© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.
Few writers have depicted Ellington and his world as vividly as Richard 0. Boyer in "The Hot Bach," a three-part profile published in The New Yorker during the summer of 1944. ]Source: Richard O Boyer, "The Hot Bach-1," The New Yorker (24 June 1944), 30-34, 37-36,40,42, 44; "The Hot Bach-2," The New Yorker (1 July 1944), 26-32. 34; "The Hot Bach-3," The New Yorker (8 July 1944), 26-31].
Boyer not only interviewed Ellington extensively but traveled with the orchestra, observed rehearsals and performances, spoke with musicians, and jotted down overheard conversations. (In the text Boyer refers to himself as the "Boswellian friend of Duke's" and "friend with a historical turn of mind.")
The result is a richly textured, candid portrait of Ellington offstage, out of the public eye.
Boyer deftly captures the group spirit of Ellington's musicians on the road, showing their extraordinary resilience in the face of monotony, physical discomfort, and racial discrimination. He highlights the important supporting roles played by Ellington's road manager Jack Boyd, his valet Richard Bowden Jones ("Jonesy"), and especially his writing partner Billy Strayhorn. Boyer's expert touch with description and dialogue brings to life scenes rarely observed by outsiders, such as activities before and after a typical dance job, and the collective working-out of a new piece in the middle of the night,
In this "jumpy atmosphere," as Boyer calls it, Ellington forms the calm center-patiently enduring a myriad of distractions, steadily making art out of chaos.
An abridged version of the article was included in Peter Gammond's Duke Ellington: His Life and Music (1958). Following is the complete text.
Remember, as you read this that it was written from the perspective of a racial context in 1944 America and does not reflect any of today’s sensibilities on the subject of race.
“Duke Ellington and the sixteen other men in his jazz band are rather surprised at the research that has been expended on bringing to light the drunks, hangovers, and frolics of their youth. The research has been done by earnest historians who are eager to determine the precise connection between dissipation and the creation of art. It is a source of mild regret to Duke and his colleagues that their escapades simply did not have that purple extravagance which is supposedly in the best tradition of jazz. Try as they would, Hugues Panassie, the French critic, and Robert Coffin, the Belgian critic, could not discover about Ellington and his band anything to match the attractive degeneracy of Buddy Bolden, a famous early cornettist and the Paul Bunyan of the jazz world, who kept himself so busy with the ladies that he had little time left for music, or of Leon Rappolo, an early clarinetist, who became insane from smoking marijuana, or even anything to equal the career of Bix Beiderbecke, another famous cornetist, who died in 1931 of drink.
Ellington is apologetic. He feels that if he had only known years ago the artistic importance of his infrequent sprees he would have paid more attention to them and remembered more for posterity. He regrets that he did not know at the time that his befuddlement was the stuff of history. He can dredge up little for the archives, "I should have kept a diary," he says.
Ellington is also surprised at critics who claim in columns of rococo prose that jazz is the American equivalent of the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome. A few weeks ago such a critique was read to Duke, a tall, broad, coffee-colored man of forty-five, as he lolled on a cot in his dressing room at the Hurricane, a Broadway night club in which he and his band were playing an engagement. The author maintained that when New York is but a memory, or at best a forest of rusty steel ascending to a quiet sky, the perceptive archaeologist will be able to recreate American civilization if he is fortunate enough to find one Ellington record amid the deserted ruins. In the record's pulsing rhythms, the article said, he will hear the throb of long-stilled traffic, see the flash of neon signs, get some suggestion of the subway, and will understand, when a solo soars above the theme and then sinks back again, how the individual of the vanished past yearned for the stars but was limited to a banal earth. Duke listened impatiently. When the final sentence had been read, he said, "I don't know. There may be something to it. But it seems to me such talk stinks up the place."
In the field of jazz there is an exceptionally wide discrepancy between the art as practiced and the art as the writers write about it. The performers sweat, and may even rehearse, for every effect they get. The writers say that their music is as effortless as a bird's. The performers devote their lives to developing their technique. The writers present them as simple children of nature who blow their primitive souls out through their horns. The performers, most of whom spent the era of prohibition working in night clubs, know the world not only in terms of music but in terms of Mickey Finns and bouncers. The writers, who consider themselves intellectuals, range all the way from surrealist poets in Paris to Yale graduates on Fortune.
