CHAPTER 4
BILLY STRAYHORN
IN THE NOVEL East of Eden, John Steinbeck’s narrator articulates, with special emphasis, a conventional view of solitary creativity:
Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of man.
That this view is held so widely explains how the image of Ellington as a self-sufficient, great composer has acquired such relentless traction—which, in turn, is why any honest assessment requires considerable effort to identify and draw out the collaborative practices that Ellington thoroughly depended on. Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, along with Lennon and McCartney, are the preeminent musical cases contradicting the East of Eden view.
A huge step forward in understanding Strayhorn’s role was made in two books published around the year 2000: Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn (1996) by David Hajdu, was followed by Something to Live For: The Music of Billy Strayhorn (2002) by Walter van de Leur. Strayhorn’s contributions were so strong that Ellington’s career inevitably divides into two parts—before Strayhorn and after. People often wonder how Ellington was able to keep his creative engines going through the 1940s and all the way into the 1960s. There is only one answer: Billy Strayhorn. Literature on Ellington divides along similar lines—books written before Strayhorn’s role was so carefully documented and books written after (and among the after, authors who have been paying attention and those who haven’t).
The story of how Lennon and McCartney first met circulated soon after the Beatles became famous, but the first encounter between Ellington and Strayhorn was not revealed to the public until almost thirty years after Strayhorn’s death. Ellington was thirty-nine, a famous figure, Strayhorn a twenty-three-year-old unknown outside of his hometown, when they were introduced on December 2, 1938, backstage, after a concert in Pittsburgh. Ellington was playing a weeklong gig at the Stanley Theater, and a friend of Strayhorn’s arranged for the pianist to play a couple of his compositions for the leader between shows. “Mr. Ellington, this is the way you played this number in the show,” Strayhorn confidently announced as he sat down and played Sophisticated Lady. It did indeed sound just like what Ellington had played on stage. “Now this is the way I would play it,” he continued, and he produced an interpretation that his friend described as “pretty hip-sounding and further and further ‘out there’ as he went on.” Ellington was impressed. He asked Strayhorn if he could do that again, so the pianist repeated his comparative exercise, this time with Solitude. Before Strayhorn left the theater Ellington asked him to arrange a song for Ivie Anderson, which the band performed a few days later, without a rehearsal but with glowing success.
Our central collaborative pairs, Ellington-Strayhorn and Lennon-McCartney, share a similar biographical moment: in each case, the leader was introduced to a younger musician, eager to join, who was clearly the leader’s musical superior. On the level of musical chops, McCartney was unequivocally beyond Lennon, and one can make that same case for Strayhorn and Ellington. That will sound outrageous to anyone who is used to hearing how equal Lennon and McCartney were, and to anyone who is accustomed to thinking of Strayhorn as Ellington’s helpful assistant. Each leader had enough confidence to bring in the younger and superior talent, which turned out to be a very smart move.
Ellington had built his career around hiring excellent musicians and using them in ways that did not occur to others. In Pittsburgh he must have sensed the possibilities right away. Occasionally he described Strayhorn as his lyricist and orchestrator, which would be something like the Yankees saying they acquired Babe Ruth for his pitching skills. But after Strayhorn’s death he gave a heartfelt account of how closely the two had worked together: “Billy Strayhorn was my right arm, my left arm, all the eyes in the back of my head, my brain waves in his head, and his in mine.” That was the level of creative intimacy that made it possible for Strayhorn to modernize the Ellington collective at the height of the Swing Era more powerfully than anyone else possibly could have.
William Thomas Strayhorn (1915–1967) was born in Dayton, Ohio, to parents who had both grown up in North Carolina. Each parent enjoyed modest advantages. His mother Lillian graduated from a two-year program at Shaw University in Raleigh, and his father James’s family had once owned a whiskey distillery. His father’s parents lived in a handsome home in Hillsborough (at the corner of Hillsborough Avenue and West Margaret Lane), where Billy spent summers when he was young. Even though he grew up in slum houses, in marginal neighborhoods, and with debilitating family tension, he also was in touch with a sense of greater possibilities; these he embraced in his vivid imagination. The family moved several times before landing in Pittsburgh in 1920.
His mother was a loving, caring woman, devoted to her son. Reading about their relationship makes one think of the Daisy-Edward relationship back in Washington, D.C. Strayhorn’s father, however, was no J. E. Ellington. His daughter described him as “bright” with “lots of personality,” but “back then, who needed a bright black man with personality?” He grew bitter and frustrated as he drifted through jobs of unskilled labor. Heavy drinking led to physical abuse and cruelty. Billy, quiet and small, got used to taking his father’s worst. His mother sent him to Hills borough during the summers, where his grandparents doted on him. His grandmother, a church pianist, happily watched the child pick out hymns he heard on Sundays on her piano. A record player was part of the fun in Hillsborough.
As a young teenager Billy worked odd jobs and saved enough money to buy a piano for himself. He took lessons at a music store. His childhood was marked by a degree of racial integration that included schools. Smart and somewhat shy, he spent a lot of time at the music store, buying whatever sheet music he could afford, and also at the town library, reading constantly. “He would ask me if I had heard of César Franck,” said a childhood friend. He was finding ways to nurture his intelligence and artistic sensitivity through music and literature, creating an alternative world for himself that did not depend on traveling to North Carolina, hiding from his father, or analyzing why he was so different from other children. “I think my brother really dove with full force into everything my mother always wanted for him—music, books, art, the whole world of culture,” explained his sister.
The public high school he attended offered a distinguished education in music that produced Strayhorn and then jazz pianist Ahmad Jamal. The music teacher, Carl McVicker, welcomed all talent, black or white, rich or poor, and he valued not only classical music but jazz as well. Strayhorn “learned everything we could teach him,” remembered McVicker. Strayhorn’s main interest was classical music, and he passionately embraced theory, piano, and repertory. He brilliantly performed Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A Minor in 1934, his senior year, with the school orchestra. “He kept to himself, since there weren’t too many black fellows in classical music back then,” recalled a classmate. He read The New Yorker. His nickname was “Dictionary,” and he liked to speak French.
By the time Ellington met him in late 1938, Strayhorn had assembled an impressive portfolio, including student pieces inspired by Chopin. He composed a concerto of his own that was stylistically indebted to Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue; it was performed at the commencement for his high school class. For a revue called Fantastic Rhythm he wrote ten songs, dance music, and incidental music. The production enjoyed some local success, and two Pittsburgh legends, singer Billy Eckstine and pianist Erroll Garner, performed in it for stretches. He enrolled at the Pittsburgh Musical Institute and returned his focus to classical music. Someone gave him an Art Tatum record and he wore it out, fascinated with the audacious harmonies and pianistic virtuosity. He was attracted to the elegant playing of pianist Teddy Wilson. “What he realized, we talked about, was that everything he loved about classical music was there, in one form or another, in jazz—and here was a place he could apply himself,” remembered a musician friend.
Compared with Ellington, Strayhorn’s musical education was more systematic, more notation based, theoretical, with much stronger cultivation of performance and much stronger awareness of classical repertory. His training came through in his early compositions from Pittsburgh, several of which were good enough to achieve world-class standing.
By 1936 he had finished Lush Life, one of his most admired songs. He began composing it in 1933 at age eighteen and then tinkered with it for three years. It took a long time for the song to break out of his private world. Singer Kay Davis premiered it at Carnegie Hall in 1948, with Strayhorn accompanying her from the piano. Recordings by Nat “King” Cole, Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, Johnny Hartman, John Coltrane, Linda Ronstadt, and many others followed. The long gestation and the very long delay to professional performance reflect Lush Life’s complexity, which pushes it closer to classical music than popular music. The intricate chords resolve irregularly, and the melody is also irregular, with very little repetition. Sparkling rhymes and chromatic details flicker by. The lyrics are clever (“relaxes” is quickly rhymed with “axis,” for example) but they feel too world weary for such a young composer. Everything is integrated at a sophisticated level, the result of three years of polishing. “Every now and then I’d go back to it, and add a little more to it,” Strayhorn remembered. It is easy to imagine how Ellington, attacked in the press for being too artistically ambitious and aiming above the heads of his audiences, might have been reluctant to challenge them with Lush Life. His band never issued a recording of it.
By 1937 he had completed another song, Something to Live For, which became the first of his pieces recorded by Ellington (March 1939). This tender ballad has a very different feeling from the delicate flamboyance of Lush Life. It was one of the compositions he sang and played during his Pittsburgh audition. The recording sold well in the spring of 1939, with Ellington’s name slapped on the disc as co-composer. Your Love Has Faded was another Pittsburgh composition recorded by the Ellington Orchestra in 1939, with Ellington’s name again added as co-composer. This became the first Strayhorn vehicle for Johnny Hodges, a long and fruitful pairing.
Before departing Pittsburgh to begin his new job, in January 1939, Strayhorn reportedly composed Take the “A” Train. At their first meeting Ellington had given the job applicant a couple of arranging tests, which he passed with honors. As he got ready to assume his new position he was nervous, so he thought to impress his boss once again by taking the directions Ellington had written out on how to get to his apartment in Harlem (don’t take the new D train, you’ll end up in the Bronx) and give them musical shape. Take the “A” Train is very modern, very hip, and instantly likeable, an effortless mix of relaxed swing, angular bebop, and experimental Bartók, all of it coming out as excellent Strayhorn. The recording from January 1941 became a best seller, and Ellington started using the piece as his theme number. Over the decades it became the number most associated with Ellington, though he never claimed credit for it. To the contrary, he explained many times to surprised admirers that it was in fact Strayhorn who had composed the most famous of all Ellington pieces. As we shall see, Ellington’s choice of making this song his emblem naturally followed Strayhorn’s success in changing the band’s sound.
Take the “A” Train is as much a part of early 1940s New York City optimism and modernity as Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie (1943). Dynamic, fresh, and colorful—this was how the city felt to two outsiders grateful to be there. Mondrian arrived in Manhattan in 1940, in flight from the Nazis, already with an appreciation of jazz. This painting and this piece of music each find a sweet spot of modernist integrity that is also instantly accessible. They convey the energy of democratized cosmopolitanism, powerful and inviting.
