© 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]. [The drawing of Duke is by the vocalist Tony Bennett.]
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, whose contours have something of the swell and sweep of a large, erect bear and whose color is that of coffee with a strong dash of cream, has been described by European music critics as one of the world's immortals, More explicitly, he is a composer of jazz music and the leader of a jazz band. For over twenty-three years, Duke, christened Edward Kennedy Ellington, has spent his days and nights on trains rattling across the continent with his band on an endless sequence of one-night stands at dances, and playing in movie theaters, where he does up to five shows a day; in the nightclubs of Broadway and Harlem and in hotels around the country; in radio stations and Hollywood movie studios; in rehearsal halls and in recording studios, where his band has made some eleven hundred records, which have sold twenty million copies; and even, in recent years, in concert halls such as Carnegie and the Boston Symphony. His music has the virtue of pleasing both the jitterbugs, whose cadenced bouncing often makes an entire building shudder, and the intellectuals, who read into it profound comments on transcendental matters.
In 1939, two consecutive engagements Ellington played were a dance in a tobacco warehouse in North Carolina, where his product was greeted with shouts of "Yeah man!," and a concert in Paris, where it was greeted as revealing "the very secret of the cosmos" and as being related to "the rhythm of the atom." On the second occasion, Jacques-Henri Levesque, a Paris critic, professed to hear all this in the golden bray of trombones and trumpets and in the steady beat of drums, bass, and piano, and Blaise Cendrars, a surrealist poet, said, "Such music is not only a new art form but a new reason for living." A French reporter asked Tricky Sam Nanton, one of Ellington's trombonists, if his boss was a genius. "He's a genius, all right," Sam said, and then he happened to remember that Ellington once ate thirty-two sandwiches during an intermission at a dance in Old Orchard Beach, Maine. "He's a genius, all right," he said, "but Jesus, how he eats!"
Ellington is a calm man of forty-five who laughs easily and hates to hurry. His movements are so deliberate that his steps are usually dogged by his road manager, Jack Boyd, a hard, brisk, red-faced little white man from Texas, whose right index finger was shortened by a planing machine twenty years ago. Boyd, who has been an Ellington employee for some years, yaps and yips at his heels in an effort, for example, to hurry him to a train which in fifteen minutes is leaving a station five miles away. Boyd also lives in fear that Ellington may fall asleep at the wrong time, and since it usually takes an hour of the most ingenious torture to put the slumbering band leader on his feet, the manager's apprehension is not unreasonable. In general, Boyd's life is not a happy one. It is his job to herd about the country a score of highly spirited, highly individual artists, whose colors range from light beige to a deep, blue black, whose tastes range from quiet study to explosive conviviality, and whose one common denominator is a complete disregard of train schedules. Often Duke finishes his breakfast in a taxi. Frequently, driven from the table in his hotel room by the jittery, henlike cluckings of Boyd, he wraps a half-finished chop in a florid handkerchief and tucks it in the pocket of his jacket, from which it protrudes, its nattiness not at all impaired by the fact that it conceals a greasy piece of meat. Not long ago this habit astonished an Icelandic music student who happened to be on a train that Duke had barely caught. The Icelander, after asking for Ellington's autograph, had said, "Mr. Ellington, aren't there marked similarities between you and Bach?" Duke moved his right hand to the handkerchief frothing out of his jacket. "Well, Bach and myself," he said, unwrapping the handkerchief and revealing the chop, "Bach and myself both" —he took a bite from the chop —"write with individual I performers in mind."
It is in this jumpy atmosphere that Ellington composes, and some of his best pieces have been written against the glass partitions of offices in recording studios, on darkened overnight buses, with illumination supplied by a companion holding an interminable chain of matches, and in sweltering, clattering day coaches. Sometimes writing a song in no more than fifteen minutes and sometimes finishing concert pieces only a few hours before their performance, he has composed around twelve hundred pieces, many of them of such worth that Stokowski, Grainger, Stravinsky, and Milhaud have called him one of the greatest modern composers. There are many musicians who have even gone as far as to argue that he is the only great living American composer. His career almost spans the life of jazz and has figured prominently in the surge which has brought jazz from the bawdy houses of New Orleans to the Metropolitan Opera House and even to Buckingham Palace. King George. who has one of the world's largest collections of Ellington records, is often found bending over a revolving disc so that he can hear more clearly the characteristically dry, dull thud of the band's bass fiddle pulsing under an Ellington theme or the intricate sinuosity of a tenor saxophone as it curls in and out of the ensemble.
