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Wednesday 12 October 2011

Bud on Bach.

Bud Powell Documentary: l'Exil Intérieur

Bud Powell Interview (1963)

Sun Ra - Interview + Live Toronto 1991

Sun Ra Interview (Helsinki, 1971)

Sun Ra Interview (Helsinki, 1971)

Sun Ra - Best Answer on Music

BBC Documentary: Sun Ra, Brother From Another Planet

Charles Mingus by Thomas Reichman (1968)

Terry Callier (Timepeace) - Traitor to the race

Where Yall At? - Wynton Marsalis

Wynton Marsalis - From The Plantation To The Penitentiary

A Conversation with Anthony Braxton


with Volkan Terzioglu and Sabri Erdem
in Istanbul on Sunday, October 15th, 1995
text by Volkan Terzioglu
Below there is a conversation that I and Sabri Erdem had in Istanbul with Anthony Braxton. Braxton was in Istanbul for Akbank International Jazz Festival with his Sextet to perform his Ghost Trance Compositions. He also had a seminar on the vocabulary of the music. He and the Sextet toured Istanbul and we found opportunity to talk to him for one and a half hour. I also have the video recording of the conversation. Many times I tried to get the confirmation for, but I could not manage. Therefore this may involve several misunderstandings, mistakes which had been unavoidable. Intentionally I am calling the below text a conversation instead of an interview, because I think that this is not formal enough.
If you have any comments, please drop e-mail to volkan.terzioglu@gmail.com
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Terzioglu - Well, Mr. Braxton, first of all I would like to begin with the subject of jazz criticism. I know that in 70's you had very strong feelings against jazz criticism. Because there have been some misunderstandings that critics have not even listened to the music thoroughly and what is the description of a jazz critic has been answered that, once you have 10 jazz records, then you can be a critic. Do you remember that?
Braxton - Yes, for me the question and subject of Jazz Criticism has been a complex subject for me for something like 30 years. I remember in the early 1960's, after reading record reviews of John Coltrane's music in Down Beat magazine, I remember even then that I did not agree with them...
Terzioglu - the recordings with Eric Dolphy?
Braxton -the recordings with Eric Dolphy, the recording Ascension, the recordings after Giant Steps as Mr. Coltrane's began to change, many of the jazz journalists would say "No, this is not jazz, this is...
Terzioglu - ... anti jazz
Braxton - ... hate music, anti jazz and when they wrote about Mr. Coltrane's music, they would write very negatively and for me even in that time period, I felt something is wrong, there is the definitions of the musicians who talk about their music and then there is the definitions of the journalistic communities. They are completely separate definitions when Mr. Coltrane recorded the record "A Love Supreme", well he was talking about the love of the Creator and Universal Love, not just sexual love, political love and in the last 30 years, we have seen even "A Love Supreme" converted to a market place philosophy. And this has been consistent with the history of journalism and the criticism and the criticism with the music.
There have been complexities based on several reasons : 1. the inability of the jazz journalistic community to understand the meta-reality of the music on its own terms. 2. there has been an inability to understand the intellectual agenda of the music and no recognition of the real intellectual agenda of the music and of course 3. there have been the political complexities related to market place philosophies, Albert Ayler's music perceived as not commercial enough for market place.
Terzioglu - I knew that he could not find any opportunity to make records and John Coltrane helped to get him market place by Impulse Records.
Braxton -Yes and this has been part of the struggle that in my opinion began in 1920's with the recording industry and the establishment of race records, country and western music. They separate all of the various categories of the music. This was established in the 20's, 1910, as part of the emergence of the new technology of the recording industry and the related business complex that would surround the music. And so for me, 1965 it was in that period that I begin to recognize profound differences between how the musicians talked about their music and how the journalists write of the music. And this problem is still with us today although it is complex. The music from the Association for the Advancement for the Creative Musicians (AACM) period, even in the black community, even among African Americans is not understood. It is complex and African Americans have not been so interested in jazz music since Charlie Parker. No one wants to talk about that. But America is an interesting country, because it has so many different people and yet at the same time because it is such a young country, we have not been able to find the healthiest balances so that all selections, sectors of the community can express themselves and make the definitions and value systems and spirituality understood and so the music we call jazz is in the middle of these problems. Jazz for me came about because of the need for individual creativity, for group creativity and for connection to spiritual intuitive thoughts and creativity. Ever since the emancipation proclamation in America that freed slaves, we have seen in America a long journey, the story of post slavery movements and how creative music and dance and painting and art is connected to human aspiration and creativity. On one hand and on the other hand, you have the jazz music complex, you have the classical music complex, you have the control on the popular music machinery that makes millions and billions of dollars. The music we call jazz does not make billions of dollars like rock'n'roll or popular musics, but it makes enough money for the jazz business complex to continue to release the records to bring about a situation where you have a group of musicians who say "well, we are jazz people" and they record them and they can play their music. The definitions with the music are reserved for the power structure, for the political structure. The intellectuals in America use jazz for many different things. Jazz is used to say "I'm black, I'm black, I'm black", Jazz is used to say "I'm hip, I'm hip, I'm hip", Jazz is used to sell instruments, to produce instruments. Magazines like Down Beat magazine, published once a month and there are many different jazz magazines and in the last 20 years, we have seen jazz to come into academia and so and even high school and you have young people playing what they call jazz. All of these connects with the music industry, however it gets complex because, for me much of the music that we call jazz in this time period does not correspond necessarily to what jazz used to be. For instance, when I was coming up in Chicago, if you want to learn how to play jazz, you go to sessions and there will be opportunities for the musicians to play and learn the repertoire. The understanding was this: mastership in Jazz meant you have to find your music, your own music...

Terzioglu - own an individual sound
Braxton - You have to find your own sound. It was not enough to find your own sound. It was not enough to imitate Charlie Parker. It was not enough to imitate John Coltrane. Rather the aesthetic reality of the music insisted that each person must find or discover self realization about themselves and to evolve one's own sound and to find your life in your music. This was what jazz was. If complex, the music that we call Bebop came about because of the post World War II vibrational factors. You had in 1945 another migration of African Americans from the Southern part of the America, up to the North part from places like Mississippi or Alabama, a great influx of African Americans will go to Chicago, to Detroit to Philadelphia to Saint Louis. In that time period, the challenge was to move away from the Southern part of America where there were segregation concepts of separate but equal which really involved inequalities to African Americans and from that point a migration took place after World War II. That migration also involved African American men and women who would begin to think about the music from political perspective, from a philosophical perspective from many different connections where in the 30's and 40's the emphasis in the music was directed towards big bands and orchestration. Suddenly after World War II, emphasis would be redirected back to the individual and the era of the virtuoso for soloists would begin. Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie's music would mark a change from an orchestra group music to small groups that would emphasize solos and the individual. This change in my opinion was part of a composite phenomenon that they concern not just the music but the literature, the journalism. A new group of writers would evolve asking questions of African American life, asking questions of America, what is America?, asking questions about what is world...
Terzioglu - the existence
Braxton - what is existence and how we felt in existence. This aspect of the music in the 90's is not understood. More and more, since what I call the 6th restructural cycle movement that have been Albert Ayler; the 1st cycle being New Orleans, 2nd cycle Chicago, 3rd cycle New York, 4th cycle Kansas City, 5th cycle bebop, Charlie Parker, 6th being Albert Ayler, 7th cycle being the AACM and the music I am a part of. So by 1950, the intellectual reality of the music had already started to change. There were problems. The problems with the journalists in my opinion involved the significance of definition as well as the complexities of wrong definitions. In America it is always been fashionable even in the early periods, for European Americans to look at African American music and think in terms of entertainment - "Oh, this is happy music, these guys play is nice and happy and they are happy, everything is happy"...
Terzioglu - The sweating brow concept


Braxton - The sweating brow. More and more the musicians themselves will say "wait a minute, there is more to the music than entertainment, there is more to the music than how Leonard Feather writes about the music, there is more to what we do than the jazz poll concept that comes every year". Many of these strategies were market place strategies, they had nothing to do with the music and so by 1960 with the 6th restructural cycle, musics as personified by the music of Albert Ayler, this was a very complex time in the 1960's in America. Three assassinations, President Kennedy, Malcolm X, Robert Kennedy; at the same time, the Vietnam War, at the same time riots all over America in effect the events of the decade in the 60's which make it possible for musicians like myself to ask the question "What's happening?". We had a new, fresh opportunity to begin again, a fresh opportunity to explore the music separate from the market place being able to control the definitions of the music and for me that is part of the importance of the 6th restructural cycle musics. That it was an opportunity to clean the mirror, which is the expression in America, to start anew and to create music that would 1. unify the composite spectrum of the creative trans-African musics, 2. that would unify the American musics, 3. that would unify a service of platform to solidify a world culture, and 4. that would be a part of a composite movement for world change and re-evaluation that would encompass the changes brought about in the modern era from nuclear physics, from Einstein, changes that would incorporate mythology, composite mythology changes, that would take into account the new technologies, television set where we can turn on the television set and see Istanbul immediately, we can put on the record and have music from Japan, we can turn on the radio, we can hear music from Rio De Janeiro and we can see the people in Rio De Janeiro. All of these matters will effect the aesthetic reality of the music. And from that point the musicians would begin to ask their own questions, but the market place would have many problems. For a period of 20 years, the market place has been looking for ways to make this music a market place commodity. It was only with the neo classic movement that came about in the 1980's where the market place after 20 years was able to come back into the music...
Terzioglu - with Wynton Marsalis
Braxton - with Wynton Marsalis, many of the younger African American who were come up who went to the university. This is interesting. Wynton with classical people and the jazz people as well as his father. Then he went to New York and studied at Juilliard and while he was studying, it was obvious that he was talented as a stylist, technician at CBS records Doctor Frank Butler, an African American who became an A and R man at Columbia...

Terzioglu - A and R man? what is that?
Braxton - This is the man who makes the decisions about what musicians they are going to record.
Terzioglu - OK
Braxton - and so they chose Wynton Marsalis, they kicked out Woody Shaw.
Terzioglu - I see, a new commodity has arrived
Braxton - A new commodity, not only had a new commodity arrived, but a new commodity whose understanding of reality was just like the market place, in terms of jazz is jazz and everything else is different, we just want to play jazz, we gonna play jazz just like Charlie Parker starting from 1945 and ending for around 1963 with Miles Davis group with Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock. This group in effect would say this. African American culture starts at New Orleans and ends at 1963 and restarts again at 1980 and goes forth and from 1960 to 1980, this is not jazz, this is not black, it is anti jazz (laughter). Political implications of that position is profound because it is taken for granted that every other group can learn from any group it was (wants?) to learn from. But the market place is the same. No, no, no! African Americans start here, stop here and you can not go outside of that. So if that is true, the jazz is dead. Jazz is like European classical music from Monteverdi stopping at maybe Wagner. Wagner gets kind of complex, but certainly Mahler and, but of course we know that Europeans continue to evolve their music post Schumann, post Wagner, and went into the modern era. But it is always ironic that everyone is doing this. The market place says "No, African Americans stays right there". And so connected with the same subject is a profound split in the African American community itself. A split that says in one hand you must play the Blues, you must play Bebop, you must think like Malcolm X, not DU BOIS but the 60's writers many of the African American nationalists like Amiri Baraka who came to the fore 1960's. It have an alliance with Joe Hammond and Columbia records when they say, "No, no, no", black must be here and then on the other side you have an African American middle class and upper class that has sent his sons and daughters to the University, they come out as professionals and they are not interested in Blues, they are not interested in jazz, but maybe now, they might like the new neo classic jazz. They wear suits and for this group when they see the Art Ensemble of Chicago, they say "they are painting up and they are playing this African music, I don't like it". And so suddenly you see the Black Community divided into many different sections fighting with another and that is here and then on top of that the composite market place which controls all of the information. It is very interesting.
Terzioglu - Well, in University, in Economy classes they taught us the demand/supply curves
Braxton - Yes, yes and the same is true for music even now. They say music works like this. This is the sound, you have the system, you must play right, perfect pitch, you must have the good technique, but they never talk of the importance of life, the importance of ....
Terzioglu - existence
Braxton - existence and learning yourself, and the fundamental laws that relate to music, science, astrology, the building blocks, the real building blocks. They don't talk about the real building blocks, they talk about style, and they make style "God".

Terzioglu - Relating to your music, as far as I listened to your music, I did not listen to your any Trillium operas. I want to refer the vocals, that are too much related to spirituality, and as far as I know, you use vocals firstly, they tell words. Because I remember "For Trio" record with Joseph Jarman, Henry Threadgill and Roscoe Mitchell, you use your voices but they are not understandable words. As far as I know they are orchestral pieces as well, opera; the significance of them. I mean I could not understand the Ashmenton, Bubba John Jack,...
Braxton - Yes ...
Terzioglu - Can you give some clues that we would understand them ?
Sabri Erdem - Spiritual wholeness between operas and your three degree system; image musics, language musics and poetic language and their implications with these 12 system. For instance Zaccko figure and I read an article showing the parallels with you and Wassily Kandinski, the painter, he has the Saint George figure fighting against pure rational, pure logical world representing his view, his spirituality...
Terzioglu - Because it is too abstract to put into words...
Braxton OK, Trillium, let me talk you about Trillium. When completed will be an opera complex that will consist of 32 - 36 separate act that can fit together in any order. At this point, I have completed Trillium A, Trillium M, and Trillium R. Trillium is the second degree of the philosophical system Tri-axium. Joe Fonda has one of the books Tri-axium.
Terzioglu - Yes, but unfortunately, it has been impossible for me to..., I mean in two days ...
Braxton - No, no, I just want you to see the connection, it is connected to Tri- axium which is the philosophical system. And in Tri-axium, I tried to build a thinking system, a system of thought that does not tell anybody what to think, but rather it gives people different ways to look at things and then you find your own way. Because I think philosophy should not tell people what to think as we move to the third millennium, but it should help people to find their way and let the people find themselves what they think. With the opera complex Trillium, what I try to do was to take the philosophical arguments in the Tri-axium writings and to expand the particular arguments into story form to discuss the arguments and so the category of works that I call Trillium is really a context of dialogues in the same way that played on would adopt thesis - antithesis form ...
Erdem - Dialectic
Braxton - Dialectic to have a discussion, I would try to extract arguments from the Tri-axium writings and make stories and so Trillium B talks of transformation, world transformation; Trillium M is a story based on value systems as it relates to four of the schematic designs, schematic arguments from the Tri-axium writings. Maybe when we finish talking, or before we leave Istanbul ask Fonda for the Tri-axium writings, I will show you what I mean when I say schematic so that you can understand how the form of schematic looks. That is ...
Terzioglu - Do you have anything that you meant, in this book (showing the book "Mixtery")?
Braxton - No, I don't think so, nothing with the schematics, no. And so, Trillium, each opera tells the story of an argument, and in every opera, there are three primary arguments and one secondary argument. And in the future after you are able to look at Tri-axium, I will send you a cassette of Trillium A which was recorded...
Terzioglu - I will be delighted ....
Braxton - will send it in a couple of weeks, I had a performance of Trillium A in 1985, in the University of California at San Diego. I also had a performance of one half of Trillium M in London and we did the same music in New York as well and I will send that to you as well as Composition 175 which is opera but is not in the Trillium System, it's in the story telling system, it is another category, but I will send that to you as well.
Terzioglu - Could you give some clues about story telling and image musics?
Braxton - OK, and so Trillium is designed for the complete classical orchestra, with 12 singers, each singer has an instrumentalist that works for the singer and each singer has a dancer that works, the understanding being in my system I am trying to make a composite esthetic music where the sound, the color, the gesture, the movements are the same and ...
Terzioglu - Opera means gesture as well, there is mise-en-scene...
Braxton - Yes, gesture and intention in our work and plus I am talking of gesture in the sense of particular movements. Sitting movements, arm movements, different movements of the arm. I am seeking with my system to map parameters, to map various parameters whether it is arm movements, body movement, the saxophone player, he plays movements (he shows some saxophone playing positions) that kind of movements.

Terzioglu - I see
Braxton - My hope is more and more because it is impossible to get the classical orchestra groups to give me a performance, I am thinking more and more of having a giant tent, like circus tent and have my own tent and then do the operas inside of the tent.
Terzioglu - So, you mention about the instrumentalists, that classical music orchestras will not perform?
Braxton - This has been the problem.
Terzioglu - Is this the question of a place of performance, because you mentioned about a tent?
Braxton - For the last 10 - 15 years, 20 years, I have been begging, begging the classical performing spaces to help me by performing some of the orchestra music, or performing the operas.
Terzioglu - You mentioned about Lincoln Center, in an interview, if you had been the manager of the Lincoln Center, you would choose your own instrumentalists, well, you like best. Is it related to Trillium operas' performances?

