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| Hail, hail, the band's all here. |
At some unknown date in 1923, but shortly after getting out of Sing Sing, a “prominent” bootlegger/gangster named Owney Madden bought a night club on the upper floor of a building on the corner of 142nd and Lenox Avenue in Harlem and renamed it the Cotton Club. It wouldn’t hit its prime for a couple years, but the venue would become synonymous with the Jazz era, and the glamor that surrounded it. For all the careers it launched and sustained - beyond counting, honestly, including the artist/legend featured in this post - life on the talent side of the stage looked very different from what audiences saw.
First, it’s easy to forget that the Jazz era coincided with Prohibition - a function of how many people ignored it, I imagine. Wikipedia’s entry on the Cotton Club notes that the authorities shut it down for selling liquor in 1925, but that’s the only hint that the authorities cared what went on inside. Madden plied the club’s well-to-do clientele with “his #1 beer” and a schedule of the biggest entertainers of the 1920s. It even hosted "celebrity nights" to give audiences a shot at something fresh, which expanded the baseline who’s who list to include (lifted straight from Wikipedia): Jimmy Durante, George Gershwin, Sophie Tucker, Paul Robeson, Al Jolson, Mae West, Richard Rodgers, Irving Berlin, Eddie Cantor, Fanny Brice, Langston Hughes, Judy Garland, Moss Hart, and Jimmy Walker, among others.
The regular programming at Cotton Club patrons were shows called “musical revues,” extended performances that featured singers, dancers, and comedians, all of it anchored with music by the house orchestra at the time. I imagine a space between vaudeville and the (early) modern variety shows aired on TV when I was a knee-high, only live and on stage. A guy named Andy Preer led the first orchestra, and for a while (1923-27), but the Internet recalls him only dimly. This was the musical revue's hey-day, when the hip and swell considered it a hot ticket, a detail that only makes the relationship between the entertainers and the entertained more coarse and distasteful. First, some framing:
“[The Cotton Club] reproduced the racist imagery of the era, often depicting black people as savages in exotic jungles or as ‘darkies’ in the plantation South. The menu depicts this imagery, with illustrations done by Julian Harrison, showing naked black men and women dancing around a drum in the jungle. Tribal mask illustrations make up the border of the menu.”
In keeping with that theme, the Cotton Club literally segregated the (largely? entirely?) black talent from its white clientele. The black singers, musicians and dancers - all of the latter cast to fit the “tall, tan and terrific” profile; “at least 5'6" tall, light-skinned, and under 21 years of age” - had to enter through a separate entrance and were barred from mingling with guests in the club itself. The superintendent’s basement at 646 Lenox was either offered or found as a place for the entertainers’ after-parties, “where they imbibed corn whiskey, peach brandy and marijuana.” Everything else reeked of spectacle and a cultural tourism bordering on outright exploitation. Wikipedia cobbled together a paraphrase of Langston Hughes’ contemporary notes:
“In addition to the ‘jungle music’ and plantation-themed interior, Hughes believed that Madden's idea of ‘authentic black entertainment’ was similar to the entertainment provided at a zoo and that white ‘strangers were given the best ringside tables to sit and stare at the Negro customers - like amusing animals in a zoo.’”
Small wonder it took actual royalty to break out of that setting. Preer’s run at the Cotton Club ended with his death in 1927. After his passing, the Cotton Club invited Chicago jazz legend King Oliver and his Orchestra to take over as house band, but he turned it down. Shortly thereafter, a songwriter named James McHugh suggested that management give bandleader of the Kentucky Club’s house orchestra an audition. He accepted, and had to beef up his orchestra to eleven members, but Duke Ellington killed the audition and became the Cotton Club’s house bandleader from 1927 to 1931. He walked a long road to get there.
Duke Ellington was born Edward Kennedy Ellington into a middle-class black family in Washington, DC in 1889. Both his parents played piano - his father, James Eward Ellington, preferred to play arias, while his mother, Daisy (Kennedy) Ellington, stuck mainly to parlor songs - which exposed the younger Ellington to music from a very young age. They also taught him pride in his heritage, surrounded him with a sophisticated crowd and provided him with piano lessons with an eye to raising a cultured, refined young man. All that polish inspired his friends to give him the nickname he carried through life: Duke.
