Duke (59 page)

He usually left it to Strayhorn to arrange such numbers, though he had spoken tactfully enough to a reporter who asked him about the Beatles in 1964: “I like the Beatles because they’re well-behaved young men, and we could use well-behaved men in show business. The most important thing about the Beatles’ music is that they’re playing in tune. It’s what the people like.” But he felt hemmed in by the growing ubiquity of rock. In 1965 he shared a bill on
The Ed Sullivan Show
with Herman’s Hermits, in 1968 with Vanilla Fudge. Two years after that, the band took part in Sullivan’s televised tribute to the Beatles, playing a four-minute medley (the host called it “a jazz concerto”) of “All My Loving,” “Eleanor Rigby,” “Norwegian Wood,” “She Loves You,” “She’s Leaving Home,” and “Ticket to Ride,” with Ellington’s sidemen bedecked in mod Carnaby Street suits with frilly lace cuffs.
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The world was changing again, and even though the band was doing its best to keep up, it wasn’t enough. A few years later Ellington expressed his frustration to a European TV interviewer, sounding less like a hip jazz musician than a grumpy old man: “The young people are the people who are buying because they are told to buy, and they cannot buy what is not pressed. . . . They tell the little children, they say, ‘Now, you buy this million,’ and they do it. It has no relationship to music and it has nothing to do with taste.”

While the band’s pop albums are never less than listenable—Strayhorn actually managed to make something magically droll out of “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” and several of his
Mary Poppins
arrangements are little short of poetic—the absence of new compositions is telling, all the more so because Columbia, Ellington’s old label, seized the opportunity to release a pair of three-disc albums called
The Ellington Era
that made many of his classic recordings of the twenties and thirties available for the first time in decades. Next to these sets,
Ellington ’65
and
Ellington ’66,
engaging though they were, sounded trivial, and now that Sinatra had left Reprise, it was only a matter of time before Ellington’s own relationship with the label petered out, as it did in April of 1965.

 • • • 

Two weeks after taping his last recordings for Reprise, Ellington underwent a public humiliation. When the Pulitzer Prizes for 1965 were announced by Columbia University, no classical-music award was given. Two of the judges on the music panel, Robert Eyer of
Newsday
and Winthrop Sargeant of
The New Yorker,
immediately resigned in protest, explaining to the press that all three judges had recommended to the Pulitzer board that while they did not feel that any new classical piece was worthy of the prize, which in past years had gone to such works as Samuel Barber’s Piano Concerto, Aaron Copland’s
Appalachian Spring,
and Charles Ives’s Third Symphony, it was their unanimous opinion that Ellington should be presented with “a special citation for long-term achievement.” The board, they said, dismissed the idea out of hand. A reporter tracked Ellington down in Kentucky and asked if he had any comment. “Fate’s being kind to me,” he replied. “Fate doesn’t want me to be too famous too young.”

Sargeant, a longtime admirer who in 1938 had written
Jazz: Hot and Hybrid,
one of the first musically informed books about jazz to be published in America, told the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch,
“We felt a special citation would be appropriate because Ellington, though outside the symphonic form, has created a great deal of music in the past 40 years that is better than a great deal of symphonic music in that it has reached an audience and can be regarded as outstanding in every sense of the word.” Aaron Copland agreed. “It’s
very
too bad,” he told
Newsweek
. “They missed an opportunity to single Mr. Ellington out. He has deserved it for so long.” The Pulitzer board, though, chose not to defend itself, and it was not until 1997 that John Hohenberg, a longtime board member, explained that the jury’s recommendation had not been taken seriously by the members of the board (according to Hohenberg, it wasn’t even brought to a vote) because it did not conform to the rules of the music prize, which then specified that it was to go to a “distinguished musical composition in the larger forms of chamber, orchestral or choral music.”

A few thoughtful observers sympathized with the board’s dilemma. The classical critic Irving Kolodin, who could not be accused of hostility to jazz in general or Ellington in particular—he had written the program notes for the 1943 Carnegie Hall concert at which
Black, Brown and Beige
was premiered—underlined the irony of the situation when he pointed out in the
Saturday Review
that “larger forms are precisely what [Ellington] is not distinguished for.” The general consensus, however, was that Copland was right, and that Ellington had said the last word with his graceful yet pointed retort. It was the board, not the composer, that came off looking small, especially in the wake of its earlier decision to void the vote of another of its juries and withhold a drama prize from
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
on the grounds that Edward Albee’s 1962 masterpiece was insufficiently “uplifting.” When
The
New York Times Magazine
commissioned from Nat Hentoff a profile of Ellington occasioned by the debacle, it was titled “This Cat Needs No Pulitzer Prize.”

“It’s
very
too bad”: Duke Ellington and Aaron Copland at the 1968 Grammy Awards. America’s greatest jazz composer had been passed over for a Pulitzer Prize three years earlier, and America’s greatest classical composer, a devoted admirer of Ellington’s music, made no secret of his dismay

He didn’t, but the cat himself begged to differ. “I’m hardly surprised that my kind of music is still without, let us say, official honor at home,” he told Hentoff. No doubt he was right, but the decision of the Pulitzer board was not just a slap at jazz in general: It was also a concerted assault on the ego of a man whose need for respectability remained so powerful that he continued to insist on publicly denying the existence of the woman who had been his companion for a quarter of a century. And whatever he may have said for quotation, Ellington very definitely took it personally when the Pulitzer board passed him over. In December he got into a quarrel with Mel Tormé, who had been contractually guaranteed top billing for a joint appearance with the Ellington band at Basin Street East, then one of New York’s top nightclubs. Tormé showed up for rehearsal and discovered that half of the bandsmen were missing. That night Joe Glaser came backstage and told the singer, “If you don’t give Duke top billing in all advertising, promotion, and on the marquee outside, he’s not walking on the stage for this entire engagement. That’s final, from Duke himself.” Tormé begged Ellington, one of his idols, to reconsider but received a chilly reply: “Yeah, baby, well, I’m not mad at you, but, you know, I nearly just won the Pulitzer prize, and this is an insult and I can’t help it if you’re in the middle.”

