Duke Ellington - 31 May 1974

When it’s finished, says the guidebook, it may well be the largest cathedral in the world. I’m always leery of sentences that contain the phrase "may well be". It means you hope; you’re not sure.

Anyway, I’m talking about the Episcopal Cathedral Church of St John the Divine on the Upper West Side in New York City. Its foundations were laid in 1892. They’ve been building it ever since, and the end is not yet.

Last Monday, St John the Divine housed a ceremony that would have set its architect revolving in his grave. Every pew was filled and every aisle, and there were several thousand listening to loudspeakers on the outside. And when the ten thousand people inside were asked to stand and pray, there was a vast rustling sound – as awesome, it struck me, as that of the several million bats whooshing out of the Carlsbad Cavern in New Mexico at the first hint of dawn.

It’s not, of course, the size of the crowd that would have shocked the cathedral’s founders. On the contrary, they might have taken it jubilantly as a sign of a great religious revival. It was what the crowd was there for. They ranged through the whole human colour scale from the most purple black to the palest white, and they were there to honour the life and mourn the death of a man who had become supreme in an art that began in the brothels of New Orleans.

The art is that of jazz and the practitioner of it they mourned was, as you must have guessed, Edward Kennedy Ellington, identified around the world more immediately than any member of any royal family as the Duke.

What are called the “vital statistics” are fairly unsurprising. He was the son of a coloured butler, but, like other great jazzmen, like Fatha Hines and Fats Waller, who were the sons of coloured parsons or church organists, young Ellington was as a little boy lifted up on to a piano stool and put to the chore of practice, which through the late 19th and early 20th Century afflicted so many generations of little boys both white and black.

What is common to so many men who were to become great jazz pianists is that they started very young and they stayed at it through their childhood and their teens and all their lives. I remember oh 10, 15 years ago, running into an old and engaging jazzman, a white, who was employed then towards the end of his life in a rather poky, smoky little jazz joint in San Francisco. Like all the good men of his trade, his ups and downs were dictated by the fickleness of fashions in music. It was a lean year and he was playing in a small band with Earl Fatha Hines who was also at possibly the lowest ebb of his popular acclaim.

Well Muggsy Spanier had left his trumpet in this dreadful nightclub but found he needed it on his night off for some impromptu gig or other, so he had to go into the nightclub the next morning, always a depressing experience what with the reek of stale air and spilled alcohol and the lights turned down to a maintenance bulb or two.

He told me that one of the unforgettable shocks of his life was going in there – it was, appropriately, called the Hangover Club – coming in from the bone-white sunlight into the smelly Stygian cave and hearing the most unlikely music coming from the piano, and squinting through the dark and seeing Fatha Hines sitting there, as apparently he did for two or three hours every morning, practising not the blues or Rosetta or Honeysuckle Rose, but the piano concertos of Mozart and Beethoven. And as Spanier came in, he looked up and said, “Just keeping the fingers loose.”

To be the best, it’s a sad thing most of us amateurs discover, you have to do this every day. I think it was Paganini who said, “If I go a week without practice, the audience notices it. If I go a day without practice, I notice it.”

Well this digression, you may not believe, is very relevant to the character and the mastery of Duke Ellington. I knew all the records of his first great period when I was in college, from say 1927 through 1932 or '3, and when I first arrived in New York I beat it up to the Cotton Club to see the great man in the flesh – long before, I regret to say, I visited the home of George Washington or even Grant’s Tomb.

But apart from a nodding acquaintance in nightclubs and becoming known to him no doubt as one of those regular nuisances who request this number or that, I didn’t meet Ellington alone, by appointment so to speak, until it must have been the very end of the second war.

I went up to his apartment on the swankier side of Harlem – there is such a neighbourhood – where the rare blacks who had made it, one way or another, had spacious apartments in large Victorian buildings looking out on a patch of greenery.

The date had been for two in the afternoon, and I now think that, in my mind’s eye, I must have expected the very dapper figure of the Duke to be seated in a Noel Coward dressing gown, deep in composition at a concert grand. For those were the days long before band leaders got themselves up in gold lame and sequins. The big band leaders wore dinner jackets, but the Duke always wore white tie and tails and was as sleek as a seal.

Well, I was shown into a comfortable, rambling apartment with a big living room that had evidently seen a little strenuous drinking the night before. Off from the living room was a bedroom with a large bed, rumpled and unmade. And that evidently gave on to a bathroom because out of it emerged what I first took to be some swami in the wrong country. It was the Duke, naked except for a pair of undershorts and a bath towel woven around his head.

