organically from start to finish, with transitional passages carefully integrated into the flow of musical events—except when Ellington got his hands on a Strayhorn manuscript and reworked it in the studio, as he did with “Chelsea Bridge,” from which he excised a minute and a half of music, rearranging what remained in such a way as to undermine its formal coherence. It was not the last time that he would “improve” a Strayhorn chart by dismantling and reassembling it to suit the imperious dictates of his ear, nor would Strayhorn easily accept Ellington’s high-handed willingness to alter his compositions. Even after they came to terms with their musical differences and arrived at a mutually acceptable modus vivendi, the two men sometimes let their sensitivities show through their guarded exteriors. In a joint radio appearance from 1962, Ellington jovially described how he went about recording a Strayhorn piece: “There is nothing like taking a Billy Strayhorn orchestration in a recording studio. . . . This is the first time it is to be played and you start to record it, and then take it and turn it all around . . . just destroy the whole orchestration pattern. It doesn’t destroy it, but [you] twist it around, turn it upside down, and this and that.” Having given the interviewer this glimpse of his working methods, Ellington proceeded to make a startling confession, couching it in the loftily ironic tone that he assumed whenever he wanted to obscure the issue: “Maybe Billy Strayhorn’s orchestrations might sound
too good. . . .
And we don’t want Strayhorn to sound too good
too young
.” To which Strayhorn replied, “You wanted to know about collaboration, and now you know. This is the
real
story.” Though his tone was as arch as Ellington’s, both men were kidding on the square.

Now that musicologists have definitively established who wrote what in the Ellington-Strayhorn oeuvre, it is hard to see how anyone could ever have confused their styles. Yet many knowledgeable listeners, among them such distinguished scholars as Gunther Schuller, did so time and again. The reason why is clear: Strayhorn’s work was being performed and recorded by a band whose members had been handpicked by Ellington himself and whose playing styles created an impression of similarity that was strong enough to throw the smartest of outsiders off the scent. But the impression was deceptive, and both Ellington and Strayhorn, unlike their critics, knew it.