by David Hajdu
The one-day session, conducted at the RCA Records studios in Manhattan on April 14, yielded seven blowing-session numbers: five standards and two originals attributed jointly to Hodges and Strayhorn. Both of the new pieces, “Cue’s Blue Now” and “Watch Your Cue,” were jam-opportunity riffs entitled in honor of Hodges’s wife, who nevertheless saw the project as short of a high point for either Hodges or Strayhorn. “I don’t think Billy put very much into it. It was more like Johnny’s kind of record,” she said. Since Hodges was under contract with Norman Granz to record exclusively for Verve Records, Dance found himself prohibited from releasing the album under Hodges’s name. As an out, he titled it Cue for Saxophone, a hint at the featured player’s identity, and issued the record in the name of Billy Strayhorn’s Septet. “Billy didn’t care,” said Dance. Indeed, as Jackson explained, Strayhorn seemed to exert a minimum of creative effort on the project. “He showed up late, and he didn’t have anything planned,” said Jackson. “He knocked off whatever arrangements we used off the top of his head. He didn’t seem to give much of a damn, and the thing had his name on it. It was sad, man. This great musician, and this record had his name on it—there were songs there with his name on them—and he didn’t give a damn about it.” Nonetheless, the Hot Club de France, a society of French jazz professionals, fans, and scholars, awarded the album its Grand Prix du Disque de Jazz pour Petit Orchestre, an honor likely influenced, at least in part, by Strayhorn’s reputation in Paris.
“I said, ‘Hey, Strays, isn’t this something, man? All those things you did for Duke, and all the people think Duke did ’em? And here there’s finally a record with your own name on it, and it’s really Rab’s! Isn’t that something?’ And Billy said, ‘Oh yes, Oliver. I’m sure there’ll be an uprising.’ Man, he didn’t think nobody cared. The way he said that—‘I’m sure there’ll be an uprising’—it hit me like a brick. His own name didn’t mean nothing to him no more. Like, fuck it—nobody cares. Why should I?”
Jackson and Strayhorn, who lived only a few blocks from each other, became friendly after recording Cue for Saxophone. The father of two young daughters, Jackson liked to walk with his children through Riverside Park, a strip of playgrounds, blacktop paths, and greenery along the Hudson River, where he’d sometimes find Strayhorn on a park bench, writing music or reading the New York Times. “I’d sit on the bench with him, and we’d talk while the kids were playing,” recalled Jackson. “I’d love that. We would talk about current events, the problems in the world. We would talk about music, music and dance, music and singing, music and drums. He had a lot of thoughts about drums and harmony, how the sounds of the drums at each point should complement the instrumentation and colors of the band. One day I saw him in the park with a big sheet of music paper, and I asked him what he was writing. He said, ‘Oh, something for strings.’ I said, ‘What?’ And he said, ‘Oh, just something for myself. Just for me.’ I looked down at the music paper, and it was a complete orchestral score. He was writing a symphonic piece right there in his head, sitting in the park. Another time, he would be stone-drunk, sitting on the same park bench smoking cigarettes. Ten, eleven in the morning. The kids and I would just be going out, and he looked like he hadn’t been home yet from the night before. I’d see him from a distance, and I never knew what I would find that day.”
