The Ellington Impulse

The following article from New York Times appeared in 1972. It is posted here for reference since it falls within the purview of the essays currently being collected at our Tone Parallel Substack. No copyright infringement is intended.

Duke Ellington sat cater cornered on a folded plaid blanket on the piano bench. “Lemme hear it now,” he said. With his left hand he cued the brass section for the biting attack he wanted on the riff theme of “New York, New York.”

It is the newest of the countless hundreds of compositions he has written since he began his career with “Soda Fountain Rag” in 1915, and he and his band will probably play it during their concert appearance at the Newport Jazz Festival here this week.

After a few measures the Duke signalled a halt. “Ooh, no, no, no,” he said.

“You want the same B‐flat as in the first bar?” asked Tyree Glenn, the lead trombonist. “Bah, bah, beyow?”

The Duke shook his head.

“What do you want?” asked the trombonist, a large, dark pudding of a man with a graying goatee.

Southern Intonation

“I want it together, mainly,” the Duke replied with a laugh. “Play it … play it with a drawl and an accent.”

He illustrated his conception by bending the word “drawl” with a full southern intonation and tightening his mouth around “accent” so that it came out as pure May fair.

“Tyree, keep it that way,” he said, after the band had played the figure again.

“I don't know what I did,” the trombonist replied, and the 15 musicians in the re cording studio in Toronto last week laughed appreciatively.

“C'mon, let's roll it,” the Duke said. Behind the glass partition the sound engineer adjusted his dials and switches and started the tape spinning.

Heard all the way through, “New York, New York,” was what has come to be thought of as typical Ellington: An easy, rocking tune, built on dark, pulsing chords, featuring a couple of solo choruses.

Behind, around, underneath and over the wind instruments was the famous Ellington piano. Almost off handedly, he spun single‐note runs and figures, some smooth and glistening as beads of dew on a spider's web, others brittle, shiny and sharply cut as a necklace of jet.

As one long instrumental passage built and swelled, he left the piano and danced a few steps in front of the band. His feet scarcely moved but his hips and shoulders expressed the rhythm.

At the age of 73, Mr. Ellington is getting a bit stiff legged. His body bends for ward from the hips when he walks, and around his right wrist he wears one of those copper bracelets that are supposed to ward off arthritis. A lifelong dedicated hypochondriac, the Duke has found some of his ailments inevitably becoming real with the passage of time.

Even so, his enthusiasm for the endless grind of travel, performance, composition, rehearsal, is undiminished. It may even have increased in recent years and become something of a compulsion with the growing realization that even the longest journey must finally come to an end.

He had been on the road almost continuously since the first of the year. It was a trip that took him and his band to Tokyo, Bangkok, Indonesia, and Jakarta, then from Tacoma, Wash., San Francis co and Los Angeles back across the country, playing concerts and dances. Now, on a rare night without a performance or the need to travel he was making records.

A Need for Haste

The same sense of a need for haste has also led him lo simplify his life. Once a fashion plate, the Duke now seldom dresses up except when he is performing. On this night he wore a loose long sleeved woolen polo shirt, a pair of bright blue narrow legged trousers, long out of fashion, that sagged below a noticeable paunch, and un polished loafers. On the massive Ellington head was perched, incongruously, a fuzzy, narrow‐brimmed blue fedora, punched out into derby shape.

His diet has been simplified, too. No longer a great gourmand, he seldom eats much besides steak and grapefruit. He gave up alcohol years ago, but as a great believer in the need for sugar to fuel his creative processes, he drinks many bottles of Coca‐Cola eich day and nibbles at peanut brittle, gumdrops and cookies that. he buys at roadside stands.

At 11:30 P.M., the Duke left the recording studio. From there he went to a nightclub to hear a singer he was thinking of engaging for a one‐week date he was booked to play at the Play boy Club Hotel in Great Gorge, N. J., that began Friday night.

He was greeted at the nightclub by the singer, Aura Rully, who came to Canada from her native Rumania three years ago. She is a striking young woman, with long, dark hair and small, feline features.

A Ceremonious Greeting

The Duke ceremoniously greeted her with four kisses, two on each cheek, took his place at a ringside table and ate a steak and drank tea while listening to her per form. He decided that she would do, and they discussed terms and Conditions in whispers when she had finished her set.

At 2 A.M. the Duke was back in his hotel room, talking with Ron Collier, who would do the arrangements that Miss Rully required. From his flight bag the Duke produced a couple of the miniature bottles of Scotch that he picks on his air travels for visitors and rang for ice and soda.

“This is first‐class Scotch,” he said, and laughed at the play on words.

“It's not a big sound,” said the arranger, speaking of Miss Rally, “but a fantastic range. But I don't know about her reading.”

“Well, if she isn't a good reader, she has to have a quick ear to do all those Ella Fitzgerald things,” said the Duke. “It works out about the same.”

