CHAPTER 1
ELLINGTON and EARLY JAZZ
New Orleans
IN JANUARY 1923, Duke Ellington first heard Sidney Bechet, already well on his way to becoming a legend. Bechet started out playing clarinet, but by this time his preferred instrument was the soprano saxophone. His performance at the Howard Theatre, in Washington, D.C., was Ellington’s first exposure to African American jazz from New Orleans, and it came as a complete shock: “I had never heard anything like it,” he remembered. “It was a completely new sound and conception to me.”
Recordings of Bechet from 1923 and 1924 make it easy to understand Ellington’s enthusiasm. The first impression one gets from Wildcat Blues, Texas Moaner Blues, and Cake Walking Babies from Home (all with Clarence Williams’ Blue Five) is of immense confidence. The playing is forceful and precise, with no false steps. With blistering attack, intense vibrato, blues saturation from start to finish, and nuances of conversational rhythm and phrasing, there is no doubt about the cultural origins of this music: this is ear-based, performer-centered music from the African American vernacular, as it was professionalized in New Orleans. Bechet has a good sense of melodic contour, nicely varied and interesting. There is a surplus of ornamentation, yet nothing feels out of place.
Ellington was hardly alone in being so impressed, and not just by Bechet but by so many of the great players from New Orleans who were conquering jazz on nearly every instrument. Bass players Bill Johnson and George “Pops” Foster, drummers Warren “Baby” Dodds and Arthur “Zutty” Singleton, trombonist Edward “Kid” Ory, clarinetists Johnny Dodds and Jimmie Noone, pianists Tony Jackson and “Jelly Roll” Morton (born Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe), cornetists Fred Keppard and Tommy Ladnier—these and many others were admired and imitated as the musicians traveled and recorded.
Cornetist Joseph “King” Oliver may have topped them all. Oliver arrived in Chicago in 1918 to lead a band of homeboys who lit up the Lincoln Gardens dance hall. On his first night there, the master of ceremonies placed a paper crown on his head, men threw hats in the air in celebration, and the crowd proclaimed him “King.” The key to Oliver’s success was “freak” playing, the name musicians from New Orleans gave to the manipulation of hats, bottles, and toilet plungers on wind instruments to create bluesy, talking effects.
Trumpeter James “Bubber” Miley heard Oliver in 1921 as he was passing through Chicago. Just like Ellington when he heard Bechet, Miley was overwhelmed. “Bubber and I sat there with our mouths open,” remembered clarinetist Garvin Bushell. “That’s where Bubber got his growling, from Joe Oliver.” Miley perfected the technique and made it his own. We could say that he was Oliver’s greatest follower in freak playing. Toward the end of the decade he became the one who, more than anyone, helped Ellington’s band achieve a distinct identity.
Following Oliver even more directly was his protégé Louis Armstrong. In New Orleans, Armstrong constantly followed his mentor in parades and memorized his solos. Armstrong preferred straight cornet playing over freak music. Like Miley, he became one of a kind, unmistakable and compelling, and by 1927 he was the most influential soloist in all of jazz. Trumpeter Charles “Cootie” Williams patterned his style after Armstrong and joined Ellington in 1929. Like Miley, Williams became one of Ellington’s key collaborators.
Clarinetist Albany “Barney” Bigard was raised in the Seventh Ward of New Orleans, a hotbed of luscious clarinet playing in the Creole tradition. He joined Ellington in 1928. Together, he and Ellington produced the band’s first megahit, Mood Indigo (1930), and he contributed to many pieces after that. Alto saxophonist Johnny Hodges was yet another 1928 addition to the Ellington band. Hodges grew up in Boston, and the experience that shaped his playing most was hearing Sidney Bechet. Ellington said that Bechet took Hodges “under his arm and taught him everything.” Of Ellington’s many collaborators, Hodges may have been the most prolific.
It wasn’t just solo playing that made New Orleans so distinctive and important. African American musicians there perfected the funky and vigorous practice known as “collective improvisation,” which transferred the interactive style of the ring shout to wind instruments. The transfer is not surprising since the formative musical experiences for most musicians took place in church. Early jazz from New Orleans was created by the same people who defiantly turned their backs on cultural assimilation and cultivated the participatory model. One observer explained that marching bands and their second-line followers basically brought the ring shout into the neighborhood streets.
Collective improvisation is organized around a known tune, usually carried by the cornet, around which the others improvise, embellish, extend, and invent figures that must have resembled the crooks, turns, slurs, and appoggiaturas of the Port Royal ring shouters. Drums, tuba (or trombone or bass viol), and guitar (or banjo) “base” the ensemble with a steady beat. Clarinet, second cornet, and trombone weave lines against the lead to produce a stylized version of church heterophony. The entire package is there—rough and ready emotional intensity, movement of the body joined to music, flagrant bending of pitch, percussive attack, strained timbre, the universal invitation to join in. The splendid series of recordings made by King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band in 1923 is the earliest and best documentation of this ear-based practice.
