Duke Ellington used to send me roses: gorgeous long-stemmed pink roses (he didn’t stint on elegance) whenever he had a song he wanted me to hear. And he signed off on all of his cards, telegrams, and phone calls, “Love you madly.” I sure did, right back.
Duke wrote more than a thousand compositions, and I wish I’d had the time to record all of them (that would have been a lot of roses). His creativity was ceaseless, constant, and unquenchable.
Duke’s often been compared to Beethoven or Puccini, for the elegant intricacy of his compositions. I also think of Picasso and his restless, almost compulsive inventiveness. Creativity never comes easy. But Duke’s genius was unstoppable.
It’s amazing to think—but important not to forget—that when Duke and I were the first performers to open Miami’s Americana Hotel in 1956, Duke couldn’t attend the press party. It was Florida, it was the South, and the hotel was segregated. Any white man with 50 cents in his pocket could buy a beer at the bar. But the creative genius who brought in customers by the thousands couldn’t sit next to him. That was America then.
But I also remember the time Duke confided an old trick to me: When he was on tour, he’d book a penthouse suite for his band manager, who was white, in the best hotel in town. Then the manager would give Duke his key. Duke, his longtime collaborator Billy Strayhorn, and a couple of other featured bandmates would sleep soundly there. And when Duke’s band traveled through the South, they’d book private train cars in which they’d sleep, eat, and even rehearse. They essentially glided over the abhorrent laws of segregation.
Duke was such a prolific composer that no one or two lyric writers could keep up with him. Typically, he’d write a song as an instrumental, his band would make it part of its repertoire, and it would already be a hit by the time Duke could find a lyricist to add words.
One of my favorite songs to sing of Duke’s is “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” which he wrote as an instrumental in 1940. Bob Russell added lyrics in 1942, and I’m glad he did. It’s a sprightly tune that turns into a wistful melody for a love that didn’t last—but, hey, that’s life.
Thought I’d visit the club / Got as far as the door . . .
It’s a ditty, not a dirge. Duke’s song had the stamp of wisdom and the experience of knowing that something and someone else would come along.
Duke was born in Washington, DC, the nation’s capital, but still a southern city, especially the year of his birth, in 1899. In fact, Duke’s mother, Daisy, was the daughter of a slave. His father, James, made blueprints for the Department of the Navy in DC. Both parents played the piano, and Duke learned from them.
A piano was not just a fixture in their home but the family entertainment system. Duke learned to play classical music, standards, hymns, and spirituals, without any sense that one kind of music was more or less sophisticated than another. Duke always used to tell me, “There’s only good music and bad music.”
I’ve been asked many times, “What made Duke Ellington so great?” and I always make a point of telling people “You can hear it for yourself. But you have to begin with Duke’s mother. Duke said she always told him, ‘You are great. You are a gift to the world,’ and made him a believer in that, too.”
Edward Kennedy Ellington told me he almost couldn’t remember a time that he wasn’t called Duke. He carried himself with dapper elegance and courtly manners, even as a kid. The name Duke just seemed to suit him—much more than Ed.
Duke began to play clubs and cafés in Washington from the time he was a teenager. He once worked behind the counter at a place called the Poodle Dog Café that already had a piano player. But the pianist often had too much to drink too early in the day. That’s when the owner would say, “Duke, take over,” and Duke would hang up his apron, slip on a jacket, and play. Duke was fourteen when he completed his first full composition (known today as the “Soda Fountain Rag,” or sometimes “Poodle Dog Rag”), which he said he wrote to capture all the spritzing, spraying, and squirting he’d do behind the counter.
Duke was also a talented artist who had turned down an art scholarship to the Pratt Institute and begun his own sign-painting business. (“Don’t do just one thing,” Duke always told me, which inspired me to work at my painting, too.) But when a client would hire him to draw a sign for some kind of dance party, Duke would offer to be the entertainment. He began to make a reputation more for his music than for his artwork. His first group was called “The Duke’s Serenaders” (their listing in the DC yellow pages billed them as “Colored Syncopaters”), and in segregated Washington, Duke’s became the orchestra of choice at numerous embassy parties, debutante balls, and birthdays.
