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Ellington's New England

Three of Ellington's most important sidemen - Harry Carney, Johnny Hodges, and Paul Gonsalves - had Massachusetts origins.

Duke Ellington, who would have turned 100 this year, is most closely identified with New York City. His home and his muse from 1923 till his death in 1974, the Big Apple inspired such pieces as "Echoes of Harlem," "Wall Street Wail," and Ellington's theme song, "Take the A Train." Composed in 1941 by his writing partner Billy Strayhorn, "A Train" commemorated the opening of the new subway line to Harlem.

But when it comes to the centennial of Edward Kennedy Ellington, there is much for New England to celebrate, too.

In the mid-1920s, when Ellington was just beginning to gain a foothold in the New York nightclub world, he would spend his summers playing a circuit of theaters, dance halls, and pavilions throughout Eastern Massachusetts. Charlie Schribman, who was based in Salem and operated a chain of ballrooms in the area, handled bookings for Ellington and other bands. In his 1971 autobiography, Music Is My Mistress, Ellington recalled Schribman as a man who "nursed" bands, who "would send for them and keep them working. ... I cannot imagine what would have happened to the big bands if it had not been for Charlie Schribman."

The band's long summer residencies brought its first exposure outside New York and its first out-of-town reviews - one of which credited Ellington with "setting New England dance crazy." Bostonians were fans from the beginning: As early as 1930, a Christian Science Monitor writer proposed that Duke Ellington's noble moniker was inspired by his "great gift for understanding and his capacity for a very simple kind of friendliness."

Ellington's music has been a part of the curriculum at the Berklee College of Music in Boston for more than 40 years. And three of Ellington's most important sidemen - saxophonists Harry Carney, Johnny Hodges, and Paul Gonsalves - had Massachusetts origins. ufdropp,2Harry Carney was 16, living with his family on Cunard Street in Boston's Mission Hill area, when Ellington hired him in the summer of 1926. Carney spelled Otto Hardwick in the Ellington band, playing alto and baritone saxophones. The following spring, Ellington offered Carney a permanent job. "I was supposed to have returned to school," Carney told jazz historian Stanley Dance, but Ellington "outtalked my mother and got permission for me to stay with the band." That began a tenure that would last 47 years. Carney's majestic baritone sax not only anchored the orchestra for nearly half a century, but his sound, which is one of the great wonders of jazz, provided Ellington with one of the richest colors in his tonal palette.

And Carney's family made the band welcome on their visits to Boston. Rex Stewart, the trumpeter and Ellingtonian (a term describing virtually anything related to Ellington) whose writings on the jazz life appear in the collection Jazz Masters of the Thirties, recalled that Carney's mother "would put on a feast that even now makes my mouth water, especially those codfish cakes, hot rolls, and baked beans. ... Any member of the group who was ever exposed to the Carney hospitality has never forgotten it."

Little wonder that Ellington was especially enthusiastic when telling audiences that "Harry Carney has come all the way from Boston, Massachusetts, to lead us into `Jam With Sam,"' the tune that served as a roll call of the band's great soloists. During the last two decades of their lives (Carney died within six months of Ellington), they traveled hundreds of thousands of miles together, with Carney at the wheel of his Chrysler Imperial. Speaking to Stanley Dance, Carney said of his boss, "He's a great fellow, and it's not only been an education being with him but also a great pleasure. At times I've been ashamed to take the money!"

And the money was considerable. While Ellington earned large sums from royalties on his many popular songs - "Mood Indigo," "In a Sentimental Mood," "I'm Just a Lucky So and So," "Do Nothin' Till You Hear From Me," "Prelude to a Kiss," "Satin Doll," "Don't Get Around Much Anymore" - he never got rich, preferring instead to pay his orchestra well, so that he could keep his "sounding board" on tap. And rarely in the history of music have composer and performer been so interdependent. "Ellington plays the piano," Billy Strayhorn famously observed, "but his real instrument is his band."