Duke Ellington flirted with baseball in his youth, but later graduated to loitering around pool-halls where he heard the music bubbling up from the fringes of polite society, ragtime mostly. Despite having real talent for artwork - he turned down a scholarship to the Pratt Institute - he committed to music from an early age. Around 15, before he could even read music, Duke Ellington composed his first original song, “Soda Fountain Rag” - aka, “Poodle Dog Rag,” in honor of where he worked at the time - a song he could play in so many ways that he could make an audience think he was playing a suite of different songs.
His first big step into music came when he meeting a drummer from New Jersey named Sonny Greer. That gave him a partner in crime, but Ellington’s day-job as a freelance sign painter provided the market. If he landed a job to paint a sign for a party, Ellington would ask if they’d booked a musical act, followed by an offer to provide a hot one if they hadn't. Still more connections and referrals came in by way of a second job as a “messenger” (courier?) for the U.S. Navy and State Department. By 1917, he’d cobbled together enough steady work to leave the family nest, as well as his first regular band, “The Duke’s Serenaders” (aka, “Colored Syncopators”). Besides Greer, the original line-up included Otto Hardwick (alto sax), Arthur Whetsel (trumpet), and Elmer Snowden (banjo) and, unlike most black acts of the time, the Serenaders played for both white and black audiences.
A shot at a bigger stage came when Greer got an invite to move to New York City to play with the Wilbur Sweatman Orchestra. Ellington decided to tag along and try to make it in the vibrant Harlem Renaissance. That first run involved more hustling than steady work, which bounced Greer and Ellington back to DC, but they kept plugging away. The timeline is fuzzy (or doesn’t exist online), but some work in Atlantic City ultimately served as a springboard to get back to New York, where Ellington and the same cast of characters landed a four-year engagement at a venue called the Hollywood club in 1923, playing as Elmer Snowden and his Black Sox Orchestra. A falling out (one source says over missing money) and a fire ended with Ellington taking over the Black Sox Orchestra and renaming them The Washingtonians, and the Hollywood Club reopening as Club Kentucky, aka, the Kentucky Club.
Even bigger introductions followed after Ellington met a music producer named Irving Mills. While he’d written several songs to that point - e.g., the song “Choo Choo” for a revue called (please stop) Chocolate Kiddies - getting under Mills’ management gave Ellington resources and connections he’d never had before. He didn’t so much run with it as sprinted. Mills extracted his price - he got a 45% cut on Ellington’s materials along with credits/copyright as a collaborator - but he also made it possible for Ellington to record often and with as many labels as he wanted. The list goes on - “Brunswick, Victor, Columbia, OKeh, Pathê (and its subsidiary, Perfect), the ARC/Plaza group of labels (Oriole, Domino, Jewel, Banner) and their dime-store labels (Cameo, Lincoln, Romeo), Hit of the Week, and Columbia's cheaper labels (Harmony, Diva, Velvet Tone, Clarion)” - and he’d record under different names when called upon (e.g., The Harlem Footwarmers for Okeh and the Jungle Band for Brunswick).
Ellington would go on to write north of 1,000 compositions throughout his…just crazy long career, but here’s a sense of what he would have recorded in the mid-to-late 1920s:
“Duke Ellington and his Kentucky Club Orchestra grew to a group of ten players; they developed their own sound by displaying the non-traditional expression of Ellington's arrangements, the street rhythms of Harlem, and the exotic-sounding trombone growls and wah-wahs, high-squealing trumpets, and saxophone blues licks of the band members.”
According to a frustratingly clipped biography posted by Columbia University, Ellington’s band established its sound during this period. The same site even goes so far as to call a before and after based on the presence or absence of one performer, trumpeter Bubber Miley, the man who introduced Duke to the “growl trumpet.” Per one passage:
“Miley is absent and the band sounds as if it were struggling. However with the debut of Ellington's early theme song ‘East St. Louis Toodleoo’ along with ‘Birmingham Breakdown’ on the session of November 29, 1926, the Duke Ellington Orchestra was essentially born. The band was up to 11 pieces including the wonderful wa-wa trombonist Tricky Sam Nanton, who made for a perfect team with Miley.”
