Duke (10 page)

Locke and his colleagues knew that blacks had made “substantial contributions” to American civilization through their music, but they paid little attention to jazz and the blues. Most of them seem to have felt that what black America
really
needed was a big-league classical composer of its own. Harlem’s jazzmen, some of whom were broadly aware of what was going on among the intellectuals, sensed in turn that the New Negroes had no great interest in them. “The two worlds, literature and entertainment, rarely crossed,” Cab Calloway said in his autobiography. “We were working hard on our thing and they were working hard on theirs.” No one then suspected that it was the jazzmen of Harlem whose contribution to American culture would turn out to have been more enduring than any of the books published by the writers of the Harlem Renaissance, much less that an obscure twenty-four-year-old society pianist from Washington would soon move to the front of their ranks.

In the summer of 1923, Sonny Greer, Otto Hardwick, and Arthur Whetsel returned to New York in the company of the banjo player Elmer Snowden, who had been offered a job there that failed to pan out. Ellington followed them, and after a few weeks of scuffling, the cabaret singer Ada “Bricktop” Smith engaged the five men to serve as the house band at Barron Wilkins’s Exclusive Club, the Harlem nightspot where she was headlining, with Snowden serving as their nominal leader. The club catered to wealthy whites but also admitted light-skinned blacks who could pay the tab, which was stiff enough for each member of the band to make thirty dollars a week plus twenty dollars a night in tips. The music they played, Ellington said, was “sweet and straight,” which was what the club’s patrons wanted to hear: “As a result of playing all those society dances in Washington, we had learned to play softly . . . we had arrangements for everything and it was what we’ve now named conversation music, kind of soft and gut-bucket.”

“This colored band is plenty torrid”: The Washingtonians in early 1924. From left: Sonny Greer, Charlie Irvis, Bubber Miley (seated), Elmer Snowden, Otto Hardwick, and Duke Ellington. This six-piece combo was the seed from which Ellington’s later bands grew, and in Miley it had a major soloist whose plunger-mute playing became an indispensable element of Ellington’s orchestral style

Such fare may have satisfied the high-rolling whites who came uptown to drink at the Exclusive Club, but it failed to pass muster with the executives of Victor Records, for whom the band cut a test record on July 26, 1923. Like most other record companies, Victor assumed that it was impossible to market sweet dance music to black record buyers, who were thought to favor blues and jazz exclusively. As Snowden told Stanley Dance:

We had been playing like most of the [white] boys downtown before, only doing it with five pieces, and we didn’t do any “jungle style.” When we first recorded for Victor—Elmer Snowden’s Novelty Orchestra—Whetsol [sic] wasn’t doing any of that stuff. He used to use a cup [mute] under a hat, and his horn would sound like a saxophone . . . our music wasn’t the kind of Negro music they wanted, so Victor didn’t issue it.

No doubt Ellington would have liked to sign a contract with the label that employed Enrico Caruso and the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, but there is no reason to think that he was displeased with the quintet’s playing. As he explained with every sign of satisfaction, he and his colleagues “were different in several ways.” “We paid quite a lot of attention to our appearance,” he said, “and if any one of us came in dressed improperly Whetsol [
sic
] would flick his cigarette ash in a certain way, or pull down the lower lid of his right eye with his forefinger and stare at the offending party.” They were, at least for the moment, content to play sweet and straight and be paid generously for doing so, enough so to allow Ellington to bring Edna up from Washington. He began working on the side as a rehearsal pianist at the newly opened Connie’s Inn, an even swankier whites-only Harlem club, where he got a close-up look at the process of putting together a cabaret floor show.

