© 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 painting 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.
“There are times when Duke Ellington exudes such calm contentment that a colleague, under the influence of the benign radiation, once murmured drowsily, "Duke makes 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, whom European music critics have called the American Bach, 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. [Awful Sad, first recorded in 1928 featuring trumpeter Arthur Whetsol, had also been recorded for Victor in 1933 —when Brown was in the orchestra —but not issued.
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 ritard 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, will ya?" He turns to Junior Raglin, the scowling bass player, and says, "Tie it way down, Junior, tie it way down." Again the 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 ringer, 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 will carry the band to another engagement.
Duke enjoys the rhythm of a train as it rolls across the country and on one occasion he even scored it, putting notes on paper as he bounced and swayed along, listening to all the metallic variations of sound. He called the piece that resulted, Daybreak Express. The continental nature of Duke's profession is indicated by his itinerary for 1942. He began on January 1st in Kansas City, Missouri, and then, playing one-night stands and engagements that lasted as long as six weeks, rattled along to Junction City, Kansas; Omaha, Nebraska; Madison, Wisconsin; Waukegan, Illinois; Elkhart, Indiana; Chicago; Detroit; Canton, Ohio; Pittsburgh; Uniontown, Pennsylvania; Boston; Lawrence, Massachusetts; Portland, Maine; Worcester, Massachusetts; Boston, Toronto, Buffalo, Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh; Moline, Illinois; South Gate, San Diego, San Francisco, Stockton, and Sacramento, all in California; Portland, Oregon; Vancouver; Seattle and Tacoma; Salem in Oregon; and then back to King City, Vallejo, San Jose, Los Angeles, and Ocean Park, in California; Salt Lake City, Denver, Chicago, Milwaukee, Chicago, Cleveland, Dayton, Fort Wayne, Chicago, St. Louis; Moberly and Kansas City, in Missouri; Topeka, Kansas; back once more to California to play at Long Beach, Los Angeles, Hollywood, Sacramento, Oakland, and San Jose; then to Salt Lake City, St. Louis, Omaha; Storm Lake and Fort Dodge, in Iowa; St. Paul, Madison, Chicago, Toledo, Cincinnati, Youngstown; Toronto and Kitchener, in Canada; down to Buffalo, Fort Dix, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Hartford, Bridgeport, Harnsburg, Columbus, and, on the last day of 1942, to Detroit.
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, traveling 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.
"You can't write music right," Duke said, explaining his methods of composition, "unless you know how the man that'll play it plays poker."
"Absolut phantastisch!" the German murmured. Duke seemed startled, then laughed.
"Vot a varm, simple laugh you haf," the refugee said enviously.
Duke laughed again. "No, what I mean is," he said, "you've got to write with certain men in mind. You write just for their abilities and natural tendencies and give them places where they do their best — certain entrances and exits and background stuff. You got to know each man to know what he'll react well to. One guy likes very simple ornamentation; another guy likes ornamentation better than the theme because it gives him a feeling of being a second mind. Every musician has his favorite licks and you gotta write to them."
"His own licks? Licks?" asked the refugee.
"His own favorite figures," Duke said. He looked out the window. "I sure hated to leave that chick," he said affably. "I'd just met her. She was all wrapped up for me. All wrapped up in cellophane."
"Please?" asked the German.
"I know what sounds well on a trombone and I know what sounds well on a trumpet and they are not the same," Duke said. "I know what Tricky Sam can play on a trombone and I know what Lawrence Brown can play on trombone and they are not the same, either."
"Don't you ever write just for inspiration?"
"I write for my band," Duke said. "For instance, I might think of a wonderful thing for an oboe, but I ain't got no oboe and it doesn't interest me. My band is my instrument. My band is my instrument even more than the piano. Tell you about me and music — I'm something like a farmer."
"A farmer that grows things?"
"A farmer that grows things. He plants his seed and I plant mine. He has to wait until spring to see his come up, but I can see mine right after I plant it, That night. I don't have to wait. That's the payoff for me."
"Mr, Ellington, how do you get those lovely melodic passages?"
