035 Mercer Ellington on Duke Ellington

Mercer Ellington 0:01
You know, the Cotton Club, it was run by mobsters. And it wasn’t necessarily a three year engagement. You didn’t sign a contract you had to get their permission to leave. Oh, oh man was able to go out and play a couple of years of one night on the condition that you will come back and do further years in the future world.

Bob Smith 0:18
That’s Mercer Ellington, son of the great orchestra leader, Duke Ellington on what it was like to be a musician in Harlem in the 1920s and 30s. Mercer Ellington, our guest today on the off ramp with Bob Smith.

Welcome to the off ramp with Bob Smith, a chance to slow down steer clear of crazy take a side road to sanity and get some perspective on life. I grew up in an era when it was still possible here and there to see the big bands performing. As a kid I saw the Glenn Miller orchestra. As an adult I saw Buddy Rich Fred Waring and Maynard Ferguson. Perhaps the most elegant of all of the big bands was on the jazz side, the Duke Ellington Orchestra. The Duke himself died in 1974. But six years later, the orchestra was still touring under the leadership of his only child musician Mercer Ellington. On August 23 1980, had performed at Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa, where I met the great man backstage securing an interview with Mercer and jazz great Cootie Williams, a trumpet contemporary of Louis Armstrong. Mercer was with his dad his entire professional career. When Mercer was born, Duke Ellington was not yet a full time musician. He made most of his living as a talented sign painter. But by the mid 1920s, Duke Ellington was a global success. So successful he could send Mercer to study music at Columbia University and Juilliard. Beginning in the late 30s. Mercer led his own bands working with Billy stray horn Clark, Terry cat, Anderson, Cootie Williams and Carmen McRae. But his eventual home was his father’s organization, the Duke Ellington Orchestra, where he played numerous roles including composer, arranger, trumpeter, even band manager. I was 29 years old and Mercer was 60 when we sat down to talk, I found him to be a delightful conversationalist, fun, friendly man like his dad, a man of impeccable manners. In a word, elegant. We spoke in a rehearsal room in the Loris college Fieldhouse shortly after the show. The result was this feature on the sophisticated nature of the Duke Ellington Orchestra.

A musical historian once wrote, If music critics think they have to make an excuse for the big band era, the name of Duke Ellington should make any further justification unnecessary. Ellington was elegant, a smooth bandleader and accomplished pianist, and most importantly, a jazz composer with no peer, a composer who wrote with and for his orchestra over the years that excitement and that freedom for musicians kept his big band together when others were falling apart. Cootie Williams is a good illustration of that. He’s getting up in years now, but he’s still a trumpet player. He has been professionally since 1928. In fact, he’s such a great trumpet player, he’s in the jazz Hall of Fame. Over the years he played with such great big band names as Fletcher Henderson Chick Webb, Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington. He even fronted his own band for 20 years. But when you ask him what band he enjoyed playing with most he doesn’t hesitate with the answer,

Speaker 1 3:59
developed in van. Why was it that his liked his music much better because he played a whole variety of music than any other band. And all other bands played one type of music and Ellington played seven a music, church music, anything that you wanted to go into, he had to play an edge of freedom to play. And that’s reason why he kept his band together because he plates he wasn’t limited to plan, Duke Ellington. Now the bands are just limited playing that same type of music all the time. The

Bob Smith 4:43
Ellington excitement that attracted Cootie Williams in the first place recently brought him out of retirement. This time it was not Duke Ellington, but Mercer Ellington, the Duke son, Mercer joined the band as a trumpeter and arranger and took over after his father’s death, and it’s obvious listening to the music watching the talent and feel Make the excitement that the Duke Ellington Orchestra is still today, a living, breathing musical organization, keeping on the veterans and building with the new comers. Well,

Mercer Ellington 5:09
basically, that’s really what we do, we play the standards. And we particularly have to be certain that the people who have come to listen to the band in the name of Ellington will get what they expected. But we can’t just limit ourselves to that. Otherwise, there’s no development, which is one of the things that pop topping is, you’ve always got to keep writing, you keep adding, keep trying, and generally are proving grounds for concert is used as the dancehall. So we find something that takes to the audience’s liking. We decided to move it up, and bring it as a concert and track so that from time to time, we make little differences and in hopes that if, say, we circle, and come back to the same spot, a year later, that the program will still be interesting. And while not necessarily quite different, but it different enough not to get the feeling that you’re dating yourself.

