The History of Jazz (26 page)

The question of Ellington’s originality has often been raised with reference to these (and other) works. Certainly, there can be little doubt, given the various accounts that have come down to us, about Duke’s willingness to borrow whatever musical materials suited his needs. Even though Ellington’s name graces the credits of these early compositions, Miley’s contribution may have, at times, matched or even surpassed Duke’s own. And appropriations from other sidemen would prove to be an ongoing formula for Ellington throughout his career. Nor were band members his only source of inspiration. “Creole Love Call” is just one instance of his delving into riffs and themes that were already part of the jazz heritage (in this case drawing from an earlier piece credited to King Oliver); even tiny musical flourishes were likely to have antecedents—the reference to Chopin in “Black and Tan Fantasy” mimics Jelly Roll Morton’s similar use of the funeral march theme in “Dead Man Blues” just a few months earlier—while Ellington’s frequent adoption of the techniques of the Harlem stride players has already been noted. Yet, through it all, Ellington’s genius lay in adapting the materials of others to his own ends, in weaving the strands and threads of music that he gathered into what can only be described as the “Ellington sound.” And though Miley’s contributions may have been great—he remains, perhaps due to his early death before the age of thirty, one of the most taken-for-granted figures of early jazz—Ellington’s ability to survive the trumpeter’s departure and take the band to an even higher level in the following years remains a telling achievement. It gives needed emphasis to the point that it was Ellington’s skill in pulling together the historical sources and passing inspirations into memorable compositions, more than any given raw materials he employed along the way, that distinguished his unique musical aptitude.

The end result was a body of music that not only reflected the character of his players but was perfectly suited to their strengths and weaknesses. “Duke studied his men,” Barney Bigard has explained. “He studied their style, how they maneuver with their music, with their playing and everything. And he keeps that in his mind so if he wrote anything for you, it fit you like a glove.” “If he’d see where a guy had got some type of talent,” added Cootie Williams, “he’d go along with him.”
²⁸
“Yes, I am the world’s greatest listener,” Ellington himself wrote in his 1973 autobiography. “Here I am, fifty years later, still getting cats out of bed to come to work so that I can listen to them.” And listen Ellington did, consummately, deeply, and out of the listening extract from each player the essence of his musical personality, out of each section its unique character, out of the whole band, a sound like no other. Competing ensembles may have sometimes had more raw talent on an individual level, but somehow Ellington was able to create, in aggregate, an ensemble that was second to none. Even at this early stage of his musical development, Ellington’s work revealed a coherent unity of vision, an overarching design that stood out from the pack. Ellington’s attentiveness to this vision appears to have extended even to the technical aspects of recordings: the sonic balance and authenticity are carefully gauged— much more so than one finds with Henderson or the other bands of the day—to create a satisfying, holistic musical experience. One suspects that this was more than happenstance, but another sign of Ellington’s working behind the scenes.

In the spring of 1927, Ellington was poised to take the next major step in his career. He had gained a dedicated following at the Club Kentucky, had embarked upon a fertile period of composition and record-making—during the late 1920s, Ellington would take his band into the studio almost every month—and had gone a long way toward forging a style of its own. Around this same time, Irving Mills, whom Ellington had met during his earliest days in New York, began taking a more active role in managing Duke’s business affairs. Although the extent of Mills’s contributions can be debated (especially with regard to his supposed musical collaborations with Ellington), his instincts for promoting the band would prove to be first rate. The final piece in the puzzle fit into place when, later that year, the Ellington band was selected to fill an opening at the Cotton Club in Harlem. Looking back at this signal event, Ellington liked to point to his luck in winning the spot—according to his account, the club’s manager showed up too late to hear the other six bands that had auditioned and selected Duke’s by default. But luck would have little to do with the successes he would soon achieve in this new setting. Through the hard work and ceaseless ambition of these apprenticeship years, Duke Ellington had prepared himself for just such a springboard to celebrity and was now determined to make the most of it.

