May 24, 2024 • 38 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, some believe he was the most important composer of the 20th century, in or out of jazz. Terry Teachout, one of America's best culture writers and author of Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, tells the story of the jazz legend, his music, his struggles, his triumphs and so much more.
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
And we love to tell stories about history, particularly the
intersection of art and culture. Many music critics believe Duke
Ellington was one of the most important composers in and
(00:31):
out of jazz, an artistic giant of the twentieth century.
His story is more than a musical journey. It is
a story about race, culture, and art, and a walk
through the twentieth century. Here to tell this remarkable story
is the late Wall Street Journal culture critic and author
Terry Teachout, whose book Duke, A Life of Duke Ellington
(00:55):
may be one of the finest biographies I've ever read.
And we're telling this story because on this day in history,
Duke Ellington died in nineteen seventy four. Duke Ellington was
born in eighteen ninety nine in our nation's capital, and
both the timing of his birth and location impacted his
(01:17):
life greatly.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
Here is Terry Teachout. Washington, d c, in Ellington's childhood
and youth, was one of the most ruthlessly segregated cities
in America. It was, you might say, the northern tip
of the Deep South. But it had a large, healthy,
prosperous black middle class, a black bourgeoisie at the same time.
(01:45):
That is what defines the Washington of Ellington's youth. In
the neighborhood he grew up in U Street, it was
a place where you lived if you could afford to,
and in the alley if you couldn't afford to, where
every kind a black person, well to do and poor,
striving and desperate. They were all thrown together. But it
(02:06):
was a society that in its own class divisions mirrored
the class divisions of the white world. There was a
racial cast system among blacks. It had to do with economics,
it also had to do with skin color, and Duke
Ellington came from light skinned parents and this put them
(02:26):
several rungs up the ladder. So you had a society
of strivers, but you also had a society of people
who were very self conscious about their place and class.
It might have looked on from the outside. Ellington's father
was considered pretty far up on the ladder of success
because he was the butler of a white doctor, and
(02:48):
so he acquired class identity and a patina of elegance
from this very affiliation. This is something that Malcolm X
talks about in his autobiography. I was quite struck by that,
and it's something I think that Ellington himself may have
had equivocal feelings about. On the one hand, he was
himself very class conscious and he was a person who
(03:10):
was inclined for his black friends to be people with
light skin. At the same time, though he believed deeply
in the self improvement ethos of the black bourgeoisie. That
is why he was determined to make something of himself
something important. His mother had told him right from the
beginning of his life, you are gifted, you are special,
(03:35):
you are going to do remarkable things. And Allington never
doubted her. She was dead serious about it. And Freud
said that a boy who has the absolute approval of
his mother is destined for success. If that's true, Duke
Ellington had the pedigree going in.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
Most great talents have mentors that inspire them, and Ellington's
muse was a musician, Harvey.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
Brook Harvey Brooks was I believe based in Philadelphia. He
was a late ragtime early stride pianist. He's not well
remembered today because he didn't make very many recordings, but
he did make piano roles. Ellington heard one early on,
and he'd never heard that kind of playing before. Being
(04:22):
from a family of the black bourgeoisie, Ellington was not
the sort of person who was likely to grow up
hearing ragtime or that kind of popular music that was
going around at the time. When he heard Harvey Brooks
playing Rags, he was stunned by how exciting the music
was and how personal, how individual it was. That was
(04:42):
really what pushed the button that made Ellington want to
be a musician. He had originally intended to be an artist,
a commercial artist, and he had real talent in that area.
But when he heard this kind of music and realized
that you could go out on a bandstand play music
like that, people would hear it and know it was you,
and that women would flock around the bandstand because they
(05:03):
found that very sexy. That was what interested him, And
of course he discovered very quickly that it wasn't just
a matter of his being interested. He also had innate
talent for it, and it was Harvey Brooks who started
him down that line, so much so that Ellington actually
sought him out a couple of years later. And Brooks
showed him some of the tricks of the trade. Usually,
(05:25):
you become interested in music because you hear it and
it's beautiful. You've become transported by it, and then you
start to think, well, maybe I could do that, maybe
I can make that. But with Ellington, it seems to
have been the actual act of performance, of getting his
hands on the keyboard and hearing the kind of music
he wanted to play that excited him. He'd taken a
(05:46):
few piano lessons as a child from a woman named,
believe it or not, Clinkscales. We had to track that
down in the census records, but it's absolutely true. But
they didn't stick with him because she wasn't teaching him
what he wanted to hear.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
Then came the race riots in Washington, d C. Which
would alter the course of Ellington's life.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
The race riots of nineteen nineteen had an overwhelming effect
on Washington, D C. They were violent, they were shocking,
They caused a lot of black people to realize just
how fragile their lives were, and it seems impossible that
they wouldn't have had that kind of effect on Allenton.
(06:31):
He had already been hearing musicians from outside Washington. He
knew there was more to the music that interested him,
the music that excited him, than he was hearing in Washington.
And he must also have realized that if you wanted
to get somewhere, if you want it to be more
than just a famous local musician at this point in
(06:53):
the history of jazz, you were going to have to
come to New York.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
And listening to the late great Terry teach Out tell
the heartbreaking story of Duke Ellington, and it will get
increasingly heartbreaking as you listen to it, and also triumphal.
You are special, you are gifted, and you will do
remarkable things, his mother said. And to have those words
spoken over you, what an advantage in life. When we
(07:21):
come back more of the remarkable story of Duke Ellington
as told by Terry teach Out here on our American Stories.
This is Lee Hibibe, and this is our American Stories,
and all of our history stories are brought to us
by our generous sponsors, including Hillsdale College, where students go
to learn all the things that are beautiful in life
(07:43):
and all the things that matter in life. If you
can't get to Hillsdale, Hillsdale will come to you with
their free and terrific online courses. Go to Hillsdale dot edu.
That's Hillsdale dot edu. And we continue with our American
(08:11):
stories and with Terry Teachout, the late and terrific writer
for the Wall Street Journal who wrote two of my
favorite books about two of my favorite people, Louis Armstrong
and Duke Ellington. And let's pick up where we last
left off. We're now moving into the area and dimension
of time.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
Time, it would turn out, played.
Speaker 1 (08:34):
As much of a role in Ellington's life as location
and race. Here is teach Out talking about the role
of the Roaring Twenties on Ellington's life and career.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
The Roaring Twenties are a cliche. They're movies, there, scenes
and TV shows. We have this idea of what they
were like. But the cliche was true. The country was
completely earned inside out by prohibition and the resulting lawlessness
that stemmed from it, by the sense of personal freedom
(09:08):
that people wanted and saw it, especially at men coming
back from the First World War coming back from Europe.
You remember the song how are you going to keep
them down on the farm after they've seen Pei? Well,
that was what the Roaring twenties meant to people. They
wanted a larger life, one that had fewer restrictions, fewer limitations.
