(This is the last part of a three-part series. Read the first part.)
Duke Ellington and the sixteen other men in his jazz band are rather surprised at the research that has been expended on bringing to light the drunks, hangovers, and frolics of their youth. The research has been done by earnest historians who are eager to determine the precise connection between dissipation and the creation of art. It is a source of mild regret to Duke and his colleagues that their escapades simply did not have that purple extravagance which is supposedly in the best tradition of jazz. Try as they would, Hugues Panassié, the French critic, and Robert Goffin, the Belgian critic, could not discover about Ellington and his band anything to match the attractive degeneracy of Buddy Bolden, a famous early cornettist and the Paul Bunyan of the jazz world, who kept himself so busy with the ladies that he had little time left for music, or of Leon Rappolo, an early clarinettist, who became insane from smoking marijuana, or even anything to equal the career of Bix Beiderbecke, another famous cornettist, who died in 1931 of drink. Ellington is apologetic. He feels that if he had only known years ago the artistic importance of his infrequent sprees he would have paid more attention to them and remembered more for posterity. He regrets that he did not know at the time that his befuddlement was the stuff of history. He can dredge up little for the archives. “I should have kept a diary,” he says.
Ellington is also surprised at critics who claim in columns of rococo prose that jazz is the American equivalent of the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome. A few weeks ago such a critique was read to Duke, a tall, broad, coffee-colored man of forty-five, as he lolled on a cot in his dressing room at the Hurricane, a Broadway night club in which he and his band were playing an engagement. The author maintained that when New York is but a memory, or at best a forest of rusty steel ascending to a quiet sky, the perceptive archæologist will be able to recreate American civilization if he is fortunate enough to find one Ellington record amid the deserted ruins. In the record’s pulsing rhythms, the article said, he will hear the throb of long-stilled traffic, see the flash of neon signs, get some suggestion of the subway, and will understand, when a solo soars above the theme and then sinks back again, how the individual of the vanished past yearned for the stars but was limited to a banal earth. Duke listened impatiently. When the final sentence had been read, he said, “I don’t know. May be something to it. But it seems to me such talk stinks up the place.”
In the field of jazz there is an exceptionally wide discrepancy between the art as practiced and the art as the writers write about it. The performers sweat, and may even rehearse, for every effect they get. The writers say that their music is as effortless as a bird’s. The performers devote their lives to developing their technique. The writers present them as simple children of nature who blow their primitive souls out through their horns. The performers, most of whom spent the era of prohibition working in night clubs, know the world not only in terms of music but in terms of Mickey Finns and bouncers. The writers, who consider themselves intellectuals, range all the way from surrealist poets in Paris to Yale graduates on Fortune. Negro jazz musicians, who have found it best to take no part in the peculiar caprices of a white world, usually have nothing to say when they are told that there is a difference of opinion about whether they were the first surrealists, as is maintained in France. They view such assertions as just one more example of an inexplicable order which simultaneously gives them adoration and Jim Crow. They find it hard to reconcile life deep in the heart of Texas, where they must say “Yassuh, Boss,” and life in Paris, where they have been told they are comparable to Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. During a European tour of the Ellington band, the conductor of a Paris symphony orchestra once bowed to Johnny Hodges on the street and respectfully asked him for an explanation of his artistry on the alto saxophone. “I just lucked up on it, Bubber, I just lucked up on it,” Johnny told him. The conductor, writing about the incident later, said, “It is a unique experience to stand before this black boy, and upon asking him to explain his amazing virtuosity, to be told, ‘I just lucked up on it, Bubber.’ ” Duke himself got into the spirit of things when he was asked, in London, in 1933, “What is hot?” He replied, “Hot is a part of music, just as the root is part of a tree and the twigs and the leaves and the trunk. Hot is to music as a root, a trunk, a twig, a leaf is to a tree.”
Despite Duke’s own doubts, it is possible that that archæologist of the future may be able to reconstruct something of the present from Ellington’s music, if, as is arguable, a composer’s music does to some extent reflect his environment. For Duke’s environment has been as American as a Model T Ford and, in a sense, as standardized. He spent his boyhood on the swarming tenement pavements in Washington, D.C., and his first job was jerking soda. He liked the pavements, and to this day he has an aversion to green because it reminds him of grass. “When I was eight,” he says, “I decided that grass was unnatural. It always makes me feel sort of creepy. It reminds me of graves.” From his early youth his days and nights have been spent, for the most part, far from grass, in cafés, cabarets, speakeasies, night clubs, drugstores, all-night lunch stands, hotel lobbies, railway depots, day coaches, subways, dance halls, movie theatres, dressing rooms, pool rooms, taxis, and buses. Duke sometimes says, “I’ve had three educations—the street corner, going to school, and the Bible. The Bible is most important. It taught me to look at a man’s insides instead of the cut of his suit.”
Duke sometimes thinks that it is good business to conceal his interest in the Bible, just as he conceals his interest in American Negro history. He doubts if it adds to his popularity in Arkansas, say, to have it known that in books he has read about Negro slave revolts he has heavily underlined paragraphs about the exploits of Nat Turner and Denmark Vesey. In public he usually sets his beige-colored face in a grin as wide as possible. He claims that the flashiness of his clothes is not self-gratification but rather a selfless effort to play up to the role the public expects him to assume, a claim his friends don’t take too seriously. He has two general modes of dress—one for the public, which a member of his band has described as “very sharp and fly,” one for rehearsing or composing. At work, he likes to wear a cheap hat, the brim turned up all around, a sports shirt without a tie, the points of the collar long enough to reach almost to his chest, brown suède shoes, a blue or maroon pullover sweater, and a sports suit so tailored that it makes him look slender. When he is leading his band at rehearsal, his expression varies between a grin, a pouty sleepiness in which every muscle droops and sags, and a fey daintiness. In this last mood he arches his eyebrows and has a coy look that is meant to be a silent appeal to his band for a delicate musical effect. As he plays the piano, his expression is often one of quizzical pleasure, as if he is surprised and delighted by the sounds he creates. “I really get wrapped up in it,” Duke says. There are times when Duke laughs naturally and exuberantly; for example, when the boys in the band, sitting around a dressing room, are competing to see who can whistle the lowest note. “I knock myself out,” he says. Then he truly seems the simple Afro-American without a care in the world. New acquaintances are always surprised when they learn that Duke has written poetry in which he advances the thesis that the rhythm of jazz has been beaten into the Negro race by three centuries of oppression. The four beats to a bar in jazz are also found, he maintains in verse, in the Negro pulse. Duke doesn’t like to show people his poetry. “You can say anything you want on the trombone, but you gotta be careful with words,” he explains.
Duke was born in Washington, in 1899, when Buddy Bolden was sounding on his cornet those uncouth notes which historians say were the beginning of jazz. While the new music moved slowly north from New Orleans, first to St. Louis and Memphis, then spreading out to Chicago, New York, and Europe, Duke was attending public school and, at his mother’s instigation, taking lessons on the piano from a woman he insists was named Miss Klinkscale. He was christened Edward Kennedy Ellington, but he has been called Duke since he was twelve, when his elegance and aplomb began to attract the attention of his playmates. His earliest musical memory, he says, goes back to when, at the age of four, he heard his mother playing “The Rosary” on the piano. “It was so pretty I bust out crying,” he says. Duke occasionally speaks of his father as Uncle Ed. This is because Duke, who has only one sister and no brothers, had twenty-eight cousins who were so frequently around the Ellington house that Duke and his sister picked up the name. Duke’s father worked for the Navy Department as a blueprint developer. “Uncle Ed sure provided for his family,” Duke says. “We didn’t want for anything.”
When Duke was fifteen, he attended a rent party, which in Washington was called a “hop” or a “shout.” The guests paid ten or fifteen cents to their host. On this occasion a man named Lester Dishman was at the piano. “He was terrific—really good,” Duke says. “The piano jumped. The air shook. With his left hand he really yum-yummed, while with his right he played intricately woven melodic things. But fast!” After hearing Dishman, Duke went to all the rent parties he could and heard Clarence Bowser, Doc Perry, Louis Brown, Louis Thomas, and other gifted pianists. “Bowser’s music was majestic,” Ellington recalls. “I used to think, if only I could just get on to that ‘Sticky Mack’ style of his. They got three, four, five dollars a night. When they played at these shouts, they never had a thought in the world, drinking gin and playing and things getting wild, so that someday serious writers in Europe would investigate them, writing monographs and things.”
“Doc Perry,” Ellington continues, “taught me to read notes, not just spell ’em out.” Duke composed his first piece shortly after hearing Dishman, while he was fifteen. It was during a summer vacation from high school. Duke remembers that he began by moving the family upright into his own room. It had a player attachment, and Duke commenced his studies by slowing down a roll of James P. Johnson playing his own “Carolina Shout.” For a week Duke studied the anatomy of “Carolina Shout.” “Then I locked myself in my room for two weeks and when I came out I had a shout of my own,” Duke says. (A “shout” in this sense is a composition to be played at a rent party.) He had not yet named it a few weeks later when he got a job as a soda jerker in the Poodle Dog Café, an establishment near the Senators’ ball park, and in honor of this event he called it “Soda Fountain Rag.” His early admirers thought he had written several shouts, for he played the piece first in blues time, then in waltz time, then straight, and finally what is now known as hot. “They never knew it was the same piece,” Duke says. When the summer was over, Duke returned to high school, from which he graduated in 1917, when he was eighteen. While he was still in school, he got the notion that he might become a designer of advertising posters. He showed a certain amount of painting talent in class and won a scholarship to the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn for the study of commercial art. When the United States entered the first World War and Washington became a boom town, people there were so dance-crazy that jazz bands were in great demand, and Duke decided he could make more money by heading a band than he could as a commercial artist. He never used his scholarship to Pratt.
The first Ellington band consisted of Sonny Greer, a dapper, sporty young fellow who was and still is the drummer; Otto Hardwicke, a mild, dentisty gentleman who played the alto saxophone for Ellington, and still does; Charlie Irvis, trombone, now dead; Elmer Snowden, banjo, who now plays the guitar in another band; Arthur Whetsol, trumpet, now dead; and Duke, piano. Duke enjoys telling how he recruited Sonny, who was greatly admired by Ellington and the other young men in the band because he came from New York. “Sonny was a very fly drummer,” Duke says, “but we wanted to be sure that he had really played in Harlem. He was playing in the pit band at the Howard Theatre in Washington and we waited on the street outside to grill him. I take the lead in conversation because I’m sure I’m a killer in my new shepherd’s-plaid suit, bought on time. Sonny comes back at us with a line of jive on Harlem that lays us low. So we decide he’s O.K. and he comes with the band.” Duke was soon clearing as much as two hundred dollars a week. “As a result of prosperity,” he says, “everybody in our band at that time became a juice hound, juice meaning any kind of firewater.” Otto Hardwicke bought a car which the band called Dupadilly, and when Dupadilly broke down he bought one that was called Dear Me. During the next few years the band played in one small Washington cabaret after another, and in 1923 it moved to New York, where a young man named Bubber Miley replaced Arthur Whetsol. “Bubber was temperamental,” Duke recalls. “He liked his liquor. He used to get under the piano and go to sleep any time he felt like it. In fact, all our horn blowers were lushies.”