Duke (12 page)

It was, for Mills, an immensely profitable business. He became a natty dresser whose Brooklyn home was decorated in an assortment of incompatible period styles. His hospitality was ostentatious, and one of his verbal tics was to offer his guests not a cigar, but a
good
cigar (“Have a good cigar, Spike”). In the twenties and thirties he looked like a well-groomed fireplug, in old age like a wealthy gnome, but at no time could he have been mistaken for anything other than a second-generation immigrant, for he was branded on the tongue with the accent of the big-city hustler, which he acquired on the streets of lower Manhattan and retained until his death. Even Bob, his loyal son, spoke of his “limited vocabulary,” and a strong scent of snobbery hangs over what some of his acquaintances had to say about him. What Ellington made of so rough-hewn a character can only be imagined, but he is not known to have uttered a disagreeable word about Mills, and most of those who knew the man believed his contribution to black music to be largely positive. Not all: John Hammond worked for Mills in 1934 and later claimed to have seen at the time “how tremendously Duke was being exploited.” In 1936 he wrote an article for the
New Masses
in which he declared that Mills’s way of doing business with songwriters was “as ingenious as it [was] unfair to the author and composer.” But he also praised Mills years later as “a man who saved black talent in the 1930’s, when there was no one else who cared whether it worked or not.”

It is unclear when Mills and Ellington first crossed paths. In 1973 Ellington said that they met “during [his] first six months in New York” and that he sold an unspecified number of blues songs to the Mills brothers for “fifteen or twenty dollars” apiece. In 1940 he remembered it differently: “The band had been at the Kentucky Club about three and a half years [i.e., late in 1926] when I first met Irving Mills. We were playing the
St. Louis Blues,
and he asked what it was. When I told him, he said it sure sounded nothing like it. So maybe that gave him ideas.” Mills recalled the song that he heard as Ellington’s “Black and Tan Fantasy,” and in 1937 he told a reporter for
Time
that as soon as he heard the Washingtonians, he “signed the Negro pianist to a contract on the back of a menu.”

This much is certain: Duke Ellington and His Kentucky Club Orchestra, as the band was billed by Vocalion, its new record company, reported to Room 1 of Brunswick Studios in midtown Manhattan on November 29, 1926, to cut two issued instrumental sides, “East St. Louis Toodle-O”
^§§
and “Birmingham Breakdown.” Not long after that, Ellington signed a personal management contract with Mills, and for the next thirteen years their fates would be entwined.

 • • • 

In later years Mills was crystal clear about what he had seen in Ellington in 1926. He had already figured out that one of the most effective ways to plug the songs that he published was to arrange for them to be recorded by suitable singers, and since a growing number of those songs were being written by and for blacks, he also needed a black band with a suitable leader. At first he tried Fletcher Henderson, but Henderson was insufficiently reliable:

He never had the same men twice, or he didn’t have the arrangements ready, or there were always some little things that didn’t make the date perfect. It was not good for the band, not good for the singer. So much for Fletcher Henderson. When I heard Duke play, I heard not only Duke, but I fell in love with every individual man as a soloist. . . . I left the club and was so intrigued with the possibilities of the band that to make sure that I’d get them to record, I went back to the club. I dated up Duke to come to the office and arrange the recording.

“A great creative artist”: Irving Mills, Percy Grainger, and Ellington at New York University, 1932. Throughout his thirteen-year association with Duke Ellington, Mills promoted the bandleader as “a great musician who was making a lasting contribution to American music,” emphasizing the fact that his jazz compositions were admired by noted classical musicians like Grainger

The “possibilities” of which Mills spoke a half century later centered on Ellington’s compositions. From the outset of their association, Mills promoted Ellington both as a bandleader and as a composer, something that had never before been done in jazz. “Every now and then the record companies wanted me to make outside tunes,” Mills later explained, “so occasionally I would make a ‘Twelfth Street Rag’ or some old, old tune. Otherwise I stuck to 100 percent Duke Ellington.” That wasn’t quite true—Ellington recorded many Mills-published songs by other hands—but in the main he stuck to his own work, a policy that was to make him unique among his fellow leaders. In a crowd of soon-to-be-familiar faces, he stood out as the only one, black or white, who wrote or cowrote most of the songs that his musicians played. Nobody had to tell him what that meant and would continue to mean, both as a musical opportunity and as a source of income.
Music Is My Mistress
contains a half-page list of the things that Irving Mills claimed to have done for Ellington, and the first item on it was his insistence that Ellington “make and record only [his] own music.”

Mills said that he immediately recognized Ellington to be “a great creative artist—and the first American composer to catch in his music the true jazz spirit.” He also understood what it would mean to have under exclusive contract a popular bandleader who, like Ellington, wrote his own material. Whenever the Washingtonians performed, whether in person or on record, they would be promoting a catalog of songs that were written by their leader and published by Mills Music Inc., which reaped the lion’s share of their sheet-music sales and performance royalties. In addition, Mills grasped early on that Ellington’s soloists were part and parcel of his composing method and that their ability to generate tunes that their leader turned into full-length songs could also be profitably exploited: “We gave every man in the band an opportunity to write. . . . They came in with ideas, and Duke helped to develop it and give it the style.”