Negro jazz musicians, who have found it best to take no part in the peculiar caprices of a white world, usually have nothing to say when they are told that there is a difference of opinion about whether they were the first surrealists, as is maintained in France. They view such assertions as just one more example of an inexplicable order which simultaneously gives them adoration and Jim Crow. They find it hard to reconcile life deep in the heart of Texas, where they must say "Yassuh, Boss," and life in Paris, where they have been told they are comparable to Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. During a European tour of the Ellington band, the conductor of a Paris symphony orchestra once bowed to Johnny Hodges on the street and respectfully asked him for an explanation of his artistry on the alto saxophone. "I just lucked up on it, Bubber, I just lucked up on it," Johnny told him. The conductor, writing about the incident later, said, "It is a unique experience to stand before this black boy, and upon asking him to explain his amazing virtuosity, to be told, 'I just lucked up on it, Bubber.'" Duke himself got into the spirit of things when he was asked, in London, in 1933, "What is hot?" He replied, "Hot is a part of music, just as the root is part of a tree and the twigs and the leaves and the trunk. Hot is to music as a root, a trunk, a twig, a leaf is to a tree."
Despite Duke's own doubts, it is possible that the archaeologist of the future may be able to reconstruct something of the present from Ellington's music, if as is arguable, a composer's music does to some extent reflect his environment. For Duke's environment has been as American as a Model T Ford and, in a sense, as standardized. He spent his boyhood on the swarming tenement pavements in Washington, D.C., and his first job was jerking soda. He liked the pavements, and to this day he has an aversion to green because it reminds him of grass. "When I was eight," he says, "I decided that grass was unnatural. It always makes me feel sort of creepy. It reminds me of graves." From his early youth his days and nights have been spent, for the most part, far from grass, in cafes, cabarets, speakeasies, night clubs, drugstores, all-night lunch stands, hotel lobbies, railway depots, day coaches, subways, dance halls, movie theatres, dressing rooms, pool rooms, taxis, and buses. Duke sometimes says, "I've had three educations —the street corner, going to school, and the Bible. The Bible is most important. It taught me to look at a man's insides instead of the cut of his suit."
Duke sometimes thinks that it is good business to conceal his interest in the Bible, just as he conceals his interest in American Negro history. He doubts if it adds to his popularity in Arkansas, say, to have it known that in books he has read about Negro slave revolts he has heavily underlined paragraphs about the exploits of Nat Turner and Denmark Vesey. In public he usually sets his beige-colored face in a grin as wide as possible. He claims that the flashiness of his clothes is not self-gratification but rather a selfless effort to play up to the role the public expects him to assume, a claim his friends don't take too seriously. He has two general modes of dress — one for the public, which a member of his band has described as "very sharp and fly," one for rehearsing or composing. At work, he likes to wear a cheap hat, the brim turned up all around, a sports shirt without a tie, the points of the collar long enough to reach almost to his chest, brown suede shoes, a blue or maroon pullover sweater, and a sports suit so tailored that it makes him look slender.
When he is leading his band at rehearsal, his expression varies between a grin, a pouty sleepiness in which every muscle droops and sags, and a fey daintiness. In this last mood he arches his eyebrows and has a coy look that is meant to be a silent appeal to his band for a delicate musical effect. As he plays the piano, his expression is often one of quizzical pleasure, as if he is surprised and delighted by the sounds he creates. "I really get wrapped up in it," Duke says. There are times when Duke laughs naturally and exuberantly; for example, when the boys in the band, sitting around a dressing room, are competing to see who can whistle the lowest note. "I knock myself out," he says. Then he truly seems the simple Afro-American without a care in the world. New acquaintances are always surprised when they learn that Duke has written poetry in which he advances the thesis that the rhythm of jazz has been beaten into the Negro race by three centuries of oppression. The four beats to a bar in jazz are also found, he maintains in verse, in the Negro pulse. Duke doesn't like to show people his poetry. "You can say anything you want on the trombone, but you gotta be careful with words," he explains.
