Duke (25 page)

The perfect instrument: Duke Ellington and his band at the Cotton Club, 1933. Top: Sonny Greer. First row: Tricky Sam Nanton, Juan Tizol, Lawrence Brown, Cootie Williams, Arthur Whetsel, Freddie Jenkins. Second row: Otto Hardwick, Harry Carney, Johnny Hodges, Barney Bigard, Fred Guy. Bottom: Wellman Braud, Ellington. With the hiring of Brown and the return of Hardwick, Ellington had finally hit on the ideal combination of players, and for the next eight years he used them with unprecedented imagination and resourcefulness

But every working musician must be as much a businessman as an artist, and Ellington and his sidemen never forgot the necessity of paying the rent. In February of 1932, at the end of their yearlong tour, John Hammond published an item in his
Melody Maker
column that reminded them, and everyone else who read it, of the ruthless realities of their line of work: “Speaking of the Duke, I hear that he will return to New York early in February, his first visit in well over a year. Trouble with local racketeers, I fear, has been one of the causes of his prolonged absence.” While there is no proof that racketeers had either run him out of town or stopped him from coming back, it is incontestable that the mob then held sway over his professional fortunes. As Mercer Ellington explained it, “The syndicate that ran [the Cotton Club] gave him a contract with options, so that as his popularity increased he couldn’t always take advantage of lucrative outside dates.” No sooner did he wrap up the movie-house tour than he hit the road again for a second year of barnstorming, but in March of 1933 he returned to the Cotton Club. The songs were good—Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler had started writing for the floor shows in 1930—and so were Ethel Waters and the other headliners.
^‡‡‡‡
Still, it was the same old segregated Cotton Club, and by 1933 Ellington was starting to wonder whether the price of his success was too high.

“At first I was happy,” he told a reporter for
The
New Yorker
a decade later. “There were lots of pretty women and champagne and nice people and plenty of money.” But there was also the grinding responsibility of making music in a commercial environment, one that was hostile to the aspirations of a cultured musician, let alone one who saw himself as an artist with a mission. The Cotton Club was prestigious and profitable, but it was also uncomfortable by definition if you happened to be black, and Irving Mills, though he had worked wonders for Ellington, was a businessman whose eye was ever and always on the main chance. As Ellington recalled it:

I’d bring something I thought was good to the music publishers and they’d ask, “Can an eight-year-old child sing it?” I’d bring something new to them and they’d say, “This ain’t what we’re looking for. We want something like Gazookus wrote last week.” I’d see guys writing little pop numbers that were going over big. I didn’t see why I should try to do something good. I thought I’d stop writing. . . . I felt it was all a racket. I was on the point of giving up.

His disillusion was evident to his friends and colleagues, as well as to Mills, who may have been crude but was nobody’s fool. The situation called for stronger medicine, and he supplied it: He sent his golden goose to England. The idea of sailing across the Atlantic appalled Ellington, who was unnerved by the prospect of traveling on an ocean liner that could hit an iceberg and sink to the bottom of the sea, but judicious doses of champagne and brandy soothed his nagging fears, and on June 9, the SS
Olympic
docked in Southampton. Ellington and his men spent the next fifty-five days touring Europe, a venture that would help to cement their reputations in America and restore their leader’s waning confidence in his own gifts.

Ellington was not the first American jazz musician to perform in Europe. Sidney Bechet and the Original Dixieland Jazz Band went there in 1919, and many others followed them, the most famous of whom was Louis Armstrong, who toured England for the first time in 1932. But Armstrong’s extroverted demeanor puzzled a considerable number of the people who saw him perform there. Even to those English musicians and fans who cherished his records, the gaudy spectacle of what the poet (and jazz buff) Philip Larkin called “the stageshow Armstrong” was at odds with their finicky sense of propriety. As one dance-band musician put it, “I much regret to have to admit to finding something of the barbaric in his violent stage mannerisms.” What they wanted was what Irving Mills was selling, a clubbable artist who wouldn’t frighten the horses. Spike Hughes assured the readers of the
Daily Herald
that Ellington and his tuxedoed musicians filled the bill: “It is not a ‘show’ band; its members do not wear funny hats, nor do they attempt any ‘comedy.’ It is a band content to play music for its own sake.”

No sooner did they arrive in London than they were treated like visiting royalty—once they found places to stay. The best London hotels were disinclined to put up black guests, and though Ellington himself claimed to have had no trouble finding a suite in Mayfair at the recently opened Dorchester, whose staff treated him so respectfully that he returned there for the rest of his life, his sidemen were forced to settle for smaller hotels and rooming houses in Bloomsbury. Three days later they opened at the Palladium, the same 2,300-seat variety house where Armstrong had made his European debut a year earlier (and where Alfred Hitchcock would soon film the climactic scene of
The 39 Steps
). They were presented by the bandleader-impresario Jack Hylton as part of a mixed vaudeville-style program, going on after Max Miller, a “blue” comedian who was a fixture on England’s music-hall stages. For added insurance, Ellington brought along Bessie Dudley, a Cotton Club dancer who was billed as the “Original Snake-Hips Girl,” and a two-man tap team. Ellington, like Armstrong, was forced to perform there and in similar venues, since the British musicians’ union was unalterably opposed to allowing foreign musicians to work in England, and the Ministry of Labour obliged the union by refusing to grant the work permits necessary for the members of American bands to appear in hotels, restaurants, or nightclubs.

