Free Duke by Terry Teachout Page A

note by slowing down to a crawl the playback mechanisms of their player pianos. That was how Ellington learned the piece, and he learned it so well that he soon felt confident enough to play the piece for the master himself. The occasion was a Washington concert called “The 20th Century Jazz Revue” at which he and other local artists appeared alongside Johnson. Ellington’s fans insisted that he play “Carolina Shout” for the composer, who was sufficiently impressed to go club-hopping with his young admirer. It was a night that Ellington never forgot: “What I absorbed on that occasion might, I think, have constituted a whole semester in a conservatory.” From then on he studied Johnson’s playing so closely that Garvin Bushell, a saxophonist who heard him two years later, testified that “he was playing like James P.,” though there were other pianists to whose tricks he paid close attention: “I also tried to copy the spectacular manner in which Luckey Roberts lifted his hands high above the keyboard as he played.” Films of Ellington shot in the twenties and thirties show that he learned that lesson, too, though he never overdid it. In his showboating as in all other things, he took care to be tasteful.
    He was, if anything, more impressed when he heard Sidney Bechet, who appeared at the Howard Theatre in January of 1923. It was, he said, his “first real encounter” with New Orleans jazz, and Ellington never forgot the “power and imagination” of the older man’s clarinet playing: “Bechet to me was the very epitome of jazz. He represented and executed everything that had to do with the beauty of it all, and everything he played in his whole life was completely original.” Bechet was the most advanced of all the early jazz soloists who made recordings by which we can gauge their prowess today. His performances of “Wild Cat Blues” and “Kansas City Man Blues,” cut for OKeh later that year, were not only as fluent and rhythmically secure as anything that Louis Armstrong recorded with King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, but were also formally coherent to a degree that Armstrong, for all his prodigious gifts, had yet to attain.
    Hearing Bechet and Johnson must have persuaded Ellington that he would have to leave Washington to develop further as an artist. He knew that his hometown was no paradise. In 1919 Washington had been put to the torch by a four-day-long race riot in which white mobs, inflamed by rumors that a black man had raped the wife of a white navy man, came to U Street with murder on their minds. Carter G. Woodson, a dean at Howard University, recalled their coming: “They had caught a Negro and deliberately held him as one would a beef for slaughter, and when they had conveniently adjusted him for lynching, they shot him. I heard him groaning in his struggle as I hurried away as fast as I could without running, expecting every moment to be lynched myself.” Ellington is not known to have spoken of the riot—he never discussed such things—but no black man who lived through those four nights could ever again doubt that he, too, was at risk. Perhaps that was when he first considered the possibility of moving to New York, for by 1923 he was sure that he wanted to live there: “Harlem, to our minds, did indeed have the world’s most glamorous atmosphere. We had to go there . . . it was New York that filled our imagination.”
    Opportunity knocked when the clarinetist Wilbur Sweatman, who had played in Washington the preceding year, sent Sonny Greer a telegram inviting the drummer to come to New York and join his band. Today Sweatman is remembered as a novelty artist who was famous for playing three clarinets simultaneously, but he was a genuinely talented instrumentalist whose 1916 recording of his own “Down Home Rag,” made two months before the Original Dixieland Jazz Band cut “Livery Stable Blues,” comes close to breaking free from the rhythmic constraints of ragtime.