Duke (48 page)

Mike Levin, long one of Ellington’s staunchest advocates, now advised the beleaguered bandleader to throw in the towel: “Isn’t it about time the Ellington orchestra was disbanded before what was left of a great reputation is completely dragged in the muck? . . . Little is said of the cold cash attitude of many of the sidemen and of the frightful trash the band has been turning out for the last three years.” Another controversy erupted, but this time Ellington’s defenders betrayed their own doubts. The bandleader Charlie Barnet, a passionate fan who had been playing his compositions for years, responded to Levin in a manner that was almost certainly more revealing than he knew:

You’re right that Ellington sounds dispirited and tired a lot of the time these days. But who the hell doesn’t? Do you have any idea what it’s like, night after night, playing to sparse crowds and unenthusiastic ones at that? . . . The things I admit are wrong about Ellington, just as you do, are a reflection of the whole business today, not just Duke.

Ellington himself weighed in the following month, and his response was no less revealing: “If I didn’t like the way this band plays I wouldn’t pay so much to listen to it and write for it. Our band is operating at a loss now.” Most revealing of all, however, was the fact that no one outside the trade press took note of the Duke-should-quit imbroglio. General-circulation magazines no longer kept up with his doings, though that didn’t stop him from continuing to write and record worthwhile music. Columbia released its first “long-playing” albums, which held up to twenty minutes’ worth of music on each side, in 1948, and his first LP, a collection of instrumentals called
Mood Ellington
, contained eight tracks recorded the preceding year, “The Clothed Woman,” “Golden Cress,” “Hy’a Sue,” “Lady of the Lavender Mist,” “New York City Blues,” “On a Turquoise Cloud,” “Progressive Gavotte,” and “Three Cent Stomp,” that were as good as anything he had ever recorded.

“The Clothed Woman,” premiered at Carnegie Hall in December of 1947 and recorded by an Ellington-led sextet three days after the concert, is still regarded as one of the most harmonically advanced of jazz compositions. Gunther Schuller would later describe it as “visionary,” praising Ellington for having written the piece in “a freely atonal harmonic language and a commensurately free rhythmic/metric structure in the manner of a declamatory recitative.” So he did, but there is more to “The Clothed Woman” than Schuller lets on. The first section is a cadenza-like out-of-tempo piano solo full of grace-note tone clusters so dissonant that most listeners (including Schuller) fail to notice that the all-but-atonal harmonies are superimposed on top of a conventional twelve-bar blues in F. A swinging full-band interlude then sweeps us into a four-to-the-bar rent-party stomp in the manner of Willie “the Lion” Smith, after which Ellington briefly returns to the outer-space harmonies with which he began.

Some of the vocal sides recorded around this time, especially Al Hibbler’s “Do Nothin’ Till You Hear from Me” and “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” are equally fine, and it is interesting to see how Ellington carved these deservedly well-remembered numbers out of “Concerto for Cootie” and “Never No Lament,” two of the Blanton-Webster band’s best sides. In both cases Ellington and Bob Russell, his lyricist, retained the opening themes of the original versions but substituted more easily singable bridges. The charts (the first by Strayhorn, the second by Ellington) are simple and bluesy sounding, and Hibbler’s straight-from-the-shoulder singing is inspired. Both songs entered the band’s permanent repertoire, a happy development that had the less happy effect of causing Ellington to shelve the instrumental pieces on which they were based.

If such records had been the norm in 1947, then Ellington’s critical reputation would have been as solid as his bank account. But for every “Clothed Woman” or “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” the band was obliged to record a novelty like “Cowboy Rhumba,” “I Fell and Broke My Heart,” or “You’re Just an Old Antidisestablishmentarianismist,” and the ratio of quality to dross did not long escape the notice of Ellington’s detractors. One of them, Alec Wilder, published in the
Saturday Review
an essay occasioned by
Mood Ellington
that remains one of the most astute appraisals of his limitations to see print. Wilder, a popular songwriter (“I’ll Be Around,” “While We’re Young”) who also composed instrumental sonatas and other works in which classical forms are infused with melodic and harmonic elements drawn from jazz and pop music, observed that the eight tracks included on
Mood Ellington

are, on the whole, representative Ellington, showing that the man has the knack, as always, for creating lovely melodic lines, strong unusual rhythms, and unique orchestral effects. . . . But can you call them compositions? And can you call the man who put them together a composer? To me, the works of Ellington in terms of composition extend only as far as the song form extends, that is, the thirty-two-measure convention of Broadway and the radio, with slight extensions and variations. Beyond this, I find little integration or growth of ideas, and nothing that can be called structure.

