by David Hajdu
One of Strayhorn’s youthful compositions is so steeped in cynicism about romance that it implies some depth of experience with love, unrequited and perhaps gay. Begun some time earlier, according to Strayhorn, but completed in 1936, the song was entitled “Life Is Lonely” but later renamed with a lyric phrase that lingered with those who heard it: “Lush Life.” It is a masterpiece of fatalist sophistication that belies its author’s youth but betrays years of ferment. His friends heard versions of the song as early as 1933, when Strayhorn sang some of it a cappella for Harry Herforth. “I had the idea for this, and I started it,” Strayhorn later explained. “And every now and then I’d go back to it, and add a little more to it—you know, a problem would come up, how it would end and how to work it out. You couldn’t solve it then, you had to go on to other things, and you keep coming back to it. So that’s how it was done.” From its opening lines, “Lush Life” can easily be interpreted as an evocation of a homosexual experience: “I used to visit all the very gay places, / Those come what may places…” Strayhorn himself would be cryptic about its meaning. “It’s a song most persons have to listen to twice before they understand it, and then lots of them don’t know what it’s about,” he hinted. Even so, a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old Homewood kid would not have been likely to use the word gay to signify same-sex romance in 1933; the usage had scarcely begun to seep beyond homosexual circles to which Strayhorn wasn’t known to belong. In any case, the lyrics of “Lush Life” are wishful, not literal; dreaming of a week in Paris, Strayhorn rarely walked past Frick Park. “Lush Life” is a prayer:
I used to visit all the very gay places,
Those come what may places
Where one relaxes on the axis
Of the wheel of life
To get the feel of life
From jazz and cocktails.
The girls I knew had sad and sullen gray faces
With distingué traces
That used to be there, you could see where
They’d been washed away
By too many through the day
Twelve o’clock tales.
Then you came along with your siren song
To tempt me to madness.
I thought for a while that your poignant smile
Was tinged with the sadness of a great love for me.
Ah, yes, I was wrong,
Again I was wrong.
Life is lonely again
And only last year
Everything seemed so sure.
Now life is awful again,
A trough full of heart
Could only be a bore.
A week in Paris will ease the bite of it.
All I care is to smile in spite of it.
I’ll forget you, I will
While yet you are still
Burning inside my brain.
Romance is mush
Stifling those who strive.
I’ll live a lush life in some small dive
And there I’ll be while I rot with the rest
Of those whose lives are lonely, too.
Good as its lyrics are, “Lush Life” can stand on its own musically as a full-composed work as clear and sharp as anything by, say, Jerome Kern. It is distinguished by a probing concerto-style exploration of its principal key (D-flat), some nicely surprising harmonic turns, melodic lines of often odd yet utterly natural-seeming duration, and virtually no repetition. Most impressively, the piece exquisitely weds words and music: A key change on “everything seemed so sure” suddenly suggests optimism, and stress notes—for instance, the “blue note” E-natural on the word jazz—fall precisely on the lyrics’ points of drama. Though darkly majestic as a whole, “Lush Life” does have moments of gawky ostentation. Between its scathing high points of protest—submitting to passion is mad, great love comes with sadness, romance is mush—there are bits of ersatz–Cole Porter pretense: the strained internal rhyme of “too many through the day,” the awkward “trough full of heart.” Then, so suffers many a prayer.
Somewhere around June 1937, Jerry Eisner, the clarinetist for whom Strayhorn had arranged “Song of India,” heard from him for the first time in two years. In the meanwhile, Eisner, through subbing in local “territory” bands, had begun building a reputation as an up-and-coming Goodman-style instrumentalist. Like most other musicians who had played with Strayhorn in high school, he had no idea that Strayhorn had grown to write music on the level of “Lush Life.” “Jerome, this is Billy Strayhorn. I want you to come up to the drugstore to meet somebody. Come up before we close at five,” Eisner recalled Strayhorn saying. Eisner showed up to find Strayhorn waiting with Calvin Dort, a snazzily dressed, thirtyish son of a prosperous white Pittsburgh family. “Expensive clothes, but he was a schlump,” said Eisner. “Fixed teeth, but never kept himself neat.” They all walked to Dort’s house a few blocks away, where Dort had an elaborate new, green-sparkled Ludwig drum kit set up in the living room. No piano. Dort spun a few records, playing along on the drums—strictly with the brushes, in the style of Ray Bauduc of Bob Crosby’s Bobcats—then poured a round of beers while Strayhorn started talking about forming a band. “That was it,” said Eisner, “and we had a trio”: piano, clarinet, and drums, the same configuration—racially too—as the Benny Goodman Trio.
Within weeks, the as-yet-unnamed group began rehearsing regularly, prompted by another terse phone call from Strayhorn. “Jerome, we’re going to pick you up in fifteen minutes,” Eisner remembered Strayhorn saying at around eleven one night. The new band mates gathered in a closed-down shoe store in a building in East Liberty that Dort’s family owned; Dort had his drum kit and an upright piano set up in the empty storefront. “We went at it all night,” said Eisner. “What songs we all didn’t already know, Strayhorn knew or could figure out in his head on the spot.” A few days later, Strayhorn formalized the group’s repertoire and handed out sixty-page spiral music-manuscript books in which he had penciled out lead sheets (indicating the chord changes and melody lines) for dozens of tunes. Taking the initiative as de facto musical director, Strayhorn not only chose the band’s material—mostly jazz and pop hits, many drawn from the Goodman catalog, including “Body and Soul,” “Diga-Diga-Doo,” “Oh, Lady Be Good,” and “Lullaby in Rhythm”—but also included stern instructions for achieving the precise sound he wanted: “If you use the Ab9 in the 2nd measure be sure and use Gb (the 7th) in your lick,” “No fast licks on this one,” “Play this as straight as possible. It will come off better.”
Mingled with the expected standards were a few surprises, Strayhorn originals, all romantic ballads in the melancholy vein. Since Strayhorn would occasionally sing in rehearsals, a few songs in the book were complete with lyrics, including the original “If You Were There” (never to be recorded or published). Sweetly tuneful, the piece is charming despite the awkward naïveté of its lyrics:
I’d like a houseboat on the Hudson River,
I’d tour the Rockies in the oldest flivver,
And even troubles would be fun to share
If you were there.
A penthouse would be
A prison to me
Unless I could share it with you,
And even the stars above lover’s lane
Would be as tasteless as a glass of stale champagne.
The band also had words and music for a superior Strayhorn torch song, “Your Love Has Faded.” A teary elegy of rejection, the song has a memorable pop-ballad melody and functionally melancholy lyrics.
Your love has faded,
It’s not what it used to be,
You don’t belong to me completely.
Your kiss is colder,
There’s none of that old desire,
None of that burning fire that thrilled me.
I don’t know what has changed you,
I’ve never been untrue,
Someone has rearranged you,
And all I get for being true is just a frozen kiss or two.
Your loved
has faded,
The flame that once burned so bright
Has faded into the night.
More impressively, the book included a Strayhorn composition that embodies the whole of his youthful frustration in a masterstroke of yearning, “Something to Live For.” Its melody is an outright cry; its modulations ache. As in “Lush Life,” the use of gay hints, possibly, at homosexual romance; only with “Something to Live For,” however, does Strayhorn speak directly from feeling rather than fantasy. Here, he puts his social climbing in compellingly personal, emotional terms:
I have almost everything a human could desire,
Cars and houses, bearskin rugs
To lie before my fire,
But there’s something missing,
Something isn’t there,
It seems I’m never kissing
The one whom I could care for.
I want something to live for,
Someone to make my life an adventurous dream.
Oh, what wouldn’t I give for
Someone who’d take my life and make it seem
Gay as they say it ought to be.
Why can’t I have love like that brought to me?
My eye is watching the noon crowd,
Searching the promenade,
Seeking a clue
To the one who will someday be
My something to live for.
The Pittsburgh jazz world was essentially segregated. On the Hill, the black section and the high point of the city’s music scene, more than twenty nightspots, bars with music, and private clubs in residential homes were open every night; its smaller-scale but higher-profile white counterpart, East Liberty, had five or six legitimate clubs and as many after-hours places. “Billy could easily have played the Hill every night of the week and made enough money to never go back to the drugstore,” said Jerry Eisner. “He wanted to play the East Liberty clubs, because they attracted the more legitimate musicians and the wealthier patrons—they represented success and prominence. But the racism there could have eaten him up.” Using Calvin Dort’s family pull, Strayhorn got his mixed-race trio its first gig in East Liberty, though in one of the district’s less genteel establishments, a semilegal joint on the second floor of the Triangle Theater building on Station Street called Charlie Ray’s. A former prizefighter with whispered mob connections, Charlie Ray was constructed like a small safe; he wore a six-inch-cigar on his lower lip and evidently never lit it. His club, an airtight box with a low pressed-tin ceiling, attracted hustlers, show-business people, and miscellaneous nocturnals. Ray called Strayhorn Jasper, a racist slur, though he liked the trio, or at least his customers’ response to it, and he kept it booked on Fridays and Saturdays for nearly a year. “We’d play till the morning, but we’d break on Saturday nights when the Benny Goodman Camel Caravan show came on the radio,” said Eisner. “We’d all listen intently. Teddy Wilson would play something, and we’d go back up on the bandstand, and Strayhorn would play what he just heard, perfectly, calling out the chord changes. The people really liked us—I know, because one customer turned the jukebox on while we were playing, and somebody else threw him down the stairs.” Billy May, then a Pittsburgh trumpet player, became a fan of the band and sat in with them. “They were a fine, professional little band, no amateur act,” he recalled. Linton Garner, Erroll’s older brother and a well-regarded modern pianist in his own right, was struck by Strayhorn’s musicianship. “He could play straight-ahead jazz,” said Garner. “But he was really an explorer, quite avant-garde to some extent.”
Spurred by Strayhorn’s adventurous playing and his long-held interest in arrangements, the group progressed in the Goodman mode and became a quintet in early 1938, expanding to include bassist Bob Yagella and vibraphonist Charles “Buzzy” Mayer. (Goodman added vibraharpist Lionel Hampton for his quartet.) Yagella, who was husky and about ten years older than Strayhorn and Eisner, was part of a musical family of boys trained to play violin. “He played the bass like a string instrument, more like a cello, than like a percussion instrument as so many jazz musicians did in those days,” recalled his brother Leo, a Pittsburgh-area bandleader for many years. Bob Yagella joined Strayhorn’s group on the coattails of his friend Mayer, whom Strayhorn got to know in late 1937 through Volkwein’s music store, where Mayer was giving drum lessons. Lean and raffish, the twenty-four-year-old Mayer had already played in a successful Pittsburgh sweet band, the Billy Catizone Orchestra, and led his own swing ensemble, Buzz Mayer and His Pirates, by the time he became friends with Strayhorn. “He was a damn fine xylophone player,” said Billy Catizone, “but he was frustrated in my band, which was a society orchestra. He went with Strayhorn because the word was spreading that Strayhorn was a great musician.” According to alto saxophonist Ray Leavy, who played with Mayer, “Our band just didn’t have enough players of Buzz’s quality, so we couldn’t make it. He was more serious. His mind never stopped working—he was like an engineer. He had that kind of mind.” Compatible in temperament, taste, and ambition, Strayhorn and Mayer experimented as a duo before Strayhorn brought him into his group. They worked out a few duets, combining tunes at Strayhorn’s suggestion, and took their work together seriously enough to try it out in the recording studio.
