Mood Indigo & Beyond

(See Cover)

The chill of a moonless July midnight was in the air, and some of the 11,000 jazz buffs in Newport, R.I.'s Freebody Park drifted towards the gate. In the tented area behind the bandstand, musicians who had finished playing for the final night of Newport's third jazz festival were packing their instruments and saying goodbye. The festival was just about over. But onstage famed Bandleader Duke Ellington, a trace of coldness rimming his urbanity, refused to recognize the fact. He announced one of his 1938 compositions, Diminuendo in Blue and Crescendo in Blue. A strange, spasmodic air, that carried memories of wilderness and city, rose through the salt-scented night air like a fire on a beach. Minutes passed. People turned back from the exits; snoozers woke up. All at once the promise of new excitement revived the dying evening.

At that magic moment Ellington's Paul Gonsalves was ripping off a fast but insinuating solo on his tenor saxophone, his fancies dandled by a bounding beat on bass and drums (Jimmy Woode and Sam Woodyard). The Duke himself tweaked an occasional fragment on the high piano. Gradually, the beat began to ricochet from the audience as more and more fans began to clap hands on the offbeats until the crowd was one vast, rhythmic chorus, yelling its approval. There were howls of "More! More!" and there was dancing in the aisles. One young woman broke loose from her escort and rioted solo around the field, while a young man encouraged her by shouting, "Go, go, go!" Festival officials began to fear that something like a rock 'n' roll riot was taking place. One of them was pleading with beaming Bandleader Ellington to stop. When the fellow's entreaties got too emphatic, Duke wagged a soothing finger at him and said mildly, "Don't be rude to the artists."

The event last month marked not only the turning point in one concert; it confirmed a turning point in a career. The big news was something that the whole jazz world had long hoped to hear: the Ellington band was once again the most exciting thing in the business, Ellington himself had emerged from a long period of quiescence and was once again bursting with ideas and inspiration.

At 57, Edward Kennedy Ellington, jazzman, composer, and beyond question one of America's topflight musicians, is a magic name to two generations of Americans. His Mood Indigo, Sophisticated Lady, Solitude, and countless other dreamy tunes have become as familiar as any other songs since Stephen Foster. As jazz composer he is beyond categorizing--there is hardly a musician in the field who has not been influenced by the Ellington style. His style contains the succinctness of concert music and the excitement of jazz. His revival comes at a time when most bandleaders who thrived in the golden '30s are partly or completely out of business,* and few have risen to replace them.

Last week Bandleader Ellington returned to New York from a four-night swing through New England and spent his first 24 hours in the company of his arranger, Billy Strayhorn, poring over a pad of hot score paper. Next night the band met to record the four new songs they had written, while wives and friends looked on. At midnight the whole crew got on the bus and left for Buffalo, where the next night they played for a Negro fraternity meeting. The affair lasted till 4 a.m. Back in New York Duke stayed up late (noon) and got up early (2 p.m.) in order to keep appointments with TV crews and the press. At week's end he was off for a handful of one-night stands before settling down for one of his periodic long runs: a fortnight's engagement in Chicago's Blue Note Cafe.

Hot Licks. Although Ellington's outfit is the only big band that has never been disbanded in its 29 years, its character has changed over the decades as death or a yen for adventure changed its roster. Yet the Ellington sound is as distinctive today as it ever was. Apart from the Duke himself, its dominant personality is provided by two men who have been with it longest: Harry Carney and the hoarse, jovial tone of his big baritone saxophone, Johnny Hodges and the refined, almost brutally sensual whine of his alto. The other characteristic sounds are the tantrum-tempered groans and howls of the growl brasses with plunger mute,* an effect originally discovered by the late Trumpeter Bubber Miley, now played on trombone by Quentin ("Butter") Jackson and on trumpet by Ray Nance.

When the saxophones play together, their tone is tinted by one of Duke's innovations, the split harmony, which hauntingly inflects the whole quality of a chord. They seem to play with a fierce joy which is stimulated by the rude sting of the trumpets--or by their melting pleasure--and the short-tempered, but softhearted bleats of the trombones. The sound combinations are already fairly routine in almost any band of today. But in the Ellington band such background licks take on the coherence of speech and frequently turn into lively conversation. In My Funny Valentine, for instance, the blue mood of its start turns black in the second chorus; the dialogue becomes desperate and reaches a violent climax before tranquillity is restored.