Collective improvisation stands as one of New Orleans’ greatest cultural gifts to the world. As the 1920s began to roar, the practice found a cultural niche it has never let go of. Establishment figures condemned the music as primitive, degenerate, uncivilized, racially contaminated, and licentious. It was blamed for rising rates of illegitimacy. Born out of a vision of social unity, a way to achieve balance between the assertion of the individual and the cohesion of the group, collective improvisation was read by opponents in the opposite way, as social anarchy, an “impulse for wildness . . . traceable to the Negro influence.” The same kind of hysterical outrage would be repeated in the 1950s in opposition to rock and roll. This was no accident, since rock and roll renewed the same set of basic principles—easy to follow, easy to learn, funky, participatory, rhythmically exciting, full of blue notes, associated with African Americans.
Jazz from New Orleans carried tremendous artistic power, and it also carried a firm definition of black authenticity. In New Orleans, African Americans had been the main audience for the music, but even there, by the mid-1910s, a few white musicians were admiring the music from a distance. The (white) Original Dixieland Jazz Band made a nationwide splash in 1917 with a simplified version of collective improvisation. Their recording of Livery Stable Blues sold over a million copies. The ODJB was received as part novelty, part fun, part rebellion, and part subliminally racial fantasy, a white conveyer of African American energy. When Oliver and his colleagues arrived in Chicago, a group of young white musicians stumbled on the “real thing” and fell in love with it. The New Orleanians nicknamed them “alligators.”
“I was not only hearing a new form of music but was experiencing a whole new way of life,” gushed saxophonist Bud Freeman. Clarinetist Mezz Mezzrow went further than most. In 1928 he moved to Harlem and, in his words, “became a Negro.” Similar behavior and sentiments surface among white rock and rollers decades later.
The sounds of New Orleans offered the surest way for Ellington to establish black authenticity in his compositions. All of jazz was indebted to the New Orleanian achievement, but Ellington discovered a way to use it with special purpose. That soloists like Miley, Bigard, Hodges, and Williams also turned out to be superb collaborators was an unexpected benefit that he was uniquely prepared to exploit.
Edward Kennedy Ellington
Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington was born in Washington, D.C., on April 29, 1899, not exactly with a silver spoon in his mouth but with advantages that set him on a path toward musical leadership. His was the largest African American community in the nation (eighty-seven thousand people). The familiar categories of low, middle, and upper classes don’t go very far in explaining his family’s position. “I don’t know how many castes of Negroes there were in the city at that time, but I do know that if you decided to mix carelessly with another you would be told that one just did not do that sort of thing,” he remembered. His parents understood who was above and who below, and like everyone else they found ways to culturally articulate their social aspirations.
His father, James Edward Ellington, known as “J.E.,” was described by daughter Ruth as a “Chesterfieldian gentleman who wore gloves and spats, very intellectual and self educated.” J.E. sometimes worked as a butler and caterer, and he had enough social polish and connections to land occasional jobs in the White House. He mastered the terms of service—proper table settings, politeness, and how to interact with empowered whites. “The way the table was set was just like those at which my grandfather had butlered,” remembered Mercer Ellington, Duke’s son. “This you might say is where the dukedom began.” Ellington acknowledged copying his father’s sharp dress and “vocabulary,” by which he meant strategies of charm and persuasion. His father had an “unsurpassed aura of conviviality” and also entrepreneurial skills, landing contracts and hiring servants for one-time events—precisely the model his son used to break into the music business.
Ellington’s mother, Daisy, came from a social position a notch or two above J.E. Her father was one of only forty African American policemen in the entire District, while his parents had both been slaves; she completed high school, while his formal education ended in grade school. Daisy gave her son the confidence to believe he could take all the good that was provided for him—anything personal, social, or cultural—and develop it to the highest degree. She was a deeply religious person for whom nose glasses and lipstick were sinful. She convinced her son that he was blessed. Like countless African American parents she was determined to overcome the limitations of the past and move forward with conviction, faith, and hope.
Throughout his illustrious career, Ellington was described as someone who connected with people very easily. This was perhaps the most important gift of all that he got from his parents, his greatest asset, the one that made him a collaborator without peer. Ellington’s confidence was further nurtured by the neighborhood. “My strongest influences, my inspirations, were all Negro,” he reported, but this environment had little in common with the vernacular arena that shaped early jazz in New Orleans. It is impossible to imagine traces of the ring shout at the churches of Ellington’s youth. That kind of cultural expression was viewed as regressive, something to turn away from without looking back. The atmosphere was very different from the Sanctified full immersion that surrounded Oliver and Armstrong in New Orleans. Ellington watched churches and school groups perform pageants on the history and progress of the Negro race, elaborate productions with props, costumes, sets, actors, and musicians, themes that would later surface in his extended pieces like Black, Brown and Beige, which he subtitled a “tone parallel of the history of the American Negro.”
Social life for the Ellington family included regular mixing with whites. “In our house,” explained sister Ruth, “while I was growing up, people of all colors were there. More whites than coloreds. My father was like that.” This kind of social confidence was useful throughout his career.
At home Daisy read through uplifting parlor songs on the piano, and J.E. played “old standard operatic things” by ear. Young Edward took a few piano lessons with a teacher improbably named Mrs. Clinkscales, but he lacked patience, didn’t practice, and skipped the lessons whenever he could. Years later Ruth remembered hearing her brother’s band broadcasting live from the Cotton Club in New York City, she and her mother “sitting in this very respectable Victorian living room” and not knowing quite what to make of the “jungle music” coming through the radio.