He played cassette tapes of several old Ellington recordings that he wanted the arranger to revise. “She needs something to open with,” he said, “something like Joya Sherrill did on ‘Mood Indigo.’”

“What about those things you did with Kay Davis?” asked the arranger. He whistled a tune. “What's that one called?”

“You mean Transbluency?” asked the Duke.

“That's it,” Mr. Collier re plied. “Have you got chart?”

“No,” said the Duke. “It's stuck away somewhere at Tom Whaley's.” (Mr. Whaley is the band's copyist.) “It's a good thought for later on.”

“How about C‐Jam Blues?” The arranger sang, “Let's all go/Down to Duke's place.”

“There's no chart for C‐Jam, the Duke said. “The chart they're faking goes back to 1941 or 1942.”

Finally, at 3:30 A.M., the arranger, pleading exhaustion and an early deadline, departed. “Now I can get down to work,” Mr. Ellington said, laughing, as he closed the door.

A Traveling Composer

Al 5 o'clock the next afternoon, which was Wednesday, the Duke, naked except for a chartreuse chiffon scarf wound around his head to protect it from air‐condition ing drafts, got out of bed in his hotel suite. He would be leaving in another hour to play a dance date in West Lorne, Ontario, 150 miles to the west.

“I was up till 7 o'clock this morning writing,” he said, rolling himself under the covers again. Next to the bed stood a small electric piano that follows him on his travels.

Did his world‐ranging trips still provide him with musical inspiration, or was it a case of having been too many places too many times?

“I compose as I travel,” he said. “Sometimes it doesn't come out until much later. A couple of days ago I was thinking about Russia, where we went last year, and I began writing. It just came out so so naturally. I think I'm going to call it ‘European Sunrise Land.’ That's a good title. He rolled over in bed, and closed his eyes, letting a stream of words pass across the inside of his lids.

“No,” he said, after a moment. “‘Continental Sunrise Land.’ From the continent you look east and there are all those countries out there in that minor key.”

‘Magicians the Smartest’

But like many, perhaps most, artists, Mr. Ellington does not really like talking about how his creative processes work, especially when he has just awakened.

“I don't understand this craze to know how every thing works,” he said grumpily. “People want to know how I do it, or they say they want to get behind the scenes. Why should the audience ever be behind the scenes? All it does is pull the petals off the creative flower.

“Magicians, they're the smartest artists in the world,” he went on. “They don't tell everybody how it's done. They're not expected to.

“That's going into the stockpile,” he said. “For an artist, that's Fort Whatsit, where they keep the gold. It's the secret of the nuclear bomb. I don't think that everybody has got the right to know where the nuclear bombs are kept and how they are turned on and off.”

The power of the Ellington creative impulse has, by general agreement, diminished with the passage of the years. The longer compositions that he mainly addresses himself to these days lack the compressed vitality of Sophisticated Lady, Mood Indigo, Warm Valley, Don't Get Around Much Anymore, I Got It Bad, to mention a few of the dozens of evergreens he has writ ten.

Once in the musical van guard, he has continued in his own path while jazz has developed in many other streams. What was once daring and disturbing in his work has come to be seen as conservative. He has been loaded with Establishment honors, including the Medal of Freedom, which was presented to him by President Nixon on his 70th birthday.

Although his place at a pinnacle of American musical history is secure, the Duke is still Impelled by fierce pride and the desire to go on working.

‘Love What We Do’

“There are only a few of us who love what we do enough to stay with it 52 weeks, 365 days a year,” he said. “You have to love something to do it like that, win, lose or draw, whether you make a profit or not. I want to keep my band together. I want to hear my music. And I'm going to keep right on doing it.”

The telephone rang. It was Harry Carney, the band's baritone saxophonist, an Ellingtonian since 1927. The Duke rides in Mr. Carney's car, rather than in the band's chartered bus, on their trips in the East.

“Got to get going,” said the Duke, rolling out of bed and quickly getting into the same clothes he had worn the night before. Downstairs, Mr. Carney was waiting by his battered white Imperial, parked in front of the hotel.

“That Collier is all right,” he said. “You know those arrangements we were playing last night. On my part, he wrote ‘Harry‐tone’ instead of baritone. No one ever came up with that one be fore.”

He lighted a cigarette. “This band is different,” he said. “Monotony never enters the picture. We play con certs, dances, we play sacred music, we play long compositions. There are so many small places that we visit, and in every one of them there are people who have been listening to Duke and the band on records for years.”

The Duke appeared at last, tipped the bellboys royally, and he and Mr. Carney pulled away. They disagreed amiably about directions, stopped for gasoline and a Coke, and got back on the divided highway.

For a while the Duke jotted notes on a sheet of musical manuscript paper. Then he dozed off while Harry Carney, hitting a steady 85 miles an hour, headed west into the slowly falling twilight.