Authors: Terry Teachout
Ellington hit another bump in the road when he went from Paris to Las Vegas and, much to his disgust, was promptly forced to make bail for four members of the Air Force. Paul Gonsalves, Ray Nance, and the trumpeters Willie Cook and Fats Ford were all arrested when heroin was found in the apartment that they had been sharing. Asked if there’d been any trouble at the time of the arrest, Ellington replied, “No, there wasn’t. The boys, you know, have a profound appreciation of the skulls they were born with.” While Cook and Ford got off, Gonsalves and Nance were prosecuted and tried. The saxophonist was put on probation, but because Nance had received a suspended sentence for a 1956 drug charge, he spent two months in jail, after which the band was banned from playing in Las Vegas for two years.
By now Columbia’s executives were losing interest in Ellington, whose records no longer sold well. Indeed, his best album of 1961 was made not for Columbia but for Roulette.
Louis Armstrong & Duke Ellington: Together for the First Time
was not nearly so elaborate an affair as the Armstrong-Ellington collaboration originally envisioned by George Avakian, who had wanted to make an album on which Armstrong would be backed by the full Ellington band. The ever-cautious Joe Glaser scuppered that notion, but he let the two men record together with the All Stars, the trumpeter’s combo, and the resulting album, which reunited Ellington with Barney Bigard, who was now playing clarinet with the All Stars, was a satisfying set of Ellington-penned songs on which Armstrong sang and played superlatively.
††††††††††
Six months after taping
Together for the First Time,
the two men appeared together on
The Ed Sullivan Show
to promote it. Sullivan, the most prominent TV variety-show host of the fifties and sixties, had finally brought Ellington onto his program in 1959 as part of a segment occasioned by the release of
Anatomy of a Murder
(which the tongue-tied Sullivan referred to on camera as “Anatomy for Murder”). After that his appearances on the popular and influential series would be frequent, and though he rarely did anything more challenging than heat up one or two of his old chestnuts, Ellington’s guest shots with Sullivan, which continued until 1970, gave him national exposure at a time when other big bands were finding it harder to get a hearing on TV.
In 1962 Columbia called it a day, dropping Ellington after six years. The decision was strictly business: Goddard Lieberson, Columbia’s president, hated the idea of showing so great an artist the door, but the accountants pulled out their balance sheets and told him that it was no longer cost-effective to record the band, and that was that. Ellington went freelance and took the opportunity to tape three all-star small-group albums. While his collaborations with John Coltrane and Coleman Hawkins were more than worth hearing, it was
Money Jungle
that made the biggest impression. A decidedly modern-sounding trio album, at times almost aggressively so,
Money Jungle
teamed him with Charles Mingus and Max Roach, two of the most revolutionary players of the postwar era. The recording session was stormy—Mingus and Roach, who were as temperamental as they were talented, found it impossible to get along—and Miles Davis, for one, didn’t much care for the results: “You see the way they can fuck up music? It’s a mismatch. . . . Duke can’t play with them, and they can’t play with Duke.” Most listeners, however, were impressed, above all by the furiously churning title track and “Fleurette Africaine,” an astringent minor-key ballad, both of which showed that Ellington could still teach the boppers a thing or two.
Around the time that
Money Jungle
was recorded, Mercer Ellington talked Cootie Williams into rejoining the band, to which Lawrence Brown had returned a year and a half earlier. Even without Columbia, things were looking up, and the end of the year brought the best news of all: Reprise, Frank Sinatra’s new label, signed Ellington to an exclusive contract. Sinatra, who had gone into the record business after growing restive at Capitol, his old label, was having fun at Reprise, where he could record whatever and whomever he wanted. He had signed Al Hibbler and later tried to hire Billy Strayhorn as one of his house arrangers, but Ellington objected, so Sinatra chose instead to take on the entire band. He, Sammy Davis Jr., and Dean Martin announced the deal in November at a Chicago bash described in
Billboard
as “the loudest, swingingest, brassyest, most-sought-after and most-crashed cocktail party of the year.” Sinatra informed the reporters that Reprise would not only allow Ellington to record at will but was also creating an “Ellington Wing” that would “showcase new as well as established jazz artists.” Ellington, in other words, would function not merely as a recording artist but as an A & R man for Reprise. He liked that idea, just as he liked the idea of working for a man like Sinatra, whom he praised in
Music Is My Mistress
as “a
primo
nonconformist
assoluto,
” instead of an executive suite full of drones: “I thought it would be a very good idea to be contracted to some company which is controlled by an artist rather than a businessman. It gives the soul a better opportunity.”