“All through grade school, I had a genuine interest in drawing and painting, and I realized I had a sort of talent for them,” Ellington recalled. His skill in visual arts earned him a scholarship from the NAACP to attend Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, but he turned it down. Here is a biographical parallel with John Lennon, who attended art school in Liverpool for several years. Both composers were clever in surrounding their music with visual imagery, Ellington through titles and publicity material, Lennon through lyrics. An ability to bring strong conceptual definition to their music may have had something to do with talent in the visual arts. Though Ellington declined the art scholarship, he put his visual talent to practical use and set up a shop for painting signs. Yet music pulled him. A piano piece by Harvey Oliver Brooks called Junk Man Rag caused a musical epiphany at age fourteen. “I cannot tell you what that music did to me,” he remembered. He sought out Brooks and persuaded him to pass on some tips at the piano. He had enough basic ability to move ahead while he gathered stray tips from ragtime pianist Oliver “Doc” Perry and music teacher Henry Grant.
Ragtime was the music that set Ellington on fire during his teenage years. Most piano rags follow a formal approach known as “strain form,” which conditioned the way Ellington thought about music for decades to come. Strain form goes like this: the piece begins with a substantial phrase or section—a “strain”—that is repeated literally to form a couplet. A contrasting idea follows, and it too is repeated. After that there might be a return to the first idea, followed by yet another new idea or two, again with literal repetition. The process just described could be represented as AABBACCDD, the plan of many piano rags, including the most famous one ever written, Scott Joplin’s Maple Leaf Rag.
Strain form made it easy to combine material from different sources—floating bits of hymns, marches, popular songs, blues, arias, rags, and folk tunes—and for Ellington it opened up a natural way to collaborate. Even Joplin, who had high, artistically minded goals for himself, was not above adding a new strain to one already composed by Louis Chauvin: the two of them produced the elegant Heliotrope Bouquet (1907) in that way. Patching together material like this became standard practice in 1920s jazz. For example, Louis Armstrong composed a theme that became the foundation for Dippermouth Blues (“Dippermouth” was one of his nicknames). Joe Oliver then added a solo, and Johnny Dodds contributed two more strains. On the record label Oliver and Armstrong were identified as co-composers, but the lead sheet sent to the U.S. Copyright Office credited only Oliver. Oliver’s solo was the standout moment in the piece, and the recording helped spread his reputation. This was how a piece begun by Armstrong (and named after him) became identified with Oliver. We shall see similar stories with Ellington.
There are countless examples like this, most with gestations that are less clearly documented. Strain form made it easy to pull a piece together from various sources and slap your name on it. Bandleaders routinely took more credit than they were entitled to. This naturally became Ellington’s preferred approach for organizing material from different people.
His ragtime passion drove him to hang around pianists, ask questions, and gradually pick up repertory by ear. He learned how to play the different dance tempos—the one-step, two-step, waltz, tango, and fox trot. Someone showed him how to slow down a piano roll recorded by the great James P. Johnson so that he could track Johnson’s notes and get them under his fingers. When the master himself came to town, Ellington’s friends urged him onto the stage to play Johnson’s Carolina Shout (the reference is to the ring shout). Johnson warmly acknowledged him and the two became friends after Ellington moved to New York City.
In the summer of 1918, with his girlfriend Edna pregnant, it was time to think more seriously about increasing his income. On one job, a musician who had contracted the gig and hired Ellington to play piano explained that he himself couldn’t be there, so could Ellington please collect the one-hundred-dollar fee, keep ten dollars, and hand the rest over? This little eye-opener inspired Ellington to set up his own business. He had in front of him his father’s example of contracting and hiring, and he had picked up some of his interpersonal savvy. Saxophonist Otto Hardwick, who started playing with Ellington around this time and stayed with him for decades, described how Ellington started to pull in a lot of “dicty” (that is, high-class) jobs at embassies and private mansions. “Sometimes he had two or three jobs going at the same time and would rush around to make an appearance with each group he’d sent out.” Nothing original was expected at these gigs. The music was light and polite, in the background and “under conversation,” service with a smile. Ellington attributed his success to one-inch ads in the telephone book.
It was not exactly what his parents had raised him for, yet they were proud. “Well he picked up the piano by ear and now he’s making more money than I am,” his father bragged. He took a few lessons in music theory and notation with a teacher from Dunbar High School, but this kind of knowledge remained very sketchy. His greatest assets were on the management side. “Duke drew people to him like flies to sugar,” said Sonny Greer, a drummer who also began a long association in the early 1920s. In spite of his success, no one was overestimating his musical future. On the legitimate side of the spectrum he lacked solid musicianship, and on the bluesy vernacular side he didn’t have much exposure or obvious talent.
Indeed, the case could be made that it was Ellington’s distance from vernacular practices, not any close familiarity with them, that made it possible for him to later make them the basis for something new and original. The same argument can be made about the Beatles, whose contact with American rock and roll during their formative years was largely limited to 45 “singles.” “There was an awareness of what was happening in America, but an enormous ignorance about it,” observed one British contemporary. “We took on the PR of it, rather than the reality of it, so it wasn’t absolutely imitative, and that was what was so important and that’s why it was interesting and that’s why it was creative.”
