Quote of the Day (Duke Ellington, on Billy Strayhorn)

“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.)