They wanted excitement. Many of them wanted city life and
(09:30):
the things that only a city can provide. It is
in cities that jazz came to be, because they had
dance halls, and they had cabarets, and they had bars,
and they had gangsters who wanted music to be played
while they were selling their illegal liquor. It was just
the word ferment. I don't mean the pun. There was
(09:52):
a tremendous cultural ferma it going along right then, not
just in music, but in every form of art. If
you weren't stimulated by that, and there was nothing in
you to be stimulated, and Ellington was stimulated to the
highest degree by this freedom. He believed in the appearance
of respectability, but he also wanted to lead a wider,
(10:14):
freed or life, and the twenties were the best time
in the world, maybe in the history of America, to
have been able to do that.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
Ellington was indeed at the right place and the right time,
doing the right thing, and no one place in particular
played more of a role in shaping Ellington's life than
the Cotton Club in New York.
Speaker 2 (10:38):
Well, it was quite a joint, and it was produced
by racial segregation. In Harlem, there were a number of
clubs that did not admit blacks. They were entertainers, they
were waiters, they were part of the staff, but they
couldn't come in as customers. They were places where white
people from downtown who had money to burn, came up
(11:01):
to entertain themselves, to discover this new exotic music called jazz.
The Cotton Club was probably the best known of these places,
decorated in the style of a plantation with a horrible irony,
and its floor shows were accompanied by jazz. So they
needed really good bands, and it was a mobbed up joint,
(11:21):
not at all surprisingly Onny Madden ran it, although by
all accounts the mobsters treated the musicians and the courts
girls with great respect. To have gotten that gig was
a big deal for Ellington, not just because it was
a high profile gig, but because suddenly he was playing
every night at a club where his band had to
(11:43):
supply a lot of music, not just songs, not just
original pieces, but music for dancing, music for floor shows.
Suddenly Duke Ellington had to produce. He was on the spot,
and the Cotton Club took what he produced and made
it known to New Yorkers with money, who talked about it,
(12:04):
and of the highest importance, he broadcast on network radio
from there. It was one of the biggest breaks of
his life when CBS installed a broadcast wire to the
Cotton Club in nineteen twenty nine. He'd been making records
(12:25):
for some time. He was known to jazz officionados, but
suddenly all you had to do to hear do Gallington
at his very best was turning your radio on at night,
and there he was. It was what made him, in
a single stroke, a national figure, and a black national figure.
There had not been black bands with this kind of
exposure on network radio. Remember too, this is in nineteen
(12:47):
twenty nine, when suddenly there's no money. It's the Great Depression.
People can't afford to buy records, but you could afford
to listen to the radio because it didn't cost anything.
That was what made Ellington a star.
Speaker 1 (13:02):
And then came Ellington's music and how he made it.
It turns out Ellington didn't compose like other composers. He
was a compiler of deeds and ideas, with a great
facility to make something out of nothing, and he didn't
always give his collaborator's.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
Credit to put it in the nastiest possible way. Douke
Ellington was a credit hall. Classical composers sit down, write
a piece, they bring it to the concert hall and
the orchestra rehearsals and they play it. Ellington couldn't write
that way because he didn't have the technical grounding that
you get from classical training. In the early years, he
also had a band full of people, some of whom
(13:42):
were very poor sight readers, and Ellington himself was not
a good sight reader. In the early years, he would
create pieces of music right there on the bandstand in
the rehearsal hall, and of course you could do that.
That's what jazz is like. It's very much an improvised music.
But Ellington had an interesting diffy. He had an extraordinarily
(14:03):
good ear for harmony, for rhythm, but he wasn't good
at writing singable melodies. When you're leading a dance band,
and to a great extent your success is reliant on
pieces in song form that can become hits, it can
become an impediment to your writing. On the other hand.
(14:24):
He had put together a band full of hand picked
musicians picked by him. He was with them every night,
every day on the road at the Cotton Club, and
they were constantly improvising, and some of them, Johnny Hodgers
in particular, were extraordinarily good at making up melodies and
melodic fragments, and Ellington was listening. What he'd liked to
(14:47):
do best was if you played a snatch of melody
that he liked, he'd buy it from you for cash
on the spot. And of course what he was buying
was the total rights to this. Jazz musicians don't tend
to think ahead about it, this kind of thing, you know,
They play it, they toss it off. They've got a
million of them. If Duke says likes this piece and
he'll buy it, okay, fine, you know, I'll take twenty
(15:08):
five bucks for it. And then he turns into a song,
and not infrequently the song would become a hit, and
unless the musician had been very shrewd about retaining rights,
all of the proceeds from that hit went to Ellington.
Speaker 1 (15:34):
And then there was, in a sentimental mood, his classic,
a song among many he was known by it. It
turns out there was the Ellington version of how that
song came to be, and then there was the reality.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
He loved to tell these stories, not just about innocml mood,
but about many of the songs that he wrote. He
had these little vignettes about what the songs meant or
how they got written. Memory serves. He claimed to have
written it when he had a woman sitting two different women,
one sitting on either end of the piano bench with him,
(16:09):
and he wrote that song on the spot to get
over with both of the ladies. That's a lovely tale.
He's not beyond it, But he left out the most
important part, which is that the melody of the song
came from somebody else. It came from Oto Hardwick, the
lead saxophone player of the band. So if he was
composing that song on the spot to get over with
(16:30):
two ladies, he was composing it with somebody else's tune.
That's a very characteristic form of Ellingtonian obfuscation. I would
say he didn't like to talk about this aspect of
his compositional process, and you can see why. There's a
certain kind of genius who wants you to think that
he does everything equally well. Ellington was that kind of genius.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
Ellington was a man of many, many talents, but he
was also a man of many secrets.
Speaker 2 (17:03):
Ellington was leading the life of a voluptuary. He was
leading a life that would have scandalized many people had
they heard about it. He certainly wanted to keep his
compositional process secret because there were aspects of it that
were trade secrets, and there were other aspects of it
that I think he would have found embarrassing, the fact
(17:24):
that he was much more a collaborative artist than he
cared for the public to realize. When you get into
the habit of keeping secrets, whether you're an artist or
a spy, it's something that can really spread throughout every
aspect of your personality. And I think that's what it
was with Duke.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
And you've been listening to the late Terry Teachout telling
the story of Duke Ellington. When we come back more
of this remarkable story here on our American Stories, and
(18:08):
we continue with our American stories in the Life of
Duke Ellington, as chronicled in the terrific book Duke, A
Life of Duke Ellington by the late Terry Teachout. A
two week trip to London that the Palladium would change
how Ellington viewed himself and his music. The reaction by
(18:33):
the audience was that powerful and that positive.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
Ellington was fairly famous by the time he went to London,
but he was famous in a way that a black
man would be famous in America in the thirties, a
way that is somewhat limited. The whole racial cast system
in this country meant that he was not seen as
an artist, but as an entertainer. Even though he saw
(18:58):
himself as an artist, there was a ceiling that he
always bumped up against in his country. So he goes
over to London and suddenly, very suddenly, that opening night,
suddenly he completely overwhelms an audience that has never heard
his band live. They've never heard anything like this. There
(19:19):
had been some jazz played in Europe before that time,
Louis Armstrong had played it, but the Ellington band was
I think peculiarly well designed to appeal to an unusually
wide range of critics and officionados in London at that time,
because it was a kind of orchestra that played not
(19:41):
just improvised solos but compositions. So you had a whole
lot of classical musicians of real distinction over there who
heard that band and who insisted when they wrote about
it that it was, in its way equivalent to the
best classical music that was coming out of America. That
was a very, very big thing for a black man
(20:02):
to hear and to be told at that time. This
was a man who was going from gig to gig
in private cars on a train, which sounds very fancy
when I say it, but he did that because you
couldn't get a hotel in the South if he were black.