In February 1923 a musician named Wilber Sweatman invited Greer, the drummer, to join his band in New York City, to which Greer replied that he would make the trip only if Sweatman hired Ellington and Hardwick as well. Sweatman conceded. In Harlem, Ellington got to know more stride pianists, including Willie “The Lion” Smith. “If anybody taught Ellington theory it was Willie,” claimed son Mercer. “He taught him things pianistically and he taught him things instrumentally.”
After a few transitions, Ellington, Greer, and Hardwick ended up in a six-piece band called the Washingtonians, which was led by Elmer Snowden. When they discovered that the leader was cheating them they decided to fire him, with Greer leading the way. Greer declined to assume leadership himself, however, and nominated Ellington: “He didn’t want it, but his disposition was better balanced than ours. He could keep us in line without doing much.”
New York City has long been the capital of the jazz world, but this was hardly the case in 1923. The New Orleanians made Chicago the cutting edge of jazz, and New York City caught up gradually. Yet Harlem was exploding with other kinds of intellectual and cultural energy, and it was increasingly well organized as an entertainment center supplying cultural labor for wealthy whites. Black musicians playing for white pleasure is a very old phenomenon in the United States, and now it was taking new form in the “black and tans.” The most famous and expensive black and tans meant (at least in New York City) exclusively black performances for exclusively white patrons. These clubs framed African American culture in a devious synthesis of stereotypical degradation and show-biz sophistication. They reassured wealthy whites of black inferiority and servitude at the same time that they paid top wages. They became a powerful cultural force. The Washingtonians landed a black-and-tan job at the Hollywood Café, a basement club on Forty-Ninth Street near Broadway, in the autumn of 1923. For the next decade or so, Ellington’s career would be largely based at black and tans, which heavily shaped his creative output.
This was where Bubber Miley entered Ellington’s band. Miley’s freak technique quickly gained notice in the New York Clipper: “This colored band is plenty torrid and includes a trumpet player . . . who exacts the eeriest sort of modulations and ‘singing’ notes heard.” Miley’s allure, Ellington remembered, caused him and the band to “forget all about the sweet music.”
Miley’s freak playing was soon supplemented with the hire of Charlie Irvis, a friend who played trombone. Their vocalized effects, regarded as deeply emotional inside African American communities, nicely fit the primitivist interests of whites at the black and tans, where they were heard as exotic and primitive. By autumn of 1926, Ellington and Miley would figure out a powerful recipe for extending the impact of this kind of music.
In the meantime Ellington tried his hand at composing and publishing. New York City may not have been the capital of jazz, but it was indeed the capital of the music industry, which included the publication of sheet music. Before he left Washington, Ellington had composed a couple of pieces. In New York he wrote some songs with Joe Trent, an established lyricist. When they sold one for fifty dollars Ellington was hooked. The Washingtonians recorded three tunes with at least partial compositional credit to Ellington in November of 1924. In the spring of 1925, Trent landed a contract to supply songs for an “all-colored” Broadway show called Chocolate Kiddies, and he invited Ellington to work with him.
Musicals with African American casts had exploded in popularity after the 1921 smash hit Shuffle Along, with songs by Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle, including I’m Just Wild About Harry. A Broadway show could launch a career like nothing else. James P. Johnson wrote The Charleston (1923) and If I Could Be with You (One Hour Tonight) (1926) for all-colored Broadway productions, and Fats Waller wrote Honeysuckle Rose and Ain’t Misbehavin’ (1929). It was a huge break for Ellington to enter this commercial world. But Chocolate Kiddies was a disappointment. While the backers tried it in Europe, the show never made it to Broadway. The songs composed by Trent and Ellington are undistinguished.
Ellington’s failed dip into Broadway show music naturally gives rise to a question: since the big money was here, why didn’t he develop further in this direction? Broadway hits fanned out across the country and just went on and on, as the famous tunes from Gershwin, Waller, and Blake still do. Ellington’s most recent biographer has suggested a provocative answer to the question that will not be to everyone’s liking: Ellington was simply not very good at writing tunes.
But what about Mood Indigo (1930) and Sophisticated Lady (1933)? Or In a Sentimental Mood (1935), Caravan (1936), I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart (1938), Do Nothin’ Till You Hear from Me (1943), and I’m Beginning to See the Light (1944)? By anybody’s standards, there are a lot of great tunes in this list, hummable melodies that people still identify with Ellington. The problem is that he didn’t write those tunes. Barney Bigard, Otto Hardwick, Johnny Hodges, Juan Tizol, and Cootie Williams wrote them, and Ellington then made songs out of them, sometimes with co-credit and sometimes with sole credit, falsely claimed.
When the critic Alec Wilder got around to Ellington in his book American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900–1950, he first explained that Ellington was primarily a composer of instrumental pieces, not songs. Some of his most popular pieces were adapted to become songs, and Wilder reviewed a few. He noted a big drop in quality at the bridge for Don’t Get around Much Anymore (1942). “It simply hasn’t the verve of the main strain,” he wrote. Indeed—the verve part was composed by Johnny Hodges. When Ellington took one of his sidemen’s catchy tunes and made a piece out of it, as happened here, the bridge was typically where he inserted his own ideas to fill out the chorus. Hodges’s name does not appear on record labels as co-composer, and it does not appear in Wilder’s discussion, just Ellington and, with this song, a complete misunderstanding of what the leader accomplished.
