by Raoul Hernandez
Duke
Ellington. The name alone evokes so much — style, elegance, grace. A certain regal bearing. And images: Grainy
black-and-white stills from another time and place. Like Harlem in the
Twenties, when underworld refinement flourished in mob spots like the Cotton
Club. Splashs of red satin ballrooms from San Antonio to Catalina Island. Top
hats and gowns, dancing. Romance — the kind that transforms misfits into
swans.
All that in a name — a name attached to a musical legacy so rich and vast it
boggles the mind. In the Yucatan, as in all of that region of Mexico probably,
they say every hill is actually the earth grown over Mayan ruins. An empire
beneath every footstep. Such is the body of work left behind by Ellington —
much of it still undiscovered: In 1988, Ellington’s son Mercer donated 200,000
pages of his father’s materials to the Smithsonian, about half of which was
unpublished music. Dig deep enough into the hillside of popular music, and
you’re bound to uncover Ellington.
Edward Kennedy Ellington was born in the nation’s capital on April 29,
1899. He wrote his first composition, “Soda Foundation Rag,” in 1913, and
played or wrote nearly every day after, until his death on May 24, 1974. During
the intervening half-century, he composed primarily for an orchestra he’d kept
together in one form or another since 1927, the year he opened at the Cotton
Club. Seventeen-year-old saxman Harry Carney joined the up-and-coming orchestra
that fall, and stayed on for 47 years, dying five months after Ellington.
Johnny Hodges played with Ellington 38 years. Sonny Greer’s tenure lasted 31
years, Russell Procope’s 28, and Paul Gonsalves’ 24. The list goes on — almost
as long as the list of standards he wrote: “Take the A Train” (that’s by
alter-ego Billy Strayhorn, actually), “Sophisticated Lady,” “Satin Doll,” “Mood
Indigo,” “Lush Life,” “Prelude to a Kiss,” “Caravan.” Some of his songs — “It
Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing,” “Don’t Get Around Much
Anymore,” and “I’m Beginning to See the Light” — have even become part of
American phraseology. Perhaps this is why Wynton Marsalis said in a recent PBS
interview that Duke Ellington is the most important musical figure of the 20th
century — an artist on the level of Bach or Picasso.
“Sure, more than that,” agrees Austin’s Martin Banks, who joined the Ellington
Orchestra in 1969. “It came through the grapevine that he’d heard me playing
trumpet with Lionel Hampton’s band. And I remember one night he came to the
Metropol where we where playing, and Hamp stopped the band to acknowledge him.
That was when I really got to see him up close for the first time. About a year
after that, Mercer asked would I like to join the band; `My dad wants you in
the trumpet section.’ I was kind of hung-up at the time where I couldn’t leave
New York. But I took it anyway.”
Six months later, however, that union was annulled when Banks couldn’t travel
on a European tour (he consoled himself with his Ray Charles gig and a stint at
the Apollo Theatre). As a result, Banks says he never really got to know an
employer whose music he’d heard on Dr. Hepcat’s radio program during his East
Austin upbringing. “I really didn’t think of it at the time as being a
phenomenal thing in my life,” says Banks in his slow `n’ smooth, low tones. “I
was wild back then. I got to tell [Ellington], though, that I used to watch him
growing up here in Austin as a kid in the Forties. We had a theatre called the
Harlem Theatre on the Eastside (it was the only theatre for us). They used to
show some little shorts between the main features, and they used to have Duke
Ellington’s band and Count Basie’s band, and I told him I used to watch his
band. And I got to play with five or six of those guys who were still in the
band, like Cat Anderson, Ray Nance (I guess I took his place), Cootie Williams,
Mercer, my friend Johnny Hodges, Russell Procope, and Harry Carney.”
If Banks didn’t fully appreciate his brief swing on the orchestra’s moonbeam
once upon a time, a lifetime in jazz has put the experience in perspective.
Perhaps, too, the cycle completes as Banks takes his trumpet and Ellington’s
music into the city of his youth via the Austin Jazz Workshop.
Taking Chicago’s Jazz-
mobile program into account — where jazz musicians of repute took their craft
and its history into inner-city schools — and the example of some friends in
Oregon who were doing a similar number, local saxman Mike Melinger conceived
the Austin Jazz Workshop (AJW), as a way to combine two loves: jazz and
teaching. So he pulled together some fellow musicians who recognized why the
idea (and practice) of teaching jazz in the classroom has been gaining
popularity since the Sixties — musicians like Banks, Southwestern State jazz
guru James Polk, trombonist Randy Zimmerman, bassist Horacio Rodriguez, and
drummer Ernie Durawa — and took “Currents in Jazz” into Austin classrooms.
Palm Elementary music teacher Debbie Tannert, for one, was impressed with what
she saw. “They did a really super job by having members of the group come out
and give workshops before the concert the next day,” says Tannert, who signed
up the AJW to talk to her 4th graders after having been to one of Melinger’s
recruitment concerts. “Last year, Horacio came out and did six 45-minute
workshops.
The group did 65 workshops, as a matter of fact — in 15 schools. Meanwhile,
Melinger was also busily setting up AJW as a non-profit corporation in order to
gain tax-exempt status from the I.R.S. Help from La Pe�a got them funds
from the City of Austin, the State Commission on the Arts, the Austin Community
Foundation, and the Musicians Performance Trust Fund, and by October of ’95,
AJW was tax-free and incorporated. “It’s been proven that kids who join some
sort of group like band or athletics tend to stay in school,” states Melinger.
This is especially true in schools with mostly black and Hispanic student
bodies, which is why AJW targets the “at risk” youth (the magic funding phrase)
population in Austin. What better way to reach a historically disadvantaged
segment of modern society than by teaching them about an art-form that
flourished despite the economic and societal repression of an entire race?
“We don’t touch too heavily on all that,” says Melinger seriously. “I’m hoping
that young people will hear the music first, get interested in it, and do some
research on their own, because I don’t think it’s completely appropriate for us
to stand up there and raise these issues just to raise them. They’re serious
issues and they need to be dealt with in a larger arena than performance. I’m
hoping their awareness of this will come more so through their digging than
from us standing up there saying `Duke Ellington was ripped off by his white
publisher.’ What we’re doing is first and foremost about music.”
So it would seem. By 9:30 the next morning — the first week of a new year and
season two for AJW — Melinger has already been through two or three different
grades of school children at Blackshear Elementary. He looks a little haggard.
Soon, though, he’s back sitting at the head of the class, his gleaming sax
cradled in his lap. “What is jazz?” he asks the class of 20 or so 3rd graders.
A hand goes up. “When they just be playing instruments and stuff,” comes the
reply. Melinger accepts this answer, forging ahead. “What’s this?” he asks
holding up his sax. “Saxophone,” comes the cry. “Does anyone know what
improvisation is?” he probes further. Not according to the silence. “Say it
with me… im-prov-is-ation.” Three times the chant goes up. Melinger follows
with a quick, bubbly sax thing. Big smiles on little faces. He plays them a
tune they know, “Happy Birthday,” inserting some stray sax wiggle to illustrate
the concept of im-prov-is-ation. They get it.
Then they’re gone.
They lose interest the minute Melinger goes into the who’s and whereof’s on
Ellington. The concept of color hues in music leaves 20 mostly brown faces
bored, sleepy, and ready for the work in a George Romero flick. Melinger puts
on an Ellington CD, and just before he can reel ’em back by getting the group
to identify a trombone, 20 5th graders pile into the room, disrupting
everything. Now, it’s total chaos. Johnny Hodges’ sweet alto sax in the
background isn’t soothing the savage little beasts. Music teacher Robert Sidle
calmly threatens the hellraisers, but it’s Melinger who regains order by
playing the backing track to “Take the A Train” while he’s blowing over the
top. Unfortunately, a stampede of new blood tramples the moment, and Melinger
fades into the background, recounting how once upon a time there were no TVs,
movies, or radios; “people had to entertain themselves.”
The class, of course, misses the irony of Melinger showing video shorts of
Ellington next. But not even the television can get their attention back. It’s
gone. They don’t get it.
Shelly Pittman, principal at Bedichek Middle School — another stop on the ’95
AJW World Tour — laughs. That’s not the point, he says over the phone. “By
putting them before the experience, you broaden their possibilities. You
sensitize them to a broader sphere of music, and an intelligence. Their
sensibilities are flirted with, and if you don’t offer it to them, they go to
sleep.”
“Yes, it makes a difference,” says Martin Banks with subtle force. “You got to
let kids like to listen to it. They all like to listen to everything —
just put it in a way they can comprehend and understand it. You got to keep
doing this. They didn’t have that when I was coming up in the schools. Jazz
wasn’t good, even in the churches — they hated it. But it was something I
liked.”
But can it be taught in schools? “I think it ought to be taught in
American schools,” says Sidle, who’s taught kids for the last 40 years. “It
should be everywhere — in all our schools, especially high schools.” But it’s
a black thing, man, the white establishment will never allow jazz to be taught
in schools. “Look at basketball,” says Sidle. “If that were true, there’d be no
one at the games.”
The following day at Blackshear the cafeteria is full — 200 little frames
seated between painted lines on the wooden gym floor. Sidle gets up to
introduce the Austin Jazz Workshop. He takes time in particular to introduce a
“young man” he used to play trombone with in high school: Martin Banks. With
that, the band (minus Polk and with Jeff Hellmer) begins an hour-long set that
includes “C-Jam Blues,” “Satin Doll,” “Lush Life,” and “Caravan.”
Probabilities are that not one child in that auditorium will know any of these
titles. Nor will they know that in 1935, Austin’s own Teddy Wilson joined Benny
Goodman and Gene Krupa as part of the first interracial group to appear on a
U.S. bandstand. They’ll not have heard that be-bop spawned the beat culture in
the Fifties, which became the hippie culture of the Sixties. Bassist Ron
Carter’s assertion that changes in jazz not only reflect, but in most cases
anticipate, profound changes in society at large probably won’t spark debate
among these school kids.
Fortunately, that’s not what matters. Not at this point, at least. What
matters is that nearly every one of those 200-or-so kids sat there (or bounced
there) for one whole hour listening to Melinger, Banks, and the rest of AJW
play the music of Duke Ellington. n
Tax deductible donations to the Austin Jazz Workshop can be mailed to: Austin
Jazz Workshop, Inc., PO Box 3741, Austin, TX 78764
Raoul Hernandez took Jazz History during graduate school at Stanford
University, and says it was one of the best courses of his collegiate career.
This article appears in January 12 • 1996 and January 12 • 1996 (Cover).