Because Duke likes peace and repose, he tries to avoid the endless controversies that go on in the world of jazz. The followers of jazz cannot even agree on the fundamental point of what it is. To keep out of this dispute in particular, Duke frequently says, when people try to pin him down, “I don’t write jazz. I write Negro folk music.” There are those who insist that the only “righteous jazz,” as they call it, is performed by bands of no more than six or seven men whose music is as spontaneous, unpremeditated, and unrehearsed as that of Shelley’s skylark. Yet the very aficionados who insist that all real jazz is improvised and that all the solos must be impromptu often claim that Duke’s artistry is the genuine, blown-in-the-bottle stuff, brushing aside his own statement that almost all the music his seventeen-piece band plays has been scored. Partly because of this bickering, Ellington always feels that he has found sanctuary when he boards a train. He says that then peace descends upon him and that the train’s metallic rhythm soothes him. He likes to hear the whistle up ahead, particularly at night, when it screeches through the blackness as the train gathers speed. “Specially in the South,” he says. “There the firemen play blues on the engine whistle—big, smeary things like a goddam woman singing in the night.” He likes, too, to sit next to the window, his chin in his hand, and, in a trancelike state, to stare for hours at the telephone poles flashing by and at the pattern of the curving wires as they alternately drop and ascend. Even at night, particularly if his train is passing through certain sections of Ohio or Indiana, he will remain at the window (shifting to the smoker if the berths are made up), for he likes the flames of the steel furnaces. “I think of music sometimes in terms of color,” he says, “and I like to see the flames licking yellow in the dark and then pulsing down to a kind of red glow.” Duke has a theory that such sights stimulate composition. “The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician,” he says. “Things like the old folks singing in the moonlight in the back yard on a hot night, or something someone said long ago. I remember I once wrote a sixty-four-bar piece about a memory of when I was a little boy in bed and heard a man whistling on the street outside, his footsteps echoing away. Things like these may be more important to a musician than technique.”
Perhaps Duke will still be awake at three in the morning, when his train stops for fifteen minutes at a junction. If there is an all-night lunchroom, he will get off the train, straddle a stool, his Burberry topcoat sagging like a surplice, a pearl-gray fedora on the back of his head, and direct the waitress in the creation of an Ellington dessert. The composition of an Ellington dessert depends upon the materials available. If, as is often the case, there is a stale mess of sliced oranges and grapefruit floating in juice at the bottom of a pan, he will accept it as a base. To this he will have the girl add some applesauce, a whole package of Fig Newtons, a dab of ice cream, and a cup of custard. When Duke is back on the train, Boyd, who has stayed up for the purpose, will beg him to go to bed, if they are on a sleeper, or to take a nap, if the band is travelling by day coach, as is often necessary in wartime. Ellington not infrequently takes out a pad of music-manuscript paper, fishes in his pockets for the stub of a lead pencil, and begins composing, and Boyd departs, complaining to the world that “Ellington is a hard man to get to bed and a harder man to get out of it.” Frowning, his hat on the back of his head, swaying from side to side with the motion of the car, occasionally sucking his pencil and trying to write firmly despite the bouncing of the train, humming experimentally, America’s latter-day Bach will work the night through.
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Boyd tries to arrange things so that the band will arrive at its destination at about six or seven in the evening, making it possible for Duke to sleep an hour or two before the night’s engagement. If the town is in the North, Ellington can occasionally get into a hotel, since his name is well and favorably known, but the other members of the band have to scurry around the Negro section of the town, if there is one, and make their own arrangements for lodgings. Usually they can get rooms in the households of amiable colored citizens, and if they can’t do that they often pass the time in some public place like a railway station or a city hall. Most dances begin at nine and run until two in the morning. On dance nights, Boyd has an assignment that almost tears him in two. He is supposed to “stand on the door” and check the number of admissions to the dance, but he is also supposed to have Duke awake and at the dance hall. At about eight-thirty, after a half hour’s futile effort to rouse his boss, he is in a frenzy. Then, with the strength of desperation—Boyd is a small man and Duke is six feet tall and weighs two hundred and ten pounds—he props the unconscious band leader in a sitting position on the edge of his bed and, grabbing his arms, pulls him out of bed and onto his feet and walks him across the floor. This usually restores a degree of consciousness, which slowly spreads through the rest of Ellington’s system. At this point, Boyd tears off to the dance hall, leaving some hanger-on behind to see that Ellington does not go to sleep again.