That, in essence, was the band the Cotton Club’s owners put under contract. It was Mills’ connection to McHugh - along with a lyricist named Dorothy Fields, one of the regular songwriters for the Cotton Club’s revues - that led to Ellington’s audition, even if Duke still had to make the most out of it. Fields, McHugh, and others continued to write songs for those shows, but they also let Ellington mix original compositions into the sets. Better still, because the Cotton Club revues regularly broadcast to national audiences, Ellington went out to a national audience for the first time. It takes an entirely different website to nail down when Ellington recorded what, but his time at the Cotton Club saw the release of some early hits noted above, plus other tunes like “Three Little Words,” “Ring Dem Bells,” his first national hit, “Creole Love Call,” and “Black and Tan Fantasy,” which ultimately inspired a 1929 movie short about a struggling musician (Ellington) and Jazz-era excess.
The biggest revue that staged during Ellington’s time at the Cotton Club was Blackbirds of 1928, a show headlined by Adelaide Hall and the song “I Can't Give You Anything But Love." Bigger shows came later, both for the Cotton Club and Duke Ellington, starting with 1933’s Cotton Club Parade, which was anchored by Ethel Waters (fascinating figure) and “Stormy Weather.” Ellington missed 1934’s Cotton Club Parade, the biggest draw in the venue’s history with 600,000 paying customers served and Hall headlining again, this time singing “Ill Wind.” For fans of pop culture, after starting at the Cotton Club as a dancer at age 16, Lena Horne made the bill for that 1934 show and would go on to perform in the movie, Stormy Weather. The good times had turned sour by then, unfortunately: caught between the Depression and race riots in 1936, the Cotton Club closed for a while, only to re-open in Midtown Manhattan - in the heart of Times Square, in fact. That meteoric run started with a splash - i.e., a blow-out opening of the new venue lead by Cab Calloway and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson (then the highest-paid black entertainer anywhere, at $3,500/week), plus 128 other performers - and to solid reviews, only to succumb to rising rents, changing tastes and, reportedly, tax evasion. The original, if shifting history of the Cotton Club ended in 1940. To think, they’d finally opened their doors to black patrons five years earlier…
Ellington, meanwhile, both struggled and succeeded during the 1930s. With recording no longer an option for revenue, a combination of radio and touring became the lifeline for him and his band. He wrote some of his biggest hits after he checked out of the Cotton Club, including “Sophisticated Lady,” “Drop Me Off in Harlem,” “In a Sentimental Mood,” and, perhaps his most famous number of all, “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)” (a phrase credited to Miler, who died young/drunk). That single also feature Ivie Anderson, the vocalist he worked with longer than any other, behind the microphone. His touring schedule, meanwhile, sent him to England - where he received a (mostly) rapturous reception - Scotland, and even The Netherlands, steps that gave Ellington an international audience on top of the largely black audience he had cultivated in the States.
This was also a time of further development and innovation. I have plans to dig into Ellington’s wide range of influences when I check back to him in the 1940s (or 1950s), but this quote from the Columbia University bio hints at the well-spring of his longevity:
“As an arranger Ellington was particularly innovative, writing for his very individual players rather than for an anonymous horn section and, not being content to play his songs the same way every time, he constantly rearranged them; "Mood Indigo" sounded different in 1933 than it did in 1953 or 1973.”
Related thereto, the 1930s saw Ellington step away from the 11-piece (minimum) orchestras he directed during his Cotton Club days to start working with nonets, octets, even sextets. Within those groups, he wrote a succession of songs that spotlighted the musicians he worked with, whether Johnny Hodges (“Jeep’s Blues”), Lawrence Brown (“Yearning for Love”), Rex Stewart (“Trumpet in Spades”), Cootie Williams (“Echoes of Harlem”; who was Miler’s successor, by the way), or Barney Bigard (“Clarinet Lament”). Related, after building his career as the master of the three-minute/one-side of a 78 rpm disc format, Ellington started composing longer songs as early as 1931 that drew inspiration from classical sources and associates more steeped in those compositions (Will Vodery being the main one I kept seeing), including numbers like “Creole Rhapsody.”
