Duke (72 page)

Books

Bigard,
With Louis and the Duke;
Chilton,
Ride, Red, Ride;
Cohen,
Duke Ellington’s America;
Collier,
Jazz;
Dance,
The World of Count Basie;
Dance,
The World of Duke Ellington;
Dietrich,
Duke’s ’Bones;
Dodge,
Hot Jazz and Jazz Dance;
Ellington,
Duke Ellington in Person;
Goldberg,
Tin Pan Alley;
Hammond,
John Hammond on Record;
Harwood,
I Went Down to St. James Infirmary;
Hughes,
Second Movement;
Lavezzoli,
The King of All, Sir Duke;
Okrent,
Last Call;
Stewart,
Jazz Masters of the Thirties;
Sweet,
Steely Dan;
Teachout,
Pops;
Traill,
Just Jazz 4;
Tucker,
Ellington;
Ulanov,
Duke Ellington;
Wilson,
Classics and Commercials;
Wright,
“King” Oliver.

NOTES

Not only were men drinking, but so were women:
For a discussion of the effect of Prohibition on women, see Okrent, 211–12.
“In the twenties [people] could love”:
Wilson, 168.

Irving Mills:
No biography of Mills has been written. The best short treatment of his life and work is in Harwood.

“Small, squat, hard-headed”:
Hughes, 251.
“The arts of persuasion”:
Goldberg, 213.

They “looked down on me”:
Mills, “Irving Mills.”

“He could feel a song”:
MM,
77.
I “title[d] all the tunes”:
Mills, “Irving Mills.”
He claimed to have come up with the title of “It Don’t Mean a Thing”:
Eliot Tiegel, “Duke and Irving Mills: They Helped Each Other Grow in the Early Years,”
Billboard,
Feb. 10, 1973. DE said in 1965 that “Bubber [Miley] was the first man I heard use the expression, ‘it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing’” (DE, “The Most Essential Instrument,”
Jazz Journal,
Dec. 1965).
His staffers supplied lyrics:
“Here’s what happens: when you’re making thirty, forty, fifty numbers a month, you don’t have the time to write all the lyrics. So once you get the idea, the story, you turn it over to somebody to write. . . . That’s why we always had three writers on most of the songs” (Mills, “Irving Mills”).
“A guy would record his own tune”:
Chilton, 81–82.

“An assortment of incompatible period styles”:
Hughes, 247–48.
“Have a good cigar, Spike”:
Ibid.
The accent of the big-city hustler:
Mills’s speaking voice can be heard on “A Nite at the Cotton Club,” a two-sided 78 recorded by DE’s band for Victor in 1929 but not issued until 1966, and “Irving Mills Presents,” a 1933 promotional film short that is available for online viewing at www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEoTwTYnc6g. He also made dozens of commercial recordings as a singer in the twenties and thirties, including several with DE.
“Limited vocabulary”:
Bob Mills, “Irving Mills.”
“How tremendously Duke was being exploited”:
Hammond, oral-history interview.
“As ingenious as it [was] unfair”:
“Henry Johnson,” “Sold—for Less than a Song,”
New Masses,
July 1936. (“Henry Johnson” was Hammond’s pseudonym.)
“A man who saved black talent”:
Hammond,
John Hammond on Record,
132.

It is unclear when Mills and DE first crossed paths:
For a discussion of various contradictory reports of their first meeting, see Steven Lasker, “Duke Ellington, Jo. Trent, Blu-Disc, Up-to-Date and Various Topics of Related Interest,”
DEMS Bulletin,
Dec. 2004–Mar. 2005.
“During [his] first six months in New York”:
MM,
72.
“The band had
been at the Kentucky Club”:
DE, “Jazz as I Have Seen It,”
Swing,
June 1940.
Mills recalled the song as “Black and Tan Fantasy”:
Irving Mills and Charles Emge, “I Split with Duke When Music Began Sidetracking,”
Down Beat,
Nov. 5, 1952, in
Reader,
274.
“He signed the Negro pianist”:
“Mills’ Music,”
Time,
Mar. 22, 1937.

A reference to a black dance step:
For more on the todalo and its relationship to “East St. Louis Toodle-O,” see Chadwick Hansen’s “Jenny’s Toe Revisited: White Responses to Afro-American Shaking Dances,”
American Music,
Spring 1987, and Mark Tucker’s “On
Toodle-oo,
Todalo,
and Jenny’s Toe,”
American Music,
Spring 1988.

“He never had the same men twice”:
Mills, “Irving Mills.”

“Every now and then”:
Ibid.
“Make and record only [his] own music”:
MM,
77.

“A great creative artist”:
Mills and Emge, “I Split with Duke When Music Began Sidetracking,” in
Reader,
274.
Mills reaped the lion’s share:
Publishers and songwriters normally split all royalties 50-50. If, however, the publisher supplies lyrics to a given song, then he also receives half of the songwriter’s share, or more if multiple writers collaborate on or are credited with the lyrics, as was frequently the case at Mills Music.
“We gave every man in the band”:
Mills, “Irving Mills.”

“A thinking, knowledgeable man”:
Stewart, 104, 107. The only extended account of Nanton’s life and work is Dietrich, 19–49.

“The inspiration for the ‘East St. Louis Toodle-O’”:
Roger Pryor Dodge, “Bubber,”
H.R.S. Rag,
Oct. 15, 1940, in Dodge, 86. Lewandos (spelled without an apostrophe) was a laundry chain that in the twenties had stores throughout the greater Boston area.

