A session with The Duke

On the 30th anniversary of the death of Duke Ellington, Radio 4 repeats Alistair Cooke's recollections of meeting and working with the legendary composer and bandleader. This Letter was originally heard in May 1974 and rebroadcast on Radio 4 on 21 May, 2004.

"When it is finished," says the guide book, "it may well be the largest cathedral in the world."

I'm always leery of sentences that contain "may well be", but it is certainly a very large cathedral, namely the Episcopal cathedral church of St John the Divine on the Upper West Side in New York city.

Its foundations were laid in 1892. They've been building it ever since. And the end is not yet.

On Monday 27 May 1974, St John the Divine housed a ceremony that will have flabbergasted its architect and its early worshippers.

Every pew was filled, the aisles were choked and there were several thousands listening to loudspeakers out on the street.

Inside there was a vast rustling, as of a congregation of bats, as 10,000 people were asked to stand and pray.

It's not the size of the crowd that would have shocked the cathedral's founders; they might have taken it jubilantly as a sign of a great religious revival.

It was what the crowd was there for. A crowd that ranged through the whole human colour scale - from the most purple black to the most pallid white - came there to honour the life and mourn the death of a man who had become supreme in an art that began in the brothels of New Orleans.

The art is that of jazz and the practitioner of it that they mourned was Edward Kennedy Ellington - identified around the world more immediately than any member of any royal family as "The Duke".

The Duke's career was so much his life that there's very little to say about his private ups and downs, if any.

He was born in Washington DC in 1899, the son of a White House butler, and perhaps the knowledge that father had a special protected status inside the white establishment had much to do with the Duke's seeming to be untouched or untroubled by the privations and public humiliations we should expect of a black person born in the nation's capital.

Certainly he must have thought of himself as belonging to one of the upper tiers of black society.

But otherwise his upbringing could be called normal for any of the black boys who were to turn into great jazz men. I'm thinking of men like Earl Hines and Fats Waller, the sons of black parsons or church organists, who almost automatically as little boys were hoisted on to a piano stool.

The Duke took piano lessons but also took to sketching and thought of a career as an artist.

This dilemma was solved by his becoming a sign painter by day and running small bands by night.

What got him into his stride was the nightly grind and the daily practice at the piano. It's something that nightclub habitués seldom credit - it being assumed that while classical pianists must follow a daily regime, people like Ellington, Hines, Waller and Tatum simply have a natural gift and just rattle the stuff off on request.

Nothing could be more false.

I remember 10 or 15 years ago running into an old and engaging jazz man, a white fellow who was employed in a poky little jazz joint in San Francisco.

He'd left his trumpet in this dreadful nightclub and he found he needed it on his night off for some impromptu gig or other so he had to go into the nightclub next morning, which is always a depressing experience, what with the reek of sour air and spilled alcohol and the lights turned down to a maintenance bulb or two.

He told me that one of the unforgettable shocks of his stint in San Francisco was coming from the bone white sunlight into this smelly cave and squinting through the dark and seeing Earl Hines sitting there - as apparently he did for two or three hours every morning - practising not the blues or Rosetta or Honeysuckle Rose but the piano concertos of Mozart and Beethoven.

To the gaping trumpeter Hines looked up and said: "Just keeping the fingers loose."

To be the best - and it's a sad truth most of us amateurs shrink from admitting - you have to run, fight, golf, write, or play the piano every day.

I think it was Paganini, may have been Rubenstein, who said: "If I go a week without practice the audience notices it. If I go a day without practice I notice it."

This digression is very relevant to the character and the mastery of Duke Ellington. He was at a piano always of course, playing, but always there as a composer also, day in and night out.

For a man of such early and sustained success it's amazing that he not only tolerated the one-night stands, the long bus rides through the day and the pick-up meals but actually cherished them as the opportunity to be alone, to sit back and scribble and hum and compose. He did this to the very end.

I knew all the records of his first period when I was in college, from 1927 into 1932.

And when I first arrived in New York I wasted no time in beating it up to the Cotton Club to see the great man in the flesh.