Duke moved to New York in the 1920s. He had a comfortable slot in Washington society but didn’t want to play just for embassy parties, and he wanted to find a place in Harlem’s Cultural Renaissance. In a short time, he formed the house band at Harlem’s Cotton Club, and soon thereafter he won a name for the weekly national radio broadcasts from the club.
Duke led his band more by inspiration and example than direction. He conducted from the keyboard, not a podium. He’d lift an eyebrow or his hand for a cue and see to it that each member of the orchestra had a moment to improvise and shine in the course of a performance.
When the Great Depression struck, millions of Americans were staggered and suffering. The music of Duke Ellington lifted them up. It had verve, lilt, and swing and reminded them of America’s strength, vigor, and inventiveness. “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)” came in 1932, “Sophisticated Lady” in 1933, “In a Sentimental Mood” in 1935.
“Sophisticated Lady” is one of the great American songs of all time. Adelaide Hall did a knockout version on the original recording, and all of the greatest American female vocalists—Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, Julie London, and in recent times Linda Ronstadt and the great Natalie Cole—have recorded versions. It turns out to be one of Lady Gaga’s favorite songs, cool and shrewdly observed. The Lady and I did our own on our 2014 duets album. Mitchell Parish wrote the lyrics to Duke’s luxurious melody, and the song is a kind of ballad to people who laugh on the outside while they carry a torch inside their heart:
Smoking, drinking
Never thinking of tomorrow . . .
Duke said the people who inspired the song in his mind were not Manhattan swells, but a few grade school teachers he had in DC who would go off to Europe during their summer break. That seemed the height of sophistication when he was a kid.
It’s hard to appreciate sometimes how much of American music runs through Duke Ellington’s work. He and his band were on break while playing at the Lincoln Tavern in Chicago in 1931, and during the intermission, when most people would have been napping, drinking, or smoking, Duke was writing a composition. (I told you: he was ceaselessly creative. He couldn’t just rest, like most people. He had to have something to show for it!) One of Duke’s great gifts was to appreciate and incorporate the talents, thoughts, and feelings of his bandmates into his music. He wrote a composition around the words that were the credo of his trumpet player, Bubber Miley: “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.” He may have been the man who coined that word for the music that was setting hearts racing and toes tapping all over America.
Bubber, by the way, had tuberculosis and didn’t live to see the song recorded, with Johnny Hodges on sax and Ivie Anderson singing those great lyrics by Irving Mills: “It makes no difference if it’s sweet or hot / Just give that rhythm everything you’ve got.”
Duke became a big name in Europe and began to tour there. The name Duke Ellington became, almost like Coca-Cola, a symbol of America. The British and French in particular praised his longer orchestral pieces, including Creole Rhapsody in 1931, and Reminiscing in Tempo, a tribute Duke wrote for his mother after she died in 1935. That work took up four sides of a ten-inch record, and although mostly shorter versions are available on CD and download today, it’s well worth hearing. It’s touching and lilting and captures the spirit of a young mother who cherished her son and gave him to the world.
Duke Ellington was a genius. He was unfailingly courteous and generous, but he kept to himself a lot. Who else could understand the depth of what went on inside his brilliant mind? We spent a lot of time together over the years; we talked about music and musicians and traded stories about producers, club owners, and friends. But Duke rarely talked about himself. He even wrote his music around the various talents of his bandmates, whom he knew so well. In 1956, he made a historic appearance at the Newport Jazz Festival, where the saxophonist Paul Gonsalves played a twenty-seven-chorus solo in the middle of Duke’s “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue” that became the center of the best-selling LP of Duke’s career.
For all of his acclaim, Duke was unassuming about himself. But he could be supremely demonstrative in friendship.
The Christmas season of 1965 was the worst that I’d lived through since the time I was ten and my father died. My wife, Patricia, and I had split up. I wasn’t welcome at our family home in New Jersey, and I missed my two sons. I was living in a small, spiritless room in the Gotham Hotel and felt sad, depressed, and lonely, yet too embarrassed to admit that to anybody and ask for companionship or cheer. For me the season was cold and gray.