Braxton - If there were possibilities to perform my music at Lincoln Center, they have the musicians, they have the money, they have the space, but rather than perform modern operas, the established structure is based on the performance of the early operas, the early European operas. It is just very complex and very difficult for a living composer to get a performance, especially for a composer, like myself who is an African American who goes his own way. I am looking to do my operas from a self reliant perspective. More and more I am thinking in terms of I will just do it myself, look for ways to have a small cheap performance. It could be very nice for me because I do not have to have a 100000 dollars for a grand performance. I need maybe 5000 dollars, I can make little small scenes (?) and have the singers.
Terzioglu - It is same everywhere in the world, because I have some friends who are composers, young composers, and they can not even have the opportunity to find an orchestra even a small orchestra, an ensemble to perform their compositions.
Braxton - This is a universal problem (laughter)
Terzioglu - And the philosophical thoughts and spirituality...
Erdem - Before that I want to ask you an additive question, you said when they are performing, they have some gestures, do you expect a kind of education for that like performing with their bodies, with bodies, for this performing, do they, the performers need an education, instruction, a period of instruction or workshop ...?
Braxton - They need much instruction, much workshop. They have to, the musicians who will be performing in the operas must learn the system of my music, not the classical orchestra, the classical orchestra for the Trillium operas have normal notated music, that they understand. But the singers, the solo instrumentalists and the dancers must learn the system of my music. More and more it's becoming impossible to simply meet a musician and say "OK, we wanna music playing and let's go play". It is becoming impossible. I have to have musicians who are interested in learning the system in my music. It might take a year, it might take two years, but there is a system that must be understood at this point to really play the music and so for your question much preparation ...
Erdem - Are there some kind of school, like your lectures in Wesleyan University, some kind of series of lectures or some kind of, new kind of education because music education and body movement education, if I understand correctly, must combine and get into each other, so I think when you are talking to us, it needs another kind of education, more complex kind of education...
Braxton - Yes, yes...
Erdem - besides music...
Braxton - Last year I formed the Tri-centric Foundation and the Tri-centric Foundation...
Terzioglu - Ted Reichman just mentioned about it.
Braxton - It was formed exactly because what you have raised, because of your idea for the need to have a platform, a school to begin to teach the musicians about the new systems. Tri-centric Foundation in the Future will seek to promote the study of my music. It will also be a platform to help other composers, especially young men and young women who are serious about their music, who are starting out, somebody has to help these people and I would like to hope that the Tri-centric Foundation will continue to expand; it is very young right now.
Terzioglu - A non-profit organization, Isn't it?
Braxton - Yes, yes and also the Tri-centric Foundation was put together to help me the Tri-centric Orchestra which is something like 40 people. We will play two nights in a 6 day festival in the Knitting Factory in November an my hope is to hold this group together. Right now Trillium A and Trillium R is being copied and my hope is by next year, we can start to form Trillium R which I am very excited about.
Terzioglu - I wish that we had that performance right in Turkey.
Braxton - Oh, I wish so of course, but it is crazy, very difficult, but I will send you cassettes of one Trillium A and one half Trillium M
Terzioglu - And the spirituality, the characters, Ashmenton, Bubba John Jack?
Braxton - The characters, I try to find 12 names, 12 character types that would reflect the characteristics of composite earth, there is the sun dance character, sun dances, a compilation of native American tendencies Ojuwain, Bubba John Jack, a certain kind of American... ... let me back up a little bit and talk about the aesthetics of the characters. My hope is to build a music system that can be looked at as far as it is city-state analogy, it is continental analogies, it is planet analogies, and the solar system in galactic analogies. Now on the plane of city-state, if we can imagine a continent with 12 different territories, 12 different lands and each land has a group of people, it is from that point that the Ashmenton character is really related to Ashmenton country which is really related to language number 2 and the system that I am trying to build is a system of 12 lands but with 3 roads, one road of stable logic connections, another road of water connections, so improvisational connections and then another connection of symbolic connections. My hope is to for the city-state analogy to have a music moving through different rounds of architectonic tendencies and ancient thoughts about life and death and marriage and friendship and change, I would like to with my system, build a microcosm model of the universe and the energies in the universe. The stable logic energies, the vibrational energies and the emotional energies. And so the characters are compilations of an attempt to not account (?) for different experiences because I don't know enough for that but only to have 12 characters that will give me the possibilities to connect into different zones, and so I can tell different kinds of stories, a story from the sun dance mentality will be different than the stories from the Ashmenton mentality in terms of language, fundamental language form and form states and arguments. What we call the mythologies, I am seeking to build my own context of mythologies and to have it based upon principal constructs as I understand the subject of mythology and of course I have much more to learn.

Terzioglu - Coming to the poetic logics, image musics and collage musics, again I want some clues to approach them by myself. I understand the language musics that you showed in the workshop, after reading Mr. Graham Lock's "An Approach to your Solo Work", what I want to ask first of all is that while constructing these language types, the question was "How to proceed?", asking to yourself and I understand that it was for your solo music, right?
Braxton - Well that was the original building blocks of the language music came about because of the solo musics in improvisation. But after that, I have tried to take the same information and then move it into the domain composition...
Terzioglu - any composition, orchestral, everything?
Braxton - any composition. Every composition I have written is connected to the language musics, same for the operas. That is why yesterday in the lecture I drew a cycle with my hand said that language music, then I drew a rectangle and talked structure space music and I drew a triangle as a way to talk of ritual of ritual and ceremonial music strategies started through improvisation which is water and circle and from that point I started to create compositions with the same material and put it in the structure space, the rectangle where in the rectangle space stable logics it is frozen, I can come back to it and it does not change just like if we play a composition "How High the Moon" whenever we come back to play it, it is still "How High the Moon", we can do something different with it. To me this difference between improvisation and mutable logic and stable logics and composition and then the next degree is to take the improvisation and the composition, put it together and push it to the triangle, and add intention, and with intention, I did not look for ways of creating the music that has a summation logic; for instance in the language musics number 4 Ashmenton plays staccato lines "padada dududu dd dududu". Composition number 37 for four saxophones also has a staccato line logic, this in the composition that in 1974, I did with Julius Hemphill, Oliver Lake and Hamiett Bluiett. Later they would go on to ...
Terzioglu - The World Saxophone Quartet
Braxton - ... make World Saxophone Quartet, but composition number 37 was the second degree of Language number 4. Now for an example, of the triangle, if I would say "Ha ha ha ha - hallo, ho ho ho how are you", if I am stammer, this is staccato line logic. So if I wrote in the opera, "Hallo, it is good to-to-to-to-to-to see you", that would be an example of language 4 inside of the language logic of the singer and that would be a way of using language 4 in a ritual construct. And that would be an example of how an improvisation, something is taken and then put into the structure space for just the abstract the abstract musics and then into the concrete where people are talking and someone happens to be a stammer. From the abstract to concrete, this for me is a part of the Tri-centric approach.
Terzioglu - For the story telling, yes those are close parallel, I mean I began to somehow understand the image musics, to perform story tellings, you are talking about the stammer person, it is somehow story telling for me. Am I right?
Braxton - Uhm, yes sir. There is another example, for instance in composition 113, for soprano saxophone that composition has a story as well and for composition 113, there are 6 microphones all around and different heights and the instrumentalist is turning and playing in different positions and there are also 12 melodic pitch sets. That represents humor, fear, anger, or something and the instrumentalist is asked to re-enact the story of Ojuwain on a train, by chance are you with me with this composition?
Terzioglu - No...

Braxton - It is available on Sound Aspects in America. It is composition 113 and it is one of the story telling structures. This composition is story telling for the individual separate from the Trillium actual opera musics.
Terzioglu - What about talking into instruments, I mean when I read the interview with Mr. Graham Lock and you, at the end of the book, you were talking about some performance, that you've done so far and you were talking into saxophone.
Braxton - Yes.
Terzioglu - And there were jokes and the context has blown out and it is just a question mark for me. How do you talk into the instrument?, in the literal sense how could it happen ? Was it a story telling?
Braxton - More and more I am learning how to speak while I am playing, while circular breathing.
Terzioglu - Yes
Braxton - The actual speech, the libretto of the speech is a story. Another approach is to take on the character of Ashmenton and to speak. This approach is akin talking in tongues. Have you heard that expression?
Terzioglu - Yes I read but could not understand...
Braxton - Talking in tongues is akin to in every person there are many different people, many different aspects of every person and so you try to go that person.
Terzioglu - OK, I see.
Braxton - Just like being an actor, how an actor takes on someone else's personality. What I'm trying to do is to take on the personalities of the 12 major characters in my system...
Terzioglu - You talk in tongues of the ...
Braxton - of the characters. That's one approach. And the other approach is to have actual librettos and have the musicians read and talk, how they talk when they are playing. For me, this is going to be one of the areas to evolve in the future, but already, I'm doing this talking to the instrument.
Terzioglu - The reason that you play alto sax solo, you don't play..., well is it true that you play sopranino saxophone solos somehow?
Braxton - I've recordings of sopranino saxophone solos, but I prefer to use the alto saxophone as my piano.
Terzioglu - As your piano?
Braxton - Yes, this is really like for me, the piano, my main instrument and I like to challenge of playing one concert with only one instrument as opposed to one piece on the saxophone, one piece on the flute; I play maybe a flute solo just one composition but then do something else, but with the alto saxophone, I like to have the whole concert, because it represents a real challenge for me and it is also possible to show how language music works because there is no mirrors, no magic. It's just one instrument playing music and you can begin to see and hear the actual languages. For me as an instrumentalist and as an improviser, this is a good challenge. And this is why I prefer the solo concerts only on the alto saxophone.

Terzioglu - But it is true that language type musics can be performed on every instrument
Braxton - Yes, yes
Terzioglu - But you prefer alto saxophone
Braxton - Only because, I have a special relationship with the alto saxophone.
Terzioglu - The sound of contrabass clarinet is very tragic.
Braxton - Oh, yes
Terzioglu - We'd like to hear other instruments that you play solo.
Braxton - I have a contrabass saxophone and one day it should ever possible, I'd like to come and bring. I have a contrabass saxophone, a bass saxophone, a baritone saxophone...
Terzioglu - Whole family, but not tenor I think...
Braxton - No, no I have tenor, tenor and baritone, I have F-sax. For me part of the fun of being an instrumentalist is to play different instruments like you don't want to eat chicken everyday (laughter). But for the instruments, I would like to have diversity plus there is a different challenge for each instrument because flute instrument is very different than the saxophone and the clarinet and the contrabass clarinet very different from the sax, and so for me as an instrumentalist, it gave a possibility to learn about the "LOW WORLD" (... sounding a very low pitch...) and the "HIGH WORLD" (... sounding a very high pitch ...). Two different strategies; this is part for me of the fun and challenge of being an instrumentalist.
Terzioglu - I just watched a movie about Thelonious Monk. Some stupid person asking him questions "Oh Mr. Monk, what do you think of yourself, as an instrumentalist or as a composer" and Monk answers "Both" (laughter). About the things that you do presently, I mean Ghost Trance, there is any transition?
Braxton - Yes
Terzioglu - The first performance here in Istanbul, well no, not the first performance, you put it on a CD, right?
Braxton - We, about two months ago, did a quartet recording of four Ghost Trance structures. At this point, the material is in my office and it has not been sold to anyone. My hope is to get this material out next year. And...
Terzioglu - So, you recorded but not put on a CD, right?
Braxton - Yes, yes. It's just a, it needs to be edited and finished and mixed and ... Last night was the first actual performance of the Ghost Trance musics.
Terzioglu - What's the point of Ghost Trance in your work? Is that ... For example, I think the Trillium operas as the point that you want to target at or you have targeted at and the Ghost Trance a new music...
Braxton - Yes
Terzioglu - I must say that I'm just surprised because it's a new beginning and totally, maybe not the correct word, but different from Trillium operas
Braxton - Uh, hum
Erdem - Because transformation, some kind of transformation
Terzioglu - Transition, trance, you know meditation
Erdem - Yes, meditation
Braxton - Uhhhhh, we would, both of you. The Ghost Trance musics will give me a way to move into the trance music ways. I mean this is why I want to go and buy as many CD's as much as I can of the Turkish Musics and the African musics, the Indian musics as I seek to examine the House number 1 which is the long sound. In India you have the Drone "Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm"
Terzioglu - Yes.
Braxton - The Turkish music have the dervishes, this is a trance music. There are different kinds of African Trance musics. And I'm interested in the real, the very long time it just keep going. The concept of Ghost Trance musics involve stream of consciousness structures that are conceived based on the 12 constructs of my system. In terms of stream of consciousness in the House of 1, stream of consciousness in the House of 8, stream of consciousness in the different Houses of the system. And meanwhile, once established, it becomes part of mutable logic construct where the other compositions become on top of it, improvisation .....(?) to it. In the same way, that the pulse track structures...
Terzioglu - Pulse track structures?
Braxton - Pulse track structures are structures that have notated music on target time spaces, improvisation and the more notated music, and so on. Unlike bebop, where you play "How High the Moon", the bass player plays the chord changes and the drummer plays the time, but the pulse track structures, you have with material open improvisation, with material open improvisation, and, on top of that another notated piece and then someone detect a solo or play a notated solo, mutable logic. Three different energies happening at the same time. That was the beginning for me of the mutable logic musics, the use of pulse track structures. I would ask you, are you with me with the Willisau four CD set?
Terzioglu - No, unfortunately...
Braxton - Are you with me with 6 compositions of the Black Saint?
Terzioglu - No, I don't think so, but I have composition number 96, 100, orchestral pieces, but I'm not sure...
Braxton - After we finish talking, I will tell you which CD's have examples and should you find that material, you could hear the pulse track structures, mutable logic musics. I mention that, because the Ghost Trance musics take this process to another, to the next level where there is a stream of consciousness of notated material, that's always happening. And these compositions put on top of that, this improvisation put on that. And to listen to the music is not to hear just one thing, but there are many things happening, so you can listen to this part of it, this part of it or you can back up and you can hear all of it, but it is these energies working in the same space and so the concept of Ghost Trance is really a stream of consciousness music like the whirling dervishes that uses the 12 constructs from the language musics. It is like a solar system, a stable logic solar system with improvisation happening in it and then with extra compositions inside of it, like planets, so it's going around and all of the things so happen and it gives a fresh sense of holistic (?) identity. This is what I am interested in.

Erdem - Ghost implies spirit?
Braxton - That is the next aspect of it. I have been studying the music of the native American Indians. And more and more I find myself influenced by their spiritualism. And Ghost Trance for me is the beginning of seeking to retain the memory of, well personal individuals, national individuals and spiritual individuals and I feel that this approach will be part of an attempt to resurrect a fresh platform for Gods and Goddesses, for heroes, for community heroes, for the firemen and firewomen and the school teachers; Ghost Trance will be a way to celebrate the memory of given individuals and thoughts.
Terzioglu - Ted Reichman and Roland Dahinden mentioned about the native Indians. They should be the point of departure to the Ghost Trance.
Braxton - Uh, hu
Terzioglu - Maybe out of context, but I just want to ask about your lectures in Wesleyan University. Do you mention about the philosophical thought and the structural base? Do one have to be an instrumentalist to attend the courses?
Braxton - No...
Terzioglu - So, the target that you are going to at the end of the courses, is that to form an ensemble to perform music? Is that true?
Braxton - At Wesleyan University, I have history classes, I teach the history of African American music, I have taught the history of European music, I have a class of history of women in creative music. I teach a class on music of John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and Charlie Mingus. I used to teach orchestration but since coming to Wesleyan, I have not taught orchestration. I have an ensemble class and in the ensemble class, I use the materials of my system and I have a seminar class, compositional seminar tutorial class where it is open for anyone who would like to take it. If you are an architect or if you are only interested in cooking food or if you want to make statues. And in the composition seminar class, we talk about form, building blocks of form and I give analysis of my music. I talk to my students about the music of Arnold Schoenberg and Karlheinz Stockhausen, Iannis Xenakis and in a year or so, I will talk to them about my new Turkish whirling dervish musics, but I need a couple of years to study this music, but whatever I learn or discover, I take to my students and start to share with them not like I have all the answers, I'm not that kind of professor. I tell my students I have no answers, but I have good questions (laughter)
Erdem - I have some questions about title drawings...
(...)

Terzioglu - I mentioned about a lady that has radio shows in official radio station, when I talked to her at the first night you came here, she told me that she would like to know and get some clues about the title drawings. She told me that she would like to learn something about the title drawings. Since you know that they are complex structures and as far as I've seen the latest compositions have titles just like pictures, that have meanings...
Braxton - Yes...
Terzioglu - There is a town, there is a road passing by...
Braxton - Yes, yes
Terzioglu - There are signs...
Erdem - Flashes and lights...
Braxton - Yes. For the system of music that I have been trying to build every composition has 3 names. There is the opus number, involving the order of the compositions; there is the coded title, involving numbers and there is the graphic title, involving the image. There are at least 6 degrees of the image titles. In the beginning, in the early 60's, as I looked for a way to name my music, I discovered that I did not want to write a piece of music and call it "The Sun Came Over the Mountain" or "Braxton's Blues", so I would in the beginnings try to have what I called the formula titles, by formula titles, I try to express sound type, velocity, temperate date and to express my the ingredients of the composition in terms of the formula of mixtures of relationships. Involving the pitch, the geometric and geosonicmetric characteristics of the composition would be the formula titles. The next set of titles would be the alternative coding titles. And by alternative coding titles, I'm referring to the decision of, to look for extra-musical factors and include that in the paradigm for the composition. For instance in the middle 60's my hero Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky would playing chess and I try to factor chess moves as part of the compositional process. I used friends initials and immigrated that into, I use astrology and Number Theory in association and integrated that information into composition and so that class of musics, I call the coding titles. Number 3, the schematic titles. By schematic titles, I try to, in the graphic image, to express the composite form state of the music, in terms of what was happening from beginning to the end in the music.
Erdem - The relation, one of them is visible, the title graph drawings; one of them audible, the music is audible. You listen to the music and you see the title drawings...
Braxton - Uhm, yes, but not necessarily in literal two dimensional sense, uhm, schematic in the sense of the processes employ at the beginning, the processes employ at the middle, the processes employ at the end for the person listening to the music, it might not always be possible to see the actual processes unless the person would analyze the compositions and analyze all of the components of the composition, but more and more, I begin to move towards three dimensional processes that would not always be audible. For the schematic structures, well the major changes in the composition in terms of mass, density, time is expressed in the titles. From the schematic titles, I moved into the dimensional joins titles, and by dimensional joins, I began to try to factor intention, spheres of intentions and zones of intentions, moving into a kind of holographic construct. From the dimensional joins, I moved into the color titles and part of the color titles and dimensional joins titles are the same. Because in the same period, I began to factor color into the actual music moving more and more into factoring body and color and extra musical paradigms. From the dimensional joins, moving into the color titles, somewhere after that I began to move into images. Image strategies have nothing to do with the actual components of each little specific element, but moving into the mysteries of the music, to the spiritual connections of the music. And so formula titles, coding titles, schematic titles, the dimensional titles, the color titles moving to holographics into total imagery titles, and that is how the titles have progressed. More and more I am starting to try to use titles to express other dimensions of connection, but the initial idea was I didn't want simply to say, here is a piece of music "The Sun Came Over the Mountain" or "Braxton's Blues", rather I want it ...(laughter)

Racism in Jazz - 1996 - audio documentary

Archie Shepp Quintet - Archie Shepp performs and talks

Nina Simone - I wish I knew How It Would Feel To Be Free

Public Enemy ft. Ice Cube & Big Daddy Kane - Burn Hollywood Burn (Uncut)

public enemy - shut'em down ( HQ )

Nas - N.I.G.G.E.R. (The Slave And The Master) Video 2008

The Ojays Ship Ahoy

Screamin' Jay Hawkins - Ignant And Shit

Tuesday 11 October 2011

The infamous Bill Cosby Pound Cake speech


Ladies and gentlemen, I really have to ask you to seriously consider what you’ve heard, and now this is the end of the evening so to speak. I heard a prize fight manager say to his fellow who was losing badly, “David, listen to me. It’s not what’s he’s doing to you. It’s what you’re not doing."
Ladies and gentlemen, these people set -- they opened the doors, they gave us the right, and today, ladies and gentlemen, in our cities and public schools we have 50% drop out. In our own neighborhood, we have men in prison. No longer is a person embarrassed because they’re pregnant without a husband. No longer is a boy considered an embarrassment if he tries to run away from being the father of the unmarried child.
Ladies and gentlemen, the lower economic and lower middle economic people are not holding their end in this deal. In the neighborhood that most of us grew up in, parenting is not going on. In the old days, you couldn’t hooky school because every drawn shade was an eye. And before your mother got off the bus and to the house, she knew exactly where you had gone, who had gone into the house, and where you got on whatever you had one and where you got it from. Parents don’t know that today.
I’m talking about these people who cry when their son is standing there in an orange suit. Where were you when he was two? Where were you when he was twelve? Where were you when he was eighteen, and how come you don’t know he had a pistol? And where is his father, and why don’t you know where he is? And why doesn’t the father show up to talk to this boy?
The church is only open on Sunday. And you can’t keep asking Jesus to ask doing things for you. You can’t keep asking that God will find a way. God is tired of you. God was there when they won all those cases -- fifty in a row. That’s where God was because these people were doing something. And God said, “I’m going to find a way.” I wasn’t there when God said it -- I’m making this up. But it sounds like what God would do.
We cannot blame white people. White people -- White people don’t live over there. They close up the shop early. The Korean ones still don’t know us as well -- they stay open 24 hours.

