Duke Ellington conducts the orchestra at St. Paul’s United Church in Toronto, March 1, 1971.DENNIS ROBINSON/The Globe and Mail
Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker
By Stanley Crouch
Harper, 448 pages, $31.99
Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington
By Terry Teachout
Gotham Books, 496 pages, $31.50
Of the making of music books (non-classical variety), like the making of music, there is no end. There are musical memoirs, whether propulsively readable, such as Keith Richards's Life and Anita O'Day's High Times Hard Times; eccentrically self-indulgent, such as Neil Young's Waging Heavy Peace; or destined for the shredder, such as Celine Dion's My Story, My Dream. There are books of theory and cultural criticism, Greil Marcus's Mystery Train, or anything by the late Lester Bangs. There are reference books, such as Will Friedwald's indispensable A Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers. There are even books on individual works, for instance, Bloomsbury Academic's excellent, if uneven, 33 1/3 series on individual albums of the rock era.
Most of all, there are biographies, superb lives such as Peter Guralnick's two-volume life of Elvis, Robin Kelley on piano wizard Thelonius Monk, or David Hajdu's Lush Life, about the undervalued Billy Strayhorn.
I mention jazz because it is widely thought a dying art form. On the stage, perhaps, but on the page, hardly. In fact, the two best music books this fall chronicle the lives and times of two jazz icons and indicate, one hopes, that rumours of the death of jazz are highly exaggerated.
By far the most anticipated music book of this season, indeed of many seasons, is the first volume of Stanley Crouch's life of Charlie Parker, the indelible alto sax player who, give or take Dizzy Gillespie, invented bebop.
Kansas City Lightning is the first of two volumes on the life of the man universally known as Bird, and is the result of more than 30 years labour by Crouch, a distinctive American cultural critic who has been writing knowledgeably and volubly on jazz for more than four decades. The early start gave him a huge edge, allowing access to many early and influential figures, such as Rebecca Ruffin, Parker's first wife, and bandleader Jay McShann.
But Crouch's book is far from a straightforward life. Rather it's an extended riff, a jazzy improvisation on Bird's life that encompasses and links its brilliant and tragic trajectory with the struggles of black musicians, the lure of drugs and drink and the role of Kansas City in jazz history. It's a book from which its protagonist is conspicuously absent for long stretches. Its closest comparison, in my experience, is Nick Tosches's Hellfire, a brimstone-coated life of Jerry Lee Lewis.
As Crouch's title suggests, Kansas City is itself a character here, a wide-open town run by corrupt mayor Tom Pendergast and an assortment of mobsters, and alive with nightclubs, speakeasies, brothels and the promise of danger, all colourfully detailed.
But it was also producing some of the greatest music in America – a jazz epicentre featuring the likes of band leaders Count Basie and Jay McShann and superb players such as Lester Young, Ben Webster and "Hot Lips" Page.
In musically inflected prose that ranges from relatively sedate to red-hot, occasionally shading into purple (the death of a friend and fellow screw-up was, for Parker, "like drinking a cup of blues made of razor blades"), Crouch builds a compelling case for the genius of Charlie Parker.
Crouch is the first Bird biographer to rely heavily on interviews with Rebecca Ruffin – Parker was 15 when they married; she was 18 – whom Parker betrayed with drugs and other women and whom he left with his doting mother, Addie, for long periods while he pursued a musical future that must then have seemed out of reach.
The testimony of Rebecca and others puts to rest the myth that Parker was an instant prodigy; at 15, he was laughed off the stage by more sophisticated musicians. It was that rejection, Crouch shows, that drove him to practice incessantly, though his progress was marred by unreliability, an increasing dependence on drugs and a distressing tendency to pawn his instruments.
Book's end finds Parker, still just 21 (he was 34 when he died in 1955), in New York in 1940; and now musicians are already going out of their way to hear the young phenom. He is about to take wing. He is on the edge of greatness. And he is on edge of disaster. Both will come to him.
