Duke (46 page)

Nor were wider cultural trends working in Ellington’s favor. Though no one knew it yet, the AFM strike had pulled the rug out from under the big-band era. The bands had been decimated by the draft, which sent thousands of musicians marching off to war (among them Lawrence Brown, Chauncey Haughton, and Wallace Jones). Now they were competing with romantic crooners like Frank Sinatra, whose singing appealed to women whose boyfriends and husbands were no longer around to take them out dancing. It was a losing battle: No fewer than six of the foremost bandleaders of the Swing Era, Les Brown, Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Woody Herman, Harry James, and Jack Teagarden, were forced to disband their groups in the winter of 1946, with Louis Armstrong following suit a year later. World War II, it seemed, had changed the way that Americans felt about popular music. They looked to it for reassurance, not stimulation. The biggest hit records of the war years were wistful ballads like “I’ll Be Seeing You,” “I’ll Walk Alone,” “Sentimental Journey,” and “White Christmas.” Up-tempo swingers, by contrast, seemed increasingly out of place.

Sensing a change in the wind, Ellington had started featuring his vocalists more prominently. At one point in 1944 he had four of them, Kay Davis, Al Hibbler, Marie Ellington (no relation), and Joya Sherrill, on his payroll. Marie Ellington, who later married Nat “King” Cole, had been hired, according to her, “because of my looks,” and Davis, a classically trained soprano with a graduate degree from Northwestern University, specialized in the wordless vocal obbligati to such instrumental numbers as “Creole Love Call” and “On a Turquoise Cloud.” The smooth-voiced Sherrill scored several jukebox hits, including “Everything but You” and “I Didn’t Know About You,” while Hibbler was a real find, a blind, virile shouter whose soulfully swoopy vibrato and inexplicably affected diction (“Don’t get a-
round
much
en-tie
more”) put off the critics but delighted the fans. “Hibbler’s no singer, he’s a tone-pantomimist,” Ellington proclaimed. “What other singer creates such tonal drama?”

Most of the new songs that Ellington wrote for his new singers were undemanding pop ditties, but they were pleasingly performed and well arranged (sometimes by Ellington, more often by Strayhorn). Even the least of them helped to keep the pot boiling. In 1943, for instance, Ellington and Bob Russell turned “Never No Lament” into “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” which became an overnight success when it was covered by the Ink Spots. Ellington loved to tell what happened next. Strapped for cash, he dropped by the William Morris office to borrow $500 ($6,400 in today’s dollars). Before he did so, he picked up his mail and found an envelope that contained a royalty check:

The figure $2,250 is what I thought I saw as I slid it back in the envelope. To myself I said, “Hey, if this is $2,250, I don’t need to make this touch up here, but maybe my eyes deceived me and it’s really $22.50.” So I pulled the check out again and it said $22,500! By the time I got my head back in my collar I was at the elevator exit on the first floor rushing to get a taxi. Man, what a surprise! What a feeling! I could breathe without inhaling or exhaling for the next three months!

But writing pop songs did not make the best use of Ellington’s gifts. Never a natural melodist, he continued to collaborate with Johnny Hodges and some of his other sidemen on many of his midforties hits, including “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore” and “I’m Beginning to See the Light.” It had always been so. Of the half dozen ballads that figured most prominently in the medley of hits that he now played at all of his concerts (it came to be alternatively known among the cognoscenti as the “dreaded medley” and the “ASCAP medley”) in order to push his songwriting royalties high enough to keep the band running, “Solitude” was the only one composed by Ellington alone. Hence it irked him that Eli Oberstein was pushing hard for more vocals and fewer instrumentals, and he wasn’t shy about complaining to reporters: “For one thing, the return of Eli Oberstein to Victor as recording director meant tremendous pressure in choosing material. . . .
Black, Brown and Beige
was distributed but was seriously cut.” By 1946 Ellington had had enough of Oberstein, and of RCA Victor. Brad McCuen, who went to work for the label two years later, was told that the last straw was a recording-studio incident in which Oberstein, speaking with his colleagues without realizing that an open mike in the control room allowed Ellington and his musicians to hear what was being said behind their backs, ordered the engineers to get ready to cut “a little Saturday-night nigger music.”

Even more stressful was the fact that the Ellington band was losing one after another of its soloists. Ben Webster had already departed in 1943, the victim of his own temperament. Clark Terry, who joined the band a few years later, heard that Webster “slapped Duke one time in the spur of the moment.” According to Don George, “He just got drunk, called Duke a motherfucker and quit.” Whatever the real reason, Ellington found Webster too hard to handle and started cutting back on his solos, leading the saxophonist to hand in his notice and start a combo. After him, the deluge: Juan Tizol joined Harry James in 1944, Rex Stewart struck out on his own a year later, and in 1946 Otto Hardwick retired from the music business. The cruelest blow of all came soon after that, when Tricky Sam Nanton was found dead in his hotel room, a victim of years and years of excessive drinking.

Gifted players replaced them all, some of whom would stay at least as long as their predecessors. Jimmy Hamilton played in the saxophone section until 1968, and Russell Procope, who replaced Hardwick in 1946, remained with the band until Ellington’s death twenty-eight years later. One or two of the new musicians became stars in their own right, above all Cat Anderson, the trumpet section’s iron-lipped high-note man, whose shrieking above-the-staff climaxes, like Hibbler’s melodramatic singing, were loathed by the critics and loved by the public.
^{‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡}
Most of them, however, preferred to keep below the radar of publicity, in particular Hamilton and Procope, a pair of well-behaved professionals whom Ellington could count on to do their jobs without fuss. While he valued them, he also knew their limitations. “He was very important to us throughout the twenty-five years he was in the band,” Ellington wrote of Hamilton in
Music Is My Mistress
. His praise of Procope was even fainter: “What is more, he became a conscientious, all-around musician, one always to be depended on.” And that was the trouble: He needed more than what they had to offer. “There is no such thing as a ‘replacement’ in my band,” he said in 1951. “A new musician means for us a new sound and the creation of new music, which he, and he alone, can properly express.” That was the keystone of the Ellington Effect. He craved new sounds at least as much as he craved new women—and he wasn’t getting them.