And suddenly he goes to London and he's being treated
like a kind of prince, like the genius that he was,
(20:25):
and he is also able to stay in the best hotels.
It thrilled him.
Speaker 1 (20:30):
Now, Ellencoln said this to a friend about staying at
a luxury hotel in England. You know, I love this place.
I don't know if you realize this, but I have
the utmost difficulty staying in a hotel like this in
the United States. A heartbreaking thing for a man of
(20:50):
his stature and talent to say.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
Can't you hear him saying that in that elegant urban
voice of his, and he's trying to say it with
a wry smile, but he's kidding on the square. He
means it. He means it. No matter how gifted you are,
you need praise. No matter how gifted you are, you
need to be complimented. You need success, You need people
(21:18):
to tell you what you're doing is worthwhile. And if
you're a black man in America in the thirties, you
need a lot of that, because you're dealing with a
whole lot of evil and foolishness. And he goes over
there and this happens to him, and he comes back
with his account full of the coin of praise. He
lived off that for a very long time.
Speaker 1 (21:41):
And then came the masking, the masking that African Americans
know and that Ellington understood because it was such a
big part of his life. A survival mechanism.
Speaker 2 (21:54):
Allington spoke to conceal himself. I think one of the
things that he didn't want people to see was there.
He wanted them to feel that he was above such things.
Wouldn't you if you were somebody like Duke Ellington. You've
been raised by him, You've been raised by your mother
to believe in the doctrine of Ellingtonian exceptionalism, and you
(22:14):
go out in the world and you start to have
great success. Some people write magazine articles about you, but
you go down south and they treat you the same
way that they treat every other person who has a
black skin. You know that hurts. Of course, he concealed it.
He had to conceal it. He concealed it behind the
mask of urbanity. He didn't want people to know that
(22:36):
they got his goat.
Speaker 1 (22:39):
After World War Two, the big band scene had lost
a lot of steam, and Ellington's career did too. But
one concert in nineteen fifty six changed all of that,
the Newport Jazz Festival.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
If you like stories, this is one of the best
of us, all possible Ellington stories. What happened in nineteen
fifty six. The Ellington band had gone through this protracted decline.
It had lost important personnel. Things had become increasingly difficult,
but Ellington started to get a handle on things. In
nineteen fifty six, Time magazine noticed this and they got
interested in maybe doing a big story about Ellington, maybe
(23:20):
doing a comeback story that would go on the cover.
But you don't get on the cover of Time and
back then unless you had a newshook. This is where
Ellington got very, very lucky. The Newport Jazz Festival had
become a big deal in American jazz. George Ween was
the man who put it together, and he was quite
reluctant to bring Ellington in because although he admired Ellington,
(23:44):
everybody in jazz dead. He thought that Ellington was kind
of yesterday's news. So a deal was struck between Ween
and Georgia Vakian, the great record producer at Columbia, and Ellington.
Ellington agreed to compose a new composition that will be
named after the festival, the Newport Jazz Festival Suite, and
(24:08):
Columbia agrees to record it live at the nineteen fifty
six festival. So the deal was struck. And the Ellington
band was full of extremely temperamental people. In as much
of an understatement as it's possible to make, almost half
the band didn't show up for the rehearsal. They were
(24:30):
very bad about rehearsing pieces. Ellington was very bad about
getting pieces written on time so that they could be rehearsed.
So they come in for this gig and everybody knows
it's a big deal. It's a huge deal. Ellington's reputation
could rest on this, and the temperamental gentleman of the
Ellington band foul up the rehearsal. Everybody is really anxious
(24:53):
about this, and they go on that night they play
the Newport Jazz Festival suite and it's it's all right,
but it wasn't anything great. George Wayne, no doubt, is
sitting in a seat thinking, oh boy, did I make
a mistake. And at this point Duke Ellington dealt himself
a handful of asses. He had a tenor saxophone player
(25:17):
in a band named Paul Gonzalez, not a refined player,
but boy could he blow, and he really liked to
blow the bus. So he calls dominueendo and a crescendo
and Duer kicks it off, and suddenly the band is
shifted into high gear. Gonzalez comes down front and he
plays twenty seven straight choruses of the Bulls and the
(25:56):
crowd goes not just wild, but they would antsy. They
were yelling and screaming, and Ellington's up there playing piano easy,
He's in bog heapey. He knows that he's got this guy.
The rhythm section is blazing and The phrase they stopped
the show is often used in exaggeration in my business
(26:18):
as a theater critic, But believe me, they stopped that show.
They stopped it cold. They stopped it so cold that
they couldn't get any other group on, and that they
had to bring Johnny Hodges on to play one of
his specialties, a slow blues, just to calm everybody down.
(26:39):
So Time magazine they're in ecstasy. Suddenly they realize they've
got a story, and they put Duke Ellington on the cover,
which in nineteen fifty six was the biggest possible deal
for any artist in terms of public recognition. And for
the rest of the fifties and well into the sixties,
the Ellington Bean lived off the publicity and the boost
(27:03):
and their reputation that came from this amazing gig an
opportunity that they came within interest of letting slip through
their fingers.
Speaker 1 (27:12):
And by the way, that Gonzale solo is considered the
greatest saxophone solo of all time by many critics, and
some even call the greatest solo of all time of
any kind. When we come back more of the story
of Duke Ellington here on our American stories, and we
(27:38):
returned to our American stories and our final segment of
our story on the Duke Duke Ellington. That is telling
this story is once again, the late Great Wall Street
Journal critic Terry teach Out. When we last left off,
Terry was telling us about how Alington had revived his
band from the brink of extinction at the Newport Jazz
(27:58):
Festival in Rhode Island, an astounding performance of Dominuendo and
Crescendo in Blue. After that, you'd think awards and accolades
would come, in particular one that Ellington coveted. Ellington was
always hoping one day that he would win the Pulitzer
Prize for the Arts. It turns out that it was
(28:20):
something that haunted Ellington.