By the mid-1930s, Duke Ellington had enough recognition among American households for Hollywood to come calling. Paramount Pictures created a short film/vehicle for him titled, Rhapsody in Black, “the first generation of non-classically arranged orchestral scores and perhaps most importantly, one of the first films written by an African American describing African American life to reach wide distribution,” a kaleidoscopic day-in-the-life tale that comes in at under 10 minutes and features the screen debut of Billie Holiday. Depressingly, and despite his considerable fame, Ellington suffered the same bullshit that any black artist did in the 1920s and 30s. As pointed out in a 2019 article on his quiet, but steady social activism in an outlet called The Conversation, he faced racist idiocy everywhere he went (yes, even England; hence the parenthetical “mostly” above):
“Northern or western engagements in the 1930s and 1940s often proved no better. While there were no ‘white only’ signs on the doors of these hotels or restaurants, establishments enforced segregation by telling black customers to enter through back doors or purchase their meals to go.”
To close this on a (semi-) high note, Ellington had the means to rent a private rail-car for a 1934 tour of the South, an arrangement that afforded lodging for him and his band, as well as places to prepare and sit down to his own meals. He faced other challenges too - most notably, the growing popularity of the big band/swing sound. The way Duke Ellington greeted changing tastes tracks with the way he coped with touring in the South. He adapted. By the time swing came around, Ellington developed the chops to meet the shift head-on. Per a(n apparently) famous line quoted in Wikipedia:
“Jazz is music, swing is business.”
Spoken like a true, hard-headed artiste…which I’ll get into a year or so [Ed. - or so, or so] from now…
About the Sampler
After a needlessly convoluted process, I complied a sampler of 35 songs - a fair amount of which is linked to above. I pulled most of the rest from a collection on Spotify titled, The Duke: The Columbia Years (1927-1962). For what it’s worth, I stuck to the earlier part of that collection to the best of my ability - which in no way means I succeeded (though based on what I've been pulling from Youtube, I did all right).
Apart from the songs linked to above, I expanded on the list of his best by pulling the songs I liked most from that 66-song collection. It’s all fairly random and/or personal, in other words, with no particular or known connection to any story, moment, or artistic period in Duke Ellington’s career, and I stand by it to that extent. With the bar lowered, those are: “The Mooche” (one of his hits, btw), “Slippery Horn” (early favorite), the Spanish-tinged “Caravan,” “The Gal from Joe’s” (another good one), “Prelude to a Kiss” (another hit), “Slap Happy,” “Country Gal,” “You’re Just an Old Antidisestablishmentarian” (couldn't find Duke's version), “Sultry Serenade” (couldn't pass on that title), “Stomp, Look and Listen,” “Three Cent Stomp,” “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” “I Can’t Believe You’re in Love with Me,” “Brown Betty,” “Blue Rose” (ft. Rosemary Clooney), and the equally long and compelling, “The Tattooed Bride.”
First, it’s easy to forget that the Jazz era coincided with Prohibition - a function of how many people ignored it, I imagine. Wikipedia’s entry on the Cotton Club notes that the authorities shut it down for selling liquor in 1925, but that’s the only hint that the authorities cared what went on inside. Madden plied the club’s well-to-do clientele with “his #1 beer” and a schedule of the biggest entertainers of the 1920s. It even hosted "celebrity nights" to give audiences a shot at something fresh, which expanded the baseline who’s who list to include (lifted straight from Wikipedia): Jimmy Durante, George Gershwin, Sophie Tucker, Paul Robeson, Al Jolson, Mae West, Richard Rodgers, Irving Berlin, Eddie Cantor, Fanny Brice, Langston Hughes, Judy Garland, Moss Hart, and Jimmy Walker, among others.
The regular programming at Cotton Club patrons were shows called “musical revues,” extended performances that featured singers, dancers, and comedians, all of it anchored with music by the house orchestra at the time. I imagine a space between vaudeville and the (early) modern variety shows aired on TV when I was a knee-high, only live and on stage. A guy named Andy Preer led the first orchestra, and for a while (1923-27), but the Internet recalls him only dimly. This was the musical revue's hey-day, when the hip and swell considered it a hot ticket, a detail that only makes the relationship between the entertainers and the entertained more coarse and distasteful. First, some framing:
“[The Cotton Club] reproduced the racist imagery of the era, often depicting black people as savages in exotic jungles or as ‘darkies’ in the plantation South. The menu depicts this imagery, with illustrations done by Julian Harrison, showing naked black men and women dancing around a drum in the jungle. Tribal mask illustrations make up the border of the menu.”
