Duke (63 page)

That was bad enough, but what happened the following May was infinitely worse: Johnny Hodges collapsed and died in the men’s room of his dentist’s office, cut down by a heart attack at the not-so-august age of sixty-three. Though his health had grown poor, his playing remained secure, and to the end the alto saxophonist offered Ellington’s fans the tightest of aural ties to the sounds of days gone by. While Ellington had featured Hodges every night and paid him lavishly, at least by the prevailing standards of jazz, he was tiring of the demands of the road, and he could have led an easier and more financially comfortable life had he wished to do so. According to Norman Granz, Lawrence Welk, who adored Hodges’s playing, had made him “a fantastic offer, infinitely more than he was making with Duke” to join Welk’s TV group, with time off to do combo dates. But even though he and Welk cut an album of ballads together, Hodges kept on riding the band bus until he died. Once more Ellington penned a tribute in the small hours, this one containing a sentence that was as true as it was uncharacteristically straightforward: “Because of this great loss, our band will never sound the same.”

Hodges was “replaced” by Norris Turney, a solid and accomplished saxophonist, but the situation facing him was as impossible as it had been when Harold Ashby and Rufus Jones “replaced” Jimmy Hamilton and Sam Woodyard. The great individualists were vanishing one by one, and the younger men who followed them into the band could not always appreciate the weight of the past that they were being asked to shoulder. Unlike Paul Gonsalves, whom Ellington had initially hired because he could play all of Ben Webster’s solos from memory, some of them didn’t even know what the band had sounded like in the old days. “When I was with Duke I had never heard of these [older] records,” Ashby admitted. “I didn’t know anything about it.” If Hodges had lived two days longer, he could have shown them exactly what they were missing. Ellington was recording his latest composition, a nine-part work called
New Orleans Suite,
and he had hoped to persuade the old master to pick up his soprano saxophone for the first time in decades to play the seventh movement, “Portrait of Sidney Bechet,” on which he was to be featured. Instead Gonsalves filled in on tenor, and though he honored his section mate with an elegiac solo, those who heard the album could think only of what might have been.

The suite itself, however, was a welcome return to past form, both for Ellington as a composer and for the band as a whole. Centered on musical portraits of Bechet, Louis Armstrong, Mahalia Jackson, and Wellman Braud, whose slap-bass playing had long anchored Ellington’s rhythm section,
New Orleans Suite
starts off with a surprise, a gospel-tinged organ-piano duet by Wild Bill Davis and Ellington, with Hodges chiming in midway through. “Blues for New Orleans,” taped two weeks before the saxophonist’s death, is a dirt-simple, heavy-on-the-backbeat blues in which the band struts so soulfully that you’d think Ray Charles had stopped by the studio to sing a couple of choruses. Not only does Hodges wail like a man half his age, but the bright, crisp sound of Davis’s electric organ lends to “Blues for New Orleans” the up-to-date feel for which Ellington had been searching in vain. Stanley Dance, present for what turned out to be Hodges’s last recording session, recalled how the delighted bandleader “was in the studio—not in the control room—conducting, routining, dancing, clapping his hands, and miming his requirements as the arrangement unfolded.”

While not all of
New Orleans Suite
is as inspired as “Blues for New Orleans,” the work is still full of aural felicities, among them Norris Turney’s flute, an instrument never before used by Ellington. Turney solos on “Bourbon Street Jingling Jollies,” a minor-key processional reminiscent of “Sonnet for Caesar” that the composer described for inexplicable reasons of his own as “a rhythmic tone parallel to the excruciating ecstasies one finds oneself suspended in when one is in the throes of the jingling rhythmic jollies of Bourbon Street.” The heartening sound of the blues, fundamental and irreducible, is omnipresent throughout
New Orleans Suite,
and despite intermittent moments of uncertain intonation and musical patchiness, even the hard-to-please Max Harrison lauded the album as “jazz without pretence,” writing eloquently of the way in which it encapsulated the long-standing traditions that made the band what it was:

The strength of the Ellington unit as a self-perpetuating phenomenon is well instanced here. Four years prior to Ellington’s death, there were in the orchestra players providing links with the beginnings and the middle period, and new men also who, like many who had come and gone, were borne up in the collective inspiration which had helped to make those veterans what they had become.