Bob Smith 6:00
Apparently, it’s quite a stimulating environment for a musician. Well,

Mercer Ellington 6:03
I think one of the other things, too, is the challenge. Because the music, he writes, is always just a little edge that way and different from just just when you expect it to turn, right, it goes left and there’s always some form of stimulation. So we we can can reach back and get things pretty much up to date as far as concept is concerned. So that we have two jobs with the orchestra. One is to keep the interest of the audience up show to show you day to day, week to week and year to year. The other is you got to keep the interest of men up because they don’t want to sit there and you know, just go through the same ritual night after night. So that we continually shift things and one of our best ways in doing this is to go back and get numbers that weren’t performed too much in the recent past. We’ve been ordering things that we bought out of our library like the thing we opened up with East St. Louis Tulum, which hadn’t been played for years, that’s a pretty old that was one of the first songs was right. And ringing bells came out of the first picture up then with Abelson Andy has recently to get these things and they have interest not only to the fan, it’s follow the band for years but with the youngest that they kind of began to study want to know what happened back then.

Bob Smith 7:32
In addition to songs like East St. Louis toodaloo, what you’re hearing right now in the original 1927, recording from Mercer’s father do, the band also plays contemporary pieces written by members of its band, and being a member of the Duke Ellington band can be at times a rather confusing thing. I read that Al Sears one of the tenor men in the past and said that when he joined the band, he was astounded to find he was playing music completely different than what the rest of the band was playing.

Mercer Ellington 8:00
Well, that’s because he took Ben West, his chair, and the man was composed mainly of four saxophones. And the music that Ben had to play was had to be developed apart from what existed in four parts before because he will play by ear and all of a sudden he land on Johnny Hodges. No, no, you land on her. Get off my note. He had to keep picking a melody or something or whether there was was away from what it was written in the race. The

Bob Smith 8:31
Ellington band Mercer brought to Loras College was a 16 piece outfit and seven of those members played with Duke Ellington when he was alive. We asked him about them.

Mercer Ellington 8:41
When I think of original van I think of the band I heard in 1927 and that was Duke Ellington. Wellman bro son agree on drums. Cudi wasn’t even there. It was guy by the name of Baba Maoli tricky Sam odo Hardwick, Barnaby God and Haricot him at that point Johnny Hodges had and I think the band that most people think of when they say original bands, the bands of the 40s when Danny Hodges was there, Cudi was there. Also Ben Webster and Barnaby God and then while you just about had a Rich’s display of talent at that point, but when you say original band, I think the best concept, best way to explain is that we have an orchestra that has seven men who in a sense, were contemporary to the item. So, for instance, Anita has been with us we’re six years old, and she was with my father for two years prior to his passing, the same with Rocky white. Also barely haul Malcolm Taylor. Chuck Connors has been in the band 18 years and how on earth so that’s sort of like a group of seniors that has, you know, sort of like the nucleus that forms the rest of the orchestra.

Bob Smith 9:55
Well, now obviously you have to recruit new people to what is an audition for a member of that You can like and band like, well, the

Mercer Ellington 10:02
man that takes the spot is prepared for before the spot empties. People interested in the band we play from place to play. So, one day you look up, you see five trumpets, or you see 6x phones, because someone expressed an interest in playing with a man. So we thought, okay, well, you work with us tonight. Let’s see what you do. If he’s interesting, a very good musician. We make a note of it. When they cheer amateurs we call him back.

Bob Smith 10:26
Is that right? Right. So you keep going on. So like a resume filing? Yeah, because we

Mercer Ellington 10:31
try them all over. And it’s no wonder that the band itself now is composed of guys from just about across the United States. And now we have five from Texas. And two from Indianapolis, one from Cincinnati, one from Dayton, two from Detroit, Michigan, three people from New York, and so on, and two out of Jersey, so that we have the van as it stands, as always, as was what might be turning the band of say, the 60s, there wasn’t a one man in the band who lived in New York, and Russell pruco. Everyone else lived away from

Bob Smith 11:11
now you took over the band. I understand you took the band out. I think it was at the day after your father’s funeral. That must be okay, that was that kind of rough, or was there an agreement that you would take the band on,

Mercer Ellington 11:20
you know, when you’ve been in children’s like I have from childhood, as you go through the rigors of it. I mean, for instance, Ella Fitzgerald lost a sister while she was doing a European tour. So she passed. Ella took one day off, flew to her funeral in Los Angeles and flew back and made a date next time. It’s not that you just avid believers in the fact that the show must go on. But it’s something like that you get used to all the trials and tribulations as you go along. The deaths and whatever occur. We’ll