“He always had a story for his music”:
MM,
106. DE took credit for this story (and, implicitly, for “East St. Louis Toodle-O” itself) in Ruby Berkley Goodwin, “Meet the Duke,”
The Bronzeman,
Aug. 1932. See also DE, “My Hunt for Song Titles,”
Rhythm,
Aug. 1933, in
Reader,
88.
“An idea man”:
Inez M. Cavanaugh, “Reminiscing in Tempo: Tricky Sam Goes Over the Great Times He Had with Duke, Bubber, Freddie Jenkins,”
Metronome,
Feb. 1945, in
Reader,
466–67.

“When I get off”:
Roger Pryor Dodge, “Harpsichords and Jazz Trumpets,”
Hound & Horn,
July–Sept. 1934, in Dodge, 25.

DE would bring unfinished, seemingly fragmentary bits of music into the studio, then shift them around:
Typical of the way that DE worked in his maturity is “Warm Valley,” a 1940 recording of which three different takes survive. The original take contains three strains. On the second take, the second strain is dropped and replaced with two new ones. The issued third take drops one of the new strains and rearranges the others in a different sequence. BS, who worked with DE on the song, recalled that “we wrote reams and reams of music on that, and he threw it all out except what you hear [on the issued take]. He didn’t use any of mine. Now, that’s arranging. The tune was written, but we had to find a way to present it” (Bill Coss, “Ellington & Strayhorn, Inc.,”
Down Beat,
June 7, 1962, in
Reader,
501).

“Duke, to the bewilderment of people”:
Irving Townsend, “When Duke Records,” in Traill, 19. The tenor saxophonist Al Sears, who joined the band in 1944, described how confusing DE’s composing methods could be to a new member: “You start at letter ‘A’ and go to ‘B’ and then suddenly, for no reason at all, when
you
go to ‘C’ the rest of the band’s playing something else which you find out later on isn’t what’s written at ‘C’ but what’s written at ‘J’ instead. And then on the next number, instead of starting at the top, the entire band starts at ‘H’—that is, everybody except me. See, I’m the newest man in the band and I just haven’t caught on to the system yet!” (George T. Simon, “It’s Like Nothing Else!,”
Metronome,
July 1944, in
Reader,
461).

“You know how the negroes are”:
Fred M. White, “Negro Music as Individual Unit Aim of Duke Ellington,”
Morning
Oregonian,
May 14, 1934.

“People heard it”:
Tim Weiner, “Keeping Time with Sonny Greer,”
Soho Weekly News,
June 15, 1979.
Jimi Hendrix heard it as a child:
Lavezzoli, 37.
Steely Dan recorded the same piece:
The performance can be heard on
Pretzel Logic,
released in 1974. Donald Fagen, Steely Dan’s coleader, sent DE a copy of the record that April in honor of his seventy-fifth birthday, a month before his death: “I would have been very flattered if he heard it, but I don’t know if he did” (Sweet, 70–71).

Miley told a friend that the song was a spiritual:
Dodge, “Harpsichords and Jazz Trumpets,” in Dodge, 23.

“Adelaide, that’s what I’ve been looking for”:
A Duke Named Ellington.

Jackson shared composing credit with Ellington and Miley:
The three men were jointly credited on the label of the 1927 Victor recording of “Creole Love Call.” When the song was copyrighted by DE the following year, he received sole credit. Barney Bigard claimed that Jackson was fired by DE for having plagiarized “Creole Love Call” (Bigard, 44). In fact, Jackson left the band in January, three months before Joe Oliver sent his letter of complaint to Victor Records. Contrary to popular belief, Oliver does not appear to have sued DE, or anyone else, to recover rights to the song. For a detailed discussion of this matter, see Steven Lasker, “Stack O’Lee Blues,”
DEMS Bulletin,
Apr.–July 2008.
“I have recently listened”:
Wright, 26.

The opening clarinet riff of “Creole Love Call” is played as a clarinet solo on “Camp Meeting Blues”:
The clarinetist on Oliver’s recording is thought to be either Jimmie Noone or Buster Bailey. Rudy Jackson can be heard playing the same solo on Sippie Wallace’s 1925 recording of “Being Down Don’t Worry Me.”

R.D. Darrell:
For a discussion of Darrell, see Collier, 228–31.
Phonograph Monthly Review:
For a short history of the magazine, see Tim Gracyk, “
Phonograph Monthly Review:
A Forgotten Publication?,”
Tim’s Phonographs and Old Records,
www.gracyk.com/pmr.shtml.
“An orchestrator in the class of Ravel, Respighi and Strauss”:
Quoted in Collier, 229.

“Two unusually interesting records”:
R.D. Darrell,
Phonograph Monthly Review,
July 1927, in
Reader,
33–34.

“Conductor of what leading judges have called”:
Dave Peyton, “The Musical Scene,”
The Chicago Defender,
Apr. 16, 1927.

The story was picked up:
“Duke Ellington Holds Prominent Place in Broadway’s Spotlight,”
New York Amsterdam News,
Apr. 20, 1927, and “Duke Ellington, Brunswick Artist, Holds Unique Place in Broadway’s Spotlight,”
The Pittsburgh Courier,
Apr. 23, 1927.