Duke (82 page)

NOTES

“A continuing autobiography”:
Nat Hentoff, “The Incompleat Duke Ellington,”
Show,
Aug. 1964.

“One of the ace foundation-and-beat men”:
MM,
164.

The band pulled into St. Louis:
Ken Steiner is the first DE scholar to have done extensive primary-source research on Blanton’s childhood and youth, and this account is based in large part on his findings, many of them as yet unpublished.
Johnny Hodges went to Club 49:
It is impossible to establish with certainty which members of the band were at the club. Club 49 announced the band’s expected presence that night in a newspaper ad that ran the same day: “THE HOME OF ALL CELEBRITIES WILL ENTERTAIN DUKE ELLINGTON AND HIS ENTIRE BAND” (
St. Louis Argus,
Oct. 20, 1939). Wendell Marshall, Blanton’s cousin, told Mercer Ellington that it was Hodges who discovered Blanton (Ellington, 85). DE claimed that BS and Ben Webster were there, but Webster had not yet joined the band (
MM,
164). Rex Stewart gave sole credit to Webster (Stewart,
Boy Meets Horn,
197). Barney Bigard said that he, Webster, and Johnny Hodges made the discovery (Bigard, 73). According to Lawrence Brown, he and Hodges were the first to draw Blanton to DE’s attention (Brown, oral-history interview). Sonny Greer claimed to have discovered Blanton himself (Greer, oral-history interview). The fact that Webster and Blanton later became close companions may explain why Bigard, DE, and Stewart all misremembered his presence that night. For a discussion of the sequence of events, see Ken Steiner,
On the Road and On the Air with Duke Ellington: The Blanton/Webster Era, Part One
(privately published, 2004).
A bassist named Jimmie Blanton:
Blanton’s first name is often spelled “Jimmy,” but he signed it “Jimmie” in all of his surviving autographs, and it is also printed that way on his letterhead.
DE “arrived in his pajamas and topcoat”:
Ellington, 85.
“Duke asked Marable if he could sit in”:
John Chilton, “Blanton’s Early Days,”
Blue Light: The DESUK Newsletter,
Oct.–Dec. 1996.

“We wonder if the maestro”:
J. Von Chapman, “Town Chatter,”
St. Louis Argus,
Oct. 27, 1939.
“I flipped like everybody else”:
MM,
164.
Blanton:
A telegram sent by Blanton to his family on November 2, the last night of the Hotel Coronado gig, said that he was “joining Duke Ellington’s band tomorrow” (Ken Steiner, personal communication).
“It was really unique”:
“Ye Scribe,” “In the Groove,”
Indianapolis Recorder,
Dec. 9, 1939.

Blanton was born in 1918:
Blanton’s death certificate says that he was born on Oct. 5, 1919, but the date of birth carved on his Chattanooga tombstone is Oct. 5, 1918, the same one that he entered on his application for a Social Security number (Ken Steiner, personal communication).
He took lessons from a classically trained teacher:
According to John Goldsby, Blanton “utilized the instrument’s full range—up to the Bb in thumb position above the octave G” (Goldsby, 49). Self-taught bassists rarely learn thumb position, a technique developed by classical bassists to facilitate the playing of high notes.
“When he left St. Louis”:
Bigard, 74.

“Listen, you’re going to hear”:
Quoted in
Hajdu, 89.
“He shocked us all”:
Hinton, oral-history interview.
Stravinsky “spent [an] entire evening”:
Stewart,
Boy Meets Horn,
196.
“Despite his youth”:
Ibid.
“They’d find out the hotel”:
Bigard, 74.

“What really struck me”:
Berger, 100.

“He wouldn’t interfere with your solo”:
Anne Judd, “Barney Goin’ Easy,”
Jazz Journal,
Sept. 1967.
“Right in the middle of a set”:
MM,
164. The timing of this event is confirmed by a contemporary report (
Jazz Information,
Jan. 26, 1940).

“Ben Webster denies plans”:
Nell Dodson, “This Is Harlem,”
New York Amsterdam News,
Jan. 20, 1940; Ibid., 4.

“My mother, she wanted me”:
Büchmann-Møller, 5.

“The hoodlum swingster”:
Stewart,
Boy Meets Horn,
197.
A Jekyll-and-Hyde personality:
Stewart,
Jazz Masters,
121.
“Kind of an introvert”:
Büchmann-Møller, 4.
“An unusual character”:
Bushell, 89.

“Every time I’d run across some of Duke’s men”:
Büchmann-Møller, 57.
“Barney Bigard took a little vacation”:
Ibid., 38. (In fact Bigard had not yet left on vacation. He plays on the session at which “Truckin’” was recorded.)
“I always had a yen for Ben”:
MM,
163.

Webster’s flirtation with DE went no further:
He did, however, sit in on one more recording session, a 1936 date on which he can be heard soloing on a DE original called “In a Jam.”

“A kind of alto approach”:
Ibid., 59.

“Ben was a different man”:
Stewart,
Jazz Masters,
124.

BS reworked “Jack the Bear”:
BS, 1962 interview. The manuscript of “Take It Away,” the piece that BS claimed to have reworked for Blanton, is in DE’s hand (EC). For a discussion of its authorship, see van de Leur, 34.