In keeping with that theme, the Cotton Club literally segregated the (largely? entirely?) black talent from its white clientele. The black singers, musicians and dancers - all of the latter cast to fit the “tall, tan and terrific” profile; “at least 5'6" tall, light-skinned, and under 21 years of age” - had to enter through a separate entrance and were barred from mingling with guests in the club itself. The superintendent’s basement at 646 Lenox was either offered or found as a place for the entertainers’ after-parties, “where they imbibed corn whiskey, peach brandy and marijuana.” Everything else reeked of spectacle and a cultural tourism bordering on outright exploitation. Wikipedia cobbled together a paraphrase of Langston Hughes’ contemporary notes:
“In addition to the ‘jungle music’ and plantation-themed interior, Hughes believed that Madden's idea of ‘authentic black entertainment’ was similar to the entertainment provided at a zoo and that white ‘strangers were given the best ringside tables to sit and stare at the Negro customers - like amusing animals in a zoo.’”
Small wonder it took actual royalty to break out of that setting. Preer’s run at the Cotton Club ended with his death in 1927. After his passing, the Cotton Club invited Chicago jazz legend King Oliver and his Orchestra to take over as house band, but he turned it down. Shortly thereafter, a songwriter named James McHugh suggested that management give bandleader of the Kentucky Club’s house orchestra an audition. He accepted, and had to beef up his orchestra to eleven members, but Duke Ellington killed the audition and became the Cotton Club’s house bandleader from 1927 to 1931. He walked a long road to get there.
Duke Ellington was born Edward Kennedy Ellington into a middle-class black family in Washington, DC in 1889. Both his parents played piano - his father, James Eward Ellington, preferred to play arias, while his mother, Daisy (Kennedy) Ellington, stuck mainly to parlor songs - which exposed the younger Ellington to music from a very young age. They also taught him pride in his heritage, surrounded him with a sophisticated crowd and provided him with piano lessons with an eye to raising a cultured, refined young man. All that polish inspired his friends to give him the nickname he carried through life: Duke.
Duke Ellington flirted with baseball in his youth, but later graduated to loitering around pool-halls where he heard the music bubbling up from the fringes of polite society, ragtime mostly. Despite having real talent for artwork - he turned down a scholarship to the Pratt Institute - he committed to music from an early age. Around 15, before he could even read music, Duke Ellington composed his first original song, “Soda Fountain Rag” - aka, “Poodle Dog Rag,” in honor of where he worked at the time - a song he could play in so many ways that he could make an audience think he was playing a suite of different songs.
His first big step into music came when he meeting a drummer from New Jersey named Sonny Greer. That gave him a partner in crime, but Ellington’s day-job as a freelance sign painter provided the market. If he landed a job to paint a sign for a party, Ellington would ask if they’d booked a musical act, followed by an offer to provide a hot one if they hadn't. Still more connections and referrals came in by way of a second job as a “messenger” (courier?) for the U.S. Navy and State Department. By 1917, he’d cobbled together enough steady work to leave the family nest, as well as his first regular band, “The Duke’s Serenaders” (aka, “Colored Syncopators”). Besides Greer, the original line-up included Otto Hardwick (alto sax), Arthur Whetsel (trumpet), and Elmer Snowden (banjo) and, unlike most black acts of the time, the Serenaders played for both white and black audiences.
A shot at a bigger stage came when Greer got an invite to move to New York City to play with the Wilbur Sweatman Orchestra. Ellington decided to tag along and try to make it in the vibrant Harlem Renaissance. That first run involved more hustling than steady work, which bounced Greer and Ellington back to DC, but they kept plugging away. The timeline is fuzzy (or doesn’t exist online), but some work in Atlantic City ultimately served as a springboard to get back to New York, where Ellington and the same cast of characters landed a four-year engagement at a venue called the Hollywood club in 1923, playing as Elmer Snowden and his Black Sox Orchestra. A falling out (one source says over missing money) and a fire ended with Ellington taking over the Black Sox Orchestra and renaming them The Washingtonians, and the Hollywood Club reopening as Club Kentucky, aka, the Kentucky Club.