Fickle Tricks. The man who is responsible for this remarkable musical idiom is a tall (6 ft. 1 in.), rangy (185 Ibs.) fellow whose newfound trimness parallels his rediscovered energies. His habitual expression combines curiosity, mockery and humor. In his pleasant Harlem apartment or in his dressing room, he usually goes about in his shorts, possibly to preserve the creases in his 100-plus suits of clothes. His public personality resembles his public appearance, which is fastidious to the point of frivolity; few are the people who get a glimpse of the man beneath this polished exterior. "You gotta be older," he explains, "to realize that many of the people you meet are mediocrities. You have to let them run off you like water off a duck's back. Otherwise, they drag you down." Even his close friends say he never exposes himself to unpleasantness if he can help it. Says one: "He likes pretty pictures and pretty melodies."

Often, his efforts to avoid unpleasantness take the form of hypochondria--as he puts it, "I'm a doctor freak." Although his doctor says he is an unusually healthy specimen, Duke tends to mistrust his ability to stay well; if his pulse rate seems slow to him in Las Vegas, it means a call to New York, for his doctor to take the next plane out. He will not tolerate air conditioning--"You know, I'm delicate. My hair gets wet, the air conditioning hits it, and I get a sharp pain right down the middle of my back." His personal vanity extends to his feet, which he exercises against the wall at odd moments during his busy days and nights.

Even the Duke himself has trouble fathoming the hidden truths of his personality, although he likes to try. "I may be a heel," he will say, "but I hate for people to think so." Or, "I always take the easy way." Perhaps his best estimate of his life and career is a self-deprecating one: "I'm so damned fickle," he says. "I never could stick with what I was doing--always wanted to try something new. I never accumulated any money, so I always had to keep working.''

At Last, Clicks. When Edward Ellington was born in Washington, D.C. in 1899, the capital was jigging to the insolent rhythms of ragtime pianists. Farther west Buddy Bolden's fabulous cornet was shaking New Orleans' levees, and such young idolaters as Joe ("King") Oliver and Sidney Bechet were soon to hammer out the rudiments of instrumental jazz. Washington jazz tended to strings--pianos, banjos, violins--but it had the same ancestry: the sophisticated rhythms of African drums, which later took on a more succinct and sensuous character as they drifted through the Caribbean islands, gradually infiltrated the U.S. via New Orleans and the East Coast. The East Coast variety, with its own flavors added, eventually became the ragtime of Duke's childhood.

"Man, those were two-fisted piano players," he recalls. "Men like Sticky Mack and Doc Perry and James P. Johnson and Willie 'The Lion' Smith. With their left hand, they'd play big chords for the bass note, and just as big ones for the offbeat, and they really swang. The right hand played real pretty. They did things technically you wouldn't believe."

Ellington's father was first a butler, then a caterer, and eventually a blueprint technician, and he provided well for his family. Duke had art lessons, at which he did extremely well, and piano lessons, which he never mastered. He felt they cramped his style. He worked in a soda fountain after school, and spent his hours at home working out his own method of playing the piano. By the time he was 14, he had started a piece called Soda Fountain Rag, and he played it so many different ways that people thought it was several compositions.

Soon Duke and his friends were playing for private affairs and dances at Washington's True Reformers Hall. A musical contractor arranged bookings in return for half of the fees. Duke noticed that the contractor got his business from a small ad in the classified phone book, so the boy took an ad himself, and he clicked. After that he never had to split his fees. Before long he had a house, a car, a wife and a son, Mercer. But his musical friends all moved to New York, where the jazz was hot. Duke followed in 1922, though it meant a fresh start, many penniless months, and a separation from his wife that became permanent.