Turney, who made his studio recording debut with the band at the first
New Orleans Suite
session, felt much the same way. “When that band was really together, man, they really played,” he said fifteen years later. “Such a sound you never heard before. I was in there. . . . I’d be in that band with all the beautiful sounds floating around you—there was just nothing like it. I can’t explain it. It was the greatest experience of my life.” But the spokes on the wheel kept on snapping. In January of 1971 Cat Anderson moved to Hollywood to become a full-time studio musician. Those who disdained his crowd-goading squeals and shrieks may have thought his departure no great loss, but Ellington knew what he was losing, and so did some of his friends. “I think the band began to fall apart . . . in the late Sixties,” Brooks Kerr said later. “It ambled along. . . . When those four men [Brown, Hodges, Woodyard, Hamilton] left, they created quite a gap which Duke had to work very hard to fill. That’s why Duke began to accent the personality aspect of it . . . he had to rely on palaver to get it over ’cause he knew the band wasn’t as up to par as it had been.”

The onstage “palaver” to which Kerr referred was still amusing, though, and one of Ellington’s best bits, in which he taught his listeners how to simulate hipness by snapping their fingers in the correct manner, had recently made it onto record. The version of “Satin Doll” that closes
Duke Ellington’s 70th Birthday Concert,
recorded in Manchester a year earlier, shows how he flattered an audience by putting it on:

Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. You’re very beautiful, very sweet, very gracious, very generous, and this is “Satin Doll.” We’ll use it now for the purpose of giving background to this finger-snapping bit, and you are all cordially invited to join the finger-snapping. . . . I don’t have to tell you, one never snaps one’s fingers on the beat—it’s considered aggressive. Don’t push it, just let it fall. And if you would like to be conservatively hip, then at the same time tilt the left earlobe, establish a state of nonchalance. And if you would like to be respectably cool, then tilt the left earlobe on the beat and snap the finger on the afterbeat. And so by routining one’s finger snapping and choreographing one’s earlobe-tilting, one discovers that one can become as cool as one wishes to be.

He even had one more musical trick tucked up his now-frayed sleeve. In June of 1970, six weeks after the band finished recording
New Orleans Suite,
Ellington made his debut as a ballet composer when American Ballet Theatre, one of the world’s leading dance companies, premiered
The River,
a new ballet by Alvin Ailey set to a score by Ellington, at New York’s Lincoln Center. Ailey had choreographed some of Ellington’s shorter pieces since working on
My People
in 1963, but
The River
was their first full-scale collaboration, as well as the first time that Ailey, a greatly admired modern-dance choreographer who led his own troupe, had made a ballet for a classical company. Having seen Ellington at work, he knew something of what to expect, but
My People
had not prepared him for what was to come.

After first suggesting a comic ballet to the unresponsive Ailey, who admitted, “I don’t have a comic bone in my body,” Ellington came back with the idea for a dance that would be “all water music . . . it was to follow the course of this stream through various stages: through a meander, a falls, and then a whirlpool, and then a giggling rapids.” In a departure from his usual refusal to look to classical composers for models, he listened to such pieces as Handel’s
Water Music,
Debussy’s
La mer,
and the four “sea interludes” from Benjamin Britten’s
Peter Grimes
“to see what other people have done with water music.” Then he started composing, sending Ailey tape-recorded piano versions of bits and pieces of the score. Ailey, who choreographed each section as soon as it arrived, was unnerved when Ellington kept changing his mind, sending new versions as he wrote them. It also bothered him that Ellington insisted on working out of sequence, writing snippet after snippet of music instead of producing self-contained sections for Ailey to stage. Just as he was about to give up, Ellington paid him a visit in person. “I have to have the whole piece . . . so I can see what I’m doing from beginning to end,” Ailey complained, and received an emollient but unhelpful reply: “Look, man, if you’d just worry a little bit more about this choreography and stop worrying about the music, you’d be better off.”