Duke was born in Washington, in 1899, when Buddy Bolden was sounding on his cornet those uncouth notes which historians say were the beginning of jazz. While the new music moved slowly north from New Orleans, first to St. Louis and Memphis, then spreading out to Chicago, New York, and Europe, Duke was attending public school and, at his mother's instigation, taking lessons on the piano from a woman he insists was named Miss Klinkscale [Marietta Clinkscales]. He was christened Edward Kennedy Ellington, but he has been called Duke since he was twelve, when his elegance and aplomb began to attract the attention of his playmates. His earliest musical memory, he says, goes back to when, at the age of four, he heard his mother playing "The Rosary'' on the piano. "It was so pretty I bust out crying," he says. Duke occasionally speaks of his father as Uncle Ed. This is because Duke, who has only one sister and no brothers, had twenty-eight cousins who were so frequently around the Ellington house that Duke and his sister picked up the name. Duke's father worked for the Navy Department as a blueprint developer. "Uncle Ed sure provided for his family," Duke says. "We didn't want for anything."
When Duke was fifteen, he attended a rent party, which in Washington was called a "hop" or a "shout." The guests paid ten or fifteen cents to their host. On this occasion a man named Lester Dishman was at the piano. "He was terrific — really good," Duke says. "The piano jumped. The air shook. With his left hand he really yum-yummed, while with his right he played intricately woven melodic things. But fast!" After hearing Dishman, Duke went to all the rent parties he could and heard Clarence Bowser, Doc Perry, Louis Brown, Louis Thomas, and other gifted pianists. "Bowser's music was majestic," Ellington recalls. "I used to think, if only I could just get on to that 'Sticky Mack' style of his. They got three, four, five dollars a night. When they played at these shouts, they never had a thought in the world, drinking gin and playing and things getting wild, so that someday serious writers in Europe would investigate them, writing monographs and things.
"Doc Perry," Ellington continues, "taught me to read notes, not just spell 'em out." Duke composed his first piece shortly after hearing Dishman, while he was fifteen. It was during a summer vacation from high school. Duke remembers that he began by moving the family upright into his own room. It had a player attachment, and Duke commenced his studies by slowing down a roll of James P. Johnson playing his own "Carolina Shout." For a week Duke studied the anatomy of "Carolina Shout." "Then I locked myself in my room for two weeks and when I came out I had a shout of my own," Duke says. (A "shout" in this sense is a composition to be played at a rent party.) He had not yet named it a few weeks later when he got a job as a soda jerker in the Poodle Dog Café, an establishment near the Senators' ballpark, and in honor of this event he called it "Soda Fountain Rag." His early admirers thought he had written several shouts, for he played the piece first in blues time, then in waltz time, then straight, and finally what is now known as hot. "They never knew it was the same piece," Duke says.
When the summer was over, Duke returned to high school, from which he graduated in 1917, when he was eighteen. While he was still in school, he got the notion that he might become a designer of advertising posters. He showed a certain amount of painting talent in class and won a scholarship to the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn for the study of commercial art. When the United States entered the first World War and Washington became a boom town, people there were so dance-crazy that jazz bands were in great demand, and Duke decided he could make more money by heading a band than he could as a commercial artist. He never used his scholarship to Pratt.
The first Ellington band consisted of Sonny Greer, a dapper, sporty young fellow who was and still is the drummer; Otto Hardwicke, a mild, dentistry gentleman who played the alto saxophone for Ellington, and still does; Charlie Irvis, trombone, now dead; Elmer Snowden, banjo, who now plays the guitar in another band; Arthur Whetsol, trumpet, now dead; and Duke, piano. Duke enjoys telling how he recruited Sonny, who was greatly admired by Ellington and the other young men in the band because he came from New York. "Sonny was a very fly drummer," Duke says, "but we wanted to be sure that he had really played in Harlem. He was playing in the pit band at the Howard Theatre in Washington and we waited on the street outside to grill him. I take the lead in conversation because I'm sure I'm a killer in my new shepherd's-plaid suit, bought on time. Sonny comes back at us with a line of jive on Harlem that lays us low. So we decide he's O.K. and he comes with the band." Duke was soon clearing as much as two hundred dollars a week. "As a result of prosperity," he says, "everybody in our band at that time became a juice hound, juice meaning any kind of firewater." Otto Hardwicke bought a car which the band called Dupadilly, and when Dupadilly broke down he bought one that was called Dear Me. During the next few years the band played in one small Washington cabaret after another, and in 1923 it moved to New York, where a young man named Bubber Miley replaced Arthur Whetsol. "Bubber was temperamental," Duke recalls. "He liked his liquor. He used to get under the piano and go to sleep any time he felt like it. In fact, all our horn blowers were lushies."
