Richard Williams LUSH LIFE: A BIOGRAPHY OF BILLY STRAYHORN by David Hajdu (Granta, R89,95)
Jazz has produced several memorable threnodies – one thinks of John Lewis’s lament for Django Reinhardt or Charles Mingus’s salute to Lester Young – but none more affecting than Blood Count, recorded by the Duke Ellington Orchestra in 1967, a few months after the death of Billy Strayhorn, Ellington’s long-time collaborator.
Dyed in the deepest indigo, it features the exquisitely mournful alto saxophone of Johnny Hodges, for whom Strayhorn had fashioned many wonderful settings. What makes Blood Count unusual is that Strayhorn wrote the piece himself. In fact, it was the last thing he composed, its title a rueful reflection of his plight in the final stages of a losing battle against cancer.
The partnership between Ellington and Strayhorn, who wrote together between 1940 and 1967, constitutes a mysterious phenomenon which went almost unexamined and hence largely misunderstood during the lifetimes of its principals.
As one of the great instruments of jazz, the Ellington orchestra was widely assumed to be the vehicle for its leader’s genius. Yet it was Strayhorn who produced some of the orchestra’s best known pieces of the post- 1940 era: Chelsea Bridge, Passion Flower, Day Dream, and Take the “A” Train, that irresistibly hectic evocation of the now- demolished elevated railroad running from 59th to 125th Streets, adopted by Ellington as his signature tune and therefore assumed by many fans to have been written by the leader.
As David Hajdu demonstrates in this expert and enjoyable biography, Strayhorn also contributed in a less clearly identifiable way to such major items of Ellingtonia as the extended works titled Black, Brown and Beige, Such Sweet Thunder and Suite Thursday. He was often employed in completing or revising Ellington’s own sketches, and frequently his participation went uncredited.
If the rest of the world thought about Strayhorn at all during his years with Ellington, it probably conceived him as a shy fellow who preferred to stay at home and toil in obscurity while Ellington took the band around the world on one long party. Not the least of Hajdu’s discoveries is that something like the opposite was the case.
Strayhorn was born in 1915 in Dayton, Ohio. He was barely out of college when he completed a song called Lush Life, a Cole Porter-influenced ballad which still defines a certain ideal of mid-century sophistication and has continued to attract interpretations by performers as various as John Coltrane and Rickie Lee Jones. Its suave harmonic turns caught Ellington’s ear when Strayhorn played for him after the two had been introduced during the orchestra’s visit to Pittsburgh in 1938.
Once he was inside the world of Ellingtonia, Strayhorn found plenty of scope to develop his love of tonal and harmonic sophistication. And there was security of a kind rarely available to a jazz musician. His name may have been missing from the credits to a few tunes, but the organisation picked up the bills for the lifestyle of a man whose sensibilities found their natural location in Manhattan’s caf society.
Strayhorn was gay, which was not something a jazz musician could be open about. So his backroom work with Ellington kept him conveniently out of the spotlight, leaving him free to pursue an active social life and giving him time for such sidebar activities as his presidency of a small social and charitable club of prominent black entertainers. Hajdu draws effective sketches of Strayhorn’s life and loves within this stylish world.
Ellington, it was said, ran his family like a business and his business like a family. For Strayhorn the price of being protected, socially and financially, was the lack of individual recognition given to his writing. “He looked back at his own life and he couldn’t find himself,” said his friend Willie Ruff, who recorded late Strayhorn work which shows his interest in finding an idiom midway between classical music and jazz.
Ruff’s poignant assessment is supported by Strayhorn’s own remark as he sickened towards death. “I can’t be Edward [Ellington] any more,” he said. “I hardly have the strength to be me.” But in taking us closer to an understanding of who that “me” might have been, Hajdu suggests something Strayhorn must have known, deep inside: that his music will live exactly as long as Ellington’s does, which is no meagre fate.