"If you want to do a mellow cluster with a mixture of trombones and saxes, it will work very well," Duke said. "A real derby, not an aluminum one, will give you a big, round, hollow effect."
"A real derby?"
"A real derby."
"Not an aluminum derby?"
"Not an aluminum derby."
"phantastisch,” the exile said.
Duke laughed. He called to Sonny Greer, his drummer, sitting up ahead, "I sure hated to miss that chick," he said. "She was all wrapped up in cellophane."
The refugee's pale blue eyes stared steadily at Duke. "When inspiration comes, Mr. Ellington," he said finally, "you write, naturlich?"
"It's mostly all written down, because it saves time," Duke said. He seemed eager to get away, but the coach was crowded and there wasn't another place to sit. "It's written down if it's only a basis for a change. There's no set system. Most times I write it and arrange it. Sometimes I write it and the band and I collaborate on the arrangement. Sometimes Billy Strayhorn, my staff arranger, does the arrangement. When we're all working together, a guy may have an idea and he plays it on his horn. Another guy may add to it and make something out of it. Someone may play a riff and ask, 'How do you like this?' The trumpets may try something together and say, 'Listen to this.' There may be a difference of opinion on what kind of mute to use. Someone may advocate extending a note or cutting it off. The sax section may want to put an additional smear on it."
"Schmear?"
"Smear," Duke said.
Duke tried a few times to end the discussion, but the exile's questioning kept bringing him back to his exposition, and he was still explaining when the train pulled into Pittsburgh, where he and his band were to give a concert at Carnegie Hall. The hall is a resplendent place. It has tall, gray marble columns with gilt Corinthian capitals, and on its walls are inscribed the names of Schubert, Brahms, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Chopin. As the band trooped through the building to the dressing rooms, Duke glanced at the list of his predecessors and remarked, "Boys, we're in fast company."
When the band is doing five shows a day in a movie house, Duke can take a hot, stuffy dressing room, often windowless and small, and give it the pleasant atmosphere of a neighborhood saloon. As soon as a show is over, Jonesy, his valet, who always wears a hat on the back of his head and a leather windbreaker, helps him undress and holds his red bathrobe up while he slips into it. Then Duke will lie down on a cot, a towel over his eyes to shield them from the light. Jonesy goes out to get him beer and sandwiches, and by the time he returns Duke is usually up playing a game of cassino with someone in his band. Other members of the band will keep walking in and out. "My honor is here. My honor is here,” Duke mumbles, as he examines his cards, in a voice that has the lulling drone of an electric fan. Sometimes he varies this refrain with the more firmly voiced observation, "I will now do something to straighten this out."
He keeps the door of his dressing room closed, but even so there is always the presence of the mechanical voice in the movie, faint yet powerful, and, now and then, the brash canned music of the newsreel. Sometimes, too, down the corridor, the deep voice of Estrelita, the South American Bombshell, who is part of an act that occasionally travels with Duke, may be heard as she sings, "Doan be so hasty. Yo' kisses so tasty!" Jimmy Hamilton's clarinet is often heard as he walks up and down outside the room like a bagpiper, practicing Grieg or some other classical composer. Someone in Duke's dressing room will open the door and say, "Jimmy, can't you get those squeaky mice outta that reed? They musta built a nest in it." Jimmy, a solemn youth, will not reply. Duke, his big face relaxed, will say sleepily,"I think I'll rest my spine awhile," and lie down again on his cot.
Billy Strayhorn will be working quietly over the score of some new tune in a corner. After a time a masseur will come in, and perhaps a newspaper reporter. Duke, his voice shaking as the masseur kneads him, will be interviewed as he lies naked on his cot. Recently a young reporter asked him what he had in mind when he wrote "Mood Indigo." "It's just a little story about a little girl and a little boy," Duke said. "They're about eight and the little girl loves the little boy. They never speak of it, of course, but she just likes the way he wears his hat. Every day he comes by her house at a certain time and she sits in her window and waits." Duke's voice dropped solemnly. The masseur, sensing the climax, eased up, and Duke said evenly, "Then one day he doesn't come." There was silence until Duke added, " 'Mood Indigo' just tells how she feels."
