Lush Life

by David Hajdu

  Virtually everything about Billy Strayhorn made him a good match with Duke Ellington. Stately to the verge of ostentation, Ellington used vast resources of ingenuity and will to project an image that promoted pride in and respect for black identity. Yet the priorities of a traveling bandleader—and one who was a tireless composer, arranger, record producer, and entrepreneur as well—prevented Ellington from delving into the high culture he strove to embody. Strayhorn, by contrast, had both the time and the inclination to study the music scores of the masters, to visit museums, and the like. “Duke was a magnificent role model. He was brilliant at it,” said Herb Jeffries. “But some of it was hocus-pocus—grand gestures and particular five-dollar phrases that he’d pronounce with dramatic emphasis. Meanwhile, he never really read anything except the Bible, which is great, mind you, if you’re only going to read one book, and he knew far less about the fine arts, including other composers, than he liked to let on. In Billy, Duke saw that image he considered so important, in flesh and blood.”

  Famously egalitarian, Ellington accepted Strayhorn’s homosexuality much as he had long embraced gifted musicians regardless of their backgrounds or idiosyncrasies. “Pop never cared one bit that Strayhorn was gay,” said Mercer Ellington. “He was never prejudiced against anybody he thought was really worthy. More to the point, he had been exposed to homosexuality his whole life in the music business. It was nothing new to him. He knew plenty of gay men and women, so there was no question about, ‘Hey, is this person a freak or something?’ Pop knew the story. He backed up Strayhorn all the way.” This support was priceless to Strayhorn, according to his intimates—particularly after his frustrations with prejudice during his early career in Pittsburgh. “With Duke, Billy said, he had security,” remarked George Greenlee. “Duke didn’t question his manliness. It wasn’t like that for him back home.” Another gay black musician who was a close friend of Strayhorn’s evoked the virtue of Ellington’s patronage empathetically. “For those of us who were both black and homosexual in that time, acceptance was of paramount importance, absolutely paramount importance,” the musician said. “Duke Ellington afforded Billy Strayhorn that acceptance. That was something that cannot be undervalued or under-appreciated. To Billy, that was gold.”

  In a sense, Strayhorn made himself a triple minority: he was black, he was gay, and he was a minority among gay people in that he was open about his homosexuality in an era when social bias forced many men and women to keep their sexual identities secret. “The most amazing thing of all about Billy Strayhorn to me was that he had the strength to make an extraordinary decision—that is, the decision not to hide the fact that he was homosexual. And he did this in the 1940s, when nobody but nobody did that,” declared his gay black musician friend. “We all hid, every one of us, except Billy. He wasn’t afraid. We were. And you know what the difference between us was? Duke Ellington.” Ellington provided Strayhorn with a high-profile outlet for his artistry, as well as with emotional support. Free to compose for the Ellington Orchestra, albeit behind the scenes, Strayhorn was also freed from the hardships he would have faced had he sought a career as a pianist or bandleader. “Billy could have pursued a career on his own—he had the talent to become rich and famous—but he’d have had to be less than honest about his sexual orientation. Or he could work behind the scenes for Duke and be open about being gay,” said his friend. “It really was truth or consequences, and Billy went with truth. It was just incredible.” Forsaking public prominence, Strayhorn found personal freedom in service to the Duke Ellington Orchestra. Now there might not be a Billy Strayhorn Orchestra. But there was a Billy Strayhorn.

  5

  BEYOND CATEGORY

  This is the way you played this number; now, this is the way I would play it. During the first few years of their association, Duke Ellington increasingly called on Strayhorn to do what he would with what Ellington had done—or what Ellington had put aside, had done partway, or wanted to do at some point. Much of this labor fell within a staff arranger’s responsibilities. As Fletcher Henderson did for Benny Goodman and Sy Oliver did for Tommy Dorsey, Strayhorn created orchestrations of pop hits and other material, including compositions by the bandleader, for the orchestra to play in its vein. Unlike Henderson or Oliver, however, Strayhorn was working with a world-class composer who had, over two decades, developed a brilliantly distinctive imprimatur. Strayhorn called it “the Ellington effect”: Duke’s way of designing compositions for specific musicians and their personal voices. “Ellington’s concern is with the individual musician, and what happens when they put their musical characters together,” explained Strayhorn in an article for Down Beat. As for the relationship between composer and arranger, Strayhorn added that Ellington’s only piece of advice was unfettering. “His first, last and only formal instruction for me was embodied in one word: observe.” The two of them would rarely discuss projects in detail. “I’d see Billy walk into Duke’s dressing room, and Duke would say, ‘Oh, Billy, I want you to finish this thing for me,’” recalled Ruth Ellington Boatwright. “Just like that: ‘I want you to finish this thing for me.’ And Billy would sit and stare into his eyes for about ten minutes, and Duke would stare back, and then Billy would say, ‘Okay.’ They wouldn’t even exchange a word. They’d just look into each other’s eyes, and Billy would go out and write what Duke wanted.”