Before Cue for Saxophone made the record stores in the spring of 1960, another album preempted it as the first full-length LP bearing Billy Strayhorn’s name. It wasn’t, however, a genuine Strayhorn solo project. Titled Billy Strayhorn/Live!!!, the Roulette Records release was a recording of the Ellington Orchestra in performance at the Blue Note in Chicago on August 9, 1959, with Ellington leading the band and playing the piano. According to the unsigned liner notes, “Billy has no intentions of leading a band on a permanent basis, but on this album he took the nucleus of Duke’s great band and went into the Blue Note.” In truth, Strayhorn had had no involvement with Billy Strayhorn/Live!!! other than being the composer of one of the record’s eight selections (“Passion Flower”) and arranger of several others (including the pop songs “All of Me” and “On the Sunny Side of the Street”). As with Stanley Dance and his Hodges record, Roulette found that Ellington’s contract with Columbia Records prohibited the company from using the bandleader’s name. “So they put Strayhorn’s name on it,” said Teo Macero, one of Ellington’s three principal producers at Columbia. “Technically, they didn’t need permission, not even from Billy, because Billy didn’t have a record contract with anybody.” Though legal, the move raised obvious ethical questions: How did Billy Strayhorn feel about it? Did he consider his own identity interchangeable with that of Duke Ellington? “The two records came out just a little while apart—our studio record and the live one—and we talked about it,” said Oliver Jackson. “Billy said, ‘Oliver, haven’t you heard? Duke and I have changed jobs. I’ve taken over the orchestra, and Duke is writing the music.’ That was the only answer you’d get out of him. He had the greatest poker face in the world, you know. It was impossible to figure out how Billy Strayhorn really felt. That was all he would say on the subject, this joke—he and Duke had changed jobs. So I said, ‘Oh. There’s gonna be an uprising.’ And we laughed our fool heads off. My kids were staring at us. I thought we were both going to piss in our pants right there in Riverside Park.”
At home, meanwhile, Goldberg finally pushed Strayhorn’s tolerance to its limit. He had met someone new, a young black artist (from western Pennsylvania, like Strayhorn) whom he was seeing surreptitiously while leaving signals in a trail evidently intended for discovery—and conflict. “Goldie had the sensitivity of a shark,” said Talley Beatty, who had dinner with Strayhorn at the Flash Inn several times (and once at the West 106th Street apartment, accompanied by choreographer Alvin Ailey) in the final weeks of the year. Beatty was developing a dance piece using recorded works by Ellington and Strayhorn. (Its music drawn primarily from the Ellington catalog, the work would take form several years later as Road of the Phoebe Snow, named for the Lackawanna Railroad line where Beatty set this ballet of love, suicide, rape, and gang violence; it would premiere, to critical acclaim, at the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park in the last week of August 1964.) “Billy couldn’t take any more shit from Goldie anymore. That was it,” said Beatty. “Goldie didn’t have to do it that way. He found some young boy and carried on behind Billy’s back but arranged it so Billy would find him out. Little hints and weak excuses, bad lies. He was just hurting him. Goldie really knew how to be hurtful.” Before Thanksgiving, Goldberg moved out of the apartment. He took most of the kitchen supplies, a painting by Felrath Hines, and the contents of the liquor cabinet.
Seeking comfort in the constancy of home and family, Strayhorn made an extended visit to Pittsburgh, staying at his parents’ house through New Year’s 1960. George Greenlee and his brother Bluford were driving and offered Strayhorn a ride. The trip was always long, at least nine hours along the two-lane roads that curl and drip around the Tuscarora Mountains, and half again as long in the kind of snowstorm the Greenlees and Strayhorn found themselves burrowing into. Strayhorn, in the back seat, mixed cocktails with his briefcase kit. George Greenlee drove until the car was thoroughly cocooned in ice; the windshield wipers polished a thickening coat of crystal. “I said, ‘I can’t drive anymore. We’re not going to make it,’” he recalled. “We pulled over and stopped the car. I turned to Billy, and he was sitting there with a drink. I said, ‘Wait a minute—alcohol! We can use the booze and deice the windshield.’ Billy said, ‘You must be joking.’ He was horrified. I said, ‘No, that’ll do it. Lemme have the booze. I’ll go out and pour it on the windshield, and we should be okay. We can’t just sit here all night.’ Billy said, ‘Oh, don’t be dramatic. Let’s just wait a while. The storm will stop.’ He thought we could just sit there and sip our drinks and everything would be fine. I reached back and started to grab the bottle. Billy said, ‘Oh, don’t grab. Here, take it!’ He handed the bottle over to me
; I think it was scotch. Good scotch, I think Johnny Walker Black. I went out and poured it on the windshield, and it worked like a charm. But Billy was mad as hell. We drove along, about one mile an hour, and kept looking out the window for a liquor store. When we finally found one, he said, ‘Stop! Stop! Stop!’ and he went out in the storm and bought two bottles—another bottle of Johnny Black and something cheap in case of emergency.”
