October 7, 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.
Duke Ellington was born in eighteen ninety nine in our
nation's capital, and both the timing of his birth and
location impacted his life greatly. Here is Terry Teachout.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
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. That is what
(01:38):
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 of
black person well to do and poor, striving and desperate
they were all thrown together. But it was a society
(01:59):
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 several wrungs
(02:19):
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 so he
(02:41):
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 was
(03:03):
inclined for his black friends to be people with white skin.
At the same time, though he believed deeply in the
self improvement ethos of the black boucheoisie. 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, you are
(03:27):
going to do remarkable things. And Ellington 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 (03:45):
Most great talents have mentors that inspire them. In Ellington's
muse was a musician named Harvey brook.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
Harvey Brooks was I believe, based in Philadelphia. He was
a late rag time early 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 from
(04:14):
a family of the black boucheoisie, 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 really what
(04:35):
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 found
(04:55):
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, you
(05:18):
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 few piano lessons as
(05:39):
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 (05:55):
Then came the race riots in Washington, DC, which would
alter the course of Ellington's life.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
The race riots of nineteen nineteen and 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 Ellington.
(06:24):
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
(06:45):
the history of jazz, you were going to have to
come to the work.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
And you've been 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.
(07:13):
When we come back more of the remarkable story of
Duke Ellington as told by Terry Teachout here on our
American Stories, Folks, if you love the stories we tell
(07:33):
about this great country, and especially the stories of America's
rich past, know that all of our stories about American history,
from war to innovation, culture and faith, are brought to
us by the great folks at Hillsdale College, a place
where students study all the things that are beautiful in
life and all the things that are good in life.
And if you can't get to Hillsdale, Hillsdale will come
(07:53):
to you with their free and terrific online courses. Go
to Hillsdale dot edu to learn more. And we continue
with our American stories and with Terry Teachout, the late
(08:14):
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. Time, it would turn out, played
(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, their 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 fermaent going along right then, not just
in music but in every form of art. If you
weren't emulated 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, freed or life,
(10:15):
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 (10:37):
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. What a horrible wirony,
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 Ony 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 Allington, 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 he
made it known to New Yorkers with money who talked
(12:03):
about it, 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
(12:24):
making records 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
(12:47):
in nineteen 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 collaborators credit.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
To put it in the nastiest possible way. Doke Ellington
was a credit hall. Classical composers sit down, write a piece,
they bring it to the concert hall and the.
Speaker 3 (13:31):
Orchestra rehearsals and they play it.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
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 were very poor sight readers, and Ellington himself.
Speaker 3 (13:45):
Was not a good site reader.
Speaker 2 (13:46):
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 diffuse.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
You should see.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
He had an extraordinarily 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.
(14:23):
On the other hand, 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.
(14:46):
What he'd liked to 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 this, 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,
(15:07):
you know, I'll take twenty 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 innocentl 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,
(16:08):
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):
the two ladies, he was composing it with somebody else's tune.
That's a very characteristic form of Ellentonian 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 days.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
Ellington was a man of many, many talents. 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 (17:44):
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 has 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
(19:40):
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 (20:31):
Ellington 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 difficulties thing in a hotel like this in
the United States. A heartbreaking thing for a man of
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):
Ellington spoke to conceal himself. I think one of the
things that he didn't want people to see it was
the hurt. 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 go out in the world and you start
(22:15):
to have great success, and 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
(22:35):
know that 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 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
(23:18):
in maybe doing a big story about Ellington, maybe 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 Waen was the
(23:38):
man who put it together, and he was quite reluctant
to bring Ellington in because although he admired Ellenton, 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
(24:03):
named after the festival, the Newport Jazz Festival Suite, and
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
(24:26):
the band didn't show up for the rehearsal. They were
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 it, and the temperamental gentleman of the
(24:48):
Ellington band foul up the rehearsal. Everybody is really anxious
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
(25:12):
a handful of asses. He had a tenor saxophone player
in a band named Paul Gonzalez, not a refined player,
but boy could he blow, and he really liked to
blow the bulls. So he calls domnuendo and a crescendo
and Duel kicks it off, and suddenly the band is
shifted into high gear. Gonzalez comes down front and he
(25:37):
plays twenty seven straight choruses of the bulls and the
crowd goes not just wild, but they would dance. They
(26:01):
were yelling and screaming, and Ellington's up there playing piano easily.
Speaker 3 (26:05):
He's in bog heath andy. He knows that he's got
this guy. The rhythm section is.
Speaker 2 (26:10):
Blazing and the phrase they stopped the show is often
used in exaggeration in my business 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
(26:30):
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. So Time magazine they're in ecstasy.