Ellington and his men were back in the studio within days of signing, and before long they had taped two albums.
Will Big Bands Ever Come Back?
was a collection of ingenious new arrangements, mostly by Strayhorn, of big-band theme songs recorded by other top leaders of the Swing Era. It stayed in the can until 1965, but the prompt release of Ellington’s first “official” album for Reprise, a program of Latin-style compositions in which the band was augmented by an assortment of percussion instruments played by everyone in the studio who wasn’t otherwise occupied, boded better for the new association. As was his wont, he sprung the charts on the band at the sessions, wanting them to be played as spontaneously as possible, and Ray Nance, for one, regretted that the musicians had not had more time to work on them, confessing that “after you heard the record, you knew you could have done better.” Reprise took advantage of the ongoing bossa nova craze by calling the album
Afro-Bossa,
though the feel of the performances was Caribbean, not Brazilian. Ellington himself described the title track as “a kind of a gut-bucket bolero . . . executed in a pre-primitive manner” (Woodyard played the drum part not with sticks but with his bare hands). Whatever its regional identification,
Afro-Bossa
was an arresting debut. The composer’s new muse, it seemed, had done her work well.
Cootie Williams admitted to being pleased to be back in the trumpet section. “My name is still on some of the parts in the arrangements, and that makes me feel specially good,” he told Whitney Balliett. Though he and Lawrence Brown were past their prime—their inimitable tones were now afflicted with the musical equivalent of middle-age spread—the playing of both men, along with that of Carney, Johnny Hodges, and Ray Nance, gave the group a direct connection to its prewar triumphs. To hear the live performances that Reprise recorded in France in February of 1963 (they were later released as
The Great Paris Concert
) is to know how much the continuing presence of the old-timers animated their younger colleagues. The band played with such mad abandon that Ellington was transported, whooping with glee all night long. Anyone who supposes that he and his musicians had nothing much of interest to say after 1942 should hear them ripping into the closing pages of
A Tone Parallel to Harlem
at the Theatre de l’Olympia two decades later.
At first Ellington’s relationship with Reprise held out much promise. Not only was
Afro-Bossa
his best studio project since
Anatomy of a Murder,
but in 1963 the label allowed him to tape full-orchestra versions of
Harlem
and
Night Creature
in Europe, where union rules governing orchestral recording were less restrictive. He was so energized that in August he premiered a new stage work, a pageantlike revue about black history called
My People
that was performed twice daily (three times on weekends) during a two-week run at Chicago’s Century of Negro Progress Exposition, a festival inspired by the same city’s Century of Progress International Exposition of 1933 and occasioned by the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation. In 1961 Ellington had expressed an interest in seeing
Black, Brown and Beige
“staged on Broadway as an opera or pageant.”
My People,
which recycled chunks of the earlier work, appears in retrospect to have been more or less what he had in mind, and unlike
Beggar’s Holiday,
which was sunk by his inability to assimilate the basics of book-show technique, the oratorio-like structure of
My People
was well within his grasp.
