by David Hajdu
As thanks for his musical guidance and prenatal care, Rosemary Clooney gave Strayhorn a Cartier watch inscribed “To Svengali.” “He was anything but,” said Clooney. “I was never associated with a man who was so completely unthreatening and uncontrolling and so completely in charge.” The album, completed on January 27 and entitled Blue Rose, included ten vocal tracks and one instrumental, a full-band arrangement of Strayhorn’s “Passion Flower.” “Having ‘Passion Flower’ on there was sort of a wink,” explained Clooney, “an inside thing to those in the know that this was basically Billy’s record.” Along with the overdubbing, a first for a major artist, the album heralded a smaller breakthrough: even though two of Strayhorn’s compositions were described as Ellington’s alone in the liner notes written by Townsend (“Grievin’” is called “one of Duke’s most effective songs,” and “I’m Checkin’ Out, Goom Bye” is referred to as “an older Ellington composition with a new sound”), Strayhorn was acknowledged, with Ellington, as one of the album’s arrangers. Pleasant as it is, Blue Rose came as a surprise to both Ellington’s jazz following and Clooney’s pop audience and failed to become the hit of Townsend’s design, never making it onto the charts.
Privately as well as professionally, Strayhorn was at an exploratory stage. Unattached, he was seen more often at gay parties, including one of the city’s more popular weekly events at a musician’s home on Sutton Place. “I never saw Billy Strayhorn on the scene except for that period, which was very brief,” said the gay music critic Roy Hemming, then twenty-nine. “Everyone knew him—he was a star in that society. He enjoyed it but stayed at arm’s length. It seemed as if he was simply interested in good company. He was extremely charming. He had a rapier wit, and certainly he adored his cocktails. Before very long he would leave, usually alone, but not always.” That spring, talk spread within gay circles that Strayhorn had been a victim of a pickup gone bad, but the facts, as Strayhorn later recounted them to Lena Horne, Aaron Bridgers, and Bill Coleman, suggested something different. On a morning around April 30, 1954, Strayhorn was returning home to his apartment on 106th Street after a night out. “He said he was pretty drunk,” Bridgers recalled. For reasons unexplained, he exited his cab around the corner from his apartment, across the street from Central Park. There was a construction site on a vacant lot, and a man was standing near a hill of sand stored for mixing cement. As Strayhorn approached him, a second man appeared, and the two strangers jumped him. They stole his wallet and beat him, and he fell into the sand pile. Fearful that his accosters would steal his black star-sapphire ring, a treasured gift from Lena Horne, Strayhorn wormed his left hand into the sand and worked the ring off, burying it there. Once he was alone, he got up on his own and walked home; his face was bruised and his ribs ached. The next morning, he returned to the scene and, digging under the imprint of his body left in the sand, he found his ring. On May 2, the New York Journal American reported in a one-line item, “Billy Strayhorn, composer and longtime Duke Ellington arranger, was mugged by a group of hoodlums a few nights ago.” “I don’t know the whole story,” said Lena Horne. “We didn’t need to discuss it. He just said, ‘I was lucky. I found my ring.’ And we talked about the cruelty of people.” In a visit to Strayhorn the day after the event, Bill Coleman was taken, above all, by his friend’s resilience. “There was no great outpouring of emotion about it, even though it was a rather vicious kind of thing that had happened,” said Coleman. “He didn’t display histrionics or anything like that. He was visibly shaken by the whole experience, of course. But he was very strong and had an extraordinary capacity to absorb things that would be devastating to someone else and carry on. He accepted it as something that happened and moved on, although I know he didn’t go out as much for a while after that. He kept his focus on his work.”
