Richard O Boyer travelled extensively with the great bandleader and his orchestra in the early Forties. Here he captures the spirit of the time
It was on a day coach, rolling through the Ohio and Pennsylvania night that Duke Ellington wrote most of New World A-Coming, a symphonic work which had its premiere at Carnegie Hall last December. A Boswellian friend of Duke’s who was travelling with him at the time took notes on the scene.
Across the aisle from Duke as he worked, four men in the band were playing tonk, a form of gin rummy, at a dollar a hand. In front of him a harassed mother was trying to soothe a crying baby and behind him two little boys, in the great day-coach tradition, were eating oranges.
Nearby, Lawrence Brown, an Ellington trombonist – a husky, dignified man who looks like a doctor and says he would like to be one – was reading the Atlantic Monthly, while Junior Raglin, a chunky youth who plays the bass fiddle, was scowling over a comic magazine.
Sonny Greer, Ellington’s jaunty, jouncy drummer, looked up from the card game and said to Duke: “What you doing, Dumpy?” Duke grunted, then said: “Oh, just fooling around on a new piece.” The other card players looked over and in succession asked: “How’s it going, Pops?” “Getting anywhere, Sandhead?” and “You sending ’em, Fatso?” The band members, who sometimes speak of Duke as The Duke, also address him as Phony, which is short for the Phony Duke, and Ze Grand, a contraction of Ze Grand Duke.
Duke didn’t reply to any of the questions; he just kept on working, swearing whenever the rocking of the train made him blur his notations. Not far away, a group of soldiers were swarming around Estrelita, whom publicity men know as the Sepia Gypsy Rose Lee or the South American Bombshell, and whom the band calls Skookums. She is a part of a vaudeville act that occasionally tours with Ellington.
Down the aisle a way, Albert Hibbler, a blind singer in the band, was balancing himself on the arm of a seat occupied by Betty Roch, Ellington’s blues singer, whose customary white dress highlights the deep black of her skin, and at one end of the car Wallace Jones, Harold Baker and Rex Stewart, trumpets, and Juan Tizol, trombone (a musician, of course, takes the name of his instrument), were discussing the occupational hazards of their trade.
“When we don’t sleep,” said Tizol, who is a Puerto Rican and the only white man in the band, “seems like our lips get even stronger. Get a lot of sleep and damn if they don’t crumple.” “I got a salve I like,” Jones said. “Prevents muscles of the lip going dead. But the muscles of my lip just wouldn’t vibrate last night, just wouldn’t vibrate. That damn hall was too cold.”
Baker began talking about the difficulty he had had in learning the trumpet. “I breathed all wrong,” he said, “and it strained the whole side of my face. It used to hurt so. I blew from too low and I couldn’t learn to keep my stomach tight. I used to blow with my jaw as hard as a wall and my teacher would walk up and bang the trumpet right out of my mouth. I pressed so hard against my teeth that they were sore all the time. To cure myself, I hang my trumpet on a string from the ceiling. Just walk up to it and blow it without touching it with my hands.
“Music is bad for the nerves,” he went on. “My nerves are bad now. You gotta do so many things at once. You gotta think about how to fill your horn, about harmony. You gotta look pretty and keep the guy next to you satisfied. You sneak each other that ole go- to-hell look, then flash the public that ole full-of-joy look. I dunno. It’s just rush and then rush some more. Never no sleep. Feel like I want to quit sometime.”
No one spoke for a moment and there was no sound except the rattling of the train. Then Baker said musingly: “Always wanted to play like Joe Smith, but seemed like my notes would crack on me. Joe’s notes were so clear and clean.” Rex Stewart, a ball of a man with a moustache and a slow, pleasant smile, said comfortingly: “Well, Harold, I’m always missing something, too. Never get exactly the right thing out. Never sounds exactly like I imagine before I play.”
The train rounded a long curve and Duke stopped writing. He began again and then evidently decided he wanted to try the music out on someone. “Sweepea? Sweepea!” he called. Sweepea is William Strayhorn, the staff arranger and a talented composer in his own right. Strayhorn, who, incidentally, does not play in the band, is a small, scholarly, tweedy young man with gold-rimmed spectacles. He got his nickname from a character in a comic strip. He had been trying to sleep, staggered uncertainly down the aisle in answer to his boss’s summons.
“I got a wonderful part here,” Duke said to him. “Listen to this.” In a functional, squeaky voice that tried for exposition and not for beauty, Duke chanted, “Dah dee dah dah dah, deedle dee deedle dee boom, bah bah bah, boom, boom!” He laughed, frankly pleased by what he had produced, and said: “Boy, that son of a bitch has got a million twists.”
Strayhorn, still swaying sleepily in the aisle, pulled himself together in an attempt to offer an intelligent observation. Finally he said drowsily, “It’s so simple, that’s why.” Duke laughed again and said: “I really sent myself on that. Would you like to see the first eight bars?”
Perhaps Duke will still be awake at three in the morning, when his train stops for 15 minutes at a junction. If there is an all- night lunchroom, he will get off the train, straddle a stool, his Burberry topcoat sagging like surplice, a pearl-gray fedora on the back of his head, and direct the waitress in the creation of an Ellington dessert.
The composition of an Ellington dessert depends upon the materials available. If, as is often the case, there is a stale mess of oranges and grapefruit floating in juice at the bottom of a pan, he will accept it as a base. To this he will have the girl add some apple sauce, a whole package of Fig Newtons, a dab of ice cream, and a cup of custard. When Duke is back on the train, Boyd, who has stayed up for the purpose, will beg him to go to bed, if they are on a sleeper, or to take a nap, if the band is travelling by day coach, as is often necessary in wartime.
Ellington not infrequently takes out a pad of music manuscript paper, fishes in his pockets for the stub of a lead pencil, and begins composing, and Boyd departs, complaining to the world that “Ellington is a hard man to get to bed and a harder man to get out of it.” Frowning, his hat on the back of his head, swaying from side to side with the motion of the car, occasionally sucking his pencil and trying to write firmly despite the bouncing of the train, humming experimentally, America’s latter- day Bach will work the night through.
Richard O Boyer’s The Hot Bach profile was first published in The New Yorker magazine in the summer of 1944. It is republished in The Duke Ellington Reader, edited by Mark Tucker (Oxford University Press).