by David Hajdu
Clearly relishing his first equal-credit collaboration with Ellington under their new understanding, Strayhorn was well into it when Ellington announced that another project would have to take priority: music for a television special. The CBS network had undertaken a competition with NBC to win FCC approval for a color-TV broadcast standard. Each network was testing and promoting its own system in the freewheeling market: CBS’s was a mechanical one involving a dinner-plate-size translucent disc tinted with three colors that spun inside the TV camera, and NBC’s was based on cathode-ray tubes. Although it may have seemed archaic in conception, the “color wheel” technology was said to produce more accurate colors than NBC’s tube-based method, except when the color wheel spun at less than constant and precise speed, which did occasionally happen. To stimulate public enthusiasm for its system, CBS created a demonstration parlor in midtown Manhattan: viewers lined up on Fifth Avenue to buy tickets and see, via closed-circuit TV, full-color still pictures of pieces of Swiss cheese and bologna. Hoping to promote the system nationally, CBS executives commissioned an original musical production from the Theater Guild. Administered by a former patent attorney, Lawrence Langner, and his wife, Armina Marshall Langner, an actress, the Guild had come to acclaim as the producers of Oklahoma! and a series of George Bernard Shaw plays. Langner approached Ellington, who pitched a variant on the history-of-jazz idea he had knocked around with Orson Welles in 1941: an allegorical trip from Africa and the Caribbean through New Orleans to the rocket age. Native costumes, jungle greenery, outer space—CBS relished it for its opportunities to use color, recalled the production’s set designer, Willard Levitas, who had recently jumped from Studio One to the higher-profile U.S. Steel Hour, on which CBS proposed to produce Ellington’s conception.
“The main thing for them was ‘Will it show off our color wheel?’” said Levitas. “They didn’t know very much about Duke Ellington except that he wasn’t white, so there was more color for them.” This was the idea for the program as Ellington explained it: “It will be the most ambitious thing we ever attempted artistically. A Drum Is a Woman is a tone parallel to the history of jazz, and the heroine is called Madam Zajj, which is a funny way of spelling jazz backward. And she is the spirit of jazz, which comes about as a result of this tremendous romance that goes on between a musician and his instrument and his music—and this is a big thing, and this is how we arrive at the statement that a drum is a woman. We’ve seen a lot of guys who would leave a real pretty chick so that he can go off into a corner and blow his horn. And you see guys like [Ellington Orchestra member] Sam Woodyard, who is a drummer, and when he takes a solo, he’ll be grunting and closing his eyes and caressing that drum and feeling the skin of its head—it couldn’t be hotter. That’s what they call their drums, skins. A drummer is a skin whipper. And a woman is definitely the most important accessory a man has.”
The show would be an Ellington-Strayhorn collaboration, the partners’ closest one ever, according to Strayhorn. “I suppose the largest hunk of collaboration was Drum Is a Woman, in which we just kind of did everything,” Strayhorn explained. “He wrote lyrics, I wrote lyrics. He wrote music, and I wrote music. He arranged, and I arranged.”
Working quickly together in New York, usually at Ellington’s apartment, as well as separately while the bandleader kept up his perpetual schedule of performances, they finished the music and threads of narration that would serve as the soundtrack, and it was recorded by the Ellington Orchestra and a few guest artists in seven New York sessions in the last months of 1956. The singers were Joya Sherrill, returning temporarily at Ellington’s request; Margaret Tynes, a twenty-seven-year-old operatic singer and teacher with little professional exposure; and Ozzie Bailey, a black cabaret singer who had gotten vocal coaching from and done a bit of recording with Luther Henderson. Bailey, thirty-one and gay, hovered near Strayhorn during the production; they became friends, though likely no closer than Strayhorn and any of the other musicians. “Ozzie, what a dear boy, but he wasn’t for Billy,” recalled Talley Beatty, Strayhorn’s old Neal Salon compatriot, who danced the role (Caribe Joe) that Bailey sang in the production. Sweetly effeminate, Bailey loved to pass the studio downtime singing American songs in French, emoting in cute gestures. Strayhorn giggled at the sight but encouraged him—“Aaah! Magnifique!”—and Bailey took a deep bow, perhaps (and perhaps not) acknowledging Strayhorn’s irony.