I’m looking and I see a man named Kenneth Clark, he and his wife Mamie. Kenneth’s still alive. I have to apologize to him for these people because Kenneth said it straight. He said you have to strengthen yourselves, and we’ve got to have that black doll. And everybody said it. Julian Bond said it. Dick Gregory said it. All these lawyers said it. And you wouldn’t know that anybody had done a damned thing. 
Fifty percent drop out rate, I’m telling you, and people in jail, and women having children by five, six different men. Under what excuse? I want somebody to love me. And as soon as you have it, you forget to parent. Grandmother, mother, and great grandmother in the same room, raising children, and the child knows nothing about love or respect of any one of the three of them. All this child knows is “gimme, gimme, gimme.” These people want to buy the friendship of a child, and the child couldn’t care less. Those of us sitting out here who have gone on to some college or whatever we’ve done, we still fear our parents. And these people are not parenting. They’re buying things for the kid -- $500 sneakers -- for what? They won’t buy or spend $250 on Hooked on Phonics.
Kenneth Clark, somewhere in his home in upstate New York -- just looking ahead. Thank God he doesn’t know what’s going on. Thank God. But these people -- the ones up here in the balcony fought so hard. Looking at the incarcerated, these are not political criminals. These are people going around stealing Coca Cola. People getting shot in the back of the head over a piece of pound cake! Then we all run out and are outraged: “The cops shouldn’t have shot him.” What the hell was he doing with the pound cake in his hand? I wanted a piece of pound cake just as bad as anybody else. And I looked at it and I had no money. And something called parenting said if you get caught with it you’re going to embarrass your mother." Not, "You’re going to get your butt kicked." No. "You’re going to embarrass your mother." "You’re going to embarrass your family." If you knock that girl up, you’re going to have to run away because it’s going to be too embarrassing for your family. In the old days, a girl getting pregnant had to go down South, and then her mother would go down to get her. But the mother had the baby. I said the mother had the baby. The girl didn’t have a baby. The mother had the baby in two weeks. We are not parenting.
Ladies and gentlemen, listen to these people. They are showing you what’s wrong. People putting their clothes on backwards. Isn’t that a sign of something going on wrong? Are you not paying attention? People with their hat on backwards, pants down around the crack. Isn’t that a sign of something or are you waiting for Jesus to pull his pants up? Isn’t it a sign of something when she’s got her dress all the way up to the crack -- and got all kinds of needles and things going through her body. What part of Africa did this come from? We are not Africans. Those people are not Africans; they don’t know a damned thing about Africa. With names like Shaniqua, Shaligua, Mohammed and all that crap and all of them are in jail. (When we give these kinds names to our children, we give them the strength and inspiration in the meaning of those names. What’s the point of giving them strong names if there is not parenting and values backing it up).

Brown versus the Board of Education is no longer the white person’s problem. We’ve got to take the neighborhood back. We’ve got to go in there. Just forget telling your child to go to the Peace Corps. It’s right around the corner. It’s standing on the corner. It can’t speak English. It doesn’t want to speak English. I can’t even talk the way these people talk: “Why you ain’t where you is go ra?” I don’t know who these people are. And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk. Then I heard the father talk. This is all in the house. You used to talk a certain way on the corner and you got into the house and switched to English. Everybody knows it’s important to speak English except these knuckleheads. You can’t land a plane with, “Why you ain’t…” You can’t be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth. There is no Bible that has that kind of language. Where did these people get the idea that they’re moving ahead on this. Well, they know they’re not; they’re just hanging out in the same place, five or six generations sitting in the projects when you’re just supposed to stay there long enough to get a job and move out.
Now, look, I’m telling you. It’s not what they’re doing to us. It’s what we’re not doing. 50 percent drop out. Look, we’re raising our own ingrown immigrants. These people are fighting hard to be ignorant. There’s no English being spoken, and they’re walking and they’re angry. Oh God, they’re angry and they have pistols and they shoot and they do stupid things. And after they kill somebody, they don’t have a plan. Just murder somebody. Boom. Over what? A pizza? And then run to the poor cousin’s house.
They sit there and the cousin says, “What are you doing here?”
“I just killed somebody, man.”
“What?”
“I just killed somebody; I’ve got to stay here.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Well, give me some money, I’ll go….”
 “Where are you going?”
“North Carolina.”
Everybody wanted to go to North Carolina. But the police know where you’re going because your cousin has a record.
Five or six different children -- same woman, eight, ten different husbands or whatever. Pretty soon you’re going to have to have DNA cards so you can tell who you’re making love to. You don’t who this is. It might be your grandmother. I’m telling you, they’re young enough. Hey, you have a baby when you’re twelve. Your baby turns thirteen and has a baby, how old are you? Huh? Grandmother. By the time you’re twelve, you could have sex with your grandmother, you keep those numbers coming. I’m just predicting.
I’m saying Brown versus the Board of Education. We’ve got to hit the streets, ladies and gentlemen. I’m winding up, now -- no more applause. I’m saying, look at the Black Muslims. There are Black Muslims standing on the street corners and they say so forth and so on, and we’re laughing at them because they have bean pies and all that, but you don’t read, “Black Muslim gunned down while chastising drug dealer.” You don’t read that. They don’t shoot down Black Muslims. You understand me. Muslims tell you to get out of the neighborhood. When you want to clear your neighborhood out, first thing you do is go get the Black Muslims, bean pies and all. And your neighborhood is then clear. The police can’t do it.

Duke Ellington interview

The basement club was cramped, and the bandstand was so small that, by the drummer’s measure, it could hardly hold a fight. The clientele included mobsters, musicians, and star performers from the nearby Broadway shows, slipping in among the crowd from the time the band appeared, at about ten o’clock, straight on “until.” The banjoist who provided the schedule could elaborate no further about how long the night went on: “Until you quit. Until period.” After 3 A.M., you couldn’t get a seat. In the fall of 1926, the craze for Negro music was already sending savvy white New Yorkers up to Harlem, but the Kentucky Club, on West Forty-ninth Street, had the hottest band in town. Trumpets, trombone, saxes, clarinet, tuba, banjo, and drums—nine or so players, huddled on the stand beneath the pipes that ran along the ceiling, plus the handsome young piano player who led the group while dancers surged around him on the floor. But the band did more than keep the temperature high and the dancers moving; its arrangements were so startling that even a familiar number like “St. Louis Blues” sounded new. Variety capped a gushing review of the “colored combo” by noting that the club’s patrons—transfixed “jazz boys” and civilians alike—spent a remarkable amount of time just sitting around and listening.

Duke Ellington and his Washingtonians had been performing in New York, under one name or another, for about three years, but their range and ambition were just beginning to show. As new arrivals, they had practiced the sweet, straight, “under conversation” music that had been in demand at the Washington society dances where the original group members started out, but they had quickly discovered that this sound was all wrong for New York. Not brazen enough, not rhythmically driving; not Negro enough; not jazz. In truth, a New York style of jazz hardly existed. In the mid-twenties, the city offered, instead, a heady variety of musical models, including its own native Harlem stride pianists (who welcomed Ellington as one of their own); the blues musicians who were part of the ongoing mass migration from the South; Fletcher Henderson’s big, polished sound; and the great horn players of New Orleans, who blazed through town now and again like comets. And then there were the resident players who had absorbed the New Orleanians’ famed techniques: the trumpeter Bubber Miley joined the Washingtonians before their first uncertain year was out and, with his waa-waa outbursts and uncannily human shrieks and cries, quickly blew their decorum away. Ellington was inspired by Miley’s wild expressiveness, even if he couldn’t yet meet it or let go the promise of all the other sounds he heard.
The number that caught Irving Mills’s attention at the Kentucky Club one night, as he recalled, was “Black and Tan Fantasy,” a three-minute musical drama jointly credited to Ellington and Miley. It isn’t difficult to figure out which of the authors did what, as a throbbingly mournful blues gives way to a refined society tune—rough and smooth, black and tan, Miley and Ellington—or as Miley’s solos rise to a hectoring beauty that finds ease and release in the band’s response. The trumpeter’s manipulation of a simple rubber plunger cup over the bell of his horn makes for some irresistibly antic sounds (the trombonist, not to be outdone, gives a good impression of a whinnying horse), but the piece delivers an unexpected emotional punch: a concluding riff from Chopin’s “Funeral March” is willfully absurd yet seems to seal the trumpet’s urgent message. (“I like great big ole tears,” Ellington said, teasingly, about audience reactions.) The over-all effect is at once mocking and chilling, like a funeral cortège with skeletons dancing behind.