Speaker 2 (28:23):
The Pulitzer Prize was originally organized to recognize classical composers.
It doesn't have to be given in any given year,
and in nineteen sixty five, the Music Panel decided that
there had been no piece of classical music, no individual piece,
that was worthy of the prize. They decided instead to
recommend to the board that Ellington be presented with a
(28:47):
special citation for long term achievement. The Board dismissed this idea,
and two of the members of the music panel resigned
in protest and talked to the press. Now, Ellington handled
himself with colossal elegance. He was on the road, he
was actually down in Kentucky and a reporter said, you
(29:09):
have any comment, and Ellington said, and again imagine this,
in that urbane voice of his, he said, Fate's being
kind to me. Fate doesn't want me to be too famous,
too young. Well that's all very well and good that
in fact, it just cut him to the quick, because
remember this is Ellington. He grew up on U Street.
(29:31):
He believes devoutly and respectability. He wants recognition for what
he is, not just for himself but for the race,
but for the music that he plays. And the Boltzers
mattered to some extent, they still matter. But in nineteen
sixty five the board high hats him. He doesn't deserve
(29:51):
the award, and he was outraged. He spoke more candidly
about this in an interview with Nat Hantoff, very frankly,
in fact, we talked about the lack of respect that
had been shown to him, that had been shown to
jazz by this award not being given to him. He
was angry, but he was angry because it hurt. This
(30:12):
was something that especially in the sixties when remember rock
has become big in the sixties and the energy that
Ellington got from the firing of the afterburners in nineteen
fifty six is now starting to dispel. He had all
sorts of reasons for wanting that kind of recognition that
being the first jazz musician to win a Pulitzer Prize
(30:32):
would have brought him, and he didn't get it. I
don't think he ever quite got over that. It's not
the sort of thing that a man like Duke Ellington
would have gotten over. And it's just too damn bad,
because you know, he was bigger than any prize. He
was bigger than any award, but he was human. He
(30:55):
was only human. You can only take so much hurt,
and that got him. It got him where he lived.
Speaker 1 (31:06):
But Ellington did receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom in
nineteen sixty nine, which offered real consolation to the Duke.
Speaker 2 (31:15):
It helped because of the way in which it was given.
The Presidential Medal of Freedom, as the name of the
award indicates, is given by the President of the United states,
he can give it to whoever he wants to. Richard
Nixon was president in nineteen sixty nine. He wasn't a
jazz above, but he actually did like music and knew
(31:36):
something about it, and he had assistance in his office
who knew a lot about it. And it was thought that,
for whatever reason, it was thought that giving Ellington the
Medal of Freedom in nineteen sixty nine was not only
something that he deserved, but that something that would be
shall we say, politic. It was also Duke Ellington's seventieth birthday,
(32:00):
and so they got the idea to put together an
all star band of the biggest names in jazz to
play for Duke Ellington's birthday party at the White House,
at which time he would be awarded the Medal of Freedom.
Now that is a big deal, and no matter what
(32:23):
your politics are, and there were a lot of people
who hated Richard Nixon in nineteen sixty nine, just as
there are now, but he was the president and this
was a very big deal, a very big deal. Ellington
accepted with the utmost delight. They had the most amazing party.
(32:43):
Richard Mixon actually played a Happy Birthday for a Duke
on piano that night and they jamped all night long.
Speaker 1 (32:57):
All lives coming to an end, and Ellington's did two.
But the legacy he left behind was extraordinary.
Speaker 2 (33:06):
He was dying and he got sick at a time
when the money was running out. He had always been
a man who believed quite passionately in maintaining his self image.
He was enormously generous, although always on his own terms.
Musicians who had been in the band and left it
he would continue to pay them for years and years afterwards.
(33:27):
I mean, he was a complicated man, but there was
a good man in there somewhere. Ultimately, he had poured
everything into the band, and again, as had been the
case right after World War Two, the gig started to
dry up. Rock and roll was here to stay. It
got harder and harder to book the Ellington band, and
(33:48):
Ellington was worn out. You can see it in photographs,
video and film of him during that period. You can
just see him starting to run down. It's so sad,
and of course what it was cancer. He played for
as long as he could, He performed as long as
(34:11):
it was possible to perform. By this time, Mercer Ellington,
his son, was out there with the band, and Duke
knew what he had, nobody was trying to hide it
from him. And to see film of those last appearances,
there was a TV tribute to the Quincy Jones produced,
and you can see film of Ellington and he looks old.
(34:34):
He looks old and tired and sad. And then it
was all gone. Then it was all gone. And even
though the band had not been at its best for
several years before that, even though Ellington's own compositional gifts
had declined, when he was gone, everybody realized what we'd lost.
(35:05):
Like most of the geniuses I've known, his highest priority
was his work. He wanted to be able to do
the work every day, to show up for the gig,
to write music, and he was willing to subordinate anything
in anybody to that. And as a result, when you
go back and look at his life, you cannot help
(35:26):
but be struck by how unattractive certain aspects of it are.
He was an opportunist, he was unscrupulous. I don't know
that he was a man I would have wanted to
work for. But if you worked for him, you were
working for a genius, and a genius whose gifts included
the gift of being able to make everybody who played
(35:48):
with him sound better, maybe even better than they were.
A gift of being able to take the little fragments
of melody that they tossed off and turn them into composition.
Is that people still sing fifty and sixty and seventy
years later. He was a giant. That is exactly what
he was. And I don't know that we fully appreciate
(36:12):
giants until after we lose them. Ellington was still famous
at the end of his life. Certainly he's important in
the way that a great composer is important. But he
made records from the mid twenties all the way down
to the time of his death, and it is the
most extraordinary, varied, imaginative personal body of work ever left
(36:38):
behind by a jazz musician. He is as great a
composer in his way as any of our great classical composers,
as Aaron Copland was Copeland, who, by the way, very
much admired him, And he was a great personality, somebody
that whether you come away from reading about him liking
(36:59):
him or dislike him, and it's more likely to be
a combination of those things, you are above all fascinated
by him. He is, aside from me, a great artist,
the most endlessly fascinating, fascinating personality in the history of jazz.
Speaker 1 (37:20):
And a terrific job on the production and the storytelling
and editing by Monty Montgomery. And a special thanks to
the late Terry teach Out for sharing his time with us.
And we'll play this piece at least once or twice
a year forever because it tells us so much about life,
especially being an African American musician at the time that
he was, and that mask he put on. I keep
(37:42):
thinking about that masking and as Terry said, he concealed
his pain with the mask of urbanity. And imagine playing
in the Cotton Club as a black man in a
black neighborhood and not allowing his wife to come in
and sit and watch. And Terry Teachout was right. We
can't appreciate giants till there passed. And Duke Ellington was
(38:03):
a giant, a complicated and brilliant giant. The story of
Duke Ellington, who died on this day in history in
nineteen seventy four. Here on our American Stories
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
And we love to tell stories about history, particularly the
intersection of art and culture. Many music critics believe Duke
Ellington was one of the most important composers in and
(00:31):
out of jazz, an artistic giant of the twentieth century.
