Duke (54 page)

Next came
Such Sweet Thunder
, a thirty-five-minute suite in which Ellington and Strayhorn offered their joint musical reflections on the plays of William Shakespeare.
A week and a half after Newport, Ellington had given two concerts at the Stratford Shakespearean Festival. Impressed by the atmosphere there, he agreed to return to Canada the following year to perform a new piece inspired by Shakespeare’s writings, with which he was said to be closely familiar. According to Don George, “He had everything by Shakespeare, in many different versions. . . . In all his copies of the Shakespearean plays, he had underlined parts that appealed to him, not only to be set to music but to be performed by him.” But nothing that Ellington said about the Bard and his works, then or later, indicated that his knowledge of the canon was other than superficial. Not even Strayhorn could make that far-fetched notion sound believable, though he tried:

Ellington has always been intrigued by Shakespeare, ’cause he said Shakespeare certainly knew more about people than anyone he’s ever known. Duke also said that the only way Shakespeare could have known as much about people as he did, was by hanging out on the corner, or in the pool room.

Hence the importance of striking a deal with Strayhorn, who had no need to brush up his Shakespeare. “We used to call him Shakespeare—that was one of his nicknames,” Jimmy Hamilton said. Others who knew the plays well backed Hamilton up. According to Thomas Patterson, the founder of the Stratford Shakespearean Festival, “We were with literally the top Shakespeare scholars in the world, and Strayhorn didn’t have a thing to apologize for. His knowledge was very deep.” Accordingly, it was Strayhorn who devised a plan of action for the proposed suite, scribbling down a list of characters from
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
and the instrumentalists who might “play” them: “Clark [Terry] = Puck; alto is Hermia; John [Sanders] = Lysander; violin = Tatania [
sic
]; clarinet = Oberon.” Irving Townsend later claimed to have found the title of the eventual work, a phrase spoken by Hippolyta in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
by flipping through
Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations
.

Such Sweet Thunder
soon evolved into a much more wide-ranging survey. Eleven of the twelve movements purport to portray characters or situations in
Antony and Cleopatra,
Hamlet,
Henry V,
Julius Caesar,
Macbeth,
A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
Othello,
Romeo and Juliet,
and
The Taming of the Shrew.
Four are twenty-eight-bar “sonnets” that feature individual soloists, while the finale, “Circle of Fourths,” was said by Ellington to be a tribute to the poet himself. “All we did is just little thumbnail sketches, you know, of very short periods, never at any time trying to parallel an entire play or an entire act or an entire character throughout, but just some little short space of time during a character’s performance,” he added.

Ellington, as always, talked a good game, elucidating his musical portraits so cleverly that few questioned their relationship to the texts of which they were supposed to be illustrative. Why did he portray Lady Macbeth with a scampering jazz waltz called “Lady Mac”? “Though she was a lady of noble birth,” he obligingly replied, “we suspect there was a little ragtime in her soul.” It sounded great to those who didn’t probe too deeply, so much so that
Such Sweet Thunder
can be understood in part as a masterpiece of packaging, a “concept album” that yokes together the names of Ellington and Shakespeare to the former’s benefit. The truth, however, was that at least two of the movements, Strayhorn’s “Half the Fun” and “The Star-Crossed Lovers,” were preexisting compositions that had no more to do with Shakespeare’s plays than “Harlem Air-Shaft” had to do with apartment life. Both were retitled and inserted when the composers ran out of time to complete the suite prior to its first public performance, which took place at New York’s Town Hall on April 28, 1957. According to Strayhorn, the usual opening-night anarchy prevailed: “We were rushed and that night at the Town Hall concert was the very first time Duke and I had heard the whole suite without a break. We had rehearsed it in pieces, but this was the first time it had been played from beginning to end.” Ellington added that the two men had “spent two months talking about [
Such Sweet Thunder
] and then . . . spent three weeks actually writing it.” The finale was as yet unwritten, so he announced from the stage that the band would perform in its place an up-tempo swinger called “Cop Out.” George Avakian was one of the few people in the hall who got the joke: “It was such a straight crowd that they didn’t even know they were being put on.”