Composed of fifteen musical numbers arranged for expanded orchestra (the usual sixteen pieces plus three percussionists and harp), A Drum Is a Woman plays off touchstone modes of jazz from the music’s African and Caribbean origins through early New Orleans music (“Hey, Buddy Bolden”) to bebop (“Rhumbop”), with a stop in outer space (“Ballet of the Flying Saucers”). The disparate elements of homage are neatly filtered through the consistently distinctive sound of the Ellington Orchestra. The high points are the least referential instrumental selections (“Rhumbop” and “Ballet of the Flying Saucers”) and the bop-influenced improvisations by Clark Terry (on “Madam Zajj”) and Paul Gonsalves (“Congo Square”). Lyrically, however, A Drum is unsettling. Alternately coy and childlike, the words rarely convey accessible or mature feeling; the title song, moreover, expresses outright sadistic misogyny in the guise of an attempted joke (presumably):
It isn’t civilized to beat women
No matter what they do or they say
But will somebody tell me
What else can you do with a drum?
By contrast, Strayhorn’s old “Don’t Mess Around with the Women” was feminist.
Working from LP pressings of the music and narration, spoken by Ellington himself, producers from CBS and the Theater Guild set out independent of Ellington and Strayhorn to stage the work as a presentation of music and dance—there would be no dialogue beyond the narration, to be handled on camera by Ellington—with the live broadcast scheduled for the following spring. In the meanwhile, the Shakespeare suite still had to be written, and more quickly than Strayhorn had originally been told. George Avakian asked Ellington to premiere the work prior to the Stratford Festival at a benefit Avakian was producing in conjunction with his wife, the classical violinist Anahid Ajemian. Dubbed Music for Modems, the concert would feature Ellington and his orchestra on a double bill with the conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos and a chamber ensemble performing Kurt Weill’s Concerto for Violin and Wind Orchestra, op. 12; Ajemian was to be the soloist in the Weill. “We were recording Drum Is a Woman and getting it together and also writing the Shakespearean suite,” recalled Strayhorn. “We had a deadline for Thunder, as we had promised to premiere it at … the Town Hall. We were rushed.” Indeed, Ellington and Strayhorn divvied up the composing responsibilities, each writing a group of the suite’s movements, and neither was on schedule as the deadline drew close. Ellington, booked with his orchestra at Birdland, composed backstage: during an intermission, he scrawled four bars of a theme on a piece of scratch paper and asked Britt Woodman, an energetic young trombonist who had joined the orchestra in 1951, to play the fragment. The following night, Ellington had turned the melodic idea into a short piece, handed the music to Woodman, and called on him to play it for the people cold. (Entitled “Sonnet to Hank Cinq,” it became the third movement of the suite.) Strayhorn was working on a theme for a segment dedicated to Romeo and Juliet, writing at home while a friend mixed cocktails, when Ellington called and told him to save time and simply steal the music—albeit from himself. Jimmy Hamilton thought there was something familiar in his part when he played the ninth movement, “The Star-Crossed Lovers.” “I said, ‘Hey, Strays, you think nobody’s going to remember this? Nobody going to forget this, man. This is the most beautiful thing you ever wrote.’” Hamilton had recorded the same piece on Johnny Hodges’s Creamy album just two years earlier, when it was still titled “Pretty Girl” and credited to Strayhorn alone. “I just shook my head when I saw that,” said Hamilton. “Strayhorn said, ‘Ellington has insisted, and when Ellington has insisted, you
know what we must do. We must do what we must do.’ We was together—I don’t know, packing up or something—and he says to me, real quiet, ‘Jimmy.’ Actually, he called me James. He says, ‘James, what could I do? He got me.’ Like, the way Duke worked, if you’re not going to give me [Ellington] what I want, I’ll get it out of you one way or another. He got what he wanted, even if you wasn’t giving it to him.”
