Brenda Coultas, Basho, Murray Kempton re Duke Ellington

I’m with Brenda Coultas when she writes:

Yo followers

Yo quilters

Yo pushcarts

Yo peddlers

Yo panhandlers

Yo homeboys

Yo in the dress

Yo on the blades

Yo in the squats

Yo in subway

Please join my astral revolution.

Basho: “The journey itself becomes home.” 

By Murray Kempton:

Duke Ellington had been playing the morning show at the old Apollo Theater in the charming but scarcely august company of the Temptations, Pigmeat Markham, and a balloon dancer. He was in the Apollo Star Dressing Room, a premise almost squalid in its modesty.

“Eddie,” another visitor said, “you are the greatest composer of the twentieth century.” Ellington delicately raised an eyebrow, on unspoken behalf of Stravinsky. “And here you are,” she finished, “working the morning show at the Apollo.”

And Ellington replied, “Maely, that is a complaint that I long ago decided had no future.”

Great composer? Forget it. Beside the point. Say only a composer who was one with Bach and Mozart, because none could write without having in mind the particular horn or voice he was writing for. Bach adjusted the aria to the resources of the soprano, and the soprano gave something of herself back to Bach.

Ellington could not have been a composer without his band. One day Cootie Williams idled a phrase and Ellington heard what the horn had found even before the horn did. That phrase became “Concerto for Cootie,” one of sacred music’s grander statements in its original form and later transmuted for secular triumph as “Do Nothing Till You Hear from Me.”

Once he signed on Ben Webster, the tenor saxophonist and the least pleasant of companions for anybody’s road. Webster objected that it would be too much trouble for him to learn the Ellington book. Ellington answered that he didn’t have to; he could just sit in the ensemble and play “I Got Rhythm” until something came to him. Something did. It was “Cottontail.” And it was from just such inspirational occasions that Duke Ellington drew the lesson that there could be no future in complaints about working the morning show at the Apollo. It was a Parnassus next to some of the precincts he endured just to keep the band booked and paid night after night for the sustenance not of his purse but of his soul.