What was most surprising about
My People
was Ellington’s interest in engaging with the present-day political climate. In the past he had steered clear of explicit talk about race relations in America, using indirection to say what he had to say. He was skeptical, too, of the efficacy of protest, privately dismissing Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which took place a few days after the opening of
My People,
as an exercise in futility: “The only people who did good out of the goddamn parade was the people who owned businesses in Washington, the hotels, and all that, they had a fucking ball, put all the fucking money in their pockets.” Like Booker T. Washington before him, Ellington had always believed, and would continue to believe, that the way for blacks to overcome the crippling burden of racism was for them to assume individual responsibility for their collective plight and forge a well-heeled, well-educated middle class of their own.
But the world had changed—and so, up to a point, had Ellington himself. Whatever his doubts about the value of marching on Washington, his admiration for King’s personal courage was boundless. In 1960 he had actually taken part in a Baltimore lunch-counter sit-in, and his decision to do so won him praise from black newspapers that had criticized his distanced attitude. The following year he added a nonsegregation rider to his contracts, allowing him to cancel any performance held in a segregated hall. Having won the Spingarn Medal, he wanted to be worthy of it, not just in his deeds but in his art, though never at the expense of entertaining his audiences. “I’ve only got about one minute of social protest written into the script [of
My People
] because while this aspect warrants notice, it unfairly tends to overshadow the continuing contributions of the Negro to American life,” he told
Variety
. In fact there was somewhat more “social protest” than that, most notably a number called “King Fit the Battle of Alabam” in which Ellington paid tribute to the “freedom riders” whom the minister led to nonviolent victory over Bull Connor, who had set police dogs on black protesters in Birmingham.
Since the band was committed to play elsewhere throughout the run of
My People,
Strayhorn and the pianist-conductor Jimmy Jones put together a pit orchestra that contained as many alumni as they could find, augmented by Ray Nance and Russell Procope, whose presence helped to give the ensemble a more authentic sound. Joya Sherrill was the top-billed singer, and the dance troupes of Alvin Ailey and Talley Beatty joined her and the other vocalists onstage. Ellington himself put his mark on every aspect of the show, whose two halves were respectively based on “Come Sunday” and “The Blues”: “I was the lyricist, the composer, the orchestrator, I directed it, I produced it, I lit the show, I did everything.” While Perry Watkins collaborated on the set design,
My People
was for the most part his own show from top to bottom. Unfortunately, his writing ability was still rudimentary by comparison with his musical skills. He had always been an awkward lyricist, and when he paid tribute to his own family in “Heritage (My Mother, My Father and Love),” he stooped to maudlin naïveté: “My mother—the greatest—and the prettiest, / My father—just handsome—but the wittiest.” In other numbers he resorted to a hectoring didacticism that was even less convincing for being couched in ill-rhymed doggerel: “What has color got to do with behavior / Or, when under fire, how brave you are?”
The project came together slowly, and according to Ailey, Ellington had trouble deciding on its tone, telling a friend that he “couldn’t make up his mind if the show was for Broadway or the Apollo.” The reviews were unenthusiastic, the box-office receipts poor, and Reprise chose not to tape an original-cast album. That was the end of
My People,
which went the way of
Jump for Joy
and
Beggar’s Holiday,
vanishing into the memory hole that awaits well-intentioned shows that prove in the end not to have been quite good enough.
• • •
The road had always been his universal antidote, and he quaffed it now. “If you have the right kind of temperament, traveling can get to you like whiskey and cigarettes,” he told a reporter. “Getting into a car or train is like being released. You know there’ll be no business problems to talk about while you’re moving.” To that list he had lately added air travel. For much of his life Ellington was so afraid to fly that his phobia made the trade papers in 1954, with
Billboard
reporting, “Duke Ellington’s fear of flying has jeopardized the European tour planned for him by impresario Harold Davison.” But he changed his tune in 1960, taking his first overseas flight to work on
Paris Blues
and loving it:
“I slept and the whole thing went off very well. It was a smooth flight with just a couple of bumps, like going over a railroad track.” Perhaps Norman Granz (or the Countess) talked him into it. Whatever the reason, he was so used to flying by 1963 that he was happy to board a plane in September and fly all the way to Damascus, there to embark on his first State Department–sponsored foreign tour.