Lucky Six. "A pal and I used to go see Willie The Lion at his club--the Capitol Palace--and Fats Waller at the Orient, and they'd let us sit in and cut in on the tips," Duke recalls. "Every day we'd go play pool until we made $2. With $2 we'd get a pair of 75-c- steaks, beer for a quarter, and have a quarter left for tomorrow." He did his own housework, including mending and pressing his tailor-made suits, always impeccably kept. Periodically, there was work for his five-man combo--Arthur Whetsel on trumpet, Otto Hardwick on bass and alto, Sonny Greer on drums and Elmer Snowden on banjo--but the real break came in 1927. "You know, I'm lucky," says Duke. "I'm lucky because I like pretty music--some people don't--and can write it down. And I was lucky when we auditioned for the Cotton Club job. Six other bands auditioned, and they were all on time. We were late, but the big boss was late too, and he heard us and he never heard the others." Duke enlarged his band to eleven pieces and stayed at the Cotton Club on Harlem's Lenox Avenue for five years.

As soon as he got on his feet, Duke sent for his mother. "I was never out of her sight until I was eight," he says. "She and my father even used to take me to dances and set me on the bandstand while they danced." He bought her furs and a big diamond ring, and sought her advice constantly. When he toured, she would follow him around the country. When she died, Duke wept in his sister's arms. As for his father, Duke had long since made him road manager of his band.

Every man in the early Ellington band--as in today's--was a soloist, and the music they played was unlike anything anyone had ever heard. Recalls a friend: "One time at the Cotton Club the entire brass section arose and delivered such an intricate and unbelievably integrated chorus that Eddy Duchin, who was in the audience, literally rolled on the floor under his table--in ecstasy." Says Ellington: "We didn't think of it as jazz; we thought of it as Negro music."

It was, indeed, full of thudding tomtoms, sizzling cymbals and gongs. Much of it had an undulating, tropical beat that might have emerged from Africa, and its saxes wailed and its brasses growled in cheerful ill temper. The titles, themselves an important part of the magical atmosphere, were such things as East St. Louis Toodle-oo, The Mooche, Creole Love Call and Black and Tan Fantasy. By that time, Composer Ellington was already making some of his important innovations; e.g., the use of a wordless soprano as if she were a musical instrument, and compositions of unusual length for a jazz band (his Reminiscing in Tempo was spread over four record sides).

Duke Ellington really started to get around. Recalls one of Duke's former managers: "I've traveled all over with him. I've seen Duke between a real duke and lady-so-and-so, and when he's dressed in those tails, he's as fine a gentleman as England could produce.

"Duke and his band played in England during the Economic Conference, in 1933. They were playing in Lord Beaverbrook's tremendous palace at a party. Jack Hylton's band played waltzes till midnight, and Duke took over at midnight. This mob, they'd never heard music like that. I was standing with Beaverbrook and Lady Mountbatteri. We Were watching all of these dignitaries, all diamonds and medals and what not. Beaverbrook was so taken with the music, and he said the mob was like a bunch of kids. He asked me questions about the band. I explained this was swing music. The Duke has the type of rhythm that more or less gets into your veins when you're dancing. Beaverbrook wrote an editorial about us."*

Quick Fix. In those days Negroes were still segregated on Broadway. Duke recalls going to work at a nightclub called the Hurricane, which he found a good spot until he began getting complaints from his Harlem friends; not one of them had been able to get in. Ellington spoke to the owner, and it was not long before the doors were opened. Duke is not a militant foe of segregation. He plays for segregated audiences on his annual swings through the South--"everybody does"--and feels lucky that there has never been an incident.

In 1926 Duke met an agent and lyric writer named Irving Mills, and Mills became manager of the band as well as Ellington's personal representative and partner. Out of this relationship came Duke's most successful years as a composer and bandleader, almost in spite of himself. "Oh yes," Mills would say, offhandedly, waving his fat cigar. "We've got a recording date tomorrow. Four new songs." Or, "Oh yes. We're going to introduce a new big work next week." Creole Rhapsody, Duke's first composition of greater than pop-tune dimensions (1932), came about after one of Manager Mills's press conferences. At that time Creole Rhapsody was just another little tune. A reporter wanted to know how come it was called "rhapsody," and Mills offhandedly said that it was "part of a larger work." And Duke Ellington, too proud to let his manager down, and unwilling to let such a whopper stand, produced the music on time--or almost on time.