When the reporter left, Duke said, "Jesus, did you see the tears come into his eyes when I spoke about 'Mood Indigo'? That's what I like. Great big ole tears. That's why I liked Whetsol." Whetsol is a trumpet player now dead. "When he played the funeral march in 'Black and Tan Fantasy,' I used to see great, big ole tears running down people's faces." Duke chuckled. In such moods as this, Duke and the older members of his band are almost sure to talk about the musicians who played with them when the band began. Their conversation has something of the nostalgic, elegiac atmosphere that surrounds a group of old Yale grads talking about football players of other years. "Bubber Miley!" Duke exclaimed on one of these occasions. (Bubber, too, is dead.) "Bubber used to say, 'If it ain't got swing, it ain't worth playin'; if it ain't got gutbucket, it ain't worth doin.'' Freddie Guy, guitarist, was present and, as Duke went on to speak of great trombone players and great trumpet players, with never a word for the rhythm section, Freddie at last mumbled regretfully, "Duke sure love his brass! Duke sure love his brass!"
The world of jazz is sentimental. When Cootie Williams, another great trumpet player, left the Ellington band three and a half years ago to go with another band [Benny Goodman sextet], a composer who had nothing to do with either band [Raymond Scott] wrote a sad piece called "When Cootie Left the Duke." Duke still finds it hard to talk of Cootie's departure. Both Bubber and Cootie were known for their "growl" effect. Duke occasionally says, "Cootie gave the growl more beauty than anyone, more melodic magnificence. He had a sort of majestic folk quality. His open horn was wonderful — wonderful loud and wonderful soft. He had a hell of a style." Such adoring reminiscence sometimes bothers the newer members of the band. Juan Tizol once asked gloomily, at one of the dressing-room sessions, "What do you see in my playing anyway, Duke? I don't call myself a hot man anyway." There was a hurt tone in his voice. "Not for me. I take all my solos straight. Sweet style."
"Well, Juan," Duke said gently, "there are times when a writer wants to hear something exactly as it's written. You want to hear it clean, not with smears and slides on it. Besides, your style is a good contrast to the more physical style of Johnny Hodges."
"I play with a legit tone," Juan said, as though accusing himself of something rather unforgivable. "Duke, what is there about my trombone tone?"
"You get an entirely different quality," Duke said. "It's real accurate. So many look on the valve trombone as an auxiliary instrument, and it's your main instrument. That's a hell of an obligation. You got to live up to those valves and you do, Juan, you do. You know how many slide trombonists use the slide so they can fake, and when you object they say, 'Whatta ya think this has got on it —valves?'"
"If there was any room in legit, I'd still go back to legit," Tizol said. He seemed inconsolable. "I like legit because I could feature myself better in legit than in a jazz band. I don't feel the pop tunes, but I feel 'La Gioconda' and 'La Boheme.' I like pure romantic flavor. I can feel that better."
Duke said to the room at large, "Juan's got inhibitions. He won't ad-lib. Once, on the 'Twelfth Street Rag,' he did some ad-libbing. Only time he ever did."
Jack Boyd, Ellington's road manager, a small, brisk white man from Texas, knocked on the door and said, "Five is in, folks" — five minutes before the band was due onstage for another performance. Jonesy came in to dress Duke, and Tizol rose to go. "You're a hell of a good man, Tizol," Duke said, making a final effort to comfort his trombone. "We need a man who plays according to Hoyle. A guy who does only one thing but does it for sure, that's it."
"I'm only legit," Tizol said.