Such Sweet Thunder
was finished and recorded by the time that Ellington presented the work in Stratford on September 5, programming it alongside the score for
A Drum Is a Woman
. It was the last time that he would ever perform either suite complete. Only two movements of
Such Sweet Thunder,
the title piece and “The Star-Crossed Lovers,” became regular parts of the band’s working repertoire. No one knows why Ellington steered clear of the work in later years, since its critical reception was favorable and has remained so ever since, with John S. Wilson praising it in
The
New York Times
as “a long work in the finest Ellington tradition . . . the best work that Mr. Ellington has done in a decade.” The only dissent of any consequence came from Whitney Balliett, who called
Such Sweet Thunder
“uncomfortably thin” and dismissed even the strongest of its sections as “casual sketches that depend largely on the soloists involved and not on the ensemble-solo development one expects from Ellington.”

Balliett’s review was brief but astute. Like virtually all of the suites that preceded and followed it,
Such Sweet Thunder
is a collection of unrelated pieces, some of which, like “Circle of Fourths,” are so thin textured as to sound tossed off rather than worked out, and the three most substantial sections, “Half the Fun,” “The Star-Crossed Lovers,” and “Up and Down, Up and Down (I Will Lead Them Up and Down),” in which Clark Terry “speaks” Puck’s signature line “Lord, what fools these mortals be!” on his trumpet, are all by Strayhorn, not Ellington. “The Star-Crossed Lovers,” in fact, is one of Strayhorn’s most inspired postwar compositions, a fine-spun, seemingly endless arc of melody sustained by off-center harmonies that go yearningly unresolved until the very last bar. That the rest of the suite came off as well as it did was, as Balliett remarked, as much a triumph of performance as of composition, for the band, notwithstanding signs of insufficient rehearsal, sounded “almost as confident, precise, and full-bodied . . . as the great Ellington organization of 1940.”

Though Ellington again kept his promise to give Strayhorn equal billing, the younger man’s name went largely unmentioned in most of the reviews of
Such Sweet Thunder
. Did he plan it that way, knowing that his worldwide celebrity would swallow up his junior partner’s lesser fame? Perhaps, though it is also true that Joe Morgen, the band’s publicist, went out of his way to keep Strayhorn out of the public eye. According to Phoebe Jacobs, “Morgen thought that Billy represented competition for Duke’s attention, and that Joe Morgen couldn’t bear. And Billy was gay, which threw Morgen completely off the deep end.” Either way Strayhorn soon figured out that the new arrangement with his patron was, like the old one, a devil’s deal. Only by striking out on his own could he hope to make a name for himself, and the reasons for him not to do so were as compelling in 1957 as they had been in 1939.

 • • • 

For all its limitations,
Such Sweet Thunder,
unlike
A Drum Is a Woman,
is a satisfying piece, Ellington’s most consistent multimovement composition since
Black, Brown and Beige
. Some of his own contributions, including the eponymous first movement, which sounds as though Shakespeare had walked into a strip joint, and the haunting “Sonnet for Caesar,” a dead-slow march in which Jimmy Hamilton’s piping clarinet wanders sorrowfully among the trombones, are up to his highest standard, while Strayhorn’s three glittering efforts give the suite a core of excellence.

But Ellington’s spectacular start at Columbia was followed by a slow fizzle. While his later albums for the label, including
Ellington Indigos,
a 1958 collection of ballad performances, and
Blues in Orbit,
a deceptively offhand-sounding album of smaller-scale compositions, all contained fine things, none had the conceptual unity of
Such Sweet Thunder
or
A Drum Is a Woman,
nor were they nearly so ambitious. In one,
Newport 1958,
he tried without success to make lightning strike twice by returning to the scene of his earlier triumph. Another, falsely billed by Columbia as a complete version of
Black, Brown and Beige,
was actually a revised version of “Black,” the work’s first movement, augmented by a vocal version of “Come Sunday” performed by the popular gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, who also contributed an impromptu “setting” of the Twenty-Third Psalm. (“He didn’t rehearse me nothin’,” she later said of the latter performance. “He said, ‘Just open the Bible and sing!’”) For those who hoped that Ellington would put all of
Black, Brown and Beige
on record, it was a disappointment.