The highest-paid member of that band was another Boston native, Johnny Hodges, the tight-lipped, glum-faced saxophonist who joined Ellington in 1928. Hodges, who was born in Cambridge and raised a few blocks from Carney in the South End, began playing the soprano saxophone at age 12. Hodges met Sidney Bechet when the New Orleans jazz pioneer was playing in a Scollay Square burlesque house in Boston in 1924. Except for a brief period in the early '50s when Hodges fronted his own combo, Ellington enjoyed "the privilege of presenting [him] night after night for 40 years," his boss said when Hodges died in 1970.

Throughout his career, Ellington and Strayhorn fashioned dozens of ballads and blues to showcase the exquisite sensuality and jesting wit of Hodges, whom Ellington eulogized as a player of "pure artistry ... a beautiful giant in his own identity."

Paul Gonsalves, a tenor saxophonist and New Bedford native, joined Ellington in 1950. Gonsalves had already been a star soloist for Sabby Lewis, Boston's premier black band leader. Gonsalves was "an incredible player," recalls Paul Broadnax, the Cambridge-born singer and pianist who began his career writing arrangements for Lewis's band. "He had such a great sound, and he was full of ideas; very, very advanced."

Broadnax remembers seeing Ellington for the first time in the early '40s at the RKO Theater (now the Wang Center) on Boston's Tremont Street. Blacks "took great pride in Ellington, whom I met but mostly adored from afar," he says. "This was still a time of extreme segregation, and very few jobs were available for black musicians on the local hotel dance scene. Most of the work for us was in the nightclubs around Columbus and Mass. Ave., the Savoy, the Hi-Hat, Eddie's, Wally's Paradise. Ellington was first class, and he played the top spots. The band always looked great; they wore beautiful tuxes, nothing ragtag, and the music just blew our minds. But the social thing was very important. Duke gave us a great feeling."

Six years after Gonsalves joined Ellington, at a time when Duke's fortunes were sagging, Gonsalves's electrifying 27-chorus-long solo on the interval connecting "Diminuendo in Blue" and "Crescendo in Blue" highlighted Ellington's triumphant appearance at the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival. The concert had such a dramatic effect on Ellington's career that he took to describing himself as having been "born in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1956." Ellington remained particularly beholden to Gonsalves afterward, tolerating the saxophonist's errant behavior, including abuse of drugs and alcohol, indulging him like a prodigal son. Gonsalves died in London a few days before Ellington in 1974.

Nat Hentoff, a Village Voice columnist, grew up in Roxbury, and he remembers hearing the Ellington orchestra on many occasions at the Roseland State Ballroom on Massachusetts Avenue (opposite the Christian Science Center) in the early '40s. "I didn't dance then, still don't, but I'd tuck my chin on the edge of the bandstand, and I'd ask Carney the names of these new tunes I didn't recognize," Hentoff says. "Often, they'd be so fresh that he'd only know them by a number. They hadn't been titled yet."

Hentoff worked as an announcer at WMEX, which broadcast from the Savoy nightclub on Columbus Avenue, and while attending Harvard he befriended Rex Stewart, whom he remembers as being "as sharp as any political analyst I've ever met." And at 17, Hentoff also caught Ellington's January 1943 concert at Symphony Hall, one of only three venues at which Duke gave complete performances of "Black, Brown, and Beige," his ambitious 43-minute-long "tone parallel to the history of the American Negro."

Five nights before the Boston performance, Ellington presented its premiere at New York's Carnegie Hall and was stung by the patronizing reviews he received from the classical-music critics in attendance. But Boston was a different story, Hentoff remembers: "There was a terrible blizzard that had paralyzed the city that day, and everybody thought I was crazy to go. I didn't expect much of a turnout, but when I got there, I was stunned to see that it was packed. I'd been at Symphony Hall just a couple of weeks earlier to hear Serge Koussevitsky conduct Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, which of course was very exhilarating. But the Ellington gave me a similar feeling, and I hardly remembered the icy walk home."

Hentoff eventually became a confidant of Ellington's. In 1965, when this composer of nearly 2,000 published works, arguably the most significant body of American music yet produced, was denied a special Pulitzer Prize in recognition of his lifetime achievement, Ellington expressed his disappointment with mocking irony: "Fate is being very kind to me. Fate doesn't want me to be too famous too young." Ellington was 66 at the time. But as Hentoff relates in his book Listen to the Stories, a few nights later a "coldly angry" Ellington told him, "Most Americans still take it for granted that European-based music is the only really respectable kind. What we do, what other black musicians do, has always been treated like the kind of man you wouldn't want your daughter to associate with."

