Talking of closed books
The Duke
Renny Green
C/ne night in Brighton exactly twenty-five Years ago I was sitting in a seafront café Passing the time of night with my fellows_axophonist Stanton, of Palace Pier fame. that unpredictable zigeuner had not long since celebrated his twenty-first birthday, and Was therefore prepared to discuss the prospect Of death with that cheerfully callous equanimity which you only find in those still Young enough to believe the myth of their own immortality. Soon we got on to the subject of the life expectancy of jazz musicians, and agreed that although insurance assessors and actuaries and other forms of plant life always took the gloomy view of our peculiar profession, there was no reason to assume that saxophonists should not hang about as long as everyone else. You have to understand that jazz being roughly the same age as the twentieth cen tury, the death of any of its great figures as early as 1949 was very little more than a theoretical proposition. The other great thing
about the jazz life in those days was that it
promised to go on forever. Each generation, each decade, saw the arrival of its own vir
tuosi. I remembered how shocked and sad dened I had been when Thomas Fats Waller was found dead in a train in 1943, but at least
when you missed his piano playing there was
the bountiful compensation of all the other piano masters. But now, in this café, Stanton
and I, without realising what we were doing, danced perilously close to the edge of that precipice of speculation looking down on doubt and the conviction that everything comes to an end if only you wait long enough. What would happen to our music, we wondered, if one by one all the great instrumentalists died off, and nobody sprang up to fill their places? We never pursued the point very far because I don't think we were able to take it seriously. Of course new virtuosi would appear; they always had in the past, hadn't they? So why should they not continue to do so? (Not being clairvoyant, I had no way of knowing on that night in Brighton that twenty-something years later I would be sitting in a London hotel dining room with Oscar Peterson abstractedly stirring my tea while trying to meet his challenge of naming six indisputably great jazz musicians under the age of forty. In the event, I couldn't name them and nor could Oscar.) That night in Brighton Stanton and'I compiled a short list of jazz masters without whose continuing contribution life would seem intolerably dull to us. I remember that the rota included Lester Young, Billie Holiday, Jack Teagarden, Johnny Hodges, Charlie Parker and Art Tatum, every one of whom is of course, long since gone. But we finally arrived at a trinity which seemed to us, as it must have for almost every young musician of the period, no matter what style he denigrated in the cause of no matter what other style, to symbolise the very heartbeat of the music. The three names were Coleman Hawkins, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington. Hawkins died in 1969, and two years later Armstrong followed him. But until May 24 this ye.ar .41ington continued to tour the world, doing ;sore than any other surviving classic jazz ;figure to foster, the comforting illusion that time can sometimes be persuaded to stand still. Where Ellington found the vitality, artistic as well as physical, to keep stepping as nonchalantly as he did in to that long succession of airport lounges which comprised the odyssey of his last twenty years I will never know. Although I talked to him several times, I never did have much idea what he was thinking 'about. One time, the two of us were caught in a comic predicament whereby one of the commercial TV companies had hired me to write Ellington's dialogue for him in some disastrously mismanaged and ineptly-produced show featuring his superlative orchestra. Now to be hired to write Ellington dialogue is rather like being advised to write it for Ustinov or Borge or any of the other great talkers who have contrived to invent their own language. So I explained to Duke what had happened, and he, pausing for a moment in the act of eating his fried eggs in his dressing room, told me to tell the studio I had written the dialogue and pick up my cheque, while he would go out there and say whatever came into his head. Long before that he had, of course, influenced my life to an incalculable degree with his music. I doubt whether many people who were not musicians understood that music, or even grasped the simplest facts about it. (The obituaries last week predictably credited him with the composition of 'Take the "A" Train', written by his beloved assistant, the late Billy Strayhorn.) But I have no doubt at all that as the years go by and the stigma of having been a jazz musician gradually falls away from his posthumour reputation, Ellington will be seen as one of the great masters of melody in this century. Not just a jazz master, but a master of music itself, which is, after all, indivisible.
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