Jazz continued its recession from the pop mainstream, the swing generation steering its new station wagons ever further from jukebox culture, the emerging generation turning to the electrified sound of rock and roll. Jazz was evolving into an elite music for mature ears; old hipsters found a different kind of nightlife in the easy pleasures of their TVs and their hi-fis. For live music, meanwhile, since jazz is a largely improvisational form, an accommodating institution took form: the jazz festival. In Newport, Rhode Island, in the summer of 1954, twenty-nine-year-old George Wein, the owner of and house pianist at Boston’s Storyville nightclub, produced the American Jazz Festival, the first of its kind. “I watched the nightclubs dry up around me,” recalled Wein. A Boston University premed graduate who had studied jazz privately with Teddy Wilson, Wein had an aggressive, percussive style of piano playing and a felicitous touch as a businessman. He was built like a cinder block, actual size. “The idea behind the Newport festival was to make live jazz appealing again to a generation that didn’t go to nightclubs anymore,” said Wein. “You could bring the kids and sit outside all afternoon and hear music, all various acts in every genre of jazz. You could have a picnic. The kids could play.” Wein had reservations about booking Ellington for Newport, concerned that Ellington was perceived as past his prime, but he offered the bandleader a slot at the third annual festival, in July 1956. “The festival—and the whole idea of a jazz festival—was still very young, and the kind of press we got was important to us,” said Wein. “Duke was booked and all set to go on in a few days, and I called him. I said, ‘Duke, what are you going to do? Do you have anything new?’ He said, ‘Well…’ And I said, ‘You can’t come up here and do a medley of your hits. You can’t. The critics will kill you. You have to come up with something new.’”
Ellington was getting the same message from Columbia Records. The label had assigned a new A & R executive to work on the Ellington account, George Avakian—a jazz enthusiast since childhood, with a pronounced interest in Ellingtonia, as well as long experience at Columbia as head of both the popular-album and international departments—and he wanted to try something new at Newport: the first live recording at a festival. “I called Duke. He was on the road somewhere, so I got him in a hotel,” explained Avakian, a continental, multilingual charmer skillful at talking any setting’s talk. “I told him we wanted to record his performance at Newport for a record. I said, ‘Look, the festival is making [news], and we’ve given them twenty-five thousand dollars for the right to record. Can you put something together that we can call “The Newport Jazz Festival Suite” or some such thing? It would be a good tie-in. I know there’s not much time. Can you do it?’ And Duke said, ‘Okay. Strays and I always have something going. I’ll put him to work on it right away.’”
To come across at the festival as more than a nostalgia act—Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, Dave Brubeck, Sarah Vaughan, and the Modern Jazz Quartet (among others) were all scheduled to perform—Ellington needed to reassert the vitality of his work and his orchestra. The Newport Jazz Festival Suite, composed of three parts (“Festival Junction,” “Blues to Be There,” and “Newport Up”) and credited to Ellington and Strayhorn, wouldn’t do it, however: though somewhat more involving than picnic soundtrack music need be, the piece is a loping parade of cool-jazz riffs stretched out with some clever repetition and plenty of solo space. Nonetheless, the orchestra’s Newport set turned out to be the event’s most celebrated performance—indeed, one that elevated the standing of both the jazz festival and the Ellington Orchestra. Ellington called for his “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue” in a showy version the orchestra had been performing for the past several years; in the middle of the two-part piece, Ellington added what would come to be called “the wailing interval,” a mammoth twenty-seven choruses of uninterrupted solo blues improvisation by the tenor saxophonist Paul Gonsalves, a bebop-oriented veteran of Dizzy Gillespie’s big band who had joined Ellington in 1951. Seemingly possessed, Gonsalves drew the festival crowd into something like a religious frenzy; Ellington egged him on, revving his arms like a drivetrain, roaring cheers from the piano. At the conclusion of the nearly fifteen-minute performance, Newport erupted into a s
creaming, stomping affirmation of Ellington’s undiminished showmanship. “That moment was a turnaround point for Duke and us,” said Wein. “If anybody needed proof that this was a band that could hold its own against anybody else out there and provide a level of music pleasure that nobody could match, there it was.” For his part, Wein felt vindicated that “people got a taste of how much music the festival could provide.”
Columbia released the live LP Ellington at Newport in the fall of 1956 to critical raves; only Ellington insiders knew that portions of the Newport Jazz Festival Suite had been rerecorded in Columbia’s Studio D on July 9, two days after the orchestra’s performance, and patched in to amend a few minor flubs in the original. After the career diminuendo of Ellington’s last half decade, the crescendo of Newport rang far: Time magazine, in a six-page cover story about Ellington in its August 20 issue, made Newport a referendum on Ellington and his role in the evolution of jazz. “The event last month marked not only the turning point in one concert; it confirmed a turning point in a career,” the story (unbylined) said. “The big news was something that the whole jazz world had long hoped to hear: the Ellington band was once again the most exciting thing in the business. Ellington himself had emerged from a long period of quiescence and was once again bursting with ideas and inspiration.… His style contains the succinctness of concert music and the excitement of jazz.” Strayhorn was noted briefly as Ellington’s arranger and shown in a “family” photo of the Ellingtons: Duke, Ruth, Mercer, and his wife, Evelyn.