There are times when Duke's cheery calm is shaken and when his dressing room is more like a prison cell than a friendly saloon. A few months ago the
band arrived in St. Louis to play at the Fox Theatre. As the train pulled into the Union Station, Ellington's two white employees — Tizol and Boyd — immediately got a taxi and went to one of the town's good hotels. Duke and the band members got taxis only after an hour and considerable begging, since most of the drivers didn't want Negroes as passengers, and then they were taken to a rickety hotel in the Negro section. The next day, when the colored members of the band went out for lunch after the first performance, they couldn't find a restaurant in the neighborhood that would serve them. They didn't have time to get over to the segregated district before they were due on stage again. They returned to the theatre and arranged for a white man to go out to buy sandwiches at a drugstore. When the proprietor of the store. making inquiry, found that the sandwiches were for a Negro band, he refused to fill the order. A few minutes later the men went back to work, hungry, the curtain rose, and from the white audience out front there came a burst of applause. The crowd cheered, whistled, and stamped its feet. As the curtain. was going up, the dejection on the faces of the players vanished, and, as swiftly as an electric light is switched on, it was replaced by a look of joy. The music blared, Duke smiled, threw back his head, and shouted "Ah-h-h!," Rex Stewart took off on a solo that was greeted with fervor, and as he bowed, the musician next to him muttered out of the side of his mouth, "Bend, you hungry fathead! Bend!" Everything was flash and brightness until the curtain came down. Then the joy was switched off and there was just a group of angry, hungry Negroes arguing their right to food,
"Can't we eat in our own country?" Rex Stewart said.
"And my son is in the Army!" another man said.
"Are we prisoners or something?" Harry Carney asked.
The band milled around in the gloom backstage. "Gee," said Stewart, "I'd like to go to a valley hemmed in by mountains, just me myself. That would be Utopia." The manager of the theatre was called, and admitted that if the band was to work it should be allowed to eat. He arranged for food to be sent in. A few minutes later, Boyd was in a saloon overlooking the stage door when a man in the band came out and got into a taxi.
"Did you see that?" asked a woman on a stool at the bar.
"See what?" Boyd said.
"See that nigra get in that cab?"
"Well, he's a pretty nice fellow. He's a member of the Ellington band. Some people think he's a very great artist."
"A very great artist? Well, I don't know what you think, but I always say that the worst white man is better than the best nigra."
Duke tries to forget things like that, and if he doesn't quite succeed, he pretends he does. An hour after the show, Duke was introduced to a policeman who said enthusiastically, "If you'd been a white man, Duke, you'd have been a great musician." Duke's smile was wide and steady as he answered quietly, "I guess things would have been different if I'd been a white man."
Once Duke is aboard a train, soothed by the ministrations of admiring porters and dining-car waiters, he likes to relax and talk about his music. He is somewhat given to making set speeches and often, when he is asked if he can recall an incident, he remembers what he is in the habit of saying about it rather than the event itself. He enjoys telling how he happened to write any of his compositions. "In my writing," he said not long ago on a train, in the presence of his historian friend, "there's always a mental picture. That's the way I was raised up in music. In the old days, when a guy made a lick, he'd say what it reminded him of. He'd make the lick and say, 'It sounds like my old man falling downstairs' or 'It sounds like a crazy guy doing this or that.' I remember ole Bubber Miley taking a lick and saying, That reminds me of Miss Jones singin' in church.' That's the way I was raised up in music. I always have a mental picture."
He looked out the window at a drab village through which the train was speeding. A woman stood on a porch, holding a tablecloth which she seemed about to flourish. Before she completed her motion, she was out of sight. "I'd like to write something about that," Duke said. "You know, people moving in a train, other people standing still, and you see them for just an instant and then you rush on forever. Sometimes you look right into their goddam eyes. Seems for a minute like you know them. Then they're gone." He kept staring out the window. After a while he pointed at a tree and said, "Looks like a band leader." Again he was moodily silent. Then he suddenly said, Take 'Eerie Moan [recorded 1933], I wrote that in 1930, when I was at the Cotton Club. It's the voice of New York City. You're lying in bed all by yourself. The window is open. It's summer. If there was someone in bed with you, you'd be contented. But you're alone and it's very late and you listen and listen and you hear something out there that comes from millions of people sleeping, from manhole covers that give a double click as a taxi shoots over them, from tugboats far away when they whistle hoarse. You really don't hear anything single, just a kind of general breathing. You feel very alone. You moan and it seems like that's the sound you're hearing from all the city outside in the night. Only place you can hear it is New York City."