This was Strayhorn when Ellington first met him and practically hired him on the spot: super talented, intellectual, articulate, ambitious, well trained, and slightly diffident. When he arrived in Manhattan he was nobody’s baby, even though he sort of looked like one. His soft facial features reminded people of the cartoon character Swee’Pea, in the Popeye comic strip series, so that became his nickname. It is not clear how much his sexual identity was evident, even to himself, but it did not take long for Manhattan to inspire confidence in his homosexuality. “There wasn’t a lot of guys [besides Strayhorn] who was homosexual and acted like that, like there it was and you have to accept it,” explained clarinetist Jimmy Hamilton. “And if you don’t—that’s your problem.”
His first Manhattan residence was the Harlem YMCA, but within a few days he moved into Ellington’s apartment, where he remained for almost a year, sharing the spacious accommodations with Ellington’s girlfriend Mildred Dixon, his sister Ruth, his son Mercer, and of course Ellington himself when he wasn’t touring. Strayhorn, Dixon, Ruth, and Mercer were all fairly close in age, and Strayhorn felt like part of the family. Ellington sent him songs and asked for quick arrangements for a recording session. In late March the band toured Europe, leaving Strayhorn behind, footloose and fancy-free in Manhattan. He took the opportunity to compose the lovely, aching Day Dream (recorded by the Ellington Orchestra in 1940 with Ellington given co-credit) and Passion Flower (recorded in 1941 with credit solely to Strayhorn). Both became specialties for Hodges. The harmonic language of Passion Flower recalls Debussy, quite distinct from the quirky harmonies Ellington liked to experiment with at his piano. “At that time people weren’t writing with that extensive level of theory,” said composer-arranger Locksley “Slide” Hampton. “His compositions were very involved. But the thing that stood out was that, with all that theory that was there, you still had a very human spiritual side to his music.”
“You’ll do whatever you feel like doing,” Ellington promised his new assistant when the two of them agreed to work together. Here he was in a luxury apartment in Manhattan, figuring out how to bring the sensitivity of contemporary classical music to jazz pieces with popular aspirations. He was indeed doing exactly what he felt like doing.
As we look at the dramas of their relationship over the next decades, Ellington often seems like an exploiter of his assistant’s talent. But imagine these initial years from Strayhorn’s point of view. You are young, unconnected, slightly introverted, nerdy, African American, and homosexual, with musical talent bursting out all over the place. What are your options? You would perhaps like to be associated with one of the great classical institutions of the United States, one of its symphony orchestras, conservatories, or opera houses. In 1939 they are not exactly begging you to join them. Or even better, to have a career as a concert pianist or a renowned composer. The point has often been made that during the Jim Crow era jazz benefited in a perverse way from discrimination. More than a few gifted African American musicians who were blocked from careers in classical music were delighted to find in jazz an idiom that valued sophistication and refinement. For no one is that truer than for Strayhorn. And within the vast, increasingly diverse world of jazz, there was no better place for him to be than with Ellington, who had been rubbing up against the prestige of classical music for a decade. Ellington offered a secure existence with one of the best dance bands in the country, on retainer with few steady obligations, a gig that was tough to top.
Strayhorn and the Ellington Miracle, 1940–1941
Can it really be coincidence that Ellington’s miraculous, midlife renewal at age forty-one dates from just after Strayhorn joined? In most accounts of this period Strayhorn’s role is underplayed. Webster, Blanton, and Strayhorn are always mentioned, but there is a tendency to emphasize Blanton and Webster. This follows from the view of Ellington “writing for his musicians,” just as Bach did. Blanton and Webster are understood as unique performers who inspired the master to compositional renewal. We have already seen how they were more than that, with Webster making significant contributions in composing, including most of the celebrated Cotton Tail. Strayhorn seems to have been as important as any member of the creative collective during this special period.
There were three main areas for Strayhorn to work in. The first was composing by himself. In the winter of 1940–1941 he wrote Chelsea Bridge and Rain Check, both with disc credit given solely to him. These two pieces demonstrate how well the young composer had settled into his position.
Chelsea Bridge, elegant and ambitious, is one of Strayhorn’s triumphs. He said later that the original title was Battersea Bridge, after James Whistler’s painting Nocturne: Blue and Gold—Old Battersea Bridge (ca. 1875). Whistler alluded to music in the titles for many of his paintings, for example, Symphony in White, Arrangement in Gray, and Harmony in Gold. Nocturne is an unmistakable reference to a set of atmospheric piano pieces by Chopin. Strayhorn returns the compliment and implies a connection between his own Chelsea Bridge and Whistler’s misty sensibility.
Nocturne: Blue and Gold—Old Battersea Bridge was the kind of painting the famous art critic John Ruskin couldn’t stand. Ruskin objected to Whistler’s emphasis on the subjective arrangements and nonrepresentational harmonies at the expense of realistic naturalism and moral clarity. Whistler was “flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face,” he sneered. Many decades later, the inspiration of Whistler’s painting turned Strayhorn’s mind toward two composers whose music he knew very well—the great French impressionists Debussy and Ravel.
The main theme of Chelsea Bridge is close to a theme from Ravel’s Valses Nobles et Sentimentales. The resemblance lasts for only a few bars, and it is mainly a matter of a distinctive harmonic progression. Debussy and Ravel both liked to take highly charged chords and spring them loose from their directional tendencies, making the harmonic progressions seem to float, like images in the mist. Chelsea Bridge brings this language to jazz. When Ben Webster enters with a solo the segue feels completely natural.
Yet, not all jazz critics were convinced. Critic Stanley Dance (who later helped Ellington write his autobiography) reacted in a way that recalls Ruskin’s response to Whistler, accusing Strayhorn of “originality at the expense of beauty . . . an obsession for tone color and voicing which excludes everything else that matters.” But Chelsea Bridge was widely appreciated by jazz musicians, not only instrumentalists and singers (lyrics were added in 1958) but composers and arrangers. Arranger Gil Evans, for example, remembered how “From the moment I first heard Chelsea Bridge, I set out to try to do that.” Webster loved the piece so much that he kept performing it into the 1950s and ’60s.
Rain Check is another up-tempo jump number swinging with vibrant themes and bright musical wit. Harmonic adventurousness is less in the forefront and more a nuance around the edges. Strayhorn’s intricate themes and arrangement take over and we are far from the collective world of the Miley method. Chelsea Bridge and Rain Check are among the first of many strong associations between Strayhorn and Webster. A sax chorus presents a new theme that just keeps climbing in intensity. Aside from brief improvised solos, it is Strayhorn from start to finish, the young composer at the top of his game.
Strayhorn himself played piano on the first recording of Rain Check. Webster, Blanton, and Strayhorn, the three newcomers, were close friends, and they occasionally performed in public as a stunning jazz trio. This opportunity must have been satisfying to Strayhorn since he never performed with the full band and received sparse acknowledgment. It must have been a touching scene to see and hear these superb musicians, so different from one another in background and personality, yet so close through their dedication to music.
The second area where Strayhorn set to work with Ellington was taking charge of arrangements for the small-group sessions and the vocal sessions. Soon after he arrived in 1939, Ellington put him in charge of the spinoff combos that had been going since 1936. When the band departed for its seven-week tour of Europe in the spring of 1939, Strayhorn hunkered down in Ellington’s apartment and pored over his boss’s portfolio of scores. He already had a passion for collecting and studying classical scores; he owned a copy of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, for example. This sustained access to the band’s library was his chance to master the Ellington effect and all other details of the leader’s style, while the small-group arrangements were a perfect opportunity to try things out. By the end of 1939 he was in charge of arrangements for singers.
His first impact through a vocal arrangement came with the song Flamingo (composed by Ted Grouya and Edmund Anderson, recorded by Ellington in December 1940). In Chapter 3 we saw how Armstrong blended modernity and popularity in a unique singing style that could not be imitated, while Ellington mixed in modern touches between straightforward renditions of the melody for It Don’t Mean a Thing. For Flamingo, singer Herb Jeffries puts on his smoothest crooning voice, which Strayhorn surrounds with an intricate formal play of motives, dramatic punctuations, surprising modulations, bold dissonance, and lavish musical commentary. “It sounded as if Stravinsky were a jazz musician,” insisted pianist, composer, and arranger John Lewis. The daring experiment was rewarded with terrific sales. Jeffries, the singer, identified with the song so much that he named his nightclub after it in Florida, years later. Ellington described Flamingo as a “renaissance in elaborate ornamentation for the accompaniment of singers.”
The third area of work for Strayhorn was direct collaboration with Ellington. When Strayhorn’s name stands alone on the composer credit, there is no question about his authorship. In other cases it seems fairly obvious that Ellington’s name was added to a piece composed by Strayhorn. When the two created together things are inevitably less clear. Sometimes there is anecdotal evidence for a specific contribution from Strayhorn, and sometimes there is stylistic evidence. Since the overwhelming tendency has been to credit Ellington at Strayhorn’s expense, it is worth pushing the matter in the other direction.
Debussy, Ravel, Bartók, Stravinsky—Strayhorn had a grasp of their modern sounds, for their lean and sleek themes, and he brought that to the Ellington Orchestra. His best pieces feel rich yet crisp and economical, sophisticated yet accessible. By 1940 he had matured as a composer whose mastery of craft allowed his personality to shine through. After his study of Ellington’s portfolio he was in a position to add to Ellington’s own efforts in a way that was fresh yet blended, a perfect meeting ground for collaboration. This was perhaps the most important ingredient that made the miracle year of 1940 what it was. Recognizing it relegates claims for an unexplainable Ellington miracle to the publicity manuals, which is where they belong.
We have seen the likelihood, based on stylistic evidence, that Strayhorn composed the introduction for Concerto for Cootie. The introduction is so unlike those composed by Ellington and so like Strayhorn’s identifiable style, that the conclusion seems inescapable. It is hardly surprising that Ellington welcomed his assistant’s improvements. Jack the Bear, already considered in Chapter 3 as a vehicle for bass player Jimmie Blanton, is another example. Ellington had been composing a piece he called Take It Away.
“It didn’t work out, and the piece was dropped,” explained Strayhorn. “Then Jimmie Blanton came into the band, and Duke wanted to feature him as a solo man. We needed some material quickly, so I reworked Take It Away as a showpiece for Blanton’s bass.” They called the new piece Jack the Bear.
A different collaborative sequence produced Sepia Panorama. Here is another illustration of Ellington’s method of building a composition by stringing ideas together, which goes back to strain form from the ragtime era. We saw with Conga Brava how this process can lead to abrupt contrasts, and the same thing happens in Sepia Panorama. Music is capable of accommodating what we might call the beautiful non sequitur, a juxtaposition of ideas that do not logically follow but still hold together. Sepia Panorama has been criticized as “fragmented,” with “conflicting juxtapositions,” but Ellington liked it enough to make it his theme music during the second half of 1940.