Reunited, at least tentatively—yet they had never quite been apart—Ellington and Strayhorn had dinner together at the Hickory House on Manhattan’s West 52nd Street in mid-August 1956. They met at Ellington’s initiative, and the dinner marked the first time they had ever discussed their relationship in terms close to negotiation, as Strayhorn recounted immediately afterward to his two dearest Copasetics friends, Cookie Cook and Honi Coles. “Billy called me. He said, ‘Edward wants to talk to me. We’re having dinner,’” recalled Coles. “I said, ‘You want me to come along? If you need some moral support…’ Billy said, ‘No, Father’—Billy always called me Father. He even sent me Father’s Day cards. ‘Ever up and onward,’ he said. So we agreed to meet at the Showman’s after he had dinner with Duke. Cookie and I were there waiting for him. About midnight or twelve-thirty he comes in, and he’s wearing the biggest Cheshire cat grin you could imagine. Cookie said to me, ‘Look at that motherfucker, Honi. That is one happy motherfucker.’ One of us said, ‘Well, tell us all about it,’ and Billy said, ‘He’s seeing stars again. He’s been seeing stars now since Newport.’ Newport could be the beginning of something big, if he took care of business, and he needed Billy for that. Billy said to us, ‘He wanted to know what I want to do. I told him a few ideas, this and that, you know. This would be nice, that thing would be wonderful.’ Billy said Duke was all over him. He’s nodding up and down. He says, ‘Yes, yes, that’s a wonderful idea! Let’s do that! Yes!’ All that’s all over, and Duke offers a toast. I don’t know if he had a drink or coffee. Duke used to drink a cup of plain hot water; maybe he had that. Billy said he offered a toast, and he said, ‘May I propose a toast? To Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn—to their new incorporation.’ Duke basically broke down and said, ‘I need you. From now, your name is up there, right next to mine. It’s Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn.’” And what sort of project would this new incorporation produce? Strayhorn told Coles, “A Shakespeare thing.”
Fifteen years after Jump for Joy, Ellington and Strayhorn entered a new level of collaboration, Strayhorn told his confidants: for large-scale projects of all sorts, as well as for individual pieces, Ellington offered to share the composing credit; moreover, he encouraged Strayhorn to contribute original concepts, not merely to execute ideas that came to Ellington or came Ellington’s way. (Any changes in their financial arrangement are untraceable and impossible to quantify since many of Strayhorn’s bills and expenditures were paid directly by Ellington and his organization, in part with Ellington’s personal funds.) The partners’ first project under the arrangement was to be a suite of pieces for the following year’s Stratford Music Festival, an offshoot of the Shakespearean Festival in Stratford, Ontario, founded in 1953 by the acclaimed English theatrical director Sir Tyrone Guthrie. Among the most ambitious of the new arts festivals popping up to fill the vacation weeks of the newly affluent and mobile postwar generation, the Stratford event presented a Shakespeare play (Alec Guinness in Richard III, for example), an opera or a symphonic work (Benjamin Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia), and a program of jazz artists, all for an admission price of five dollars. A few weeks after his celebrated 1956 appearance at Newport, Ellington had made his Stratford debut on a bill with the Dave Brubeck Quartet, the Modern Jazz Quartet, the Art Tatum Trio, and others. But his choice of program, a dance-oriented show of his hits, had disappointed the festival’s founder, Thomas Patterson, and its musical director, Louis Applebaum, both of whom had solicited Ellington to present a major new work. A year in advance of the 1956 festival, Patterson had gone to Chicago to meet with him. “It was kind of fascinating,” said Patterson. “The band was located in Chicago and playing gigs around, and I went to meet Duke for the first time. It was in his hotel room, and Duke was lying in bed surrounded by a whole bunch of people. It was a madhouse. Ellington was on the phone to New York and various places, and there was a guy in Chicago who had done a bust of Ellington and was there to present it to him, and the newspapers were there and everything, to get a picture of it. Ellington got out of bed in his pajamas and put a shirt and a jacket on with his pajama bottoms still on and stood beside the bust to get his picture taken. He took off the shirt and jacket and went back to bed, and we talked. I told him all about the festival, and he said, ‘Oh, it sounds marvelous, marvelous. We’ll certainly create something very special and worthy of such a wonderful festival.’ Of course, it wasn’t until he came here and played the first time and saw what we were about that he got Strayhorn to start something for the next year.”