Whether or not Irving Mills shed a tear, he recognized both the artistic merit and the financial potential of such original work. A song publisher with a special interest in blues, Mills immediately decided to go into band management, with Duke Ellington and His Kentucky Club Orchestra (their latest, somewhat grandiloquent billing) as his initial client. Mills insisted that Ellington concentrate on recording his own compositions, and that fall the energized players made their first important disks. One year later, they opened at the Cotton Club.
More than half a century after the Civil War, the most famous night club in New York was a mock plantation. The bandstand was done up as a white-columned mansion, the backdrop painted with cotton bushes and slave quarters. And the racial fantasy extended well beyond décor: whites who came to Harlem to be entertained were not to be discomfited by the presence of non-entertaining Negroes. All the performers were black—or, in the case of the chorus girls, café au lait—and all the patrons white, if not by force of law then by force of the thugs at the door. Ellington had to ask permission for friends to see his show. Ironically, it was the Cotton Club that allowed Ellington to expand his talents, by employing him to arrange and compose for a variety of dancers, singers, miscellaneous acts, entr’actes, and theatrical revues. His most extraordinary talent, however, may have been for making the best of tainted opportunities. For the big revues, with their plots about black savages and threatened maidens, he devised music of sophistication and cheekily exotic allure, under such titles as “Jungle Blues,” “Jungle Night in Harlem,” and—sinister little masterpiece—“The Mooche.” But even before the band sounded a note it delivered a statement: impeccably dressed in matching tuxedos and boutonnières, its members were of a class with the biggest swells in the room. And Ellington was the swellest of all: unfailingly soigné, magisterially presiding over the urban jungle, he stood untouched and never lost his smile. What was he thinking? What did he feel about—what did he contribute to—the mire of American race relations during the last century? Harvey G. Cohen’s “Duke Ellington’s America” (Chicago; $40) attempts to get under the skin of this apparently most imperturbable of men, and the results, if hardly conclusive, are fascinating. One of Ellington’s few confidantes, his sister, Ruth, believed that he concealed himself under “veil upon veil upon veil,” and Cohen is not the first Ellingtonian to treasure the smallest telltale sign of his subject’s human susceptibilities. There is, for example, an uncharacteristically angry letter to a white business associate with whom Ellington wished to break (which is nevertheless signed “with great respect,” and turns out not to have been sent). Cohen’s extremely intelligent and formidably documented book—a welcome change from much that has been published about Ellington—is not a standard biography; Ellington’s personal life and sexual mores are officially beyond its scope. Nor is it a critical work, since it contains no musical analysis and not a great deal of musical description. Cohen’s long hours in the Smithsonian’s huge trove of Ellington papers were devoted to the business records and the scrapbooks, and, as his title suggests, he has broad social issues on his mind. Even Ellington’s professional life is examined in circumscribed areas, almost all of which touch at some point upon race. The question is whether, sooner or later, everything did.
Early in the book, Cohen quotes Ellington’s longtime collaborator Billy Strayhorn objecting to a movie project about Ellington that Strayhorn was told would have a racial theme. “I don’t think it should be racial because I don’t think he’s racial,” Strayhorn protested. “He is an individual.” But Strayhorn concluded, in a line of thinking that seems emblematic of the era and of the personalities involved, “You don’t have to say the darn thing.” Cohen keeps Ellington’s individuality firmly in sight, while detailing such targeted subjects as his relationship with Mills, the white man who has been lauded for launching Ellington’s career and—both before and after they split, in 1939—accused of exploitation; Ellington’s travels with his band in the harshly segregated South of the nineteen-thirties and forties; the overt, if often forgotten, racial programs of much of his music; and his sometimes contentious relationship with the civil-rights movement of the nineteen-fifties and sixties.
A different set of subjects—Ellington’s musical development, his band members, even his women—might have yielded something closer to the post-racial portrait for which Strayhorn argued, a portrait more in accord with the high personal horizon on which Ellington’s sights were set. But “the darn thing” will not go away, and race remains unsurprisingly essential to the story of America’s first widely recognized black artist, and of what he had to say.
An unshakable dignity seems to have been instilled in Ellington from childhood, and Cohen examines the aspiringly genteel society in which the much beloved boy grew up. Ellington’s father, who worked for years as a butler in a prominent white home, saw that his family’s dinner table was always formally set, no matter the lack of funds at any given time. His pious mother virtually worshipped her son—who was her only child until he was sixteen, when his sister finally came along. And Ellington worshipped his mother in return; he fondly remembered her playing parlor tunes and hymns on the piano—he said the music made him cry—and he attributed his lifelong confidence to her frequent assurances that he was blessed, which he had always believed.
And why not? Edward Kennedy Ellington was born in 1899, in Washington, D.C., at a time when the nation’s capital was arguably the best place for an African-American child to live. The largest urban Negro community in the country maintained its own opera company, classical-music groups, and literary societies; its segregated schools taught African history, stressed proper manners and speech, and were intent on producing students who were, in Ellington’s phrase, “representative of a great and proud race.” For many years, from Emancipation through the imposition of onerous racial restrictions by the Wilson Administration, climaxing in a brutal, white-sparked riot following the First World War, the upper stratum of the city’s black population held to a proto-Harlem Renaissance ideal: demonstrate how civilized, intelligent, and accomplished we are, and racism will fade away. One need not demand respect if one commands it.
Ellington acquired the nickname “Duke” on the brink of adolescence, and, whatever its source (accounts differ), it indicates the superior impression that the boy already made—not an insignificant trait in an era when outstanding black musicians were known professionally as Bubber, Sonny, and Cootie. If he was intended for leadership, however, it clearly wasn’t going to proceed from his scholastic efforts. Although his schooling may have afforded him an inner strength, Ellington was a careless student, even in music (where his only grade on record is a D). But then he didn’t respond to formal training of any kind. Early piano lessons failed to hold his interest, and he learned to play mostly on his own, mastering James P. Johnson’s notoriously difficult “Carolina Shout”—well enough to impress Johnson—by slowing down the piano roll and matching his fingers to the depressed keys. When he wanted to go further, he charmed his way into pickup lessons from the professionals who hung out in the local poolroom. He was careful to point out, later on, that these early masters included both conservatory-trained musicians and unschooled “ear cats” who couldn’t read a note, and that he had freely learned from both. Charm, drive, and an audacious talent: he was barely out of his teens before he had established the Duke’s Serenaders and several other nicely profitable dance bands, and was supporting himself—and a wife and baby—in style. Yet, by his own account, even when he felt sure enough to try his fortunes in New York, age twenty-four, he had never actually written music. He had composed a few songs in his early years, and began composing again as soon as he hit Tin Pan Alley, but he had never written anything down and wasn’t entirely certain that he could. Ellington was himself something of an “ear cat,” and even as he learned what he needed to know, and his music became increasingly complex, his instinctual bias was for the more instinctual art. Partly, this was the natural democrat’s appreciation of the tough and unschooled African-American “gutbucket” sound; partly it was the natural aristocrat’s desire to make everything look easy. (“How was I to know that composers had to go up in the mountains, or to the seashore, to commune with the muses for six months?”) Other popular composers have faced similar gaps between their early training and their goals; George Gershwin’s solution was to make himself a lifelong student, working with a series of teachers on harmony, counterpoint, orchestration. Ellington didn’t have the temperament for this approach, nor did it appear to offer what he needed. He had something all his own, something that made the arduous process of writing music yield immediate and exhilarating results: he had his band.
The scrappy band of the early Kentucky Club days became an orchestra of a dozen players at the Cotton Club. But Ellington wanted an even larger sound: more color, more detail, more possibilities. By the time of the first European tour, in 1933, there were fourteen players, plus a vocalist; the group that was ultimately known as Duke Ellington and His Famous Orchestra had grown, by the mid-forties, to nineteen players, travelling and recording together, working and virtually living together, fifty-two weeks a year. These musicians were Ellington’s inspiration, not merely as professionals but as individuals with irreplaceable musical personalities. He did not write a “Concerto for Trumpet,” in 1939; rather, it was a “Concerto for Cootie”—that is, a work designed for the specific articulations of the superb trumpet player Cootie Williams, who replaced Bubber Miley and had already been with Ellington for about ten years. (“You can’t write music right,” Ellington told this magazine, more than sixty years ago, “unless you know how the man that’ll play it plays poker.”)
But these musicians were sometimes his collaborators in a more unusual way, described by reporters who sat in, marvelling, on working sessions. Ellington would start off with a melody, or even just a few bars that were quickly tweaked and critiqued into a theme. Then, one by one, the improvisations began—Barney Bigard on clarinet, Johnny Hodges on alto saxophone, Tricky Sam Nanton on trombone were all especially fluent—with each player improving on the last player’s phrases, elaborating and extending, while the trombonist /copyist Juan Tizol caught the accumulating effects on paper (albeit not quite as fast as they kept coming). Ellington approved or rejected the additions, made changes and issued challenges, then usually took the results home and worked the whole thing over. The next day, there would be a few hours of refinement and repetition, until the piece was fixed and memorized. (Ellington always preferred memorization: how could you let loose if your nose was stuck in a score?) By this method, the time for creating or arranging a new number—most numbers were about three minutes long, the standard length of a 78-r.p.m. recording—appears to have been just two days. “My band is my instrument,” Ellington said, and the way he played it explains his music’s extraordinary mixture of freedom and control.
This collaborative process could create difficulties when Ellington employed a melody that he had overheard one of the musicians playing, or that a musician had sold him for a regulation fee. The main tune of “Concerto for Cootie,” for example, was something that Ellington bought from Williams for twenty-five dollars, a sum believed to be reasonable by both parties until, a few years later, words were added and it became a hit as “Do Nothing Till You Hear from Me”—with no royalties for Williams. Johnny Hodges, the band’s most gorgeously lyrical player and a fount of melody—he contributed the tunes for “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore” and “I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart”—became so annoyed that, during performances, he mimed rubbing dollar bills between his fingers when Ellington launched into a number that Hodges felt was rightly his. One of Ellington’s most beloved songs, “Sophisticated Lady,” has several contributing claims and was described by the trombonist Lawrence Brown as “one of those where everybody jumps in.”
But, as Billy Strayhorn pointed out, the various contested melodies were musical scraps that would not have amounted to anything had Ellington not labored to smooth out rough parts, create harmonies, add bridges, and set them in a coherent musical frame. None of Ellington’s musicians—not even Strayhorn—ever composed a hit on his own. Most important, all these works turned out to sound purely and recognizably like Ellington. For those who doubted that he was a “real” composer, here was the conundrum: How could the band have created Ellington, when Ellington created the band?
Despite the air of insouciance, Ellington took his composing seriously. It was gratifying to have people sit and listen to his music in a proper theatre, as they did for the first time in 1930, when the band accompanied Maurice Chevalier during a Broadway run and filled out the bill for an entire act. Coast-to-coast radio broadcasts from the Cotton Club had won the band an enormous following, and it gave concert-style performances throughout its first national tour, in 1931, usually performing in movie theatres between shows. Recordings had similarly prepared the way in England and France, where, in 1933, the band appeared on variety bills in the biggest venues, and was met with a respect that, for all its popularity, it had never known at home. Members of the group were suddenly being discussed not merely as entertainers but as artists, and it seemed that every note they played was considered to be—in the words of one British critic—“directly an expression of Duke’s genius.” Artist. Genius. Claims of this sort had been made before the European tour, but during the mid-thirties they began to take hold. Cohen documents Irving Mills’s long-term publicity campaign to build his client just such a gold-plated image, unprecedented for an African-American. It does not impugn Mills’s belief in Ellington’s artistry to note that his goal was to share this belief with the increasingly large, white, record-buying public. Most of the campaign revolved around Ellington’s gifts as a composer (“Again!” ran the ad for a new song, “Solitude,” in 1935. “The stamp of Ellington’s genius!”), and Ellington fed the fire with the release of several longer compositions. “Creole Rhapsody” (1931), “Reminiscing in Tempo” (1935), and the conjoined “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue” (1937) all took up two or more sides of 78-r.p.m. recordings—until then a length generally granted only to works of classical music, and a sign that Ellington was extending the notion of musical seriousness beyond its conventional bounds. He told reporters that he was working on a symphonic suite and an opera, both based on the history of the American Negro people. It was just a matter of time before he got to Carnegie Hall.
“What we could not say openly, we expressed in music,” Ellington wrote in the British magazine Rhythm, in 1931, trying to explain the Negro musical tradition that had grown up in America, music “forged from the very white heat of our sorrows.” All his life, Ellington gave the impression of having been unscathed by racism, either in his early years—color, he said, was never even mentioned in his parents’ home—or during the long professional decades when it defined almost every move he made: where he could play his music, who could come to listen to it, whether he could stay in a hotel or attend another musician’s show, and where (or whether) he could find something to eat when the show was over. The orchestra made its first Southern tour just after its return from England, in 1933, travelling (thanks to Mills) in supremely insulated style: two private Pullman cars for sleeping and dining, and a separate baggage car for the elaborate wardrobe, scenery, and lights required to present a show more dazzling than any that most of the sleepy little towns where they made their stops had ever seen. Ellington made a special effort to perform for black audiences, even when it meant that the band added a midnight show in a place where it had performed earlier that night exclusively for whites. Reports from both racial groups were that the players outdid themselves; it is difficult to know where they felt they had more to prove.
Segregation was hardly peculiar to the South, of course, any more than it was limited, in New York, to the Cotton Club and its ilk. The down-and-dirty Kentucky Club had been no different: even without thugs at the door, there was an unspoken citywide dictate about where the different races belonged. The only exceptions were the “Black and Tans,” the few Harlem clubs that permitted casual racial mixing, and to which Ellington seems to have been paying tongue-in-cheek tribute with the not-quite-meshing themes of “Black and Tan Fantasy.” This was the first number played, after “The Star-Spangled Banner,” at Ellington’s landmark Carnegie Hall concert, in January, 1943, although the piece sounded very different from his twenties hit: taken at a slower tempo, with extended solos, it was twice its original length—so deliberative it seemed a kind of statement—and showed off the burnished power of Ellington’s forties band.
But much of the program that night made a statement. There were no pop vocals; Ellington presented a trio of new musical portraits of the historic black performers Bert Williams, Bill (Bojangles) Robinson, and Florence Mills; even the brassy instrumental “Ko-Ko,” of 1940, was, Ellington told the audience, meant to portray the square in New Orleans where slaves had once come together to dance—the place where jazz was born. Everything was designed to set off “Black, Brown and Beige,” a three-movement composition, some forty-five minutes long, that had been advertised as “Duke Ellington’s first symphony” and that Ellington described as “a parallel to the history of the American Negro.” It seems unlikely that any other musical début has carried such hope of repairing divisions: between jazz and classical, between black and white. The audience itself was described in the press as “black, brown, and beige”—hardly the usual Carnegie crowd—and included Eleanor Roosevelt, Leopold Stokowski, Count Basie, and Frank Sinatra, all waiting for the revelation of a truly uniting, truly American music.
“Black, Brown and Beige” had an elaborate scenario, which Ellington only hinted at in his spoken remarks. The first and most richly developed section, “Black,” began with a powerful work song launched on the timpani and moved on to a homemade hymn of celestial longing; Ellington spoke, rather obliquely, of these related aspects of the lives of slaves. (A recording of the concert, complete with Ellington’s remarks, was released in the nineteen-seventies.) “Brown,” far more disjointed, took on Emancipation and the Negro’s loyal service in a series of American wars (a matter of obvious relevance in 1943), before concluding with a darkly discordant, sung blues. “Beige,” which brought the piece up to contemporary Harlem, was the weakest section, perhaps because Ellington was still working on it the night before the concert, but it stirred him to remarks about the “veneer” of progress and a people who still “don’t have enough to eat and a place to sleep.” Even these mildly critical observations were quickly buried, however, with his reassurance that, these days, “we, of course, find the black, brown, and beige right in there for the red, white, and blue.” The patriotism and the exuberance are affecting, and entirely apt for a concert that served as a benefit for Russian war relief and also marked Ellington’s twentieth anniversary in music. What these sentiments do not jibe with, entirely, are the stark and angry words that he meant the music to express. Comprising twenty-nine handwritten pages, and drawing on several previous drafts, Ellington’s scenario was grounded in extensive reading and research. An opening section about the proud history of African civilizations quotes from the anthropologist Franz Boas, as transmitted by W. E. B. Du Bois—but is only fleetingly suggested in the opening drums of “Black.” A detailed section on the horrors of the Middle Passage includes scenes of mutilation and sounds of screaming that Ellington described as “a symphony of torture.” Neither the scenes nor the sounds became part of the completed work. The scenario for “Brown” honors the leaders of violent slave rebellions—not mentioned again—and the light café-concert music for “Beige” comes nowhere close to addressing Ellington’s lines: “Who brought the dope / And made a rope / of it, to hang you / In your misery . . . / And Harlem . . . / How’d you come to be / Permitted / In a land that’s free?” Cohen speculates that Ellington muted his message because of the probable cost to his “prominent media status” or, alternatively, because he genuinely believed that he would have greater effect through his music than through confrontation. Another reason is suggested in the scenario itself, where Ellington explains that African-American song began when a clever slave decided to placate and yet evade his master: “I’ll sing, and hide my thoughts from him.”
“Black, Brown and Beige” was torn apart by the major critics. It is difficult not to wonder if Ellington’s work was damaged by his holding back so much of what he wanted to say—if his unyielding self-control was not sometimes less than ideal for his art. Or if the problem, as critics charged, was that he had simply not acquired the technique for an extended work. Judged as jazz, the composition was deemed unrecognizable; judged as classical music, it was found “formless and meaningless,” a series of poorly connected parts that did not add up to a whole. Cohen is not the first to retort that “Black, Brown and Beige” should not be judged by preëxisting standards—that its abrupt musical transitions were not a shortcoming but a choice—and that the composer had achieved exactly what he intended. But Ellington was so discouraged by the reviews that, after the Carnegie concert, he performed the full work twice more, and never again. He recorded only some abbreviated and reworked sections. Near the end of his life, he said that the music was less interesting than the script.
He did not stop writing longer pieces, although they now came mostly in the form of suites, with separate sections bound by an inclusive theme, and no pretension to the kind of unity he had so publicly failed to achieve. Almost all these works were written in close collaboration with Billy Strayhorn, whose shimmering semi-classical touch became as much a part of the Ellington sound through the next decades as the growling brass had been during the “jungle” years; it is possible that no one will ever disentangle which of the pair composed exactly what parts of a long series of works, from “The Perfume Suite,” in 1945, to “Far East Suite,” more than twenty years later. Yet the band remained no less a part of Ellington’s creative life; no other group could get the sound he wanted, and few were even equipped to try. More, he needed his players to give color and form to the musical sketches that now poured forth unceasingly: waking or eating, walking or showering, on a crowded train surrounded by rowdy musicians or in a quiet car travelling through the weary night from one small-town job to another.
It was an ungrateful era. The Harlem craze was dead, the Cotton Club was closed, and the war that had been fought for democracy, equality, and freedom—Ellington had been a true believer, selling War Bonds on the radio and opening concerts with “The Star-Spangled Banner”—had done nothing to improve the status of the country’s Negro citizens. In order to stay together, the band had taken to relentless touring. And, with private Pullman cars a luxury of the past, racial indignities had become an inevitable part of present life: Ellington was reported to be especially fearful of venturing into any place where he risked being turned away. Yet even as the smaller combos of the rising bebop movement drove other big bands out of business, and as Duke Ellington and His Famous Orchestra found themselves playing an endless series of one-night stands, Ellington pressed on, not merely a Jazz Age survivor but, it seemed, the last believer in big-band jazz as a living, developing art. The new works—especially the longer ones—didn’t always go over with the record companies (RCA Victor waited years to release “The Perfume Suite”), or with the audience, or even, sometimes, with the players. (“We didn’t like the tone poems much,” Johnny Hodges admitted when he and a couple of other band members took off on their own, in 1951.) Disappointed critics prescribed a choice: the century’s most important jazz composer could narrow his focus, concentrate, and compose—or lead the band and tour until he dropped. Not both.
For Ellington it would have been like choosing his heart over his lungs; the whole system by now worked together or not at all. The choice was apparently personal as well as musical: he loved the life of the road, surrounded by people yet essentially alone. (He and his wife had separated early on. A famed sexual raconteur, he was rumored to have a woman waiting at every stop.) Cohen points out that Ellington could have been a rich man if he had stayed home, collected royalties, and composed. The band had become a very expensive proposition, and was subsidized largely by those royalties from long-ago hits. Even when it had a big resurgence, thanks to an appearance at the Newport Festival, in 1956, the stir was due not to the newly minted “Newport Festival Suite” but to a crazily exciting six-minute improvisation by the saxophonist Paul Gonsalves, played between the paired 1937 pieces “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue.” Contrary to the long-term concertizing trend in Ellington’s music, the performance got people back on their feet and dancing again, and got Ellington on the cover of Time. His renewed stature did not prevent controversy in the black community, however, when, in 1959, the N.A.A.C.P. gave Ellington its highest award. Recipients during the previous couple of years had been Martin Luther King, Jr., and the civil-rights activists Daisy Bates and the Little Rock Nine. Now the editorial pages of African-American newspapers doubtfully inquired: What had Ellington done to deserve this honor? It wasn’t just a question of what music had to do with civil rights; Jackie Robinson had won in 1956, with no such questions raised about baseball. Rather, as the Time article had put it, “Duke is not a militant foe of segregation.” It went on to note that “he plays for segregated audiences on his annual swings through the South,” and added that Ellington had explained, with a verbal shrug, “Everybody does.”
What had he done to deserve the honor? The plainly factual answer is that he had raised a lot of money over the years playing benefits for the N.A.A.C.P., and for many other organizations that had asked for his help. But there were deeper answers. Ellington, offended by the accusation that he had been silent on civil rights, replied that those who doubted him had simply failed to use their ears. “They’ve not been listening to our music,” he said. “For a long time, social protest and pride in black culture and history have been the most significant themes in what we’ve done.” In sum: “We have been talking for a long time about what it is to be black in this country.” For Ellington, being black in this country meant approaching difficult issues in strategically different ways. Earlier in the fifties, he had quarrelled with the N.A.A.C.P., in fact, over playing segregated theatres, arguing that his musicians needed to make a living, and that the N.A.A.C.P. ought to focus on more urgent matters (such as “the toilets and water fountains in colored waiting rooms”). At the same time, he had written privately to President Truman, asking if Truman’s daughter, Margaret—a concert singer—might serve as honorary chairwoman for an N.A.A.C.P. benefit, the proceeds of which were to be used “to stamp out segregation, discrimination, bigotry,” and other American ills. The letter was discovered by the music historian John Edward Hasse in the Truman Library, with Ellington’s request marked with the word “No!” underlined twice.
Cohen vigorously defends Ellington against critics and historians, both past and present, who have ignored the “nonverbal communication” that is the real basis of his contribution. The language of music is, of course, allusive; the language of protest, as it was developing in the late fifties, was, of necessity, direct—and therefore depended on words, which helps to explain the presence of white folksingers in the forefront of the movement where black jazz musicians might be expected to stand. But even when Ellington used words, he preferred to remain allusive (and elusive). In the wake of the 1957 school-desegregation battles in Little Rock, Charles Mingus recharged the relation of jazz to politics by composing “Fables of Faubus,” featuring less than flattering lyrics about the Arkansas governor; Ellington recorded a new version of the hymn from “Black, Brown and Beige,” titled “Come Sunday,” in which Mahalia Jackson, pleading with the Lord to “see my people through,” evokes both Heaven and a country redeemed.
His efforts became more direct during the next few years. In 1960, Ellington agreed to accompany some Johns Hopkins students, after a performance, to a Baltimore restaurant that had turned black students away, and to be captured by a local photographer being turned away himself; it was a major act in terms of the cost to his pride. In 1961, his booking contracts began to stipulate that he would not play before segregated audiences. He led a State Department tour, in 1963, designed to counter the news stories about American racism that were proving so useful to the Communist cause, and Cohen believes its political dividends helped to spur the passage of the 1965 Civil Rights Act. Cohen offers many other examples of Ellington as a sometimes surreptitious “race leader,” but it is almost embarrassing that he should have to make the effort. Celebrating Ellington’s seventieth birthday, in 1969, Ralph Ellison recalled what it was like when, in his youth, in the thirties, the Ellington band came to Oklahoma City “with their uniforms, their sophistication, their skills; their golden horns, their flights of controlled and disciplined fantasy,” all of it like “news from the great wide world.” For black boys like Ellison all over the country, the band had been “an example and goal,” he wrote. Who else—black or white—had ever been “so worldly, who so elegant, who so mockingly creative? Who so skilled at their given trade and who treated the social limitations placed in their paths with greater disdain?”
Two years before Ellington died, in 1972, Yale University held a gathering of leading black jazz musicians in order to raise money for a department of African-American music. Aside from Ellington, the musicians who came for three days of concerts, jam sessions, and workshops included Eubie Blake, Noble Sissle, Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Mingus, Max Roach, Mary Lou Williams, and Willie (the Lion) Smith. During a performance by a Gillespie-led sextet, someone evidently unhappy with this presence on campus called in a bomb threat. The police attempted to clear the building, but Mingus refused to leave, urging the officers to get all the others out but adamantly remaining onstage with his bass. “Racism planted that bomb, but racism ain’t strong enough to kill this music,” he was heard telling the police captain. (And very few people successfully argued with Mingus.) “If I’m going to die, I’m ready. But I’m going out playing ‘Sophisticated Lady.’ ” Once outside, Gillespie and his group set up again. But coming from inside was the sound of Mingus intently playing Ellington’s dreamy thirties hit, which, that day, became a protest song, as the performance just kept going on and on and getting hotter. In the street, Ellington stood in the waiting crowd just beyond the theatre’s open doors, smiling. ♦





