Authors: Terry Teachout
Not only did Ellington make a good living playing at the Cotton Club, but he was being paid to hone his skills on company time. As Freddie Jenkins remembered it, “He used to set us on the stand and pay us union scale, maybe for five hours, just to help him formulate chords. He’d assign different notes to every instrument in the band and say—‘Play that, B—a—a—m!’ . . . Sometimes he’d do that three or four times before he found just the combination he wanted.” Even if he was only writing music for the band to play between shows and on radio broadcasts, though, he still had to turn out more of it than ever before. This meant that he could no longer count on improvising arrangements on the spot in collaboration with his musicians: He had to learn how to write them down. By 1928 Ellington was supplying the band with fully notated charts, though he also continued to create new compositions at rehearsals and to insist that the players memorize their parts so that they would not have to fumble on the bandstand: “He would just start to play at the piano, maybe like a hint of the upcoming song, and then you would go for it.” And his style, at once earthy and sophisticated, was well suited to the needs of the club, which sought to persuade its customers that they were getting a taste of the real Harlem without making them feel too uncomfortable in the process.
How did Owney Madden and his associates treat their hirelings? “Stretch” Johnson, who called them “a band of the most vicious thugs and racketeers that had ever been produced in New York,” said that Madden’s men “recognized [the dancers] as, in their opinion, a more talented group of blacks, but generally they thought of us as niggers, like everybody else . . . they kept their distance and we kept ours.” The female members of the chorus line, however, had a different point of view. One of them recalled in 1985 that Madden’s men “were very protective of the girls.” The job was exhausting—the dancers worked seven nights a week, and once a year they went up to Sing Sing to perform for friends of the management—but the pay, $35 a week, was adequate, and the fact that the owners of the club kept their distance struck most of the women as a relief rather than an insult. Instead of fraternizing with the gangsters, they went out with the musicians (Sonny Greer and Fred Guy both married Cotton Club Girls). Madden, on the other hand, got along well with Ellington, and the two men often stayed up late after the shows to play bridge. “He loved Duke and he loved me,” Greer said. “And his influence was so powerful that we was always in the clear. . . . I keep hearing about how bad the gangsters were. All I can say is that I wish I was still working for them. Their word was all you needed. They had been brought up with the code that you either kept your word or you got dead.”
Whatever Madden thought of his other black employees, he paid them on time, and he also poured money into the floor shows, which according to one account were budgeted at $4,000 a week ($52,000 in today’s dollars). One show followed another:
The Cotton Club Show Boat
in April,
Hot Chocolate
in October,
Springbirds
the following March. By 1929 the club’s ads, most of which made mention of “Duke Ellington’s Recording Orchestra,” sported enthusiastic quotes from such Broadway columnists as Mark Hellinger, Louis Sobol, and Walter Winchell (“The Cotton Club Revue is one of the outstanding diversions in New York”). Winchell, who was a friend of Dorothy Fields’s father and had close ties to Madden, was on hand for Ellington’s opening night. After that he was seen frequently at the Cotton Club, meaning that the Ellington band appeared no less frequently in the city’s most influential entertainment column. Most artists will swallow a fair amount of humiliation in return for free publicity, and Duke Ellington, at least for a time, was no exception. He knew that far worse fates could befall a black musician than playing for big money in a segregated nightclub.
• • •
As 1927 gave way to 1928, Ellington continued to tinker with the personnel of his band, seeking out new players whose styles, like those of Bubber Miley and Tricky Sam Nanton, were sufficiently unorthodox to arouse his imagination. He had hired two such men in mid-1927, a Creole bassist from New Orleans named Wellman Braud (pronounced “Bro”) and Harry Carney, an alto saxophonist and clarinet player from Boston who started playing baritone saxophone after joining the band. Early the following year he talked another New Orleans musician, Barney Bigard, into signing up, and shortly after that Arthur Whetsel came back to New York and rejoined the trumpet section, bringing the number of players up to eleven. Ellington had long appreciated Whetsel’s playing, but the other three men were just as inspiring.