Around the same time, Ellington started going to Tin Pan Alley, the neighborhood in lower Manhattan where sheet-music publishers were clustered, to sell songs that he wrote with Jo. Trent, a black lyricist. None of them became a hit, but the flat fees that he accepted for writing such forgotten ditties as “Blind Man’s Buff” helped to sweeten the family pot still further. On one of Ellington’s first visits to Tin Pan Alley, Fred Fisher, the composer of “Chicago,” offered to buy a song from him and asked the fledgling composer for a “lead sheet,” a single-staff sheet of music containing the tune and lyrics. “I had never made a lead sheet before, nor tried to write music of any kind,” he later said. Snowden claimed that Ellington “couldn’t really read then,” by which he meant that the young pianist was not yet able to read written-out music at sight. While he had made considerable progress since the days of “Soda Fountain Rag,” he still had a long way to go before he could call himself a true professional.

In September he took a giant step toward that goal. Snowden’s band, which was now known as the Washingtonians, signed a six-month contract to accompany a floor show and play for dancing at a newly opened club called the Hollywood, located on West Forty-Ninth Street near Broadway. Though the basement cabaret was seedy to the point of sordidness and its owners seem on occasion to have resorted to arson to pay their bills, it had one incontestable advantage over the Exclusive Club: The Hollywood was located not in Harlem but in Manhattan’s midtown theater district, meaning that it was covered by white journalists. In November the Washingtonians got their first high-profile review, a rave in the
New York Clipper,
a trade paper:

This colored band is plenty torrid and includes a trumpet player who never need doff his chapeau to any cornetist in the business. He exacts the eeriest sort of modulations and “singing” notes heard. . . . The boys look neat in dress suits and labor hard but not in vain at their music. They disclose painstaking rehearsal, playing without music.

The “‘hot’ cornetist” who caught the ear of Abel Green, an entertainment reporter who later became the editor of
Variety,
was not Arthur Whetsel, who had gone back to Washington. It was James “Bubber” Miley, who had joined the band when it started playing at the Hollywood and expanded from five to seven pieces, taking on a trombone player and a second saxophonist. Unlike John Anderson and Roland Smith, about whom next to nothing is known beyond their names, Miley was, as Green’s review indicates, a find, the first jazz soloist of significance with whom Ellington had worked to date and the one whose contribution to his style was greater than that of anyone else with whom he played in the twenties.

Born in South Carolina in 1903, Miley was an experienced jazzman who had toured with Mamie Smith, a vaudeville performer who in 1920 became the first black singer to record blues songs. While on tour with Smith in 1921, he heard King Oliver’s band in Chicago and was staggered by the New Orleans cornetist’s muted “wah-wah” solos. Such playing had yet to be heard in New York—Oliver did not cut his first records until two years later—and Garvin Bushell, another of Smith’s sidemen, recalled in his 1988 memoir the overwhelming impression that it made on him and Miley: “Bubber and I sat there with our mouths open. . . . The trumpets and clarinets in the East had a better ‘legitimate’ quality, but the sound of Oliver’s band touched you more. It was less cultivated but more expressive of how the people felt.” Miley taught himself how to use a “plunger” mute (the rubber suction cup better known to laymen as the business end of a plumber’s helper) in order to mimic Oliver’s raspy, growling sound, and by 1923, when he signed on with the Washingtonians, he had mastered the technique.

Ellington was as excited by Miley’s playing as Miley had been by Oliver’s. “Our band changed its character when Bubber Miley came in,” he wrote in 1940. “He used to growl all night long, playing gut-bucket on his horn. That’s when we decided to forget all about sweet music.” Snowden was reluctant to make so drastic a change in the band’s style, but the Washingtonians, Ellington said, were “a sort of cooperative organization, nobody was really the leader,” and the group decided to go along with Miley. Their decision was cemented by the hiring in December of Charlie Irvis, a trombonist with a similar style. According to Ellington, Irvis “got a great, big, fat sound at the bottom of the trombone—melodic, masculine, full of tremendous authority.” With the two plunger-wielding brassmen in place, the Washingtonians started to take advantage of the stability afforded by their contract with the Hollywood, where they would perform for much of the next four years. Such long-term employment is crucial to the growth of a working jazz band, for it allows the members to get to know one another’s playing intimately and work out a collective style in relative tranquility. In addition, bands with regular gigs also find it easier to attract players of better quality, and by 1925 the Washingtonians were starting to acquire new members who, like Greer and Hardwick before them, would stick with Ellington for years to come.