On April 28, Such Sweet Thunder was given its premiere at Town Hall in Manhattan’s theater district to a sellout audience of fifteen hundred. “That night at the Town Hall concert was the very first time Duke and I had heard the whole suite without a break,” said Strayhorn. “This was the first time it had been played from beginning to end. That particular night we put the whole thing together—it was very nice and went along very well.” In truth, the composition wasn’t performed to its end: only eleven of its twelve movements were ready that night. As a finale, Ellington told the band to vamp on the blues, and he announced to the audience that the orchestra would now perform the conclusion of the suite, a movement entitled “Cop-Out.” No one laughed, Avakian recalled. “It was such a straight crowd that they didn’t even know they were being put on.”
Like virtually every other Ellington or Ellington-Strayhorn suite, Such Sweet Thunder is ostensibly programmatic in structure: each of its movements has an intended relationship to Shakespeare, and it is that commonality, rather than any purely musical thread (or threads), that links the pieces. Unlike individual sections of the other suites, however, most of those in Such Sweet Thunder are not traditional descriptive music. (Originally a painter, Ellington had always liked to sketch musical portraits, evoking the emotions, the ambient sounds, or the sensations he associated with a subject.) The Shakespeare connections vary from abstract to obscure: tempo changes in “Sonnet for Hank Cinq” refer to “changes of pace and the map as a result of wars,” according to Ellington. A bright, prankish segment, “Lady Mac,” evokes turn-of-the-century America because, Ellington said, “We suspect there was a little ragtime in soul.” In purely musical terms, however, Such Sweet Thunder holds up without elliptical defense. The musical diversity and the emotional range of the suite are impressive, from the propulsive swing of “Madness in Great Ones” and the moody exotica of “Sonnet in Search of a Moor” and “Half the Fun” to the winking tease of “The Telecasters.” Even without the romance of “The Star-Crossed Lovers”/ “Pretty Girl,” Such Sweet Thunder would surely have been regarded as a complex and hefty work.
About a dozen blocks uptown from Town Hall, the U.S. Steel Hour staff was busily concocting as colorful a show as they could for the broadcast of A Drum Is a Woman, due in less than two weeks. The producer, Marshall Jamison, a Broadway director, had passed copies of the album on to Willard Levitas, as well as to the choreographer, Paul Godkin, and the director, Paul Felton, with these instructions: “Do whatever the hell you want, because the thing doesn’t make any sense.” Levitas, who didn’t own a record player and didn’t want anyone to know, proceeded more or less blindly until Jamison had the narration transcribed and distributed in script form. “I didn’t really know much about the music, but we were all told that it didn’t matter as long as everything was colorful,” said Levitas, who used lots of fresh greenery and flowers in the jungle sequences. He was most proud of the New Orleans set, which, along with more flowers, included a balcony with wrought-iron filigree. Unfortunately, the bulky color-wheel cameras were so limited in mobility that much of the New Orleans set couldn’t be seen on the air. Godkin devised resourceful dances for Talley Beatty and Carmen DeLavallade, a principal dancer with the Metropolitan Opera. Owing again to the cameras’ immobility and relatively narrow field of vision, the dancers were restricted. “We did a lot of moving in toward the camera and back away from the camera,” said Beatty, who danced in his bare feet; he bled through the rehearsals, conducted in a studio with cracking plank floors and exposed nail heads. “We had to work in very small areas in front of the cameras. But Paul did wonderful work. The dances were wonderful. They captured the music quite vividly—Paul was very respectful of the music. He loved Duke and Billy.” Carmen DeLavallade thought Godkin and Strayhorn seemed temperamentally alike. “Paul was a lot like Billy. He was always calm and took everything in his stride, at least the way he presented himself to others,” she said. “He never seemed unhappy about anything, and he did beautiful work. The music and Paul’s dances made that show work, even though they were done completely independently.” Godkin contributed an idea for the sets: a jeweled tree. “He just liked the idea. It didn’t mean anything and it had nothing to do with the record,” said Levitas. “We used it anyway. What did it matter?” Little was required of Ellington and Strayhorn beyond the narration and the music, both of which would be performed live before the camera by Ellington and his orchestra. While Ellington focused on the narration, Strayhorn held up the musical end, playing piano behind some of the narration; recorded tracks from the LP were used for a few dance sequences.