Duke, Sonny, and Otto (who holds that his name should be pronounced as if it were spelled O-toe) like to sit around and recall the golden days of their youth. All three have described in detail every hangover they can remember to those writers who want to believe that the pressure of jazz is so intense that young Negroes take to alcohol and dope in an effort to attain the proper mood to produce their fevered art, but their efforts to satisfy these writers are lame and they know it. Sonny sometimes sums up the distressing normality of their early days in New York by saying, "We scuffled around trying to make a buck, but we had a happy time. That's how it was." Occasionally he says, "Many's the time we split a hot dog six ways—but reluctantly." In a more mellow mood, he insists that they always ate as much as they could hold. "Duke drew people to him like flies to sugar," Sonny says. "Duke would turn on the old charm and then we would all eat." As a matter of fact, the band, which didn't get off to a particularly successful start in New York, lived for three months without visible means of support. They were supported, actually, by a legendary gentleman whom Duke refers to as "Mr. Gunion." "A Mr. Gunion," Duke says, "is any guy who throws his money around. Mr, Gunion supported us while we were spending most of our time hanging around, playing now and then, just for fun, at Harlem places like Mexico's, the Capitol Club, Barren's, and Smalls' Paradise." However, Mr. Gunion's support was precarious and at the end of the three months, Duke, Otto, and Sonny returned to Washington "to fatten up." As Duke, who values his food, recreates this happy occasion, he sounds like a Kentucky colonel remembering mint juleps on the pillared veranda. "We got to Washington on a Sunday morning," he says. "Otto went to his home, because he lived in Washington, and Sonny came home with me. I still remember the smell of hot biscuits when we walked in. There was butter and honey. My mother broiled six mackerel. There was lots of coffee. Uncle Ed got out the old decanter and we lay there drinking corn in the sunshine. It was nice."
The band reassembled in New York when they got news of a job at a place called the Hollywood Club, at Forty-ninth Street and Broadway. It was at this cabaret, later the Kentucky Club, that the Ellington band began to take on its permanent form. There it first went on the air, over national radio hookups, on early-morning sustaining programs, and there Bubber Miley, who was then the spark plug of the group, stamped his character on the band, by means of the growl of his trumpet and his gutbucket technique. The band's manner of playing came to be known as "the jungle style." It played at the Kentucky Club for four years and the only unpleasant events were four small fires, each of which managed to burn up Sonny Greer's drums.
It was during this period that Freddie Guy, a slim, light-brown guitarist, joined the band. He is still with it, and today he says, "I grew up with this little band, and if they're going to hell, I'm going, too. Been everywhere else with 'em. When my wife says, as we start on a trip, 'Please don't go,' I say, 'All right. Hand me my suitcase.'" Guy remembers that the Kentucky Club had a line of twelve girls and that everyone worked till he dropped, "Once you put your horn in your mouth, you didn't take it out until," he says. He waits for his listener to ask, "Until when?" Then he says, "Until you quit. Until period. You started at nine and played until."
While Duke was at the Kentucky Club, he began writing at the pace that has enabled him to turn out a total of more than twelve hundred pieces. In 1927, his last year there, he wrote, among other pieces, "Black and Tan Fantasy," "Creole Love Call," "East St. Louis Toodle-Oo," "Hop Head," "Down in Our Alley Blues," "Jubilee Stomp," "Black Beauty," "Blues I Love to Sing," "Birmingham Breakdown," and "The Creeper." [Only five of these tides were first recorded in 1927. The others date from 1926 (East St. Louis Toodle-Q, Birmingham Breakdown, The Creeper) and 1928 (Jubilee Stomp, Black Beauty).
