[Dixielandjazz] Creole Love Call

[Steve Voce]

Seeing that you are obviously a dedicated Ellingtonian, Maryk, I hope you'll be interested by this account of the first time that
I met the great man.

Steve Voce

A Cold From Little Eddie
By Steve Voce
The phone rang in Stanley Dance's home in Connecticut. The call was from
London. "This is Little Eddie. Just to let you know that we arrived all
right.."
Considering that they seem to live normally in a state of almost mindless
fatigue, it is amazing that the Ellington band members manage to be so
composed and sociable most of the time. Perhaps the most imperturbable of
them all is baritone sax player Harry Carney. He has an elephantine memory
that is almost supernatural. Standing outside the Empire in a Jacques Tati
beret and overcoat, which made one wonder where he had left his motor bike,
he recalled his first visit to Liverpool. 'In 1933 we stayed down that
street. I think it was the second turning on the left, and their name was
Jackson. I wonder if they still live there?'
             Later he was talking to clarinettist Jimmy Hamilton. 'I was
thinking of phoning home today, but after that hotel bill last night, I can't
afford it. Five quid just for bed and breakfast.'
             'You know why that is,' said Hamilton. 'They watch you come in
through the door and they say "This here is Harry Carney. He can pay! Jack
up everything."'
               Sinclair Traill, editor of Jazz Journal International, had
come up to Liverpool to join me for Duke Ellington's Sunday night concert at
The Empire. Jimmy took me upstairs to meet trumpeter Cootie Williams. 'Harry
'll be on the phone now. Wherever we are he always calls home. If he was in
Hell he'd be asking for a telephone.'
               Close up Cootie looks like a granite Red Indian, and his
conversation, consisting mainly of grunted 'Yeah?' and 'No?' filled out the
analogy. I left him cleaning his already gleaming horn, squeezed between the
Rabbit and the Cat  (Johnny Hodges and Cat Anderson) and went to join
Sinclair in the Duke's room, which had been converted into a sanatorium -
Duke had the most impressive cold that I had ever been close up to. The room
was littered with Kleenex tissues and Duke was selecting his underwear for
the concert from a caseful held out by his dresser.
              'Can you get me some fresh, unstrained grapefruit juice?' he
asked me. 'A jugful?'
                This presented rather a problem since the grapefruit trees in
Liverpool have not even flowered yet, never mind borne fruit.  However I
managed to get a jugful of some kind of grapefruit juice (I suspect it was
the bottled kind) and took it back to the dressing room like one of the
three wise men.
(Note added in 2000: the grapefruit juice resulted from a walk across
Liverpool to the Adelphi Hotel. This was a Sunday and the city virtually
shut down in those days of austerity. I had great difficulty in persuading
the hotel people to lend me the jug. All pubs and any source of alcohol
closed by 10 p.m. every night.).
            Duke sipped it. 'I think they strained it by mistake,' Sinclair
offered.
            'They grow the grapefruit a bit sweet around here, too,' said
Duke, sniffing the jug suspiciously.
             The dressing room belonged during the week to Morecambe of
Morecambe and Wise, who was appearing at the theatre in pantomime. Mr.
Morecambe had left a pleasant note inviting Duke to help himself to a drink
and to make use of the television set in the room. Duke switched on the
television while the half bottle of gin on the table went round the room.
The time was 7.30 p.m. and I realised with no little discomfort what was
about to happen.
          An unctuous and servile voice came out of the speaker: '.welcome
you ladies and gentlemen once again to the Black and White Minstrel Show!'
        And there they were, capering about in their patchwork suits and
gollywog make-up. This, I said to myself, is going to be one of those famous
moments of truth.
       Duke and Strayhorn watched in baleful silence. Strayhorn took off his
glasses, examined them, and put them back on. Suddenly the Minstrels went
into 'Caravan', and George Chisholm came on.
           'Well produced show,' said Duke, and turned back to the problem of
his underwear.
           A mother and daughter, whose interest in jazz must have been
tenuous, suddenly appeared in the room. Apparently Duke had met them
somewhere and promised them tickets for the show. All the seats were sold,
so I gave them my tickets.
            There followed a stormy tussle between Sinclair and the stage
foreman, a belligerent and disenchanted person whom I learned to avoid years
ago. His attitude was almost as cold as the stage of the theatre.
             'If you had wanted to borrow ten bucks and I had never met you
before, these guys would show you right into my dressing room,' said Duke,
'but if you were someone important who had just come in to see the show
before signing a contract or something, they'd practically come to blows
keeping you out.
                On stage the Ellingtonians were shivering behind the curtain.
Johnny Hodges examined his alto and began calling for anti-freeze. We sat
down on two stools just off-stage from the piano.
                 Duke didn't appear backstage until the band crackled into 'A
Train'. He walked briskly to the mike, did the 'we love you madly' bit, and
walked briskly off-stage to our side.
             'Jesus!' he said. 'When they built this place they forgot to put
the roof on.' He called out for spotlights to be placed to shine on the
piano stool. Would someone mind going out there and breaking the ice between
the piano keys?
             The concert progressed more or less normally except that they
left out 'Kinda Dukish' and 'Pretty and the Wolf' but added 'Mainstem'. The
next day the Liverpool Daily Post said that 'Kinda Dukish' was one of the
concert highlights. During the last tour the Liverpool Echo claimed that the