Broadcast on May 8, 1957, and credited equally to Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, A Drum Is a Woman came off as a polished and eminently colorful execution of a largely enigmatic idea. “In those days, if somebody didn’t fall on his face and you went on on time and you got off on time, the show was a success,” said Levitas. The ratings suggested otherwise: relative to most U.S Steel Hour productions, A Drum Is a Woman fizzled, reaching an estimated 5,279,000 homes (a “25 share” on the Nielsen ratings, representing slightly more than 14.2 percent of U.S. households); fewer than 100,000 viewers had the TV sets necessary to view the program in color. The program remained another kind of triumph, however. “It was unheard of to give that kind of forum to a black show done by black artists in that day. Unheard of,” said Jamison. “A lot of white people would change the channel as soon as they saw black faces and never give the thing a shot. CBS took a big gamble doing it. You gotta give them a lot of credit. But they lost.” In a decision unrelated to CBS’s presentations of Swiss cheese or A Drum Is a Woman, the FCC rejected the color wheel and named NBC’s tube system the color broadcast standard.
Bringing together both the new Ellington-Strayhorn collaborations in one sprawling program, Ellington and his orchestra performed the entirety of A Drum Is a Woman, complete with narration, as an opener to the long-promised debut of Such Sweet Thunder at the Stratford Shakespearean Festival on the afternoon of September 5, 1957. A capacity crowd of five hundred filled the festival concert hall, a poorly ventilated nineteenth-century barn converted into a badminton court and then reconverted into a theater. The stage protruded out into the audience, which surrounded the performers on three sides, Elizabethan style. By the day of the performance, Ellington and the orchestra, accompanied by Strayhorn, had already spent nearly a week at the festival, taking in other performances and socializing, for which Ellington allowed liberal time at this venue. Strayhorn surprised the Shakespeareans with his casual erudition. “I’m not saying I expected him to be unintelligent, but I frankly wasn’t prepared for the depth of his knowledge,” admitted Tom Patterson. “We were with literally the top Shakespeare scholars in the world, and Strayhorn didn’t have a thing to apologize for. His knowledge was very deep.” Under Mary Joliffe’s wing, Strayhorn took in Benjamin Britten’s opera The Turn of the Screw; over drinks at the reception afterward, Strayhorn initiated a discussion contrasting the Britten work with the Henry James story on which it is based. “He was very bookish. He fit right in with that crowd,” said Joliffe. “At the same time, he was extremely cool. He was an incredible dresser.” That evening, Strayhorn wore a pink silk shirt he had had custom-made in Paris, which Joliffe told him she found “lovely.” The next day, he brought one in a gift box to her office. “He told me, ‘Don’t worry. If I really like a shirt, I always buy two,’” said Joliffe.
Strayhorn was so comfortable at Stratford that he wanted to perform there. “He was very eager to play piano at the festival,” said Patterson. “We talked about it, but it j
ust couldn’t be arranged for that particular year. The program was completely arranged and very tightly scheduled.” Instead, Strayhorn watched from backstage as the Ellington Orchestra performed Such Sweet Thunder, the climax of the festival. Paul Gonsalves was wrapping up the furious tenor-saxophone improvisation designed as the piece’s finale—titled “Circle of Fourths,” the last movement seems to climb ever higher by using intervals of fourths (supposedly representing the four dimensions of Shakespeare’s work: tragedy, comedy, history, and the sonnets) in one major key after another—when Ellington waved for Strayhorn to come out front. Gliding up from the piano bench and over to center stage, Ellington kept his eyes on Gonsalves and pumped his fist, the “Keep rolling” signal. Strayhorn sat at the piano. Back to the audience, Ellington raised both hands up to his shoulders—“Finale”—and the orchestra burst into the piece’s final chord. His hands slashed downward, the chord clipped short, and Ellington pointed to Strayhorn, who moved the index finger of his right hand above the fifth-octave C and lowered it onto the key to a roar of laughs and applause. “Billy Strayhorn, ladies and gentlemen!” boomed Ellington. “Billy Strayhorn!”