Even bigger introductions followed after Ellington met a music producer named Irving Mills. While he’d written several songs to that point - e.g., the song “Choo Choo” for a revue called (please stop) Chocolate Kiddies - getting under Mills’ management gave Ellington resources and connections he’d never had before. He didn’t so much run with it as sprinted. Mills extracted his price - he got a 45% cut on Ellington’s materials along with credits/copyright as a collaborator - but he also made it possible for Ellington to record often and with as many labels as he wanted. The list goes on - “Brunswick, Victor, Columbia, OKeh, Pathê (and its subsidiary, Perfect), the ARC/Plaza group of labels (Oriole, Domino, Jewel, Banner) and their dime-store labels (Cameo, Lincoln, Romeo), Hit of the Week, and Columbia's cheaper labels (Harmony, Diva, Velvet Tone, Clarion)” - and he’d record under different names when called upon (e.g., The Harlem Footwarmers for Okeh and the Jungle Band for Brunswick).
Ellington would go on to write north of 1,000 compositions throughout his…just crazy long career, but here’s a sense of what he would have recorded in the mid-to-late 1920s:
“Duke Ellington and his Kentucky Club Orchestra grew to a group of ten players; they developed their own sound by displaying the non-traditional expression of Ellington's arrangements, the street rhythms of Harlem, and the exotic-sounding trombone growls and wah-wahs, high-squealing trumpets, and saxophone blues licks of the band members.”
According to a frustratingly clipped biography posted by Columbia University, Ellington’s band established its sound during this period. The same site even goes so far as to call a before and after based on the presence or absence of one performer, trumpeter Bubber Miley, the man who introduced Duke to the “growl trumpet.” Per one passage:
“Miley is absent and the band sounds as if it were struggling. However with the debut of Ellington's early theme song ‘East St. Louis Toodleoo’ along with ‘Birmingham Breakdown’ on the session of November 29, 1926, the Duke Ellington Orchestra was essentially born. The band was up to 11 pieces including the wonderful wa-wa trombonist Tricky Sam Nanton, who made for a perfect team with Miley.”
That, in essence, was the band the Cotton Club’s owners put under contract. It was Mills’ connection to McHugh - along with a lyricist named Dorothy Fields, one of the regular songwriters for the Cotton Club’s revues - that led to Ellington’s audition, even if Duke still had to make the most out of it. Fields, McHugh, and others continued to write songs for those shows, but they also let Ellington mix original compositions into the sets. Better still, because the Cotton Club revues regularly broadcast to national audiences, Ellington went out to a national audience for the first time. It takes an entirely different website to nail down when Ellington recorded what, but his time at the Cotton Club saw the release of some early hits noted above, plus other tunes like “Three Little Words,” “Ring Dem Bells,” his first national hit, “Creole Love Call,” and “Black and Tan Fantasy,” which ultimately inspired a 1929 movie short about a struggling musician (Ellington) and Jazz-era excess.
The biggest revue that staged during Ellington’s time at the Cotton Club was Blackbirds of 1928, a show headlined by Adelaide Hall and the song “I Can't Give You Anything But Love." Bigger shows came later, both for the Cotton Club and Duke Ellington, starting with 1933’s Cotton Club Parade, which was anchored by Ethel Waters (fascinating figure) and “Stormy Weather.” Ellington missed 1934’s Cotton Club Parade, the biggest draw in the venue’s history with 600,000 paying customers served and Hall headlining again, this time singing “Ill Wind.” For fans of pop culture, after starting at the Cotton Club as a dancer at age 16, Lena Horne made the bill for that 1934 show and would go on to perform in the movie, Stormy Weather. The good times had turned sour by then, unfortunately: caught between the Depression and race riots in 1936, the Cotton Club closed for a while, only to re-open in Midtown Manhattan - in the heart of Times Square, in fact. That meteoric run started with a splash - i.e., a blow-out opening of the new venue lead by Cab Calloway and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson (then the highest-paid black entertainer anywhere, at $3,500/week), plus 128 other performers - and to solid reviews, only to succumb to rising rents, changing tastes and, reportedly, tax evasion. The original, if shifting history of the Cotton Club ended in 1940. To think, they’d finally opened their doors to black patrons five years earlier…
Ellington, meanwhile, both struggled and succeeded during the 1930s. With recording no longer an option for revenue, a combination of radio and touring became the lifeline for him and his band. He wrote some of his biggest hits after he checked out of the Cotton Club, including “Sophisticated Lady,” “Drop Me Off in Harlem,” “In a Sentimental Mood,” and, perhaps his most famous number of all, “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)” (a phrase credited to Miler, who died young/drunk). That single also feature Ivie Anderson, the vocalist he worked with longer than any other, behind the microphone. His touring schedule, meanwhile, sent him to England - where he received a (mostly) rapturous reception - Scotland, and even The Netherlands, steps that gave Ellington an international audience on top of the largely black audience he had cultivated in the States.