Just as Ellington looked for more than mere conscientiousness from his sidemen, so did he demand more sympathetic treatment from his record label. After cutting his last sides for Victor in September of 1946, he signed an exclusive contract with Musicraft, an obscure independent label founded in 1937 and best known for having recorded Dizzy Gillespie, Leadbelly, Teddy Wilson, Josh White, and the original-cast album of
The Cradle Will Rock,
Marc Blitzstein’s prolabor musical. Musicraft promised him the moon—a three-year contract with a guarantee of $100,000 in royalties per year—and
Variety
described the deal as “probably unequaled by any other Negro band in the business.” But it was still a giant step in the wrong direction for Ellington, who had spent the past six years working for America’s biggest record label.

He remained beyond category, of course. NBC had proved it yet again when, two days after the death of President Roosevelt, it aired “A Tribute to F.D.R. by the American Negro,” the second episode of
Your Saturday Date with the Duke,
Ellington’s new weekly radio series. The band performed such pieces as “Come Sunday,” “Mood Indigo,”
New World A-Coming,
and a vocal version by Al Hibbler of “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen,” prefaced by the portentous words of a solemn-voiced network announcer: “Duke Ellington—composer, conductor, fine artist—speaks in his way of the deep sorrow of his people . . . Through Duke Ellington’s music, the heart of the Negro weeps for Franklin Roosevelt.” Ellington and his men are thought to be the only popular musicians who were heard on any of the radio networks, which switched to news, religious, or classical music after FDR’s death was reported.
Variety
reported that “no other dance band could have filled the spot without arousing criticism.”

But he was no longer commercial, at least not as far as NBC was concerned. His new show was “sponsored” not by a maker of cigarettes or toothpaste but by the US Treasury Department, which used it to sell war bonds. At the ripe age of forty-six, the host of
Your Saturday Date with the Duke
had become the dean of a fast-shrinking field. A year later, Barry Ulanov published
Duke Ellington,
the first full-length book about Ellington, a fancily written but well-informed survey of his life and work that was produced with its subject’s grudging cooperation. “You don’t build a statue to a man while he’s still alive,” Ellington told Leonard Feather. “People will think I’m a thing of the past, something to look back on.” The press thought so, too, and the headlines of the stories about him that came out in 1946 show how far he had slipped: “Is the Duke Declining? ‘Loss of Stars Killing His Band.’” “‘I’m Not Slipping’—Duke Ellington: ‘My Current Ork Just as Good and Perhaps More Flexible,’ He Says.” “Ellington Fails to Top Himself: Mix Finds Concert Good, Not Great.”

It was time once again for a change, and Ellington knew it better than anyone. But now that World War II was over, would he be able to grapple with postwar cultural shifts? Were his inner resources sufficient to the daunting task of stylistic regeneration? What—if anything—did Harlem’s Aristocrat of Jazz have up his sleeve?

13

“MORE A BUSINESS THAN AN ART”

Into the Wilderness, 1946–1955

T
HE FAILURE OF
Jump for Joy
to move to Broadway had been and would remain one of Duke Ellington’s greatest disappointments. It made him more open than he might have been to a proposal that was made to him in mid-1946. It came from Perry Watkins, the only working black scenic designer in New York City and the first black member of United Scenic Artists, the union of designers and artists for the entertainment industry. Watkins, who had collaborated with Orson Welles and John Houseman on the legendary all-black “Voodoo
Macbeth
” presented in 1936 by the WPA’s Negro Theater Unit, now wanted to produce an updated version of
The Beggar’s Opera,
John Gay’s tale of low life in London, in which the gangsters, pimps, and whores of the 1728 ballad opera would be transplanted to present-day America. Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill had done something similar, but their
Threepenny Opera
was not yet well-known outside Europe (a 1933 Broadway production had been a dismal flop, closing after just twelve performances). Watkins’s version, by contrast, would be all-American—and racially integrated. As he explained a year later, “
Beggar’s Holiday
was conceived from the first—more than a year before it reached Broadway—as a bi-racial musical.” Then he spotted Ellington in a restaurant, went to his table, and offered to commission him to write the score. Ellington agreed on the spot.

Watkins promptly discovered that his new partner had never heard of
The Beggar’s Opera.
“I realized all of a sudden that Duke never went to the theater very much,” he recalled. Ellington spent too much time on the road to do so, much less to have learned how much the musical-comedy idiom had evolved in recent years. In this deficiency lay the fundamental flaw in all of his theatrical projects: He didn’t understand what a contemporary musical
was
. Except for
Show Girl,
the failed 1929 George Gershwin musical in which the Ellington band had briefly appeared, the only shows with which he is likely to have been closely familiar were the community pageants of his youth and the Cotton Club revues for which he had played. His experience with
Jump for Joy,
a plotless revue, had taught him nothing about how to write an
Oklahoma!
-style “book show” whose songs drive the action. Yet he still wanted to write a successful Broadway show, and always had. “Ellington wanted the recognition of writing a Broadway show,” said his friend Luther Henderson, a classically trained orchestrator who worked on
Beggar’s Holiday
. “In fact, he wanted the recognition of writing a Broadway show more than he wanted to write a Broadway show.” What he didn’t want to do was interrupt his busy schedule in order to learn the craft of book-based musical-comedy writing. It was
Black, Brown and Beige
all over again—only with higher stakes.