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.)

Song Lyric of the Day (Moraes and Jobim, with a Quintessential Summer Song)

“Tall, (and) tan, (and) young, (and) lovely
The girl from Ipanema goes walking
And when she passes, I smile - but she doesn't see…”—“The Girl From Ipanema,” composed by Antonio Carlos Jobim, Portuguese lyrics by Vinicius de Moraes, English lyrics by Norman Gimbel, sung by Astrud Gilberto in English and Joao Gilberto in Portuguese, with Stan Getz on saxophone, on the LP Getz/Gilberto (1964)

One of my favorite deejays, WNYC-FM’s Jonathan Schwartz, has said that American beaches were dominated by the sound of “The Girl From Ipanema” in the summer of 1964. No wonder. Maybe you’d have to go back to Leonardo with his Mona Lisa to find the female of the species evoked so indelibly, between Stan Getz’s smoky sax and the words and melody by Moraes and Jobim.

(Time to debunk a myth here: the two did not compose it in a bar. The truth is interesting enough: they were inspired by 18-year-old Heloisa Eneida Menezes Paes Pinto, now known as Helo Pinheiro, stopping by frequently at the restaurant the songwriters frequented, on her way to pick up cigarettes for her mother. Being an unconscious muse has given Helo celebrity ever since then. In the last decade, even in her sixties, she’s posed for Playboy with her youngest daughter and appeared on America’s Next Top Model.)

Astrud Gilberto (whose photo accompanies this post), who had not sung professionally before this record, did so memorably now, picking up the cue from her husband at the time, Joao.

All in all, this became the song that fed countless Norteamericano, middle-aged males’ fantasies of lying on a beach, unconstrained by family, eyeing lissome Latin American ladies. You can almost see the wheels spinning in the brain of Mark Sanford: “Hey, what’s wrong with oodles of ogling?” (I think we know the answer to that by now, don’t we?)

But read that last line in the quote above—in its quiet but unmistakable way, it concerns sexual frustration as surely as the far more aggressive Rolling Stones hit of the next year, “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” Listen, fella: It’s not just that when you smile, “she doesn’t see” but that she doesn’t see you—undoubtedly because she has a boyfriend her own age, you besotted midlife fool!

One more thing: Only seven years before releasing this Grammy-winning song, Stan Getz was so sore about the music industry that he told Down Beat Magazine that he would get his high school degree, then go on to become a physician. The magazine reprinted his 1957 interview with John Tynan in its May 2009 issue, with this quote about his instrument, the tenor sax:

“Apparently there’s nowhere new to go. All the avenues appear to have been explored. Of course, there will always be the one guy that’s going to burst through the blockade. I don’t know who he is, but he’ll come along one of these days and there’ll be something really new in tenor sax playing again.”

Little did he know that this “one guy,” who would look abroad, where he would pick up and spread stateside the whole bossa nova craze of the Sixties, was himself.