Suddenly they realized 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
(26:51):
of public recognition. And for the rest of the fifties
and well into the sixties, the Ellington Band lived off
the publicity and the boost 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 it 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
(27:37):
we 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 with a funding 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
(28:20):
was something that haunted Ellington.
Speaker 2 (28:22):
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
(28:46):
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
(29:08):
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.
Speaker 3 (29:39):
That he plays.
Speaker 2 (29:40):
And the Boltzers mattered to some extent, they still matter.
But in nineteen sixty five the board high hats him.
He doesn't deserve the award, and he was outraged. He
spoke more candidly about this in an interview with Nat Hantoff,
very frankly, in fact, and he talked about the lack
(30:01):
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 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
(30:21):
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 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
(30:45):
damn bad, because you know, he was bigger than any prize.
He was bigger than any award, but he was human.
He was only human. You can only take so much hurt, and.
Speaker 3 (31:00):
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
(31:35):
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 Nixon actually played a Happy Birthday for a Duke
on piano that night and they jam all night.
Speaker 1 (32:50):
On all lives coming to an end, and Ellington's did too,
But the legacy he left behind was extraordinary.
Speaker 2 (33:05):
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.
Speaker 3 (33:25):
For years and years afterwards.
Speaker 2 (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 was cancer. He played
for as long as he could, He performed as long
(34:11):
as it was possible to perform. By this time, Mercer Ellington,
his son, was out there with the band, and Duke knew.
Speaker 3 (34:19):
What he had.
Speaker 2 (34:20):
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, He looks old
and tired and sad. And then it was all gone.
Then it was all gone. And even though the band
(34:44):
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. Like most of
(35:06):
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 but be struck by
(35:28):
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 with him sound better,
(35:50):
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 compositions 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 giants until after we
(36:13):
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
(36:35):
personal body of work ever left 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.
Speaker 3 (36:49):
Admired him, And he was a great.
Speaker 2 (36:51):
Personality, somebody that whether you come away from reading about
him liking him or disliking 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
(37:14):
history of jazz.
Speaker 1 (37:19):
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're so grateful that he did. 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,
(37:43):
and that mask he put on. I keep thinking about
that masking and as Terry said, he concealed his pain
with the mask of urbanity. I mean, 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 teach Out was right, we
can't appreciate giants until there passed. And Duke Ellington was
(38:05):
a giant, a complicated and brilliant giant. The story of
Duke Ellington 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.
Duke Ellington was born in eighteen ninety nine in our
nation's capital, and both the timing of his birth and
location impacted his life greatly. Here is Terry Teachout.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
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. That is what
(01:38):
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 of
black person well to do and poor, striving and desperate
they were all thrown together. But it was a society
(01:59):
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 several wrungs
(02:19):
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 so he
(02:41):
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 was
(03:03):
inclined for his black friends to be people with white skin.
At the same time, though he believed deeply in the
self improvement ethos of the black boucheoisie. 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, you are
(03:27):
going to do remarkable things. And Ellington 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 (03:45):
Most great talents have mentors that inspire them. In Ellington's
muse was a musician named Harvey brook.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
Harvey Brooks was I believe, based in Philadelphia. He was
a late rag time early 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 from
(04:14):
a family of the black boucheoisie, 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 really what
(04:35):
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 found
(04:55):
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, you
(05:18):
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 few piano lessons as
(05:39):
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 (05:55):
Then came the race riots in Washington, DC, which would
alter the course of Ellington's life.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
The race riots of nineteen nineteen and 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 Ellington.
(06:24):
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
(06:45):
the history of jazz, you were going to have to
come to the work.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
And you've been 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.
(07:13):
When we come back more of the remarkable story of
Duke Ellington as told by Terry Teachout here on our
American Stories, Folks, if you love the stories we tell
(07:33):
about this great country, and especially the stories of America's
rich past, know that all of our stories about American history,
from war to innovation, culture and faith, are brought to
us by the great folks at Hillsdale College, a place
where students study all the things that are beautiful in
life and all the things that are good in life.
And if you can't get to Hillsdale, Hillsdale will come
(07:53):
to you with their free and terrific online courses. Go
to Hillsdale dot edu to learn more. And we continue
with our American stories and with Terry Teachout, the late
(08:14):
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. Time, it would turn out, played
(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, their 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 fermaent going along right then, not just
in music but in every form of art. If you
weren't emulated 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, freed or life,
(10:15):
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 (10:37):
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. What a horrible wirony,
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 Ony 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 Allington, 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 he
made it known to New Yorkers with money who talked
(12:03):
about it, 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
(12:24):
making records 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
(12:47):
in nineteen 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 collaborators credit.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
To put it in the nastiest possible way. Doke Ellington
was a credit hall. Classical composers sit down, write a piece,
they bring it to the concert hall and the.