Boyd lurched down the aisle. Duke caught him by the arm. "What time have we got to catch the train tomorrow?" Duke asked. "Seven in the morning," Boyd said cheerfully. "God damn!" said Duke. "You can't sleep after the birds wake up, so you don't want anyone else to! You're not normal. You can't sleep after sunrise." Duke's voice was bitter. "You change that train or we won't get any sleep!" Boyd continued down the aisle, muttering to himself, and Duke mumbled, "He can't sleep after sunrise and he doesn't want anyone else to,"
Two young soldiers came up to ask for his autograph. After Duke had given it to them, they hung around to talk. "My favorite piece," one of the soldiers said, "is 'In a Sentimental Mood.'"
"It was one of those spontaneous things," Duke said. "It was after a dance at Durham, North Carolina, and they gave me a private party. Something was wrong with it. Two girls weren't speaking to each other. One girl had cut in on the other girl's guy and the other girl kept saying, 'Of all the people in the world! That she should take my man!' I was sitting at the piano, one girl on each side, and I'm trying to patch 'em up, see? And I said, 'Let's do a song' and that was the outcome, and when I finished they kissed and made up." Other passengers had become aware that Duke was talking about his music and a little group crowded around, its members occasionally clutching at each other and at the seats to steady themselves.
"How about 'Clarinet Lament'?" someone asked.
"It was just something for Barney to play," Duke said. Barney is Barney Bigard, a famous clarinettist who used to be with the band. "We sort of worked it out together. You sit down and try this and that and finally you run upon something and write it out."
"How about 'Awful Sad'?"
"It's a beautiful thing," Duke said. "Very little to be said beyond the title. After I wrote it I said, 'What'll I call it?,' and someone said, 'It's awful sad. I fingered it out on the piano. It was late at night. It had a beautiful part for Whetsol, a beautiful, tender part. It gives me a chill when I hear it."
Someone asked him about "Solitude" and he said, "I wrote it in Chicago in twenty minutes while waiting for a recording date. The other band, the one ahead of us, was late coming out and I wrote it while holding a sheet of music paper against a glass wall. When we went in, it was the first thing we made. The sound engineer was half crying. It filled everybody up. To make people cry, that's music at its highest. My songs had a tendency in those days to be laments. There was always that melancholy in them. You look at the same melancholy again and again from a different perspective."
Duke seemed to feel that the conversation had taken too somber a turn and he began speaking of his appetite, documenting his claim that it is national, even international, in scope. "I have special places marked for special dishes," he said. "In Taunton, Massachusetts, you can get the best chicken stew in the United States. For chow mein with pigeon's blood, I go to Johnny Cann's Cathay House in San Francisco. I get my crab cakes at Bolton's — that's in San Francisco, too. I know a place in Chicago where you get the best barbecued ribs west of Cleveland and the best shrimp Creole outside New Orleans. There's a wonderful place in Memphis, too, for barbecued ribs. I get my Chinook salmon in Portland, Oregon. In Toronto I get duck orange, and the best fried chicken in the world is in Louisville, Kentucky. I get myself a half-dozen chickens and a gallon jar of potato salad, so I can feed the seagulls. You know, the guys who reach over your shoulder. There's a place in Chicago, the Southway Hotel, that's got the best cinnamon rolls and the best filet mignon in the world. Then there's Ivy Anderson's chicken shack in Los Angeles, where they have hot biscuits with honey and very fine chicken-liver omelets. In New Orleans there's gumbo file. I like it so well that I always take a pail of it out with me when I leave. In New York I send over to the Turf Restaurant at Forty-ninth and Broadway a couple of times a week to get their broiled lamb chops. I guess I'm a little freakish with lamb chops. I prefer to eat them in the dressing room, where I have plenty of room and can really let myself go. In Washington, at Harrison's, they have devilled crab and Virginia ham. They're terrific things. On the Ile-de-France, when we went to Europe, they had the best crepes Suzette in the world and it took a