Mood Indigo & Beyond

(7 of 9)

Bop Kicks. It was about the same time that Duke got what he calls "the check." Things were very black. There was a recording ban on,* which meant no extra fees, and the band was taking a $500 loss a week just to play at a club with a "wire," i.e., a radio hookup. "I was short of cash," he says, "so I went into the William Morris office to negotiate a small loan. While I was standing around, a boy came through with the mail, and handed me a letter from Victor records. I glanced at it. It was a check for $2,250. I slid it back into the envelope quick. Just what I needed, I thought. Two thousand, two-hundred-and-fifty dollars would do me nicely. But maybe I had misread it. Probably it was $22.50. I opened it again. It was $22,500, royalties for Don't Get Around Much Any More. I went out of there like a shot, and nobody saw me for two months."

During the '40s, Duke turned out several large jazz tone poems, notably Black, Brown and Beige, which has to do with states of mind rather than skin colors; Tattooed Bride, a humorous episode; Harlem, with its smooth changes of pace from nimble to noble; Liberian Suite, written on commission for the Liberian government centennial.

Despite the fame of these works, things continued strictly blue for the Ellington gang. Most of the original band members had either quit or died, and with their replacements, Composer Ellington seemed to have trouble writing new songs as distinctive as the old. The jazz world was getting its kicks from bop, but when Ellington tried to go along with the new style, he seemed to be regressing: he had been using their tricks for years. On the fringes of show business, men became reputable critics overnight simply by writing attacks on Ellington.

The Clock Ticks. But the attraction of the Ellington band never faded among musicians. And today, joining him means both musical glory and financial security. "You hear the band, when you're not in it," says Butter Jackson, "and you like the way it sounds. You think you'd like to be playing that." Once in, every man is tempered by the fire of 14 other men's alert ears. There is no other discipline. Says Duke: "I told those guys in 1927 they were never going to drive me to the nuthouse. 'We may all go there,' I said, 'but I'm going to be driving the wagon.' " He can't remember ever firing anybody, but he has driven some to quit. One man regularly arrived tight and got drunker as the evening wore on. At the worst moment Duke would schedule the fellow's solo in racing tempo, so fast that he could not play the notes, and he eventually quit in humiliation.