But, apart from a nodding acquaintance in nightclubs and becoming known to him no doubt as one of those ever-present nuisances who request this number and that, I didn't meet Ellington alone - by appointment so to speak - until the very end of the second war.

I went up to his apartment on the swagger side of Harlem.

Ellington was at the top of the scale in a large, Victorian building looking out on a patch of greenery.

The date had been for two in the afternoon and in my mind's eye I had the picture complete: the dapper figure of the Duke seated in a Noel Coward dressing gown, deep in composition at a concert grand.

For those were the days long before band leaders got themselves up in gold lame and sequins. The big band leaders wore dinner jackets. The Duke wore white tie and tails and was as sleek as a seal.

Well, I was shown into a large, rambling apartment with a living room that had evidently seen a little strenuous drinking the night before.

Off from the living room, behind curtained French doors, was a bedroom.

The doors were open and there in full view was a large bed, rumpled and unmade.

And beyond that a bathroom. And out of it emerged what I first took to be some swami in the wrong country.

It was the Duke, naked except for a pair of under-drawers, and a towel woven around his head.

He came in groaning slightly and saying to himself: "Man!"

Then his man came in, a black butler. And they went into the knotty question of what sort of breakfast would be at once tasty and medicinal.

It was agreed on and the Duke turned and said: "Now," meaning: what's your business at this unholy hour of two in the afternoon?

I had come to suggest that he might like to record a long session with his band for the BBC. This was remember the peak period of his big band and I suggested that we record him, not as we now say in concert but in rehearsal.

He shot a suspicious glare at me, as if I'd suggested recording him doing five finger exercises. But slowly and warily he began to see my problem and to respect it.

Simply, how to convey to a listener - this was before television - the feeling of being present at the act of creation, when it was happening to the Duke standing in front of the band in rehearsal.

Everybody knows that the best jazz is impossible to write down in the usual musical notation.

Jazz is always improvisation done best by a group of players who know each other's whimsical ways, with such mysteries as harmonics, counterpoint, scooped pitch, jamming in unison.

Alone among jazz composers the Duke's raw material - what he started with, as he stood there or sat at the piano - was the tune, scribbled bridge passages, a sketch in his head of the progression of solos and ensembles he wanted to hear.

And an instinctive knowledge of the rich and original talents and strengths and perversities of his players. They were not just trumpet, trombone, clarinet, E-flat, alto sax and so on; they were individual performers who had stayed with him for years, for decades.

Well, eventually the Duke appreciated that what we wanted was not just another performance. He agreed and we had a long and unforgettable session in a hired studio on Fifth Avenue where we recorded the whole process of the number dictated, the roughest run through, with many pauses, trying this fusion of instruments and that, stopping and starting and transferring the obligato from one man to another and the Duke talking and shouting - "Now Tricky, four bars" and "Barney in there, eight".

And in the last hour, what had been a taste in the Duke's head came out as a rich harmonious meal.

He has left us in the blessed library of recorded sound a huge anthology of his music, from his 28th birthday to his 75th.

He began as a minority cult, too rude or difficult for the collectors of dance music.

For much, maybe most, of his time he was never a bestseller. He never stuck in the current popular groove or in his own groove, he moved with all the influences of the time - from blues to bebop and the moderns - and transmuted them into his own.

And at the end the newer harmonic structures he was always reaching for were no more saleable to the ordinary popular music fan than they'd ever been. Most people simply bowed to him as to an institution and bowed accordingly.

In 1931 a college roommate of mine, who was something of a pioneer jazz critic on the university weekly, was graduating and he wrote a farewell piece.

He recorded the rise and fall, during his four-year stint, of the Red Hot Peppers and the Blue Four and McKinney's Cotton Pickers and Bix Beiderbecke and Trumbauer, and he ended with the phrase: "Bands may come and bands may go but the Duke goes on forever."

Ah, how true. We thought it a marvel that the Duke had ridden out all fashions for four long years.

In fact his good and always developing music lasted for 47 years and we have it all.

So I'm inclined to paraphrase what John O'Hara said on the death of George Gershwin.

Duke Ellington is dead. I don't have to believe it if I don't want to.