Braud, born in 1891, was the band’s senior member, a sober-sided Louisianian of long musical experience who believed himself to have been “the first person to start the walking bass.” He was the first string bassist to play in the Ellington band—his predecessors were tuba players—and today he is remembered as an exponent of the now-obsolete “slap-bass” technique, in which the player uses his right hand to slap the strings against the fingerboard, creating a percussive effect. Unlike most early jazz bassists, Braud was also adept with the bow, getting a smooth sound that contrasted nicely with the pop and snap of his two-beat pizzicato style, and his round tone and rhythmic vigor gave the Ellington band a firm foundation. Gene Ramey, a young bassist from Texas, was impressed by how Braud, Guy, and Sonny Greer were “a totally different kind of rhythm section. For the first time you could hear the bass player coming through.” Even younger players like George Duvivier, who disdained the slap-bass technique as outdated, admired Braud: “Wellman was playing solos with real notes, without the folderol that was associated with bass solos. . . . [He] had an enormous sound.” He was also an excellent cook and was later admired by his colleagues for the spicy New Orleans–style dishes that he prepared backstage whenever the band was on the road.
Ellington appreciated Braud’s playing, though he seems not to have cared for the older man’s bossy personality. In addition to composing a musical portrait of Braud in 1970, he included a revealing pen portrait of the bassist in
Music Is My Mistress:
When Mr. Braud joined us . . . he was already a celebrated veteran of New Orleans jazz, and a clean, neatly dressed coach who knew all the answers. He and Freddy Guy were the two Big Daddies. As a bass player, he believed in crowding the microphone, and when you got ready to blow a chorus Mr. Braud would already have established so compelling a beat that you could not miss.
Though the seventeen-year-old Harry Carney had only a sliver of Braud’s musical experience, he was to become the longest-lasting piece in the puzzle that was the Ellington Effect. He started playing with the band in June of 1927, and according to Carney, Ellington became a “sort of guardian” to him. Not only did he spend the rest of his life in the band, but Carney and Ellington eventually became the closest of companions. At the time, though, he was teased by his older bandmates, one of whom, Sonny Greer, nicknamed him “Youth.” Even then he was, in Ellington’s words, “a very well-behaved, well-organized young man,” and he took his duties seriously enough to change instruments upon joining the band, having concluded that it would “give more variety” to the clarinet-dominated reed section if he started doubling on baritone saxophone. Soon the big horn became his primary instrument: “My greatest kick with the instrument, which then seemed so much bigger than me, was that I was able to fill it and make some noise with it. I enjoyed the tone of it and I started to give it some serious study, and I’ve been carrying it around ever since.” Influenced by Coleman Hawkins, Fletcher Henderson’s star soloist, and Adrian Rollini, whose bass saxophone graced the small-group records of Bix Beiderbecke, Red Nichols, and Joe Venuti, Carney strived to duplicate Hawkins’s facility and Rollini’s tone, thereby becoming the first great baritone-sax soloist in jazz. Ellington was fascinated by the massive sound, dark as twice-burnt umber and fine-grained as mahogany, that Carney drew from the cumbersome instrument, and for the next half century it would serve as one of his signature timbres.
One reason why Carney cut back on his clarinet playing was the presence in the reed section of Albany Leon Bigard, born in 1906 and always called “Barney,” who was one of the finest jazz clarinet soloists of the twenties and thirties. Bigard, who doubled on tenor saxophone but preferred playing the smaller horn, was a light-skinned middle-class Creole who had recorded with King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton. Distant and glum, he was, like so many humorless men, a practical joker who liked nothing better than to see a fellow musician put on the spot. But Ellington loved his “woody tone,” a peculiarly resonant sound common to New Orleans clarinet players: “He was invaluable for putting the filigree work into an arrangement, and sometimes it could remind you of all that delicate wrought iron you see in his hometown.”
Bigard came on board when Ellington grew “kind of tired” of Rudy Jackson’s playing. He was struck by the self-assurance with which his new employer spoke of his plans for the future:
“I want you to join my band,” he says. “I don’t know how long we’re going to stay here, but we are trying to build up a good band. If we can do it, and the boss likes us, then we can stay at this Cotton Club a long time. We’ll have a good job there.” I noticed he kept talking in the plural: “Our band,” “We can stay there,” and liked that from the start about him. . . . Just like he was going to turn the music business upside down and you would be part of it.