Sepia Panorama apparently started out as a composition by Ellington. Around the same time he asked Strayhorn to make an arrangement of Tuxedo Junction, a recent hit for Glenn Miller. From Strayhorn’s arrangement he especially liked a phrase that he decided to use in Sepia Panorama. Following this came another of Ellington’s clever experiments with schematic form. He created an extended palindrome, an unusual approach in music, several steps down the path of finding the normal way and doing the opposite.
The resulting pattern of themes looks like this: A (composed by Ellington), B (composed by Ellington), C (composed by Strayhorn), D (improvised blues chorus), D (improvised blues chorus), C, B (reduced), A. The piece starts with an assertive theme, a riff-based blues chorus. This yields to a more mellow yet harmonically adventurous second theme. Moving from the first to the second feels like a natural progression of lowering the energy a notch. Ellington then pasted in Strayhorn’s passage from Tuxedo Junction to cause a bracing leap up in range and volume, as well as a sudden jump over to another key. Strayhorn’s material is crisp, bright, clear and strong. The idea of the unprepared outburst probably came directly from the Glenn Miller recording of Tuxedo Junction, where something similar happens several times.
Two improvised blues choruses follow, both very mellow, one featuring Ellington and Blanton and the other Webster. Filling out the middle of a piece with blues choruses was a standard device, but Ellington had a trick up his sleeve. If, after the two blues choruses, he had simply repeated the order of themes A, B, and C, Sepia Panorama might have felt a bit routine. Instead, Strayhorn’s passage leaps out ahead of time, freshly unexpected with its bright and forceful energy. The shaken-up order seems to legitimize the non sequitur of Strayhorn’s material: we are encouraged to listen not for logical continuity but for some higher-level emotional synthesis. Sepia Panorama replaced East St. Louis Toodle-O as Ellington’s theme music until it was bumped by Take the “A” Train.
Concerto for Cootie and Jack the Bear were both recorded in March 1940. Also recorded in that month was Ko-Ko, one of the greatest pieces in the entire Ellington canon. There is no direct documentation of Strayhorn’s role in this celebrated landmark, but much of the evidence for collaboration has not come to light until relatively recently. Since we have nothing close to a full picture of how things worked, the question inevitably arises: is it likely that Ellington did not involve his brilliant assistant, who was turning out terrific material left and right, in one of his most famous pieces?
While Basie’s Volcano was a precedent for Ko-Ko, the comparison also reveals an emphatic difference. Ko-Ko is built around seven blues choruses, plus introduction and conclusion (with an added tag), all in a minor key, which automatically distances the piece from typical Swing Era buoyancy. The vitality is in step with Basie, but Ko-Ko is much darker and dramatic. Blanton’s bass is picked up well by the microphone, and he pulses through the piece like a throbbing heart.
The taut riffs come in call and response and they come in layers, like Basie except laced with dissonant punctuations. Nanton’s talking trombone dominates choruses two and three. For chorus four Ellington’s fragmented piano dialogues with dissonant shards from the horns. In chorus six, the band swells to heightened volume and dissonance only to break off surprisingly, with Blanton dramatically popping out all by himself for three unaccompanied breaks. The explosive climax and stark contrast are potent. It’s hard to imagine what the light-footed jitterbuggers thought of Ko-Ko. It could easily have been one of the pieces that “sailed over all but a few heads,” as DownBeat described an Ellington concert in May 1940.
We might speculate about Strayhorn’s contribution. Ellington asked him to rework Jack the Bear by incorporating bass player Jimmie Blanton after he joined the band in October 1939. Ko-Ko dates from around the same time, and it also appears to have been a piece that Ellington drafted before the bass virtuoso’s arrival. It would have seemed natural to have Strayhorn rework Ko-Ko to include Blanton. Jack the Bear and Ko-Ko were both ready to go for a recording session on March 6, 1940.
If Strayhorn added a chorus for Blanton, that would have been chorus six, with his three solo breaks. This is the climax of the entire piece. It involves part writing that is not particularly characteristic of Ellington: a little motive is imitated, bounced from saxophones to trombones to trumpets in quick succession; it then rises to a crisp rhythmic kick (half note followed by two eighth notes ending on beat three) at the top. Most of the piece, in contrast, is based on call and response. The idea of tossing a motive back and forth like this would come easily to anyone who has studied a lot of classical music.
Moreover, the third punctuation, which moves to the “V” chord of the blues form, is a massive but controlled scream, with flat seven and flat nine in tension with the root of the chord, flat thirteen in tension with the fifth, and eleven in tension with the third (a flat ten is thrown in for good measure). Previous arrivals at this spot in the blues form are not nearly so loaded with dissonance, and the dissonances are not so prominent, either. Here they are placed on the top end of the range in high relief, which is something Strayhorn liked to do. The effect resembles the famous and equally climactic horn blast in Take the “A” Train, where we also find the same rhythmic kick (half note followed by two eighth notes on beat three). If Strayhorn was responsible for this chorus, he probably also added the little tag at the end of the piece, which uses the same imitative figures, again for climactic effect.
Gunther Schuller admired how the small group of winds sounded so massive in Ko-Ko, and he compared the fullness of the arrangement to pieces like Stravinsky’s Symphony for Wind Instruments, his Symphony of Psalms, and Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra. Any connection to Stravinsky and Bartók would have come from Strayhorn. In early 1941, Strayhorn made some arrangements for a seven-piece band led by Lee Young in California. “Billy got a great, full sound out of those seven pieces,” the grateful leader remembered. “He made us sound like fourteen.” Strayhorn had reached an uncommon fluency. “It was so natural, so easy to him, like writing a letter,” said another arranger to whom Strayhorn had given some tips. “I don’t think he had any realization that what he could do was incredible. It just doesn’t come like that to other people.”
Frankly, it is easier to assume that Strayhorn was involved with Ko-Ko than it is to assume that he was not. “I’d see Billy walk into Duke’s dressing room, and Duke would say, ‘Oh, Billy, I want you to finish this thing for me,’” recalled Ellington’s sister Ruth. “Just like that: ‘I want you to finish this thing for me.’ And Billy would sit and stare into his eyes for about ten minutes, and Duke would stare back, and then Billy would say, ‘Okay.’ They wouldn’t exchange a word. They’d just look into each other’s eyes, and Billy would go out and write what Duke wanted.”
From later years there are reports of the two of them composing together on the telephone, bouncing around ideas. “In music as you develop a theme or a musical idea, there are many points at which direction must be decided,” remembered Ellington, “and any time I was in the throes of debate with myself, harmonically or melodically, I would turn to Billy Strayhorn. We would talk and then the whole world would come into focus.”
“I don’t think your strain is melodic enough,” Strayhorn once told Ellington on a train. It is unlikely that the surviving evidence captures the full richness of their quirky back and forth. After the arrival of Strayhorn the default assumption that Ellington gets primary credit becomes more suspicious than ever. He had long been in the habit of hiring first-rate talent, giving them autonomy, and absorbing their best work. In 1940, Strayhorn extended the entire project.
The two found their collective stride, and sparks flew so fast that the record companies could barely keep up. Strayhorn’s 1939 year of apprenticeship paid off, and by 1940 he was ready to assume a position as Ellington’s right arm, his left arm, the eyes in the back of his head, his brain waves, whatever the situation called for. Rather than “the summit of [Ellington’s] compositional achievement,” as one writer has put it, 1940 looks more like the summit of his new collaboration with Strayhorn.
What distinguishes the miracle year of 1940 is not just the high quality of the music but also its persuasive modernity. Strayhorn helped Ellington reach a cutting-edge position in the world of big band jazz analogous to what he had achieved with Miley in 1926. It was easy for Ellington to make Take the “A” Train his new theme music in early 1941 because Strayhorn’s modern touches had become so much a part of the Ellington sound. His talent came through in editing, arranging, orchestration, coaching (of the vocalists), composition, upgrades in elegance and classiness, and strategic doses of innovation.
The pattern continued. Take the “A” Train jump-started 1941. Also in 1941, Strayhorn reworked and improved I Got It Bad (and That Ain’t Good), Rocks in My Bed, and C Jam Blues, with Ellington solely credited for all three.
C Jam Blues has very slight definition as a “piece” of music, though it has been a very happy success, recorded many times by many groups, from Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys to Charles Mingus. Compositions based on blues form and style, both vocal and instrumental, numbered in the thousands during the 1920s. Riff-based blues were especially popular following the success of Basie, as we have seen, with the riffs usually generated by session men. There is no reason to doubt the rumors that Bigard was responsible for this one.
The charm of C Jam Blues is the riff, which is simple but interesting enough to bear repetition. There are only two different pitches, one of them repeated seven times in a row, eight notes altogether, blues understatement brought to a point of logical conclusion. The riff carries through the harmonies of the blues chorus without a note being changed. Chorus two brings a snappy little countermelody into partnership. After that the various soloists improvise, one per chorus, just like a jam session, with violinist Ray Nance leading off. The very first recording (September 1941) of this casual piece carried the name C Blues. It was made, appropriately enough, by Barney Bigard and His Orchestra, one of the small-group spin-offs. For the recording by the full Ellington band in January 1942, Strayhorn reworked the arrangement. His new material gave the final chorus a crisp, dramatic finish, enriching the piece’s identity and lifting it a notch up from the feeling of a casual jam session. His new material became as much a part of the piece’s identity as Bigard’s riff.
Rocks in My Bed and I Got it Bad (and That Ain’t Good) were two of the standouts from the 1941 musical Jump for Joy: A Sun-Tanned Revu-sical. This project arose during the band’s extended stay at Casa Mañana, a large nightclub near Los Angeles. The cast for the musical was entirely African American, and the themes were related to civil rights. A group of Left-leaning Hollywood writers and actors invited Ellington to compose the music. As many as fifteen writers worked on the show, supported by seven meddling backers.
Ellington had wanted to write a musical for a long time, including one with Langston Hughes in 1936 that never happened. This project resonated with two themes he cherished: racial pride and racial progress. The show’s purpose, Ellington explained, was to “take Uncle Tom out of the theatre, eliminate the stereotyped image that had been exploited by Hollywood and Broadway, and say things that would make the audience think.” In February 1941, he delivered a talk at an African American church in Los Angeles, in celebration of Annual Lincoln Day Services, and he argued there that the “Negro is the creative voice of America.” The new musical would be an opportunity to put that view on full display.
