Ellington, Armstrong and Basie used music to break racial ceilings
You likely know their names: Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and William James “Count” Basie. And you probably think you know their stories.
Ellington is the man who seduced the country with “Mood Indigo” and 6,000 other tunes composed on his Steinway Grand, and who wound up on a U.S. coin and a U.S. postage stamp. Armstrong, also known as Satchmo, was a multitalented rhythm maker — trumpeter, vocalist and leading man on the silver screen — who charmed us when he crooned “Mack the Knife” and whose “Heebie Jeebies” we instantly grasped despite its indecipherable English. Then there was the Count, the most inscrutable of the trio, who proved — with his trademark flicker of the brow and tinkle on the treble — that the best place from which to conduct a band is a piano stool.
Yet as much as we think we do, we don’t know any of the three. Not really.
The story of Ellington, the grandson of slaves who was christened Edward Kennedy Ellington, was layered, nuanced and embellished not just by his managers, but by his own image polishing that saw him invent alluring tales of who gave him his royal nickname when he’d crowned himself a duke.
Armstrong’s father took off when he was an infant, his teenage mother temporarily took to hustling, and he was raised by his grandmother, great-grandmother and a family of Lithuanian Jews named Karnofsky.
The Count, the son of a coachman and laundress, also grew up in a world unfamiliar to white fans, one he dreamed of escaping every time the traveling carnival swept into town and from which he finally engineered a getaway with help from another jazz icon, Fats Waller.
What is far less known about these groundbreakers is that they were bound not merely by their music or even the discrimination that they, like all Black people of their day, routinely encountered. Each defied and ultimately overcame racial boundaries — not by waging war over every slight, which would have accomplished little in the Jim Crow era of racial segregation, but by opening America’s ears and souls to the magnificence of their melodies. White men who wouldn’t let a Black person through their front door wooed their sweethearts with tunes from the Count, the Duke and gravel-throated Satchmo. White women who dodged Black people on the sidewalk gleefully tapped their high heels in the isolation of their living rooms. Even the most unyielding of rednecks flipped on their radios to hear “One O’clock Jump”as they sped their trucks through the rolling hills of the hinterlands. Race, for once, fell away as America listened rapt.
In the process Messrs. Basie, Ellington and Armstrong crashed through racist ceilings, making both musical and social history. All would be toasted by presidents, from the race-baiting Richard Nixon to the biracial Barack Obama. As their irresistible tunes still keep our feet tapping to this day, the lives of these jazzmen resonate in the way they quietly upended how musical dynasties are constructed and how human rights are secured. The sound of their evolving jazz dialect formed a cultural fulcrum that no outraged protestor or government-issued desegregation order could begin to achieve.
Each of these unique and improvisational men did that in his own way. Armstrong was over-the-top, genuine and appealed to our nostalgia. Ellington was moody, aristocratic and futuristic. Basie, with a temperament both reticent and heartfelt, was smack dab in the moment. What the three men had in common stands out even more and adds to their collective impact. They were born on society’s underside within five years of one another, at the advent of the 20th century. All stayed front and center on the musical stage for more than half of that century, forging melodic models that hadn’t existed and elevating jazz into a pulsating force for spontaneity and freedom. And each faced a color bar that extended beyond the legally segregated South. “I don’t eat with n—s,” a tall Yalie announced emphatically as Duke sat down with young fans in the dining room of the Ivy League college. “I didn’t dare look at Duke,” his host George Avakian — then a Yale student and later a famous record producer — recalled in a 1993 interview, and “nobody said anything until Duke said, ‘Well, let’s enjoy our dinner.’ ” Satchmo, for his part, recalled that where he grew up, after “white Trash” guzzled too much bad whiskey all of a sudden “it’s N— Hunting time. Any N—.”
These conductors fought back unselfconsciously, interested primarily in making a living and staying alive. They took their rip-roaring harmonies and unthreatening personalities to white audiences that had never seen Black men up close in that way and certainly had never loved them like they did Duke, Satchmo and the Count. Their anthems made visible the invisible stories of Black America, from slavery through segregation and desegregation, infusing them into the American songbook and psyche. In the process they created a genre that Armstrong called Black American Music and Ellington dubbed Negro Folk Music. “The Negro,” Duke explained, “is not merely a singing and dancing wizard but a loyal American in spite of his social position. I want to tell America how the Negro feels about it.” And he did, as did his friends Armstrong and Basie.