Lush Life

by David Hajdu

  Scuffling for another musical challenge and, perhaps, a safer one, Strayhorn took a late-night job as bar pianist at one of the nicer joints on Apple Street, a busy club in East Liberty with a good piano and a small old dog that roamed among the customers as if it and not its master, Woogie Harris, a mid-level local numbers man, owned the place. Besides the tips, Strayhorn was drawn to Harris’s because it was a hangout for members of both the white and black arms of the (then-segregated) Musicians Protective Union. “Strayhorn liked to go up there and run chords off,” said Kenneth Hill of the Moonlight Harbor Band, an alto saxophonist who occasionally sat in with Strayhorn at Harris’s. “He got to play, and other musicians got to hear him. He was quite a good musician, it was obvious.”

  At the same time, between his hours at Harris’s and his shifts back at the Pennfield Pharmacy, Strayhorn was working to gain a reputation as an arranger. With Jerry Eisner providing entrée, Strayhorn offered to contribute arrangements to a local rehearsal band run by Bill Ludwig, a wealthy drummer friend of Eisner’s whose family owned a floral business in Pittsburgh’s exclusive Squirrel Hill district. In all, Strayhorn wrote five or six orchestrations for Ludwig’s twelve-piece unit, according to Eisner. “Nice, swinging charts,” said Eisner. Strayhorn was also drawing on Bill Esch’s association with the Buddy Malone Orchestra; though Esch filled most of the band book, Strayhorn submitted several sophisticated dance charts that Malone used at society dates, according to Mickey Scrima. “Most of the other bands were using stocks [over-the-counter arrangements]. So between Esch and Strayhorn, the Malone group had a really nice, original sound,” Scrima said. “Strayhorn had some great voicings, very advanced, more advanced than the band most of the time.” (One of Strayhorn’s big-band pieces was “Ugly Ducklin’,” which he also called “Smoky City.” It was composed at the time of Fantastic Rhythm for a group configured like the Moonlight Harbor Band, although none of that ensemble’s musicians recall performing the piece. According to Scrima, the composition was probably performed by the Ludwig group. A modernist, somewhat modal work, it would resurface years later under the title “Smada.”)

  As word of his arrangements for Ludwig and Malone spread among musicians, Strayhorn was offered a slot as regular arranger and pianist for a dance band formed by nineteen-year-old drummer Anthony Edward D’Emilio in mid-1938. A child violin prodigy from a musical Italian family, D’Emilio had studied the contrabass at Pea-body High School under its respected musical director, Wally Cross (a Trotsky double), taken a few drum lessons at Volkwein’s (more than likely from Buzz Mayer, the store’s percussion teacher at the time), and initially tried breaking into the band business with a ten-piece all-white utility group he called the Anthony Edwards Orchestra. It ran through store-bought stock arrangements at a few fraternity dances and stag parties, then disbanded for lack of return business, according to the group’s trombonist, Orva Lee Ice. Wanting an upgrade geared for the swing ballroom circuit, D’Emilio formed a fifteen-piece group with a jazzier name, the Rex Edwards Orchestra. The two chief soloists, Strayhorn and the lead tenor saxophonist (his name now forgotten), were black, the rest of the group white—“absolutely unheard of, to everybody who saw it,” said Ice, who rehearsed with the new band but was not invited to join permanently. “After failing with a knock-around band, Ed [D’Emilio] got serious,” explained Ice. “He was a great classical musician. He had very high standards with this band. That’s why he didn’t take a lot of men from the first band—me included—and that’s why he got Billy Strayhorn.”

  The Rex Edwards Orchestra developed a repertoire of more than 120 pieces, mostly stocks heavily revised by Strayhorn—“He showed the guys how to alter the harmony and the accents to improve the original chart,” recalled Ice—as well as several dozen of Strayhorn’s own arrangements and at least a few original Strayhorn compositions, including the band’s theme song, the lovely ballad “Remember.” While D’Emilio booked and fronted the band, Strayhorn shaped the Rex Edwards Orchestra’s sound with terse authority. “At rehearsal, he was the one in charge,” said Ice. “He heard every instrument and every note. He knew exactly what he wanted, and he would correct you—‘Hey, let’s do that again. You’re not breathing correctly.’” Inhibited by its mixed-race membership from playing the segregated ballrooms in Pittsburgh, the Rex Edwards Orchestra rehearsed extensively and performed mainly at social functions and private parties—thirty to fifty dates in 1938, in the estimate of Fred Whitlinger, a musician friend of D’Emilio’s who acted as the group’s unofficial, unpaid manager. “It was a real smooth band. Very pretty,” said Whitlinger. “It had what it took, as far as the music went.”