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In general, or so its members like to think, the more exhausted the Ellington band is, the better it plays. Ordinarily, the tempo at the beginning of a dance is rather slow; both players and dancers have to warm up to their interdependent climax. By midnight both are in their stride. Then the trumpets screech upward in waves, sometimes providing a background for a solo, soft and sensuous, by tough little Johnny Hodges, alto saxophonist, who advances toward the front of the stage threateningly and who holds his instrument as if it were a machine gun with which he was about to spray the crowd. Johnny is fond of addressing his fans as “Bub” or “Bubber” when they come up to talk to him at a dance. Junior Raglin’s bass fiddle beats dully, like a giant pulse. Junior’s eyes are closed and his face is screwed up as if he were in pain. Duke’s face is dominated by an absorbed, sensual scowl as he plays his piano. Sonny Greer, a cigarette waggling before an impassive face, jounces up and down on his stool so hard that he seems to be on a galloping horse, and Rex Stewart, as the night advances, becomes progressively more cocky and springy as he takes his solos. Sometimes the excitement among the dancers reaches a pitch that threatens literally to bring down the house. Two years ago, a dance in a hall in Arkansas was stopped when the floor began to collapse under the feet of the jitterbugs, and five years ago, in Bluefield, West Virginia, so many people crowded about Duke on the stage that it caved in, fortunately without casualties. Almost always a group of serious thinkers who attend these affairs just for the music and not for the dancing gather before the bandstand in front of Duke and make profound comments. “The guy is really deep here,” one will say, over the howling of the jitterbugs. Another will murmur, “Terrific mood, terrific content, terrific musicianship.” Prim little colored girls sitting along the wall with their mammas—many of Duke’s dances in the North are attended by both Negroes and white people—will get up and really throw it around when they are asked to dance, and then will return demurely to their mammas. The serious thinkers disapprove of the jitterbug and his activities, but Duke says, “If they’d been told it was a Balkan folk dance, they’d think it was wonderful.” Every now and then there is a wail from Tricky Sam Nanton’s trombone, a sad wa-wa melody which sometimes sounds like an infant crying, sometimes like the bubbly, inane laugh of an idiot, and sometimes like someone calling for help. Sam says, “It’s a sad tale with a little mirth. When I play it, I think of a man in a dungeon calling out a cell window.” Usually a dance ends peacefully, but more than once, in the Southwest, cowboys have brought the festivities to an abrupt ending by firing their guns at the ceiling. On such occasions, the band gets off the stage in a hurry, which is probably a good idea. Once in a while, in the South, a gentleman draws a gun and insists that the band play only his favorite tunes. Unpleasantness, however, is not confined to regions below the Mason-Dixon line. During prohibition, a group of gangsters tried to shake Duke down when he was in Chicago. They presented their demand to Sam Fleischnick, who was then Duke’s road manager
. Fleischnick refused. “All our boys carry guns,” he told the gangsters. “If you want to shoot it out, we’ll shoot it out.” Ellington considered getting out of town when he heard of Fleischnick’s declaration of war against the gang, but he finally solved the problem in more sensible fashion. He telephoned the influential owner of a New York night club where Duke and his band once had played and the owner arranged for Ellington to have the freedom of Chicago without cost.