To Ellington devotees in Europe, which he toured in 1933 and in 1939, identifying him as a mere writer and player of jazz (his instrument is the piano) is like identifying Einstein as a nice old man. Some notion of their fervor is apparent in the words of a London critic reporting an Ellington concert at the Palladium. "His music has a truly Shakespearean universality," he wrote, "and as he sounded the gamut, girls wept and young chaps sank to their knees." The American counterparts of these European devotees prefer to emphasize the air of gaudy sin that surrounded the birth of jazz instead of likening it to the music of the spheres. They like to dwell on Madam White's Mahogany Hall in New Orleans, a resort which offered its patrons jazz music, and on Buddy Bolden's extravagant love life (Bolden was an early jazz cornettist), and they find pleasure in the belief that most jazz musicians smoke marijuana and die spectacularly in a madhouse. They try to ignore the ugly fact that several of Ellington's musicians learned how to play in Boy Scout bands. In endowing the late Bubber Miley, originator of the growl style on the trumpet and one of the early members of Ellington's band, with an almost legendary aura, although he has been dead less than ten years, they are grateful for the fact that he at least was a very heavy drinker.
Anyone who is now forty-five has lived through the entire history of jazz, but this does not prevent the followers of the art from speaking, for example, of the trumpet player King Oliver, who died in 1938, as if he were a Pilgrim Father. In the jazz world, 1910 is the Stone Age and 1923 is medieval. The men in Ellington's band, which was playing when Benny Goodman was in short trousers and when the word "swing" was unknown, have aroused such admiration individually that there are many collectors who spend their time searching for old Ellington records not because they want to listen to the band as a whole but to savor the thirty seconds in which their particular hero takes a solo. As he plays, they mew and whimper in a painful ecstasy or, as they themselves put it, they are sent.
Ellington has, like most entertainers, a stage self and a real self. On the stage, at least when he supplies the "flesh" —the trade term for personal appearances in movie houses —he presents himself as a smiling, carefree African, tingling to his fingertips with a gay, syncopated throb that he can scarcely control, As the spotlight picks him out of the gloom, the audience sees a wide, irrepressible grin, but when the light moves away, Ellington's face instantly sags into immobility. He has given a lot of thought to achieving serenity and equipoise in a life that gives him neither repose nor privacy. He craves peace. He will not argue with anyone in his band, and his road manager, on whom most of the burdens fall, repeatedly sums up his problem in the phrase "Trouble with this band is it has no boss." The arguments which Duke refuses to have, and which, to Boyd's acute distress, he concedes beforehand, usually involve overtime pay or a request for an advance on next week's salary. When Boyd tries to persuade Duke to take a militant attitude, Ellington usually says, in a tone of wheezy complaint, "I won't let these goddam musicians upset me! Why should I knock myself out in an argument about fifteen dollars when in the same time I can probably write a fifteen-hundred-dollar song?" Besides, Ellington contends that an argument may mean the difference between a musician's giving a remarkable performance and just a performance. Furthermore, doctors will tell you that there is a definite relation between anger and ulcers. "Anyway," he will add, in a final desperate defense of his pacific nature, "why should I pit my puny strength against the great Power that runs the universe?" Ellington wears a gold cross beneath his flamboyant plaids and bold checks, reads the Bible every day, along with Winchell and the comics, and has been known to say, "I'd be afraid to sit in a house with people who don't believe. Afraid the house would fall down." He broods about man's final dissolution, and in an effort to stave his own off he has a complete physical examination every three months.
Part of Duke's character goes well enough with the onstage Ellington who periodically throws back his head and emits a long-drawn-out "Ah-h-h!" as if the spirit of hot had forced wordless exultation from his lips. He likes to eat to excess and to drink in moderation. He is also fond of what he calls "the chicks," and when they follow him to the station, as they often do, he stands on the back platform of his train and, as it pulls out, throws them big, gusty, smacking kisses. (He is married, but he has been separated from his wife for fifteen years.) He has a passion for color and clothes. He has forty-five suits and more than a thousand ties, the latter collected in forty-seven states of the Union and seven European countries, and his shoes, hats, shirts, and even his toilet water are all custom-made. His usual manner is one of ambassadorial urbanity, but it is occasionally punctuated by deep despair. In explaining his moods, he says, "A Negro can be too low to speak one minute and laughing fit to kill the next, and mean both." Few people know that he is a student of Negro history. He is a member of one of the first families of Virginia, for his ancestors arrived at Jamestown in 1619, a year before the pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock. He has written music commemorating Negro heroes such as Crispus Attucks, the first American killed in the American Revolution; Barzillai Lew, one of the men depicted in the painting called "The Spirit of '76"; and Harriet Tubman, Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, Frederick Douglass, and other Negro fighters for freedom. [Beyond Barzallai Lou (as Ellington spelled the name) and the historically panoramic Black, Brotvn and Beige (both 1943), it is not clear which other pieces Boyer had in mind that commemorated various "Negro fighters for freedom."]