His story is more than a musical journey. It is
a story about race, culture, and art, and a walk
through the twentieth century. Here to tell this remarkable story
is the late Wall Street Journal culture critic and author
Terry Teachout, whose book Duke, A Life of Duke Ellington
(00:55):
may be one of the finest biographies I've ever read.
And we're telling this story because on this day in history,
Duke Ellington died in nineteen seventy four. Duke Ellington was
born in eighteen ninety nine in our nation's capital, and
both the timing of his birth and location impacted his
(01:17):
life greatly.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
Here is Terry Teachout. Washington, d c, in Ellington's childhood
and youth, was one of the most ruthlessly segregated cities
in America. It was, you might say, the northern tip
of the Deep South. But it had a large, healthy,
prosperous black middle class, a black bourgeoisie at the same time.
(01:45):
That is what defines the Washington of Ellington's youth. In
the neighborhood he grew up in U Street, it was
a place where you lived if you could afford to,
and in the alley if you couldn't afford to, where
every kind a black person, well to do and poor,
striving and desperate. They were all thrown together. But it
(02:06):
was a society that in its own class divisions mirrored
the class divisions of the white world. There was a
racial cast system among blacks. It had to do with economics,
it also had to do with skin color, and Duke
Ellington came from light skinned parents and this put them
(02:26):
several rungs up the ladder. So you had a society
of strivers, but you also had a society of people
who were very self conscious about their place and class.
It might have looked on from the outside. Ellington's father
was considered pretty far up on the ladder of success
because he was the butler of a white doctor, and
(02:48):
so he acquired class identity and a patina of elegance
from this very affiliation. This is something that Malcolm X
talks about in his autobiography. I was quite struck by that,
and it's something I think that Ellington himself may have
had equivocal feelings about. On the one hand, he was
himself very class conscious and he was a person who
(03:10):
was inclined for his black friends to be people with
light skin. At the same time, though he believed deeply
in the self improvement ethos of the black bourgeoisie. That
is why he was determined to make something of himself
something important. His mother had told him right from the
beginning of his life, you are gifted, you are special,
(03:35):
you are going to do remarkable things. And Allington never
doubted her. She was dead serious about it. And Freud
said that a boy who has the absolute approval of
his mother is destined for success. If that's true, Duke
Ellington had the pedigree going in.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
Most great talents have mentors that inspire them, and Ellington's
muse was a musician, Harvey.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
Brook Harvey Brooks was I believe based in Philadelphia. He
was a late ragtime early stride pianist. He's not well
remembered today because he didn't make very many recordings, but
he did make piano roles. Ellington heard one early on,
and he'd never heard that kind of playing before. Being
(04:22):
from a family of the black bourgeoisie, Ellington was not
the sort of person who was likely to grow up
hearing ragtime or that kind of popular music that was
going around at the time. When he heard Harvey Brooks
playing Rags, he was stunned by how exciting the music
was and how personal, how individual it was. That was
(04:42):
really what pushed the button that made Ellington want to
be a musician. He had originally intended to be an artist,
a commercial artist, and he had real talent in that area.
But when he heard this kind of music and realized
that you could go out on a bandstand play music
like that, people would hear it and know it was you,
and that women would flock around the bandstand because they
(05:03):
found that very sexy. That was what interested him, And
of course he discovered very quickly that it wasn't just
a matter of his being interested. He also had innate
talent for it, and it was Harvey Brooks who started
him down that line, so much so that Ellington actually
sought him out a couple of years later. And Brooks
showed him some of the tricks of the trade. Usually,
(05:25):
you become interested in music because you hear it and
it's beautiful. You've become transported by it, and then you
start to think, well, maybe I could do that, maybe
I can make that. But with Ellington, it seems to
have been the actual act of performance, of getting his
hands on the keyboard and hearing the kind of music
he wanted to play that excited him. He'd taken a
(05:46):
few piano lessons as a child from a woman named,
believe it or not, Clinkscales. We had to track that
down in the census records, but it's absolutely true. But
they didn't stick with him because she wasn't teaching him
what he wanted to hear.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
Then came the race riots in Washington, d C. Which
would alter the course of Ellington's life.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
The race riots of nineteen nineteen had an overwhelming effect
on Washington, D C. They were violent, they were shocking,
They caused a lot of black people to realize just
how fragile their lives were, and it seems impossible that
they wouldn't have had that kind of effect on Allenton.
(06:31):
He had already been hearing musicians from outside Washington. He
knew there was more to the music that interested him,
the music that excited him, than he was hearing in Washington.
And he must also have realized that if you wanted
to get somewhere, if you want it to be more
than just a famous local musician at this point in
(06:53):
the history of jazz, you were going to have to
come to New York.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
And listening to the late great Terry teach Out tell
the heartbreaking story of Duke Ellington, and it will get
increasingly heartbreaking as you listen to it, and also triumphal.
You are special, you are gifted, and you will do
remarkable things, his mother said. And to have those words
spoken over you, what an advantage in life. When we
(07:21):
come back more of the remarkable story of Duke Ellington
as told by Terry teach Out here on our American Stories.
This is Lee Hibibe, and this is our American Stories,
and all of our history stories are brought to us
by our generous sponsors, including Hillsdale College, where students go
to learn all the things that are beautiful in life
(07:43):
and all the things that matter in life. If you
can't get to Hillsdale, Hillsdale will come to you with
their free and terrific online courses. Go to Hillsdale dot edu.
That's Hillsdale dot edu. And we continue with our American
(08:11):
stories and with Terry Teachout, the late and terrific writer
for the Wall Street Journal who wrote two of my
favorite books about two of my favorite people, Louis Armstrong
and Duke Ellington. And let's pick up where we last
left off. We're now moving into the area and dimension
of time.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
Time, it would turn out, played.
Speaker 1 (08:34):
As much of a role in Ellington's life as location
and race. Here is teach Out talking about the role
of the Roaring Twenties on Ellington's life and career.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
The Roaring Twenties are a cliche. They're movies, there, scenes
and TV shows. We have this idea of what they
were like. But the cliche was true. The country was
completely earned inside out by prohibition and the resulting lawlessness
that stemmed from it, by the sense of personal freedom
(09:08):
that people wanted and saw it, especially at men coming
back from the First World War coming back from Europe.
You remember the song how are you going to keep
them down on the farm after they've seen Pei? Well,
that was what the Roaring twenties meant to people. They
wanted a larger life, one that had fewer restrictions, fewer limitations.
