The historian John Lukacs, in “A Thread of Years” (1998), his collection of vignettes from across the twentieth century, imagines a few jazz fans listening to a cocktail pianist in New York in 1929. Then he talks about how this music—melodic swing at the beautiful, blurred boundary of jazz and popular song—defined a state of mind before the Second World War. Everybody “who responded to that kind of American music,” Lukacs states categorically, “hated the Nazis.” It’s a nice rejoinder to the Marxist philosopher Theodor Adorno’s insistence that the “monotony” and rhythmic seductions of jazz were a friend to fascism. And it trails a question. What was in this dance music, heard in short takes on scratchy 78s, that left its devotees devoted to some larger set of humane values?
The question is at the heart of Terry Teachout’s searching new biography, “Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington” (Gotham), which touches on the mystique of the great bandleader’s music as much as on its notes and measures. Ellington was a dance-band impresario who played no better than O.K. piano, got trapped for years playing “jungle music” in gangster night clubs, and at his height produced mostly tinny, brief recordings. (His finest was made on a bitter winter night in 1940, in a Fargo, North Dakota, ballroom.) How did he become a dominant figure of modern music and, for many people, an exemplar of art? The typical answer used to be that he was really a master composer on the European model, all score paper and seclusion and suites. On inspection, this doesn’t hold much water. Ellington’s best music turns out to be the crystallized collective improvisation of an exceptionally ornery group of musical malcontents. To explain it all, we seem to need new categories of value, and another kind of meditation on what originality is.
This is Teachout’s second big jazz biography. His first was “Pops,” an excellent volume on Louis Armstrong, which he turned into an even better play, “Satchmo at the Waldorf.” Teachout inhabits right-leaning places where riff-loving men seldom wander, but his writing seems all the better for his distance from liberal piety; some of the best jazz criticism has always come from less than liberal precincts, as with the apolitical Whitney Balliett and the Tory Philip Larkin. Apologetics are the enemy of art criticism, and the conservative critic has the advantage of distance from the ideological passions that can encumber jazz: not everything has to be seen as an allegory of persecution and salvation—there are just good and worse musicians and music. (In the same way, the unbelieving biographer of a great Roman Catholic thinker isn’t oppressed by the need to show that he was always right.) Yet Teachout is a sensitive writer, and one reason his biographies are moving is that he has obviously been giving himself an education in the realities of American racial history as he writes them. We are reminded, alongside him, on almost every page, just how brutal, demeaning, and absolute bigotry against blacks was for so long in America.
Armstrong is easy. He was not just a genius but an irresistible lion. Even the old complaints about his having sold out no longer seem credible: he simply went from making most of the best jazz records ever made to making some of the best pop records. Though Armstrong could articulate his sources—Joe Oliver, the lost Buddy Bolden—the Armstrong sound emerges early and whole. As with Elvis, though on a far roomier artistic scale, it just happened.
Ellington, by contrast, was a slow starter and a slow learner, whose first hits now sound dated and chi-chi. The son of Washington, D.C., domestics who passed on a high sense of style and a fastidious desire for elegance, he was a city man. There was something self-constructed about him, as there had to be with so many African-American figures of the era—he was a Duke in the same way that Father Divine was divine. Unlike Armstrong, he had a platonic idea of the kind of music he wanted to make, and of the kind of musician he wanted to be, which preceded his actually making any. Early Ellington oscillates uneasily between a kind of “primitivist” growling and stuttering, and tepid impressionistic effects, as in “Creole Love Call.” But the idea that possessed him—rhythmic adventure, unafraid of seeming too “African”; lyric embroidery, unashamed of emotional delicacy—was powerful, and capable of being realized in a more complete way. He spent the next fifty years realizing it.
Well before Ellington made his permanent music, he was the man even people who didn’t like jazz were allowed to like. Dignity demanded that he never take off his dinner jacket, and then it became a straitjacket. As Balliett pointed out, Ellington knew from the beginning that he needed a sound, more even than a beat or a style. The individual players he employed weren’t up-to-date urban players but, often, less sophisticated New Orleans musicians, whose great gift was a distinctly human tone, often achieved with the use of homemade mutes and plungers. They never suffered from the homogenized, driving tone of the white bands.