Bob Smith 11:51
have more with Mercer Ellington on the Duke Ellington Orchestra when the off ramp continues. You’re listening to the off ramp with Bob Smith and a conversation I had with the son of the late great Duke Ellington Mercer Ellington in 1980. When Mercer was touring with the orchestra, a Duke Ellington Orchestra after the Dukes death in 1974, was not planned. Mercer said its continued existence was due to one invitation

Mercer Ellington 12:21
says it was failure to play the hand and are continuing with the schedule because Ed Reilly who represented IBM, had a handshake with Ellington in the hospital, and said, Do I want the band to play the convention? Whether it’s with you or without you, meaning he thought maybe the band would have to go and play it, or papa still in hospital. As it turned out, we wanted to without him completely, and the next six months of data we had stayed in as a memoriam. To him, people just fog when the band came through, they paid a tribute to Arlington. While we were doing that we got other dates. And here we are six years later, the

Bob Smith 12:59
Duke Ellington Orchestra of the 1980s gave its audiences the standards

hot instrumental solos

add some says Lincoln temporary vocal work by singer Anita more.

But the legacy of the man who founded the band, the man who started the drive toward diversity lives on their stories that when the big bands were all breaking up, because of the money situation, transportation costs, that the Duke was supporting the band by his own royalties from his compositions.

Mercer Ellington 13:54
That’s what kept us going. In fact, that’s actually what’s helped us out. I say, in the first two or three years that we’ve existed, the raw dust mask happen and the songs and things that you’re writing a book on your father, yeah, it’s, in a sense, criticism is vengeance involved in the book because he left me mad about that. And, in addition, it’s more personalized. We call it Duke Ellington in person. And we give away some of the sort of inner semantics that do Galinda employed with the guys he worked with some with the ladies that he will live with and serve as basic philosophy and some of the sets beguiling that he was able to do. And also, Ellington was a man who was very dictatorial in a very subtle way. I mean, he always had you doing what he wants you to do. You never knew how you landed up in that spot, but there was Mercer

Bob Smith 14:58
joined his dad’s band ended the 1950s first in the brass section. And then as an arranger, I

Mercer Ellington 15:03
joined the band first and I play trombone in the 50s. And then later, he hired me as a road manager. And I said on one condition, I play the trumpet section, which is where I’ve been trying to get for years. Nepotism in reverse. Any I got the job and we’ll stay there, right through the 70s. As the years went on, or days, I should say cooter was sitting back in the section, he said, man, get up and start talking. Somebody’s got to talk to these people. And I was racing back and forth trying to play pots, because they had very little solo roles. And finally, I just left the home back then. But I still hang on to it. And blue couple notes here and there dances

Bob Smith 15:43
during the book. Have you found anything about your father that you weren’t aware of before? Not

Mercer Ellington 15:47
new, mostly, your idolized him so much, that as I was growing up, I would hang with all the people he knew, and all his buddies that he had gone with, you know, hung around with through the years, and accidentally spend hours and days talking to these people just learning events and incidents of things that happened in the past. And by the time I used to embarrass him tremendously, because we’d be out, and this is like, after I’ve gotten was about 45 or 50. And we were talking about something and someone mentioned, the Saratoga club of only old age. And I go from complete description and detail and everything. We come up with the answer. And he says, Tell them also that you weren’t there.

Bob Smith 16:34
During our conversation, Mercer Ellington mentioned several famous New York clubs that his father played in, so we asked him about the most famous Harlem nightspot, the Cotton Club, Dukes first big break was a three year run playing there. And Mercer told us it was sometimes easier for a Cotton Club musician to be hired than fired.

Mercer Ellington 16:53
Oh, you know, the Cotton Club was on Lenox Avenue. And it wasn’t necessarily three engagement. In those days, it was luck in the sense that he got the job to work in the Cotton Club. And it was run by mobsters. People like Jack legs, diamond used to come to it all the time. Only man and you know, I never do out in the field. Gangnam anything I saw because I had learned that they were people first. And they used to play bridge and all that stuff. So that as the years went by, I mean, you didn’t sign a contract, you had to get their permission to leave. Oh, oh man was able to go out and play it a couple of years of working on the condition that you will come back and do further years in the future with him. So he went back to Lenox Avenue, the club closed and moved downtown to for you. But for you six feet. It’s if you go by there now and I don’t even think that name is up anymore. But what they used to call the Latin Quarter that was a downtown Cotton Club. And as the days went on, the bands found other places to go and they had less less attractions withdrawn to support the club in finding clothes. But Louie was laying down on straw and Caleb Ellington. Jimmy lots for the band is very hardly ever spoken up to date. Keeping Lunsford was in and out there and all in all the great bands I mean, they just dwindle because there was no place for them to go. Place. It was much more highly indicative of what happened to showbusiness from those days, the disappearance of Savoy because the United States and its international brochures shows there’s a period of jazz involved, and they have a marquee on the Savoy Ballroom on New Year’s Eve and New York’s was appealing the Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson and Benny Goodman, for $2, to two hours on a New Year’s Eve. It was that kind of graph race and it really kept in life in New in the show business and all over the major cities had places like Milwaukee had the Eagles, and Chicago granters ballroom and so forth. But it disappeared. So what do you play today? We just keep moving. We’ve, for most part, work Europe, I’d say about 1/3 of the lease will have this year. We’ve been to Mexico, Japan so far, major six we leave for South America. In the latter part of June, we go to Australia and New Zealand, come back and then go to Europe for July. And with that, it gives us enough time in between to find the other places within the states that keep us moving around.