In March 1938, Strayhorn and Mayer booked time in the economical George Hyde Studio and recorded demonstration records of three pieces: “I Surrender, Dear,” and two medleys, one of “I Never Knew” and “Diga-Diga-Doo,” the other of “I Got Rhythm” and “China Boy.” All are predominantly Mayer showcases; the tunes were all best known for their performances by the vibraharpists Lionel Hampton and Red Norvo. Strayhorn still shines through with a hip, casual sense of time and some quirky touches: he skips and adds a few beats here and there in the medley of “I Got Rhythm” and “China Boy,” toying with his idol’s work. For Strayhorn’s group, a bonus of adding Mayer was one guaranteed booking: Mayer’s mother owned an amusement park about fourteen miles southwest of the Pittsburgh city limits, between the towns of Bridgeville and Canonsburg. (Mayer’s father had died of pneumonia in 1927 shortly after being severely burned in a gas explosion while constructing the park.) Set on fifteen acres and catering mainly to an affluent white clientele, the park consisted of a small lake with some fifteen rowboats, a carousel, and some spin-around rides for children; five or six octagon-shaped cottages designed in a faux-Japanese style; and an outdoor bandstand that couples could use for ten cents a dance. All through the summer of 1938, Strayhorn’s group was the entertainment at Rakuen Lakes, and Billy Strayhorn lived there, sharing cottages with the Mayer family. “During the day, Buzz and Billy would help out a bit with any chores, carrying supplies, whatever,” remembered Lois Hill, a Mayer niece who lived with them that summer. “At night, they’d play music, and anybody who thought they were the help was suddenly in for a shock.” Ray Leavy drove out to hear the group once, with the idea of sitting in. “I had my sax with me, but when I heard those guys play I kept it zippered up,” he said.
As well as the group may have jelled as a quintet, it had to revert to a trio at summer’s end; Mayer was studying for his pilot’s license, and Yagella kept a day job in Pittsburgh that he wasn’t willing to give up. The group was offered steady work—four hours a night, six nights a week—at a new nightclub that two friends of a friend of Calvin Dort’s were about to open in Winchester, Virginia, a wheat-farming town of about ten thousand people. It was to be a long-term engagement, advertised and promoted, so the group was told it needed a name. They chose the Mad Hatters, inspired by a drawing Eisner had seen in one of Strayhorn’s issues of the New Yorker. When the group arrived at the club, a sign in front boldly announced the Mad Hatters. But the place was still being built. “We had to pitch in and paint the walls and everything,” said Jerry Eisner. “What a scene. To make matters worse, much worse, this is the South now, and Billy wasn’t allowed to stay in the boardinghouse where we were set up. He had to sleep in a cot in the back room of the club, and he did it, because the ban
d was the priority.” The club opened shortly, and the band’s run was a success for several weeks. “I don’t know if people thought we were a big act from the North or what, but we did real well,” said Eisner. They did well, that is, until a patron in front made a remark about “that nigger on piano.” Calvin Dort kicked his whole drum kit at the man, and as a ruckus ensued, the band fled out the back way. Outside, Dort somehow commandeered a truck, and he drove it north with the two white band members in the cab, Strayhorn alone in the dark in the back, until they reached the Pennsylvania border. “Although Billy was certainly no stranger to prejudice, that incident made quite a big impression on him,” said Eisner. “It didn’t make him give up, though—just the opposite. He was even more thoughtful and determined than usual. That’s when he started talking about different ways to pursue his music.”
When he settled back in Pittsburgh, Strayhorn took the trio into the recording studio at Volkwein’s, where the Mad Hatters laid down four demo sides, including two Goodman Trio numbers famous for their Teddy Wilson solos: “Body and Soul” and “Sweet Sue” (the other two titles are lost and forgotten). The tracks capture a vibrant, polished group deeply influenced by Goodman and Wilson. Eisner has a mature tone and a tidy way with a phrase; Strayhorn displays a striking rhythmic sense and harmonic command, in addition to Tatumesque speed. On “Body and Soul,” the original record of which included one of Wilson’s best-known solo breaks, Strayhorn’s improvisation is more in the spirit of the daring early Wilson than Wilson’s own playing was at that point. Dort kept time and a low profile. Now rendered in shellac, the Mad Hatters would never play again.