Furious though he was with Ellington’s procrastinatory habits, Ailey was fascinated by his crowded schedule, though he wondered when the hardworking composer found time to sleep, much less write:

He would get up about five o’clock in the afternoon and have breakfast until about seven o’clock and get dressed and receive people until about nine o’clock. Then get dressed and go down and do the nine-thirty show or [the] ten o’clock show, come back upstairs at midnight, change clothes, receive more people, go back downstairs, do a one o’clock show until three o’clock in the morning, socialize with people until four o’clock or five o’clock and then come up at five o’clock in the morning and work from five o’clock until ten o’clock.

Eventually Ellington started knitting his themes into finished movements, which he sent to Ailey “page by page or two pages at a time.” Once again, though, he had waited too long to accommodate the iron necessities of the situation, and Ailey had only enough time to finish staging seven of the thirteen movements by the time of the premiere on June 25, from which the composer was absent, having left town to fulfill an engagement in Chicago. The printed program billed the ballet, which was danced to a tape of the score, as “Seven Dances From a Work in Progress Entitled
The River.
” The critics, making due allowance for the fact that the ballet was unfinished, received it with enthusiasm, taking special note of Ellington’s musical contribution. Clive Barnes, the dance critic of
The
New York Times,
called it “that rare thing among classic scores, something that is contemporary, moving and yet totally unsentimental.”

Ailey finished choreographing
The River
the following year, and the complete work became a permanent part of American Ballet Theatre’s repertory, though Ellington died before he could see it danced in public. Nor did the band ever perform it live: Ron Collier, a Canadian composer-arranger, scored
The River
for ABT’s pit orchestra, and it is in this form that the ballet is danced today. Collier’s orchestrations, while more than competent, are impersonal sounding when heard alongside the preliminary versions that Ellington scored for and recorded with the band for Ailey to use in rehearsal, just as Luther Henderson’s symphonic arrangement of
A Tone Parallel to Harlem,
imaginatively realized though it is, lacks the idiosyncratic ensemble colors of Ellington’s best music. Even so,
The River,
like
New Orleans Suite,
is a worthy addition to the Ellington catalog, a set of attractively varied character pieces that are as danceable in toto as any of the great nineteenth-century dance scores. Watching a performance suggests how great a loss it was that Ellington never wrote a full-evening ballet. Such a work, in which self-contained musical movements are arranged in a dramatic sequence determined by the choreographer, would have suited his formal limitations, and his ability to write concise musical character studies made him as well suited to the creation of dance scores as were Tchaikovsky or Delibes.

The River
is full of such vignettes, including “Spring,” a portrait of the origins of a river, and “Vortex,” a miniconcerto for percussion and orchestra that made a deep impression on Whitney Balliett when he heard the band record it prior to the premiere:

The section passages . . . are brief but dense and booting, there are solo parts by Paul Gonsalves, and there are heavy, dissonant full-band chords. And all this is done against the furious rat-tat-tat-tat of the snare, the glockenspiel, and the timpani. It is exciting, tight crescendo music, and it reminded me of early Stravinsky, except that it is unmistakably a jazz composition.

At seventy-one, there was still life in the old boy yet.

 • • • 

He remained famous, of course. Television had long ago seen to that, and continued to keep him before the public long after his records were no longer selling. One day in 1970, a couple of months after his final appearance on
The Ed Sullivan Show,
Ellington deigned to walk a block from a Manhattan rehearsal hall to his waiting car. Balliett, who was accompanying him, recorded the ensuing events with obvious amusement:

He started west on Fifty-sixth Street, moving in the determined, stiff way of older men with tired feet. He got a lot of double takes, and whenever he passed a garage or a restaurant with its complement of New York early-evening sidewalk loungers, he was greeted with, “Hey, Duke!” or “Mr. Ellington!” Each time, he looked interested and said, “How you been?” or “How’s everything?” and shook hands as if he were greeting friends he hadn’t seen in twenty-five years.