He has also written an unproduced opera, "Boola," which tells the story of the American Negro, and a long symphonic work entitled "Black, Brown and Beige," which he says is "a tone parallel to the history of the Negro." His concern for his race is not entirely impersonal, since he and his band are constantly faced, even in the North, by the institution of Jim Crow. "You have to try not to think about it," Duke says, "or you'll knock yourself out."
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 backyard 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 traveling 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.
It was on a day coach, rolling through the Ohio and Pennsylvania night, that Ellington wrote most of "New World A-Coming," a symphonic work which had its premiere at Carnegie Hall last December. A Boswellian friend of Duke's who was traveling with him at the time took notes on the scene. Across the aisle from Duke as he worked, four men in the band were playing tonk, a form of gin rummy, at a dollar a hand. In front of him a harassed mother was trying to soothe a crying baby and behind him two little boys, in the great day-coach tradition, were eating oranges.
Nearby, Lawrence Brown, an Ellington trombonist, a husky, dignified man who looks like a doctor and says he would like to be one, was reading the Atlantic Monthly, while Junior Raglin, a chunky youth who plays the bass fiddle, was scowling over a comic magazine. Sonny Greer, Ellington's jaunty, jouncy drummer, looked up from the card game and said to Duke, "What you doing, Dumpy?" Duke grunted, then said, "Oh, just fooling around on a new piece." The other card players looked over and in succession asked, "How's it going, Pops?," "Getting anywhere, Sandhead?," and "You sending 'em, Fatso?" The band members, who sometimes speak of Duke as The Duke, also address him as Phony, which is short for the Phony Duke, and Ze Grand, a contraction of Ze Grand Duke. Duke didn't reply to any of the questions; he just kept on working, swearing whenever the rocking of the train made him blur his notations. Not far away, a group of soldiers were swarming around Estrelita, whom publicity men know as the Sepia Gypsy Rose Lee or the South American Bombshell and whom the band calls Skookums. She is a part of a vaudeville act that occasionally tours with Ellington. Down the aisle a way, Albert Hibbler, a blind singer in the band, was balancing himself on the arm of a seat occupied by Berry Roche, Ellington's blues singer, whose customary white dress highlights the deep black of her skin, and at one end of the car Wallace Jones, Harold Baker, and Rex Stewart, trumpets, and Juan Tizol, trombone (a musician, of course, takes the name of his instrument), were discussing the occupational hazards of their trade.
"When we don't sleep," said Tizol, who is a Puerto Rican and the only white man in the band, "seems like our lips get even stronger. Get a lot of sleep and damn if they don't crumple."
"I got a salve I like," Jones said. "Prevents muscles of the lip going dead. But the muscles of my lip just wouldn't vibrate last night, just wouldn't vibrate. That damn hall was too cold."
Baker began talking about the difficulty he had had in learning the trumpet. "I breathed all wrong," he said, "and it strained the whole side of my face. It used to hurt so. I blew from too low and I couldn't learn to keep my stomach tight. I used to blow with my jaw as hard as a wall and my teacher would walk up and bang the trumpet right out of my mouth. I pressed so hard against my teeth that they were sore all the time. To cure myself, I hang my trumpet on a string from the ceiling. Just walk up to it and blow it without touching it with my hands.
"Music is bad for the nerves," he went on. "My nerves are bad now. You gotta do so many things at once. You gotta think about how to fill your horn, about harmony. You gotta look pretty and keep the guy next to you satisfied. You sneak each other that ole go-to-hell look, then flash the public that ole full-of-joy look. I dunno. It's just rush and then rush some more. Never no sleep. Feel like I want to quit sometime." No one spoke for a moment and there was no sound except the rattling of the train. Then Baker said musingly, "Always wanted to play like Joe Smith, but seemed like my notes would crack on me. Joe's notes were so clear and clean." Rex Stewart, a ball of a man with a mustache and a slow, pleasant smile, said comfortingly, "Well, Harold, I'm always missing something, too. Never get exactly the right thing out, Never sounds exactly like I imagine before I play."
The train rounded a long curve and Duke stopped writing. He began again and then evidently decided he wanted to try the music out on someone. "Swee-pea? Sweepea!" he called. Sweepea is William Strayhorn, the staff arranger and a talented composer in his own right. Strayhorn, who, incidentally, does not play in the band, is a small, scholarly, tweedy young man with gold-rimmed spectacles. He got his nickname from a character in a comic strip, Strayhorn, who had been trying to sleep, staggered uncertainly down the aisle in answer to his boss's summons.
