MATHIS AND THE DUKE

"When people listened to Ellington's music, they forgot they were white. They became human beings listening to great music. It gave them a moment that they could transcend themselves."-- Mercer Ellington in a PBS documentary

-----
Flipping through my old fanclub newsletters one day, I came across a picture I had almost forgotten about, of two people who are very important figures in the music world, each in their own way. The suave, debonair man with the brilliantined hair is obviously dressed for show at the piano with mic in place, obviously playing a melody of some kind, looking up at some unknown person or thing out of view, maybe someone in his entourage. This just might be a scene from a rehearsal session, because there's someone standing beside him who in all likelihood wouldn't be had this been an actual performance. The pianist's companion is a slim young man in casual dress; he looks kind of like a young college student with his plaid shirt and pullover sweater. Looks like he's studying, too, his elbow propped up on something beside the piano, his head propped on his fist at the temple. He's looking down with a half-smile at the older man's hands as they dance across the keys. The admiration in the young man's face is apparent.

These two men, Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington and John Royce "Johnny" Mathis seem to share a lot in common. Both men would come to be known professionally simply by their last names. Both men resisted more popular arenas for their music and maintained their musical individuality, though not necessarily by choice. Both lost their beloved mothers to cancer and were devastated by their loss, as one would well imagine. Both men transcended race, became one with their audience. Both men knew full well where they came from. Both men were more than conscious of race, and neither man enjoys discussing it. Each man chose to fight the good fight through their music.

Fifteen years after Ellington's death, Johnny Mathis would dedicate an entire album almost an entire hour long to the music of Duke Ellington. This work, titled In A Sentimental Mood, subtitled Mathis Sings Ellington, would be later be nominated for a Grammy award (not that those are worth anything, anymore). Mathis had recorded an Ellington number before then, though.

Jump for Joy, which Mathis performs on his 1963 recording Johnny, came from a special stage production, built around the supposed death of Jim Crow and Uncle Tom. Ellington supplied several songs to the production; and he supplied his singer, Ivie Anderson, too, who had a hit with "I Got It Bad and That Ain't Good".

So who was the man who so impressed young Mathis that he would dedicate an entire album to him?

Musically speaking, Ellington was not afraid to experiment. He wrote with specific members of his band in mind. He followed his own musical muses, producing his big band production numbers, while the rest of the jazz world was discovering Bebop, basically isolating himself from popular culture. While other jazz bands abandoned the road for the dance floor, Ellington continued to tour, saying he wouldn't know any other way of doing what he did.

A lot of young musicians who would not have otherwise been able to afford to further their education got their music careers started as a result of a scholarship Ellington established. A good example is Elayne Jones, a now-retired tympanist of the San Francisco Opera. Ms. Jones was the first black woman to be a principal player in a major symphony orchestra, and she wouldn't have had this chance had she not been one of the three lucky finalists for the first Ellington scholarship in 1945. She attended the Juilliard School of Music in New York City, a very expensive school her parents would not have been able to afford.

As previously mentioned, Ellington was devoted to his mother, Daisy Ellington. At one point, he had his mother, wife, young son and baby sister living in the same apartment while he was on the road! Ellington lost his mother to cancer in 1935, which plunged him into the depths of despair for a time. But he tried to deal with his loss not only through an elaborate funeral (complete with a half-ton iron casket and $2,000 depression dollars worth of flowers), but also by writing, composing the song Reminiscing in Tempo in her honor. Still, according to his son Mercer, he didn't write anything significant for the next three years. "Nothing else really mattered," he says about that period.

Life eventually went on for Ellington, and formed a big band, and dumped the man who made him famous, Irving Mills. Ellington noticed that Mills had bought a cheaper casket for his mother than the one he had ordered with $5000; Ellington told Mills goodbye. He had planned to leave Mills all along, as Mills was not an easy personality to get along with. However, the casket affair appears to have been the straw that broke the camel's back, so to speak.

Ellington and his band travelled primarily by train. To avoid any unnecessary contact with what Ellington regarded as "the objectionable people" throughout the South, they chartered two pullmans and a baggage car, and they would pull into the station and just live there. Ellington felt train travel commanded a certain amount of respect, since at the time the President travelled primarily by train also.

Interesting story: In the early forties there weren't disc jockeys on the radio playing records. Radio stations actually used to play live music and broadcast it over the air! They either used a house band, that worked for the radio station, or the performing band would come to each radio station and perform live! Well, of course when you do that there are performance rights that go to the songwriter or whoever has the copyright to the song. So one year, ASCAP which is a song publishing and licensing company, went on strike against basically all the radio stations. ASCAP wanted more fees from the radio stations, and the radio stations balked at this. So a brouhaha ensues. This was very bad news for musicians, because a lot of music from the Broadway shows and movies that they played was controlled by ASCAP. So to counter this the radio stations came up with their own licensing company called BMI, for Broadcast Music, inc., and they got songwriters to write new songs for their catalog that they could play on the air, and not have to use any ASCAP songs. They started charging a penny for each performance of a song on record. ASCAP never did this. This got a lot of music publishers to break on through to their side.