Bob Smith 19:41
How do you know where you are? I

Mercer Ellington 19:44
was you know the problem is figuring out what’s going on today. Because you’re still living in the future so much. For instance, last week, I was involved with getting the music for the sacred concert. Oh to the choir music getting the V straight for Australia and also getting instrumentation and names ready for South America. So in a while you’re thinking all this and Chuck says, what hotel are you gonna be in tomorrow? I don’t know. The present a place where he’s just totally oblivious of either what day it is versus Sandy who will run by sometimes, you know, you’re not aware. And we will force this year way it was we were headed with mixed emotions because we’re used to spending Christmas holidays and Easter with our families. You know, everybody just goes no, this this year, we worked through both holidays.

Bob Smith 20:38
So families try to join us. Yeah, so

Mercer Ellington 20:41
Oh, yeah. Go to the wives on board now. And next thing you know, if we go someplace like Disneyland, Knott’s Berry Farm, six or seven kids go on with their dogs and everything.

Bob Smith 20:53
What are you talk you think that in your case, at least the big band business is still booming?

Mercer Ellington 20:57
Oh, yeah. Booming, and both music and babies was a winner you take a vacation, we take a vacation at work. Because one of the days or one of the places we’ll go to will be nice and cotton’s for about four days. We would never be able to afford the vacation and

Bob Smith 21:18
provide the rooms one way the band survives financially these days is that some of its members double as roadies putting up and tearing down the equipment after the performance for extra pay. And you might say that Mercer is well, bus captain

Mercer Ellington 21:32
I just go out there and put in an appearance and make sure that those who are not ready and getting together and on the bus will be there shortly.

Bob Smith 21:39
You handle that yourself. Do you have a road manager? How

Mercer Ellington 21:41
does everybody what you What You See Is What You Get every job I’ve ever had with the band. I still retain my first job was assistant band boy and then lead on the manager and bandleader. So now, I’m still road manager. And on stage rock is the stage manager drummer. He takes care of the equipment and we you know, we move and we keep it reduced. Everybody gets more pay. And we’re able to move more concisely, particularly when we flat but

Bob Smith 22:16
who’s the Assistant band boy these days I am.

Mercer Ellington and the Duke Ellington Orchestra, this is Bob Smith. Shortly after this interview, Mercer Ellington became the conductor of the Broadway musical sophisticated ladies, a review of his dad’s music, played nightly by Mercer and the Duke Ellington Orchestra. The show was a smash success and ran until 1983. After the Broadway run, Mercer kept the Ellington Orchestra on the road into the late 1980s. When Mercer disbanded the unit, he settled in Denmark with his family, and he handed over to Danish radio a colossal archive of on issue Duke Ellington recordings which his father had made over the years. These were broadcast in their entirety, and the many hours of previously unknown music caused a sensation among Duke Ellington enthusiast throughout the world. At the time of Mercer’s death in 1996. The British newspaper The Independent remarked had his father not been such a great and prolific composer Mercer Ellington would have been held in higher regard for his own writing. Among his compositions were pigeons and peppers in 1937, Moon mist, jumping pumpkins, and a classic The Ellington band frequently played, things aren’t what they used to be. Today, the Duke Ellington experience continues to delight audiences under the direction of one of Dukes grandsons, Mercer’s son, Paul Ellington. Well, that’s our show for now. We thank you for listening to this interview with Mercer Ellington, the son of Duke Ellington recorded back in 1980. It’s time to leave the off ramp and get back on the expressway of life, but we hope you’ll join us next time for the off ramp with Bob Smith.

The off ramp with Bob Smith is produced in association with CPL radio and the Cedarbrook Public Library Cedarburg, Wisconsin.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai