[Dixielandjazz] Review: Duke, A life of Duke Ellington--

[Norman Vickers]

To:  Musicians and Jazzfans; DJML

From:  Norman Vickers. Jazz Society of Pensacola

 

>From New York Times ,. December 6:  Here’s an excellent review of Terry
Teachout’s biography of Duke Ellington.  If you wish, compare my review—see
www.jazzpensacola.com  click news on drop down menu and then click reviews.
James Gavin’s review is better.  Wish I’d written one that well. At least, I
can claim priority. (smile)


  _____  

December 6, 2013 New York Times

Big Band

By JAMES GAVIN

DUKE

A Life of Duke Ellington

By Terry Teachout

Illustrated. 483 pp. Gotham Books. $30.

Eighty years before “branding” had become the familiar hard-nosed term for
the packaging and selling of entertainers, Duke Ellington was a dreamlike
synthesis of image, talent and social relevance. As a black jazz titan in a
racist age — he rose to stardom in the 1920s — the aristocratic maestro took
on a weighty double role: to lift jazz to the level of concert music and to
win respect for his race. 

He triumphed on both counts. Ellington played piano, but his real instrument
was the orchestra. The sound he created was a tapestry of bluesy textures,
lowdown swing and solo instrumental voices that growled, cried or wailed.
Ellington led the band with a majesty that made him seem truly royal. He
moved quickly from the Cotton Club in Harlem to Broadway and Hollywood; his
orchestra played Carnegie Hall throughout the ’40s; and he landed on the
cover of Time. His compositions, from “It Don’t Mean a Thing (if It Ain’t
Got That Swing)” to the “Black, Brown and Beige” suite, glorified the black
experience and earned him comparisons to Prokofiev and Stravinsky. All the
while he had one crowning goal: to entertain “without compromising the
dignity of the Negro people.” 

His was a grand tightrope act. Dressed in tails, grinning broadly from the
piano, he stayed ever suave and impeccable. Ellington couldn’t let the
public see his flaws, and he had many, from his relentless womanizing to his
penchant for hogging credit from his collaborators. He knew that a black man
in his position had to seem superhuman; anything less might cause a response
articulated by his comrade Lena Horne: “There go those black people messing
up again.” 

In his 1973 memoir, “Music Is My Mistress,” he merely polished the facade. A
1987 biography by James Lincoln Collier focused on the music and sidestepped
the personality. Ellington’s newest biographer, Terry Teachout, clearly saw
the challenge of writing about the enigmatic legend. In “Duke: A Life of
Duke Ellington,” he calls Ellington “a riddle without an answer, an
unknowable man who hid behind a high wall of ornate utterances and flowery
compliments that grew higher as he grew older.” 

Yet in his cleareyed reassessment of a man regarded in godlike terms,
Teachout, the drama critic for The Wall Street Journal, delves behind “the
mask of smiling, noncommittal urbanity that he showed to the world.” The
facts and stories he relates aren’t new, but rarely have they had such a
compelling narrative flow or ring of reliability. As in his last book,
“Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong,” Teachout keeps his psychoanalyzing within
safe limits; he contextualizes historically without sounding contrived, and
honors his subject’s musical achievements through just the right amount of
close analysis. 

He traces Ellington’s cultivated veneer to his turn-of-the-century childhood
in Washington, D.C. Middle-class blacks of the time, like his parents, knew
that upward mobility depended on adopting the whitest mannerisms possible.
Ellington’s father, a butler, dressed and spoke in a high-flown, fussy
fashion; he and his wife, Daisy, groomed their son to do the same. A
childhood friend seems to have christened the young Edward Kennedy Ellington
“Duke,” thus sealing his air of eminence. 