As a composer of melody, Ellington was no Waller, no Blake, no Gershwin, no McCartney. Inevitably there will be arguments about this or that tune, but it seems wise to simply hold in a suspended state of curiosity the idea that he didn’t become a composer of Broadway hits because he lacked the talent to do so. This could also be framed more positively: he didn’t devote himself to Broadway hits because he turned out to be much better at something else. He figured out how to compose collaboratively, according to a quirky set of exchanges and relations that made him one of a kind. His principal partners would not be lyricists, in the Broadway model, but the musicians who worked in his band. Collaborative composition turned out to be a perfect way to compensate for his weaknesses and maximize his strengths.
In the spring of 1925 the Hollywood Café reopened as the Kentucky Club, and Duke Ellington’s Washingtonians, as the band was soon called, continued to build their reputation. White musicians stopped by to hear them. The famous bandleader Paul Whiteman gave him a fifty-dollar tip one evening. Work like this was good for professional development if you could hack the grueling hours. “Once you put your horn to your mouth, you didn’t take it out until you quit,” remembered Freddy Guy. The band expanded to seven players and then eight, sometimes reaching ten and increasing its expressive range.
Meanwhile, there were more opportunities to record. “Race records,” as they were known during this period, were made by African American musicians and marketed to African American audiences. Without race records, music history would be very different: we would lack recordings of the King Oliver Creole Jazz Band, Bessie Smith and dozens of blues singers, Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five, Jelly Roll Morton’s Red Hot Peppers, and much, much else. In 1920, Okeh Records took a chance and recorded Mamie Smith singing Crazy Blues. The company was handsomely rewarded for its risk. Competitors followed, each with their own label, color coded to keep everything separate from the main (white) part of the business. The business model for race records was low budget, with little rehearsal, low pay, and little oversight.
The production of race records was monitored slightly, if at all. The recordings were so cheap to make that flops were not a big deal, which allowed musicians to experiment, as Armstrong did, for example, with his scat hit Heebie Jeebies (1926).
The situation was very different from the 1950s, where studio producers, representing the company, intervened at many levels. A by-product of this business model was that performers were expected to record their own compositions so that the company didn’t have to pay royalties; instead they could simply pay the composer-performer a modest fee. This inspired those performers to compose more, and it is one of the reasons why we have a lot of recorded compositions during this period from Joe Oliver, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington.
The performers didn’t get paid much for race recordings but they got good publicity, as Oliver found out with Dippermouth Blues. If their compositions got recorded by others, then the copyright holder of the tune could reap a windfall. Following the success of the blues singers, dance bands found their way onto race records with ensembles like King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band in 1923, the Clarence Williams’ Blue Five in 1924, and Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five in 1925. In November 1924, Ellington’s band recorded seven sides, followed by two sides in the fall of 1925 and four in the spring of 1926. But Bubber Miley, the star trumpeter who had put the band on the map and made Ellington forget all about the sweet stuff, irresponsibly missed every one of them. These recordings offer nothing noteworthy, certainly nothing that would predict the recordings that would soon make him famous.
Modern Black Music
Jazz acquired so much momentum that it became one of the defining cultural features of the 1920s, maybe even the most defining of all. That was partly thanks to the protean nature of the word itself, which soon came to mean many different kinds of music. Jazz became a sprawling field of almost infinite blends, a heady play between black music and white music, blues and ragtime, popular and classical, soloists and groups, ear-based playing and notation, collective improvisation and fixed arrangements, song and dance, and rough-and-ready tone production and conservatory-based sound. New Orleans got it started, but that was not necessarily everyone’s first thought when they heard the word “jazz.” The idea of making music modern, a huge theme for this period, helped drive innovation. As Ellington settled into his career he had to contemplate where in this large arena of possibility his place would be.
He was doing well at the Kentucky Club, but he was still small potatoes compared with big-name white bandleaders like Paul Whiteman, Isham Jones, and Paul Ash. More within reach was Fletcher Henderson’s Orchestra, probably the most successful African American dance band in the country by 1926. Henderson had a regular gig at the Roseland Ballroom, on Broadway between Fifty-First and Fifty-Second Streets, not far from the Kentucky Club. “My biggest ambition was to sound like Fletcher,” Ellington remembered. His eventual breakthrough depended on being different from Henderson, but he got there through mastering the model Henderson established. This meant figuring out how to satisfy white audiences.
Henderson (1897–1952) arrived in New York City in the summer of 1920 fresh from Atlanta University, where he majored in chemistry and served as university organist. His intention was to attend Columbia University, but he soon hooked up with the Pace and Handy Music Company and put his academic plans aside. Most of the advantages enjoyed by Ellington when he was growing up were cleanly trumped by Henderson. W. E. B. Du Bois’s concept of a “talented tenth,” the African American elite who were, in Du Bois’s view, destined to lead “The Race” forward, could have been framed with Henderson in mind. Henderson’s father, Fletcher Sr., taught Latin and served as school principal in Cuthbert, Georgia. Fletcher Jr. practiced classical piano daily beginning at age six, locked in the family parlor. Even after his son became famous, Fletcher Sr. refused to allow jazz recordings to be played in his house.