Over the years, Ellington cultivated those kinds of players until, with the 1940 band, he achieved something extraordinary—an all-star band that played together, soloed luminously, and never sounded competitive. As critics still remark in proper wonder, at least five of the musicians—Jimmy Blanton, on bass, Ben Webster, on tenor sax, Johnny Hodges, on alto sax, Harry Carney, on baritone sax, and Tricky Sam Nanton, on the trombone—are in the running for the very best ever to have picked up their instrument.
Yet a residue of disappointment clings to these pages: Ellington was an elegant man but not a very nice one, Teachout concludes, exploiting the musicians he gathered and held so close. He used his musicians (not to mention his women) often quite coldly, and his romantic-seeming life was really one long cloud of shimmering misdirection. Teachout reveals that Ellington was rarely the sole composer of the music associated with his name. Nearly all his hit songs, Teachout explains, “were collaborations with band members who did not always receive credit—or royalties—when the songs were recorded and published.” It’s long been known by fans that many of the most famous “Ellington” numbers are really the arranger Billy Strayhorn’s, including “Take the A Train” and “Chelsea Bridge,” and that the valve trombonist Juan Tizol wrote most of “Caravan.” But much of “Mood Indigo” was Barney Bigard’s, while “Never No Lament” (which became the hit “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore”), “I’m Beginning to See the Light,” and “I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart” began as Johnny Hodges riffs and then became songs. “Sophisticated Lady,” “Prelude to a Kiss,” and “In a Sentimental Mood,” in turn, are melodies originally blown by, and rarely credited to, the alto-sax player Otto Hardwick.
None of these are obvious, all-purpose riffs, or simple blues phrases. They’re rich, melodic ideas, as complex as anything in Gershwin or Rodgers. Ellington owned them, but they didn’t start in his head, or take form under his fingers. Teachout says all the right things about how, without Ellington’s ears to hear them and his intelligence to fix and resolve them, these might have been butterflies that lived a day, fluttered, and died. But you sense that he’s shaken by the news. It seems like theft. It certainly bothered the musicians. Hodges used to make a sign of counting money when Ellington was playing the medley of his tunes.
One might be a touch more defiant on behalf of the Duke. Ellington really did take other men’s ideas and act as if they were his own. But he did this because he took other men’s ideas and made them his own. There are artists whose genius lies in exploiting other people’s talent, and we can recognize the exploitation as the genius. It is the gift of such artists to be able to energize and paralyze other people and do both at the same time. It may be true that Herman Mankiewicz wrote most of “Citizen Kane,” scene by scene and even shot by shot. What is certainly true is that nothing else that survives of Mankiewicz’s is remotely as good as “Citizen Kane.” That’s because he was writing “Citizen Kane” for Orson Welles. Johnny Hodges spent many years on his own, with every chance to keep his tunes to himself. No other standard ever emerged. Suppose Billy Strayhorn had been liberated instead of “adopted” and infantilized. Would he have had the energy and mastery to form a band, sustain it, recruit the right musicians, survive their eccentricities and addictions, give them music they could play, record it, and keep enough of a popular audience alive to justify the expense of the rest? It is painful to read of Strayhorn desolate over having credit for his music stolen by the Duke; it is also the case that Ellington had the genius not to have to cry.
Ellington’s ear, his energy, his organizational abilities, the sureness of his decisions are a case study for management school. (Consider the way he fired Charles Mingus for fighting with Tizol, fondly but with no appeal: “I’m afraid, Charles—I’ve never fired anybody—you’ll have to quit my band. I don’t need any new problems. Juan’s an old problem. . . . I must ask you to be kind enough to give me your notice.”) These are not ordinary or secondary gifts. They were the essence of his genius. Ellington had an idea of a certain kind of jazz: tonal, atmospheric, blues-based but elegant. He took what he needed to realize the ideal he had invented. The tunes may have begun with his sidemen; the music was his. This is not a secondary form of originality, which needs a postmodern apologia, in which “curating” is another kind of “creating.” It is the original kind of originality.
There’s a reason that Duke’s players mostly complained of being cheated only of the dough. Originality comes in two kinds: originality of ideas, and originality of labor, and although it is the first kind that we get agitated about, we should honor the second kind still more. There is wit, made by the head and spun out into life; and work, created mostly by fingers engaging tools as various as tenor saxes and computer keyboards. It is an oddity of our civilization, and has been since the Renaissance, to honor wit more than work, to think that the new idea “contributed” by the work matters more than the work itself.
