The Duke

The Duke

Duke Ellington, 1958

Book Details

Terry Teachout

DUKE

A Life of Duke Ellington

483pp. Robson. £25.

978 1 84954 629 4

US: Gotham. $30.

978 1 59240 749 8

Duke Ellington – an artist of the first order and a natural born editor, not least of his own story

JOHN MOLE

A photograph, taken in London two years after Duke Ellington's celebrated "rebirth" at the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival, provides a telling frontispiece to this excellent, revelatory and, with eighty-one pages of source notes, copiously documented book. It shows the Duke regarding himself in a full-length dressing room mirror, adjusting his bow tie and – ever the model of sartorial theatricality – preparing to go out on stage to practise his familiar wry flattery, telling us that we are very beautiful, very sweet, very generous, very gracious and that he and all the kids in the band want us to know that they love us madly. On tour, he will open the show with Billy Strayhorn's "Take the 'A' Train" or his own "Rocking in Rhythm", introduce new work, featuring his star soloists, and reprise his greatest hits in what Terry Teachout refers to more than once as "the dreaded medley", punctuated by the applause of recognition. This will be both the measure and the price of his achievement as composer and band leader. As Teachout forensically demonstrates, behind the smooth public face lay a complex, evasive personality: unquestionably one of the greatest figures in twentieth-century music, compared by André Previn to Stravinsky and Prokofiev, and admired by Aaron Copland, he was also a self-centred hedonist who "talked not to explain himself but to conceal himself". An account of his life might be summed up well by the title of Richard Aldington's study of D. H. Lawrence: Portrait of a Genius, but . . . .

As a drama critic for the Wall Street Journal, a playwright, an accomplished jazz bass player and a biographer of Louis Armstrong, Teachout is well placed to examine with equal authority Ellington's methods of composition and the individual contributions of many other great musicians who brought out the unique tone colour of his orchestration. Teachout integrates his analysis with a vivid exploration of character. "Music is my mistress", Ellington declared in the title of his own fascinating but personally elusive autobiography (published in 1973) – and his band was his musical laboratory. During his long career as a band leader, from the Cotton Club to the late Sacred Concerts, several of his top instrumentalists came, went and returned, resentful of the degree to which he took credit for melodies based on phrases from their own improvisations, but only too aware of how uniquely he brought out the best in them.

A familiar pattern was to emerge as early as 1926, when Ellington (then in his mid-twenties) was signed up for promotion by Irving Mills who, in order to make a celebrity out of his personable star, ensured that everything came "from the pen of Duke Ellington". Although, as Alex Ross puts it in his book The Rest is Noise (2009), "Ellington carved out his own brand of eminence, redefining composition as a collective art", Teachout doesn't pull his punches when quoting the complaints of Johnny Hodges, Barney Bigard and, above all, the trombonist Lawrence Brown. There are bound to be those who feel that Ellington's reputation will be harmed by what is revealed, but one only has to listen to that "command of instrumental colour that sets his work apart from every other big-band composer of the Swing Era" for faith to be restored. Teachout appends his own list of fifty key recordings at the back of the book.

In one of the illuminating comparisons he makes between Ellington and artists in other genres, Teachout records the admiration expressed by Orson Welles, who is reported to have said that Ellington was the only genius he had ever known apart from himself, and observes that, while it is not part of the vocabulary of jazz, the word "auteur" could be used as readily of Ellington as of Welles, both of them being artists of the first order who were also natural born editors, not least of their own reputations. A comparison is also made between their family backgrounds (both were spoiled children) and their "unlimited appetites for food and sex". In Ellington's case, Teachout takes considerable pains, as he puts it, to "scrub away the sugar from the candy-coated caricatures" of his parents presented in Music is My Mistress, but still shows his middle-class Washington childhood to have protected him from racial hostility, his father passing on his "smooth talking savoir-faire" and his mother instilling "'Ellington exceptionalism', a doctrine to which he would subscribe for ever after". It showed not only in his confidence and his certainty of his own worth and significance (he was furious when passed over for a Pulitzer prize, and when Benny Goodman made it to Carnegie Hall before he did), but also, more admirably, in the stands he made against prejudice. (Often there was a degree of humour, as when, hiring Pullman cars to travel in the segregated South, he declared, "That's the way the President travels".) As for the sex, his early marriage to Edna was never dissolved, and he had other partners on whom he regularly cheated. Teachout considers Ellington's "satyriasis" and whether his attitude towards women was, as his son Mercer claimed, basically contemptuous beneath the charm, or whether he liked but was wary of them. As he warned the photographer Gordon Parks, a woman "has more ways to destroy you than the Soviet Army".

Absorbing though all of this is, what matters most is the music. Teachout gives full attention to the range of Ellington's ambition and achievement, and the trajectory of his career. He examines the genesis of Ellington's first major suite, Black, Brown and Beige, his Carnegie Hall debut, and the thinking that lay behind his assertion that he didn't write jazz, but negro folk music. He is particularly interesting on the difficulties Ellington had when attempting extended works, many of which were ramshackle in construction, an assembly of brilliant miniatures. In fact, as what was almost certainly his greatest (1940–41) orchestra demonstrated, the concentrated form of the three-minute miniature was ideally suited to his gift for writing portraits and tone parallels, of creating impressionism with a beat.

Every musician Ellington hired became an integral part of his palette – from Bubber Miley, Otto Hardwick and Tricky Sam Nanton to Clark Terry and Paul Gonsalvez, via Ben Webster, Cootie Williams and Johnny Hodges, with the bedrock baritone of Harry Carney, who remained with Ellington to the last and died only five months after him in 1974, having said, "With Duke dead, I have nothing to live for". Teachout quotes illuminatingly from their accounts of working with their leader, of band discipline or more often the lack of it. He is also excellent on the intricacies of Ellington's hand-in-glove relationship, both musical and personal, with his arranger and right-hand composer Billy Strayhorn, and the seismic effect of Strayhorn's death.

The final chapter, which describes Ellington's seventieth birthday celebrations at the White House and his refusal to let up on touring, as well as his loneliness and decline, is a particularly moving last act, reminding us, as so often in this book, of Terry Teachout's ability to bring his experience of theatre to bear on the story he tells.