Unfortunately for Ellington and his band, all of his hits to that point were ASCAP licensees., and he couldn't play his own hits on the air at these radio stations: "Sophisticated Lady", "Mood Indigo," "Creole Love Call," and others. His band had to work, he was in a bind, so he called on his son Mercer and Billy Strayhorn to get busy writing songs that he could play on the air, and at one radio station in Chicago, he was playing the same four songs on the air twice a night! Finally they got enough songs together to satisfy the audiences. "Take the A Train," "Chelsea Bridge," "Moon Mist," "Things Ain't What They Used To Be" were all songs that came out of this period between 1940 and 1941.

Ellington paid guaranteed salaries to his musicians whether an audience showed up to see him or not. This made for lean times during the late forties and fifties. He got royalties from his recordings, and reinvested them in order to maintain the orchestra. Things got so bad, he played high school dances and amusement parks to keep his band in business.

Another interesting fact: Ellington was a hypochondriac, and kept a doctor on call, his best friend, Dr. Arthur Logan. Reportedly, Ellington never missed one show in 50 years on the road. When Logan died under mysterious circumstances, Ellington was not told of it until the day of the funeral. A disheartened Ellington, who was already fighting cancer at the time, died exactly six months and one day later.

He was aware of two-tier society, he wrote specificaly on the subject. Ellington thought about people, more so than about black and white issues.

Herb Jeffries, the first Black singing cowboy who was an Ellington vocalist for a time, said that "Duke was not a politician, and he wasn't interested in politics. Duke was interested in music...that had charm that soothed the savage beast, and that was his politics...he healed more people with his music, and brought compassion into many savage human beings.."

Ellington used to answer (or dodge, depending upon one's point of view) the question of who his audience in a most roundabout way. He'd say, "The music of my people is what...Now, which of my people?...I'm in a lot of different groups....the group of piano players...those who aspire to be dilettantes...oh, yeah, those who appreciate Beaujolais!"

Duke summed it up this way, "I've had such a strong influence by the music of the people. THE people! THAT'S the better word, because THE people ARE my people!"

Still, Ellington contributed to the musical "Jump For Joy" because, as he explained, "there were some things which needed to be said.." He composed other pieces that dealt with the condition of the Negro, as Blacks were called in his day. One important piece was called "Black, Brown, and Beige,"

Music was Duke's politics, and so it seems to be for Mathis. When Mathis was a young man, he once explained that he felt he could best serve his people, that is, Blacks, by just "being", and doing the best job he knew how to do.

Of course, Mathis is not a composer of songs. A writer for Rolling Stone magazine once said that Mathis was a conduit of new music to old folks. I totally agree with that statement. Remember what I said about the teacher? It works both ways: he's also a conduit of old music to us young folks! The pipeline through which the musical genius of others is conveyed to the general public. People on both ends of the pipe discover wonderful new music, including that of the great Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, because of Mathis.

Mathis paid tribute to this great composer in his 1991 Grammy-nominated album In a Sentimental Mood: Mathis Sings Ellington. When he came to Oklahoma City in 1989, I got to hear Duke Ellington songs which I didn't even realize had words to them...like Sophisticated Lady and Satin Doll.* Here are some things I've learned about some of the other songs on the Mathis sings Ellington album (I refer to this as an album, since it was released as an LP overseas):

Something To Live For was written by Billy Strayhorn as part of a show called "Fantastic Rhythm" for the high school he was attending. Duke Ellington recorded it later on, and he took credit for it, as was the custom!
In answer to the question of what Ellington considered a typical Negro piece among the songs he'd written, Duke Ellington considered In A Sentimental Mood a good example.
Solitude, written in twenty minutes, sold hundreds of thousands of copies of sheet music and became Ellington's most successful song of the mid-30's.
Come Sunday first appeared in the 1940 Carnegie Hall performance "Black, Brown, and Beige", his first long thematic piece that unfortunately was given the thumbs-down by most professional critics at the time. (Ellington always took kind of a dim view of critics, anyway, so it's not like he expected them to like it.)
Caravan was one of the biggest hits Duke Ellington had. It was written by band member Juan Tizol, who sold it to Irving Mills for $25. After Caravan became such a big hit, however, Tizol asked for and got a share of the royalties. Tizol also claimed to have written Perdido, but of course he was never given credit for any of the songs. Mills and Ellington took credit for any song any of the band members wrote.
Lush Life was the song Billy Strayhorn auditioned for Ellington. Ellington like it, and its composer, immediately; they worked together from then on until Strayhorn's death in 1967.

Duke Ellington. His music was universal. Johnny Mathis. His music, culled from the genius of others, is timeless.

*The lyrics to "Satin Doll" were written by Johnny Mercer; "Sophisticated Lady" by Mitchell Parish.

Read more about Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington. I recommend these books:
Ellington by James Lincoln Collier
Music Is My Mistress by Duke Ellington
The World of Duke Ellington by Stanley Dance

If you can catch them, please find these wonderful documentaries from PBS' American Masters Series:
A Duke Called Ellington, Pts. 1 and 2
Duke Ellington

The New York Times is featuring a retrospective on the Duke of Ellington for his centennial. You will have to register with them to see it, but it's free and well worth the hassle. You can hear his music, read essays much better-written than the ones I write, and see a video, if you have the right software. There's even a forum where you can put in your two cents in about Ellington. Check it out!

God Bless Johnny Mathis and Duke Ellington.

Hits so far! Proudly hand-coded on a Macintosh computer.
Please use Netscape 3.0 or better to view these files.