  Seemingly inexhaustible in musical energy as well as ambition, Strayhorn continued to play at Woogie Harris’s late at night and, later still, at a no-name second-floor after-hours place on Wood Street in Homewood where D’Emilio and his musician friends would frequently rendezvous. “We would try to stump him,” remembered Orva Ice. “I would ask him to play something out of a symphony, and he would know the tune. And he used to take the classical pieces and adapt them to jazz. Another thing, the most sensational thing—he used to be able to, within half an hour, play tunes, bits and pieces, so that you were listening to maybe twenty-four tunes in half an hour. He made a sort of rhapsody out of them. The man had a sense—from his brain to his fingers—what should be in what order and how to intertwine and interweave the tunes. We just stared at his fingers, which were always slipping under the cuffs of his shirtsleeves, by the way.” Another musician of D’Emilio’s acquaintance, James “Honey Boy” Minor, a drummer and leader of one of Pittsburgh’s most-talked-about black bands, heard Strayhorn both at Woogie Harris’s and in Homewood. After a session sitting in with the Rex Edwards Orchestra, Minor asked Strayhorn to write a few arrangements for his group, too. Mickey Scrima, a big fan of Minor’s hard-driving style, heard Honey Boy Minor and His Buzzing Bees perform Strayhorn charts at a dance date on the Hill. “They were Fletcher Henderson-type things, real swing numbers,” said Scrima, “but with that Strayhorn sophistication, which a lot of that real swinging dance music didn’t have. The combination of the two was fantastic.” Minor himself was delighted with Strayhorn—that is, with his work. “I liked his music,” said Minor. “We were very happy to play his music. But he wasn’t for us. I think he liked boys.” No matter. “There was no stopping him,” said Scrima. “He was doing so much that was so great that he was bound to put one of those bands into the big time. Or he would hit the big time himself, or something.”

  3

  OVERTURE TO A JAM SESSION

  Music appreciation was a business booster for Pennfield Pharmacy. School-age kids like Helen Reis and Jack Farrell, who lived a few doors apart in a row of brick houses two blocks from Pennfield, phoned in orders for ice cream or pop to satisfy multiple appetites. “I told my mother I just had to have something for dessert, because I knew Billy would bring it and play the piano for us if we asked, which everybody did,” said Reis, whose parents would usually tip Strayhorn a dime. “So many people did the same that he got very well known in the area.” Through this reputation for music-to-go, Strayhorn picked up some less demeaning and better-paying work performing at cocktail parties and business-related social events in the Point Breeze area. As Lillian Strayhorn Dicks recalled, “He got to spending a lot of time every night around the drugstore neighborhood. It was a white world where we weren’t accepted, but Billy was, because of his talent. He was invited into people’s homes. He was going to parties and playing the piano, which is what he wanted to do. He was doing whatever he thought he had to do to find success with his music, and he obviously presumed that whatever break he was going to get was going to come out of the white world, through a white music publisher or a white entrepreneur he might meet somehow.” As it happened, it was a white acquaintance from the drugstore—David Perelman, a young, bushy-haired intern from the University of Pittsburgh’s College of Pharmacy—who offered Strayhorn a more direct co
urse, one into the era’s center of black power.

