Duke Ellington

[Hardbopjazz]

Rare auction spotlights African American treasures

Original Duke Ellington scores, for sale in a rare auction, show his creative process

BY KARIN LIPSON

STAFF WRITER

February 26, 2004

Auction consultant and musician Wyatt H. Day got a phone call that left him stunned: The caller owned some original musical scores by jazz legend Duke Ellington and wanted to put them up for sale.

"My mouth hung open," Day recalled. "This is the kind of stuff that you just don't see."

When he did see them - arrangements for brass and reeds, handwritten by Ellington in pencil, jotted with instructions to his band members and, in one case, signed with a distinctive flourish - Day's excitement level jumped a few more octaves: "It was like handling a Mozart score," he said recently.

Maybe Mozart jamming at the Cotton Club, the jazz nightspot where the suave Ellington and his orchestra held sway, first in Harlem and later downtown, starting in 1927. At least three of the scores, which will be auctioned Thursday at the Swann Galleries in Manhattan, were created for the Cotton Club.

That swank nightclub figured large in the early Ellington sound, said the scores' consigner, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "They were the house band at one of the most popular clubs in Harlem, where the elite would go," he said. "So they became very famous very quickly, and also Duke had the opportunity to try out different arrangements with the orchestra."

Although it was seen as the Carnegie Hall of nightspots, the Cotton Club was hardly demure. "There was drinking, debauchery, music - it was heaven," the scores' owner said. "It was where everybody wanted to be."

Gift from son

A musician himself, the consigner said he got the scores as a gift from Ellington's son, Mercer, with whom he worked closely as a musical assistant.

They range from a reworking of Harold Arlen's "Stormy Weather," which Ellington recorded in 1933, to the classic Ellington hit "I Got It Bad and That Ain't Good" (1941).

Offered in six lots estimated to sell for $2,000 to $6,000 apiece - and presented as the first original Ellington scores ever to go up for auction - they're part of a sale of African- Americana organized by Day.

In an event that includes boldly colorful movie posters featuring Lena Horne and Paul Robeson and a pastel by Harlem Renaissance artist Aaron Douglas, Ellington's slightly smudged, penciled scores may not be the most visually arresting material up for grabs. They are, after all, just notes on a lined page, mostly quick sketches to be fleshed out later. (Was it haste that led Ellington to spell his song title "I got it Bab" instead of "Bad"?)

For Ellington lovers and other jazz buffs, however, the scores provide windows into the mind of an American icon. "You can put him up there," said Monk Rowe, director of the Hamilton College Jazz Archive of videotapes in Clinton, N.Y. "If you're going to name American composers, you can name Aaron Copland, and you can name [Leonard] Bernstein, and you can name Duke Ellington and [George] Gershwin."

To jazz historians such as Rowe, the scores ("Oh, wow!" he said on learning of them) help illuminate Ellington's combination of creative genius, canny management and bonding with fellow musicians.

Such scores let us "see his thinking process," Rowe said. "Ellington was famous for writing for individuals, not just instruments." Unusual for seeking out players with a distinctive sound, rather than mere technical prowess, Ellington wrote to their strengths, incorporating their styles in his music and allowing them ample solo time. Many band members stayed with Ellington for years, even decades.

There they are, woven right into these scores: "Cooty ad lib," Ellington writes, a notation to trumpeter Cootie Williams; or "Bridge to Rab," referring to saxophonist Johnny "Rabbit" Hodges. Instructions to sax players Harry Carney and Ben Webster, trombonist "Tricky Sam" Nanton and clarinetist Barney Bigard also pepper the manuscripts.

Smithsonian's trove

Though the scores may be rare on the open market, such Ellingtonia abounds in the Smithsonian Institution's Duke Ellington Collection. "We have 200,000 pages of documents, half of it unpublished music" composed or arranged by Ellington and his bandmates, said John Edward Hasse, an Ellington expert who is curator of American music at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.

With its trove of Ellington scores, the Smithsonian material "would probably duplicate these things," said Day, of Swann Galleries. "Just like a writer, [a composer] wouldn't just scribble it out. There would probably be different treatments of the same tune."

And, of course, recordings. "Ellington is probably one of the most well-recorded artists in the history of jazz," said Dan Morgenstern, director of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University.

The interplay between manuscript and recording is important, Day agreed. In fact, it's pretty much the point. "We knew what he sounds like. This is what it looks like." Hear daily radio features commemorating African-Americans at www.newsday .com/entertainment.