The Pace and Handy Music Company was loaded with prestige, first because of partner W. C. Handy’s accomplishments in composing and publishing, with huge hits like St. Louis Blues, and second because of Black Swan Records, formed by Harry Pace. The company’s goal was to put forward the best The Race had to offer, and they did not mean jazz, at least not initially. Black Swan’s cultural vision of high-brow classical music was sanctioned by the NAACP, which bought shares in the company. Pace, too, was a graduate of Atlanta University (1903 valedictorian) and he welcomed young Henderson as “musical director and recording manager.” Henderson stepped into the expanding scene with promise and optimism. But before he knew it he was leading a dance band of his own. His was not a jazz band but a step above, which was precisely what the Roseland Ballroom was looking for when they hired him. This whites-only ballroom was slightly upscale. Every night it featured two bands that took turns and provided continuous music without a break. Henderson went head-to-head with first-rate white bands led by Vincent Lopez and Sam Lanin. The interracial competition must have given the scene a touch of daring.
Henderson was inventing a new talented-tenth script by competing with white dance bands on their own turf. The African American press loved to write about his success. He made records with major labels like Vocalion and Columbia, both marketing to whites. Henderson’s was not a jazz band when he entered the Roseland, but it was just around this time that jazz was starting to infiltrate the repertory of the fancy white bands. Henderson naturally followed suit. He enjoyed one advantage over his white rivals: he could hire African American soloists, many of whom were better at playing the “hot” solo style. In the fall of 1924 he brought in trumpeter Louis Armstrong and clarinetist Buster Bailey.
Since Henderson was recording not on the cheaper race labels but on high-end white labels, the companies set him up with recent hits, for which they paid royalties to composers. This meant that he could record all the tunes he was performing at the Roseland rather than slapping together ad hoc pieces and arrangements made for recording sessions, as Oliver, Armstrong, Ellington, and most other African American bands were forced to do. Bands like Henderson’s had well-rehearsed sections of instruments—a trumpet section and a saxophone section, maybe even a couple of trombones—the opposite in some ways to the spontaneous and participatory sound of collective improvisation. When a song became popular it was turned into a dance-band arrangement. The same published arrangements were purchased and played by virtually everyone. Or you could skip the sheet music and wander over to a bar with a “fistful of nickels,” as Mercer Ellington described his father doing, play a recording over and over again on the jukebox and gradually crib the details. This continued to be standard practice into the 1950s, when the Beatles learned how to do it. It was also common to “doctor the stocks,” which meant personalizing the arrangement in some way to distinguish your version from everyone else’s.
But by the mid-1920s, more and more elite bands were hiring arrangers as a way to distinguish themselves even further. The arranger played a creative role every bit as important as an improvising soloist or a composer of tunes. Henderson hired arranger Don Redman in 1923, and it was Redman’s work, more than anyone else’s, that defined the band’s sound until he departed in 1927.
Redman’s primary focus was to pack as much variety into the three-minute arrangement as could be managed. There always needed to be a catchy intro and ending, as well as space for one or more hot soloists. Instrumentation might change as often as every measure. Tunes and melodic fragments tossed through the orchestra in a dizzying back and forth. Redman could direct a soloist to play the lead melody or an entire section to do it, accompanied by subdued chords or with exciting call and response, all of it moving with soft demure or toward vigorous climax. Emphasis was on novelty and surprise, high values for the Jazz Age.
In 1925, Redman took the Oliver-Armstrong Dippermouth Blues from 1923 and made a fresh arrangement of it. He renamed it Sugar Foot Stomp, and asked Armstrong himself to contribute a version of his mentor’s famous solo. Sugar Foot Stomp is a clever reconceptualization of the original. In the 1923 recording from the Oliver band, bass player Bill Johnson yells out, at a climactic moment, “Oh play that thing!” as if Oliver and his musicians were all in church, urging one another to spiritual ecstasy. In the Henderson version Redman delivers the outburst, but more subdued and understated. “Play” now means playful. Jazz Age cool replaces the feverish intensity of the ring shout. Redman’s achievement was to capture that lighthearted playfulness throughout the arrangement, through bouncy new melodies, through Armstrong’s confident but understated solo, and with some slick harmonic turns.
Redman and other arrangers were also experimenting with ways to integrate soloists into their arrangements. T.N.T., recorded in October 1925, is a good example. T.N.T. has the usual respect for variety, with the main theme tweaked differently almost every time it returns. In several strains Armstrong is set in dialogue with the orchestra, with nice movement between his hot solo style and the more orderly lines of the arranged theme. In Carolina Stomp, recorded in the same month, Redman scripts vigorous responses to Armstrong in a crisp dialogue. Redman and Henderson were not just framing their featured hot soloist but learning from him. Armstrong inspired a melodic style in their arrangements that was more expansive and more driving. He “changed our whole idea about the band musically,” Redman insisted.
1.4 Fletcher Henderson
When Ellington said that he wanted to be like Henderson, he had all of this in mind—the ability to compete with the best white dance bands, high-end white patronage, personalized arrangements, a nice array of hot soloists, and polished ensemble playing.
Henderson’s success automatically established him as an emblem of black modernity. The search for a modern African American identity during the 1920s was fueled from three different directions—the Great Migration and the historic aspirations attached to it; Du Bois’s talented-tenth vision for the future of The Race; and the nationwide fervor for a seemingly endless stream of cultural, social, economic, and technological inventions. African American journalists viewed Henderson’s band as the direction African American jazz should take. “Modernism will always rule,” wrote music columnist Dave Peyton in the Chicago Defender, and what he had in mind was exactly the kind of music Henderson specialized in.