  Perelman’s next-desk friend at school was twenty-year-old George Greenlee, said to be the first Negro admitted to the institution. Smartly groomed and intensely bright—he had a contained smile that stopped just short of a smirk—Greenlee had grown up in a moneyed stratum of black society, first in South Carolina and then in western Pennsylvania; his uncle William Augustus “Gus” Greenlee was an imperial force in black Pittsburgh. With seed money supposedly made hijacking beer trucks, the elder Greenlee built a numbers racket on a reputation for playing straight and paying up. Bulky and strong-featured, he liked looking the part of a racketeer and wore custom-made white suits and white ties with black shirts and white shoes. By the late 1930s, Greenlee’s empire of sports, entertainment, and real-estate holdings included a stable of boxers (among them, the light heavyweight champion John Henry Lewis); Pittsburgh’s Negro League baseball team, the Crawfords (whose ballpark, Greenlee Field, was the only black-owned stadium in the country); and the city’s two most prosperous nightclubs, Crawford Grill One and Crawford Grill Two. In the hope that Gus Greenlee could open entertainment-career doors for a gifted black musician, David Perelman implored his classmate to exert some kindred influence. “David came to me one day and said, ‘George, we have a delivery boy who’s one of the finest musicians I’ve ever heard, and he doesn’t seem to be able to get a break. Your uncle knows all the big musicians. Why don’t you introduce him to somebody?’ But I had never met this fellow Billy or heard him play. So I said, ‘David, are you sure this guy is that good?’ He said, ‘Believe me.’” Greenlee proceeded on faith. “David was one of the first whites that accepted me as a friend and not as an oddball,” Greenlee explained, “so I decided to go out on a limb for him. Besides, I didn’t have time to meet this piano player. Turned out that my uncle was having a big party that night for the band that was opening in town the following evening. I could set everything up at the party for this guy to meet the incoming bandleader, Duke Ellington. Otherwise, I’d wait a week and introduce him to the next bandleader, Basie. But I thought I might as well get this over with and introduce this fellow to whomever was there first.”

  Shortly after midnight on December 1, 1938, George Greenlee nodded and back-patted his way through the ground-floor Rumpus Room of Crawford Grill One (running from Townsend Street to Fullerton Avenue on Wylie Avenue, the place was nearly a block long) and headed up the stairs at the center of the club. He passed the second floor, which was the main floor, where bands played on a revolving stage facing an elongated glass-topped bar and Ray Wood, now a hustling photographer, offered to take pictures of the patrons for fifty cents. Greenlee hit the third floor, the Club Crawford (insiders only), and spotted his uncle with Duke Ellington, who was engaged to begin a week-long run at the Stanley Theatre the following day. “As soon as my uncle introduced us,” said Greenlee, “I turned to Duke and I said, ‘Duke, a good friend of mine has written some songs, and we’d like for you to hear them.’ I lied, but I trusted David. I knew Duke couldn’t say no with my uncle standing there. So Duke said, ‘Well, why don’t you come backstage tomorrow, after the first show?’ It was all set.”

  The next morning, Greenlee arranged (through Perelman) to meet Strayhorn for the first time in front of the Stanley Theatre before the 1:00 p.m. opening matinee. The day was chilly but still, and a light snow fell on and off. Strayhorn was collected, Greenlee would recall, and looked properly ascetic—“He was wearing his Sunday best, but they were pretty well worn.” They watched the first show, a long set of Ellington Orchestra numbers peppered with a tap-dance act (Flash and Dash) and a comedy team (the Two Zephyrs), then found their way through the baroque old Stanley, eight stories high, with thirty-five hundred seats and three full floors of dressing rooms. Ellington’s dressing room was the size of a large dining room and, in fact, was set up like one: several place settings were arranged on a table, and there was an upright piano along one wall. Ellington, alone with his valet, lay on a reclining chair in an embroidered robe, getting his hair conked, eyes closed.

  “I introduced Billy, and we stood there,” said Greenlee. “Duke didn’t get up. He didn’t even open his eyes. He just said, ‘Sit down at the piano, and let me hear what you can do.’” Strayhorn lowered himself onto the bench with calibrated grace and turned toward Ellington, who was lying still. “Mr. Ellington, this is the way you played this number in the show,” Strayhorn announced and began to perform his host’s melancholy ballad “Sophisticated Lady,” one of a few Ellington tunes Strayhorn knew from his days with the Mad Hatters; as a trio, the group used to play a version inspired by Art Tatum’s arabesque 1933 recording. “The amazing thing was,” explained Greenlee, “Billy played it exactly like Duke had just played it on stage. He copied him to perfection.” Ellington stayed silent and prone, though his hair work was over. “Now, this is the way I would play it,” continued Strayhorn. Changing keys and upping the tempo slightly, he shifted into an adaptation Greenlee described as “pretty hip-sounding and further and further ‘out there’ as he went on.”