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There are times when Duke Ellington exudes such calm contentment that a colleague, under the influence of the benign radiation, once murmured drowsily, “Duke make me sleepy, like rain on the roof.” His nerves and laughter are so loose and easy that members of his jazz band believe that they got that way because of his physical makeup rather than because of the quality of his spirit. “His pulse is so low he can’t get excited,” they explain. “His heart beat slower than an ordinary man’s.” Only something in the flow of the blood, they are sure, could explain a calm that has survived twenty-three years in the band business—years in which Duke and his seventeen-piece band have again and again clattered on tour from one end of the country to the other. Duke believes that his calm is an acquired characteristic, attained through practice, but whether acquired or inborn, it is his monumental placidity, which is only occasionally shattered, that enables Duke to compose much of his music in an atmosphere of strident confusion. Most composers, alone with their souls and their grand pianos, regard composition as a private activity. Often, when Duke is working out the details of a composition or an arrangement, the sixteen other members of his band not only are present but may even participate, and the occasion sometimes sounds like a political convention, sometimes like a zoo at feeding time. Ordinarily, Duke completes the melody and the basic arrangement of a composition before he tries it out on the band at a rehearsal; then, as he polishes, or “sets,” the arrangement, he is likely to let the men in the band make suggestions in a creative free-for-all that has no counterpart anywhere in the world of jazz or classical music. Perhaps a musician will get up and say, “No, Duke! It just can’t be that way!,” and demonstrate on his instrument his conception of the phrase or bar under consideration. Often, too, this idea may outrage a colleague, who replies on his instrument with his conception, and the two players argue back and forth not with words but with blasts from trumpet or trombone. Duke will resolve the debate by sitting down at his piano, perhaps taking something from each suggestion, perhaps modifying and reconciling the ideas of the two men, but always putting the Ellington stamp on the music before passing on to the next part of the work in progress. Duke sometimes quotes Bach. “As Bach says,” he may remark, speaking about piano playing, “if you ain’t got a left hand, you ain’t worth a hoot in hell.”
The band rarely works out an entire arrangement collectively, but when it does, the phenomenon is something that makes other musicians marvel. This collective arranging may take place anywhere—in a dance hall in Gary, Indiana, in an empty theatre in Mobile, or in a Broadway night club. It will usually be after a performance, at about three in the morning. Duke, sitting at his piano and facing his band, will play a new melody, perhaps, or possibly just an idea consisting of only eight bars. After playing the eight bars, he may say, “Now this is sad. It’s about one guy sitting alone in his room in Harlem. He’s waiting for his chick, but she doesn’t show. He’s got everything fixed for her.” Duke sounds intent and absorbed. His tired band begins to sympathize with the waiting man in Harlem. “Two glasses of whiskey are on his little dresser before his bed,” Duke says, and again plays the eight bars, which will be full of weird and mournful chords. Then he goes on to eight new bars. “He has one of those blue lights turned on in the gloom of his room,” Duke says softly, “and he has a little pot of incense so it will smell nice for the chick.” Again he plays the mournful chords, developing his melody. “But she doesn’t show,” he says, “she doesn’t show. The guy just sits there, maybe an hour, hunched over on his bed, all alone.” The melody is finished and it is time to work out an arrangement for it. Lawrence Brown rises with his trombone and gives out a compact, warm phrase. Duke shakes his head. “Lawrence, I want something like the treatment you gave in ‘Awful Sad,’ ” he says. Brown amends his suggestion and in turn is amended by Tricky Sam Nanton, also a trombone, who puts a smear and a wa-wa lament on the phrase suggested by Brown. Juan Tizol, a third trombone, says, “I’d like to see a little retard on it.” Duke may incorporate some variation of one of the suggestions. Then he’ll say, “Come on, you guys. Get sincere. Come on down here, Floor Show”—he is addressing Ray Nance—“and talk to me with your trumpet.” In a