By Fredric Dannen
In 1902, the French author André Gide was invited to name the greatest poet his country had produced in the previous century. His reply is often quoted: “Hugo – hélas!” Written in full, that might have read something like, “The greatest French poet of the 19th century was Victor Hugo – I’m sorry to say!”
Gide’s laconic, alliterative remark was obviously meant to be funny. If anyone took him seriously, they might have objected to his choice. Why not Charles Baudelaire, or Paul Verlaine, or Stéphane Mallarmé? You could make a reasonable argument for any of them as France’s greatest 19th century poet.
But then again, why argue at all? As far as I’m concerned, Gide had given a suitably flippant answer to a silly question. You can say which writer has had the greatest sales, but choosing a country’s or century’s greatest writer is a meaningless exercise.
Still, critics and commentators make such pronouncements all the time. Twenty years ago, Ken Burns’ epic documentary miniseries Jazz, written by Geoffrey Ward, debuted on public television, and was greeted with praise in some quarters and disdain in others. My own assessment falls somewhere in the middle, but I remember being put off by Ward’s flat assertion that Duke Ellington was “America’s greatest composer.” At the very least, Ward should have thrown in “arguably” as a qualifier, because other people might contend with equal vehemence that the greatest American composer was George Gershwin or Charles Ives or and Aaron Copland.
While I found Ward’s statement indecorous, I had no problem with the idea of ranking Ellington as a composer of the highest order. He has been credited with over a thousand works, including some of the best-loved standards in the history of jazz, among them “East St. Louis Toodle-O,” “Sophisticated Lady,” “In a Sentimental Mood,” “I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart,” “I’m Beginning to See the Light,” and “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore.” His compositional facility, it was said, was on par with Schubert’s. Ellington claimed, for instance, that he scratched out “Mood Indigo” while his mother cooked dinner.
Or so goes the legend – a legend to which I can no longer subscribe. A few months ago, I came across a book published in 2018 by musicologist Thomas Brothers, entitled Help!: The Beatles, Duke Ellington, and the Magic of Collaboration. Regarding the Beatles, Brothers confirmed what most of us Beatles fans already assumed, that the band’s collaborative methods resulted in music greater than its individual members, including its two principal songwriters, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, could have created on their own.
The big surprise of Brothers’ book – a claim that has neither been disproven or even fervidly disputed by jazz scholars – is that Ellington was actually more a collaborative assembler than a composer, and that “his carefully managed image as a composer-genius, unique in the sprawling field of jazz,” was a deception that has fooled jazz fans for decades.
Ellington, Brothers goes so far as to assert, “was simply not very good at writing tunes.” The principal melodies of all the songs I cited above were actually created by members of Ellington’s band: James “Bubber” Miley, Lawrence Brown, Otto Hardwick, Johnny Hodges, and Cootie Williams. The melody for “Mood Indigo” was brought to Ellington by a clarinetist he hired in 1930, Barney Bigard.
Bigard said he “had to laugh” when he read Ellington’s account of his having written “Mood Indigo” while his mother prepared dinner. He was somewhat less amused to discover that a composition he had sold to Ellington for $25 was earning large sums for Ellington and his manager. Bigard ultimately sued for a share of royalties, and won.
It turns out that Ellington’s talent was for refining into finished compositions the melodic gold spun out by his soloists. “East St. Louis Toodle-O,” for instance, the 1926 jazz standard that put Ellington’s band on the map, began as a trumpet solo composed and performed by Bubber Miley. Ellington likely wrote the introduction, a sequence of mysterious minor chords that sets up Miley’s solo. Miley drops out, then returns irresistibly at the end; the intervening section is at best mediocre.
Or consider “Don’t Get Around Much Any More.” The main theme was composed by Johnny Hodges, who typically receives no credit for the song. The bridge, which Ellington likely wrote, “simply hasn’t the verve of the main strain,” noted critic Alec Wilder in his book American Popular Song. Wilder, who was evidently ignorant of Hodges’ contribution, seemed mystified by the sudden drop in quality from the main theme to the bridge.
I was already aware before reading Brothers’ book that Ellington had not written some of the songs commonly ascribed to him. For instance, the fourth and fifth tracks of the album Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Duke Ellington Songbook are “Caravan,” which Ellington’s trombonist Juan Tizol composed entirely, and “Take the A Train,” which even Ellington acknowledged was written by jazz pianist Billy Strayhorn. I just hadn’t realized the extent to which Ellington promoted the idea that he was principal or sole composer of so much music that had sprung from collaboration.
I was especially startled to read Brothers’ account of the composition of “Sophisticated Lady,” the 1932 hit that Ellington claimed he had written one day at the piano. The initial release properly credited trombonist Lawrence Brown, who composed the main theme, and saxophonist Otto Hardwick, who wrote the bridge, but their names were subsequently dropped from record labels and sheet music. Brown was bitter. “I don’t consider you a composer,” he reportedly snapped at Ellington. “You are a compiler.”
Brothers’ book, I must admit, shocked me. I still admire Ellington, but now in a different way. Without him, many great jazz standards would probably not exist; the band members who provided the tunes needed Ellington as much as he needed them. I just cannot get over the power and persistence of the Ellington myth. It makes Geoffrey Ward’s investiture of Ellington as America’s greatest composer seem all the more foolish.
