Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, 1963
We look back to a review by Brian Morton of Lush Life: A biography of Billy Strayhorn
Billy Strayhorn died on May 31, 1967, aged fifty-one. In the New York Times obituary, he was described as a "jazz composer, arranger, lyricist and pianist, who was often called Duke Ellington's alter ego". Quoting the paper's jazz critic, John S. Wilson, the obituary went on to despict Strayhorn as a "'small stately man' who observed the world with 'benign amusement' through dark-rimmed glasses. His friends emphasized his modesty, his humility and his desire to stay in the background among the Ellington contingent." Friends like Lena Horne (who would, but for one obstacle, have married him) paid lavish treatment to his benignity and generosity; almost any half-dozen bars of a Strayhorn composition bespeak the stateliness of his musical imagination. The problems lie with his "humility", his "modesty", and his "desire" to remain in Ellington's shadow.
David Hajdu's biography of Strayhorn has been the occasion of some controversy in the United States, where Duke Ellington is now considered to be an untarnishably major artist. What Lush Life addresses is the almost buried question of how even-handedly credited were their respective contributions to compositions and arrangements for the Ellington band. It is widely known that the band's signature theme "Take the 'A' Train" was Strayhorn's, but elsewhere the story is more confused. The two men met on December 2, 1938, when, at the behest of a friend, Strayhorn imitated Ellington's performance of his moody ballad "Sophisticated Lady", and then re-harmonized it, apparently pushing it out into unfamiliar keys and tempos. Accounts of collaborators' first encounters are often gilded with hindsight, but Hajdu sees no reason to doubt that Ellington and his confidant, the baritone saxophonist Harry Carney, were immediately impressed with Strayhorn's intuitive skills and recruited him as their composer/ arranger. The young man – born in 1915, and sixteen years Ellington's junior – was quickly apprised of the reality of the partnership when, in 1939, Duke's name was quietly added as co-composer to the credit for "Something to Live For".
Ellington had had to surrender royalties to the wily Irving Mills, who mysteriously appears as co-composer on some of Ellington's most significant work, and Hajdu is sufficiently alive to the realities of the music industry not to attempt to demonize Duke. Even so, behind Ellington's wry claim that it was his burden to act as frontman and flak-catcher, and that it was both a privilege and a solemn duty to "bow after a Billy Strayhorn orchestration" there lies a small uneasy question of recognition, or lack of it.
Two men could scarcely have been more different. The Washingtonian Ellington was urbane, priapic, remote, resolutely paranoid and hypochondriac, his favoured meal plain meat, a half grapefruit and hot water. Raised in Homewood, Pittsburgh, and in near-poverty, Strayhorn was shyly gregarious, passionately self-educated, absurdly open-handed and full of appetites. He was also, by the standards of the time, openly and unapologetically homosexual which is why Lena Horne married someone else, not quite on the rebound from a life-long friendship that could never blossom into erotic romance.
When Strayhorn wrote and sang of "the very gay places" in the extraordinary drinking song and prayer that gives Hajdu his title, it was probably without any awareness of the word's coterie associations, which had not yet entered mainstream language. But, though the song was begun in his teens, by the time it was finished in 1936, Strayhorn was well used to the view through the bottom of a cocktail glass.
Whether his alcohol intake hastened the onset of oesophagal cancer is open to speculation. Any suggestion that his self-sublimation and relegation as Ellington's "alter ego" was a contributory factor to his illness is beyond even Hajdu's partisanship. He does, though, produce enough anecdotal evidence to support the notion that Strayhorn suppressed his artistic, if not his sexual, frustration in drink.
Hajdu seems more secure when examining lyrics (and Strayhorn's lyrics range from heartbreaking subtlety to awkwardness: "A trough full of heart / Could only be a bore") than when analysing the harmonic structure of a song. His more purely musical commentaries, though accurate (and pointing to details like the E-natural on the word "jazz" in "Lush Life", a moment singers other than Strayhorn often ham up outrageously) have an unconvincingly feel of repeating something learnt by rote. He is, though, absolutely right in his summary of "Blood Count", Strayhorn's last composition, originally called "Blue Cloud", but transformed into a "wrenching moan, its pedal-point bass line evoking the rhythmic drip of intravenous fluid".
Strayhorn died in the arms of Bill Grove, his last companion. Some contemporary versions of his death had him cradled by Lena Horne, a typically homophobic device confounded by the fact that Horne was in Europe at the time. Like all his many friends, she was devastated, but if Ellington's autobiography, Music Is My Mistress, is to be believed, his was the most vociferous reaction. "I started sniffling and whimpering, crying, banging my head up against the wall, and talking to myself about the virtues of Billy Strayhorn. . . . Subconsciously I sat down and started writing what I was thinking, and as I got deeper and deeper into thinking about my favorite human being, I realized that I was not crying any more. It seemed that what I was doing was more important than anything." What he wrote was delivered at the funeral and Hajdu relays it without comment and without irony:
His greatest virtue, I think, was his honesty, not only to others, but to himself. His listening-hearing self was totally intolerant of his writing-playing self when, or if, any compromise was expected or considered expedient . . . . His patience was incomparable and unlimited. He had no aspirations to enter into any kind of competition, yet the legacy he leaves . . . will never be less than the ultimate on the highest plateau of culture (whether by comparison or not). God bless Billy Strayhorn.
Apart from the final benediction, bad faith underlies the rest.
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