The burst of creative energy brought about by the Harlem Renaissance did not long remain a secret to white audiences. The written word was the first to travel below the demarcating line, drawn at 110th Street, which separated black Harlem from white New York. Alain Locke’s pathbreaking
The New Negro
spread news of the movement on its appearance in 1925, but even earlier works such as James Weldon Johnson’s
The Book of American Negro Poetry
(1922) had already signaled the emergence of a new literary culture. In neo-minstrel fashion, white writers were attracted by the primitivist ethos they perceived in these works and, donning a linguistic equivalent of blackface, concocted a host of derivative efforts. Notable examples of “black” fiction by white writers include Waldo Frank’s
Holiday
(1923), Sherwood Anderson’s
Dark Laughter
(1924), and Carl Van Vechten’s
Nigger Heaven
(1926).

In the world of Harlem nightlife, the consumption of black entertainment by an affluent white clientele came to be known as
slumming
. In earlier years, the white audience had waited until black music came to it. A series of shows—
In Dahomey
(1902),
In Abyssinia
(1906), and
Bandana Land
(1907), among others—had titillated New York whites with glimpses of black entertainment that, for all their stereotypes, were far more authentic than the diluted minstrel efforts of earlier years. The turning point, however, was the highly successful revue
Shuffle Along
, which opened at the Sixty-third Street Music Hall in 1921.
Shuffle Along
drew large audiences with its talent-laden collection of black artists, both on stage and behind the scenes (including Paul Robeson, Florence Mills, William Grant Still, Adelaide Hall, Noble Sissle, and Eubie Blake), and represented a major advance for African Americans in the New York entertainment industry.

But white America was not content to remain passive spectators at black artistry. Especially when they took to the dance floor, they were increasingly drawing on the steps and movements created by African Americans. We have already witnessed the symbiotic relationship between the cutting-edge popular dance styles of Vernon and Irene Castle and the music of James Reese Europe, as well as the assimilation of the cakewalk and turkey trot into the ballrooms of mainstream America. The linkages between black dance, jazz music, and the broader culture were furthered in the 1920s with the popularity of the Charleston, the shimmy, and the Black Bottom. Harlem participated in this process, and in many ways drove it, serving in the late 1920s and 1930s as the epicenter of fervent dance activity that would set the model for the next stage in this evolutionary process.

Opened in 1926, the Savoy Ballroom represented the new ethos at its highest pitch. It boasted a spacious dance floor of 250 by 50 feet, fronted by two bandstands, with a special section—the so-called “Cat’s Corner”—where the best dancers could display their moves. As the famous song title asserted, the patrons were truly “stompin’ at the Savoy”—so much so that management needed to replace the burnished maple dance floor every three years. From the start, the Savoy was fully integrated. And not only did white dancers make their way to this Harlem nightspot, but the dances of the Savoy also came downtown, and from there eventually spread across the nation. When choreographer Frederick Ashton required dancers for
Four Saints in Three Acts
, the modernist opera by Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein, he quickly moved to scout the talent on the Savoy floor. But popular dance styles were even more impacted by these Harlem proceedings. The Lindy hop (named after aviator Charles Lindbergh’s famous 1927 solo “hop” across the Atlantic) gained widespread notoriety only after Herbert White, the head bouncer at the Savoy, organized some ballroom regulars into a group known as Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers. As the dance gained popularity with young white Americans, it became widely known as the jitterbug, although it underwent a subtle transformation in the process, with the horizontal movements of the Lindy hop taking on a more vertical, jumping motion. With the rise of swing in the late 1930s, and its acceptance by young Americans of all colors, the central role of dance in the music continued unabated. Swing music was inseparable from swing dancing, and the competitions on the floor, judged by a jury of one’s peers selected from among the patrons, was as much a main event as the proceedings on the bandstand. Even when Benny Goodman played at Carnegie Hall, the newspapers reported that teenagers were literally “dancing in the aisles.”