The greatest of DE’s three-minute masterpieces:
For an analysis of “Ko-Ko,” see Edward Green, “‘It Don’t Mean a Thing if It Ain’t Got That Grundgestalt!’—Ellington from a Motivic Perspective,”
Jazz Perspectives,
July 2008.

“A little descriptive scene”:
DE,
The Duke Ellington Carnegie Hall Concerts: January 1943.
“An excerpt from the incomplete score”:
Ulanov, 253. Only one piece of DE’s holograph manuscript for “Ko-Ko” survives, a “2nd Tenor” part for Ben Webster (EC). It was almost certainly added to the piece after Webster joined the band.
“I felt long ago”:
“Ellington Composes New Number,”
Detroit Evening Times,
July 30, 1940.
DE claimed to have spent nine years working on
Boola:
Alfred Frankenstein, “‘Hot Is Something About a Tree,’ Says the Duke,”
San Francisco Chronicle,
Nov. 9, 1941.

“Every time Ben got up”:
Dance,
The World of Duke Ellington,
39. DE had done the same thing when Lawrence Brown joined the band in 1933: “There were no third trombone parts, so I had to sort of compose my own parts. Then as the new numbers came out they started arranging for third trombone” (Brown, oral-history interview).

“Not up to the Ellington standard”:
Review of “Ko-Ko” and “Conga Brava,”
Down Beat,
May 1940.
“I find I have all these other lifetimes”:
Max Jones and Humphrey Lyttelton, BBC radio interview with DE, 1964;
RIT,
372.
“During this period”:
MM,
154.

It got into Walter Winchell’s column:
Walter Winchell, “Lint from a Blue Serge Suit,”
The Philadelphia Inquirer,
July 6, 1944.
“I stood on the bus”:
Williams, oral-history interview.
The main theme of “Never No Lament” was a Johnny Hodges riff:
It was an obbligato to “I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart,” which was itself a Hodges-penned melody (Brown, oral-history interview; Stewart,
Boy Meets Horn,
190).

Among the most formally unpredictable of his 1940 compositions:
“Concerto for Cootie” is the subject of one of the first extended formal analyses of a composition by DE, André Hodeir’s “A Masterpiece:
Concerto for Cootie,
” originally published in 1954 (in
Reader,
276–88).

“Mister Blues”:
Helen Oakley Dance, oral-history interview.

“A song of sorrow”:
MM,
469.

“You write just for their abilities”:
Boyer, “The Hot Bach,” 228.
“I have often seen him”:
BS, “Billy Strayhorn: ‘The Ellington Effect,’”
Down Beat,
Nov. 5, 1952, in
Reader,
270.
“To incorporate Duke Ellington’s harmonic approach”:
Barnet, 77.

“We don’t have a first saxophone player”:
Dance,
The World of Duke Ellington,
163.

“It’s just a little story”:
Boyer, “The Hot Bach,” 230.

“I think of music sometimes”:
Ibid., 218.
“I hear a note by one of the fellows in the band”:
George, 226. (This remark was reported to George by Brooks Kerr.)
“The memory of things gone”:
Boyer, “The Hot Bach,” 218.

“Once, we were riding a train”:
Stewart,
Jazz Masters,
99.
A down-home blues:
“Things Ain’t What They Used to Be” is officially credited to Mercer Ellington, but Hodges is rumored to have gambled away the rights to the song in a poker game (“Mercer Ellington,”
Blue Light: The DESUK Newsletter,
Apr. 1996). In later life Hodges spoke of the number in such a way as to indicate that it was one of his own compositions (see, for instance, Dance,
The World of Duke Ellington,
92). It was later arranged for the full band, whose members supplied a bawdy lyric of their own for the rocking triplet figure that kicks off “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be”: “All the boys in the band eat puss-eeeeeeeeeeey!” (Gleason, 243).

Webster is known to have written “Cotton Tail”:
Stewart,
Jazz Masters,
129. According to Milt Hinton, he also wrote “In a Mellotone” (Büchmann-Møller, 70).

“Hundreds of tin-roofed theaters”:
David Davis, “Golden Buckaroo,”
L.A. Times Magazine,
Apr. 6, 2003.
“That’s it! Don’t go any further”:
MM,
166.

“Well, go ahead on”:
Williams, oral-history interview.
“All white musicians in name bands”:
Stewart,
Boy Meets Horn,
193.
Jimmy Maxwell, one of Benny Goodman’s trumpeters, told David Berger years later that Williams, who had been making $75 a week with DE, was offered $250, not $200 (Berger, personal communication). All other sources, including Williams in his oral-history interview, agree on the lower figure.
Stewart claimed that DE refused to pay Johnny Hodges for doubling on soprano saxophone:
Stewart,
Boy Meets Horn,
192.
“I gave it up”:
Dance,
The World of Duke Ellington,
96.

“Duke knew about it”:
Williams, oral-history interview.
“He’s just Goodman”:
Dance,
The World of Duke Ellington,
108. Another possible explanation of this remark is that Williams believed that DE played favorites with his musicians, suggesting that the trumpeter continued to resent DE for having given Rex Stewart extra solos when he joined the band in 1934.

“He was almost in tears”:
Jimmy Gentry, “Nance Takes Cootie Spot with Duke,”
Down Beat,
Nov. 15, 1940.