Duke is proud of the fact that he never had any conservatory training. He likes to say, "I got most of my instruction riding around Central Park in a taxi." His instructor on these occasions was Will M[arion] Cook, who once broke his violin into pieces after reading an article in the Times calling him the greatest Negro violinist in the world. "What I've been trying to be," he explained, "is the greatest violinist, not the greatest Negro violinist." "Will never wore a hat," Duke says, "and when people asked him why, he'd say because he didn't have the money to buy one. They'd give him five dollars and then he and I would get in a taxi and ride around Central Park and he'd give me lectures in music. I'd sing a melody in its simplest form and he'd stop me and say, 'Reverse your figures.' He was a brief but a strong influence. His language had to be pretty straight for me to know what he was talking about. Some of the things he used to tell me I never got a chance to use until years later, when I wrote the tone poem 'Black, Brown, and Beige.'"
In 1927, the band went on the road under the management of Irving Mills, an agent who specialized in Negro entertainment. It was playing at a theatre in Philadelphia when the proprietors of the Cotton Club in Harlem, which was just about to open, decided that they wanted to engage it. They had been persuaded by Jimmy McHugh, who had written the score of the show that was to open the new club. Duke couldn't go because he had a contract with the owner of the Philadelphia theatre which ran for a week beyond the date of the Cotton Club's opening, and the owner declared with considerable heat that nothing on earth could persuade him to release Ellington. The Cotton Club people acted with the forthrightness that was characteristic of the prohibition era. They called Boo Boo Hoff, a friend and an underworld power in Philadelphia, and Boo Boo sent an emissary known as Yankee Schwarz to the theatre man. "Be big," Yankee Schwarz pleaded. "Be big or," he mumbled embarrassedly, "you'll be dead." The choice presented no dilemma to the theatre man, Duke's band arrived at the Cotton Club a few minutes before the opening. Because of their excitement and exhaustion, the musicians didn't play well that opening night. One of the proprietors, a man with an Irish soul, didn't respond to their music, which seemed to him jangling and dissonant. His customers didn't seem to enjoy it, either. Before the night was over, he grimly expressed a wish for something more melodic and McHugh rushed up to Ellington. "For God's sake!" he cried. "Play 'Mother Machree' or I'm a goner!" Ellington did the best he could with it.
Both Ellington and McHugh survived the opening, and after a shaky beginning, the band soon reached heights that some of its admirers say it has never surpassed. Duke played five years at the Cotton Club, and there many of the band's most famous men joined it. Tricky Sam Nanton, trombone, and Ham Carney, baritone saxophone, had already signed up at the Kentucky Club, and now Wellman Braud, bass; Johnny Hodges, alto and soprano sax; Barney Bigard, clarinet; Juan Tizol, valve trombone; and Cootie Williams, trumpet, made their appearance. The boys from Harvard and Princeton discovered the orchestra and made weekend trips to Harlem to hear it play. Soon it was said that Duke's music, chromatically rich and often containing two or three themes in a delicate balance, had so modified jazz that he had created a new-art form. Amid the prohibition frenzy that exploded each morning in the Cotton Club, there was always a serious little group of intellectuals who listened to "Mood Indigo," "The Mooche," "Awful Sad," "Sophisticated Lady," "Shout 'Em, Aunt Tillie," "Ring Dem Bells," "Cotton Club Stomp," "Flaming Youth," "Doin' the Voom Voom," and a hundred other Ellington pieces with a veneration heretofore reserved for Beethoven's Fifth.
"At first," Duke says, "I was happy. There were lots of pretty women and champagne and nice people and plenty of money." But some time in 1932, a year in which Duke made sixty thousand dollars, the life began to pall. The endless succession of drunks who demanded the right to drape their weaving bodies over him, whispering hoarsely in his ear, began to wear him down. He became moody. His friends started to worry about him. He frequently proclaimed that life was nothing but a racket, and he felt that he had things to say in music but that the commercialism of his trade was so overwhelming that he was not permitted to say them. "I'd bring something I thought was good to the music publishers," he recalls, "and they'd ask, 'Can an eight-year-old child sing it?' I'd bring something new to them and they'd say, 'This ain't what we're looking for. We want something like Gazookus wrote last week.' I'd see guys writing little pop numbers that were going over big. I didn't see why I should try to do something good. I thought I'd stop writing. Music publishers would come around with little tunes and say, 'If you'll put your name on it, we'll make it our Number One plug.' If something bad was plugged, it would go over better than something good that wasn't. I felt it was all a racket. I was on the point of giving up." Duke's mood in those days was so low that he was even irritated by his most ardent admirers, those who practically dedicated their lives to collecting and savoring the records that he and his band had been making ever since 1926. "One of these guys," Duke says, "would come up after you had played a number and say, 'Why did Barney hit an E-flat natural in the thirteenth bar? He didn't do it on the record.' If you did something new, it made 'em mad."