With the 1920s showering financial rewards on those who were good at coming up with new inventions, there was no shortage of musical talent stepping forward. From a direction quite different than Henderson’s came Jelly Roll Morton. Less engaged with established paths into commercial success, Morton found his own way. Ellington paid attention and picked up something very different from the nearby examples in midtown Manhattan.
Morton was a pianist, composer, arranger, entertainer, and tall-tale huckster who, like many of his fellow New Orleanians, filed a lot of tunes for copyright. A number of them carried far beyond the U.S. Copyright Office: Morton’s King Porter Stomp, for example, became Benny Goodman’s theme during the Swing Era. In 1926, Morton organized a band of clarinet, cornet, trombone, banjo, drums, and bass, with himself on piano. Everyone was from New Orleans. He named the band “Jelly Roll Morton’s Red Hot Peppers.” The intention was to work out fresh arrangements of Morton’s own compositions, but only for the recording studio. The band never performed in public.
The results stand as one of the greatest series of recordings in jazz history. In tune after tune Morton frames solos, changes textures and combinations of instruments, uses contrasts of loud and soft, and micromanages the production of elegant little gems. The series is an early example of a composer who regards the phonograph as a chance to make a compositional statement he could not have otherwise made. The musicians got paid to rehearse, a rare thing at the time, which allowed Morton to develop his ideas in direct contact with the band.
Morton launched the series with Black Bottom Stomp, a reworking of an earlier piano rag. This is one of many pieces (for example, Charleston Rag, Heebie Jeebies, Georgia Grind, Mess Around, East St. Louis Toodle-O) from the period that links to a dance. It is one of the best. Like countless dances throughout American history, the Black Bottom emerged from the African American community and made its way into white society as a cut-loose bit of fun. By the time Morton recorded on September 15, 1926, the dance had just made a big splash on Broadway, and the Dancing Masters of America had declared it the Charleston’s successor. The Prince and Princess of Romania announced their intention to learn the steps on their upcoming visit to the United States, in October. “You clap your hands on your rear end,” went one description. “Then you bend your legs and go down, down to the floor, twisting and turning, close to your partner. Then you come back up and move away from your partner and give him the come-on with your fingers down here.” The Juvenile Protection Agency of Chicago complained that the Black Bottom “has ceased to be a dance at all and is merely an immoral exhibition,” but that was not enough to derail its momentum and may have had the opposite effect. Black and tans were hopping with the Black Bottom in 1926.
1.5 Jelly Roll Morton, 1926
Morton captured the pizzazz of the whole phenomenon and gave it lasting musical definition in this recording. Gunther Schuller has described the musical form:
Intro A1 A2 A3 Interlude B1 B2 B3 B4 B5 B6 B7 Coda
Many race recordings from this period are organized in this way. What usually happens is that a theme is stated completely, then followed by a string of improvised solos that are based on the chords supporting the theme. Morton’s strategy is to bring in tricks from the arranger’s table. He blends elements of variety with touches of continuity while taking full advantage of his musicians’ New Orleanian skill set.
His A theme is nothing fancy but it is crisp and attractive, the kind of thing Ellington would have swapped his cummerbund to be able to compose in 1926. According to Barney Bigard, who played with both men, Morton “wrote more damn tunes than Duke Ellington ever thought about writing.” It is played by full orchestra, but the way it is constructed implies a sort of call and response. A2 makes that explicit: the trumpet improvises (or is it scripted?) over the chords, and it is answered by the second part of the theme, played by the orchestra. A3 brings another improvisation, now by the clarinet, but without the call and response. The plan produces a gradual metamorphosis from highly organized to seemingly spontaneous.
As if to ratchet up formal strength once again, the interlude, a quick call and response between trumpet and orchestra, modulates with strong focus to set up the new theme. There was a tradition in New Orleans of bringing performances to a rousing finish in the final chorus with collective improvisation and a vigorous thump on every beat, especially on bass. Morton puts this texture here, at the first statement of the B theme. The effect is to electrify the entire second half of the piece. The B statements that follow are neatly varied with changing details of instrumentation, rhythmic accompaniment, texture, countermelodies, range, melodic variation, dynamics, and improvisation. Each is energized by a two-bar “break,” dashes of solo vigor of which Morton was especially fond.
With the Red Hot Peppers Morton found a splendid way to mix writing with improvisation, arrangement with spontaneity, micromanagement from the central controller with intuitive ear playing from the vernacular tradition. The musicians were happy to yield to his preference or assert themselves, whatever he wanted. It can be hard to tell where the break is between Morton’s writing and improvised solos, which seems to have been part of his conception. It is a splendid response to the available resources, sui generis. Morton picks and chooses with unrivaled ease between the unnotated approach favored by Oliver and the notated approach preferred by Henderson. The composer-arranger’s control is loose enough to bring in the musicians’ performer-centered creativity, yet firm enough to work with principles of variety, contrast, and formal patterns of design.
In this strategy he anticipated Ellington. Morton never ran a band for very long, but if he had done that, with a working orchestra continuously at his fingertips, he might have gone even further in the direction Ellington ultimately followed. Temperamentally he was a lone cowboy who never could have sustained the complex musical-business relationships that Ellington was born and raised to finesse.