Wilder had had problems with
Black, Brown and Beige:
“Ellington was unhappy and unconvincing when he attempted the larger, longer forms. It was, I thought, unsuitable and even pretentious of him to develop his thematic material in terms of so-called ‘serious’ music.” But he also felt that it was necessary for Ellington’s own sake that he keep trying to break out of “the confining mold of the eight-measure phrase, the three-minute or the four-minute record. . . . I do not think that it is enough for a man of Duke’s talent to be ‘as good as ever.’” And he made the thoughtful suggestion that Ellington’s “fortunate alliance with Columbia, with its Long Playing record, on which he can go on for six, eight, or eleven minutes (if that is his choice)[,] could be a determinative factor when he starts recording again.”

Overstated though it was, Wilder’s essay was full of challenging insights. It was also ahead of the curve. Because of a second recording ban by the American Federation of Musicians, the Ellington band stopped recording altogether at the end of 1947 and cut no more commercial sides of any consequence until December of 1950. But George Avakian was determined to do right by Ellington as soon as he could, so much so that he was even willing to record the suites: “I had carte blanche, we were making gigantic profits on the popular albums and anything I wanted to do, I didn’t have to ask any questions.” Spurred by the coming of the LP, he would not hesitate to commit Columbia Records to the great cause of making it possible for Ellington to do his best work.

Yet the world continued to turn throughout his absence from the recording studio, and by 1949 it was spinning so fast that it looked as if he might not be able to keep up. It was Louis Armstrong, not Duke Ellington, who in that year became the first jazz musician to make the cover of
Time,
an honor that the trumpeter shared with such other notables of the moment as J. Edgar Hoover, Douglas MacArthur, Cole Porter, Albert Schweitzer, Elizabeth Taylor, Mao Tse-tung, and a superannuated vaudeville comedian named Milton Berle who had moved to television the preceding June to host a weekly variety series called
Texaco Star Theater.
Within months Berle was the first full-fledged celebrity of the new electronic medium that was to dominate the postwar entertainment industry. Most Americans could not yet afford a TV set of their own in 1949—a console with a sixteen-inch screen cost $695, half the price of a new car—but they wanted one anyway, even though there was little of interest to see on network TV, least of all Berle’s frenetic brand of slapstick comedy. Not that the movies were much more adventurous. The top-grossing film of 1949 was Cecil B. DeMille’s
Samson and Delilah
and the most popular stars were Abbott and Costello, Gary Cooper, Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, and John Wayne. The hottest records of the year included the Andrews Sisters’ “I Can Dream, Can’t I?,” Frankie Laine’s “Mule Train,” Vaughn Monroe’s “Riders in the Sky,” and Columbia’s original-cast album of
South Pacific,
the new Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, which sold more than a million copies.

It isn’t hard to see why Americans were turning to escapist entertainment in 1949. That was the year when China went Red, Russia tested its first atomic bomb, and the United States and its terrified European allies joined together to form NATO, the multinational military alliance whose purpose was to repel a possible Soviet invasion of Western Europe. William Faulkner, who won the 1949 Nobel Prize for literature, described in his acceptance speech the state of collective tension that had replaced the giddy optimism of the postwar moment: “Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear . . . There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up?” But some American artists were starting to respond to what W. H. Auden had dubbed “the age of anxiety.”
Life,
the most trend-conscious of mass magazines, ran a feature in August called “Jackson Pollock: Is He the Greatest Living Painter in the United States?” that described the up-and-coming Pollock as “the shining new phenomenon of American art” while simultaneously making it clear that his abstract-expressionist style was not for everybody (“Still others condemn his pictures as degenerate and find them as unpalatable as yesterday’s macaroni”). For all the success of
South Pacific,
1949 was also the year of Arthur Miller’s
Death of a Salesman,
a play that dared to suggest that the American dream had its nightmarish side. So, too, did such bitterly disillusioned film-noir thrillers as
Criss Cross,
D.O.A.,
Gun Crazy,
and
White Heat,
in which Jimmy Cagney, long one of Hollywood’s most beloved stars, played a murderous gangster teetering on the edge of madness.

