“In music, as you develop a theme or musical idea,
there are many points at which directions must be decided, and at any time I
was in the throes of debate with myself, harmonically or melodically, I would
turn to Billy Strayhorn. We would talk, and then the whole world would come
into focus. The steady hand of his good judgment pointed to the clear way that
was fitting for us. He was not, as he was often referred to by many, my alter
ego. Billy Strayhorn was my right arm, my left arm, all the eyes in the back of
my head, my brainwaves in his head, and his in mine.”—Duke Ellington, Music Is My Mistress (1976)
For nearly three decades—a period in which his
ambitions and achievements expanded—Duke Ellington turned to an indispensable collaborator, Billy Strayhorn. Their
artistic closeness contrasted sharply with the face they presented to the
world: Ellington, handsome, tall, elegant, so self-confident that, despite
being a member of a repressed minority, his nickname “Duke” seemed a richly
deserved recognition that he was one of nature’s noblemen; Strayhorn, short,
bookish, shy—and, in a time far less accepting of his orientation than today,
homosexual. Even in the image accompanying this post, he appears to be lost far away in a feeling nobody else can access, except maybe through a melody through which the emotion could be transmuted.
On this date in 1967, Strayhorn lost his battle
against cancer of the esophagus, at age 51. Even to the end, Ellington’s
stand-in pianist, composer-partner and arranger on standards such as “Take the A Train,”
“Chelsea Bridge” and “Lush Life” was creating music. While in the hospital, he sent
the manuscript for the haunting “Blood Count” for a concert he could
not attend. “It takes its place among the very greatest performances in the
Ellington canon; a noble work, and a supremely honest one,” noted critic Dan
Morgenstern in his Living With Jazz
anthology.
(For an especially evocative performance of this last
composition, watch and listen on YouTube to Stan Getz, performing in 1990 when the tenor saxophonist was facing his
own sentence to death by cancer.)
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