  At the end of the number, Strayhorn turned to Ellington, now standing right behind him, glaring at the keyboard over his shoulders. “Go get Harry,” Ellington ordered his valet. (Baritone saxophonist Harry Carney, Ellington’s closest intimate among the members of his entourage in this period, had played in the orchestra since 1926, when he was sixteen years old, and the two frequently traveled together to engagements.) “Wellll…” proceeded Ellington dramatically as he faced Strayhorn eye to eye for the first time, Ellington gazing down, Strayhorn peering up. “Can you do that again?” “Yes,” Strayhorn replied matter-of-factly, and began Ellington’s ruminative “Solitude,” once more emulating the composer’s piano style. When Harry Carney entered the room, Ellington stagewhispered, “Listen to this kid play.” Again Strayhorn declared, “This is the way I would play it,” and reharmonized the Ellington song as a personal showcase. Brazenly (or naively) the twenty-three-year-old artist demonstrated both a crafty facility with his renowned elder’s idiom and a spirited capacity to expand it through his own sensibility. The potency struck Ellington, Greenlee recounted: “Billy was playing. Duke stood there behind him beaming, and he put his hands on his shoulders, like he wanted to feel Billy playing his song.” Carney hustled out and returned with two more members of Ellington’s musical inner circle: alto saxophonist Johnny Hodges, thirty-two, a premier Ellington soloist since he joined the band in 1928, and Ivie Anderson, thirty-three, who became Ellington’s first full-time vocalist in 1931.

  As this group gathered around Strayhorn, “Things got hectic,” said Greenlee. “Duke fired off a million questions about Billy’s background and training and so forth. Billy kept playing from then on, mostly his own things—‘Something to Live For,’ which he sang, and a few others” (including a piece so new he hadn’t given it a title yet). Recalling the occasion in later years, Ellington focused on that moment: “When Stray first came to see me in the Stanley Theatre, I asked him the name of a tune he’d played for me, and he just laughed. I caught that laugh. It was that laugh that first got me.” However impressed he may have been by Strayhorn’s musical skills, Ellington was also struck by something visceral.

  Uncertain how best to use him—Ellington’s orchestra already had a pianist—Ellington left Strayhorn with an initial assignment to write lyrics to an instrumental piece. As Strayhorn recalled, “I know how something-or-other it must have been to meet a young man in a town like Pittsburgh. I played for him. I played and sang. Uh, he, uh, he was—he liked me very much, and he said, ‘Well, you come back tomorrow,’ and he gave me an assignment. He had an idea for a lyric. He said, ‘You go home and write a lyric for this,’ and I did. I rushed home and I wrote this lyric.” (The title of the song and the lyrics are unknown.) Strayhorn returned to see Ellington the following evening and submitted his work but found that the frantic events of late had taken a visible toll on him. “Everybody was just so wonderful to m
e—Ivie Anderson particularly, because she was worried,” he said. “She said, ‘Lookit, you go out and get yourself a sandwich or something, because you’re not eating.’ I must have looked a little peaked.” Invited back, he visited Ellington again at the Stanley three days later, when he was given a second assignment, this time to apply his evident skill at harmonization to a vocal selection for Ivie Anderson. As Robert Conaway remembered, “After the meeting, he said, ‘He likes my work, and he gave me an arrangement to do.’”

  The next evening, Strayhorn worked on his orchestration for Ellington, polishing it with the help of his friend Bill Esch rather than returning to the Stanley; Ellington left the theater early that night anyway and spent the after-show hours at the Loendi, a black social club in a rambling three-story brick house on the Hill. By the following evening, Ellington’s last at the Stanley, Strayhorn was ready and returned with his work, and, sharing his good fortune, he brought along Esch. Ellington, who was between shows, wrapped up dinner in his dressing room with Thelma Spangler, a striking, soft-spoken young woman he had met the previous evening at the Loendi. The three musicians huddled together on their feet, poring over music paper for about five minutes, discussing aspects of the arrangement animatedly, Spangler recalled. A chime sounded and Ellington tucked the manuscript under his arm, pronouncing, “Time to go back on.”

  Spangler watched the show from the wings. Strayhorn and Esch stood behind the curtain, near Ellington’s piano, while Ellington passed parts of Strayhorn’s arrangement to the musicians on stage. “Duke gave some of the guys some tips,” said Spangler. “Like, he’d hum something to one guy, or he’d say, ‘You come in here.’ A couple of times he asked Billy something, and Billy answered him, and then Duke explained it to the band. It all happened very quickly. Then Ivie came out on stage. Duke whispered to her and raised his hands, and they did the song, just like that.” The arrangement was a slow-tempo version of “Two Sleepy People.” “Oh God, it was pretty, like something in a dream,” Spangler said. “Ellington smiled all over himself, and he told Billy after the show how happy he was with his music.”