This was also a time of further development and innovation. I have plans to dig into Ellington’s wide range of influences when I check back to him in the 1940s (or 1950s), but this quote from the Columbia University bio hints at the well-spring of his longevity:
“As an arranger Ellington was particularly innovative, writing for his very individual players rather than for an anonymous horn section and, not being content to play his songs the same way every time, he constantly rearranged them; "Mood Indigo" sounded different in 1933 than it did in 1953 or 1973.”
Related thereto, the 1930s saw Ellington step away from the 11-piece (minimum) orchestras he directed during his Cotton Club days to start working with nonets, octets, even sextets. Within those groups, he wrote a succession of songs that spotlighted the musicians he worked with, whether Johnny Hodges (“Jeep’s Blues”), Lawrence Brown (“Yearning for Love”), Rex Stewart (“Trumpet in Spades”), Cootie Williams (“Echoes of Harlem”; who was Miler’s successor, by the way), or Barney Bigard (“Clarinet Lament”). Related, after building his career as the master of the three-minute/one-side of a 78 rpm disc format, Ellington started composing longer songs as early as 1931 that drew inspiration from classical sources and associates more steeped in those compositions (Will Vodery being the main one I kept seeing), including numbers like “Creole Rhapsody.”
By the mid-1930s, Duke Ellington had enough recognition among American households for Hollywood to come calling. Paramount Pictures created a short film/vehicle for him titled, Rhapsody in Black, “the first generation of non-classically arranged orchestral scores and perhaps most importantly, one of the first films written by an African American describing African American life to reach wide distribution,” a kaleidoscopic day-in-the-life tale that comes in at under 10 minutes and features the screen debut of Billie Holiday. Depressingly, and despite his considerable fame, Ellington suffered the same bullshit that any black artist did in the 1920s and 30s. As pointed out in a 2019 article on his quiet, but steady social activism in an outlet called The Conversation, he faced racist idiocy everywhere he went (yes, even England; hence the parenthetical “mostly” above):
“Northern or western engagements in the 1930s and 1940s often proved no better. While there were no ‘white only’ signs on the doors of these hotels or restaurants, establishments enforced segregation by telling black customers to enter through back doors or purchase their meals to go.”
To close this on a (semi-) high note, Ellington had the means to rent a private rail-car for a 1934 tour of the South, an arrangement that afforded lodging for him and his band, as well as places to prepare and sit down to his own meals. He faced other challenges too - most notably, the growing popularity of the big band/swing sound. The way Duke Ellington greeted changing tastes tracks with the way he coped with touring in the South. He adapted. By the time swing came around, Ellington developed the chops to meet the shift head-on. Per a(n apparently) famous line quoted in Wikipedia:
“Jazz is music, swing is business.”
Spoken like a true, hard-headed artiste…which I’ll get into a year or so [Ed. - or so, or so] from now…
About the Sampler
After a needlessly convoluted process, I complied a sampler of 35 songs - a fair amount of which is linked to above. I pulled most of the rest from a collection on Spotify titled, The Duke: The Columbia Years (1927-1962). For what it’s worth, I stuck to the earlier part of that collection to the best of my ability - which in no way means I succeeded (though based on what I've been pulling from Youtube, I did all right).
Apart from the songs linked to above, I expanded on the list of his best by pulling the songs I liked most from that 66-song collection. It’s all fairly random and/or personal, in other words, with no particular or known connection to any story, moment, or artistic period in Duke Ellington’s career, and I stand by it to that extent. With the bar lowered, those are: “The Mooche” (one of his hits, btw), “Slippery Horn” (early favorite), the Spanish-tinged “Caravan,” “The Gal from Joe’s” (another good one), “Prelude to a Kiss” (another hit), “Slap Happy,” “Country Gal,” “You’re Just an Old Antidisestablishmentarian” (couldn't find Duke's version), “Sultry Serenade” (couldn't pass on that title), “Stomp, Look and Listen,” “Three Cent Stomp,” “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” “I Can’t Believe You’re in Love with Me,” “Brown Betty,” “Blue Rose” (ft. Rosemary Clooney), and the equally long and compelling, “The Tattooed Bride.”
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