Ellington knew that a good dance band needs showmen as well as soloists, and in 1928 he found one. The diminutive Freddie Jenkins was a left-handed trumpet player—a childhood accident had damaged the fingertips of his right hand—whose antics on the bandstand irked Bubber Miley, who complained about his “posturing and posing.” Before long his new colleagues started calling him “Posey,” and the nickname stuck. But Ellington knew better than to complain about Jenkins’s showboating: “He brought us a new kind of sparkle: his every move was a picture, in the groove, and right on top of the action.” Some of his tricks are documented in
Check and Double Check,
a 1930 film that includes a performance by the band in which the ever-smiling Jenkins upstages his poker-faced colleagues by tossing his head, tapping his foot, shaking his hips, and flapping his derby mute like a sail in a high wind. He was also a competent soloist and section man who had no trouble reading Ellington’s charts, making his arrival a net gain on all counts.
Unlike Jenkins, Johnny Hodges, who replaced Otto Hardwick as the band’s lead alto saxophonist in May of 1928, was incapable of showmanship. His shyness with strangers was often mistaken for hauteur, and he rarely smiled in public, preferring to conceal his anxieties with phlegmatic inscrutability whenever he got up on the bandstand to play. “Everybody said Johnny was gruff,” said Cue, his second wife. “They thought he was cold. He was just afraid.” But Hodges needed no charm to hold an audience’s attention. He was, then and later, Ellington’s greatest soloist, the only one (save for Bechet and, later, Ben Webster) who was as impressive on his own as with the full band behind him. “He may look as though he’s on his last walk to the gallows,” said one of his bandmates, “but he appreciates the applause and he thanks the audience with a million dollars’ worth of melody!” At first Hodges was best known for his up-tempo solos, but he quickly emerged as a peerless bluesman, and later on he became the band’s principal ballad soloist, the role in which he is best remembered today. The rich yet penetrating tone and well-controlled glissandi with which he adorned such songs as Ellington’s “I Got It Bad (And That Ain’t Good)” and “Warm Valley” and Billy Strayhorn’s “Passion Flower” were appreciated by musicians and fans alike. Lawrence Welk, whose squareness is a universal byword, was “so impressed with Johnny’s great ability” that the two men actually recorded an album together. “He plays from the heart rather than the notes,” Welk said. “Besides everything else, he plays the prettiest saxophone of anyone I know.”
Born John Cornelius Hodges in Boston in 1907, Hodges was usually called “Rab” or “Rabbit,” a nickname whose origins are obscure.
†††
He was a childhood friend of Harry Carney and a protégé of Sidney Bechet (“I had quite a few of his riffs”) who played alto, clarinet, and soprano saxophone, Bechet’s own instrument, with equal skill. He was working with Chick Webb’s band when Ellington and Hardwick came to a four-year parting of the ways that appears to have been brought about by the excessive drinking of the man known to his colleagues as “Professor Booze.” Unlike Hardwick, Hodges was a poor sight reader, and he was intimidated by the prospect of mastering Ellington’s book of written arrangements. Barney Bigard recalled, “Johnny was scared when he first joined us . . . Harry Carney and I would take him in hand and if Duke had written a new orchestration with a sax ensemble we would go over it with Johnny until he had it down pat.” His gifts as a soloist were never in doubt, though, and on his first recording session with the band, he played a pair of self-assured choruses on “Yellow Dog Blues” and “Tishomingo Blues” (the first on soprano saxophone, the second on alto). Though he sat alongside Bubber Miley and Tricky Sam Nanton, the stars of the band, the stone-faced Hodges sounded as if he hadn’t a care in the world.
All of these men helped to inspire the stream of compositions that flowed from Ellington’s pen in 1928 and 1929, most of which were recorded almost as soon as they were written. He had yet to hit his stride as a composer, but he was well on the way to it. To be sure, many of his latest pieces, especially such swingers like “Hot and Bothered” and “Jubilee Stomp,” were largely given over to showy solos by the members of the band. But “Awful Sad,” “Black Beauty,” and “Misty Mornin’” sound a lyrical note new to Ellington’s work, while the atmospheric tone of “Black and Tan Fantasy” and “Creole Love Call” permeates “The Blues with a Feelin’.” These latter numbers bear out the truth of Harry Carney’s words: “When you look back, you can see that from the late ’20s onward, every time there was an addition to the band, the new instrumentalist seemed to give Duke new ideas and something to draw from and add in his writing.” It was as if they were all characters in a long-running show of his devising, and it was the theatricality of the musical settings that he devised for them that he surely had in mind when he later proclaimed himself to be “a man of the theater.”