Safe in Pittsburgh, nearly twenty-four hours after leaving New York, Strayhorn found change: his nieces and nephews numbered twenty-three now. Johnny and his wife, Susan, had David, Kenneth, John, Douglas, Darryl, and Linda; Jimmy and his wife, Helen, had Helen, Carole, James, Lawrence, Donna, William, and Deborah; Georgia and Robert Conaway had Adrienne, Cheryll, Michael, and the twins Keith and Kevin (both mentally handicapped), in addition to Georgia’s sons Gregory and Albert from her first marriage, to Albert Morris; and Lillian and her husband, Jesse, had Leslie, Gary, and Galen. (Teddy was still a bachelor, and he was drinking hard.) There was decrement: Georgia and Robert had recently separated, Georgia moving somewhere in surburban New Jersey, where she was living with friends. And, at the center, equilibrium: Lillian and James, their anger dissipated and their bodies tired, rested together in a benign union of acceptance.
* * *
Duke Ellington kept touring as always, fielding pitches on the phones backstage to appear at jazz festivals sprouting up all over the country in Newport’s image. For the upcoming summer of 1960, the Duke Ellington Orchestra was booked to appear at seven festivals, including the Saugatuck Jazz Festival in Michigan, the Randalls Island Jazz Festival in New York, the Quaker City Jazz Festival in Philadelphia, and the Monterey Jazz Festival in California. Promoters of the highest-profile and best-paying festivals, such as Jimmy Lyons of Monterey, solicited Ellington to premiere long-form compositions befitting Ellington’s standing as a composer and, by association, the stature of their festivals. Ellington acceded discriminatively, accepting one “commission” in early spring of 1960 to compose a piece for the Monterey event to be conducted that September. (Though Lyons did not compensate Ellington for the composition per se, the value of the premiere was factored into the fee for the orchestra’s appearance, according to Lyons.) “Ellington and Strayhorn talked the thing over,” said Lyons, “and Duke said, ‘Jimmy, Billy has a wonderful idea. We’ll compose a new suite inspired by the John Steinbeck book.’ He meant Sweet Thursday, which deals with our area. Billy knew about it and had read it, so that’s what they decided to do.” In mid-March, Strayhorn flew to Las Vegas, where Ellington was playing a twelve-week engagement (doubled, by demand, from a planned six weeks) at the Starlight Lounge in the Riviera Hotel and where Irving Townsend of Columbia was due to discuss prospective recording projects, including the Steinbeck piece. There was little work for Strayhorn. “He and Duke did some talking about the music they were going to do for Monterey,” recalled the bassist Jimmy Woode, “but the festival was so far off that they didn’t apply themselves to it excessively. We decided to have a contest—Strayhorn, Gonsalves, myself, and a few others at first, but they dropped out early. We wanted to see if any of us could outdrink Strayhorn. We identified him as the epitome, of course. The rest of us could only aspire to approach his ability.” The competition went on for three straight days and two nights, unimpeded by sleep or intervention by Ellington. Gonsalves and Woode broke away only to work, playing four shows over two evenings in the midst of their drinking heat. They stopped to eat each day, and on the third afternoon lunched at the Riviera coffee shop, where Woode watched Strayhorn slowly slide down the front of his banquette seat and under the table. Benevolent in victory, Woode and Gonsalves spun a few chairs around and slid the backs against the tabletop, devising a nest for their friend to rest on the floor, and they asked the waitress to leave Strayhorn alone, kindly, until he awoke.
