[Dixielandjazz] Duke Ellington reviewed

Tue Mar 8 12:27:48 PST 2011

Oh well, might as well. I wheeled this piece out for Harry Callaghan, but might as well
see if anyone else is interested.
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.