Ellington’s Left-leaning collaborators—all of them white—were motivated by a sharper political agenda. One of the songs was called “I’ve Got a Passport from Georgia,” a satire about racism dominating that state so thoroughly that it was no longer recognizably part of the United States. Threats from the Ku Klux Klan caused the song to be cut from the show. The writers aimed to balance the seriousness of their political message with comedy and entertaining brilliance, which can be glimpsed today through a Soundie called Bli-Blip, where the charming Marie Bryant and Paul White perform a dance skit with jive talk and inventive jitterbug, accompanied by the Ellington band. The stage version of Jump for Joy in Los Angeles featured Dorothy Dandridge, Ivie Anderson, comedians, dancers, a choir, a dancing chorus, a cast of sixty, and Ellington’s orchestra playing from the pit. The musical ran for only twelve weeks and never made it to the Big Apple. “That killed me,” Ellington said to a friend about the show’s mixed reception.
Ellington and Strayhorn wrote the music together, but composer credit was given only to Ellington, with Strayhorn barely mentioned in the program as having made some of the arrangements. “We should have listed Billy, too: ‘By Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn,’” confessed Henry Blankfort, the producer and director.
“Billy really did write a whole lot of the show,” added Sid Kuller, one of the writers and a catalyst for the entire project. “It was a big enough shock to the world to have Duke Ellington’s name up there. Listen, the world wasn’t ready to accept a show by Duke Ellington. It certainly wasn’t ready to accept Duke Ellington and some other guy nobody ever heard of.” Despite Kuller’s argument to the contrary, the world probably would have accepted this without blinking. What really mattered to Kuller and his friends was the marketing advantage of Ellington’s name.
I Got It Bad (and That Ain’t Good) was good enough to survive the abbreviated run. Strayhorn made the arrangement; it is not clear how much he was involved with the composition. Ivie Anderson’s recorded performance with the Ellington Orchestra became a hit. Strayhorn continued making new arrangements of the song for years, often with a featured role for Hodges.
An attempt was made to reenergize the show after a few weeks by bringing in blues singer Big Joe Turner (whose recording of Shake Rattle and Roll thirteen years later had considerable influence on rock and roll). Ellington and Strayhorn created a new number for Turner called Rocks in My Bed. Strayhorn’s essential contribution to the success of this song is now clear. In the first recording of the song, performed by Turner, the harmonies are straight-ahead blues. But when it was time to record with the full band and Ivie Anderson, Strayhorn embellished the harmonies and transformed the melody as well. He enriched the piece and made it much more sustainable.
January 23, 1943, brought the debut of the Ellington piece about which more has been written than any other, the extended work Black, Brown and Beige: A Tone Parallel to the History of the American Negro. Since 1930, Ellington had been talking about composing on the theme of African American history, something longer than just a couple of disc sides, maybe even an opera. “It’s time a big piece of music was written from the inside by a Negro,” he told a journalist in 1941. Black, Brown and Beige was his strongest fulfillment of this vision.
The extended pieces had been key to establishing his reputation as a composer, and with Strayhorn now taking over so many responsibilities he could devote more time to this project. The first performance of Black, Brown and Beige at Carnegie Hall clocked in at forty-five minutes, far exceeding anything he had written. Ellington had been irritated at Irving Mills for not getting him a gig at Carnegie Hall in the 1930s, and now he had it. The performance was part of a publicity blitz that his new management called “National Ellington Week,” described by one writer of the time as the “greatest pre-performance press ever accorded a jazz man.” Eleanor Roosevelt, Glenn Miller, and Leopold Stokowski were among the luminaries in the audience for the Carnegie Hall premiere. A commemorative plaque presented to Ellington bore signatures of Marian Anderson, Aaron Copland, Benny Goodman, Earl Hines, and others.
Mercer Ellington explained the title as an allusion to color prejudice within the African American community, discrimination based on shades of skin tone, while Ellington himself suggested that it had to do with changing states of mind that were closer to or further from a white state of mind, black being further and beige being closer. Neither of these provocative interpretations was offered publicly, at least not for a long time. But at the premiere performance Ellington did speak before each of the three long movements, describing their content. There was also a printed program with extensive notes. The basic idea was a chronological representation of African American history, moving from 1620 through the Revolutionary War (“Black”), then from that war through the First World War (“Brown”), and finishing with the modern scene (“Beige”).
“Black,” Ellington explained, starts with work songs and then moves to spirituals, the aim being to show the close relationship between the two idioms. Highlights of “Black” include a muscular theme that returns several times. And then there is Come Sunday, the jewel of the entire piece, with a long, stand-alone afterlife. “Brown” has three divisions, first a salute to the West Indies, second, the Emancipation, and third, the blues. “Beige” gives a panorama of contemporary life in Harlem, from church to a penthouse in Sugar Hill.
The problems with Black, Brown and Beige are the same problems that plague the other extended pieces: the themes are of uneven quality and longer stretches of time are not organized convincingly. Critics complained, for example, how “the first movement . . . all but falls apart into so many separate pieces.” Composer Paul Bowles opened his review by praising Ellington highly. “He is the composer of many of the finest popular melodies of the last 15 years,” Bowles assured his readers, a false claim that no one in 1943 (and far beyond) would have even thought to question. Then he dismissed Black, Brown and Beige as “formless and meaningless . . . nothing emerged but a gaudy potpourri of tutti dance passages and solo virtuoso work. (The dance parts used some pretty corny riffs, too.) There were countless unprovoked modulations, a passage in 5/4, paraphrases on well-known tunes that were as trite as the tunes themselves, and recurrent climaxes that impeded the piece’s progress.”
Yet it is easy to admire this piece even with its defects. There is enough integrity to sustain appreciation for the innovation of composing A Tone Parallel to the History of the Negro. “The Negro was put ahead twenty years culturally as a result of this affair,” commented one white observer, and the nobility of Ellington’s vision is audible. It has been suggested that a more prominent role for the programmatic storytelling that lay behind the shifting musical events might enhance the audience’s experience. Maurice Peress’s arrangement for string orchestra shows that there is no need to halt the Ellington tradition of adaptation and collaboration.
Ellington relied on two of his strongest collaborators for key moments. For the spiritual-like Come Sunday he looked to Johnny Hodges. The tempo is extremely slow. It takes Hodges two full minutes to play through the thirty-two-bar theme. The pace invites the great alto saxophonist to do what he did best: he treats the theme in the manner that African Americans sometimes used to call “long meter,” meaning the performance of a spiritual or hymn at a very slow tempo with overwhelming ornamentation. It is a breathtaking performance. Moody harmonies and voicings shimmer behind Hodges and animate the piece further. Hodges, a master at sustaining interest at such a slow tempo, was later matched by Mahalia Jackson, who also knew something about ornamenting power and who made her contribution after lyrics were added in the late 1950s.
It comes as no surprise to learn that Ellington brought in Strayhorn for Beige, since that is where the tone parallel arrives at the modern moment in African American history. It has been estimated that Strayhorn wrote about a third of this thirteen-minute section. Especially effective is his jazz waltz depicting the sophisticated fun of the Harlem elite in a penthouse on Sugar Hill. It hardly needs to be said that the entirety of Black, Brown and Beige was credited solely to Ellington. This was, after all, “National Ellington Week,” and his moment in the spotlight at the most famous monument to great composers in the United States. When asked about his involvement Strayhorn characteristically ducked the issue. For the same Carnegie Hall concert, Ellington asked Strayhorn to rework, without credit, a composition from 1938 called Blue Belles of Harlem, where one reviewer heard “overtones suggestive of Ravel” without knowing that it was Strayhorn rather than Ellington who accounted for that connection.
Hodges was making $190 per week in December 1943, the highest salary in the band, and he was responding with first-rate material that continued to feed Ellington’s revenue stream. This included Ellington’s big hit of 1944, I’m Beginning to See the Light. Don’t Get Around Much Anymore had been a success for the Ink Spots in early 1943, with the creative product from Hodges leading to copyright and credit for Ellington. I’m Beginning to See the Light also started as a catchy tune from Hodges, to which Don George added some sharp lyrics, among the best of any Ellington song.
George pitched the piece to some big-name white bands, though Ellington was skeptical and advised him not to waste time on it. Selling a song like this was standard practice, based on the reality of much stronger market potential for white bands. In a Sentimental Mood, for example, had been a far bigger hit for Benny Goodman than it was for Ellington. Harry James said yes to George’s pitch, and Johnny Thompson made a nice arrangement of I’m Beginning to See the Light for the James Orchestra. The James recording sold well and made the tune known. The disc showed composer credit for James, Ellington, Hodges, and George, proving that there was enough room for multiple credits when the politics required it. In 1945 the Ink Spots once again (now with Ella Fitzgerald joining them) stepped into the picture. Their recording made I’m Beginning to See the Light an even bigger hit, and George felt vindicated. In the summer of 1944 the song was heard as a patriotic statement; according to George, the record “played on every loudspeaker on every PT boat that carried our boys to the attack on the beaches of Normandy.”
Ellington’s Black, Brown and Beige may not have been the success he was hoping for, but his appearance (and subsequent appearances) at Carnegie Hall worked well for him. He won awards from DownBeat magazine in 1944 and Esquire in 1945. Feature stories in the Saturday Evening Post and The New Yorker followed, also in 1945, with a weekly radio show on the ABC network, broadcasting across the country and to armed forces abroad. Yet the war years were stressful for all swing bands. Transportation was challenging, shellac for making phonograph records was in short supply, and musicians were being drafted, thus creating shortages of qualified players. Ellington suffered a string of departures: Williams left in 1941, Bigard in 1942, Blanton died in 1942, Webster went out to lead his own combo in 1943, Tizol joined Harry James in 1944 (and later returned), and Ray Nance and Rex Stewart left in 1945 (Nance later returned).