  Strayhorn also added his own touches to Ellington’s compositions, such as “Sepia Panorama,” which briefly served as the band’s theme song; though most of this episodic mood piece is Ellington’s, sixteen bars of it came from a Strayhorn arrangement of Erskine Hawkins’s theme song, “Tuxedo Junction,” that the Ellington band didn’t record. Strayhorn revamped an aborted Ellington effort, “Take It Away,” and it became the exploratory bass vehicle “Jack the Bear.” “Duke originally wrote the thing as an experiment,” explained Strayhorn. “It didn’t work out, and the piece was dropped. Then [bassist] Jimmy Blanton came into the band, and Duke wanted to feature him as a solo man. We needed some material quickly, so I reworked ‘Take It Away’ as a showpiece for Blanton’s bass.” Ellington resisted completion (and not only in music: he never divorced his first and only wife, Edna Ellington, after making a new home with Mildred Dixon; as a bandleader, he never fired a musician but would simply hire a replacement, leaving the problem musician to get the message and quit on his own). “As long as something is unfinished,” Ellington said, “there’s always that little feeling of insecurity, and a feeling of insecurity is absolutely necessary unless you’re so rich it doesn’t matter.” With Strayhorn on hand, Ellington could keep that insecurity and gain the security of knowing that something he dropped could now not only be finished but possibly improved. As for Strayhorn’s reputation as a composer in his own right, two of his songs had been recorded and released as 78s by the end of 1940: another of his Mad Hatters numbers, “Your Love Has Faded,” as well as his lushly evocative “Day Dream.” Along with “Something to Live For,” the records marked the emergence of Strayhorn’s individual voice, an emotive one distinct from Ellington’s; even so, as with “Something to Live For,” the labels on both “Your Love Has Faded” and “Day Dream” listed Duke Ellington as co-composer.

  Publishing credits and such were business, however, and didn’t much concern a Stravinsky-reading aesthete like Billy Strayhorn—at least until 1941. In December 1940, he was in Chicago, where he had supervised and played piano on Johnny Hodges’s small-group recording of “Day Dream,” as well as three other Hodges-group numbers (Ellington’s “Junior Hop” and Hodges’s own “Good Queen Bess” and “That’s the Blues, Old Man”) and a few tunes by ensembles featuring Ellington trumpeter Rex Stewart and clarinetist Barney Bigard. Ellington and the orchestra had just moved on from Chicago to Culver City, California, to play the Casa Mañana, a new backlot-Mexicana nightspot built on the site of Sebastian’s Cotton Club, once the top West Coast showplace for black entertainment, when a message came from Ellington. Strayhorn and Mercer Ellington
, who had traveled with the band to Chicago, were to head west immediately. A prolonged legal scuffle between the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) and the radio industry had just come to an unexpected head: radio stations were refusing to submit to an ASCAP-proposed increase in the fees that stations were obliged to pay for the right to broadcast music by ASCAP-member composers. Launching their own organization to compete with ASCAP, called Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI), the stations announced that as of the first of the year they would refuse to air any music by ASCAP members. This was tantamount to a ban on most popular music, including virtually all the best-known compositions by Duke Ellington, who had belonged to ASCAP since 1935. In order to perform on radio, Ellington needed practically a whole new repertoire, but he couldn’t write it—or cowrite it; the music had to come solely from composers unaligned with ASCAP, such as Billy Strayhorn, who had never been urged to join, and Mercer Ellington, who hadn’t composed much music.