Duke's friends decided that a tour of Europe for him and his band might be the solution to the problem. The thought of such a thing alarmed Duke, who had an almost psychopathic fear of the ocean. His explanation was that when he was sixteen he had read a book about the suffering of those who went down on the Titanic. "What about icebergs?" he asked his friends. He was unconvinced when told that a collision was not inevitable. Nevertheless, Mills booked him and his band for a European tour, and they finally boarded the Olympic, bound for England, in the summer of 1933. Duke was full of foreboding. His anxiety grew when a passenger told him that at night the ship was steered not by human hands but by an automatic pilot. "I couldn't understand," Duke says, "how an automatic pilot could see an iceberg. I decided that I wasn't gonna take any chances by sleeping at night. I slept in the day and stayed up all night, but it was very lonesome." Duke tried to keep the band awake and alert through the dark hours by buying the boys quantities of a drink composed of Bass ale, brandy, and champagne, but the plan was self-defeating. One by one, Duke's companions would succumb to sleep, and by four or five in the morning he would find himself deserted. He would pace the deck miserably, waiting for daylight, when the robot helmsman would be relieved by a human being, who could see icebergs.
The reception Ellington got in England was vastly encouraging to him. A large crowd met him at the dock in Southampton and he was followed through the streets of London. He found that his desire to write sincerely, which he had felt was not appreciated, was understood and valued three thousand miles from the Cotton Club. He received an ovation when he walked out on the stage before his band to conduct a concert in London's Palladium. There were demonstrations at his concerts in Liverpool and Glasgow. He liked leading his band in "God Save the King'' and told a British reporter, "I am very sincere when I play the King," He and his band went on to France, where he found that he was considered the originator of one of the only two art forms that had stemmed from America. {The other was the animated cartoon, as developed by Walt Disney.) He heard for the first time that he and his band were surrealists, because their music rose from the unconscious rather than the conscious.
The event in Europe Duke enjoyed most was a party given by Lord Beaverbrook for the Prince of Wales, at which the Ellington band provided the music. "It was very ducky," Duke told reporters on his return to the United States. "We were way up, feeling mellow, the result of plenty of nectar." Duke says that King George, then the Duke of York, asked him to do a solo of "Swampy River," an Ellington composition. Duke did not recognize him and refused. "I gave him the light fluff," Duke recalls, "and said, 'You know, I never do solos.'' All in all, the present King had a bad time at the party. He had set his heart on going along with the band to a recording studio after the party to watch it make a record, but the Scotland Yard detectives wouldn't let him] They said there would be too big a crowd. "The Prince of Wales," Duke remembers, "wanted to show Sonny Greer how to beat those drums. We expected some Little Lord Fauntleroy stuff, but he really gave out some low-down Charleston."
When Duke returned to the United States in the fall, he felt better. He now was certain that there was a breed of folk the world over who listened to his records and knew what he was driving at. For two years, which he spent on tour, he was in fine fettle. Then, in 1935, his mother, to whom he had been very close, died and he fell into a state of depression again. He had always felt that he and his activities were the special concern of a benevolent God. In the face of this tragedy, he began to doubt it. He wondered whether his luck had permanently changed. It was then that he began wearing the little gold cross that always hangs around his neck. He read his Bible through three times in 1935 in an effort to regain his equilibrium. "I wrote 'Reminiscing Tempo' that year," Duke says. "It was one of my first ambitious things, was written in a soliloquizing mood. My mother's death was the greater shock. I didn't do anything but brood. The music is representative of that. It begins with pleasant thoughts. Then something awful gets you down. Then you snap out of it, and it ends affirmatively."
