Lush Life: A Biography Of Billy Strayhorn (review)

LUSH LI FE: A BI OGRAPHY OF BI LLY STRAYHORN DAVI D HAJDN FARRAR STRAUS AN D GI ROUX I f Herbie Hancock is right— and he surely is—that Duke Ellington must be considered the equal of George Gershwin in the history of American music, then what to do with Billy Strayhorn, Ellington's longtime arranger, the man responsible ioi such h a s h Eltingtonia as "Take the 'A' Train" and "Chelsea Bridge"? Well, you can adopt a revisionist stance, as Hajdn has in his generally superb biography of Strayhorn, and argue that a lot of what we've come to accept as Duke was only half Duke—or Duke not at all, in the case of the compositions that Strayhorn evidently produced wholly from his own talent, but that were attributed to Ellington because that was the best way to promote and sell them. The issue is as old as scholarship: Did Shakespeare write all his plays, or did Marlowe and Milton lend a hand? Was Billy Strayhorn merely Ellington's handmaid arranger and occasional collaborator, or was Ellington really more Billy than Duke? As with any revisionist exercise , much of what Hajdn owes us as a biographer of Strayhorn's life has to take a back seat to the underlying agenda, which is to debunk the notion that Ellington exerted total command of his musical empire. True, Ellington discovered Strayhorn and covered the expenses that flowed from Strayhorn's at times extravagant lifestyle (rent, clothes, booze, clubs). True, Ellington and Strayhorn had a sophisticated, intimate , often impenetrable relationship that appears to have been conducted almost psychically in terms of what the Duke needed (one story has Ellington summoning Strayhorn whenever he needed a work on a score, and the two mean staring at each other, silently, for ten minutes before Strayhorn left with a perfect understanding of his duty). True, Strayhorn was a mostly quiet figure who seemed willing to submit his ambition to the sheer strength of Ellington's stature and will. Arguably, Billy Strayhorn got exactly what he wanted out of his career as Ellington's right hand: a lush life in American and European midcentury cafe society and smart circles, a life far from the narrow confines of his youth in Pittsburg, a life in which he was able to practice his only posible secret—his homosexuality—openly and affirmatively without fear of reprisal. I n other words, Strayhorn had nothing to complain about. Hajdn, however, has a bone to pick, and he picks very effectively, amassing a welter of mainly oral evidence to indicate that Strayhorn was not merely indispensible to Duke Ellington, but perhaps Ellington's fellow traveler in musical greatness. Beyond being "hip to Duke," as highschool friend Mickey Scrima pointed out when asked if Strayhorn knew anything about Ellington before their first meeting, Strayhorn was transDuke , bigger than the grandest figure ever in African American music, a sort of brain to the Duke's soul. I t's an out-there position, effortlessly controversial because, like many controversies, anyone who would be shocked was already wise to the story. Duke Ellington, besides being the spine of the American musical century, was a brilliant promoter of himself and his Big Plan for what he did best, which was add an aura of intellectual fortitude to the tinny tunes that had characterized American popular music—mainly American songs— before he and Count Basie inaugurated the Swing Era and invented the big band as a popular ci terpoi n 1 lo the symphony orchestra. Ellington was Nat King Cole for high-culture aesthetes, a composer rather than a performer, a h ileadei rathei thai sin mentalist, a artist rather than an interpreter. I t's not unlike the the bind that auteur loyalists find themselves in when the have to admit that no one could make a film by himself—Gregg Toland's genius as a cinematographer really doesn't detrai i from Orson Welle: brilliance as a director ( though John Houseman's skills as a screenwriter might be another matter); however, lo i encode thai the shots were all Toland's idea does tarnish somewhat the illusion that Citizen Kane was...