  “Strayhorn and I got this big break at the same time,” remembered Mercer Ellington. “Overnight, literally, we got a chance to write a whole new book for the band. It could have taken us twenty years to get the old man to make room for that much of our music, but all of a sudden there was this freak opportunity. He needed us to write music, and it had to be in our names.” Rooming at the Sutherland, a small but pleasant South Side hotel for blacks, Strayhorn and Mercer Ellington had a couple of days in Chicago before the next available train to Los Angeles. “We were sharing the same room and we had all this work to do,” said Ellington. “It was one room and two people. When I was up during the day, Strayhorn would use the bed, and while he was up at night, I would sleep in it. The maid never got a chance to change the sheets—she gave us some hell. But we were writing so much music so fast we didn’t care.” For fuel, they brought in a gallon jug of blackberry wine; as Mercer Ellington recalled, Strayhorn needed “some loosening up” to increase productivity. “At one point, he was having some sort of trouble,” said Ellington, “and I pulled a piece of his out of the garbage. I said, ‘What’s wrong with this?’ And he said, ‘That’s an old thing I was trying to do something with, but it’s too much like Fletcher Henderson.’ I looked it over—it was ‘“A” Train’—and I said, ‘You’re right.’ It was written in sections, like Fletcher Henderson. But I flattened it out anyway and put it in the pile with the rest of the stuff.” Happily frantic, the two composers boarded the train waving to their friends, a bottle of whiskey in each hand; once en route, they traded two bottles for a carton of cigarettes, which they considered a superior composing aid. “We were having a time,” admitted Ellington. As Strayhorn remembered, “There was a big mad scramble to build up a new library. So I sat down and started writing. I don’t know how on earth I got through it. Mercer did ‘Jumpin’ Punkins’ and all those things of his. And out of that, of mine, came ‘“A” Train’ and, oh, a whole lot of other things—big stacks of things.” “Loosened up” by Mercer Ellington, a bit of booze, and at least half a carton of cigarettes—and perhaps most significantly, freed for the first time since his arrival in New York to write entirely as himself—Strayhorn produced a big stack of things indeed, including “After All,” “Clementine,” “Chelsea Bridge,” “Johnny Come Lately,” “Rain Check,” “A Flower Is a Lovesome Thing,” and “Passion Flower” (the last two recorded by Ellingtonians in small bands), every one a creative triumph.*

  Ellington picked the hard-swinging new arrangement of “Take the ‘A’ Train” for his orchestra’s latest radio theme, replacing the ASCAP-controlled “Sepia Panorama” (itself a recent replacement for the band’s longtime theme song, Ellington’s atmospheric “East St. Louis Toodle-O”). Ellington was evidently undeterred (and perhaps encouraged) by the song’s debt to Fletcher Henderson, the Georgia-born bandleader and arranger who played an incalculable behind-the-scenes role in Benny Goodman’s rise as the King of Swing. Indeed, “‘A’ Train” became not only Ellington’s signature song but his greatest success. Recorded for the high-profile Victor label in Hollywood in February 1941 and issued as a 78 shortly thereafter, the song was an immediate best-seller (the record stayed on the charts for seven weeks that summer) and jukebox sensation; a few months out of the Sutherland Hotel trash, “Take the ‘A’ Train” became a leitmotif of the swing era. Infectiously upbeat, the number derives its propulsion from the arrangement’s kicky rhythmic figures, and its peppy main theme is at once unusual and hummable.

  Most of Strayhorn’s other new contributions to the Ellington Orchestra band book were more characteristic of the young composer’s musical personality and serious orientation. The most ambitious among them was “Chelsea Bridge,” an impressionistic miniature composed, Strayhorn said, with a painting by James McNeill Whistler in mind. (Whistler rendered several scenes of rivers and bridges in London, although none of the Chelsea Bridge.) Unlike conventional tune-based pop and jazz numbers of the day, “Chelsea Bridge” is “classical” in its integration of melody and harmony as an organic whole. A bridge is not an apt metaphor for the composition, which more vividly evokes the water below; it flows naturally, inevitably, and with hidden depth. There is more Debussy than Ellington in “Chelsea Bridge,” although Ellington had long experimented with imaginatively colored tone poems. Comparably sophisticated though much different in style, “Johnny Come Lately” brought the hipster experimentalism of Strayhorn’s after-hours sessions with Dizzy Gillespie and Max Roach to the Ellington organization: the piece is proto-bop, rhythmically vigorous and angular, harmonically modernist. “Rain Check,” a somewhat more traditional up-tempo number, springs with all the ebullience of “Take the ‘A’ Train,” but its snappy melody and jitterbug beat disguise progressive structure and some sly, almost inaudible dissonance. Strayhorn also applied his advanced musical sensibility to new orchestrations of other composers’ works, most notably “Flamingo,” which Ellington described as “the renaissance of vocal orchestration.” When Strayhorn arranged it, “it began to blossom,” said Ellington. “Before then, an orchestration for a singer was usually something pretty tepid, and it was just background—that’s about all. But now, this had real ornamentation, fittingly done, supporting the singer and also embellishing the entire performance of both the singer and the band.” Originally a virtually unknown instrumental by pop composer Ted Grouya, the tune was discovered by Ellington’s friend Edmund Anderson, a businessman, who added lyrics. Strayhorn’s arrangement suggests early-twentieth-century orchestral composition in its heady chromaticism and liquid movement. Yet it’s not pretentious; Strayhorn harnessed his conservatory skills in the service of feeling. “It was a good song,” recalled Anderson, “but Strayhorn’s arrangement gave it a deeper quality.”