How much of Strayhorn’s contributions were known during these years? Very little, and what was known could easily be downplayed or ignored, a situation that carries into the present day. The band’s radio audience did not know that Strayhorn, rather than Ellington, had created most of the new arrangements they were listening to. Crediting on discs continued according to the quirky patterns we have seen: some of their collaborations were cosigned (Out of This World), sometimes Ellington had Strayhorn rewrite an earlier piece without credit (Blutopia), some of Strayhorn’s creations lacked any credit to him (Air-Conditioned Jungle), some showed sole credit for him (Mid-Riff), and some were simply shelved. Critic Alec Wilder wrote in 1948 that Ellington’s “disciple and associate Billy Strayhorn has contributed material of worth, but numerically its quantity is still small.” The quantity was far greater than any outsider could have known.
There are many different kinds of evidence for composer credit, and all of them come with problems. Sometimes an original manuscript exists and the handwriting indicates authorship, yet the survival of this kind of evidence is so precarious that it cannot come anywhere close to telling the whole story. An original copyright deposit, a revised copyright deposit, an original record label, and a later record label—often these sources disagree with one another. Liner notes, program notes, and publicity releases further complicate the story. Isolated remarks from interviews are perhaps the most reliable evidence of all, but they are sparse. Strayhorn’s and Ellington’s names weave in and out of view, the former mostly out and the latter mostly in. Ellington, his family that worked for him (his sister, her husband, his son), his managers, and his close friends in the business all routinely pushed credit in his direction, under the premise that what was good for Ellington was good for the Ellington collective.
For Strayhorn the issue was only partly financial, since he was well taken care of. In 1941, Ellington gave him stock in his sheet-music publishing company. Strayhorn’s reward, according to the Ellington ecosystem, would not be full artistic credit but job security, generous pay, and a sense of belonging to an artistic achievement that was highly regarded. As Cootie Williams put it, “It was a pleasure, you know, to have the band to play your song.” Undoubtedly Strayhorn felt that way, too, at least for a while.
It has been claimed that Strayhorn preferred to remain hidden, that he didn’t want publicity and was happy to serve his boss. “Billy could have pursued a career on his own,” insisted a friend. “He had the talent to become rich and famous—but he’d have had to be less than honest about his sexual orientation. Or he could work behind the scenes for Duke and be open about being gay. It really was truth or consequences, and Billy went with truth.” In the late 1940s the frustrations of this compromise were beginning to show.
A theatrical production called Beggar’s Holiday (1946) was a turning point. “Ellington wanted the recognition of writing a Broadway show,” said his friend and collaborator Luther Henderson. “In fact, he wanted the recognition of writing a Broadway show more than he wanted to write a Broadway show.” It made perfect sense to hand the assignment over to his assistant, with Ellington to be consulted by telephone. As with Jump for Joy, Ellington received composer credit, with Strayhorn cited for “supervising” the orchestration. “Mr. Ellington’s score is a generous outpouring of his individual talent, filled with the spirit and the warmth of his music, the pulsing beat of his rhythms, the strength and the refreshing colors of his modern harmonies,” wrote one reviewer. At the opening-night party Ellington circulated in full glory while a demoralized Strayhorn quickly exited.
In April 1947 a friend of Strayhorn’s from the music business was surprised to discover that he had no formal contract with Ellington and no sense of the value of his contributions. He was also pondering his own sense of artistic mission. “He encouraged me not to compromise,” said an artist friend. “He said he knew all about compromise, and things hadn’t always worked out the way he expected.” The reality was that all swing musicians, not just Strayhorn and Ellington, were forced to evaluate what they wanted to do and how they could make a living doing it, for the Swing Era was in decline. Leading bands experimented with reducing to smaller sizes. Bebop was increasingly capturing connoisseurs dedicated to the cutting edge. Blends of jazz with rhythm and blues were popular. Louis Armstrong enjoyed a surprising late-career resurgence with a New Orleans revival band. Singers like Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole, Peggy Lee, and Doris Day claimed more and more attention, transforming the great dance bands into backup units. In an article for DownBeat (November 1952), Leonard Feather wrote that the only sustainable big bands left were those led by Ellington, Woody Herman, Count Basie, and Stan Kenton.
Ellington’s royalty stream helped keep the band going. He increasingly relied on revisions of his famous pieces, which formed the core of his very first LP, the 1950 Masterpieces by Ellington. Strayhorn was again in charge. He reconceived and greatly extended Mood Indigo (fifteen and one-half minutes), Sophisticated Lady (eleven and one-half minutes), and (In My) Solitude (eight and one-half minutes). His contributions are so substantial, it has been observed, that a more appropriate title for the album would have been Masterpieces by Ellington, Arranged by Strayhorn. (Note the typical omission of the co-composers: a better emendation would be Masterpieces by Bigard, Brown, Hardwick, and Ellington, Arranged by Strayhorn.) Strayhorn’s arrangement of The Tattooed Bride has been singled out as the finest version of that extended piece. Only Ellington was credited on the LP, further disgruntling his assistant.
Ellington offered him shares in a new record company he was launching, where Strayhorn would get full performing and composing credit, but the company folded quickly. Satin Doll was a bright spot in 1953. Strayhorn took an Ellington riff and ran it through a harmonic sequence with just the right touches, turning it into Ellington’s last hit record and a jazz standard, with only Ellington’s name listed as composer. In mid-1953 they drifted apart, each collaborating with others and working together only occasionally. “It was a situation where Duke still called him if he needed him, and Billy, he was there if he was needed,” remembered clarinetist Jimmy Hamilton. “But their heads was somewhere else.” As were the heads of the American record-buying public. In 1955, Bill Haley and the Comets reached the top of the pop charts with Rock around the Clock, while Fats Domino’s Ain’t That a Shame hit number one on the rhythm and blues charts.
A Jazz of Their Own
The Strayhorn-Ellington relationship was stunningly creative, thoroughly intimate, and highly unusual. They started out as master and assistant. There must have been a feeling of father and son, as well. It has also been claimed that they were lovers. Mercer Ellington said their sexual relationship was known among the band. “We had a relationship that nobody else in the world would understand,” remarked Ellington.
“He had a very, very, very deep love for Strayhorn,” said close friend Marian Logan, “and Strayhorn obviously loved Duke, too.”
As David Hajdu puts it, they settled into “a jazz of their own.” It is hardly surprising that this intertwining of personal closeness, artistic collaboration, and noncontractual business generated a set of deeply conflicted feelings for the junior partner.
The poignancy that automatically surfaces includes Strayhorn’s descent into alcoholism. Performing musicians are routinely exposed to the dangers of substance abuse, with so many infamous examples in jazz and rock that the topic hardly needs to be mentioned. Musicians must be up when the late-night performance begins, and they need to come down when it is over. They live apart from family and social networks, with inverted hours, so they settle into an in-group culture where stimulants and alcohol are perceived as necessary and frequently regarded as creative aids.
Alcohol abuse was rampant in Ellington’s band, and Strayhorn was part of the crowd. It contributed to his early death at age fifty-one, in 1967. His conflicting emotions about Ellington may have fueled his illness. Musicians who worked for Ellington reacted with a range of emotions when he claimed credit for their creative work, from bitterness to resignation to contentment. It was harder for Strayhorn since he was a composer and arranger, which meant that his identity was more thoroughly subsumed by the leader. Others could take a turn in the spotlight and play the solos they had created, while Strayhorn stayed behind the curtain.
His collaboration with Ellington, then, mixed personal and artistic tensions in a unique way—we could call it the Strayhorn problem. As he explored his options in the early 1950s, a question must have lurked in the back of his mind: what was his place in the world of professional musicians and how did that correlate with his artistic aspirations? His situation was unavoidably shaped by his formative work with Ellington.
Strayhorn drifted through several theatrical productions. A natural career choice would have been to work with vocalists. As different as Ellington and Strayhorn were, they shared a gift for musical empathy, each good at reading and responding to other musicians. This is hardly a skill that all great composers have, though it is one shared by all great collaborators. Strayhorn was frequently praised for his ability to work with singers. In 1955 he toured with Lena Horne and accompanied her on an LP. “He had a trick of hearing the breath,” explained Horne. “He made a soft little bed right there to support the structure, so while you’re taking your breath, nobody knows. It takes an awful lot of sensitivity.”
“It was like he had a direct psychic link to Lena,” remembered drummer Chico Hamilton. “When she was singing, he translated what she was feeling on the piano and sent back to her in his music at the same time. It went both ways.”
He “could have done a million sessions, he was fast, he was good,” said trumpeter Jimmy Maxwell. Temperament and self-identity got in the way. “Billy wasn’t what you’d say a professional,” was how Maxwell framed it. “He was an artistic man.”
“The actual source of his frustration was artistic,” insisted Leonard Feather, but one would have to immediately qualify that and say that the artistic frustration was completely bound up with his complicated history with Ellington, which turned out to be inescapable. His professional identity, from 1939 forward, had been completely formed around this relationship. The easiest way to solve the problem of how to proceed turned out, unsurprisingly, to be a return to Ellington.
As a creative collaborator, Ellington’s formative moment came in 1926, at age twenty-seven, when he discovered a fresh way to combine vernacular performance with jazz arrangement, yielding new compositional possibilities. For Strayhorn, the parallel moment was his study of Ellington’s portfolio in 1939, at age twenty-four, after which he went into action editing, adding, revising, and offering up his own work for the leader to process as he wished. The nature of creative synthesis in the two cases is very different. Ellington got a lot of mileage out of responding to someone else’s first-rate material and coming up with fresh ways to frame it. His method was more open-ended than Strayhorn’s bringing together of two different compositional sensibilities.
Just as the modern solution in 1926 would not do the trick in 1940, so did 1956 call for something fresh. The challenge may have been even greater this time around. In the mid-1950s heady innovations in jazz were spinning out in a dizzying array of directions. One of the leading lights, Charles Mingus, understood and admired Ellington’s methods and his achievements. Compositions like Pithecanthropus Erectus (1956), Haitian Fight Song (1957), and Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting (1959) helped establish Mingus as one of the greatest jazz composers of all time, right alongside Ellington.
A first-rate bass player, Mingus actually joined the Ellington Orchestra briefly in the early 1950s. Mingus developed his own ways of bringing musicians into the creative process. One was to hum the themes he wanted them to play and then urge them to personalize their parts. He believed that writing everything out tended to fix the ideas too firmly. The group worked out the arrangement together by ear, with the leader tinkering as the process unfolded. Mingus was inspired not just by Ellington’s collaborative method but also by his sense of a cutting-edge African American modernity based on the vernacular. He was the worthy follower who took the concept further. On the vernacular side were his dramatic uses of heterophony (two or more variations of a melody played simultaneously), evoking the “dark church where everyone was screaming” that he had experienced as a child. Collaboration with Mingus can have the aura of a militant statement of civil rights. Dissonances explode with rage that cannot possibly be controlled. Like Strayhorn, Mingus learned from classical composers, but since he was more collaboratively involved with his musicians than Strayhorn he achieved much greater vernacular intensity.