Not, however, Elmer Snowden, whose departure from the band was both imminent and involuntary. When his colleagues found out that he was pocketing their share of a raise, they gave him the boot and persuaded a reluctant Ellington to take his place at the helm.
^**
“It didn’t take long before we thrust leadership on Duke,” said Sonny Greer. “He didn’t want it, but his disposition was better balanced than ours. He could keep us in line without doing much. We were a pretty wild bunch in those days, myself in particular.”

Greer may have been wild, but he was also proud:

There were no small bands so well rehearsed as ours was then. Most of them played stocks, which we never did. Duke wasn’t writing so much, but he would take the popular tunes and twist them, and Toby was doubling on C-melody and baritone, so we would sound like a big band, but soft and beautiful. . . . We worked as one man. Duke was the brains, always prodding us to do better, showing kindness and understanding.

The fact that the Washingtonians did not normally play from published “stock arrangements” of popular tunes of the day (they sometimes used them, but not often) may have had more to do with Ellington’s limited sight-reading skills than the band’s ingenuity. But it was also a matter of principle. As one of his sidemen explained, “Duke worked largely from head arrangements and he insisted everyone memorize their parts. He thought you couldn’t get inside a piece of music if you were busy keeping up with the charts.”
^††
And his method of developing those arrangements was, or purported to be, thoroughly democratic: “We would just sit down at the piano and we’d say you take this and you take that.” It is, however, notable that Ellington used the royal
we
, one of his favored turns of phrase, in the 1964 interview in which he explained how the Washingtonians arranged the tunes that they played. At that point Greer was at least as well known as Ellington: Not only did he double as the band’s vocalist, but his expansive personality made him popular with the club’s regular customers. But Ellington was already, as Greer put it, the “brains” of the group, and before long he was its leader in every sense.

In
Music Is My Mistress
Ellington spoke of the “new colors and characteristics” of the music that the Washingtonians were playing. They came not just from Miley and Irvis but from everything that he heard around him. He was as willing to learn from the quasi-symphonic sounds of the movie-house orchestras of New York as from the playing of Fletcher Henderson’s big band, the group that impressed him most. He even learned from Paul Whiteman, the plump bandleader with the toothbrush mustache whose dance orchestra had accompanied George Gershwin in the world premiere of
Rhapsody in Blue
on February 12, 1924. Whiteman was a regular visitor to the Hollywood, where he left behind fifty-dollar tips, and Ellington, who throughout his life would speak admiringly of his musical achievements, understood the landmark importance of Gershwin’s first “classical” composition. Two years later he wrote a short piece for solo piano called “Rhapsody Jr.” whose whole-tone tunes are as much a nod to Gershwin’s musical language—and ambitions—as is the piece’s title.

Ellington also studied informally with Will Marion Cook, whose story epitomizes the disadvantages under which turn-of-the-century black artists worked. Born in 1869, Cook was a U Streeter, the son of a Howard University law professor. His musical talent was so outstanding that he studied violin at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and Joseph Joachim’s Hochschule für Musik in Berlin, and later on he also studied “a bit of composition” (as he put it) at New York’s National Conservatory of Music with Antonín Dvorˇák, who was fascinated by spirituals and incorporated their melodic shapes into his
New World Symphony
. Unable to establish himself as a concert soloist because of his race, Cook chose instead to become a composer of popular music, collaborating in 1898 with Paul Laurence Dunbar on
Clorindy: Origin of the Cakewalk,
one of the first all-black shows to play on Broadway. Five years later his
In Dahomey
made Bert Williams, the black vaudeville singer-comedian, a Broadway star.