Trumpeter and educator Herb Pomeroy, the man who made Ellington an academic subject, saw Duke from two perspectives. Pomeroy spent several years on the road with Lionel Hampton and Stan Kenton before embarking on a 40-year teaching career at the Berklee College of Music, where he established a seminar on Ellington in the late '50s - the only course of its kind in the country at the time.

Duke's unconventional composing and arranging styles, described by Pomeroy as "trial and error, seat-of-the-pants," baffled other musicians for years, perhaps even Ellington himself, who was notoriously tongue-in-cheek. "On one of the early occasions when we met," Pomeroy recalls, "Duke said, `Herb, I understand you're teaching a course on me up there in Boston. Maybe I should come up and take it, in order to find out what I'm doing."'

Pomeroy also played with the Ellington orchestra on numerous occasions, spelling the veteran trumpeter Cootie Williams. His first time with the band was unforgettable, Pomeroy recalls: "We were playing the Starlight Lounge in Peabody, and I'm playing Cootie's book. You know, even with Duke, it wasn't all concert halls and festivals. He had to have a book for country club dances and proms, and as I was looking through Cootie's book, I noticed some music by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, `Tijuana Taxi,' as I recall. I thought, `My God, the great Cootie Williams has to play this stuff.'

I'm expecting a night of `Cottontail' and `Harlem Air Shaft.' Well, after a while, Duke introduced me as a new member of the band, saying, `Ladies and gentlemen, Herb Pomeroy wants you to know that he loves you madly, and he would like to play "Tijuana Taxi" for you.' Well, I was so taken aback that I got out my plunger and played something - whatever it was, it wasn't very sincere. But I got through it. And then Duke thanked the audience for their kind applause and reminded them that `Herb Pomeroy still loves you madly, and now he would like to play "Tijuana Taxi" for you once more.' You know, it was Duke's way of saying, `Welcome to the band, Herb!"'

Pomeroy survived this innocuous hazing ritual and remained wide-eyed in his appreciation of Duke Ellington. "I was like a kid in a candy store every time I played in that band," Pomeroy says. "I was checking out everything. The band itself was like a vibrant human animal."

Among the dates that Pomeroy played with Ellington was one of a series of summer concerts presented by the late Elma Lewis in Franklin Park during her annual Marcus Garvey Festival. This was a favored venue of the Ellingtonians, who enjoyed the relaxed, down-home air of the event and the opportunity it afforded for reunions with old friends and family. In Music Is My Mistress, Ellington described Lewis as "the symbol of Marcus Garvey come alive and blazing into the future of the arts." He happily recalled the orchestra's "wonderful reception ... and the soul supper afterward."

During his lifetime, Duke Ellington received numerous honors and awards from area colleges and municipalities, including the Paul Revere Plaque from the city of Boston, honorary doctor of music degrees from Berklee, Assumption College in Worcester, and Brown University in Providence, and the keys to the city of Worcester. In 1943, Boston was one of only three cities in which Ellington performed "Black, Brown, and Beige." He presented his Sacred Concerts, the three liturgical works that occupied much of his writing during his last decade, at area churches. Of his 1965 performance with conductor Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops, Ellington said he was "thrilled to tingling."

It's now a quarter-century since Duke Ellington's death at age 75, and his stature only grows with the passage of time. Earlier in this centennial year, an honorary Pulitzer Prize was awarded to Ellington; it was terribly overdue and hardly noticed.

Since his death, New York City has honored Ellington's memory by naming two streets after him on the Upper West Side - Duke Ellington Circle and Duke Ellington Boulevard. In 1997, a towering statue of Ellington was unveiled in the northwest corner of Central Park.

Given his substantial ties to Boston, it would hardly seem out of place for a bust of Ellington to someday grace this city of statues. The Commonwealth Avenue Mall would be an appropriate location: It was 18 stories above the intersection of Comm. Ave. and Arlington Street where, in 1935, Duke Ellington broke a local color barrier, becoming the first black musician to lead his orchestra at the city's choicest Swing-era venue, the rooftop of the Ritz-Carlton.