He came in, groaning slightly and saying to himself “Man!” And then his man came in, a coloured butler, and they went into the knotty question of what would be the right breakfast that might be at once tasty and also medicinal. It was agreed on, and the Duke turned and said, “Now” – meaning what’s your business at this unholy hour of two in the afternoon?

Until the breakfast arrived (and he went at it like a marooned mountaineer) he was casual, almost (I was afraid) bored. What I’d come to propose was that he might like to do a long broadcast session with his big band – this, remember, was 1945 or '6, the peak period of his big band – not in concert, as we now say, but in rehearsal. He shot a suspicious glare at me as if I’d suggested recording him doing five-finger exercises.

But my problem, which I’d wrestled with and been thrown by many times, was how to convey to the listener – this was before television – how to convey the curious genius of the Duke since it was unique in the practice of jazz music, perhaps in any music, which was to show a composer whose most creative act was not at the keyboard or composing on paper, which he could do very fast in all sorts of places, but in the hours that he stood in front of the band. That was when he melded or wove together the special sounds and talents of the men in front of him in between their playing and pausing.

That’s not said very well. I’ll try again. Everybody knows that most good jazz is impossible to write down in the usual musical notation. You can no more make a transcription of Fatha Hines playing the S. Louis Blues than you can print five instructions for the average swimmer to do the 200 metres like Mark Spitz.

All right, jazz is improvisation, done best by a group of players who know each other’s whimsical ways with such mysteries as harmonics, counterpoints, scooped pitch, jamming in unison and so on. But alone among all jazz composers, the Duke’s raw material was his own instinctive knowledge of the rich and original talents of his players. They were not just trumpet, trombone, E flat alto saxophone. They were superb and individual performers who stayed with him for years, for decades. One of them, Harry Carney, played with the Duke on his first recording date in 1927 and he was there to play on the last date in Kalamazoo, Michigan, last March.

The Duke created his best music while it was being rehearsed. After 30 years with more or less straight jazz tunes, some of his own, he turned more and more to religion and to the ambitious composition of religious music. But from the beginning to the end, it was the same process. In 1927 there was an inimitable Ellington sound, and so there was at the end.

By the way, the Duke warmed to my idea after about two hours, most of which he spent on the telephone talking about “flatted fifths” and “tossing twelve bars to Johnny or Barney”. And we had a long and unforgettable session in a studio on Fifth Avenue where we recorded the whole process of the Duke dictating the number, trying out this fusion of sounds and then that; and stopping and starting and talking to the players while he put it all together. We recorded it on 16-inch discs and it was wonderful; and I have a set, and if the BBC doesn’t, you ought to hear it.

The Duke was an elegant and articulate man and strangely apart from the troubles in the recent turmoil of his race – not because he was ever indifferent or afraid. He was in his mature and later years a devout and supremely spontaneous human being who simply assumed that all men of all colours are brothers. All the problems of prejudice and condescension and tension between black and white simply dissolved in the presence of a man that even an incurable bigot recognised as a man of unassailable natural dignity. He had a childlike side, which we ought to remember is recommended in the New Testament for entry into the kingdom of heaven.

He was very sick indeed in the last three months. He knew, but he kept it to himself, that he had cancer of both lungs; and a week or two before the end, he sent out what looked like Christmas cards to hundreds of friends and acquaintances. They were a greeting. On a field of blue was a cross made up of two words – one vertical and one horizontal – and they were joined by the letter ‘O’. The vertical word was ‘love’ and the horizontal word was ‘God’.

So he died as he lived, an elegant and dignified and greatly gifted man; a vast credit, as Jimmy Cannon used to say about Joe Lewis, a credit to his race. The human race, that is. He has left us, in the blessed library of recorded sound a huge anthology of his music, which never got stuck in the groove from his 28th birthday to his 75th.

When I was in college, my roommate was not only a jazz maniac but also one of the very first knowledgeable jazz critics, and when he left Cambridge – as I did in the summer of 1932 – he wrote in the university weekly a tribute to the Duke. "Bands may come," he wrote, "and bands may go, but the Duke goes on forever." In other words, we thought it a marvel that the Duke had ridden out all fashions and lasted five long years. In fact, his music grew and developed through an incredible 47 years, and we have it all.

And so I’m inclined to say what John O’Hara said on the death of George Gershwin. Transposing the two names, we can say Duke Ellington died last week. I don’t have to believe it if I don’t want to.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

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