In addition to recording for Columbia, Ellington started in 1956 to make additional private tapes that went into what he called his “stockpile,” a cache of unreleased material that accumulated into the seventies. Unlike the scores of his compositions that had been prepared by Strayhorn and John Sanders for his sixtieth birthday, he saw the stockpile as his true legacy, a sonic archive that belonged solely to him—and to posterity. In the words of Brooks Kerr, a blind jazz pianist and Ellington scholar to whom he later became close, “He was the kind of guy that was going to go to his grave with all the secrets in his head. And his legacy would be his unissued recordings that he would will to his family.”

Was he writing too much, and did he wait too long to start writing? The answer to the second question is an incontestable yes. “I wouldn’t finish anything if I didn’t know when I was going to play it,” he blithely admitted. Time and again he tarried so much that the musical quality of his work was impaired as a result. When Norman Granz called in his marker and recorded
Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Duke Ellington Song Book
for Verve in 1957, the sessions were, in Fitzgerald’s words, “a panic scene, with Duke almost making up the arrangements as we went along.” It may have been his bloody-minded way of getting back at Granz for having bested him in the negotiations over Johnny Hodges’s contract. The fact that the album mostly failed to come up to snuff didn’t seem to bother Ellington, though it troubled Fitzgerald so much that she considered scrapping the project in midsession. “Ella really was very upset, and she didn’t want to do it,” Granz said. “She wanted to walk out. . . . Strays spent a lot of time holding Ella’s hand and saying, ‘There, there, it’s going to be okay. Don’t worry.’”

When he was good, though, nobody was better, and he could still rise to the occasion of a fresh challenge, as he did when Otto Preminger, one of Hollywood’s top film directors, invited him to score
Anatomy of a Murder
in 1959. Preminger’s latest film was based on the bestselling novel of the same name by John Voelker, a Michigan Supreme Court justice who wrote under the pseudonym “Robert Traver.” While jazz-flavored film scores had been popular ever since the release of
The Man with the Golden Arm,
Preminger’s 1955 film version of the novel by Nelson Algren about a heroin-using jazz drummer, it is not clear why Preminger deemed such a score suitable for a film that was set in rural Michigan. Though the director was familiar enough with Ellington’s music to have initially considered using “Sophisticated Lady” as the theme song for
Laura,
he was at least as interested in the windfall of publicity that would arise from hiring jazz’s best-known composer to score his first film. Ellington would also be the first black composer of any kind to write a full-length film score, and that, too, was newsworthy.

Hope Preminger, the director’s wife, suggested yet another reason for his decision to approach Ellington:

Otto chose Duke because Duke would be a talked-about choice, and Otto valued that. And he liked to use people who really wanted to score a film. Otto was quite unusual because he insisted on having the composer on the set during the production. He felt that they got closer to the picture that way. Therefore, he said he liked to use composers eager to prove themselves, because nobody else would sit [still] for spending all that time on the set.

Ellington was starting at the top:
Anatomy of a Murder
was a big-budget screen adaptation of a blockbuster novel, one that was far more candid about sex than was common in 1959. The cast was led by James Stewart, who played a “humble country lawyer” (as his character puts it) whose “cornball” manner (as George C. Scott, his prosecutorial nemesis, puts it) conceals a cold-eyed appreciation of what one of his colleagues describes as “the natural impurities of the law.” Inspired by a passage from the novel in which the first-person narrator goes to a roadhouse to listen to “a new small Negro combo, with a pixilated piano man,” Wendell Mayes, the screenwriter, took Stewart’s character, who in the novel was an amateur drummer, and turned him into an amateur pianist, as Stewart was in real life (though Strayhorn dubbed his on-screen playing). He also wrote in an on-screen cameo for Ellington, who plays a jazz pianist named Pie Eye. In addition to playing a duet with Stewart, he was given a grand total of two lines to speak: “Hey, you’re not splittin’ the scene, man? I mean, you’re not cuttin’ out?”