Ellington, who seems to derive inspiration from being on the move, wrote many of the tunes in a taxi on the way to the studio, or even in the studio. Sometimes he would jump out of bed in the middle of the night, grunt a tune that had just come to him and play it on the piano. It made little difference, since all new numbers had to be worked out anyhow. "You play this," Duke would say to one musician at a time, while noodling out a tune on the piano. As soon as they heard a phrase, the musicians learned it, and then toyed with it until they made it sound as if they had invented it themselves.

Even accidents were turned to advantage. One day, when only half the band arrived for a recording session, a new distribution of voices was evolved on the spot to make the few sound richer. The tune was Mood Indigo, and the broad-spaced trio at the start became one of Duke's sound trademarks. Other tunes lay fallow in the band's books until somebody set words to them and they caught on, e.g., Never No Lament (Don't Get Around Much Any More), Concerto for Cootie (Do Nothin' 'Til You Hear from Me). Ellington is accustomed to hearing his ideas unexpectedly used by other songwriters, and is resigned to it.

Counting Chicks. Duke's fertile mind continued to turn out songs, even when there were no recording deadlines to meet. The band could now play a week's worth of dances and never repeat itself or play any composer except Ellington. During the early years, Ellington found that one hit tune a year was enough to keep the band popular. What kind of music did he think he was writing? Mostly, he thinks it was folk music. In any case, he says, his songs are "all about women," and almost any one who listens receptively will agree. Duke is well qualified to discourse musically--or any other way--on the chicks, as he calls them. He has made a long and continuing study of the subject, and is himself the object of study by his subjects. As soon as he appears on a Harlem sidewalk, the street becomes crowded with chicks. The young ones merely ask for his autograph; older ones pass with glittering, sidelong glances beneath lowered lashes.

In 1939 Musician Ellington and Manager Mills agreed to go separate ways (Mills has since become a successful music publisher). One of Duke's subsequent adventures was Jump for Joy, which he wrote and produced with a group of Hollywood artists. It was a revue designed to fight Uncle Tomism in the entertainment world, and the show folded after twelve weeks of backstage wrangling. As usual, Duke had written for his own band, and the band was in the pit. "We stayed out there for a while, just barely keeping our heads above water," he says. "But there were not enough people clamoring to buy at our price. So we put the price up. We gave a concert in Carnegie Hall."

Bop Kicks. It was about the same time that Duke got what he calls "the check." Things were very black. There was a recording ban on,* which meant no extra fees, and the band was taking a $500 loss a week just to play at a club with a "wire," i.e., a radio hookup. "I was short of cash," he says, "so I went into the William Morris office to negotiate a small loan. While I was standing around, a boy came through with the mail, and handed me a letter from Victor records. I glanced at it. It was a check for $2,250. I slid it back into the envelope quick. Just what I needed, I thought. Two thousand, two-hundred-and-fifty dollars would do me nicely. But maybe I had misread it. Probably it was $22.50. I opened it again. It was $22,500, royalties for Don't Get Around Much Any More. I went out of there like a shot, and nobody saw me for two months."

During the '40s, Duke turned out several large jazz tone poems, notably Black, Brown and Beige, which has to do with states of mind rather than skin colors; Tattooed Bride, a humorous episode; Harlem, with its smooth changes of pace from nimble to noble; Liberian Suite, written on commission for the Liberian government centennial.

Despite the fame of these works, things continued strictly blue for the Ellington gang. Most of the original band members had either quit or died, and with their replacements, Composer Ellington seemed to have trouble writing new songs as distinctive as the old. The jazz world was getting its kicks from bop, but when Ellington tried to go along with the new style, he seemed to be regressing: he had been using their tricks for years. On the fringes of show business, men became reputable critics overnight simply by writing attacks on Ellington.

