Free Duke by Terry Teachout Page B

Greer was interested in the offer but told Sweatman that he would only come if Ellington and Otto Hardwick could accompany him, and the clarinetist agreed to hire them as well. The three men went to New York in February, and a few days later they were playing at Harlem’s Lafayette Theatre with Sweatman, who was billed as the “MUCH IMITATED RAGTIME AND JAZZ CLARIONETIST.” It was Ellington’s first trip to New York, as well as the first time that he had played on a vaudeville bill: “It was another world to us, and we’d sit on the stage and keep a straight face. . . . [Sweatman] was a good musician, and he was in vaudeville because that was where the money was then, but I think things were beginning to cool off for him, and soon we were not doing so well.”
    Sweatman went back to the road, and Ellington and his friends stayed behind in Harlem. Unable to find jobs, they hung out with other musicians, foremost among them Willie “the Lion” Smith, a cigar-chewing braggart who ranked just below James P. Johnson in the pantheon of Harlem pianists. Artie Shaw, who got to know Smith in the thirties, described him as having a “kind of nice, almost arrogant manner . . . he just knew who he was, he knew what he was about.” Smith in turn remembered Ellington as a “good-looking, well-mannered fellow; one of those guys you see him, you like him right away . . . I took a liking to him and he took a liking to me.” Ellington responded by listening attentively to his new friend’s compositions, which were unlike anything being played by his contemporaries. Smith was one of the first stride pianists to dispense with the rigid left-hand accompaniment patterns that he and his colleagues had taken from ragtime, replacing them with melodic figures and classical-style ostinati that made his salonlike pieces, which bore such titles as “Echoes of Spring” and “Morning Air,” sound like a blend of late ragtime and the light classics. Ellington was more open than most of his fellow pianists to Smith’s approach. In 1939 he recorded a gracefully swinging evocation of Smith’s musical language called “Portrait of the Lion,” and a quarter century later he said that the older pianist had been his “strongest influence.”
    As much as Ellington and his friends loved New York and its artists, they could not live there without work, so they reluctantly returned to Washington. But they had seen the promised land, and the next time that Duke Ellington went there, it would be for keeps.
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    By 1923 Harlem had replaced Washington as the unofficial capital of black America. It was a boiling cauldron of imaginative energy, and even its white neighbors were taking note of what would soon be dubbed the “Harlem Renaissance.” The flourishing of the black middle class had everything to do with the emergence of this movement, which throughout its decade-long existence was mainly literary. Black poets, novelists, scholars, and intellectuals like James Weldon Johnson, Alain Locke, Claude McKay, and (later) Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston published articles and books in which they proclaimed the emergence of what Locke, the head of Howard University’s philosophy department, called a “new Negro” who had broken “the vital inner grip of prejudice” and was becoming “a collaborator and participant in American civilization.”
    Locke and his colleagues knew that blacks had made “substantial contributions” to American civilization through their music, but they paid little attention to jazz and the blues. Most of them seem to have felt that what black America really needed was a big-league classical composer of its own. Harlem’s jazzmen, some of whom were broadly aware of what was going on among the intellectuals, sensed in turn that the New Negroes had no great interest in them. “The two worlds, literature and entertainment, rarely crossed,” Cab Calloway said in his autobiography. “We were