It took Duke some time to snap out of it. "When my mother died," he says, "the bottom dropped out. I had no ambition. Before that I'd compete with anybody. I'd say, 'You wanna fight? O.K., because I'm fighting for my mother and the money I get will go to her.'' When his father died, in 1937, Ellington suffered an emotional relapse and lost whatever ground he had gained. For a time he did almost no composing. In 1939, again at the urging of his friends, he decided to repeat the European cure. The band toured France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, and once more Duke was restored. "You have to be a Negro to understand why," Rex Stewart, one of Ellington's trumpet men, once said. "Europe is a different world. You can go anywhere, do anything, talk to anybody. You can't believe it. You are like a guy who has eaten hot dogs all his life and is suddenly offered caviar. You can't believe it."
"Things have happened to me in such a way," Duke said on his return, "as to prove religion to me. I have stood alone and had things come out all right. I'm certain religion gives you strength. It makes you feel that if you are God's son you are strong and don't have to worry."
Duke has made nearly a million dollars in the last twenty years, but he has spent it as he made it. He has received about a half million in royalties from phonograph records; almost twenty million of his records have been sold. He has received a quarter of a million in sheet-music royalties. For one-night stands —dances and concerts — which have taken up most of the band's time in recent years, Duke collects between $1,250 and $2,000, depending on the attendance. He may gross as much as $10,000 a week from one-nighters, but the band's payroll and expenses are so heavy that he is fortunate if he breaks even on the road. Duke's men receive between $125 and $185 a week and expenses when traveling, while he draws $600, $250 from the current receipts, the remainder in the form of an allowance from the auditor—a white man named William Mittler —who handles all his financial affairs. He spends money lavishly, supports a good many hangers-on, lends money freely, gets it back infrequently, and is usually broke when the weekly pay day rolls around. In 1939, a year in which the band came out even, he took in $160,000; in 1940 he grossed $185,000, but his payroll had ascended from $80,000 to 198,000, and travel expenses had increased from $25,000 to $30,000. The following year he took in only $135,000 and ended up with a loss of $1,500, and in 1942 he grossed $210,000 and netted only $4,000. He is now under the management of the William Morris agency. In order to sell his records and sheet music, Duke must remain before the public even when it costs him money. He lost $18,000, for example, on a six-month engagement at the Hurricane in 1943, but he figured that it was a good investment because of the Broadway address and the free radio time and publicity.
Ellington lives in a large, airy apartment at 935 St. Nicholas Avenue. The furnishings, which include gold-and-blue rugs and tapestries from Sweden, are modern. He was married in 1918, but for the past fifteen years he has been separated from his wife, who lives in Washington. They have one son, Mercer, also a composer and now a sergeant in the Army. Occasionally, around four or five in the morning, when the band is in New York, the men go up to Duke's apartment and talk, drink, and eat until almost noon. Many of their remarks are apt to begin, "Do you remember when . . ." and the stories they introduce may concern anything from the time that Tricky Sam, after a good deal of schnapps in Copenhagen, joined a confusing Danish folk dance, to the time Harold Baker blasted out a trumpet solo to quell a riot on a boat on the Mississippi. Junior Raglin, as bulky as a football player and as black as Jack Johnson, may tell how he misplaced his bull fiddle in Boise, Idaho, and Rex Stewart is almost sure to speak of his experiences while trouping with Gene Bedini's "Peek-a-Boo" girl show through Pennsylvania when he was fifteen years old.
As the morning progresses, the gigantic Junior may confide his ambition to play the Italian harp in a symphony orchestra, and Jimmy Hamilton, Duke's intense young clarinetist, will probably become involved in an argument over his favorite instrument. "The clarinet," he will say, "is a very intelligent instrument." Nicknames are a good deal in evidence and it develops that Johnny Hodges is known as Rabbit, that Sonny is called Nasty, that Rex is known as Fatstuff, and that Otto Hardwicke is Professor Boozay. When Sonny and Otto join forces to roam Harlem in search of diversion, their nicknames change to Spruce and Juice. There is a lot of laughter and a lot of noise at these gatherings, but almost inevitably there are solemn interludes in which the men complain that the band can't get a radio sponsor because its members are Negroes. Duke thinks that winning the war will change this and much more. When he was working several months ago on a composition called "New World A-Coming," he liked to repeat the title and then say, "And I mean it."”