Louis Applebaum, a professional music administrator who had come from Canada’s National Film Board, attributed Ellington’s change of heart to two factors. “I had tried to impress upon him that we weren’t interested in just another one-night-stand show—‘and then I wrote…’” said Applebaum. “After he played the first year, he realized that he had missed an opportunity and offered to come back next time with something special. Also, while he was here he became very, very close to [director of music promotion] Barbara Reed, and there was no question whatsoever that their closeness had a great, great deal to do with Ellington’s sudden enthusiasm for Stratford.” The Reed-Ellington relationship shouldn’t be interpreted reductively, however, according to Reed’s boss, publicity director Mary Joliffe: “Everybody takes credit for getting Duke to write for the festival. It was Barb who did it, but not just Barb as a woman. Duke had a million women, and he didn’t write music for all of them, even if he told them he did. Barb was a genius as a publicist, and she showed Duke what it could do for him to have this association with Stratford. She gave the motivation.” Applebaum, in turn, specifically suggested that Ellington write a work inspired by Shakespeare. Ellington responded that the suite form, his favorite anyway, was fitting for the project. And Strayhorn took it on excitedly, glowing to his friends about having an Ellington Orchestra project geared especially to him.
Strayhorn’s affection for Shakespeare was well established on the band bus. “We used to call him Shakespeare—that was one of his nicknames,” said Jimmy Hamilton. “Not when he was around, I’m talking about.” With the most literate instrumentalists in the orchestra, Strayhorn was known to indulge in an occasional debate on the Bard: the trumpeter Willie Cook, a Gillespie big-band veteran from Chicago, tangled with him on the issue of stylistic brevity at a hotel bar somewhere in the Midwest. “I told him I thought Shakespeare was verbose,” said Cook. “That got Strayhorn mad. He was steaming. I said Shakespeare used too
many couplets to make his points. I told him Kahlil Gibran could say the same thing in four or five words. Strayhorn was spouting off all this Shakespeare, all these lines from all the plays and whatnot. ‘How would Kahlil Gibran say that?’ It was funny, man—he was so mad. When Duke said he was writing a Shakespeare suite for the band, I said to myself, ‘Oh, man, now Strayhorn’s going to get back at me. My whole horn part’s going to be four or five notes!’” Ellington’s own approach to Shakespeare was imaginative, if defensively colored by his autodidact’s pride. As Strayhorn explained at the time, “Ellington has always been intrigued by Shakespeare, ‘cause he said Shakespeare certainly knew more about people than anyone he’s ever known, Duke also said that the only way Shakespeare could have known as much about people as he did was by hanging out on the corner or in the pool room. He says that if William Shakespeare were alive today, you would surely find him down at Birdland listening to jazz.” For his own preparation, Strayhorn stuck with books: he spent-evenings perusing his old complete works of Shakespeare, jotting musical notes in the margins. Late one night, he came into the Showman’s with one volume under his arm; he held the book on his lap for hours, chatting with Honi Coles and a few casual friends from the neighborhood until suddenly he stood up, slipped the Shakespeare onto the stool, and sat on it. “He looked me straight in the eye with a grin,” said Coles, “and he said, ‘Look, I’m as big as you. How do you like that? Shakespeare is so excellent for a person’s growth.’” For several days, Strayhorn obsessed on the suite’s title; resisting Ellington’s preference, “The Shakespearean Suite,” he called his friends at all hours with ideas. One was “Nova,” Avon spelled backwards; another, “Madness in Great Ones,” became a title for one movement. He settled on Such Sweet Thunder, a phrase from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Hippolyta: “I was with Hercules and Cadmus once / When in a wood of Crete they bay’d the bear / With hounds of Sparta.… I never heard / So musical a discourd, such sweet thunder”).