  As this wave of tunes hit the record stores, musicians—composers and arrangers, in particular—started buzzing about Billy Strayhorn. “I grew up in New Mexico, and Duke was my idol,” recalled pianist and composer John Lewis. “One of the outstanding things for me was the first Strayhorn thing I heard. It was the arrangement of ‘Flamingo.’ It had nothing to do with what had gone on in jazz at all before. It sounded as if Stravinsky were a jazz musician.” The baritone saxophonist and composer Gerry Mulligan recounted, “I was part of a small community of very young musicians and arrangers, and we paid a lot of attention to who was doing what with all of the bands. When Strayhorn came on the scene, he just blew us away, because he was doing very complicated, sophisticated things, and they didn’t sound complicated to the ear at all—they sounded completely natural and very emotional. To bring all that complexity to bear and have it be so beautiful was something incredible to everybody who knew anything.” Gil Evans, who was writing for the Claude Thornhill Orchestra in the early 1940s, recalled, “From the moment I first heard ‘Chelsea Bridge,’ I set out to try to do that. That’s all I did—that’s all I ever did—try to do what Billy Strayhorn did.” Also the saxophonist and arranger Benny Carter: “Strayhorn’s compositions were so complete. They weren’t just riffs o
r chord changes like so many others were doing. It made us all think a little differently about what we were doing.” Dizzy Gillespie: “All those sevenths—man, I never heard anything like those things until him. I got ideas from hearing him that I knew I could use forever.” Bill Finegan, who wrote for Glenn Miller: “It didn’t take a thing away from Duke to recognize that Strayhorn, like Duke, was an original. There was so much all-around musical knowledge in those things he did, and always something original, the element of surprise.” Billy May, who wrote for Charlie Barnet and Glenn Miller: “Now, I knew Billy in Pittsburgh, so I knew what he was capable of. Then he came up with ‘Chelsea Bridge’ and ‘Mid-Riff’ and ‘Passion Flower’ and all those songs in the 1940s. He had a tremendous amount of consistency. There wasn’t a clinker in the bunch. That’s what was truly amazing, I think—every single song had something great.” Ralph Burns, who wrote for Woody Herman: “Billy took big-band music and moved it up a couple of steps musically. He was really writing classical music for the Duke Ellington Orchestra.” Slide Hampton, then a young trombonist (and later an arranger): “‘Chelsea Bridge,’ ‘Passion Flower’—at that time, people weren’t writing with that extensive level of theory. His compositions were very involved. But the thing that stood out was that, with all that theory that was there, you still had a very human and spiritual side to his music.”

  Gone was the mimicry of Gershwin and Porter that tainted Strayhorn’s first major efforts, Concerto for Piano and Percussion and Fantastic Rhythm—experimentation as homage. Gone was the mannered fuss of his more pretentious early songs, such as the river-flivver rhyming “If You Were There”—social climbing in B-flat. Mature and honest, his first big-band masterstrokes for the Ellington Orchestra are debtless Strayhorn, and revealingly so. Many of the pieces share a feeling, an essential component of their “Strayhorn sound,” of darkness. “Chelsea Bridge,” “Passion Flower,” “After All,” “A Flower Is a Lovesome Thing”—different statements in the same voice, they suggest a personal anguish. Just as all the floral-related titles (like “Violet Blue” and “Lotus Blossom” of the later 1940s) evoke their author’s formative experiences in his grandmother’s Hillsborough garden, the inner torment of the music casts light on the private world Strayhorn explored in his walks along the Eno River. Friends like Mickey Scrima, Herb Jeffries, George Greenlee, and Haywood Williams assumed that he found music the one way to release the frustration and hurt concealed under the armor of politesse. “The guy went through a lot of shit in his life, from his father right on through school—the kids calling him a sissy, you know,” said Scrima. “He kept it all in and put on a big front that everything was fine, nothing bothered him. Then he sat down and wrote all that music with all that emotion. All his feelings came out in the music. That’s what made his stuff so incredible and different from Duke’s. It was great music, like Duke’s was, and it was so full of dark feeling.”