c The basement club was cramped, and the bandstand was so small that, by the drummer’s measure, it could hardly hold a fight. The clientele included mobsters, musicians, and star performers from the nearby Broadway shows, slipping in among the crowd from the time the band appeared, at about ten o’clock, straight on “until.” The banjoist who provided the schedule could elaborate no further about how long the night went on: “Until you quit. Until period.” After 3 A.M., you couldn’t get a seat. In the fall of 1926, the craze for Negro music was already sending savvy white New Yorkers up to Harlem, but the Kentucky Club, on West Forty-ninth Street, had the hottest band in town. Trumpets, trombone, saxes, clarinet, tuba, banjo, and drums—nine or so players, huddled on the stand beneath the pipes that ran along the ceiling, plus the handsome young piano player who led the group while dancers surged around him on the floor. But the band did more than keep the temperature high and the dancers moving; its arrangements were so startling that even a familiar number like “St. Louis Blues” sounded new. Variety capped a gushing review of the “colored combo” by noting that the club’s patrons—transfixed “jazz boys” and civilians alike—spent a remarkable amount of time just sitting around and listening.
Duke Ellington and his Washingtonians had been performing in New York, under one name or another, for about three years, but their range and ambition were just beginning to show. As new arrivals, they had practiced the sweet, straight, “under conversation” music that had been in demand at the Washington society dances where the original group members started out, but they had quickly discovered that this sound was all wrong for New York. Not brazen enough, not rhythmically driving; not Negro enough; not jazz. In truth, a New York style of jazz hardly existed. In the mid-twenties, the city offered, instead, a heady variety of musical models, including its own native Harlem stride pianists (who welcomed Ellington as one of their own); the blues musicians who were part of the ongoing mass migration from the South; Fletcher Henderson’s big, polished sound; and the great horn players of New Orleans, who blazed through town now and again like comets. And then there were the resident players who had absorbed the New Orleanians’ famed techniques: the trumpeter Bubber Miley joined the Washingtonians before their first uncertain year was out and, with his waa-waa outbursts and uncannily human shrieks and cries, quickly blew their decorum away. Ellington was inspired by Miley’s wild expressiveness, even if he couldn’t yet meet it or let go the promise of all the other sounds he heard.
The number that caught Irving Mills’s attention at the Kentucky Club one night, as he recalled, was “Black and Tan Fantasy,” a three-minute musical drama jointly credited to Ellington and Miley. It isn’t difficult to figure out which of the authors did what, as a throbbingly mournful blues gives way to a refined society tune—rough and smooth, black and tan, Miley and Ellington—or as Miley’s solos rise to a hectoring beauty that finds ease and release in the band’s response. The trumpeter’s manipulation of a simple rubber plunger cup over the bell of his horn makes for some irresistibly antic sounds (the trombonist, not to be outdone, gives a good impression of a whinnying horse), but the piece delivers an unexpected emotional punch: a concluding riff from Chopin’s “Funeral March” is willfully absurd yet seems to seal the trumpet’s urgent message. (“I like great big ole tears,” Ellington said, teasingly, about audience reactions.) The over-all effect is at once mocking and chilling, like a funeral cortège with skeletons dancing behind.
Whether or not Irving Mills shed a tear, he recognized both the artistic merit and the financial potential of such original work. A song publisher with a special interest in blues, Mills immediately decided to go into band management, with Duke Ellington and His Kentucky Club Orchestra (their latest, somewhat grandiloquent billing) as his initial client. Mills insisted that Ellington concentrate on recording his own compositions, and that fall the energized players made their first important disks. One year later, they opened at the Cotton Club.
More than half a century after the Civil War, the most famous night club in New York was a mock plantation. The bandstand was done up as a white-columned mansion, the backdrop painted with cotton bushes and slave quarters. And the racial fantasy extended well beyond décor: whites who came to Harlem to be entertained were not to be discomfited by the presence of non-entertaining Negroes. All the performers were black—or, in the case of the chorus girls, café au lait—and all the patrons white, if not by force of law then by force of the thugs at the door. Ellington had to ask permission for friends to see his show. Ironically, it was the Cotton Club that allowed Ellington to expand his talents, by employing him to arrange and compose for a variety of dancers, singers, miscellaneous acts, entr’actes, and theatrical revues. His most extraordinary talent, however, may have been for making the best of tainted opportunities. For the big revues, with their plots about black savages and threatened maidens, he devised music of sophistication and cheekily exotic allure, under such titles as “Jungle Blues,” “Jungle Night in Harlem,” and—sinister little masterpiece—“The Mooche.” But even before the band sounded a note it delivered a statement: impeccably dressed in matching tuxedos and boutonnières, its members were of a class with the biggest swells in the room. And Ellington was the swellest of all: unfailingly soigné, magisterially presiding over the urban jungle, he stood untouched and never lost his smile. What was he thinking? What did he feel about—what did he contribute to—the mire of American race relations during the last century? Harvey G. Cohen’s “Duke Ellington’s America” (Chicago; $40) attempts to get under the skin of this apparently most imperturbable of men, and the results, if hardly conclusive, are fascinating. One of Ellington’s few confidantes, his sister, Ruth, believed that he concealed himself under “veil upon veil upon veil,” and Cohen is not the first Ellingtonian to treasure the smallest telltale sign of his subject’s human susceptibilities. There is, for example, an uncharacteristically angry letter to a white business associate with whom Ellington wished to break (which is nevertheless signed “with great respect,” and turns out not to have been sent). Cohen’s extremely intelligent and formidably documented book—a welcome change from much that has been published about Ellington—is not a standard biography; Ellington’s personal life and sexual mores are officially beyond its scope. Nor is it a critical work, since it contains no musical analysis and not a great deal of musical description. Cohen’s long hours in the Smithsonian’s huge trove of Ellington papers were devoted to the business records and the scrapbooks, and, as his title suggests, he has broad social issues on his mind. Even Ellington’s professional life is examined in circumscribed areas, almost all of which touch at some point upon race. The question is whether, sooner or later, everything did.
Early in the book, Cohen quotes Ellington’s longtime collaborator Billy Strayhorn objecting to a movie project about Ellington that Strayhorn was told would have a racial theme. “I don’t think it should be racial because I don’t think he’s racial,” Strayhorn protested. “He is an individual.” But Strayhorn concluded, in a line of thinking that seems emblematic of the era and of the personalities involved, “You don’t have to say the darn thing.” Cohen keeps Ellington’s individuality firmly in sight, while detailing such targeted subjects as his relationship with Mills, the white man who has been lauded for launching Ellington’s career and—both before and after they split, in 1939—accused of exploitation; Ellington’s travels with his band in the harshly segregated South of the nineteen-thirties and forties; the overt, if often forgotten, racial programs of much of his music; and his sometimes contentious relationship with the civil-rights movement of the nineteen-fifties and sixties.
A different set of subjects—Ellington’s musical development, his band members, even his women—might have yielded something closer to the post-racial portrait for which Strayhorn argued, a portrait more in accord with the high personal horizon on which Ellington’s sights were set. But “the darn thing” will not go away, and race remains unsurprisingly essential to the story of America’s first widely recognized black artist, and of what he had to say.
An unshakable dignity seems to have been instilled in Ellington from childhood, and Cohen examines the aspiringly genteel society in which the much beloved boy grew up. Ellington’s father, who worked for years as a butler in a prominent white home, saw that his family’s dinner table was always formally set, no matter the lack of funds at any given time. His pious mother virtually worshipped her son—who was her only child until he was sixteen, when his sister finally came along. And Ellington worshipped his mother in return; he fondly remembered her playing parlor tunes and hymns on the piano—he said the music made him cry—and he attributed his lifelong confidence to her frequent assurances that he was blessed, which he had always believed.
And why not? Edward Kennedy Ellington was born in 1899, in Washington, D.C., at a time when the nation’s capital was arguably the best place for an African-American child to live. The largest urban Negro community in the country maintained its own opera company, classical-music groups, and literary societies; its segregated schools taught African history, stressed proper manners and speech, and were intent on producing students who were, in Ellington’s phrase, “representative of a great and proud race.” For many years, from Emancipation through the imposition of onerous racial restrictions by the Wilson Administration, climaxing in a brutal, white-sparked riot following the First World War, the upper stratum of the city’s black population held to a proto-Harlem Renaissance ideal: demonstrate how civilized, intelligent, and accomplished we are, and racism will fade away. One need not demand respect if one commands it.
Ellington acquired the nickname “Duke” on the brink of adolescence, and, whatever its source (accounts differ), it indicates the superior impression that the boy already made—not an insignificant trait in an era when outstanding black musicians were known professionally as Bubber, Sonny, and Cootie. If he was intended for leadership, however, it clearly wasn’t going to proceed from his scholastic efforts. Although his schooling may have afforded him an inner strength, Ellington was a careless student, even in music (where his only grade on record is a D). But then he didn’t respond to formal training of any kind. Early piano lessons failed to hold his interest, and he learned to play mostly on his own, mastering James P. Johnson’s notoriously difficult “Carolina Shout”—well enough to impress Johnson—by slowing down the piano roll and matching his fingers to the depressed keys. When he wanted to go further, he charmed his way into pickup lessons from the professionals who hung out in the local poolroom. He was careful to point out, later on, that these early masters included both conservatory-trained musicians and unschooled “ear cats” who couldn’t read a note, and that he had freely learned from both. Charm, drive, and an audacious talent: he was barely out of his teens before he had established the Duke’s Serenaders and several other nicely profitable dance bands, and was supporting himself—and a wife and baby—in style. Yet, by his own account, even when he felt sure enough to try his fortunes in New York, age twenty-four, he had never actually written music. He had composed a few songs in his early years, and began composing again as soon as he hit Tin Pan Alley, but he had never written anything down and wasn’t entirely certain that he could. Ellington was himself something of an “ear cat,” and even as he learned what he needed to know, and his music became increasingly complex, his instinctual bias was for the more instinctual art. Partly, this was the natural democrat’s appreciation of the tough and unschooled African-American “gutbucket” sound; partly it was the natural aristocrat’s desire to make everything look easy. (“How was I to know that composers had to go up in the mountains, or to the seashore, to commune with the muses for six months?”) Other popular composers have faced similar gaps between their early training and their goals; George Gershwin’s solution was to make himself a lifelong student, working with a series of teachers on harmony, counterpoint, orchestration. Ellington didn’t have the temperament for this approach, nor did it appear to offer what he needed. He had something all his own, something that made the arduous process of writing music yield immediate and exhilarating results: he had his band.
The scrappy band of the early Kentucky Club days became an orchestra of a dozen players at the Cotton Club. But Ellington wanted an even larger sound: more color, more detail, more possibilities. By the time of the first European tour, in 1933, there were fourteen players, plus a vocalist; the group that was ultimately known as Duke Ellington and His Famous Orchestra had grown, by the mid-forties, to nineteen players, travelling and recording together, working and virtually living together, fifty-two weeks a year. These musicians were Ellington’s inspiration, not merely as professionals but as individuals with irreplaceable musical personalities. He did not write a “Concerto for Trumpet,” in 1939; rather, it was a “Concerto for Cootie”—that is, a work designed for the specific articulations of the superb trumpet player Cootie Williams, who replaced Bubber Miley and had already been with Ellington for about ten years. (“You can’t write music right,” Ellington told this magazine, more than sixty years ago, “unless you know how the man that’ll play it plays poker.”)
But these musicians were sometimes his collaborators in a more unusual way, described by reporters who sat in, marvelling, on working sessions. Ellington would start off with a melody, or even just a few bars that were quickly tweaked and critiqued into a theme. Then, one by one, the improvisations began—Barney Bigard on clarinet, Johnny Hodges on alto saxophone, Tricky Sam Nanton on trombone were all especially fluent—with each player improving on the last player’s phrases, elaborating and extending, while the trombonist /copyist Juan Tizol caught the accumulating effects on paper (albeit not quite as fast as they kept coming). Ellington approved or rejected the additions, made changes and issued challenges, then usually took the results home and worked the whole thing over. The next day, there would be a few hours of refinement and repetition, until the piece was fixed and memorized. (Ellington always preferred memorization: how could you let loose if your nose was stuck in a score?) By this method, the time for creating or arranging a new number—most numbers were about three minutes long, the standard length of a 78-r.p.m. recording—appears to have been just two days. “My band is my instrument,” Ellington said, and the way he played it explains his music’s extraordinary mixture of freedom and control.
This collaborative process could create difficulties when Ellington employed a melody that he had overheard one of the musicians playing, or that a musician had sold him for a regulation fee. The main tune of “Concerto for Cootie,” for example, was something that Ellington bought from Williams for twenty-five dollars, a sum believed to be reasonable by both parties until, a few years later, words were added and it became a hit as “Do Nothing Till You Hear from Me”—with no royalties for Williams. Johnny Hodges, the band’s most gorgeously lyrical player and a fount of melody—he contributed the tunes for “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore” and “I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart”—became so annoyed that, during performances, he mimed rubbing dollar bills between his fingers when Ellington launched into a number that Hodges felt was rightly his. One of Ellington’s most beloved songs, “Sophisticated Lady,” has several contributing claims and was described by the trombonist Lawrence Brown as “one of those where everybody jumps in.”
But, as Billy Strayhorn pointed out, the various contested melodies were musical scraps that would not have amounted to anything had Ellington not labored to smooth out rough parts, create harmonies, add bridges, and set them in a coherent musical frame. None of Ellington’s musicians—not even Strayhorn—ever composed a hit on his own. Most important, all these works turned out to sound purely and recognizably like Ellington. For those who doubted that he was a “real” composer, here was the conundrum: How could the band have created Ellington, when Ellington created the band?
Despite the air of insouciance, Ellington took his composing seriously. It was gratifying to have people sit and listen to his music in a proper theatre, as they did for the first time in 1930, when the band accompanied Maurice Chevalier during a Broadway run and filled out the bill for an entire act. Coast-to-coast radio broadcasts from the Cotton Club had won the band an enormous following, and it gave concert-style performances throughout its first national tour, in 1931, usually performing in movie theatres between shows. Recordings had similarly prepared the way in England and France, where, in 1933, the band appeared on variety bills in the biggest venues, and was met with a respect that, for all its popularity, it had never known at home. Members of the group were suddenly being discussed not merely as entertainers but as artists, and it seemed that every note they played was considered to be—in the words of one British critic—“directly an expression of Duke’s genius.” Artist. Genius. Claims of this sort had been made before the European tour, but during the mid-thirties they began to take hold. Cohen documents Irving Mills’s long-term publicity campaign to build his client just such a gold-plated image, unprecedented for an African-American. It does not impugn Mills’s belief in Ellington’s artistry to note that his goal was to share this belief with the increasingly large, white, record-buying public. Most of the campaign revolved around Ellington’s gifts as a composer (“Again!” ran the ad for a new song, “Solitude,” in 1935. “The stamp of Ellington’s genius!”), and Ellington fed the fire with the release of several longer compositions. “Creole Rhapsody” (1931), “Reminiscing in Tempo” (1935), and the conjoined “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue” (1937) all took up two or more sides of 78-r.p.m. recordings—until then a length generally granted only to works of classical music, and a sign that Ellington was extending the notion of musical seriousness beyond its conventional bounds. He told reporters that he was working on a symphonic suite and an opera, both based on the history of the American Negro people. It was just a matter of time before he got to Carnegie Hall.
“What we could not say openly, we expressed in music,” Ellington wrote in the British magazine Rhythm, in 1931, trying to explain the Negro musical tradition that had grown up in America, music “forged from the very white heat of our sorrows.” All his life, Ellington gave the impression of having been unscathed by racism, either in his early years—color, he said, was never even mentioned in his parents’ home—or during the long professional decades when it defined almost every move he made: where he could play his music, who could come to listen to it, whether he could stay in a hotel or attend another musician’s show, and where (or whether) he could find something to eat when the show was over. The orchestra made its first Southern tour just after its return from England, in 1933, travelling (thanks to Mills) in supremely insulated style: two private Pullman cars for sleeping and dining, and a separate baggage car for the elaborate wardrobe, scenery, and lights required to present a show more dazzling than any that most of the sleepy little towns where they made their stops had ever seen. Ellington made a special effort to perform for black audiences, even when it meant that the band added a midnight show in a place where it had performed earlier that night exclusively for whites. Reports from both racial groups were that the players outdid themselves; it is difficult to know where they felt they had more to prove.
Segregation was hardly peculiar to the South, of course, any more than it was limited, in New York, to the Cotton Club and its ilk. The down-and-dirty Kentucky Club had been no different: even without thugs at the door, there was an unspoken citywide dictate about where the different races belonged. The only exceptions were the “Black and Tans,” the few Harlem clubs that permitted casual racial mixing, and to which Ellington seems to have been paying tongue-in-cheek tribute with the not-quite-meshing themes of “Black and Tan Fantasy.” This was the first number played, after “The Star-Spangled Banner,” at Ellington’s landmark Carnegie Hall concert, in January, 1943, although the piece sounded very different from his twenties hit: taken at a slower tempo, with extended solos, it was twice its original length—so deliberative it seemed a kind of statement—and showed off the burnished power of Ellington’s forties band.