Tormé went on without Ellington, which was a disastrous choice. “Rarely had my charts been so mangled, played with such astonishing disinterest,” he recalled. A few days later, he reluctantly gave in and the billing was changed. It wasn’t the first time that Ellington had been so unyielding in a billing dispute: The same thing had happened in 1960 when he shared a bill with the comedian Mort Sahl at a Los Angeles club. Then as now, he was willing to sulk in his dressing room until he got his way. But the fact that he went so far as to cite the Pulitzer debacle to Tormé is an indication of how harshly it had wounded him.

Ellington suffered another humiliation the following March when he made a second full-scale assault on Broadway.
Pousse-Café,
his latest stage project, was a freely adapted musical version of
The Blue Angel
whose setting was transplanted from Berlin to New Orleans. On paper the show looked promising, and his collaborators, who included the director José Quintero and the novelist Jerome Weidman, who had written the book for
I Can Get It for You Wholesale,
the show with which Barbra Streisand made her Broadway debut, were impeccably credentialed. None of them, however, had reckoned on Ellington’s unwillingness to commit himself fully to the laborious process of writing a new musical. Theodore Bikel, the star of
Pousse-Café,
wrote in his 1994 memoir of the resulting ordeal:

Duke Ellington was nowhere to be found either in the beginning or for any rehearsals. That was a money decision. He had written a number of songs, which were put into various parts of the script in an attempt to make them part of a whole, but that is no way to put a musical together. The songs have to be an integral and organic part of the process, and the composer needs to be present for it. They did not want to pay the Duke for being around, and so he stayed away, and all we had were the songs he had originally done.

He got what he deserved.
Pousse-Café
opened at the Forty-Sixth Street Theatre on March 18, 1966, and closed the following night, having received brutal reviews. It was his most abject failure, one so complete that he said not a single word about it in
Music Is My Mistress
. But his career, like his music, had always been full of the sharpest possible contrasts, and in between the loss of the Pulitzer Prize and the disaster of
Pousse-Café
came a triumph that was to transform his old age: the premiere of his first concert of sacred music.

 • • • 

Duke Ellington was never ostentatious about his religious observances, which amounted for the most part to daily Bible study and private prayer in hotel and dressing rooms, but he was deadly serious about them. Unwilling though he was to observe the Seventh Commandment, he meant it, more or less, when he told Richard O. Boyer that “I’d be afraid to sit in a house with people who don’t believe. Afraid the house would fall down.” He had believed in God from childhood onward, and he embraced Christianity more purposefully after his mother’s death, wearing a small gold cross around his neck and reading the Bible three times straight through. “Come Sunday,” the best-known section of
Black, Brown and Beige,
is a “tone parallel” of a church service, and when Mahalia Jackson sang it on record in 1958, even the most skeptical of listeners could not doubt its composer’s faith.

It was for this reason that he was hesitant to accept a commission from the Very Reverend C. Julian Bartlett, dean of San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral, and the Reverend John S. Yaryan, the cathedral canon, to compose a sacred work and perform it in the cathedral. At first he questioned his “eligibility” for the task, which he defined clearly and modestly: “You have to go out there and make a noise that tells the truth. . . . You can jive with secular music but you can’t jive with the Almighty.” In addition, he was unwilling to water down his music so as to make it acceptable to the church’s elders. But the Rev. Bartlett, who had been impressed by the deep spiritual feeling of Jackson’s version of “Come Sunday,” assured him that what he had in mind was a program “totally in [Ellington’s] character, the way [he] wanted to do it.” In the fall of 1964, two years after he first approached the composer, Ellington accepted the commission. The press appears to have been dubious about his musical intentions. “No, we’re not going to have a jam session,” he said at a press conference held prior to the event. “This is my greatest opportunity to say something.” As for the Rev. Bartlett, he described the planned concert with simple sincerity: “The offering of sacred music by Duke Ellington and his musicians will be just that—an offering of his talent to Almighty God. We receive him humbly and with thanksgiving for his tremendous talents.”

Ellington’s program note for the first performance of the hour-long program, which took place on September 16, 1965, was in part an apologia for what he thought might be understood as his presumption in writing church music: “Every man prays in his own language and there is no language that God does not understand.” The language of his “Concert of Sacred Music” was, however, entirely understandable, since most of the music performed at the cathedral consisted of excerpts from
Black, Brown and Beige
and
My People,
augmented by a solo version of
New World A-Coming
. “A lot of it sounded like
Black, Brown and Beige
with more singing and some extra music,” said Claire Gordon, a longtime friend who had also been present at the 1943 Carnegie Hall concert. The San Francisco premiere, which played to a packed house, received overwhelmingly favorable reviews, and the work was performed a second time on the day after Christmas at New York’s Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, where it was recorded for RCA, Ellington’s new record label. It was a package deal—he agreed in return to tape a greatest-hits-in-stereo album called
The Popular Duke Ellington
—that paid off handsomely for all parties concerned. Not only did
The Popular Duke Ellington
sell well, but
Duke Ellington’s Concert of Sacred Music
won him another Grammy Award.