moment or so the air is hideous as trombone and clarinet, saxophone and trumpet clash, their players simultaneously trying variations on the theme. Johnny Hodges suggests a bar on his alto saxophone, serpentine, firm, and ingratiating, and tied closely to Duke’s theme. Harry Carney, baritone sax, may say it is too virtuoso for the whole sax section and clean it up a little, making it simpler. “Come on, you guys. Let’s play so far,” Duke says. As the band plays in unison, the players stimulate one another and new qualities appear; an experienced ear can hear Rex Stewart, trumpet, take an idea from Brown and embellish it a bit and give it his own twist. Duke raises his hand and the band stops playing. “On that last part—” he says, “trumpets, put a little more top on it, willya?” He turns to Junior Raglin, the scowling bass player, and says, “Tie it way down, Junior, tie it way down.” Again they play, and now the bray of the trumpets becomes bolder and more sure, the trombones more liquid and clearer, the saxophones mellower, and at the bottom there is the steady beat, beat, beat, beat, four to a bar, of the drums, bass, and guitar, and the precise, silvery notes of Ellington on the piano, all of it growing, developing, fitting closer together, until Duke suddenly halts them by shouting, “Too much trombone!” Juan Tizol, a glum white man and the only player in the band who likes to play sweet, complains, “I think it’s too gutbucket for this kind of piece. I’d like it more legit.” He plays a smooth, clear curlicue on his valve trombone. “Well, maybe you’re right,” Duke says, “but I still think that when Sam gets into that plunger part, he should give it some smear.” Again the band begins at the beginning, and as the boys play, Duke calls out directions. “Like old Dusty,” he may say (Dusty is a long-dead jazz musician), and even as he says it the emphasis and shaping will change. Or he may lean forward and say to one man, “Like you did in ‘The Mooche,’ ” or he may shout over to Carney, who doubles on the clarinet, “The clarinet is under Tricky too much!” As the music begins to move along, he shouts, “Get sincere! Give your heart! Let go your soul!” His hands flicker over the keyboard, sometimes coming in close together while he hunches his broad, quivering shoulders, one shoulder twisted higher than the other, an absorbed half-smile upon his face. At a signal from Duke, various players, with the theme now solidly in mind, will get up and take solos. He points at the soloist he wants and raises his right index finger, and as long as the player doesn’t get too far away from the theme, Duke lets him have his way. Perhaps two hours have gone by. The sky is getting gray, but the boys have the feel of the piece and can’t let it alone. They play on and on, their coats off, their hats on the backs of their heads, some with their shoes off, their stocking feet slapping up and down on the floor, their eyes closed, their feet wide apart and braced when they stand for a solo, rearing back as if they could blast farther and better that way. Now Juan Tizol grabs a piece of paper and a pencil and begins to write down the orchestration, while the band is still playing it. Whenever the band stops for a breather, Duke experiments with rich new chords, perhaps adopts them, perhaps rejects, perhaps works out a piano solo that fits, clear and rippling, into little slots of silence, while the brass and reeds talk back and forth. By the time Tizol has finished getting the orchestration down on paper, it is already out of date. The men begin to play again, and then someone may shout “How about that train?” and there is a rush for a train that w
ill carry the band to another engagement.
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Duke likes trains because, as he says, “Folks can’t rush you until you get off.” He likes them, too, because dining-car waiters know about his love for food and he is apt to get very special attention. His journeys are punctuated by people who shove bits of paper at him for his autograph. Not long ago, travelling between Cleveland and Pittsburgh on a day coach, a German refugee with sad, weak blue eyes who had once played chamber music in Stuttgart sat down next to Duke and asked him for his autograph, and the two men got into conversation. A friend of Duke’s with a historical turn of mind happened to be along on the trip and took notes on what the two men said. The refugee knew little about jazz, but he did know that Stokowski, Stravinsky, and Milhaud had described Ellington as one of the greatest modern composers.
The 40s: The Story of a Decade Page 49