If the Washingtonians had sounded the same way in November of 1926 that they did on the records they cut earlier in the year, then Mills’s ability as a talent scout would have bordered on the prophetic. But the hiring of a new trombonist had made a big difference: Joseph Nanton, always known as “Tricky” to the members of the band and “Tricky Sam” to the public, replaced Charlie Irvis, and by November he was, after Miley, the band’s principal solo horn. Born in New York of West Indian parents in 1904, Nanton was intellectually curious to a degree unusual among jazz musicians of the period. Rex Stewart, who got to know him in the thirties, described the trombonist as a “thinking, knowledgeable man” with the melancholy face of a basset hound and an unquenchable taste for liquor, which he quietly sipped on the bandstand: “He was well acquainted with such erudite and diverse subjects as astronomy, how to make home brew, and how to use a slide rule. He could recite poetry by ancient poets that most of us never knew existed, and he knew Shakespeare.” He also knew what to do with a plunger: His muted solos had a raw, vocalized quality that bore a startlingly close resemblance to human speech. (Unlike Miley and most other plunger-mute players, his preferred sound was not “wah-wah” but “yah-yah.”) Nanton spent the next two decades in Ellington’s trombone section, and in time his playing became the most recognizable color on the composer’s palette.

It mattered, too, that Ellington was now working with a bigger band. The Club Kentucky bandstand was so small that it would hold only seven musicians, so he took the opportunity to add three new men when the Washingtonians toured New England in the summer of 1926. Working with this group had taught Ellington how to use the expanded tonal resources of a ten-piece band to the best advantage, and when Irving Mills and Vocalion Records invited him to show what he could do, Ellington brought all ten players into the studio and led with the strongest card in his hand. “East St. Louis Toodle-O,” the Washingtonians’ first electrical recording, had been written for the larger band the preceding summer, and it makes arresting use of the wider range of tone colors available to a ten-piece ensemble.

“East St. Louis Toodle-O” gets under way with eight bars of moaning low-register saxophone-section chords (the bass line is played by a tuba, darkening the sound still further) that serve as an ear-catching minor-key introduction. The introduction is promptly repeated, this time as the opening section of a thirty-two-bar AABA-song-form chorus, with Bubber Miley playing a raspy, blues-drenched plunger solo that floats freely atop the arc of rising and falling chords. What would normally follow is a string of additional choruses constructed along similar lines, but Ellington surprises us by introducing a contrasting sixteen-bar strain with a two-bar tag. The major-key harmonies of this strain are first used to accompany a solo by Tricky Sam Nanton, then heard underneath an ensemble theme whose polkalike rhythms bear a definite resemblance to the tune of “I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate.” The two strains alternate unpredictably, with Miley returning at the end to round out what is not a mere repeating-chorus song but a full-fledged instrumental composition. The form of “East St. Louis Toodle-O” is simple but satisfying, and though Miley’s solo is the best part, it is the dark-hued saxophone-and-tuba accompaniment that helps to make it so—a sign that Ellington may already have been starting to think of orchestral color as his musical signature.

He was also, as would be the case for the rest of his career, collaborating closely with his star sidemen. Although Ellington receives sole credit on the label of Vocalion 1064 as the composer of “East St. Louis Toodle-O,” later recordings of the piece credit Bubber Miley as co-composer. What did Miley contribute? The chantlike four-bar melodic motif heard at the beginning of his solo was definitely his own creation. Miley told a friend that “the inspiration for the ‘East St. Louis Toodle-O’ came one night in Boston [on the band’s 1926 tour of New England] as he was returning home from work. He kept noticing the electric sign of the dry-cleaning store Lewandos. The name struck him as exceedingly funny and it ran through his head.” Miley started singing an improvised tune that fit the name of the store: “Oh, Le-wan-
dos!
Oh, Le-
wa-
ah-an-dos!” Out of that fragmentary idea came the rest of his solo, a set piece that he repeated with minor variations each time the band played “East St. Louis Toodle-O.”

Ellington said that Miley had conceived of the song as a musical portrait. As he explained in
Music Is My Mistress,
the trumpeter “always had a story for his music, such as: ‘This is an old man, tired from working in the field since sunup, coming up the road in the sunset on his way home to dinner. He’s tired but strong, and humming in time with his broken gait—or vice versa.’ That was how he pictured ‘East St. Louis Toodle-oo [
sic
].’” Ellington loved to trot out such tales, some of which were attached after the fact to the compositions that they were alleged to have inspired. Miley himself seems to have said no such thing, nor did he claim to have contributed more to the piece than his trumpet solo. But the solo was a defining contribution in and of itself, and Tricky Sam Nanton, speaking with specific reference to “East St. Louis Toodle-O” and “Black and Tan Fantasy,” called Miley “an idea man. . . . His ideas were more or less the backbone of the band. His ideas and the tunes he wrote set the band’s style.”

The question of what constitutes a “tune” is central to grasping the nature of Ellington’s achievement as a composer. Miley made one statement that may touch on the matter: “When I get off [i.e., play an inspired solo] the Duke is always there.” What did he mean? Perhaps he was saying that Ellington used his best improvised solos as the raw material for finished compositions that showed off Miley’s playing to even more advantageous effect, as he would do with other players later on. We can only speculate, since no manuscript materials for the original version of “East St. Louis Toodle-O” survive, and it’s safe to assume that the piece, like the rest of Ellington’s early compositions, was worked out on the bandstand and in the studio long before anyone thought to write it down. But most scholars now believe that Ellington supplied and scored the chordal backdrop for Miley’s solo, composed the second strain, and established the overall running order.

In doing so—if that is what he did—he established a pattern for many other pieces that he would write in years to come. One of his favorite gambits, for instance, was to launch his records not with an ensemble chorus but with an instrumental solo accompanied by the band. At times, as in “East St. Louis Toodle-O,” these solos took the place of written-out themes, for Ellington made a point of hiring players whose styles were so characterful (and melodically appealing) that he could get away with giving them nothing more than a cushion of interestingly scored chords over which they would then improvise. When he wrote a melody of his own, it was often, like the second strain of “East St. Louis Toodle-O,” both unsingable and unmemorable. Most of the themes that he is known to have written himself, as opposed to the ones that he derived from his bandstand listening, typically arise from and adumbrate their underlying harmonies rather than having a fully independent life of their own.