One day during the holiday season, I heard singing in the hotel hallway. I figured the singers were carolers who wanted a contribution for a good cause, and I threw open the door. I saw about a dozen singers in the hallway. They were singing the Alan Jay Lerner and Burton Lane song “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever.” It turned out that Duke was giving a concert of sacred music at a church on Fifth Avenue. Louis Bellson, his drummer, told Duke that I was low. So he sent over a choir of voices to cheer me up. I invited them in, and we sang together, making the holiday for me, courtesy of Duke.
Duke wasn’t a person to explain himself much. He didn’t speak a lot about his spiritual life. He just lived it. He used to say that the only book he’d read cover to cover was the Bible. And he believed it was the only book you really needed to read.
“Tony,” he said, “it can get boiled down to a single message, like a great song: God is love.” Of all the paintings I’ve done, my favorite is a portrait of Duke, which I was thrilled to give to the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. I called it Duke Ellington: “God Is Love.” He tried to live by that, too.
Today Duke Ellington is on a stamp, his name is on schools, and he’s hailed as a genius. But we should remind ourselves that Duke, and every other entertainer doing the great songs we believed in, including me, got hit hard by the rise of rock in the ’50s and ’60s. The folks who ran the record companies would anoint some new young talent or group and promote the hell out of them—for a few months or a year. Just take a look at Billboard’s top songs of 1962. You’ll see some names and songs that have stood the test of time, such as the peerless Elvis Presley, the Shirelles, Neil Sedaka, and the great Ray Charles. But you’ll also see a lot of one- or two-hit wonders, like Joey Dee and the Starliters, and Bobby (Boris) Pickett and the Crypt-Kickers (who recorded that timeless “classic” “Monster Mash”).
Record company executives were always eager to “discover” new young talent (and to be sure, a lot of them were talented; I don’t want to sound like some scolding old fool who doesn’t think anything good has been written since Frank Sinatra sent bobby-soxers into a swoon). The record companies could direct, mold, and ultimately own new young talent in a way they couldn’t order around established artists who had built their own identity, such as Duke Ellington, Frank Sinatra, and Ella Fitzgerald. And, I hope, me.
Duke said he was once summoned to a meeting with Columbia Records executives who cleared their throats, cracked their knuckles, and announced, “Uh, oh, sorry, Duke, but your records just aren’t selling the way they used to.” That was after they had done almost nothing to promote his new records, just relying on Duke’s stellar name.
“I guess I must be mistaken,” Duke said he told the execs. “I thought I was supposed to make the records and you were supposed to sell them.”
That sharp observation reminds me to this day that everything I need to know about the music business can be found in the Bible of Duke Ellington.
Duke and I did twenty-five concerts with the New York Philharmonic in 1968, to mark my twenty years in show business. I took second billing. The only time I had ever done that before was with Count Basie and Frank Sinatra. I have no problem playing second bill to royalty—Duke, the Count, or the Chairman of the Board. They have elevated me in every way.
I think what I learned most from Duke over the decades was how his extraordinary creative output was so original and distinct, he never worried about going into or out of style. He was always Duke, his own man, with that singular, inimitable style that belonged to no one else and was matched by no one else. He didn’t look at the weekly hit parade or the year’s Billboard rankings. He took the long view, as all great artists do. Some years would be better than others. But in the end, they all added up to an unsurpassed life and career.
I have a favorite image of Duke that I keep in my mind. Bobby Hackett and I were playing the Somerset Hotel in Boston in the early ’60s, and one bright day we were sitting in my room or Bobby’s room when the phone rang. It was Duke. He said to come down to the lobby, there was a piano and he wanted us to hear a song. It was a broken-down old relic of a piano, with eight notes on the middle C octave busted. But Duke played it anyway, for an hour, choosing notes that would avoid that octave.
Duke Ellington found a new way to make an old piano play the music that flowed from his soul into his fingers. His creativity was ceaseless, restless, and tireless. We have a whole world of music to see us through our lives because of him.
Il Duomo, Florence