The financial ramifications of these developments in theater and dance were not lost on promoters and impresarios. The procurement of black entertainment for white audiences soon became, inevitably and fortuitously, a mini-industry, a burgeoning microcosm of New York nightlife as a whole. Their appetites whetted by these dances and shows, white audiences began seeking even greater verisimilitude in their samplings of African American culture. But even when journeying into Harlem to witness them firsthand, these spectators nonetheless demanded venues that protected their position as ruling-class elites. In this context, the grotesque spectacle of the Harlem club for all-white audiences was born, a musical menagerie in which social proximity and distance could coexist.

At the height of the Jazz Age, Harlem featured eleven nightclubs that catered to high-class whites, as well as “five hundred colored cabarets of lower ranks,” according to
Variety
.
²⁹
It is easy to condemn the leading Harlem establishments for the patronizing attitudes on which they were built. Nonetheless, they served to mitigate, however clumsily, the currents of racism that were running rampant in other social institutions. In America, music was the first sphere of social interaction in which racial barriers were challenged and overturned. And the challenge went both ways: by the mid-1920s, white bands were playing for all-black audiences at Lincoln Theater and elsewhere. These intermediate steps between segregation and integration represented, for all their problems, progress of sorts. Yet from a purely musical perspective, the contributions of the Harlem clubs were almost wholly laudable. Channeling the financial means of white society into black artistry, they created a staging point for a cultural fermentation that would transform American music for good. Connie’s Inn, on the corner of 131st Street and Seventh Avenue, may have been a tawdry bootlegger’s showplace, but it was also the birthplace of Fats Waller’s
Hot Chocolates
show that brought Louis Armstrong, and a number of memorable songs, to the attention of a wider public. Other nightspots—Ed Small’s Paradise, Broadway Jones’s Supper Club, Barron’s Exclusive Club—for all the faux pearl glamor and underworld connections, also served as spawning grounds for an African American artistic revolution that would prove to be, with the passing of time, every bit as important as the more highbrow literary and dramatic achievements of the Harlem Renaissance.

Among all these venues, the most important—the Carnegie Hall for those who could not perform at Carnegie Hall—was the Cotton Club. But the ambiance here was far removed from concert hall propriety: where the more adventurous New Yorkers went for nightlife in those Prohibition years, they expected alcohol; and where alcohol flowed, organized crime usually ran the tap. Opened in 1923 by Owney Madden and his gang—Owney had recently been released from Sing Sing after serving eight years for murder—the Cotton Club served as the most glamorous distribution outlet for Madden’s bootleg beer business. The confluence of mobsters, money, and music may have created opportunities for Ellington, but with it came added pressures. In addition to playing its standard repertoire, the group now took on responsibility for backing up the other Cotton Club acts—a daunting change for a band that had, for all its merits, grown comfortable performing charts written to accentuate the instrumentalists’ strengths and avoid their weaknesses. But the demands of the new setting were as much psychological as musical. “When I went to the Cotton Club,” Sonny Greer recalls, “they put pressure on. They put pressure on us, and no denying at that time, when the Syndicate say they want something, they got it or you wasn’t in the business.”
³⁰
Yet Ellington was well suited to thrive in this new environment. His sense of showmanship, his own perfectionist tendencies, his ambitions—these were now given a suitably grand setting for their expression. By the close of his Cotton Club years, Ellington would have parlayed this opportunity into a position of preeminence, establishing his group as the most critically acclaimed African American band of its day.

Although Ellington had previously expanded his group for recordings, the Club Kentucky engagement had supported only a sextet. Now required to front a much larger band, Ellington again displayed his unerring knack for finding the right individual ingredients for the complex new sounds he was in the process of concocting. In this defining moment, when he was on the cusp of stardom, Ellington brought in a core group of players who would stay with him for years—in some instances, for decades—and help him create more than a passing style, but in essence serve as building blocks for their employer’s lifelong vocation as a composer and bandleader.