What Crouch does superlatively is capture the excitement of a Charlie Parker performance, his incandescent swing, the way he took notes to places they'd never been before. We hardly need another case made for Bird's roosting place in the jazz pantheon. But Crouch's take, combining as it does a troubled, spoiled young man in a hurry, a splendid evocation of an era, a keen ear for the music, a tremendous understanding of black culture and a unique prose style, takes us as close as we are likely to get to the early years of a genius-in-waiting.
Read this while listening to Bird blow on Ko-Ko or Cherokee and wait as patiently as you can for volume two, which will cover Parker's New York career and the birth of bebop.
One of Charlie Parker's major influences, as much for his music as for his cool professionalism – what Crouch calls "the easeful quality of his bearing … his special brand of elegance" – was the bandleader, composer and arranger Duke Ellington.
No new case need be made the greatness of Ellington, either. And Terry Teachout does not propose to make one. Instead, Teachout, himself a composer as well as author of a fine biography of Louis Armstrong, offers a linear narrative that builds on and synthesizes a mountain of earlier work, such as Harvey Cohen's 2010 Duke Ellington's America.
Teachout shows that, despite his surface cool elegance, his deeply held religious beliefs and sincere desire to represent his people with dignity, Ellington (1899-1974) was an illusionist. For he was also a hedonist, a rootless nomad with a tomcat's sexual appetites – even as he aged noticeably, many women continued to find him irresistible – a preference for hotel living and a taste for drink.
And he was controlling. After his death, his son, Mercer, found a note with a three-point credo: "No problem. I'm easy to please. I just want to have everybody in the palm of my hand."
And for much of his life he did. From his days as bandleader at Harlem's celebrated but segregated Cotton Club (black performers, white patrons) to his apotheosis as ambassador of American culture, Ellington presided over an ever-changing and often unruly collection of superb talents, part of Teachout's vivid cast of secondary characters.
They range from impresario Irving Mills, who, though musically illiterate, was instrumental in launching and promoting Ellington's career, to the band's virtuoso and fractious soloists, such as sax player Johnny Hodges and trumpeter "Cootie" Williams, and, most movingly, his brilliant, long-time co-composer and arranger, Billy Strayhorn.
Strayhorn, intellectual, accomplished, gay, was Duke's functional son, collaborator – and rival. In his deceptive memoir, Music Is My Mistress (well, the only one he was faithful to, at any rate), Ellington wrote: "Billy Strayhorn was my right arm, my left arm, all the eyes in the back of my head, my brainwaves in his head, and he in mine." All true. And yet, Ellington was always loath to give full credit to the man who wrote, among other works, the band's signature tune, Take the A Train.
Where Teachout really excels is in his rich understanding of Ellington's music, his mastery of tonal colour, harmony and mood. He tells us why Duke's untrained method of composition produced many three-minute masterpieces, but failed to yield the successful longer-form pieces he sought in such works as Black, Brown, and Beige.
Best of all are Teachout's astute analyses of individual works. His readings of Mood Indigo and Ko-Ko (yes, the same Ko-Ko Charlie Parker made his own) are themselves worth the price of admission.
Teachout's Ellington is the Duke of deception, a man sparing with the truth, an intellectual poseur, an insatiable satyr, a controlling self-promoter always reluctant to share credit. But he was also a musical genius who wrote some of the greatest tunes in the American Songbook and presided over a long sequence of superb bands and players (whom he paid generously). I'd say that compensates abundantly for his defects.
What Duke and Bird shared, besides being mama's boys and the excess so boringly common to musicians, is that they were both innovators, among the most important and daring musical figures of the 20th century. That hardly needed demonstration again, but if these two excellent books find the readers they deserve, and send them to some of the greatest music ever made, they'll more than have served their purpose.
Martin Levin has written on music for many publications, including the Times Literary Supplement and Toronto Life.