Speaker 3 (13:31):
Orchestra rehearsals and they play it.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
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 were very poor sight readers, and Ellington himself.
Speaker 3 (13:45):
Was not a good site reader.
Speaker 2 (13:46):
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 diffuse.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
You should see.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
He had an extraordinarily 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.
(14:23):
On the other hand, 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.
(14:46):
What he'd liked to 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 this, 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,
(15:07):
you know, I'll take twenty 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 innocentl 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,
(16:08):
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):
the two ladies, he was composing it with somebody else's tune.
That's a very characteristic form of Ellentonian 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 days.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
Ellington was a man of many, many talents. 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 (17:44):
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 has 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
(19:40):
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 (20:31):
Ellington 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 difficulties thing in a hotel like this in
the United States. A heartbreaking thing for a man of
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):
Ellington spoke to conceal himself. I think one of the
things that he didn't want people to see it was
the hurt. 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 go out in the world and you start
(22:15):
to have great success, and 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
(22:35):
know that 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 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
(23:18):
in maybe doing a big story about Ellington, maybe 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 Waen was the
(23:38):
man who put it together, and he was quite reluctant
to bring Ellington in because although he admired Ellenton, 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
(24:03):
named after the festival, the Newport Jazz Festival Suite, and
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
(24:26):
the band didn't show up for the rehearsal. They were
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 it, and the temperamental gentleman of the
(24:48):
Ellington band foul up the rehearsal. Everybody is really anxious
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
(25:12):
a handful of asses. He had a tenor saxophone player
in a band named Paul Gonzalez, not a refined player,
but boy could he blow, and he really liked to
blow the bulls. So he calls domnuendo and a crescendo
and Duel kicks it off, and suddenly the band is
shifted into high gear. Gonzalez comes down front and he
(25:37):
plays twenty seven straight choruses of the bulls and the
crowd goes not just wild, but they would dance. They
(26:01):
were yelling and screaming, and Ellington's up there playing piano easily.
Speaker 3 (26:05):
He's in bog heath andy. He knows that he's got
this guy. The rhythm section is.
Speaker 2 (26:10):
Blazing and the phrase they stopped the show is often
used in exaggeration in my business 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
(26:30):
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. So Time magazine they're in ecstasy.
Suddenly they realized 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
(26:51):
of public recognition. And for the rest of the fifties
and well into the sixties, the Ellington Band lived off
the publicity and the boost 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 it 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
(27:37):
we 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 with a funding 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
(28:20):
was something that haunted Ellington.
Speaker 2 (28:22):
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
(28:46):
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
(29:08):
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.
Speaker 3 (29:39):
That he plays.
Speaker 2 (29:40):
And the Boltzers mattered to some extent, they still matter.
But in nineteen sixty five the board high hats him.
He doesn't deserve the award, and he was outraged. He
spoke more candidly about this in an interview with Nat Hantoff,
very frankly, in fact, and he talked about the lack
(30:01):
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 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
(30:21):
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 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
(30:45):
damn bad, because you know, he was bigger than any prize.
He was bigger than any award, but he was human.
He was only human. You can only take so much hurt, and.
Speaker 3 (31:00):
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
(31:35):
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 Nixon actually played a Happy Birthday for a Duke
on piano that night and they jam all night.
Speaker 1 (32:50):
On all lives coming to an end, and Ellington's did too,
But the legacy he left behind was extraordinary.
Speaker 2 (33:05):
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.
Speaker 3 (33:25):
For years and years afterwards.
Speaker 2 (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 was cancer. He played
for as long as he could, He performed as long
(34:11):
as it was possible to perform. By this time, Mercer Ellington,
his son, was out there with the band, and Duke knew.
Speaker 3 (34:19):
What he had.
Speaker 2 (34:20):
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, He looks old
and tired and sad. And then it was all gone.
Then it was all gone. And even though the band
(34:44):
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. Like most of
(35:06):
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 but be struck by
(35:28):
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 with him sound better,
(35:50):
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 compositions 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 giants until after we
(36:13):
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
(36:35):
personal body of work ever left 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.
Speaker 3 (36:49):
Admired him, And he was a great.
Speaker 2 (36:51):
Personality, somebody that whether you come away from reading about
him liking him or disliking 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
(37:14):
history of jazz.
Speaker 1 (37:19):
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're so grateful that he did. 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,
(37:43):
and that mask he put on. I keep thinking about
that masking and as Terry said, he concealed his pain
with the mask of urbanity. I mean, 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 teach Out was right, we
can't appreciate giants until there passed. And Duke Ellington was
(38:05):
a giant, a complicated and brilliant giant. The story of
Duke Ellington here on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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