Haitian Fight Song, for example, has military-style drum cadences in the middle section, which is surrounded by blues choruses, one after the other, similar to examples from Ellington. What is unforgettable is the stunning ensemble performance from trombonist Jimmy Knepper, saxophonist Shafi Hadi, pianist Wade Legge, drummer Dannie Richmond, and Mingus himself in the great, tumultuous swells of collective improvisation that start and finish the piece. It sounds like a lot more than five people playing: it sounds like a congregation ablaze with the fire of the Holy Spirit and prepared to burn American racism to the ground. This is improvisation with a compositional purpose, led by Mingus with essential contributions from the others.
What Mingus lacked was Ellington’s interpersonal skills. He liked to tell the story of how Ellington fired him. “The charming way he says it, you feel like he’s paying you a compliment,” he remembered. “Feeling honored, you shake hands and resign.” Mingus’s management style fell on the other, difficult end of the spectrum. The Ellington ecosystem of give-and-take, soft sell and high praise, you scratch my back and I’ll scratch your back—that didn’t come naturally to him. He routinely embarrassed musicians in the middle of performances and even attacked them physically, punching out a few front teeth on two occasions. Mingus said that his primary drummer, Dannie Richmond, who stayed with him longer than anyone, “gave me his complete open mind . . . to work with as clay.” (Mingus here recalls Alfred Hitchcock: “All actors are cattle.”) It is impossible to imagine Ellington ever regarding one of his musicians like that. Yet Mingus enjoyed a posthumous benefit that Ellington never got—a legacy orchestra dedicated solely to his music. Led by his widow Sue, and filled with dedicated Mingus collaborators mixed with younger players, the Mingus Big Band continues to keep alive the ear-based, collective method that Ellington pioneered and Mingus furthered.
There was no way for Ellington and Strayhorn to compete directly with someone like Mingus, but 1956 was the year of Ellington’s surprise success at the Newport Jazz Festival, which suddenly thrust him into the spotlight. The centerpiece was Paul Gonsalves’s solo in Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue, and the performance included attractive arrangements of Black and Tan Fantasy, Mood Indigo, Sophisticated Lady, Take the “A” Train, and Jeep’s Blues. But this was all in the basket of updated oldies, which could hardly satisfy high artistic ambitions. There was a solution in sight, represented in another type of piece performed at Newport. Columbia Records had approached Ellington, very near the performance date in July, with the idea of a “suite” celebrating this event. “Can you do it?” came the query. “Okay, I’ll get Strays to work on it right away,” was the reply. Given the rush, the Newport Festival Suite is unsurprisingly long on improvised solos.
But the genre of the suite turned out to be an attractive way to advance the Ellington-Strayhorn reconciliation. Such Sweet Thunder (1957), The Nutcracker Suite (1960), and The Far East Suite (1966) stand among their finest accomplishments. The suites also solved a set of four nagging problems, all in one stroke.
First, they relieved a point of tension related to artistic differences. Ellington, as we have seen, liked to fuse together diverse material, a typical 1920s approach to strain form. He shared this preference with John Lennon, who described composition as “doing little bits which you then join up.” McCartney could unite with Lennon in this method, especially during the Beatles’ early years, when one composer invented a verse and the other added a bridge, for example. But McCartney also mastered a more holistic approach to composing a single continuous statement, meticulously designed. Yesterday is a great example, as are many of McCartney’s best songs. Strayhorn was like McCartney in this respect. Ellington routinely welcomed additions, extensions, edits, and substitutions to a score when he brought it to his musicians, while Strayhorn conceived a score as complete and final. He might leave space for improvisation, of course, but he didn’t welcome revision. Ellington’s abrupt transitions from one section to another expose his cut-and-paste method, while Strayhorn’s more seamless transitions indicate a unified conception. Ellington’s method taken to an extreme was described in a report from 1960:
The final polishing of any Ellington arrangement is done as the band plays it, and Duke, to the bewilderment of people who have watched him record, writes and rehearses music in segments, usually of eight measures and almost always without a written conclusion . . . Duke’s final instructions for a performance might go as follows: “Start at letter C. Then go to A and play it twice, only second time leave off the last two bars. These bars are at the beginning of a sheet you have marked X. After X I’ll play until I bring you in at C and you go out with letter D. Any questions?”
It is impossible to imagine Strayhorn ever embracing a strategy like this.
The problem was that Ellington did not hesitate to scramble Strayhorn’s painstakingly crafted material when it suited him. When Ellington chopped up, abridged, pasted in, or simply rearranged his assistant’s thoughtful designs, it must have been a source of irritation. But Ellington was in charge and could do what he liked. In the early days it would have been easy to take this as a gesture of inclusion, but as time went on Strayhorn must have found the practice frustrating. In the suites, however, Ellington could compose his small piece and Strayhorn could compose his. The two related as independent movements, each touching on a shared theme, and there was no need to force them together.
This is related to the second problem that the suites averted—the handling of extended form. Joining up phrases in a three-minute piece is one thing, but stretching that technique to the level of ten or fifteen minutes is another. With the suites there was no need. Only one of the twelve movements for Such Sweet Thunder, for example, exceeds four minutes. The idea of a suite accommodates diversity and doesn’t require the tricks of the trade for organizing extended pieces. Yet a suite was automatically associated with the world of classical music, so it carried art credentials.
Plus, the concept was tailor-made for the newly invented LP. In this there is another parallel between the Ellington collective and the Beatles when the latter started to think in terms of albums rather than singles. Only two of the thirteen tracks on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band are longer than four minutes. The album is defined as a kind of psychedelic collage, the various components linked by the implied theme. Lennon and McCartney had no training in writing extended pieces, either, so this approach worked well for them. Pepper acquired the status of art like no rock album had ever done before.
By agreement, the suites solved a third problem: Ellington now assured his partner that he would be co-credited on all of them. He kept the promise even in cases where Strayhorn made no contribution at all. Here is an obvious comparison with Lennon and McCartney, who quickly recognized how cosigning all of their compositions, regardless of who wrote what, would be a boon to their collective enterprise.
And the fourth problem solved by the suite format was the central one for the final phase of Ellington’s career: what would be the Ellington-Strayhorn niche amid the diversity of high-level 1950s jazz? The suites turned out to be a perfect way for Strayhorn to continue infusing the band’s sound with modern sophistication. The concept played to his strengths, and that is the primary reason that they account for much of the best Ellington material from this period forward.
Such Sweet Thunder (1956, also known as The Shakespeare Suite) was conceived after the Stratford Shakespearean Festival requested Ellington to compose a new number to celebrate its annual gathering. An association with Shakespeare must have delighted Ellington, with the playwright’s mix of classiness and popularity, plus the inevitable comparison of Shakespeare “writing to the actor” with Ellington “writing to the musician.” The idea was to have music inspired by various characters in Shakespeare’s plays, “thumbnail sketches,” as Ellington described them. Included are four “sonnets” for subsets of the band that demonstrate, once again, Ellington’s cleverness with musical form: each is built around fourteen phrases, with ten notes in each phrase, analogous to Shakespeare’s poetry. In general, however, there are few direct connections to Shakespeare other than the imagery of the various titles, obliquely brought to life as musical moods.
The original recording of Such Sweet Thunder credited the entire suite to both Ellington and Strayhorn, with no indication that they had mostly worked separately on individual numbers. Their independence produced a satisfying range of expression analogous to the vivid characters. All of it is justified by the suite aesthetic, which had always, back to the earliest representations of the genre in classical music, leaned toward variety rather than unity. The plan for virtually every soloist to get a turn in the spotlight generated an attractive mix all by itself.
Ellington makes some imaginative contributions to Such Sweet Thunder, especially through titling. Madness in Great Ones uses the cut-and-paste method to evoke Hamlet’s derangement in a string of non sequiturs. Virtuoso high-note trumpeter Cat Anderson is used to good effect. Sonnet for Caesar features plaintive writing for clarinet, which is effectively harmonized. But the three strongest numbers for the suite were composed by Strayhorn, who was devoted to Shakespeare and quoted him often.
Two of the three Strayhorn standouts were composed earlier. The static, moody harmony and the habanera ostinato in Half the Fun have led to apt comparisons with Debussy’s piano prelude La Puerta del Vino. Superb playing from Hodges and percussionist Sam Woodyard bring Strayhorn’s sure control of form to life. Strayhorn had earlier staked out his place in the tradition of Far Eastern musical exoticism with a fresh 1945 arrangement of Tizol’s Caravan, and after Half the Fun he would have more to come with the stunning Arabesque Cookie, written for the 1960 adaptation of Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker Suite.
Strayhorn’s The Star-Crossed Lovers is the true highlight, with a strong and independent performing life. This exquisite ballad, also written earlier, is one of Strayhorn’s greatest accomplishments, a superb example of meticulous craft and pithy inspiration from start to finish. Here is where the compatibility of the two close friends, Strayhorn and Hodges, reaches the musical sublime. With Bubber Miley’s great masterpieces we observed how bending pitch and talking effects are inseparable from the construction of the melody. They do not feel added but rather part of the conception. That is not how The Star-Crossed Lovers came about, but still there is a comparison to make. Strayhorn’s composition is an exquisite play between melodic and harmonic details that keep shifting, ever so slightly, as the piece unfolds. The richness of the harmonic motion works with melodic expectations, all of it subtly redirected and crafted according to the plan of the chorus. It is this melodic-harmonic structure that is the basis for the piece’s success. But Hodges’s magnificence (Gonsalves plays the first two phrases on tenor sax and Hodges follows) feels like it belongs to the piece. His performance is so powerfully imprinted that it cannot be escaped, and this followed directly from the long musical partnership between the two.
One writer has argued that the Strayhorn-Hodges ballads can sometimes feel like “overly scented confections,” where Strayhorn pushes “his art to the very limits of sensualism and, at times, sentimentality.” One can understand this reaction from listeners who prefer their musical emotions slightly dry. What makes The Star-Crossed Lovers exceptional is how Strayhorn’s unexpected half steps are extended by Hodges with smaller, microtonal steps of bending, stretching, and sliding, a perfect match of composition and performer.