Pictures shot on the stage of the Palladium show the musicians dressed in white blazers, white shoes, and medium-dark slacks (Ellington is wearing an all-white outfit and seated at a white piano). Behind them was a backdrop that incoporated grinning-darky caricatures of banjo players. Sonny Greer had brought his full kit to England: timpani, chimes, a vibraphone, even a small gong. Ellington, who relished the drummer’s showmanship, said that Greer sat above the band “like a high priest, or a king on a throne.” As for the Duke himself, he was terrified by the crowd’s full-throated response to the opening-night show: “This was a night that scared the devil out of the whole band, the applause was so terrifying—it was applause
beyond
applause. On our first show there was 10 minutes of continuous applause.”

The press was all over the map. Everyone admired the way the band looked onstage, and many reviewers, implicitly comparing Ellington to Armstrong, praised him for his decorous carriage: “Ellington was always composed, always the gentleman.” But Ernest Newman, the doyen of English classical-music critics, called him “a Harlem Dionysus drunk on bad bootleg liquor” in his weekly column for
The
Times,
a piece of phrasemaking nasty enough to stick (Barry Ulanov cited it a decade and a half later in his Ellington biography).
The
Times
’s daily reviewer was no less snooty:

He does at once and with an apparently easy show of ingenuity what a jazz band commonly does with difficulty or fails to do. And the excitement and exacerbation of the nerves which are caused by the performances of his orchestra are the more disquieting by reason of his complete control and precision. It is not an orgy, but a scientific application of measured and dangerous stimuli.

The jazz press was, of course, transported.
The Melody Maker
reported that the sound of the band in person “literally lifts one out of one’s seat.” Some of the highbrows felt the same way, and a few of them knew enough about jazz to appreciate what they were hearing. Among the latter was Constant Lambert, who in 1927 had written
The Rio Grande,
a work for piano, chorus, and orchestra that was one of the earliest pieces written by a European classical composer to make idiomatic use of the language of jazz-based popular music. Lambert, who doubled as a critic, wrote in
The
Sunday Referee
that Ellington was “probably the first composer of real character to come out of America . . . after hearing what [he] can do with fourteen players in pieces like ‘Jive Stomp’ and ‘Mood Indigo,’ the average modern composer who splashes about with eighty players in the Respighi manner must feel a little chastened.”

Two weeks later Ellington played a matinee concert sponsored by
The
Melody Maker
. He performed the same popular program that he had offered at the Palladium, which included songs like “Stormy Weather” and “Three Little Words” in addition to his own compositions, and it failed to pass muster with Spike Hughes, who showed his priggish side in his review: “Is Duke Ellington losing faith in his own music and turning commercial through lack of appreciation, or does he honestly underestimate the English musical public to such an extent that a concert
for musicians
does not include ‘The Mooche,’ ‘Mood Indigo,’ ‘Lazy Rhapsody,’ ‘Blue Ramble,’ ‘Rockin’ in Rhythm,’ ‘Creole Love Call,’ ‘Old Man Blues,’ ‘Baby, When You Ain’t There,’ or ‘Black Beauty’?” Ellington was unamused by Hughes’s presumption, thereafter referring to him as “the Hot Dictator,” but he paid attention to the review. A second concert met with Hughes’s approval, no doubt because Ellington took care to play all the pieces that he had mentioned, as well as one, “Sirocco,” by the critic himself. Hughes also wrote program notes that set what he thought to be a proper tone for the occasion: “‘Echoes of the Jungle’ dates from 1931. This is a direct contrast to ‘Old Man Blues.’ Where the first composition is definitely
allegro,
this is
andante;
where in the former work the scoring is full and brilliant, the latter is particularly remarkable for the extremely economical use made of the orchestra.”
^§§§§

After finishing its two-week run at the Palladium, the band performed in Birmingham, Blackpool, Glasgow, Harrogate, and Liverpool, as well as cutting a few records and playing on the BBC, which also broadcast an interview with Ellington. In between performances he and his musicians found time to drop by a party that was thrown by Lord Beaverbrook for the Prince of Wales, an amateur drummer who sat in with the band. “Windsor can play good drums—good, hot drums,” Ellington said. And he also made a point of meeting with Constant Lambert, whose interest in the composer was not new. Lambert had been writing about Ellington’s music as early as 1931: “He gives the same distinction to his
genre
that Strauss gave to the Waltz or Sousa to the March.” He may also have played some of Delius’s music for Ellington, who claimed in
Music Is My Mistress
and on other occasions that he had never heard any of the English composer’s music before coming to England. However it came about, Ellington bought several Delius scores during his stay, and they made a lasting impression on him. “There was one English composer—and that’s about the only time I’ve ever heard him absolutely point out something he liked,” Mercer said. “And in fact I heard him say this twice: if it was painting it was Monet and most of the artists around the Renaissance period. And Delius was the one person he liked so much in [classical] music.”

“Always the gentleman”: Broadcasting on the BBC, June 14, 1933. Ellington was an immediate hit with British audiences, who appreciated his decorous manner, and he in turn was inspired by the enthusiasm with which they responded to his challenging compositions