What Johnny Hodges was doing in making those new melodies may have been more like the copying errors in ceaseless cell fission than like premeditated decision: as he set to playing the same chord changes over and over, night after night, a lucky error in a note may, one night, have touched another and become an innovation. It was a happy accident produced by hard labor. But that it reflected effort as much as inspiration should only increase its value. No author really minds, too much, seeing his or her ideas “out there,” to be recycled, and even a conceptual artist has a slightly guilty conscience about trading in that commodity alone. (That’s why Jasper Johns fans insist that it is the finish, the touch, that really matters.) What artists dislike is having their effort recirculated without recompense. It is our sentences, not our sentiments, that we ought to protect. The Duke’s men grasped this. They were glad to concede to their self-made duke all of his preëminence—indeed, his royalty. They just wanted him to hand over their royalties first.
What mattered was the band. Duke Ellington was a great impresario and bandleader who created the most stylish sound, and brand, in American music, and kept a company of musicians going for half a century. That this description seems somehow less exalting than calling him a “major American composer” or a “radical musical innovator” is a sign of how far we have to go in allowing art to tell us how to admire it, rather than trying to make it hold still in conventional poses in order to be admired.
“You can’t talk about the Beatles without mentioning the transcendent Duke Ellington. . . .They are off by themselves, doing their own thing, just as Ellington always has been. Like Ellington, they’re unclassifiable musicians.” The likeness in this case was made by the editor William Shawn and has been repeated many times since. This thing was hard enough for Ellington to do, even with his decades of work. How the Beatles did it, given their nonmusical backgrounds and six-year arc of production, from first record to last, remains one of the mysteries of modern creativity.
Mark Lewisohn’s new book, “Tune In” (Crown Archetype)—the first volume of a promised three-volume history of the Beatles—tells the story of their lives up to 1962, when they had yet to make an LP. It may be the most granular biography ever written for anyone not a politician in high office tracked by an official diary. Week by week, guitar by guitar, fan by fan, Lewisohn manages to fill in blanks that no one knew were empty. This is particularly amazing given that the subjects are four teen-age boys in a provincial city whose acts seemed unlikely to be remembered by anyone in the next five hours, much less for the next five decades. But the Beatles, it turns out, were the Beatles before they were the Beatles: their admirers in Liverpool tracked, in microcosm, the response that the rest of the world would have when it got to know them. They were famous before they became famous.
What combination of animal magnetism and musical genius could so excite people in Liverpool, and then the world? In part, the fuss can be explained just by listing the things the Beatles did well: they harmonized, played guitar, looked good, were naturally witty, wrote wonderful melodies in a new style, etc. But although they were a three- and then a four-man band, they were, from the start, a two-man compact—what mattered was their inner twoness, more than their iconic fourness. To borrow a mot from Stephen Sondheim about Rodgers and Hammerstein, this was the meeting of a youth of limited talent and unlimited soul with one of unlimited talent and limited soul. The size of Paul McCartney’s gift is ridiculous, and as mystifying as such gifts always are. Before he was nineteen, Lewisohn reveals, he had written the music to at least three standards (“Michelle,” “I’ll Follow the Sun,” and “When I’m Sixty-four”). It was John Lennon who gave the pair emotional maturity. Lewisohn rightly points to the startling, sad dignity of his sentences—“I can’t conceive of any more misery”; “In my mind there’s no sorrow”—even in his early, easy songs. Together, the two made something deeper than either ever could have alone.
They were two where other bands had one, and they had three voices where other bands had fewer. When they emerged from their long stint in Hamburg, they were not that much better on their instruments; what they began to do marvellously well was sing. Two-part harmony, two-part unison, three-part harmonies—Geoff Emerick, their engineer, remarks in his book about recording the group that they were always in tune, even amid screams and on first takes. (Ellington himself once said, dryly, after they became famous, that “the most important thing about the Beatles’ music is that they’re playing in tune.”) The uninitiated tend to think of pop singing as an instinctive thing: either you’re good at it or you’re not. To be around aspiring pop singers is to learn that the voice is an instrument that, like any other, is improved and broadened by practice and trial and error and perseverance. When McCartney eulogized Lennon, this was the thought that came to mind: “Didn’t understand a thing / but we could always sing.” And—no small point—by the end of the period covered in this volume, they no longer sang with assumed accents. Though they still did impressions of Little Richard, most of the time they sang as themselves, Liverpool “scousers” all.
Still, if one thing stands out as the source of their originality, it is the theft of improbable parts, and the sheer range of their stealing. They must have been the most eclectic band at work in the world in 1960: they imitated girl bands without seeming to understand that their songs were meant for girls, did Goffin & King and Meredith Willson and Little Richard and Marlene Dietrich—all sung with that unique Beatles mix of irony and intensity, John and Paul smiling at each other at the absurdity of being in show business while still making it sound as though it mattered. The eclecticism that distinguishes their late great recordings—so that “Revolver” includes Baroque, Indian, cool-jazz, Broadway-ballad, and sea-chantey styles, and that’s just Side 1—was intuitive from the start. They mixed up Broadway show songs with Latin rhythms, speeded up Roy Orbison licks, and lifted the bass part for “I Saw Her Standing There” straight from Chuck Berry. But then Chuck Berry, as Keith Richards insists in his “Life,” had borrowed many of his riffs from his own piano player, Johnnie* Johnson. Everyone was lifting from everyone; the difference was that the Beatles were lifting more from more people, with less shame. Theirs was a triumph of the eclectic ear, and proof that eclectic ears make electric music.
Lewisohn also points out that they benefitted from an economy of musical scarcity. New rock-and-roll records were hard to come by in Liverpool. (Lewisohn debunks the idea that they were brought in by local sailors.) The variety of music played on the BBC was limited; the pirate radio stations faded in and out. As with the French Impressionists who cherished Japanese prints that were nothing more than popular graphics back in Japan, it was a classic case of overvaluing the exotic object in ways that made even third-rate masters seem blessed. A small song by a minor singer, like “Anna,” by Arthur Alexander, got the same loving re-creation as a Bacharach-David standard. In the blooming of American pop, there was surf music and twist music and R. & B. and folk, mostly kept apart by specific tastes and snob values. But scarcity makes you squeeze all the juice you can out of whatever you can find.
Some far-off theorist may one day articulate the optimal artistic balance between abundance and scarcity—between having lots of stuff to look at or listen to to get you going and not having so much that you aren’t hungry for the next. Ellington had an idea of the music he wanted to make, but it hadn’t yet been made. Every shot of Debussy was a shock, every new riff on the same chords a revelation. The Beatles had an ocean of Americana to hear, but it cost them something each time to hear it. Scarcity doesn’t just make you more appreciative of plenty. It makes you more intently conscious of desire. Water in the desert costs more; it also tastes sweeter.
A Beatles-Duke playlist, folded together, has a common quality (which took me by surprise, but shouldn’t have), and that is excitement. The most obvious thing is the most easily overlooked, or mis-heard. The drummer drives the band. The performers sound exhilarated by the act of making music. Go from “Please, Please Me” to “Take the A Train,” and you hear the shared fervor of musicians not just making a new sound but listening to themselves as they do. It’s the sound of self-discovery. That must be why American music became the soundtrack of self-emancipation, East and West alike.
Inevitably, the left-wing claim that jazz was an ally of fascism was mirrored, in our time, by the right-wing claim (which Lukacs sadly endorses) that rock and roll was an antirational music of implicitly totalitarian emotion, a music that culminates, as Allan Bloom wrote, in “a pubescent child whose body throbs with orgasmic rhythms; whose feelings are made articulate in hymns to the joys of onanism or the killing of parents.” In fact, few jazz fans didn’t hate Nazis, and it was rock-and-roll fans, we now know, who made the various and velvet revolutions of Eastern Europe. Why did jazz songs immunize listeners against fascism, as rock provided an alternative to the gray oppressions of Stalinist official culture? Because they are demonstrations of the actual force of freedom, rather than mere rhetoric in its favor. If you want to know what a fully empowered human being sounds like, listen to Ben Webster play “Cotton Tail”; if you want to feel the liberty of youth, listen to “I Saw Her Standing There.” (And if you need to be reminded that being fully empowered isn’t the same as being a happy man, or that the liberty of youth is not always gentle, read Teachout on the reasons that Webster was called “the Brute,” or Lewisohn on the teen-age John’s treatment of his girlfriends.) Most people would rather swing than march, and would rather rock than live a regimented life. That was a very big lesson of the sad century just past. It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing. It can’t. ♦
*In an earlier version of this article, Chuck Berry’s piano player was mistakenly called Jimmy Johnson.