Jazz was blossoming in the form of ragtime, and he fell in love with its
syncopated rhythms. Musically he was largely self-taught, and soon after he
started his first combos, he formed a concept that had little to do with
ragtime. He unleashed it in 1927 at the Cotton Club, the gold ring for black
entertainers. The room’s brilliantly staged variety shows gave a nearly
all-white clientele an illusion of untamed Africa. Ellington’s sound —
dubbed “jungle music” — thrilled audiences with its raw vivacity. The band’s
dark, moaning horns held the essence of the blues; to Ellington, they evoked
“the mass singing of slaves.” 

He needed a powerful white champion to truly make it big, and he had found
one in Irving Mills, a music publisher who managed the band. Mills helped
polish its image for mass (i.e., white) dissemination; he handled the
business side, while shielding the leader as best he could from racial
blows. For this he extracted a heavy price — up to 50 percent of the band’s
income. He also doctored many Ellington songs and took co-writer credit.
Ellington accepted it all as the necessary trade-off for stardom. 

The formula worked. Hits tumbled out of him: “Mood Indigo,” “Sophisticated
Lady,” “Solitude,” “Caravan,” “In a Sentimental Mood.” The pressured leader
did most of his writing on the fly; he liked to compose piecemeal in
rehearsals with the band, assembling songs like jigsaw puzzles. Ellington
was no great melodist; his players’ improvised solos were often the source
of his tunes. Some musicians sued him later. 

One who stayed quiet was Billy Strayhorn, the composer and arranger whom the
Ellington trombonist Lawrence Brown called “the genius, the power behind the
throne.” Meticulously schooled and much more harmonically advanced than his
employer, Strayhorn lifted the band to its highest refinement. Ellington
called him “my right arm, my left arm, all the eyes in the back of my head,”
but he had no compunction about robbing him of at least some of his glory;
on many Strayhorn songs, including “Something to Live For” and “Day Dream,”
Ellington followed Mills’s lead and added his own name as co-author.
Professionally, Strayhorn seemed doomed to live in the shadows, in part
because he was gay and had opted not to hide it. 

Teachout relates even the most dramatic episodes in the Ellington story with
a poised impartiality. He doesn’t take a novelistic approach, nor does he
describe music with the lyrical flights of fancy favored by such writers as
Greil Marcus and Lester Bangs. Teachout writes in an earthbound style marked
by sound scholarship and easy readability. He particularly shines in his
portraits of Ellington’s renowned sidemen, including Jimmie Blanton, Ben
Webster, Paul Gonsalves and Juan Tizol. As the largely unsung heroes of the
band, they could be angry, sloppy or alcoholic. For all of Ellington’s
obsessive drive for control, he hadn’t the nerve to discipline them. 

By the late ’40s the swing era had entered a decline, and so did Ellington.
His prestige and his record sales sagged; many of his key musicians left.
Ellington kept writing ambitious thematic works, but most were panned as
pretentious and weak. He had one last blaze of glory, a surprise smash
appearance at the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival. But the boost it gave him had
faded by the ’60s. Rarely had Ellington allowed even a flash of bitterness
to peek through, but he couldn’t hide it in 1965, when the Pulitzer Prize
board members rejected a proposal by the music committee to give him a
lifetime achievement award. Ellington denounced their snobbery toward
nonclassical forms, and hinted at possible racism. 

In Teachout’s poignant last pages, the jazz giant is broke and passé, yet
still addicted to a lonely life on the road with a band he couldn’t afford
to maintain. When he died of pneumonia after a diagnosis of lung cancer, in
1974, he owed the I.R.S. more than half a million dollars. 

Yet none of his missteps have dimmed the Ellington legend. Seldom overtly
political, he preferred to lead by example. The need for symbolic black
achievers — Oprah Winfrey, Quincy Jones, Tyler Perry and, of course, Barack
Obama — is still with us; the N.A.A.C.P., with its annual Image Awards,
continues to honor blacks who in its view uphold a positive appearance.
“Duke” humanizes a man whom history has kept on a ­pedestal. 

James Gavin is the author of “Stormy ­Weather: The Life of Lena Horne.” His
biography of Peggy Lee will be published next year.