Duke (22 page)

While this does nothing to diminish Ellington’s greatness, his lifelong reluctance to give full credit to his collaborators places his personality in an unflattering light. Whether or not Bigard stole “Mood Indigo” from Lorenzo Tio Jr., he was right to criticize Ellington for his own musical appropriations: “That’s the only thing I didn’t like about Duke. He never gave the boys in the band the credit they deserved. . . . It wouldn’t cost him nothing to credit them—he was a genius.” It was true, and those who have spent time around geniuses know that some of them cannot bear to be thought less than perfect.

6

“A HIGHER PLATEAU”

Becoming a Star, 1931–1933

W
HAT DUKE ELLINGTON
lacked in collegiality, he more than made up for in talent, and he was doing things with his musicians that no other big-band composer had done up to that time. Gunther Schuller did not overstate the case when he said that in pieces like “Mood Indigo” and “Old Man Blues,” Ellington had achieved “the perfect balance between composition and improvisation . . . This achievement is, of course, above all else, Ellington’s greatest contribution to the development of jazz.” Other arrangers of the twenties and thirties, among them Bill Challis and Don Redman, used the dance-band instrumentation with a like degree of coloristic imagination, but unlike them, Ellington was also producing original compositions of permanent interest. It is instructive to listen to his recordings of the period in tandem with those of Fletcher Henderson, the bandleader who had been one of his first professional models (“I tried desperately to try and sound like Fletcher Henderson”) when he came to New York in 1923. Despite its lack of discipline, the Henderson band was a first-class group, and in Coleman Hawkins it had one of the most influential jazz soloists of the twentieth century. But after 1926, Ellington’s music was so far in advance of anything that Henderson was playing that direct comparisons are pointless, even embarrassing.

In this respect he had only one rival, Jelly Roll Morton, who had grappled with similar compositional problems in his small-group recordings of the midtwenties and solved them with comparable success—and it’s interesting to note that Ellington never spoke of Morton other than with icy contempt. “Sure, Jelly Roll Morton has talent . . . talent for talking about Jelly Roll Morton,” he told Leonard Feather. “Jelly Roll Morton played piano like one of those high school teachers in Washington; as a matter of fact, high school teachers played better jazz.” He should have known better, and very likely did. “Probably he was jealous of [Morton] in those days,” Barney Bigard said. It is, however, impossible to prove that Ellington heard any of the Red Hot Peppers’ Victor recordings, much less that he was influenced by them in any way, and so one must take his word for it that Morton’s music meant nothing to him.

Conversely, he would never have a bad word to say about Paul Whiteman, whom he described to a newspaper columnist in 1932 as his “favorite musician.” Long after Whiteman’s music fell out of fashion, Ellington remained loyal to the man who had shown him what a jazz orchestra could do: “Paul Whiteman was known as the King of Jazz, and no one as yet has come near carrying that title with more certainty and dignity . . . there is no doubt but that he has carried jazz to the highest position it ever has enjoyed.” He made a point of mentioning Whiteman when being interviewed by Howard Taubman of
The
New York Times
prior to the Carnegie Hall premiere of
Black, Brown and Beige
, and what he said was notable:

Our band came along just when Paul Whiteman and his orchestra had popularized the symphonic style. And don’t let them kid you about Whiteman. He has been a big man in our music. He’s done a lot for it, especially with his concerts where he gave composers a chance to write new, extended works.

Today Whiteman’s “symphonic jazz” is known only to musical archaeologists, but for the young Duke Ellington it was very much a thing of the present. Working in tandem with Ferde Grofé, Whiteman had organized in 1920 one of the first modern American dance bands to use written arrangements, an innovation that opened the door to the big-band era. While his earliest recordings sound overpolite and rhythmically stiff to modern ears, so does most other recorded “jazz” of the period, and his agenda was in any case quite different from that of the black musicians of New Orleans and Chicago. Whiteman never said that he sought to “make a lady out of jazz,” an apocryphal quote that continues to be cited sniffishly, but what he did say was equally to the point: “The modern jazz can be played without so much roughness and made quite attractive. That’s what I aim to do.” To that end he put together a twenty-eight-piece concert orchestra that performed an unusually wide range of popular music with polish and warmth. For most white Americans in the twenties, Whiteman’s music
was
jazz, the very thing that novelists like F. Scott Fitzgerald and John O’Hara had in mind when they wrote about the manners and morals of what came to be known as “the Jazz Age.” And some of it was jazz by any definition—Bix Beiderbecke’s presence in the trumpet section ensured that—while much of the rest of it, including George Gershwin’s
Rhapsody in Blue,
the first of many such essays in “symphonic jazz” that Whiteman commissioned, was deeply informed by the sounds of black jazz.

Ellington had tangled feelings about Gershwin, whom he regarded with a volatile mix of admiration, envy, and resentment. He would be judiciously critical of
Porgy and Bess,
arguing in public that “Gershwin’s music, though grand, was not distinctly or definitely negroid in character” and expressing more frankly in private his dislike of the racial attitudes embedded in the opera’s libretto: “
Porgy and Bess
, those people in those alleys, waking up, dusting those carpets out the window and beating their brooms in time and all that bullshit.” In 1940, though, he told an interviewer who asked him to name the greatest American composer that it was “George Gershwin, without a doubt. He had the broadest scope and wrote in the vein of all America. He occasionally was influenced by the masses, but much of his work was purely original.” And for all his reservations about
Porgy,
Ellington knew that Gershwin’s concert works were far more ambitious than anything to which he had set his hand, just as he knew that the premiere of
Rhapsody in Blue,
at which Jascha Heifetz, Fritz Kreisler, Sergei Rachmaninoff, John Philip Sousa, and Leopold Stokowski were present, had conferred on its composer the same cultural legitimacy after which the status-conscious Ellington hungered.