From yet another direction still came James P. Johnson, whom we have already met when Ellington learned his rag Carolina Shout from a piano roll. Like Henderson, Johnson had solid training on classical piano. He was also a good composer. His hit If I Could Be with You (One Hour Tonight) became one of the decade’s enduring standards (1926; lyrics by Henry Creamer). Johnson’s reach for musical innovation included classically inspired compositions built around “folk” material. His Yamekraw: A Negro Rhapsody (1927) was a model for Ellington’s extended compositions a few years later. Johnson described Yamekraw as “a genuine Negro treatise on spiritual, syncopated and ‘blue’ melodies.” There are scattered examples throughout music history of one composer orchestrating another’s composition, a collaborative relationship though not necessarily one that involves active exchange. Ferde Grofé brilliantly orchestrated Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, for example, which was the model for Johnson’s Yamekraw. The composer William Grant Still, who made a specialty out of the art of orchestration, built on Grofé’s achievement and orchestrated Yamekraw, lifting it to a higher level.
In 1926, Ellington and his band were doing well, especially when the recreant Miley showed up. But when he mulled over ways to advance further, Ellington must have seen the obstacles. He had neither the ear-playing skills of Morton nor the technical skills of Henderson. He lacked Johnson’s command of harmony and melodic craft. The dozen or so pieces he had recorded through the fall of 1926 put him nowhere near any of these musicians. He studied the arrangements of Redman, Morton, Oliver, and anyone else who caught his fancy, though he lacked their training and abilities. Yet in this vigorously expanding marketplace, there was plenty of opportunity for African American bandleaders who could combine, in some fresh package, the skills of manager, leader, entrepreneur, arranger, composer, performer, and cultural visionary. When the talented tenth thought of how to move The Race forward, they did not have in mind the commercial wheeling and dealing of popular culture. Jazz musicians surprised them. Fertile synergy between creative exploration and popular culture turned out to be a potent mix that could explode with powerful results.
In Harlem, Ellington stumbled upon a connection that made a difference, not in career opportunities or musical models but on a deeper level. Will Marion Cook was an old-school professional on Broadway, a member of the talented tenth before the phrase was coined. Cook was born in 1869 in Washington, D.C., where his father was the dean of Howard University School of Law. At age 15 he attended Oberlin College, from which both of his parents had graduated, to study violin. From there he made his way to the Berlin Hochschule für Musik and took violin lessons with the legendary Joseph Joachim, a close associate of Brahms. Back in the United States he studied composition with the equally legendary Antonín Dvořák at the National Conservatory of Music of America, in Manhattan. By the time Ellington met him he had a career as a composer, arranger, and conductor, especially for all-colored Broadway shows.
Cook had a good sense of tunes, arrangements, and what it meant to be a professional African American musician, though he lacked the interpersonal skills to make the most of his abilities. Ellington started to hang around with him in the mid-1920s. “I can see him now with that beautiful mane of white hair flowing in the breeze as he and I rode uptown through Central Park in the summertime in a taxi with an open top,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I would ask questions and get my education.”
A few choice words stuck. “First you find the logical way,” Cook told him, “and when you find it, avoid it, and let your inner self break through and guide you.” At least once this general guideline was illustrated in specific detail. “I’d sing a melody in its simplest form,” Ellington recalled, “and he’d stop me and say, ‘Reverse your figures.’” Cook’s authority gave Ellington confidence. Jazz originality was bursting out all over during the mid- and late 1920s, and though it took him some time, Ellington was figuring out how he could participate.
The solution was to collaborate. In itself this was not surprising, since virtually all of the musical greatness we have covered so far involved some kind of gathering of creative forces into a single musical statement, from Oliver’s collective improvisation to Redman’s distribution of hot soloists and arranged parts to Morton’s savvy blend of compositional control and improvisational freedom to Johnson’s reliance on William Grant Still. Ellington discovered a collaborative model different from all others. It involved a fresh blend of performance, arrangement, and composition. We could say that he took the logical way of organizing these three activities and flipped it.
Until the last few months of 1926, arrangements in the Ellington band do not seem to have been a very high priority. Like most bands, Ellington doctored the stocks. The band typically worked out a “head arrangement,” which meant finding its way as a group, trying out various ideas, and memorizing without recourse to writing. Bechet described going to Ellington’s apartment (we don’t know exactly when this happened), where the musicians talked through the possibilities, experimented on the piano, and got “the feeling for the band, playing together . . . The arrangements, they came out of that,” he explained. It was easy to make suggestions and include the best from each musician. Hot solos, the head arrangement, and the preexistent tune and its harmonies all stood in a fairly conventional relationship with one another.
Ellington’s flip of the conventional way depended on one voice emerging from the band and standing above all others. In the summer of 1926, Bubber Miley, the flamboyant trumpet player who had put the band on the black-and-tan map of Manhattan, came up with a stunning solo that got Ellington thinking differently. Ellington’s creative stroke followed Miley’s, and it involved an ingenious way to blur the boundaries between the largely separate categories of composition, performance, and arrangement. This unconventional move would become Ellington’s recipe for making the biggest mark of all in the burgeoning world of jazz.