But much of the program that night made a statement. There were no pop vocals; Ellington presented a trio of new musical portraits of the historic black performers Bert Williams, Bill (Bojangles) Robinson, and Florence Mills; even the brassy instrumental “Ko-Ko,” of 1940, was, Ellington told the audience, meant to portray the square in New Orleans where slaves had once come together to dance—the place where jazz was born. Everything was designed to set off “Black, Brown and Beige,” a three-movement composition, some forty-five minutes long, that had been advertised as “Duke Ellington’s first symphony” and that Ellington described as “a parallel to the history of the American Negro.” It seems unlikely that any other musical début has carried such hope of repairing divisions: between jazz and classical, between black and white. The audience itself was described in the press as “black, brown, and beige”—hardly the usual Carnegie crowd—and included Eleanor Roosevelt, Leopold Stokowski, Count Basie, and Frank Sinatra, all waiting for the revelation of a truly uniting, truly American music.
“Black, Brown and Beige” had an elaborate scenario, which Ellington only hinted at in his spoken remarks. The first and most richly developed section, “Black,” began with a powerful work song launched on the timpani and moved on to a homemade hymn of celestial longing; Ellington spoke, rather obliquely, of these related aspects of the lives of slaves. (A recording of the concert, complete with Ellington’s remarks, was released in the nineteen-seventies.) “Brown,” far more disjointed, took on Emancipation and the Negro’s loyal service in a series of American wars (a matter of obvious relevance in 1943), before concluding with a darkly discordant, sung blues. “Beige,” which brought the piece up to contemporary Harlem, was the weakest section, perhaps because Ellington was still working on it the night before the concert, but it stirred him to remarks about the “veneer” of progress and a people who still “don’t have enough to eat and a place to sleep.” Even these mildly critical observations were quickly buried, however, with his reassurance that, these days, “we, of course, find the black, brown, and beige right in there for the red, white, and blue.” The patriotism and the exuberance are affecting, and entirely apt for a concert that served as a benefit for Russian war relief and also marked Ellington’s twentieth anniversary in music. What these sentiments do not jibe with, entirely, are the stark and angry words that he meant the music to express. Comprising twenty-nine handwritten pages, and drawing on several previous drafts, Ellington’s scenario was grounded in extensive reading and research. An opening section about the proud history of African civilizations quotes from the anthropologist Franz Boas, as transmitted by W. E. B. Du Bois—but is only fleetingly suggested in the opening drums of “Black.” A detailed section on the horrors of the Middle Passage includes scenes of mutilation and sounds of screaming that Ellington described as “a symphony of torture.” Neither the scenes nor the sounds became part of the completed work. The scenario for “Brown” honors the leaders of violent slave rebellions—not mentioned again—and the light café-concert music for “Beige” comes nowhere close to addressing Ellington’s lines: “Who brought the dope / And made a rope / of it, to hang you / In your misery . . . / And Harlem . . . / How’d you come to be / Permitted / In a land that’s free?” Cohen speculates that Ellington muted his message because of the probable cost to his “prominent media status” or, alternatively, because he genuinely believed that he would have greater effect through his music than through confrontation. Another reason is suggested in the scenario itself, where Ellington explains that African-American song began when a clever slave decided to placate and yet evade his master: “I’ll sing, and hide my thoughts from him.”
“Black, Brown and Beige” was torn apart by the major critics. It is difficult not to wonder if Ellington’s work was damaged by his holding back so much of what he wanted to say—if his unyielding self-control was not sometimes less than ideal for his art. Or if the problem, as critics charged, was that he had simply not acquired the technique for an extended work. Judged as jazz, the composition was deemed unrecognizable; judged as classical music, it was found “formless and meaningless,” a series of poorly connected parts that did not add up to a whole. Cohen is not the first to retort that “Black, Brown and Beige” should not be judged by preëxisting standards—that its abrupt musical transitions were not a shortcoming but a choice—and that the composer had achieved exactly what he intended. But Ellington was so discouraged by the reviews that, after the Carnegie concert, he performed the full work twice more, and never again. He recorded only some abbreviated and reworked sections. Near the end of his life, he said that the music was less interesting than the script.
He did not stop writing longer pieces, although they now came mostly in the form of suites, with separate sections bound by an inclusive theme, and no pretension to the kind of unity he had so publicly failed to achieve. Almost all these works were written in close collaboration with Billy Strayhorn, whose shimmering semi-classical touch became as much a part of the Ellington sound through the next decades as the growling brass had been during the “jungle” years; it is possible that no one will ever disentangle which of the pair composed exactly what parts of a long series of works, from “The Perfume Suite,” in 1945, to “Far East Suite,” more than twenty years later. Yet the band remained no less a part of Ellington’s creative life; no other group could get the sound he wanted, and few were even equipped to try. More, he needed his players to give color and form to the musical sketches that now poured forth unceasingly: waking or eating, walking or showering, on a crowded train surrounded by rowdy musicians or in a quiet car travelling through the weary night from one small-town job to another.
It was an ungrateful era. The Harlem craze was dead, the Cotton Club was closed, and the war that had been fought for democracy, equality, and freedom—Ellington had been a true believer, selling War Bonds on the radio and opening concerts with “The Star-Spangled Banner”—had done nothing to improve the status of the country’s Negro citizens. In order to stay together, the band had taken to relentless touring. And, with private Pullman cars a luxury of the past, racial indignities had become an inevitable part of present life: Ellington was reported to be especially fearful of venturing into any place where he risked being turned away. Yet even as the smaller combos of the rising bebop movement drove other big bands out of business, and as Duke Ellington and His Famous Orchestra found themselves playing an endless series of one-night stands, Ellington pressed on, not merely a Jazz Age survivor but, it seemed, the last believer in big-band jazz as a living, developing art. The new works—especially the longer ones—didn’t always go over with the record companies (RCA Victor waited years to release “The Perfume Suite”), or with the audience, or even, sometimes, with the players. (“We didn’t like the tone poems much,” Johnny Hodges admitted when he and a couple of other band members took off on their own, in 1951.) Disappointed critics prescribed a choice: the century’s most important jazz composer could narrow his focus, concentrate, and compose—or lead the band and tour until he dropped. Not both.
For Ellington it would have been like choosing his heart over his lungs; the whole system by now worked together or not at all. The choice was apparently personal as well as musical: he loved the life of the road, surrounded by people yet essentially alone. (He and his wife had separated early on. A famed sexual raconteur, he was rumored to have a woman waiting at every stop.) Cohen points out that Ellington could have been a rich man if he had stayed home, collected royalties, and composed. The band had become a very expensive proposition, and was subsidized largely by those royalties from long-ago hits. Even when it had a big resurgence, thanks to an appearance at the Newport Festival, in 1956, the stir was due not to the newly minted “Newport Festival Suite” but to a crazily exciting six-minute improvisation by the saxophonist Paul Gonsalves, played between the paired 1937 pieces “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue.” Contrary to the long-term concertizing trend in Ellington’s music, the performance got people back on their feet and dancing again, and got Ellington on the cover of Time. His renewed stature did not prevent controversy in the black community, however, when, in 1959, the N.A.A.C.P. gave Ellington its highest award. Recipients during the previous couple of years had been Martin Luther King, Jr., and the civil-rights activists Daisy Bates and the Little Rock Nine. Now the editorial pages of African-American newspapers doubtfully inquired: What had Ellington done to deserve this honor? It wasn’t just a question of what music had to do with civil rights; Jackie Robinson had won in 1956, with no such questions raised about baseball. Rather, as the Time article had put it, “Duke is not a militant foe of segregation.” It went on to note that “he plays for segregated audiences on his annual swings through the South,” and added that Ellington had explained, with a verbal shrug, “Everybody does.”
What had he done to deserve the honor? The plainly factual answer is that he had raised a lot of money over the years playing benefits for the N.A.A.C.P., and for many other organizations that had asked for his help. But there were deeper answers. Ellington, offended by the accusation that he had been silent on civil rights, replied that those who doubted him had simply failed to use their ears. “They’ve not been listening to our music,” he said. “For a long time, social protest and pride in black culture and history have been the most significant themes in what we’ve done.” In sum: “We have been talking for a long time about what it is to be black in this country.” For Ellington, being black in this country meant approaching difficult issues in strategically different ways. Earlier in the fifties, he had quarrelled with the N.A.A.C.P., in fact, over playing segregated theatres, arguing that his musicians needed to make a living, and that the N.A.A.C.P. ought to focus on more urgent matters (such as “the toilets and water fountains in colored waiting rooms”). At the same time, he had written privately to President Truman, asking if Truman’s daughter, Margaret—a concert singer—might serve as honorary chairwoman for an N.A.A.C.P. benefit, the proceeds of which were to be used “to stamp out segregation, discrimination, bigotry,” and other American ills. The letter was discovered by the music historian John Edward Hasse in the Truman Library, with Ellington’s request marked with the word “No!” underlined twice.
Cohen vigorously defends Ellington against critics and historians, both past and present, who have ignored the “nonverbal communication” that is the real basis of his contribution. The language of music is, of course, allusive; the language of protest, as it was developing in the late fifties, was, of necessity, direct—and therefore depended on words, which helps to explain the presence of white folksingers in the forefront of the movement where black jazz musicians might be expected to stand. But even when Ellington used words, he preferred to remain allusive (and elusive). In the wake of the 1957 school-desegregation battles in Little Rock, Charles Mingus recharged the relation of jazz to politics by composing “Fables of Faubus,” featuring less than flattering lyrics about the Arkansas governor; Ellington recorded a new version of the hymn from “Black, Brown and Beige,” titled “Come Sunday,” in which Mahalia Jackson, pleading with the Lord to “see my people through,” evokes both Heaven and a country redeemed.
His efforts became more direct during the next few years. In 1960, Ellington agreed to accompany some Johns Hopkins students, after a performance, to a Baltimore restaurant that had turned black students away, and to be captured by a local photographer being turned away himself; it was a major act in terms of the cost to his pride. In 1961, his booking contracts began to stipulate that he would not play before segregated audiences. He led a State Department tour, in 1963, designed to counter the news stories about American racism that were proving so useful to the Communist cause, and Cohen believes its political dividends helped to spur the passage of the 1965 Civil Rights Act. Cohen offers many other examples of Ellington as a sometimes surreptitious “race leader,” but it is almost embarrassing that he should have to make the effort. Celebrating Ellington’s seventieth birthday, in 1969, Ralph Ellison recalled what it was like when, in his youth, in the thirties, the Ellington band came to Oklahoma City “with their uniforms, their sophistication, their skills; their golden horns, their flights of controlled and disciplined fantasy,” all of it like “news from the great wide world.” For black boys like Ellison all over the country, the band had been “an example and goal,” he wrote. Who else—black or white—had ever been “so worldly, who so elegant, who so mockingly creative? Who so skilled at their given trade and who treated the social limitations placed in their paths with greater disdain?”
Two years before Ellington died, in 1972, Yale University held a gathering of leading black jazz musicians in order to raise money for a department of African-American music. Aside from Ellington, the musicians who came for three days of concerts, jam sessions, and workshops included Eubie Blake, Noble Sissle, Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Mingus, Max Roach, Mary Lou Williams, and Willie (the Lion) Smith. During a performance by a Gillespie-led sextet, someone evidently unhappy with this presence on campus called in a bomb threat. The police attempted to clear the building, but Mingus refused to leave, urging the officers to get all the others out but adamantly remaining onstage with his bass. “Racism planted that bomb, but racism ain’t strong enough to kill this music,” he was heard telling the police captain. (And very few people successfully argued with Mingus.) “If I’m going to die, I’m ready. But I’m going out playing ‘Sophisticated Lady.’ ” Once outside, Gillespie and his group set up again. But coming from inside was the sound of Mingus intently playing Ellington’s dreamy thirties hit, which, that day, became a protest song, as the performance just kept going on and on and getting hotter. In the street, Ellington stood in the waiting crowd just beyond the theatre’s open doors, smiling. ♦