Equally dazzling is the piece Strayhorn wrote specifically for Such Sweet Thunder—Up and Down, Up and Down (I Will Lead Them Up and Down). Here is where his passion for Shakespeare fueled his musical imagination. Up and Down is a musical illustration of Puck, the mischief maker in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It is a superb composition of wit and complexity. It paradoxically feels tightly managed and raucous at the same time. Trumpeter Clark Terry, one of Ellington’s finest soloists of the 1950s, is cast as Puck, and he delivers his lines with just the right touch of bluesy subversion. Multiple strategies work their combined charms. Strayhorn’s even-note runs of counterpoint recall Bach, and they are set off against Terry’s very un-Bachian half-valving. The counterpoint flows in glittering streams of fairy dust, but it also pushes up against harmonic dissonance in a bracing, atonal way. And the basic strategy—basic to all of the Ellington-Strayhorn suites—of pitting classical against jazz emerges here in a fresh and skillful way as the composer strings out long, pedal-based washes of whimsical counterpoint followed by stocky, self-contained jazz phrases for the delicately sauntering Puck.
Up and Down is not exactly a Take the “A” Train crowd pleaser, and it might even fall under the category of pieces that “sailed over all but a few heads,” as DownBeat complained in 1940. Perhaps someone even objected that it emphasizes “originality at the expense of beauty,” as a critic said about Chelsea Bridge. If they did say that, they missed it. Strayhorn has carved out a beauty of his own, infused with concentrated originality.
Ellington was having fun trying to keep up with him. Nevertheless, one doesn’t hear the same focus and richness of expression in Ellington’s numbers for Such Sweet Thunder that one hears in Strayhorn’s. The Times called this suite “the best work that Mr. Ellington has done in a decade.” To take that claim seriously would be to rank Strayhorn’s three standouts among the finest compositions to emerge from the Ellington collective during the 1950s. Rival nominations would include, on the weighty end of the spectrum, A Tone Parallel to Harlem (1951, also known as Harlem or Harlem Suite), one of the more successful of the old-style extended pieces. On the pop side would be Satin Doll. We have already seen Strayhorn’s primary role in the latter; for the former he composed the final thirty seconds of the thirteen-minute piece, a crisp and bombastic conclusion to a piece that goes in a lot of different directions.
Ellington kept his word and co-credited his junior colleague, but since neither name was associated with individual numbers the superiority of Strayhorn’s material was not apparent. Ellington started a cute tradition of having his assistant make a cameo appearance for Half the Fun. Jazz scholar Brian Priestley remembered seeing this in Leeds, England, in October 1958, the “closing rhythm-section vamp coinciding with the stage-lights fading to black as a spotlight picked out Strayhorn, who came on stage just to play a single low piano note.” Meanwhile, publicist Joe Morgen was working in the opposite direction, doing everything he could to keep Strayhorn out of publicity materials so as not to distract attention away from the leader. Morgen hustled up praiseful articles in Newsweek, Look, and the New York Times during 1957, with Strayhorn’s name nowhere in sight.
Strayhorn is the key to the success of the late suites because they play to his strengths—classy jazz, witty and refined. He was in his element. Ellington worked under deadlines, Strayhorn more when the muse moved him. Ellington had multiple responsibilities and always thought about the bottom line, which was less of a concern to Strayhorn. An observer watched them at work on the film score for Paris Blues, and he was surprised to see Ellington carrying most of the load. “Duke was a professional and a crowd pleaser, and the essence of his pieces was to please the crowd,” he explained. “Strayhorn wasn’t: the essence of his work was to satisfy himself. He didn’t always have a lot of output. Duke kept Strayhorn around knowing the output might be small and getting smaller, but wanting it all.”
Turner’s painting inspired Chelsea Bridge in 1941, Shakespeare’s play inspired Up and Down in 1957, and Tchaikovsky’s charming ballet The Nutcracker Suite inspired some stunning music from Strayhorn in 1960. The ballet had risen in popularity thanks to George Balanchine’s midcentury choreography and Christmastime entry into American living rooms through CBS television. The Nutcracker Suite was already a suite so it naturally fit the Ellington-Strayhorn model, and it automatically carried the magic formula of classy yet accessible, the best-loved piece by the quintessential middle-brow composer. Strayhorn convinced his boss, who was happy to come along for the imperial ride.
In an interview, Strayhorn explained the challenge. “It’s always a struggle . . . to present [the music of] someone of the stature of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky and adapting it to our flavor without distorting him. . . . Actually, it sort of felt like we were talking to him, because we didn’t want him turning over any more than he already was.” Strayhorn’s loyalty comes through in the final product. It was fine for Chuck Berry to riff on teenage rebellion and teasingly command Beethoven and Tchaikovsky to Roll Over (in their graves), but that was not Strayhorn’s approach. He infuses his adaptation with respect at the same time that he feels no limitations. The project is a dialogue between creative adults, and the mature segment of the record-buying public is warmly invited to join the party.
The British critic Eddie Lambert wrote (around 1980) that “Ellington’s aim in The Nutcracker Suite seems to have been to give full value to the three principal features of Tchaikovsky’s score—its rich melodic content, its colorful textures, and its humor . . . Ellington ensures that the humor is wholly musical, giving an elegant glow to a set of performances of characteristic Ellington quality.” This is spot-on if we replace “Ellington” with “Strayhorn.” It is now clear that the Nutcracker is primarily Strayhorn’s work. The surviving manuscripts establish that he wrote six of the nine movements and Ellington one (Peanut Brittle Brigade). Of the remaining two (for which manuscripts do not survive), one seems like Strayhorn (Chinoiserie) and the other seems like Ellington (Volga Vouty). The two contributions from Ellington are serviceable. Strayhorn’s The Nutcracker Suite would have to be called an arrangement of Tchaikovsky, but he has so thoroughly reconceived everything that it is more like an independent composition.
At the initial meeting with Ellington, in Pittsburgh at the Stanley Theater, Strayhorn played Sophisticated Lady the way Ellington had played it and then showed him another way, “pretty hip-sounding” and pretty impressive. From the very first notes in the Overture, Tchaikovsky’s material is easily recognizable but completely recast. The tempo, mood, form, and scoring are all different but the theme is clearly stated. Musical climax happens in Strayhorn’s style rather than Tchaikovsky’s style, and the same is true of the elegant transitions and the cool resolutions.
“Their scoring is among the most detailed and precise they ever wrote for the band,” noted Lambert about Nutcracker, not knowing that it was Strayhorn whom he was praising. Tchaikovsky himself was a fine orchestrator, and Strayhorn was inspired. His magical use of instruments is evident in every movement. Inventive scorings include the introductions to Toot Toot Tootie Toot (Dance of the Reed Pipes) and Chinoiserie, which is so radically fractured with percussion and accompaniment that it sounds funny, yet the whole thing is done with so much integrity that it works. Strayhorn’s humor is everywhere, delivered by musicians who know what to do with it. Jazzed-up Tchaikovsky could have sounded trite, but the intelligence of the arranger and his musicians avoids that hazard completely.
Another advantage to The Nutcracker Suite was that the original was music for dancing. This automatically provided a connection to jazz and suggested an approach: Strayhorn could transform the styles of movement, adding a playful dimension. The ballerina of Tchaikovsky’s Sugar Plum Fairy, twinkling across the stage to the sounds of celesta and violin, yields to Harry Carney’s lumbering baritone sax, the classic Ellington sound, spurred by Sam Woodyard’s Latin-jazz groove. The movement is retitled Sugar Rum Cherry. This is not quite straight-ahead jazz and the texture is sparse and atmospheric. Tchaikovsky’s theme is clipped and fragmented, modernist style, at several turns, including the clever conclusion where it whittles down abruptly to a little riff, repeated and fading away as Carney’s character struts around the corner.
As a nod to the LP structure Strayhorn composed an Entr’acte to finish side one. It is built out of phrases from the Overture tossed around imaginatively through various soloists, now with paraphrase, now with counterpoint, now with riffs. Chinoiserie begins with a stunning mosaic of percussion, piano, and glissando bass (the mosaic reminds me of the groove McCartney invented for the Beatles’ Come Together, I guess because each is so strikingly original). This becomes the basis for an increasingly layered texture. Quirky Monk-like (or Webern-like, or both) dots of dissonance accommodate the come and go of soloists.
The grand finale, Arabesque Cookie, based on Tchaikovsky’s Arabian Dance, is a full display of what a jazz orchestra assuming the role of classical chamber orchestra can do. From the first notes of the bamboo flute in the introduction, the arranger-composer gives notice of his ambitions. Three trombones play Tchaikovsky’s first theme (CD 0:20) in imitation, the last with wah-wah, backed by a Latin groove with prominent tambourine. Tchaikovsky’s second theme is introduced (0:46) with the unusual scoring of bass clarinet and regular clarinet playing in very low and very high registers, respectively, to create an eerie sense of spaciousness. The effect of all of this sonic invention is less exotic than it is otherworldly.
The exposition of the main themes yields (1:35) to a passage of florid arabesques, effuse and luxurious, clarinet waves that effectively set off the deliberate progress of the primary themes. Extension of the main themes follows, with fresh scoring and melodic development, but this is suddenly interrupted (2:56) by a fresh breakout of a completely new groove. This one is a distinctly jazz groove, and it supports an improvised solo from Hodges. The surprise is quickly joined by another (3:13): when the main thematic group reenters, the solo becomes an obbligato on top of it. Strayhorn has discovered a new and happy way to synthesize the idioms of jazz and classical. Tchaikovsky ended Arabian Dance with some nice turns between major and minor versions of the same chord. Strayhorn reduces the device to a simple statement of an isolated major chord (3:44) that sits in the middle of the texture like a cool beam of light. Increasing layers in the background generate great richness. When the Latin groove with tambourine returns for the finish, followed by recapitulation of the main themes and a gradual winnowing, everything feels exactly right.
In September 1963, Ellington, Strayhorn, and the band began a trip through Syria, Jordan, Afghanistan, India, Ceylon, Pakistan, Iran, and Lebanon, sponsored by the U.S. State Department. Their assignment was part of an extended program of “cultural presentations” designed to chip in soft support for the cold war against the Soviet Union. Ellington, always diplomatic, handled the assignment well, and there was tremendous enthusiasm for the music. The assassination of President Kennedy in late November brought the tour to a quick end, but the band was later hired for similar tours, including one to Japan in 1964.