They wanted excitement. Many of them wanted city life and
(09:30):
the things that only a city can provide. It is
in cities that jazz came to be, because they had
dance halls, and they had cabarets, and they had bars,
and they had gangsters who wanted music to be played
while they were selling their illegal liquor. It was just
the word ferment. I don't mean the pun. There was
(09:52):
a tremendous cultural ferma it going along right then, not
just in music, but in every form of art. If
you weren't stimulated by that, and there was nothing in
you to be stimulated, and Ellington was stimulated to the
highest degree by this freedom. He believed in the appearance
of respectability, but he also wanted to lead a wider,
(10:14):
freed or life, and the twenties were the best time
in the world, maybe in the history of America, to
have been able to do that.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
Ellington was indeed at the right place and the right time,
doing the right thing, and no one place in particular
played more of a role in shaping Ellington's life than
the Cotton Club in New York.
Speaker 2 (10:38):
Well, it was quite a joint, and it was produced
by racial segregation. In Harlem, there were a number of
clubs that did not admit blacks. They were entertainers, they
were waiters, they were part of the staff, but they
couldn't come in as customers. They were places where white
people from downtown who had money to burn, came up
(11:01):
to entertain themselves, to discover this new exotic music called jazz.
The Cotton Club was probably the best known of these places,
decorated in the style of a plantation with a horrible irony,
and its floor shows were accompanied by jazz. So they
needed really good bands, and it was a mobbed up joint,
(11:21):
not at all surprisingly Onny Madden ran it, although by
all accounts the mobsters treated the musicians and the courts
girls with great respect. To have gotten that gig was
a big deal for Ellington, not just because it was
a high profile gig, but because suddenly he was playing
every night at a club where his band had to
(11:43):
supply a lot of music, not just songs, not just
original pieces, but music for dancing, music for floor shows.
Suddenly Duke Ellington had to produce. He was on the spot,
and the Cotton Club took what he produced and made
it known to New Yorkers with money, who talked about it,
(12:04):
and of the highest importance, he broadcast on network radio
from there. It was one of the biggest breaks of
his life when CBS installed a broadcast wire to the
Cotton Club in nineteen twenty nine. He'd been making records
(12:25):
for some time. He was known to jazz officionados, but
suddenly all you had to do to hear do Gallington
at his very best was turning your radio on at night,
and there he was. It was what made him, in
a single stroke, a national figure, and a black national figure.
There had not been black bands with this kind of
exposure on network radio. Remember too, this is in nineteen
(12:47):
twenty nine, when suddenly there's no money. It's the Great Depression.
People can't afford to buy records, but you could afford
to listen to the radio because it didn't cost anything.
That was what made Ellington a star.
Speaker 1 (13:02):
And then came Ellington's music and how he made it.
It turns out Ellington didn't compose like other composers. He
was a compiler of deeds and ideas, with a great
facility to make something out of nothing, and he didn't
always give his collaborator's.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
Credit to put it in the nastiest possible way. Douke
Ellington was a credit hall. Classical composers sit down, write
a piece, they bring it to the concert hall and
the orchestra rehearsals and they play it. Ellington couldn't write
that way because he didn't have the technical grounding that
you get from classical training. In the early years, he
also had a band full of people, some of whom
(13:42):
were very poor sight readers, and Ellington himself was not
a good sight reader. In the early years, he would
create pieces of music right there on the bandstand in
the rehearsal hall, and of course you could do that.
That's what jazz is like. It's very much an improvised music.
But Ellington had an interesting diffy. He had an extraordinarily
(14:03):
good ear for harmony, for rhythm, but he wasn't good
at writing singable melodies. When you're leading a dance band,
and to a great extent your success is reliant on
pieces in song form that can become hits, it can
become an impediment to your writing. On the other hand.
(14:24):
He had put together a band full of hand picked
musicians picked by him. He was with them every night,
every day on the road at the Cotton Club, and
they were constantly improvising, and some of them, Johnny Hodgers
in particular, were extraordinarily good at making up melodies and
melodic fragments, and Ellington was listening. What he'd liked to
(14:47):
do best was if you played a snatch of melody
that he liked, he'd buy it from you for cash
on the spot. And of course what he was buying
was the total rights to this. Jazz musicians don't tend
to think ahead about it, this kind of thing, you know,
They play it, they toss it off. They've got a
million of them. If Duke says likes this piece and
he'll buy it, okay, fine, you know, I'll take twenty
(15:08):
five bucks for it. And then he turns into a song,
and not infrequently the song would become a hit, and
unless the musician had been very shrewd about retaining rights,
all of the proceeds from that hit went to Ellington.
Speaker 1 (15:34):
And then there was, in a sentimental mood, his classic,
a song among many he was known by it. It
turns out there was the Ellington version of how that
song came to be, and then there was the reality.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
He loved to tell these stories, not just about innocml mood,
but about many of the songs that he wrote. He
had these little vignettes about what the songs meant or
how they got written. Memory serves. He claimed to have
written it when he had a woman sitting two different women,
one sitting on either end of the piano bench with him,
(16:09):
and he wrote that song on the spot to get
over with both of the ladies. That's a lovely tale.
He's not beyond it, But he left out the most
important part, which is that the melody of the song
came from somebody else. It came from Oto Hardwick, the
lead saxophone player of the band. So if he was
composing that song on the spot to get over with
(16:30):
two ladies, he was composing it with somebody else's tune.
That's a very characteristic form of Ellingtonian obfuscation. I would
say he didn't like to talk about this aspect of
his compositional process, and you can see why. There's a
certain kind of genius who wants you to think that
he does everything equally well. Ellington was that kind of genius.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
Ellington was a man of many, many talents, but he
was also a man of many secrets.
Speaker 2 (17:03):
Ellington was leading the life of a voluptuary. He was
leading a life that would have scandalized many people had
they heard about it. He certainly wanted to keep his
compositional process secret because there were aspects of it that
were trade secrets, and there were other aspects of it
that I think he would have found embarrassing, the fact
(17:24):
that he was much more a collaborative artist than he
cared for the public to realize. When you get into
the habit of keeping secrets, whether you're an artist or
a spy, it's something that can really spread throughout every
aspect of your personality. And I think that's what it
was with Duke.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
And you've been listening to the late Terry Teachout telling
the story of Duke Ellington. When we come back more
of this remarkable story here on our American Stories, and
(18:08):
we continue with our American stories in the Life of
Duke Ellington, as chronicled in the terrific book Duke, A
Life of Duke Ellington by the late Terry Teachout. A
two week trip to London that the Palladium would change
how Ellington viewed himself and his music. The reaction by
(18:33):
the audience was that powerful and that positive.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
Ellington was fairly famous by the time he went to London,
but he was famous in a way that a black
man would be famous in America in the thirties, a
way that is somewhat limited. The whole racial cast system
in this country meant that he was not seen as
an artist, but as an entertainer. Even though he saw
(18:58):
himself as an artist, there was a ceiling that he
always bumped up against in his country. So he goes
over to London and suddenly, very suddenly, that opening night,
suddenly he completely overwhelms an audience that has never heard
his band live. They've never heard anything like this. There
(19:19):
had been some jazz played in Europe before that time,
Louis Armstrong had played it, but the Ellington band was
I think peculiarly well designed to appeal to an unusually
wide range of critics and officionados in London at that time,
because it was a kind of orchestra that played not
(19:41):
just improvised solos but compositions. So you had a whole
lot of classical musicians of real distinction over there who
heard that band and who insisted when they wrote about
it that it was, in its way equivalent to the
best classical music that was coming out of America. That
was a very, very big thing for a black man
(20:02):
to hear and to be told at that time. This
was a man who was going from gig to gig
in private cars on a train, which sounds very fancy
when I say it, but he did that because you
couldn't get a hotel in the South if he were black.