dozen at a time to satisfy me. The Cafe Royal, in the Hague, has the best hors d'oeuvres in the world — eighty-five different kinds, and it takes a long time to eat some of each. There's a place on West Forty-ninth Street in New York that has wonderful curried food and wonderful chutney. There's a place in Paris that has the best octopus soup. And oh, my, the smorgasbord in Sweden! At Old Orchard Beach, Maine, I got the reputation of eating more hot dogs than any man in America. A Mrs. Wagner there makes a toasted bun that's the best of its kind in America. She has a toasted bun, then a slice of onion, then a hamburger, then a tomato, then melted cheese, then another hamburger, then a slice of onion, more cheese, more tomato, and then the other side of the bun. Her hot dogs have two dogs to a bun. I ate thirty-two one night. She has very fine baked beans. When I eat with Mrs. Wagner, I begin with ham and eggs for an appetizer, then the baked beans, then fried chicken, then a steak - her steaks are two inches thick — and then a dessert of applesauce, ice cream, chocolate cake, and custard, mixed with rich, yellow country cream. I like veal with an egg on it. Monseigneur's, in London, has very fine mutton. Durgin-Park's, in Boston, has very fine roast beef. I get the best baked ham, cabbage, and cornbread at a little place near Biloxi. St. Petersburg, Florida, has the best fried fish. It's just a little shack, but they can sure fry fish. I really hurt myself when I go there."
Duke's audience seemed awed at his recital, and he looked rather impressed
himself. "Gee," he said admiringly, "I really sent myself on that, didn't I?" Some of the passengers wanted to ask more questions, but Duke had worked himself up to the point of having to go to the diner. There, between bites, he resumed the discussion of his music with one of his new acquaintances, who had gone along with him. "Take 'Harlem Air Shaft,"' Duke said. "So much goes on in a Harlem air shaft. You get the full essence of Harlem in an air shaft. You hear fights, you smell dinner, you hear people making love. You hear intimate gossip floating down. You hear the radio. An air shaft is one great big loudspeaker. You see your neighbors' laundry. You hear the janitor's dogs. The man upstairs' aerial falls down and breaks your window. You smell coffee. A wonderful thing, that smell. An air shaft has got every contrast. One guy is cooking dried fish and rice and another guy's got a great big turkey. Guy-with-fish's wife is a terrific cooker but the guy's wife with the turkey is doing a sad job." Duke laughed. "You hear people praying, fighting, snoring. Jitterbugs are jumping up and down always over you, never below you. That's a funny thing about jitterbugs. They're always above you. I tried to put all that in 'Harlem Air Shaft.'"
It was dark outside now, and Duke looked out at the night. When he saw that the moon was up, he said, "Bomber's moon. I'm going to write a song about that." Duke's companion asked him about "Saturday Night Function." "That's from the old rent-party days," he said. "When I was young, I traveled around with a character named Lippy and with James P. Johnson, one of the world's great piano players. He really can play plenty of piano. I can still hear Lippy coming into a tenement at four in the morning and shouting, 'It's Lippy, and James P. is with me!' We'd be in bed and hear that ole click, clack, click of those triple locks and when they'd open up, Lippy would shout, 'Wake up everybody and dust off that piano so James P. can play!' Everybody would crowd around and James P. would milk 'em around, kind of teasing 'em when they asked for a piece, saying 'Is this what you mean?' and 'Or is this the number?' and then finally bang into it. That's real dramatic timing."
Duke lit a cigarette. "That's the way the whole world should be," he said.
"James P. was an artist and the people wanted to hear him at any hour. Now everybody wants to know your pedigree. I think I'll build a city like that. A guy has a new painting or a poem that he wants people to enjoy at four in the morning, and it's all right. I’ll have nothing but bungalows, so we can always knock on windows and walk in and sit down and start playing on a man's piano without offending anybody." He was silent for a moment and then said, "I like that city idea." He thought for a while. "I really like that city idea. I think I'll call it Peaceful Haven."
To be continued and concluded in Part 3.