When Irving Townsend arrived from Columbia’s Los Angeles office, he joined Ellington for steaks at the Riviera with Strayhorn (who was rested), the orchestra’s road manager, Al Celley, and band members Harry Carney, Ray Nance, and Jimmy Hamilton, along with a couple of female guests. Townsend was eager to issue an attention-grabbing new addition to the Ellington catalog but seemed only halfheartedly responsive to the Steinbeck project, as Hamilton observed. “Duke told Billy to speak up. ‘Strayhorn, why don’t you explain your latest idea? It’s quite an idea,’” Hamilton recalled. “That’s when Billy told everybody about The Nutcracker Suite, which we did in the band shortly after that. Billy had a way with words when he talked. He talked that thing up. That’s when it was decided, there, that we would do it, The Nutcracker Suite.” The notion was to adapt Tchaikovsky’s ballet score for jazz orchestra, a venturesome project that appealed to Strayhorn, Ellington, and Townsend alike: it could rekindle the conservatory-trained collaborator’s youthful passion for classicism (and, in the process, enliven his spirits) while heightening Ellington’s stature and, perhaps, expanding his audience. The link to a nineteenth-century Russian composer would enhance not only Ellington but also his favorite concert form, the suite; one of the most beloved works of one of the world’s most popular orchestral composers is a group of tuneful dance pieces, just like what Duke Ellington wrote (often with Billy Strayhorn). Jazz composers and arrangers had long drawn from classical sources, of course. Ellington himself had vamped on Franz Liszt’s second Hungarian Rhapsody in his version of Arthur Johnston and Sam Coslow’s “Ebony Rhapsody” in the Rape of the Rhapsody segment of the 1934 Paramount movie Murder at the Vanities (an Ellington performance that Strayhorn said inspired him as a young man in Pittsburgh); indeed, the swing bandleader Larry Clinton had recorded “jazzed-up” versions of a few movements of the Nutcracker in 1940. Still, the task of rethinking a complete long-form classical masterwork in a new idiom remained a formidable challenge. “It was a struggle,” said Strayhorn; with Townsend’s support, he dove into the jazz Nutcracker in New York, consulting with Ellington by phone. “It’s always a struggle, you know, to present someone of the stature of Peter Ilych Tchaikovsky and adapting it to our flavor without distorting him. It entailed a lot of conversation. Long-distance calls back and forth between New York and California and records, listening to the actual, the way that the originals were actually played and discussions and this and that and the other. Tchaikovsky wasn’t available. Actually, it sort of felt like we were talking to him, because we didn’t want him turning over any more than he already was.” Strayhorn reveled in his chimerical company and applied himself to their collaboration with much of his old zeal. “Doing the Tchaikovsky suite was like a tonic,” said Marian Logan, who spent most of one weekend in her apartment watching Strayhorn write, hum, whistle, and occasionally dance a few steps to the emerging music. “It was a beautiful springtime, but you would have thought it was Christmas, he was carrying on so with that Nutcracker. He loved that so. I said, ‘Bitty, you were born at the wrong time. I think you’re really an old Russian.’ ‘Oh really? Do you really think so?’ I said, ‘Well, you’re certainly acting like one.’ Strays said, ‘Well, then, I think I should have a vodka.’ And he did. We toasted Tchaikovsky and had a grand old time. But he really worked on that music. He loved doing that music.” According to Logan, “Strays liked to have a collaborator. He liked somebody to hide behind. Now he had the greatest collaborator of them all, a dead man. Duke was always removed—he was never around, and when he was, he never told Strays what to do—but he was still there.” Obscured by shadow over shadow, Tchaikovsky’s over Ellington’s, Strayhorn busied himself in security.
He took a flight to Columbia’s Radio Recorders studio in Los Angeles and, working closely with Ellington, began recording on June 3, ten days after the Ellington Orchestra concluded its Las Vegas run; the sessions were animated. “Billy was very, very greatly involved in the recording,” recalled Jimmy Hamilton. “He had quite a few unusual ideas all prepared for us, and we had to do them very exactly. [Russell] Procope was supposed to play this strange little bamboo whistle. [Juan]
Tizol played the tambourine. It was his ideas, and everybody was very happy with the results—I mean, Duke and everybody who was involved.” Indeed, in an unprecedented demonstration of the project’s debt to Strayhorn, Irving Townsend decided to feature him prominently on all the album credits and artwork, commissioning the photojournalist Gordon Parks to do the photography. “The record company told me this was a collaboration between Billy and Duke—and Tchaikovsky—and I tried to capture the uniqueness of that partnership, Billy and Duke’s,” said Parks, whose cover portrait of Ellington and Strayhorn does evoke partnership, although something less than collaborative equality: Ellington and Strayhorn wear identical clothing (white polo-style sweaters casually unbuttoned at the neck); Ellington, his chin resting suavely on the knuckles of his left hand, gazes squarely into the lens, while Strayhorn, snuggling body-to-body behind Ellington, his head nodding forward and his eyes heavy, peers at the ground.*