c The basement club was cramped, and the bandstand was so small that, by the drummer’s measure, it could hardly hold a fight. The clientele included mobsters, musicians, and star performers from the nearby Broadway shows, slipping in among the crowd from the time the band appeared, at about ten o’clock, straight on “until.” The banjoist who provided the schedule could elaborate no further about how long the night went on: “Until you quit. Until period.” After 3 A.M., you couldn’t get a seat. In the fall of 1926, the craze for Negro music was already sending savvy white New Yorkers up to Harlem, but the Kentucky Club, on West Forty-ninth Street, had the hottest band in town. Trumpets, trombone, saxes, clarinet, tuba, banjo, and drums—nine or so players, huddled on the stand beneath the pipes that ran along the ceiling, plus the handsome young piano player who led the group while dancers surged around him on the floor. But the band did more than keep the temperature high and the dancers moving; its arrangements were so startling that even a familiar number like “St. Louis Blues” sounded new. Variety capped a gushing review of the “colored combo” by noting that the club’s patrons—transfixed “jazz boys” and civilians alike—spent a remarkable amount of time just sitting around and listening.
Duke Ellington and his Washingtonians had been performing in New York, under one name or another, for about three years, but their range and ambition were just beginning to show. As new arrivals, they had practiced the sweet, straight, “under conversation” music that had been in demand at the Washington society dances where the original group members started out, but they had quickly discovered that this sound was all wrong for New York. Not brazen enough, not rhythmically driving; not Negro enough; not jazz. In truth, a New York style of jazz hardly existed. In the mid-twenties, the city offered, instead, a heady variety of musical models, including its own native Harlem stride pianists (who welcomed Ellington as one of their own); the blues musicians who were part of the ongoing mass migration from the South; Fletcher Henderson’s big, polished sound; and the great horn players of New Orleans, who blazed through town now and again like comets. And then there were the resident players who had absorbed the New Orleanians’ famed techniques: the trumpeter Bubber Miley joined the Washingtonians before their first uncertain year was out and, with his waa-waa outbursts and uncannily human shrieks and cries, quickly blew their decorum away. Ellington was inspired by Miley’s wild expressiveness, even if he couldn’t yet meet it or let go the promise of all the other sounds he heard.
The number that caught Irving Mills’s attention at the Kentucky Club one night, as he recalled, was “Black and Tan Fantasy,” a three-minute musical drama jointly credited to Ellington and Miley. It isn’t difficult to figure out which of the authors did what, as a throbbingly mournful blues gives way to a refined society tune—rough and smooth, black and tan, Miley and Ellington—or as Miley’s solos rise to a hectoring beauty that finds ease and release in the band’s response. The trumpeter’s manipulation of a simple rubber plunger cup over the bell of his horn makes for some irresistibly antic sounds (the trombonist, not to be outdone, gives a good impression of a whinnying horse), but the piece delivers an unexpected emotional punch: a concluding riff from Chopin’s “Funeral March” is willfully absurd yet seems to seal the trumpet’s urgent message. (“I like great big ole tears,” Ellington said, teasingly, about audience reactions.) The over-all effect is at once mocking and chilling, like a funeral cortège with skeletons dancing behind.
Whether or not Irving Mills shed a tear, he recognized both the artistic merit and the financial potential of such original work. A song publisher with a special interest in blues, Mills immediately decided to go into band management, with Duke Ellington and His Kentucky Club Orchestra (their latest, somewhat grandiloquent billing) as his initial client. Mills insisted that Ellington concentrate on recording his own compositions, and that fall the energized players made their first important disks. One year later, they opened at the Cotton Club.
More than half a century after the Civil War, the most famous night club in New York was a mock plantation. The bandstand was done up as a white-columned mansion, the backdrop painted with cotton bushes and slave quarters. And the racial fantasy extended well beyond décor: whites who came to Harlem to be entertained were not to be discomfited by the presence of non-entertaining Negroes. All the performers were black—or, in the case of the chorus girls, café au lait—and all the patrons white, if not by force of law then by force of the thugs at the door. Ellington had to ask permission for friends to see his show. Ironically, it was the Cotton Club that allowed Ellington to expand his talents, by employing him to arrange and compose for a variety of dancers, singers, miscellaneous acts, entr’actes, and theatrical revues. His most extraordinary talent, however, may have been for making the best of tainted opportunities. For the big revues, with their plots about black savages and threatened maidens, he devised music of sophistication and cheekily exotic allure, under such titles as “Jungle Blues,” “Jungle Night in Harlem,” and—sinister little masterpiece—“The Mooche.” But even before the band sounded a note it delivered a statement: impeccably dressed in matching tuxedos and boutonnières, its members were of a class with the biggest swells in the room. And Ellington was the swellest of all: unfailingly soigné, magisterially presiding over the urban jungle, he stood untouched and never lost his smile. What was he thinking? What did he feel about—what did he contribute to—the mire of American race relations during the last century? Harvey G. Cohen’s “Duke Ellington’s America” (Chicago; $40) attempts to get under the skin of this apparently most imperturbable of men, and the results, if hardly conclusive, are fascinating. One of Ellington’s few confidantes, his sister, Ruth, believed that he concealed himself under “veil upon veil upon veil,” and Cohen is not the first Ellingtonian to treasure the smallest telltale sign of his subject’s human susceptibilities. There is, for example, an uncharacteristically angry letter to a white business associate with whom Ellington wished to break (which is nevertheless signed “with great respect,” and turns out not to have been sent). Cohen’s extremely intelligent and formidably documented book—a welcome change from much that has been published about Ellington—is not a standard biography; Ellington’s personal life and sexual mores are officially beyond its scope. Nor is it a critical work, since it contains no musical analysis and not a great deal of musical description. Cohen’s long hours in the Smithsonian’s huge trove of Ellington papers were devoted to the business records and the scrapbooks, and, as his title suggests, he has broad social issues on his mind. Even Ellington’s professional life is examined in circumscribed areas, almost all of which touch at some point upon race. The question is whether, sooner or later, everything did.
Early in the book, Cohen quotes Ellington’s longtime collaborator Billy Strayhorn objecting to a movie project about Ellington that Strayhorn was told would have a racial theme. “I don’t think it should be racial because I don’t think he’s racial,” Strayhorn protested. “He is an individual.” But Strayhorn concluded, in a line of thinking that seems emblematic of the era and of the personalities involved, “You don’t have to say the darn thing.” Cohen keeps Ellington’s individuality firmly in sight, while detailing such targeted subjects as his relationship with Mills, the white man who has been lauded for launching Ellington’s career and—both before and after they split, in 1939—accused of exploitation; Ellington’s travels with his band in the harshly segregated South of the nineteen-thirties and forties; the overt, if often forgotten, racial programs of much of his music; and his sometimes contentious relationship with the civil-rights movement of the nineteen-fifties and sixties.
A different set of subjects—Ellington’s musical development, his band members, even his women—might have yielded something closer to the post-racial portrait for which Strayhorn argued, a portrait more in accord with the high personal horizon on which Ellington’s sights were set. But “the darn thing” will not go away, and race remains unsurprisingly essential to the story of America’s first widely recognized black artist, and of what he had to say.
An unshakable dignity seems to have been instilled in Ellington from childhood, and Cohen examines the aspiringly genteel society in which the much beloved boy grew up. Ellington’s father, who worked for years as a butler in a prominent white home, saw that his family’s dinner table was always formally set, no matter the lack of funds at any given time. His pious mother virtually worshipped her son—who was her only child until he was sixteen, when his sister finally came along. And Ellington worshipped his mother in return; he fondly remembered her playing parlor tunes and hymns on the piano—he said the music made him cry—and he attributed his lifelong confidence to her frequent assurances that he was blessed, which he had always believed.
And why not? Edward Kennedy Ellington was born in 1899, in Washington, D.C., at a time when the nation’s capital was arguably the best place for an African-American child to live. The largest urban Negro community in the country maintained its own opera company, classical-music groups, and literary societies; its segregated schools taught African history, stressed proper manners and speech, and were intent on producing students who were, in Ellington’s phrase, “representative of a great and proud race.” For many years, from Emancipation through the imposition of onerous racial restrictions by the Wilson Administration, climaxing in a brutal, white-sparked riot following the First World War, the upper stratum of the city’s black population held to a proto-Harlem Renaissance ideal: demonstrate how civilized, intelligent, and accomplished we are, and racism will fade away. One need not demand respect if one commands it.
Ellington acquired the nickname “Duke” on the brink of adolescence, and, whatever its source (accounts differ), it indicates the superior impression that the boy already made—not an insignificant trait in an era when outstanding black musicians were known professionally as Bubber, Sonny, and Cootie. If he was intended for leadership, however, it clearly wasn’t going to proceed from his scholastic efforts. Although his schooling may have afforded him an inner strength, Ellington was a careless student, even in music (where his only grade on record is a D). But then he didn’t respond to formal training of any kind. Early piano lessons failed to hold his interest, and he learned to play mostly on his own, mastering James P. Johnson’s notoriously difficult “Carolina Shout”—well enough to impress Johnson—by slowing down the piano roll and matching his fingers to the depressed keys. When he wanted to go further, he charmed his way into pickup lessons from the professionals who hung out in the local poolroom. He was careful to point out, later on, that these early masters included both conservatory-trained musicians and unschooled “ear cats” who couldn’t read a note, and that he had freely learned from both. Charm, drive, and an audacious talent: he was barely out of his teens before he had established the Duke’s Serenaders and several other nicely profitable dance bands, and was supporting himself—and a wife and baby—in style. Yet, by his own account, even when he felt sure enough to try his fortunes in New York, age twenty-four, he had never actually written music. He had composed a few songs in his early years, and began composing again as soon as he hit Tin Pan Alley, but he had never written anything down and wasn’t entirely certain that he could. Ellington was himself something of an “ear cat,” and even as he learned what he needed to know, and his music became increasingly complex, his instinctual bias was for the more instinctual art. Partly, this was the natural democrat’s appreciation of the tough and unschooled African-American “gutbucket” sound; partly it was the natural aristocrat’s desire to make everything look easy. (“How was I to know that composers had to go up in the mountains, or to the seashore, to commune with the muses for six months?”) Other popular composers have faced similar gaps between their early training and their goals; George Gershwin’s solution was to make himself a lifelong student, working with a series of teachers on harmony, counterpoint, orchestration. Ellington didn’t have the temperament for this approach, nor did it appear to offer what he needed. He had something all his own, something that made the arduous process of writing music yield immediate and exhilarating results: he had his band.
The scrappy band of the early Kentucky Club days became an orchestra of a dozen players at the Cotton Club. But Ellington wanted an even larger sound: more color, more detail, more possibilities. By the time of the first European tour, in 1933, there were fourteen players, plus a vocalist; the group that was ultimately known as Duke Ellington and His Famous Orchestra had grown, by the mid-forties, to nineteen players, travelling and recording together, working and virtually living together, fifty-two weeks a year. These musicians were Ellington’s inspiration, not merely as professionals but as individuals with irreplaceable musical personalities. He did not write a “Concerto for Trumpet,” in 1939; rather, it was a “Concerto for Cootie”—that is, a work designed for the specific articulations of the superb trumpet player Cootie Williams, who replaced Bubber Miley and had already been with Ellington for about ten years. (“You can’t write music right,” Ellington told this magazine, more than sixty years ago, “unless you know how the man that’ll play it plays poker.”)
But these musicians were sometimes his collaborators in a more unusual way, described by reporters who sat in, marvelling, on working sessions. Ellington would start off with a melody, or even just a few bars that were quickly tweaked and critiqued into a theme. Then, one by one, the improvisations began—Barney Bigard on clarinet, Johnny Hodges on alto saxophone, Tricky Sam Nanton on trombone were all especially fluent—with each player improving on the last player’s phrases, elaborating and extending, while the trombonist /copyist Juan Tizol caught the accumulating effects on paper (albeit not quite as fast as they kept coming). Ellington approved or rejected the additions, made changes and issued challenges, then usually took the results home and worked the whole thing over. The next day, there would be a few hours of refinement and repetition, until the piece was fixed and memorized. (Ellington always preferred memorization: how could you let loose if your nose was stuck in a score?) By this method, the time for creating or arranging a new number—most numbers were about three minutes long, the standard length of a 78-r.p.m. recording—appears to have been just two days. “My band is my instrument,” Ellington said, and the way he played it explains his music’s extraordinary mixture of freedom and control.
This collaborative process could create difficulties when Ellington employed a melody that he had overheard one of the musicians playing, or that a musician had sold him for a regulation fee. The main tune of “Concerto for Cootie,” for example, was something that Ellington bought from Williams for twenty-five dollars, a sum believed to be reasonable by both parties until, a few years later, words were added and it became a hit as “Do Nothing Till You Hear from Me”—with no royalties for Williams. Johnny Hodges, the band’s most gorgeously lyrical player and a fount of melody—he contributed the tunes for “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore” and “I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart”—became so annoyed that, during performances, he mimed rubbing dollar bills between his fingers when Ellington launched into a number that Hodges felt was rightly his. One of Ellington’s most beloved songs, “Sophisticated Lady,” has several contributing claims and was described by the trombonist Lawrence Brown as “one of those where everybody jumps in.”
But, as Billy Strayhorn pointed out, the various contested melodies were musical scraps that would not have amounted to anything had Ellington not labored to smooth out rough parts, create harmonies, add bridges, and set them in a coherent musical frame. None of Ellington’s musicians—not even Strayhorn—ever composed a hit on his own. Most important, all these works turned out to sound purely and recognizably like Ellington. For those who doubted that he was a “real” composer, here was the conundrum: How could the band have created Ellington, when Ellington created the band?
Despite the air of insouciance, Ellington took his composing seriously. It was gratifying to have people sit and listen to his music in a proper theatre, as they did for the first time in 1930, when the band accompanied Maurice Chevalier during a Broadway run and filled out the bill for an entire act. Coast-to-coast radio broadcasts from the Cotton Club had won the band an enormous following, and it gave concert-style performances throughout its first national tour, in 1931, usually performing in movie theatres between shows. Recordings had similarly prepared the way in England and France, where, in 1933, the band appeared on variety bills in the biggest venues, and was met with a respect that, for all its popularity, it had never known at home. Members of the group were suddenly being discussed not merely as entertainers but as artists, and it seemed that every note they played was considered to be—in the words of one British critic—“directly an expression of Duke’s genius.” Artist. Genius. Claims of this sort had been made before the European tour, but during the mid-thirties they began to take hold. Cohen documents Irving Mills’s long-term publicity campaign to build his client just such a gold-plated image, unprecedented for an African-American. It does not impugn Mills’s belief in Ellington’s artistry to note that his goal was to share this belief with the increasingly large, white, record-buying public. Most of the campaign revolved around Ellington’s gifts as a composer (“Again!” ran the ad for a new song, “Solitude,” in 1935. “The stamp of Ellington’s genius!”), and Ellington fed the fire with the release of several longer compositions. “Creole Rhapsody” (1931), “Reminiscing in Tempo” (1935), and the conjoined “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue” (1937) all took up two or more sides of 78-r.p.m. recordings—until then a length generally granted only to works of classical music, and a sign that Ellington was extending the notion of musical seriousness beyond its conventional bounds. He told reporters that he was working on a symphonic suite and an opera, both based on the history of the American Negro people. It was just a matter of time before he got to Carnegie Hall.
“What we could not say openly, we expressed in music,” Ellington wrote in the British magazine Rhythm, in 1931, trying to explain the Negro musical tradition that had grown up in America, music “forged from the very white heat of our sorrows.” All his life, Ellington gave the impression of having been unscathed by racism, either in his early years—color, he said, was never even mentioned in his parents’ home—or during the long professional decades when it defined almost every move he made: where he could play his music, who could come to listen to it, whether he could stay in a hotel or attend another musician’s show, and where (or whether) he could find something to eat when the show was over. The orchestra made its first Southern tour just after its return from England, in 1933, travelling (thanks to Mills) in supremely insulated style: two private Pullman cars for sleeping and dining, and a separate baggage car for the elaborate wardrobe, scenery, and lights required to present a show more dazzling than any that most of the sleepy little towns where they made their stops had ever seen. Ellington made a special effort to perform for black audiences, even when it meant that the band added a midnight show in a place where it had performed earlier that night exclusively for whites. Reports from both racial groups were that the players outdid themselves; it is difficult to know where they felt they had more to prove.
Segregation was hardly peculiar to the South, of course, any more than it was limited, in New York, to the Cotton Club and its ilk. The down-and-dirty Kentucky Club had been no different: even without thugs at the door, there was an unspoken citywide dictate about where the different races belonged. The only exceptions were the “Black and Tans,” the few Harlem clubs that permitted casual racial mixing, and to which Ellington seems to have been paying tongue-in-cheek tribute with the not-quite-meshing themes of “Black and Tan Fantasy.” This was the first number played, after “The Star-Spangled Banner,” at Ellington’s landmark Carnegie Hall concert, in January, 1943, although the piece sounded very different from his twenties hit: taken at a slower tempo, with extended solos, it was twice its original length—so deliberative it seemed a kind of statement—and showed off the burnished power of Ellington’s forties band.
But much of the program that night made a statement. There were no pop vocals; Ellington presented a trio of new musical portraits of the historic black performers Bert Williams, Bill (Bojangles) Robinson, and Florence Mills; even the brassy instrumental “Ko-Ko,” of 1940, was, Ellington told the audience, meant to portray the square in New Orleans where slaves had once come together to dance—the place where jazz was born. Everything was designed to set off “Black, Brown and Beige,” a three-movement composition, some forty-five minutes long, that had been advertised as “Duke Ellington’s first symphony” and that Ellington described as “a parallel to the history of the American Negro.” It seems unlikely that any other musical début has carried such hope of repairing divisions: between jazz and classical, between black and white. The audience itself was described in the press as “black, brown, and beige”—hardly the usual Carnegie crowd—and included Eleanor Roosevelt, Leopold Stokowski, Count Basie, and Frank Sinatra, all waiting for the revelation of a truly uniting, truly American music.
“Black, Brown and Beige” had an elaborate scenario, which Ellington only hinted at in his spoken remarks. The first and most richly developed section, “Black,” began with a powerful work song launched on the timpani and moved on to a homemade hymn of celestial longing; Ellington spoke, rather obliquely, of these related aspects of the lives of slaves. (A recording of the concert, complete with Ellington’s remarks, was released in the nineteen-seventies.) “Brown,” far more disjointed, took on Emancipation and the Negro’s loyal service in a series of American wars (a matter of obvious relevance in 1943), before concluding with a darkly discordant, sung blues. “Beige,” which brought the piece up to contemporary Harlem, was the weakest section, perhaps because Ellington was still working on it the night before the concert, but it stirred him to remarks about the “veneer” of progress and a people who still “don’t have enough to eat and a place to sleep.” Even these mildly critical observations were quickly buried, however, with his reassurance that, these days, “we, of course, find the black, brown, and beige right in there for the red, white, and blue.” The patriotism and the exuberance are affecting, and entirely apt for a concert that served as a benefit for Russian war relief and also marked Ellington’s twentieth anniversary in music. What these sentiments do not jibe with, entirely, are the stark and angry words that he meant the music to express. Comprising twenty-nine handwritten pages, and drawing on several previous drafts, Ellington’s scenario was grounded in extensive reading and research. An opening section about the proud history of African civilizations quotes from the anthropologist Franz Boas, as transmitted by W. E. B. Du Bois—but is only fleetingly suggested in the opening drums of “Black.” A detailed section on the horrors of the Middle Passage includes scenes of mutilation and sounds of screaming that Ellington described as “a symphony of torture.” Neither the scenes nor the sounds became part of the completed work. The scenario for “Brown” honors the leaders of violent slave rebellions—not mentioned again—and the light café-concert music for “Beige” comes nowhere close to addressing Ellington’s lines: “Who brought the dope / And made a rope / of it, to hang you / In your misery . . . / And Harlem . . . / How’d you come to be / Permitted / In a land that’s free?” Cohen speculates that Ellington muted his message because of the probable cost to his “prominent media status” or, alternatively, because he genuinely believed that he would have greater effect through his music than through confrontation. Another reason is suggested in the scenario itself, where Ellington explains that African-American song began when a clever slave decided to placate and yet evade his master: “I’ll sing, and hide my thoughts from him.”
“Black, Brown and Beige” was torn apart by the major critics. It is difficult not to wonder if Ellington’s work was damaged by his holding back so much of what he wanted to say—if his unyielding self-control was not sometimes less than ideal for his art. Or if the problem, as critics charged, was that he had simply not acquired the technique for an extended work. Judged as jazz, the composition was deemed unrecognizable; judged as classical music, it was found “formless and meaningless,” a series of poorly connected parts that did not add up to a whole. Cohen is not the first to retort that “Black, Brown and Beige” should not be judged by preëxisting standards—that its abrupt musical transitions were not a shortcoming but a choice—and that the composer had achieved exactly what he intended. But Ellington was so discouraged by the reviews that, after the Carnegie concert, he performed the full work twice more, and never again. He recorded only some abbreviated and reworked sections. Near the end of his life, he said that the music was less interesting than the script.
He did not stop writing longer pieces, although they now came mostly in the form of suites, with separate sections bound by an inclusive theme, and no pretension to the kind of unity he had so publicly failed to achieve. Almost all these works were written in close collaboration with Billy Strayhorn, whose shimmering semi-classical touch became as much a part of the Ellington sound through the next decades as the growling brass had been during the “jungle” years; it is possible that no one will ever disentangle which of the pair composed exactly what parts of a long series of works, from “The Perfume Suite,” in 1945, to “Far East Suite,” more than twenty years later. Yet the band remained no less a part of Ellington’s creative life; no other group could get the sound he wanted, and few were even equipped to try. More, he needed his players to give color and form to the musical sketches that now poured forth unceasingly: waking or eating, walking or showering, on a crowded train surrounded by rowdy musicians or in a quiet car travelling through the weary night from one small-town job to another.
It was an ungrateful era. The Harlem craze was dead, the Cotton Club was closed, and the war that had been fought for democracy, equality, and freedom—Ellington had been a true believer, selling War Bonds on the radio and opening concerts with “The Star-Spangled Banner”—had done nothing to improve the status of the country’s Negro citizens. In order to stay together, the band had taken to relentless touring. And, with private Pullman cars a luxury of the past, racial indignities had become an inevitable part of present life: Ellington was reported to be especially fearful of venturing into any place where he risked being turned away. Yet even as the smaller combos of the rising bebop movement drove other big bands out of business, and as Duke Ellington and His Famous Orchestra found themselves playing an endless series of one-night stands, Ellington pressed on, not merely a Jazz Age survivor but, it seemed, the last believer in big-band jazz as a living, developing art. The new works—especially the longer ones—didn’t always go over with the record companies (RCA Victor waited years to release “The Perfume Suite”), or with the audience, or even, sometimes, with the players. (“We didn’t like the tone poems much,” Johnny Hodges admitted when he and a couple of other band members took off on their own, in 1951.) Disappointed critics prescribed a choice: the century’s most important jazz composer could narrow his focus, concentrate, and compose—or lead the band and tour until he dropped. Not both.
For Ellington it would have been like choosing his heart over his lungs; the whole system by now worked together or not at all. The choice was apparently personal as well as musical: he loved the life of the road, surrounded by people yet essentially alone. (He and his wife had separated early on. A famed sexual raconteur, he was rumored to have a woman waiting at every stop.) Cohen points out that Ellington could have been a rich man if he had stayed home, collected royalties, and composed. The band had become a very expensive proposition, and was subsidized largely by those royalties from long-ago hits. Even when it had a big resurgence, thanks to an appearance at the Newport Festival, in 1956, the stir was due not to the newly minted “Newport Festival Suite” but to a crazily exciting six-minute improvisation by the saxophonist Paul Gonsalves, played between the paired 1937 pieces “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue.” Contrary to the long-term concertizing trend in Ellington’s music, the performance got people back on their feet and dancing again, and got Ellington on the cover of Time. His renewed stature did not prevent controversy in the black community, however, when, in 1959, the N.A.A.C.P. gave Ellington its highest award. Recipients during the previous couple of years had been Martin Luther King, Jr., and the civil-rights activists Daisy Bates and the Little Rock Nine. Now the editorial pages of African-American newspapers doubtfully inquired: What had Ellington done to deserve this honor? It wasn’t just a question of what music had to do with civil rights; Jackie Robinson had won in 1956, with no such questions raised about baseball. Rather, as the Time article had put it, “Duke is not a militant foe of segregation.” It went on to note that “he plays for segregated audiences on his annual swings through the South,” and added that Ellington had explained, with a verbal shrug, “Everybody does.”
What had he done to deserve the honor? The plainly factual answer is that he had raised a lot of money over the years playing benefits for the N.A.A.C.P., and for many other organizations that had asked for his help. But there were deeper answers. Ellington, offended by the accusation that he had been silent on civil rights, replied that those who doubted him had simply failed to use their ears. “They’ve not been listening to our music,” he said. “For a long time, social protest and pride in black culture and history have been the most significant themes in what we’ve done.” In sum: “We have been talking for a long time about what it is to be black in this country.” For Ellington, being black in this country meant approaching difficult issues in strategically different ways. Earlier in the fifties, he had quarrelled with the N.A.A.C.P., in fact, over playing segregated theatres, arguing that his musicians needed to make a living, and that the N.A.A.C.P. ought to focus on more urgent matters (such as “the toilets and water fountains in colored waiting rooms”). At the same time, he had written privately to President Truman, asking if Truman’s daughter, Margaret—a concert singer—might serve as honorary chairwoman for an N.A.A.C.P. benefit, the proceeds of which were to be used “to stamp out segregation, discrimination, bigotry,” and other American ills. The letter was discovered by the music historian John Edward Hasse in the Truman Library, with Ellington’s request marked with the word “No!” underlined twice.
Cohen vigorously defends Ellington against critics and historians, both past and present, who have ignored the “nonverbal communication” that is the real basis of his contribution. The language of music is, of course, allusive; the language of protest, as it was developing in the late fifties, was, of necessity, direct—and therefore depended on words, which helps to explain the presence of white folksingers in the forefront of the movement where black jazz musicians might be expected to stand. But even when Ellington used words, he preferred to remain allusive (and elusive). In the wake of the 1957 school-desegregation battles in Little Rock, Charles Mingus recharged the relation of jazz to politics by composing “Fables of Faubus,” featuring less than flattering lyrics about the Arkansas governor; Ellington recorded a new version of the hymn from “Black, Brown and Beige,” titled “Come Sunday,” in which Mahalia Jackson, pleading with the Lord to “see my people through,” evokes both Heaven and a country redeemed.
His efforts became more direct during the next few years. In 1960, Ellington agreed to accompany some Johns Hopkins students, after a performance, to a Baltimore restaurant that had turned black students away, and to be captured by a local photographer being turned away himself; it was a major act in terms of the cost to his pride. In 1961, his booking contracts began to stipulate that he would not play before segregated audiences. He led a State Department tour, in 1963, designed to counter the news stories about American racism that were proving so useful to the Communist cause, and Cohen believes its political dividends helped to spur the passage of the 1965 Civil Rights Act. Cohen offers many other examples of Ellington as a sometimes surreptitious “race leader,” but it is almost embarrassing that he should have to make the effort. Celebrating Ellington’s seventieth birthday, in 1969, Ralph Ellison recalled what it was like when, in his youth, in the thirties, the Ellington band came to Oklahoma City “with their uniforms, their sophistication, their skills; their golden horns, their flights of controlled and disciplined fantasy,” all of it like “news from the great wide world.” For black boys like Ellison all over the country, the band had been “an example and goal,” he wrote. Who else—black or white—had ever been “so worldly, who so elegant, who so mockingly creative? Who so skilled at their given trade and who treated the social limitations placed in their paths with greater disdain?”
Two years before Ellington died, in 1972, Yale University held a gathering of leading black jazz musicians in order to raise money for a department of African-American music. Aside from Ellington, the musicians who came for three days of concerts, jam sessions, and workshops included Eubie Blake, Noble Sissle, Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Mingus, Max Roach, Mary Lou Williams, and Willie (the Lion) Smith. During a performance by a Gillespie-led sextet, someone evidently unhappy with this presence on campus called in a bomb threat. The police attempted to clear the building, but Mingus refused to leave, urging the officers to get all the others out but adamantly remaining onstage with his bass. “Racism planted that bomb, but racism ain’t strong enough to kill this music,” he was heard telling the police captain. (And very few people successfully argued with Mingus.) “If I’m going to die, I’m ready. But I’m going out playing ‘Sophisticated Lady.’ ” Once outside, Gillespie and his group set up again. But coming from inside was the sound of Mingus intently playing Ellington’s dreamy thirties hit, which, that day, became a protest song, as the performance just kept going on and on and getting hotter. In the street, Ellington stood in the waiting crowd just beyond the theatre’s open doors, smiling. ♦