"I got a wonderful part here," Duke said to him. "Listen to this." In a functional, squeaky voice that tried for exposition and not for beauty, Duke chanted, "Dah dee dah dah dah, deedle dee deedle dee boom, bah bah bah, boom, boom!" He laughed, frankly pleased by what he had produced, and said, "Boy, that son of a bitch has got a million twists."
Strayhorn, still swaying sleepily in the aisle, pulled himself together in an attempt to offer an intelligent observation. Finally he said drowsily, "It's so simple, that's why."
Duke laughed again and said, "I really sent myself on that. Would you like to see the first eight bars?"
"Ah yes! Ah yes!" Strayhorn said resignedly, and took the manuscript. He looked at it blankly. Duke misinterpreted Sweepea's expression as one of severity.
"Don't look at it that way, Sweepea," he said. "It's not like that."
"Why don't you reverse this figure?" asked Strayhorn sleepily. "Like this." He sang shakily, "Dah dee dah dah dah, dah dee dah dah dah, boomty boomty boomty, boom!"
"Why not dah dee dah dah dah, deedle dee deedle dee dee, boom bah bah bah, boom?" Duke said.
"Dah dee dah dah dah!" sang Strayhorn stubbornly.
"Deedle dee deedle dee dee!" Duke answered.
"Dah dee dah dah dah!" Strayhorn insisted.
Duke did not reply; he just leaned eagerly forward and, pointing to a spot on the manuscript with his pencil, said, "Here's where the long piano part comes in. Here's where I pick up the first theme and restate it and then begin the major theme. Dah dee dah, deedle dee deedle dee, boom!"
The train lurched suddenly. Sweepea collapsed into a seat and closed his eyes. "Ah yes!" he said weakly. "Ah yes!"
Duke retrieved his manuscript from him and went back to work. The blackness outside was changing to gray, and presently the music slipped from his hand and his head dropped forward as if his neck was broken. Some time later Boyd bustled through the coach, shouting to the band that the train would be in New York in half an hour. He was brought to a halt by the sight of Ellington's sleeping form. He began to shake Duke. "Damn if I don't let him stay here!" Boyd said to Duke's friend after a moment. "Damn if I don't do what I did in Tacoma! Let him stay there that time until the train was switched to a siding five miles away. He had to walk back. Damn if you wouldn't think that'd cure him!" He loosened his clutch on Duke's collar and the big man sagged forward. Boyd glared at him. "Once in San Francisco," he said, "Ellington slept that way and when he got off the train he was so sleepy he got in a line of men that were being herded into a van. They were prisoners for San Quentin. When Ellington tried to get out, the guard wouldn't let him. Damn if I should of rescued him! Should of let him go to prison. It would of taught him."
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.
Duke thereupon pads sleepily about the room, groping for his red bathrobe and red slippers. His bare shanks show from beneath what appears to be a short, old-fashioned nightshirt, but if anyone calls it a nightshirt Duke is insulted. He says sulkily, "It's an Oriental sleeping coat. Not a nightshirt. Have 'em specially made for me." When he gathers himself together, he reaches for a phone and orders what for him is breakfast — fruit, cornflakes, and black tea with cream. While he is on the phone, he may pick up a pencil and scribble a few bars of music on the pad before him. After humming a bit of what he has just written down, he may say, "Always like to use the voice instead of the piano when writing. Piano holds you too much to what falls naturally under the fingers." With an almost imperceptible increase in tempo, he will eat his breakfast, and then, at a faster pace, he will shave and take a shower. He usually trots out of the bathroom, flings himself on his bed, and douses himself with talcum powder. He also sprays himself with toilet water, Then he may say, "Tell you about me and toilet water. It must have two properties. It must have a nice, clean fragrance, and it must be pleasant to the taste. Have mine blended for me. Call it Warm Valley. After one of my pieces." When he has dressed, he grabs a hat, flings it away, takes another one, and says, "Tell you what goes with me and hats. I pay twenty-five or thirty dollars for a specially tailored hat and then throw it away and buy one of these dollar-ninety-five corduroy porkies. I love these little porkies."
Duke usually arrives at a dance a trifle late, a common practice among band leaders and one they justify by arguing that they can make a more dramatic entrance after the band has been playing awhile. Most of the dances Ellington plays for are held in auditoriums, dance halls, or armories that accommodate anything from two to ten thousand people. When Duke arrives, someone tells the men in the band, and after a minute or two they call a halt and explode into the band's dressing room. They are very intense.