Though he continued throughout 1931 to build on the success of “Mood Indigo” and “Old Man Blues” with such three-minute gems as the jaunty “Rockin’ in Rhythm” and the darkly nostalgic “Echoes of the Jungle,” and despite his insistence that he wasn’t interested in “symphony techniques,” Ellington was definitely interested in writing pieces that, like Gershwin’s
Rhapsody in Blue
and Concerto in F, burst out of the straitjacket of song form. “At present he is at work on a tremendous task, the writing, in music, of ‘The History of the Negro,’ taking the Negro from Egypt, going with him to savage Africa, and from there to the sorrow and slavery of Dixie, and finally ‘home to Harlem,’” a journalist reported in December of 1930. Three months later he published an essay called “The Duke Steps Out” in which he spoke of the racial roots of his musical ambitions:

The music of my race is something more than the “American idiom.” It is the result of our transplantation to American soil, and was our reaction in the plantation days to the tyranny we endured. What we could not say openly we expressed in music, and what we know as “jazz” is something more than just dance music . . . the characteristic melancholy music of my race has been forged from the very white heat of our sorrows.

Once again Ellington set forth his plans to chronicle the history of his race in sound, explaining that he was “engaged on a rhapsody unhampered by any musical form in which [he] intend[ed] to portray the experiences of the coloured races in America in the syncopated idiom.” The work, he added, would consist of “four or five movements . . . I am putting all I have learned into it in the hope that I shall have achieved something really worth while in the literature of music, and that an authentic record of my race
written by a member of it
shall be placed on record.” Many years passed before he got around to delivering on that promise, but by the time that “The Duke Steps Out” was published, Ellington had indeed written a rhapsody of his own, a six-and-a-half-minute piece that took up both sides of a ten-inch 78, and if it was something less than a masterpiece, it was also something more than a cameo.

If Ellington’s various accounts of the genesis of
Creole Rhapsody
can be trusted, it came about in the most casual of ways.
Time
reported in its 1956 cover story on Ellington that Irving Mills happened to mention to a reporter that his client was working on a “rhapsody” that was “part of a larger work.” Though he was doing no such thing, “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.” In
Music Is My Mistress
Ellington told the same story somewhat differently:

Irving Mills came to me one day with an original idea. He was always reaching toward a higher plateau for our music.

“Tomorrow is a big day,” he said. “We premiere a new long work—a rhapsody.”

“Really?” I replied. “Okay.”

So I went out and wrote Creole Rhapsody, and I did so much music for it that we had to cut it up and do two versions. One came out on Brunswick and the other, longer one, on Victor. Irving almost blew his connection at both companies for recording a number that was not only more than three minutes long, but took both sides of the record.

It is, as usual with Ellington, a rattling good tale, but the facts, also as usual, fail to bear all of it out. Ellington said in his autobiography that the band was playing at Chicago’s Oriental Theatre when Mills approached him about writing a “new long work,” but that was in February. The band recorded the first version of
Creole Rhapsody
in New York on January 20, 1931, toward the end of a long run at the Cotton Club. Nor does Barry Ulanov’s biography say anything about Mills’s having ordered him to write the piece. What we do know is that NBC’s logbooks show that he had recently broadcast three pieces from the Cotton Club whose titles suggest that they
might
have been
Creole Rhapsody.
“Cotton Club Rhapsody” aired on November 20, “California Rhapsody” on December 23, and “Brooklyn Rhapsody” on January 20, the same day that Brunswick recorded
Creole Rhapsody
. Nothing is known about these latter pieces, and it is possible that one or more of them was
Creole Rhapsody
in disguise.

Regardless of how and when it actually got written, the Brunswick version of
Creole Rhapsody
is, as Ellington rightly said in “The Duke Steps Out,” “unhampered by any musical form.” Its main distinction is its length: Ellington had recorded a two-sided version of “Tiger Rag” in 1929, but it was nothing more than an extra-long showcase for his soloists.
Creole Rhapsody,
by contrast, is a through-composed work in which improvisation takes a backseat, and the entire piece is played at the same medium-brisk tempo, creating an impression of unity that is belied by the piece itself, a potpourri of unrelated themes (the first of which is closely based on the introduction to “Move Over,” a little-known Ellington recording from 1928) connected by piano interludes. The obvious model was
Rhapsody in Blue
and the multistrain concert-style works that were being written by Ferde Grofé and other composers for Paul Whiteman’s band in the late twenties, though listeners unfamiliar with these now-obscure pieces will be more likely to find
Creole Rhapsody
reminiscent of a Broadway production number. The opening theme, which returns at frequent intervals throughout the piece, sounds like a life-in-the-big-city music cue of the sort that a stage-savvy composer like Alfred Newman might have written for one of the Hollywood films that Ellington watched in between playing live stage shows at the movie houses where he and his band would soon be appearing regularly.