The idea for The Far East Suite arose as a set of reflections on the first tour in 1963. Four movements were composed and premiered individually in early 1964. Then five more pieces were added in 1966 to give the suite its final form. Among this second set of pieces was Isfahan, which dated from before work with the State Department began (the first title was Elf), and also Ad Lib on Nippon, a multipart piece Ellington created with clarinetist Jimmy Hamilton during the tour of Japan. The remaining three were composed by Ellington for the 1966 recording dates.
Another majestic ballad from Strayhorn almost steals the show. Isfahan had nothing to do with the Middle East at the point of its conception but was simply given a new name and inserted because the music is so good. The tempo is just a whisker faster than The Star-Crossed Lovers, though it is hard to imagine that sensual lingering has ever been expressed in music as delightfully as it is here. Phrases extend, caesuras stretch out, ideas repeat with slight yet nimble difference, and Hodges’s operatic presence brings every harmonic-melodic dodge to its maximum potential. Contributing to the magic are the inner lines of the sax section, smaller wheels of chromatic sparkle spinning inside the more majestic arc of Hodges’s line. When the time comes for him to ascend to an anguished climax the whole band joins in full support.
If Isfahan is not quite the show stealer that The Star-Crossed Lovers was for Such Sweet Thunder, that is because of the great material from the original group of four movements, including two from Ellington. These carry direct references to music the two composers heard on their 1963 tour. Amad and Depk are two of my favorites among compositions firmly attributed to Ellington during the 1960s. Both are superb ensemble pieces, with rhythmic verve and harmonic intensity. Amad has long stretches of static harmony, an allusion to Middle Eastern music. After the introduction the piece clicks into a strong groove based on a two-note riff, with the orchestra adding layers and moving through call-and-response figures. This is Ellington at his earthiest, the band popping with excitement. Lawrence Brown’s caravanesque trombone solos represent a Muslim call to prayer. Depk is more harmonically traditional in an Ellingtonian sense, with nicely paced modulations and effective spurs of dissonance from the leader. Inspired by a wedding dance from Jordan, it moves with spirited ease between four-bar, six-bar, and three-bar groupings, then kicking into triple meter. This is all pulled off with polish and elegance, none of it sounding contrived. Ellington’s piano playing for both of these pieces shows why he was often considered to be the most important member of the rhythm section.
Ellington recalled the origin of Strayhorn’s Bluebird of Delhi. A mynah liked to come around the window of Strayhorn’s hotel room. “He was always talking to it,” Ellington remembered, ‘How are you today? Good morning! Do you want something to eat?’” There exists an ancient tradition in classical music of imitating birds, but I’m not sure how many of them convey this level of crisp vitality. Part of what gives the call such vivid definition is the harmonic setting, which can be described as “bitonal,” another trick from the high modernist workbench (and not at all foreign to Ellington), here presented as exotic mimesis. As the movement unfolds, the bird, played by clarinetist Jimmy Hamilton, relaxes a bit, flies around and checks things out, turns corners of adventure, rips into a peak of exaltation, and restates its exotic call for the finish.
Strayhorn’s Agra is named after the location of one of the most inspiring architectural monuments in the world, the Taj Mahal. The structure was built by the fifth Mughal emperor as a tomb for his favorite wife, Mumtaz Mahal, who died during childbirth. The connection between Strayhorn’s music and the architecture is more mysterious than what arose from Whistler’s misty brushstrokes, Tchaikovsky’s ballet score, and Shakespeare’s mischievous Puck. He decided to feature Harry Carney, who delivers one of his greatest performances, an outpouring of expressive timbral nuance. Carney’s baritone sax is appropriately weighty for this topic, but the music is also moody and somewhat enigmatic, with flickering changes of mode. Most of the piece is built around a drone, again a reference to music from the region. In contrast, the stunning introduction intertwines a series of climbing harmonies, full of tension, carried by Carney’s effusive saxophone.
These pieces from Strayhorn are among his last. In 1964 he was diagnosed with cancer. Composing and arranging over the next couple of years was sporadic. In June 1965 a concert devoted to his music was presented in Manhattan, with the composer himself at the piano, performing with Clark Terry, Bob Wilber, Willie Ruff, and others. The concert, wrote critic Dan Morgenstern in DownBeat, demonstrated “that Strayhorn is much more than Ellington’s alter ego . . . Everything he plays is invested with a rare sense of form and development . . .” One of the last numbers he revised, a ballad for Hodges, was grimly named Blood Count. The end came on May 31, 1967.
At the funeral Ellington spoke eloquently about his colleague’s “freedoms”—“freedom from hate, unconditionally; freedom from self-pity . . . freedom from fear of possibly doing something that might help another more than it might himself; and freedom from the kind of pride that could make a man feel he was better than his brother or neighbor.” Strayhorn’s family had difficulty gaining ownership of his musical manuscripts, however, with Ellington’s sister Ruth claiming them for the Ellington business, Tempo Music. “Billy worked for Edward. Therefore, his work was rightfully Edward’s,” she explained. That’s how things looked to the Ellingtons. She had watched Strayhorn enter Ellington’s life and watched him leave it twenty-eight years later, so she had an informed perspective.
In the seven years Ellington lived after Strayhorn’s death, his stature just kept growing. Strayhorn’s illness inspired him to reflect on his own mortality, yielding a “Concert of Sacred Music” that was performed in September 1965 at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. A video recording of the whole concert, made for television, can easily be located on the web. The concert mainly features revisions of old material. When Hodges performs Come Sunday you can almost see the golden light of the Holy Spirit streaming down on his upturned, concentrated gaze. Gospel singer Queen Esther Marrow is followed by jazz singer Jon Hendricks and the Grace Cathedral Choir. Ellington’s modest and humble lyrics move between biblical quotations and more universal messages. Virtually all of the music carries a grandeur that soars in the cathedral setting. For the exciting conclusion Ellington brought out tap dancer Bunny Briggs, put him in counterpoint with a scatting Hendricks, and framed him by the choir and the jazz orchestra for an up-tempo arrangement of Come Sunday that he named David Danced Before the Lord. The Sacred Concerts stand as a spectacular example of Ellington’s conceptual power. Mixing secular and sacred music was hardly new in the African American tradition, but the way he put the whole thing together was tremendously effective. Sacred Concerts became his primary creative outlet during the last years, with extensively new and revised versions for the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York City, Westminster Abbey in London, and many other places.
The Sacred Concerts seemed to put Ellington at the center of all African American culture, and with the mid-1960s victories for civil rights this was a position of tremendous symbolic value. He was no longer just the leader of and composer for the greatest jazz band in history, but someone who embodied the best of African American cultural history. Like a king, he symbolized everything that was good—nobility, dignity, loyalty, equanimity, elegance, aspiration, optimism, perseverance, resilience, confidence, daring, originality, intellect, brilliance, and transcendence.
He was invited several times to the White House, where his father had worked as a servant. Honorary doctorate degrees streamed in. The Ellington canon stood as an unmatched accomplishment. It meant different things to different parts of the population, and it carried special significance for jazz musicians, fans, and advocates. With rock and pop music exploding in popularity and with jazz patronage struggling, Ellington was the best possible person to validate the entire tradition. His accomplishment was clearly equal to any cultural achievement anywhere, without apology.
But among all the possible meanings of the Ellington phenomenon that were embraced during these triumphant years the idea that he occupied the driving center of a creative collective was usually missing. The essential members of the collective were relegated to the shadows, from which they might emerge briefly but not too long or with too much emphasis. The king absorbs everything. The idea that Ellington’s best work depended on collaboration was far from anyone’s mind.
Two sleights of hand had to be performed over and over again by Ellington’s publicists and by hosts of writers. First was the willful ignoring of collaborative realities. Second was a set of lexical acrobatics over the word “composer” and the assertion that this creative activity was distinct from what soloists, improvisers, and arrangers did. Both relate directly to the legacy of the ring shout, where the impulse to explore all openings for creative agency flourished. There is a long history of distinguishing Ellington from mere tunesmiths on the one hand and mere jazz improvisers, who are not composing in “the real sense of the word” (Hodeir) or are not composing at all (C. Lambert). And the biggest distinction those worried about his status had to firm up is between the jazz composer and the jazz arranger. These rigid boundaries have been essential for the Western notion of the great composer, but they were fairly useless in jazz. The groundwork was laid in New Orleans, where Buddy Bolden improvised blues to make his mark, Joe Oliver tinkered with collective improvisation, and Louis Armstrong worked over his solos until he got them the way he wanted them. Early jazz in New Orleans overflowed with performer-centered creativity.
Even though commercial pressures from copyright and marketplace distinction brought greater interest in compositional definition, the blurring of these creative categories remained commonplace. This practical reality has hardly been limited to jazz. You can find it in James Brown’s funk ensembles, in Richard Smallwood’s gospel ensembles, and throughout traditions that were shaped by the legacy of the ring shout.
What were Ellington’s greatest skills? Certainly a knack for instrumentation. He gained mastery of the three-minute form, and he was daring about organizing his material. Like so many jazz musicians, he was fascinated with harmony. Schuller insisted that harmony was, in fact, “his strongest suit.”
Or, we could say that his strongest suit was maximizing the creative potential of his musicians in the service of compositional definition. At age twenty-seven, the failed composer discovered a new way to generate fresh music by extending material from his soloists through framing and conceptualizing, nipping and tucking, harmonizing, and arranging and enhancing with contrast and form. He spent the rest of his life relentlessly plumbing collaborative practice for every possible scrap of value. He got the best of his musicians’ melodies, the best of their arranging ideas, the best of their editing, the best of their creative use of timbre, and the best of their fully formed compositions. To that he added whatever seemed to fit and the whole enterprise soared. The genius collaborator kept the whole thing miraculously going for forty-some years, through a combination of business savvy, interpersonal skills, creative daring, and determination that truly put him, his band, and his music beyond category.
Across the Atlantic, in the late 1950s, another group of musicians stumbled into an equally successful approach to creative collaboration. They had even less contact with the African American musical vernacular than Ellington had when he was growing up. Nevertheless, it was the basis for the music they made together. Their provincial town in the north of England was a port with historic connections to the United States, and the timing was right. Postwar, working-class Liverpudlians found much to admire from the United States, and the communal verve of the ring-shout legacy made its mark. It would have been difficult to script their unlikely story in a novel and make it believable, but such are the quirks of history.