The Clock Ticks. But the attraction of the Ellington band never faded among musicians. And today, joining him means both musical glory and financial security. "You hear the band, when you're not in it," says Butter Jackson, "and you like the way it sounds. You think you'd like to be playing that." Once in, every man is tempered by the fire of 14 other men's alert ears. There is no other discipline. Says Duke: "I told those guys in 1927 they were never going to drive me to the nuthouse. 'We may all go there,' I said, 'but I'm going to be driving the wagon.' " He can't remember ever firing anybody, but he has driven some to quit. One man regularly arrived tight and got drunker as the evening wore on. At the worst moment Duke would schedule the fellow's solo in racing tempo, so fast that he could not play the notes, and he eventually quit in humiliation.

Mercer Ellington (who is now in the recording business) well remembers the days when he was working his way up through the ranks of the band as baggage boy. "We got to Cleveland about 8 or 9 o'clock one morning," he says. "I complained that I was hungry. 'What!' said my father. 'Didn't you just eat yesterday?' " Today, things are different. The Ellington band, back on top, asks a tidy $2,500 a night for a dance, plus about half of the net gate receipts. The fee is $3,500 for a college concert-and-prom. Altogether, Duke Ellington, Inc. grosses between $500,000 and $700,000 a year. Part of the reason for the band's durability is the fact that, unlike most bands, it plays everything--concerts, proms, dances, theaters, nightclubs, hotel dining rooms, and even rock 'n' roll hops. Most of its time is devoted to living "on the other side of the clock" while playing one-night stands. The band packs up its instruments between 1 and 4 a.m., gets aboard the big bus with "Mr. Hi-Fi of 1956'' on the fluted sides, and rides, argues and snores its way to the next town (favorite topics: chicks, music, food, geography). The arrival may be at dawn or dusk, depending on the distance. One musician described the rest of the process: "You go to the hotel, take a long look at the bed, go play the date, take another look at the bed and get on the bus.'' Such a life seems to agree with the Ellington bandsmen, who are cushioned against some of life's jolts by getting the highest pay in the business ($200-$500 a week).

Duke travels by car or train these days. He never flies, and has serious reservations about steamships. But when he hits New York between tours, his rounds of lawyers, music publishers, recording studios, photographers and tailors are fairly ducal. He likes to play the patriarch of his family which includes his sister, his son Mercer, 37, his three grandchildren and (by virtual adoption) his doctor and his arranger, Billy Strayhorn.

Ellington's second wind has been felt in the music business for months, and the major record companies have been bidding for his remarkable signature:

This week he plans to sign (with Columbia) a contract designed to give him the broadest possible scope. He will have time to write more big works, both instrumental and dramatic. Planned for the immediate future: a musical on the history of jazz, specifically composed for records. Ellington began work on this score 15 years ago in Hollywood, on a commission from Orson Welles, but he soon put it aside. "I wrote a piece of music . . . just 28 bars," he wrote later. "It was a gasser --real great, I confess it. And I lost it. I always said, and I say to this day, that it was the greatest thing I ever wrote . . . I got the money, but they never got the 28 bars." Now, Duke is determined to go on with the project despite the missing 28 bars.

Says a friend: "Duke hasn't hit his stride yet. If he retired for a few years and just wrote, he would leave a wealth of music. The record companies should let Duke write tremendous symphonies that would represent America and a style of music. He should be allowed to write big works, to write and record with big symphony orchestras. He shouldn't be limited to 14 or 15 men."

To which Edward Kennedy Ellington replies: "We're not worried about writing for posterity. We just want it to sound good right now!"

* Benny Goodman plays occasional weekend dates, Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey have combined their bands, Artie Shaw is out of the music business, Cab Galloway is appearing as a solo singing act. Such sweet-music bandleaders as Guy Lombardo and Sammy Kaye, however, are still going strong.

* Actually, the business end of a "plumber's helper."

* In the London Daily Express, advocating colored colonial Members of Parliament, Press Lord Beaverbrook took Ellington as a fine example of his race, described him as "a genius of Negro music. He sat by the side of his host, modest, dignified, delighting all the company with his gay mind and splendid bearing."

* Instituted by Music Czar James C. Petrillo in a campaign to force radio stations, bars and restaurants to employ members of the American Federation of Musicians.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.