And suddenly he goes to London and he's being treated
like a kind of prince, like the genius that he was,
(20:25):
and he is also able to stay in the best hotels.
It thrilled him.
Speaker 1 (20:30):
Now, Ellencoln said this to a friend about staying at
a luxury hotel in England. You know, I love this place.
I don't know if you realize this, but I have
the utmost difficulty staying in a hotel like this in
the United States. A heartbreaking thing for a man of
(20:50):
his stature and talent to say.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
Can't you hear him saying that in that elegant urban
voice of his, and he's trying to say it with
a wry smile, but he's kidding on the square. He
means it. He means it. No matter how gifted you are,
you need praise. No matter how gifted you are, you
need to be complimented. You need success, You need people
(21:18):
to tell you what you're doing is worthwhile. And if
you're a black man in America in the thirties, you
need a lot of that, because you're dealing with a
whole lot of evil and foolishness. And he goes over
there and this happens to him, and he comes back
with his account full of the coin of praise. He
lived off that for a very long time.
Speaker 1 (21:41):
And then came the masking, the masking that African Americans
know and that Ellington understood because it was such a
big part of his life. A survival mechanism.
Speaker 2 (21:54):
Allington spoke to conceal himself. I think one of the
things that he didn't want people to see was there.
He wanted them to feel that he was above such things.
Wouldn't you if you were somebody like Duke Ellington. You've
been raised by him, You've been raised by your mother
to believe in the doctrine of Ellingtonian exceptionalism, and you
(22:14):
go out in the world and you start to have
great success. Some people write magazine articles about you, but
you go down south and they treat you the same
way that they treat every other person who has a
black skin. You know that hurts. Of course, he concealed it.
He had to conceal it. He concealed it behind the
mask of urbanity. He didn't want people to know that
(22:36):
they got his goat.
Speaker 1 (22:39):
After World War Two, the big band scene had lost
a lot of steam, and Ellington's career did too. But
one concert in nineteen fifty six changed all of that,
the Newport Jazz Festival.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
If you like stories, this is one of the best
of us, all possible Ellington stories. What happened in nineteen
fifty six. The Ellington band had gone through this protracted decline.
It had lost important personnel. Things had become increasingly difficult,
but Ellington started to get a handle on things. In
nineteen fifty six, Time magazine noticed this and they got
interested in maybe doing a big story about Ellington, maybe
(23:20):
doing a comeback story that would go on the cover.
But you don't get on the cover of Time and
back then unless you had a newshook. This is where
Ellington got very, very lucky. The Newport Jazz Festival had
become a big deal in American jazz. George Ween was
the man who put it together, and he was quite
reluctant to bring Ellington in because although he admired Ellington,
(23:44):
everybody in jazz dead. He thought that Ellington was kind
of yesterday's news. So a deal was struck between Ween
and Georgia Vakian, the great record producer at Columbia, and Ellington.
Ellington agreed to compose a new composition that will be
named after the festival, the Newport Jazz Festival Suite, and
(24:08):
Columbia agrees to record it live at the nineteen fifty
six festival. So the deal was struck. And the Ellington
band was full of extremely temperamental people. In as much
of an understatement as it's possible to make, almost half
the band didn't show up for the rehearsal. They were
(24:30):
very bad about rehearsing pieces. Ellington was very bad about
getting pieces written on time so that they could be rehearsed.
So they come in for this gig and everybody knows
it's a big deal. It's a huge deal. Ellington's reputation
could rest on this, and the temperamental gentleman of the
Ellington band foul up the rehearsal. Everybody is really anxious
(24:53):
about this, and they go on that night they play
the Newport Jazz Festival suite and it's it's all right,
but it wasn't anything great. George Wayne, no doubt, is
sitting in a seat thinking, oh boy, did I make
a mistake. And at this point Duke Ellington dealt himself
a handful of asses. He had a tenor saxophone player
(25:17):
in a band named Paul Gonzalez, not a refined player,
but boy could he blow, and he really liked to
blow the bus. So he calls dominueendo and a crescendo
and Duer kicks it off, and suddenly the band is
shifted into high gear. Gonzalez comes down front and he
plays twenty seven straight choruses of the Bulls and the
(25:56):
crowd goes not just wild, but they would antsy. They
were yelling and screaming, and Ellington's up there playing piano easy,
He's in bog heapey. He knows that he's got this guy.
The rhythm section is blazing and The phrase they stopped
the show is often used in exaggeration in my business
(26:18):
as a theater critic, But believe me, they stopped that show.
They stopped it cold. They stopped it so cold that
they couldn't get any other group on, and that they
had to bring Johnny Hodges on to play one of
his specialties, a slow blues, just to calm everybody down.
(26:39):
So Time magazine they're in ecstasy. Suddenly they realize they've
got a story, and they put Duke Ellington on the cover,
which in nineteen fifty six was the biggest possible deal
for any artist in terms of public recognition. And for
the rest of the fifties and well into the sixties,
the Ellington Bean lived off the publicity and the boost
(27:03):
and their reputation that came from this amazing gig an
opportunity that they came within interest of letting slip through
their fingers.
Speaker 1 (27:12):
And by the way, that Gonzale solo is considered the
greatest saxophone solo of all time by many critics, and
some even call the greatest solo of all time of
any kind. When we come back more of the story
of Duke Ellington here on our American stories, and we
(27:38):
returned to our American stories and our final segment of
our story on the Duke Duke Ellington. That is telling
this story is once again, the late Great Wall Street
Journal critic Terry teach Out. When we last left off,
Terry was telling us about how Alington had revived his
band from the brink of extinction at the Newport Jazz
(27:58):
Festival in Rhode Island, an astounding performance of Dominuendo and
Crescendo in Blue. After that, you'd think awards and accolades
would come, in particular one that Ellington coveted. Ellington was
always hoping one day that he would win the Pulitzer
Prize for the Arts. It turns out that it was
(28:20):
something that haunted Ellington.