trumpet solos of  the alto saxophone player Johnny Hodges were very moving.
                The big drawback about listening from the wings was that the
normal bite of the sax section was a bit muffled. But this was more than
compensated for the ability to hear the continuous battery of asides that
goes on between the members of the band.
             After Hodges had blandly laid down three of his masterworks, he
was in the process of sitting down again when Ellington called him out for
another bow. While smirking politely at the audience Rabbit was muttering
all the time to his boss. 'Lay off it, Dukie. Every time I bend down I can
feel the ice cracking off the back of my pants.'
             At the interval 'Dukie' hustled off to his room to change into
ankle length underpants. The trumpet and trombone sections, who hadn't
missed the goings on in the wings, gathered around Sinclair's chair, removed
his flask, and emptied it. Sinclair stood in the middle in his overcoat,
looking for all the world like some football coach with his team at half
time. I almost expected him to produce a plate of sliced lemons from
somewhere.
            The teams changed ends and crashed into the second half with a
heat that had obviously come from Sinclair's flask, now lying forlornly abandoned behind the piano stool.
             'Little Eddie', who kept bounding into the wings to give us a
rundown on the state of the weather on-stage, had still not warmed up and
was having constant trouble with his cold. The piano was by now full of
abandoned Kleenex tissues.
             'Tell Stray to have my ugly pills ready when we come off,' he
said as the last number approached.
          'Man,' said Jimmy Hamilton as they came off-stage, 'Will I be
glad to get out of this freezing theatre and into that freezing coach where
I can at least die in an undignified posture of my own choosing.' (The band
was making the 200-mile trip back to London overnight).
                In the Duke's room the Wardrobe Section were busily packing
his clothes. Duke and Billy Strayhorn were discussing how best to
reciprocate Mr Morecambe's gesture with the gin. The half-bottle was by now
as empty as Sinclair's flask. With a little pressure Duke extracted the fact
that Billy had a full bottle of gin in his bag.
           'This fellow has been very gracious to us,' said Duke. 'We should
try to be even more gracious in return. I think you should leave the full
bottle.'
            'Why not just refill the half from my bottle?' suggested Billy.
'There's going to come a moment of crisis on that train' (Stray and Duke
were going back to London with Sinclair on the train) at about three o'clock
in the morning when I'm going to need that gin.'
            'No,' insisted Duke. 'We must be more gracious than he. The
gracious thing to do is to leave the full bottle.' (Duke doesn't drink these
days).
            'Edward, you're being gracious as all hell with MY gin.' Stray
jammed his hands in the pockets of his collarless George Melly-type corduroy
suit and looked disconsolate. Harry Carney, who was going back on the coach
and stood no chance with the gin either way, roared with laughter.
             With Duke absorbed in his dressing, Billy cautiously refilled
the half bottle and slipped his own bottle back into his bag.
              We reached the Adelphi Hotel at eleven o'clock, and with
customary British Railways grace (the hotel belonged to BR) the headwaiter
refused to serve us. 'I have to have my staff in by seven in the morning,
and I'm not keeping them back now for you.' In a second-class hotel they
would have probably had the bouncer throw us out.
            Duke walked past as though he didn't know that the headwaiter
was there (he probably didn't) and sat down at a table. Eventually a waiter
arrived and Duke ordered soup, bacon and eggs 'with the eggs cooked easy',
toast and 'as many kinds of jam as you've got.'
             'Give me my Ugly pill,' he said to Strayhorn, abandoning yet
another tissue. Strayhorn produced two pills, one a murky white large enough
to choke a big horse, the other (the Ugly pill) smaller and bright emerald
green.
             Duke explained when I asked him that he had to take them to get
any kind of relief from his cold, which was a really remarkable one. 'They
put me in an ugly mood, and I get rude, very rude, to people I have no right
to be rude to. I get very nasty, and really I shouldn't. I get very ugly.'
             'Come now Edward, you're not the monster you would have everyone
believe you are,' said Billy.
             'I'm not a monster,' retorted Duke. 'You're the monster. You're a monster
among monsters.'
             'I guess I must be a monster,' Billy agreed, 'because the king
monster says I am.'
             Edward poked into the two plates of jam in front of him - one
blackcurrant and one strawberry. He stopped a passing waitress: 'What other
kinds of jam have you got? And bring me more milk and grapefruit juice.' She
looked at him as though he was mad, but came back with raspberry jam, milk
and grapefruit juice.
             Billy surveyed the remains of Duke's snack. 'The inside of your
stomach will be like Chicago on St. Valentine's Day. Your germs will be
tightening their hold.'
              'It couldn't be much tighter. These germs have got inside my
lovely, lovely body and they reckon on staying there forever. They must like
my piano playing.'
                Duke collected a huge supply of paper napkins, and I drove
them to Lime Street Station. 'You should be wearing a coat,' Duke said to me
at the station.
               I left them in the frozen station to face what transpired to
be a night in a train without heat - too cold to stay in their sleepers, in
fact.
                Three days later I had one of the most aggressive colds I
have yet encountered. I took consolation in the thought that it had probably
originally belonged to Little Eddie.

                 I think I could do with some of those Ugly pills.