As Sonny Greer explains, "To give anything, you gotta give everything." Their intensity is expressed by a weird cacophony in which some of the musicians shriek like steam whistles, some of them imitate the pantings of locomotives, some sing like saxophones or trombones, and some make sounds so complicated and unearthly that it seems impossible that they come from a human throat. There is a good deal of horsing around and pushing, and occasionally a bottle is passed. While all this is going on, Albert Hibbler may still be dressing and complaining, "I can't see my uniform." Somebody may say with rough affection, "Shut up, you squarehead. You don't need no uniform," and hunt it up for him. If someone tells Duke that there is a big crowd on the floor, he starts to yell, "Hurry up! Hurry up! I want to make my entrance!" No one pays much attention to him. Lawrence Brown, who is one of the best trombones in the profession, usually stands apart from the rumpus, as if he disapproved. "I don't care anything about the band business," he says. "I sometimes think I may still study medicine." Brown, who is thirty-six, a college graduate, and the son of a minister, used to play trombone for Aimee Semple McPherson in the Angelus Temple in Los Angeles, a fact which disturbs some of his admirers, who, with the reverse morality of jazz fanciers, would prefer that he had begun his career in a sporting house. While his mates riot in the dressing room, Brown may say with quiet pride, "I do not curse, drink, or smoke." Not long ago he said that if he couldn't become a doctor, he would be a dentist or an undertaker.
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 a 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.
When a dance is over, Boyd and his Negro assistant, Richard Jones, or Jonesy, who doubles as Duke's valet, begin packing the instruments, uniforms, scores, stands, and the like so that they can be transported to the next town the band is playing. "If the band gets four hours' sleep," Boyd often says, "me and Jonesy don't get any. When the band walks out, they're through, but me and Jonesy have to get the baggage on the train and often we don't get to bed at all." After work, Ellington and Strayhorn are likely to go to some Negro all-night spot, if they are in Buffalo, Cleveland, Chicago, New Orleans, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, or some other big town which affords such a luxury. Duke, who is always worrying about keeping his weight down, may announce that he intends to have nothing but Shredded Wheat and black tea. When his order arrives, he looks at it glumly, then bows his head and says grace. After he has finished his snack, his expression of virtuous determination slowly dissolves into wistfulness as he watches Strayhorn eat a steak. Duke's resolution about not overeating frequently collapses at this point. When it does, he orders a steak, and after finishing it he engages in another moral struggle for about five minutes. Then he really begins to eat. He has another steak, smothered in onions, a double portion of fried potatoes, a salad, a bowl of sliced tomatoes, a giant lobster and melted butter, coffee, and an Ellington dessert —perhaps a combination of pie, cake, ice cream, custard, pastry, jello, fruit, and cheese. His appetite really whetted, he may order ham and eggs, a half-dozen pancakes, waffles and syrup, and some hot biscuits. Then, determined to get back on his diet, he will finish, as he began, with Shredded Wheat and black tea.
Long before this, he is usually surrounded by an admiring crowd, which watches him with friendly awe. He chats with the chicks in the group and may turn from his steak or lobster to say pleasantly to one of them, "You make that dress look so beautiful." He is not a bit embarrassed by the fact that he said the same thing the night before to another chick in another town. Sometimes he will pause before eating a dessert awash in rich yellow cream and say to a girl, "I never knew an angel could be so luscious." At the end of his supper, he may lean back, satisfied at last, and sing out to Strayhorn, "Dah dah dee dee dee, tah tahdle tah boom, deedle dee, deedle dee, boom!"
''Why not deedle dee deedle dee dee, deedle dee deedle dee dee, dumtah dumtah dumtah, boom?" Billy asked recently on such an occasion.
"I don't think that's right for a trio," Duke said. "This is a trio."
"I don't think your strain is melodic enough," Billy said.
"I think it's a nice strain. Then it goes backward." Duke said, and sang,
"Boom, dee deedle, dee deedle, boom tah tahdle tah, dee dee dee dan dah!"
"I still think it has too many notes for a trio," Billy said. "I'm looking for something small that goes up a half tone."
Sometimes Duke and Strayhorn have adjoining rooms at a hotel. It will be bright daylight when they climb into their beds, Duke first having said his prayers. Ellington may stare up at the ceiling a moment before he falls asleep and then call ro Billy, in the next room, "Sweepea! How about dah dee dah dah, dah dee dah dah dah as an opening fanfare?"
"Why not deedle dee deedle dee deedle dee, deedle dee dee?" sings Sweepea sleepily.
Then there is silence.”
To be continued in Part 2.
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