c The basement club was cramped, and the bandstand was so small that, by the drummer’s measure, it could hardly hold a fight. The clientele included mobsters, musicians, and star performers from the nearby Broadway shows, slipping in among the crowd from the time the band appeared, at about ten o’clock, straight on “until.” The banjoist who provided the schedule could elaborate no further about how long the night went on: “Until you quit. Until period.” After 3 A.M., you couldn’t get a seat. In the fall of 1926, the craze for Negro music was already sending savvy white New Yorkers up to Harlem, but the Kentucky Club, on West Forty-ninth Street, had the hottest band in town. Trumpets, trombone, saxes, clarinet, tuba, banjo, and drums—nine or so players, huddled on the stand beneath the pipes that ran along the ceiling, plus the handsome young piano player who led the group while dancers surged around him on the floor. But the band did more than keep the temperature high and the dancers moving; its arrangements were so startling that even a familiar number like “St. Louis Blues” sounded new. Variety capped a gushing review of the “colored combo” by noting that the club’s patrons—transfixed “jazz boys” and civilians alike—spent a remarkable amount of time just sitting around and listening.
Duke Ellington and his Washingtonians had been performing in New York, under one name or another, for about three years, but their range and ambition were just beginning to show. As new arrivals, they had practiced the sweet, straight, “under conversation” music that had been in demand at the Washington society dances where the original group members started out, but they had quickly discovered that this sound was all wrong for New York. Not brazen enough, not rhythmically driving; not Negro enough; not jazz. In truth, a New York style of jazz hardly existed. In the mid-twenties, the city offered, instead, a heady variety of musical models, including its own native Harlem stride pianists (who welcomed Ellington as one of their own); the blues musicians who were part of the ongoing mass migration from the South; Fletcher Henderson’s big, polished sound; and the great horn players of New Orleans, who blazed through town now and again like comets. And then there were the resident players who had absorbed the New Orleanians’ famed techniques: the trumpeter Bubber Miley joined the Washingtonians before their first uncertain year was out and, with his waa-waa outbursts and uncannily human shrieks and cries, quickly blew their decorum away. Ellington was inspired by Miley’s wild expressiveness, even if he couldn’t yet meet it or let go the promise of all the other sounds he heard.
The number that caught Irving Mills’s attention at the Kentucky Club one night, as he recalled, was “Black and Tan Fantasy,” a three-minute musical drama jointly credited to Ellington and Miley. It isn’t difficult to figure out which of the authors did what, as a throbbingly mournful blues gives way to a refined society tune—rough and smooth, black and tan, Miley and Ellington—or as Miley’s solos rise to a hectoring beauty that finds ease and release in the band’s response. The trumpeter’s manipulation of a simple rubber plunger cup over the bell of his horn makes for some irresistibly antic sounds (the trombonist, not to be outdone, gives a good impression of a whinnying horse), but the piece delivers an unexpected emotional punch: a concluding riff from Chopin’s “Funeral March” is willfully absurd yet seems to seal the trumpet’s urgent message. (“I like great big ole tears,” Ellington said, teasingly, about audience reactions.) The over-all effect is at once mocking and chilling, like a funeral cortège with skeletons dancing behind.
Whether or not Irving Mills shed a tear, he recognized both the artistic merit and the financial potential of such original work. A song publisher with a special interest in blues, Mills immediately decided to go into band management, with Duke Ellington and His Kentucky Club Orchestra (their latest, somewhat grandiloquent billing) as his initial client. Mills insisted that Ellington concentrate on recording his own compositions, and that fall the energized players made their first important disks. One year later, they opened at the Cotton Club.
More than half a century after the Civil War, the most famous night club in New York was a mock plantation. The bandstand was done up as a white-columned mansion, the backdrop painted with cotton bushes and slave quarters. And the racial fantasy extended well beyond décor: whites who came to Harlem to be entertained were not to be discomfited by the presence of non-entertaining Negroes. All the performers were black—or, in the case of the chorus girls, café au lait—and all the patrons white, if not by force of law then by force of the thugs at the door. Ellington had to ask permission for friends to see his show. Ironically, it was the Cotton Club that allowed Ellington to expand his talents, by employing him to arrange and compose for a variety of dancers, singers, miscellaneous acts, entr’actes, and theatrical revues. His most extraordinary talent, however, may have been for making the best of tainted opportunities. For the big revues, with their plots about black savages and threatened maidens, he devised music of sophistication and cheekily exotic allure, under such titles as “Jungle Blues,” “Jungle Night in Harlem,” and—sinister little masterpiece—“The Mooche.” But even before the band sounded a note it delivered a statement: impeccably dressed in matching tuxedos and boutonnières, its members were of a class with the biggest swells in the room. And Ellington was the swellest of all: unfailingly soigné, magisterially presiding over the urban jungle, he stood untouched and never lost his smile. What was he thinking? What did he feel about—what did he contribute to—the mire of American race relations during the last century? Harvey G. Cohen’s “Duke Ellington’s America” (Chicago; $40) attempts to get under the skin of this apparently most imperturbable of men, and the results, if hardly conclusive, are fascinating. One of Ellington’s few confidantes, his sister, Ruth, believed that he concealed himself under “veil upon veil upon veil,” and Cohen is not the first Ellingtonian to treasure the smallest telltale sign of his subject’s human susceptibilities. There is, for example, an uncharacteristically angry letter to a white business associate with whom Ellington wished to break (which is nevertheless signed “with great respect,” and turns out not to have been sent). Cohen’s extremely intelligent and formidably documented book—a welcome change from much that has been published about Ellington—is not a standard biography; Ellington’s personal life and sexual mores are officially beyond its scope. Nor is it a critical work, since it contains no musical analysis and not a great deal of musical description. Cohen’s long hours in the Smithsonian’s huge trove of Ellington papers were devoted to the business records and the scrapbooks, and, as his title suggests, he has broad social issues on his mind. Even Ellington’s professional life is examined in circumscribed areas, almost all of which touch at some point upon race. The question is whether, sooner or later, everything did.
Early in the book, Cohen quotes Ellington’s longtime collaborator Billy Strayhorn objecting to a movie project about Ellington that Strayhorn was told would have a racial theme. “I don’t think it should be racial because I don’t think he’s racial,” Strayhorn protested. “He is an individual.” But Strayhorn concluded, in a line of thinking that seems emblematic of the era and of the personalities involved, “You don’t have to say the darn thing.” Cohen keeps Ellington’s individuality firmly in sight, while detailing such targeted subjects as his relationship with Mills, the white man who has been lauded for launching Ellington’s career and—both before and after they split, in 1939—accused of exploitation; Ellington’s travels with his band in the harshly segregated South of the nineteen-thirties and forties; the overt, if often forgotten, racial programs of much of his music; and his sometimes contentious relationship with the civil-rights movement of the nineteen-fifties and sixties.
A different set of subjects—Ellington’s musical development, his band members, even his women—might have yielded something closer to the post-racial portrait for which Strayhorn argued, a portrait more in accord with the high personal horizon on which Ellington’s sights were set. But “the darn thing” will not go away, and race remains unsurprisingly essential to the story of America’s first widely recognized black artist, and of what he had to say.
An unshakable dignity seems to have been instilled in Ellington from childhood, and Cohen examines the aspiringly genteel society in which the much beloved boy grew up. Ellington’s father, who worked for years as a butler in a prominent white home, saw that his family’s dinner table was always formally set, no matter the lack of funds at any given time. His pious mother virtually worshipped her son—who was her only child until he was sixteen, when his sister finally came along. And Ellington worshipped his mother in return; he fondly remembered her playing parlor tunes and hymns on the piano—he said the music made him cry—and he attributed his lifelong confidence to her frequent assurances that he was blessed, which he had always believed.
And why not? Edward Kennedy Ellington was born in 1899, in Washington, D.C., at a time when the nation’s capital was arguably the best place for an African-American child to live. The largest urban Negro community in the country maintained its own opera company, classical-music groups, and literary societies; its segregated schools taught African history, stressed proper manners and speech, and were intent on producing students who were, in Ellington’s phrase, “representative of a great and proud race.” For many years, from Emancipation through the imposition of onerous racial restrictions by the Wilson Administration, climaxing in a brutal, white-sparked riot following the First World War, the upper stratum of the city’s black population held to a proto-Harlem Renaissance ideal: demonstrate how civilized, intelligent, and accomplished we are, and racism will fade away. One need not demand respect if one commands it.
Ellington acquired the nickname “Duke” on the brink of adolescence, and, whatever its source (accounts differ), it indicates the superior impression that the boy already made—not an insignificant trait in an era when outstanding black musicians were known professionally as Bubber, Sonny, and Cootie. If he was intended for leadership, however, it clearly wasn’t going to proceed from his scholastic efforts. Although his schooling may have afforded him an inner strength, Ellington was a careless student, even in music (where his only grade on record is a D). But then he didn’t respond to formal training of any kind. Early piano lessons failed to hold his interest, and he learned to play mostly on his own, mastering James P. Johnson’s notoriously difficult “Carolina Shout”—well enough to impress Johnson—by slowing down the piano roll and matching his fingers to the depressed keys. When he wanted to go further, he charmed his way into pickup lessons from the professionals who hung out in the local poolroom. He was careful to point out, later on, that these early masters included both conservatory-trained musicians and unschooled “ear cats” who couldn’t read a note, and that he had freely learned from both. Charm, drive, and an audacious talent: he was barely out of his teens before he had established the Duke’s Serenaders and several other nicely profitable dance bands, and was supporting himself—and a wife and baby—in style. Yet, by his own account, even when he felt sure enough to try his fortunes in New York, age twenty-four, he had never actually written music. He had composed a few songs in his early years, and began composing again as soon as he hit Tin Pan Alley, but he had never written anything down and wasn’t entirely certain that he could. Ellington was himself something of an “ear cat,” and even as he learned what he needed to know, and his music became increasingly complex, his instinctual bias was for the more instinctual art. Partly, this was the natural democrat’s appreciation of the tough and unschooled African-American “gutbucket” sound; partly it was the natural aristocrat’s desire to make everything look easy. (“How was I to know that composers had to go up in the mountains, or to the seashore, to commune with the muses for six months?”) Other popular composers have faced similar gaps between their early training and their goals; George Gershwin’s solution was to make himself a lifelong student, working with a series of teachers on harmony, counterpoint, orchestration. Ellington didn’t have the temperament for this approach, nor did it appear to offer what he needed. He had something all his own, something that made the arduous process of writing music yield immediate and exhilarating results: he had his band.
The scrappy band of the early Kentucky Club days became an orchestra of a dozen players at the Cotton Club. But Ellington wanted an even larger sound: more color, more detail, more possibilities. By the time of the first European tour, in 1933, there were fourteen players, plus a vocalist; the group that was ultimately known as Duke Ellington and His Famous Orchestra had grown, by the mid-forties, to nineteen players, travelling and recording together, working and virtually living together, fifty-two weeks a year. These musicians were Ellington’s inspiration, not merely as professionals but as individuals with irreplaceable musical personalities. He did not write a “Concerto for Trumpet,” in 1939; rather, it was a “Concerto for Cootie”—that is, a work designed for the specific articulations of the superb trumpet player Cootie Williams, who replaced Bubber Miley and had already been with Ellington for about ten years. (“You can’t write music right,” Ellington told this magazine, more than sixty years ago, “unless you know how the man that’ll play it plays poker.”)
But these musicians were sometimes his collaborators in a more unusual way, described by reporters who sat in, marvelling, on working sessions. Ellington would start off with a melody, or even just a few bars that were quickly tweaked and critiqued into a theme. Then, one by one, the improvisations began—Barney Bigard on clarinet, Johnny Hodges on alto saxophone, Tricky Sam Nanton on trombone were all especially fluent—with each player improving on the last player’s phrases, elaborating and extending, while the trombonist /copyist Juan Tizol caught the accumulating effects on paper (albeit not quite as fast as they kept coming). Ellington approved or rejected the additions, made changes and issued challenges, then usually took the results home and worked the whole thing over. The next day, there would be a few hours of refinement and repetition, until the piece was fixed and memorized. (Ellington always preferred memorization: how could you let loose if your nose was stuck in a score?) By this method, the time for creating or arranging a new number—most numbers were about three minutes long, the standard length of a 78-r.p.m. recording—appears to have been just two days. “My band is my instrument,” Ellington said, and the way he played it explains his music’s extraordinary mixture of freedom and control.
This collaborative process could create difficulties when Ellington employed a melody that he had overheard one of the musicians playing, or that a musician had sold him for a regulation fee. The main tune of “Concerto for Cootie,” for example, was something that Ellington bought from Williams for twenty-five dollars, a sum believed to be reasonable by both parties until, a few years later, words were added and it became a hit as “Do Nothing Till You Hear from Me”—with no royalties for Williams. Johnny Hodges, the band’s most gorgeously lyrical player and a fount of melody—he contributed the tunes for “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore” and “I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart”—became so annoyed that, during performances, he mimed rubbing dollar bills between his fingers when Ellington launched into a number that Hodges felt was rightly his. One of Ellington’s most beloved songs, “Sophisticated Lady,” has several contributing claims and was described by the trombonist Lawrence Brown as “one of those where everybody jumps in.”

But, as Billy Strayhorn pointed out, the various contested melodies were musical scraps that would not have amounted to anything had Ellington not labored to smooth out rough parts, create harmonies, add bridges, and set them in a coherent musical frame. None of Ellington’s musicians—not even Strayhorn—ever composed a hit on his own. Most important, all these works turned out to sound purely and recognizably like Ellington. For those who doubted that he was a “real” composer, here was the conundrum: How could the band have created Ellington, when Ellington created the band?
Despite the air of insouciance, Ellington took his composing seriously. It was gratifying to have people sit and listen to his music in a proper theatre, as they did for the first time in 1930, when the band accompanied Maurice Chevalier during a Broadway run and filled out the bill for an entire act. Coast-to-coast radio broadcasts from the Cotton Club had won the band an enormous following, and it gave concert-style performances throughout its first national tour, in 1931, usually performing in movie theatres between shows. Recordings had similarly prepared the way in England and France, where, in 1933, the band appeared on variety bills in the biggest venues, and was met with a respect that, for all its popularity, it had never known at home. Members of the group were suddenly being discussed not merely as entertainers but as artists, and it seemed that every note they played was considered to be—in the words of one British critic—“directly an expression of Duke’s genius.” Artist. Genius. Claims of this sort had been made before the European tour, but during the mid-thirties they began to take hold. Cohen documents Irving Mills’s long-term publicity campaign to build his client just such a gold-plated image, unprecedented for an African-American. It does not impugn Mills’s belief in Ellington’s artistry to note that his goal was to share this belief with the increasingly large, white, record-buying public. Most of the campaign revolved around Ellington’s gifts as a composer (“Again!” ran the ad for a new song, “Solitude,” in 1935. “The stamp of Ellington’s genius!”), and Ellington fed the fire with the release of several longer compositions. “Creole Rhapsody” (1931), “Reminiscing in Tempo” (1935), and the conjoined “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue” (1937) all took up two or more sides of 78-r.p.m. recordings—until then a length generally granted only to works of classical music, and a sign that Ellington was extending the notion of musical seriousness beyond its conventional bounds. He told reporters that he was working on a symphonic suite and an opera, both based on the history of the American Negro people. It was just a matter of time before he got to Carnegie Hall.

“What we could not say openly, we expressed in music,” Ellington wrote in the British magazine Rhythm, in 1931, trying to explain the Negro musical tradition that had grown up in America, music “forged from the very white heat of our sorrows.” All his life, Ellington gave the impression of having been unscathed by racism, either in his early years—color, he said, was never even mentioned in his parents’ home—or during the long professional decades when it defined almost every move he made: where he could play his music, who could come to listen to it, whether he could stay in a hotel or attend another musician’s show, and where (or whether) he could find something to eat when the show was over. The orchestra made its first Southern tour just after its return from England, in 1933, travelling (thanks to Mills) in supremely insulated style: two private Pullman cars for sleeping and dining, and a separate baggage car for the elaborate wardrobe, scenery, and lights required to present a show more dazzling than any that most of the sleepy little towns where they made their stops had ever seen. Ellington made a special effort to perform for black audiences, even when it meant that the band added a midnight show in a place where it had performed earlier that night exclusively for whites. Reports from both racial groups were that the players outdid themselves; it is difficult to know where they felt they had more to prove.
Segregation was hardly peculiar to the South, of course, any more than it was limited, in New York, to the Cotton Club and its ilk. The down-and-dirty Kentucky Club had been no different: even without thugs at the door, there was an unspoken citywide dictate about where the different races belonged. The only exceptions were the “Black and Tans,” the few Harlem clubs that permitted casual racial mixing, and to which Ellington seems to have been paying tongue-in-cheek tribute with the not-quite-meshing themes of “Black and Tan Fantasy.” This was the first number played, after “The Star-Spangled Banner,” at Ellington’s landmark Carnegie Hall concert, in January, 1943, although the piece sounded very different from his twenties hit: taken at a slower tempo, with extended solos, it was twice its original length—so deliberative it seemed a kind of statement—and showed off the burnished power of Ellington’s forties band.