Speaker 2 (28:23):
The Pulitzer Prize was originally organized to recognize classical composers.
It doesn't have to be given in any given year,
and in nineteen sixty five, the Music Panel decided that
there had been no piece of classical music, no individual piece,
that was worthy of the prize. They decided instead to
recommend to the board that Ellington be presented with a
(28:47):
special citation for long term achievement. The Board dismissed this idea,
and two of the members of the music panel resigned
in protest and talked to the press. Now, Ellington handled
himself with colossal elegance. He was on the road, he
was actually down in Kentucky and a reporter said, you
(29:09):
have any comment, and Ellington said, and again imagine this,
in that urbane voice of his, he said, Fate's being
kind to me. Fate doesn't want me to be too famous,
too young. Well that's all very well and good that
in fact, it just cut him to the quick, because
remember this is Ellington. He grew up on U Street.
(29:31):
He believes devoutly and respectability. He wants recognition for what
he is, not just for himself but for the race,
but for the music that he plays. And the Boltzers
mattered to some extent, they still matter. But in nineteen
sixty five the board high hats him. He doesn't deserve
(29:51):
the award, and he was outraged. He spoke more candidly
about this in an interview with Nat Hantoff, very frankly,
in fact, we talked about the lack of respect that
had been shown to him, that had been shown to
jazz by this award not being given to him. He
was angry, but he was angry because it hurt. This
(30:12):
was something that especially in the sixties when remember rock
has become big in the sixties and the energy that
Ellington got from the firing of the afterburners in nineteen
fifty six is now starting to dispel. He had all
sorts of reasons for wanting that kind of recognition that
being the first jazz musician to win a Pulitzer Prize
(30:32):
would have brought him, and he didn't get it. I
don't think he ever quite got over that. It's not
the sort of thing that a man like Duke Ellington
would have gotten over. And it's just too damn bad,
because you know, he was bigger than any prize. He
was bigger than any award, but he was human. He
(30:55):
was only human. You can only take so much hurt,
and that got him. It got him where he lived.
Speaker 1 (31:06):
But Ellington did receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom in
nineteen sixty nine, which offered real consolation to the Duke.
Speaker 2 (31:15):
It helped because of the way in which it was given.
The Presidential Medal of Freedom, as the name of the
award indicates, is given by the President of the United states,
he can give it to whoever he wants to. Richard
Nixon was president in nineteen sixty nine. He wasn't a
jazz above, but he actually did like music and knew
(31:36):
something about it, and he had assistance in his office
who knew a lot about it. And it was thought that,
for whatever reason, it was thought that giving Ellington the
Medal of Freedom in nineteen sixty nine was not only
something that he deserved, but that something that would be
shall we say, politic. It was also Duke Ellington's seventieth birthday,
(32:00):
and so they got the idea to put together an
all star band of the biggest names in jazz to
play for Duke Ellington's birthday party at the White House,
at which time he would be awarded the Medal of Freedom.
Now that is a big deal, and no matter what
(32:23):
your politics are, and there were a lot of people
who hated Richard Nixon in nineteen sixty nine, just as
there are now, but he was the president and this
was a very big deal, a very big deal. Ellington
accepted with the utmost delight. They had the most amazing party.
(32:43):
Richard Mixon actually played a Happy Birthday for a Duke
on piano that night and they jamped all night long.
Speaker 1 (32:57):
All lives coming to an end, and Ellington's did two.
But the legacy he left behind was extraordinary.
Speaker 2 (33:06):
He was dying and he got sick at a time
when the money was running out. He had always been
a man who believed quite passionately in maintaining his self image.
He was enormously generous, although always on his own terms.
Musicians who had been in the band and left it
he would continue to pay them for years and years afterwards.
(33:27):
I mean, he was a complicated man, but there was
a good man in there somewhere. Ultimately, he had poured
everything into the band, and again, as had been the
case right after World War Two, the gig started to
dry up. Rock and roll was here to stay. It
got harder and harder to book the Ellington band, and
(33:48):
Ellington was worn out. You can see it in photographs,
video and film of him during that period. You can
just see him starting to run down. It's so sad,
and of course what it was cancer. He played for
as long as he could, He performed as long as
(34:11):
it was possible to perform. By this time, Mercer Ellington,
his son, was out there with the band, and Duke
knew what he had, nobody was trying to hide it
from him. And to see film of those last appearances,
there was a TV tribute to the Quincy Jones produced,
and you can see film of Ellington and he looks old.
(34:34):
He looks old and tired and sad. And then it
was all gone. Then it was all gone. And even
though the band had not been at its best for
several years before that, even though Ellington's own compositional gifts
had declined, when he was gone, everybody realized what we'd lost.
(35:05):
Like most of the geniuses I've known, his highest priority
was his work. He wanted to be able to do
the work every day, to show up for the gig,
to write music, and he was willing to subordinate anything
in anybody to that. And as a result, when you
go back and look at his life, you cannot help
(35:26):
but be struck by how unattractive certain aspects of it are.
He was an opportunist, he was unscrupulous. I don't know
that he was a man I would have wanted to
work for. But if you worked for him, you were
working for a genius, and a genius whose gifts included
the gift of being able to make everybody who played
(35:48):
with him sound better, maybe even better than they were.
A gift of being able to take the little fragments
of melody that they tossed off and turn them into composition.
Is that people still sing fifty and sixty and seventy
years later. He was a giant. That is exactly what
he was. And I don't know that we fully appreciate
(36:12):
giants until after we lose them. Ellington was still famous
at the end of his life. Certainly he's important in
the way that a great composer is important. But he
made records from the mid twenties all the way down
to the time of his death, and it is the
most extraordinary, varied, imaginative personal body of work ever left
(36:38):
behind by a jazz musician. He is as great a
composer in his way as any of our great classical composers,
as Aaron Copland was Copeland, who, by the way, very
much admired him, And he was a great personality, somebody
that whether you come away from reading about him liking
(36:59):
him or dislike him, and it's more likely to be
a combination of those things, you are above all fascinated
by him. He is, aside from me, a great artist,
the most endlessly fascinating, fascinating personality in the history of jazz.
Speaker 1 (37:20):
And a terrific job on the production and the storytelling
and editing by Monty Montgomery. And a special thanks to
the late Terry teach Out for sharing his time with us.
And we'll play this piece at least once or twice
a year forever because it tells us so much about life,
especially being an African American musician at the time that
he was, and that mask he put on. I keep
(37:42):
thinking about that masking and as Terry said, he concealed
his pain with the mask of urbanity. And imagine playing
in the Cotton Club as a black man in a
black neighborhood and not allowing his wife to come in
and sit and watch. And Terry Teachout was right. We
can't appreciate giants till there passed. And Duke Ellington was
(38:03):
a giant, a complicated and brilliant giant. The story of
Duke Ellington, who died on this day in history in
nineteen seventy four. Here on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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