Younger jazz musicians were no less responsive. Now that the swinging sounds of the big-band era had been supplanted by romantic balladry and gimmicky novelty songs, it was progressive-minded beboppers like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Miles Davis who set the tone of postwar jazz—though their music, like Pollock’s drip paintings, would never become truly popular. Most Americans preferred Perry Como, and a growing number of them were embracing other styles of music as well. It was in 1949 that Hank Williams recorded “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” and Louis Jordan stormed the charts with “Saturday Night Fish Fry.” Black listeners were no more interested in modern jazz than white ones. Jordan’s cheery, stripped-down combo jazz spoke more strongly to them, and
Billboard
took note of their tastes by scrapping the now-stilted phrase
race music
and replacing it with
rhythm and blues
.

Could an aging jazzman still make a living by writing and performing adventurous big-band music that was neither blandly popular nor radically experimental? No one, least of all Duke Ellington himself, knew for sure.

 • • • 

A talented new sideman could always stoke Ellington’s imagination, and he found one in 1950. The tenor saxophonist Paul Gonsalves, who had been playing with the big bands of Count Basie and Dizzy Gillespie, joined Ellington in November and stayed until his death in 1974. Born in Massachusetts in 1920, Gonsalves was a Hawkins-Webster clone (“Coleman Hawkins was
it
for me”) whose Cape Verdean parentage led his new bandmates to dub him “Mex.” Ellington admitted to having hired him because he “knew all of Ben’s solos note for note,” but Gonsalves blossomed into a star instrumentalist whose ability to rouse an audience with up-tempo blues solos would become consequential to the band’s future. Sweet-tempered and much loved, he was an uncontrollable drinker who discovered the parallel pleasures of heroin during his tenure with Gillespie, and in time he became the band’s most unreliable sideman. According to Ellington,

He wants to be liked by everybody, and doesn’t want anything from anyone except a kind word and a water chaser. . . . He has respect for respect, but never makes demands for himself. There is never an evil thought in his mind. In fact, his purity of mind suggests to me that he would have made a good priest. His punch line, of course, is “Jack Daniels,” but that is just a kind of façade.

A month after Gonsalves’s arrival, Ellington recorded
Masterpieces by Ellington,
his first twelve-inch LP, which contained four long tracks,
The Tattooed Bride
and richly colored “concert arrangements” of “Mood Indigo,” “Solitude,” and “Sophisticated Lady” on which the saxophonist was prominently featured. These extended versions were arranged by Strayhorn, who went uncredited in the liner notes and whose contribution to the album did not become known until long after his death. As Walter van de Leur remarked in his study of Strayhorn’s music, the title might as well have been
Masterpieces by Ellington, Arranged by Strayhorn
. But Ellington, too, was hard at work, and on January 21, 1951, the band made its Metropolitan Opera House debut with an NAACP benefit concert whose centerpiece was the premiere of
A Tone Parallel to Harlem
. The piece had been commissioned by NBC the preceding year as part of what was meant to be a multimovement group composition called
Portrait of New York
(the other composers were Vernon Duke, Don Gillis, Skitch Henderson, and Sigmund Romberg) designed for performance by Arturo Toscanini’s NBC Symphony, and a fully scored version would be premiered in June by the Ellington band and seventy NBC musicians at Lewisohn Stadium, the summer home of the New York Philharmonic.

Harlem
opens with a two-note motif, a descending minor third played by Ray Nance in which the trumpeter appears to be “speaking” the word “Harlem,” which will recur throughout the work. What follows its initial statement is a kind of musical travelogue, one whose events Ellington summed up as follows: