Free Duke by Terry Teachout

invidiously to the drummers who followed him into the Ellington band: “We used to say that nobody but Sonny Greer, who had strange time, could play with that band. We did not foresee how good it would sound when Sam Woodyard or Louis Bellson was with it.” But they heard him in middle age, after years of drinking had gnawed away at his skill. “Greer was not the world’s best reader of music,” said Ellington, “but he was the world’s best percussionist reactor. When he heard a ping he responded with the most apropos pong.” Whitney Balliett’s description of his style has never been bettered:
He used timpani and tomtoms a lot, filling cracks and cheering the soloists. He used deceptive, easy arrays of afterbeat rimshots that drove the band while remaining signals of cool. He flicked cowbells to launch a soloist, and he showered everyone with cymbals. He sparkled and exploded, but his taste never faltered.
    None of these men was known for his hot solos, yet another indication that the “jass” played by the Duke’s Serenaders was fairly innocuous sounding. Ellington says nothing in Music Is My Mistress about having listened to early jazz recordings, and except for a single encounter with James P. Johnson, he did not hear any of the foremost jazz instrumentalists of the day in person prior to 1923. What he knew about jazz was what he heard around him, and it’s unlikely that anyone who lived in Washington knew much more about it than he did. But if he was a one-eared prince in a kingdom of the deaf, he was also wise enough to know his limitations, and to do something about them. Having “built up so much of a reputation that [he] had to study music seriously to protect it,” he began studying harmony with one of the most accomplished classical musicians on U Street. Henry Grant was a pianist, conductor, and composer who taught at Dunbar (Hardwick and Whetsel played in his school bands) and led church choirs and neighborhood glee clubs. He helped found the National Association of Negro Musicians in 1919 and edited its journal, The Negro Musician, in whose pages he praised Eubie Blake, another of his pupils: “I marvelled at his natural technique and got my first lesson—an insight into the soul of an exponent of ‘Ragtime.’”
    While Ellington could not have found a more suitable teacher, he was too impatient with book learning to take more than “half a dozen” lessons from Grant. During that time, he said, “I discovered that F-sharp is not a G-flat. That was the end of my lessons . . . because I found out what I wanted to know.” If this is true, then he stopped short of grappling with anything beyond the basics of elementary harmony, and he is not known to have listened to classical music other than occasionally at any time in the first half of his life. Barry Ulanov states flatly in his 1946 biography, written with Ellington’s cooperation, that “Duke had little direct contact with the main stream of traditional music,” and Ellington himself said repeatedly that he was not influenced by classical music: “If serious means European music, I’m not interested in that. . . . I am not writing classical music, and the musical devices that have been handed down by serious composers have little bearing on modern swing.” To be sure, he also said that Grant “lighted the direction to more highly developed composition.” But he never learned from Henry Grant or anyone else how classical composers use harmony to articulate and propel large-scale musical structures, and the day would come when his lack of that knowledge served him ill.
    Ellington learned a more immediately useful kind of lesson when a friend played him a new piano roll by James P. Johnson. “Carolina Shout” was Johnson’s cheval de bataille, the showpiece with which he vanquished all comers at “cutting sessions” in Harlem. The version that he cut for QRS in the summer of 1921 allowed other pianists to copy it note by