Duke Ellington, Live at the Aquacade, and: Hawk-Man

Duke Ellington, Live at the Aquacade

Fate's being kind to me. It doesn't want me to be too famous too young.

—Duke Ellington

A paycheck. A nadir. Hired as accompanimentfor sequined swimmers in an amphitheater in Queens.To keep the band working. A footnote.

I was born at Newport in '56, Ellington was fondof saying. Born again, to be fair, usheredby Paul Gonsalves's twenty-seven-chorus solo

and a white woman's dance. Born aloft a tritone,tethered to the breath of the thirty-six-year-old'stenor sax. Though just months earlier,

Sir Duke was made to descend to the speckled stageof the Aquacade, in the heart of Queens. For six weeks,Ellington and his orchestra—minus Gonsalves

and Willie Cook, minus Rick Henderson, Dave Black,and Britt Woodman, each replaced by membersof the Local 802—played medleys behind a forty-foot

screen of water. "Mood Indigo" bleeding into "Solitude,""The Mooche" giving over to "Perdido,"then "Take the 'A' Train," a rose to the stitching

of Bed-Stuy to Harlem, to black modernity.Picture it: the nearly all-white crowd, working menand wives, their sons and daughters, cheering

every lift and gasping at the fireworks fillingthe night sky. 1955. A boy shifts in his seat.His eyes dart from the divers to the dancing waves

pink as cotton candy. His mind wanders.And Ellington, tired and aloof, pushes his waythrough an old arrangement of "Sophisticated

Lady." He won't return for a second set, excusedwhile another conductor leads the bandaugmented by strings. To hell with it,

Ellington mutters, lighting another cigarettein his dressing room, Newport still an undiscovered country.America's Debussy, alone, unaccustomed,

wiping the sweat from his forehead with an embroideredhandkerchief, four miles and four yearsfrom the East Elmhurst home of Malcolm X.

Here are the relics of our future. Here is the futureof us all, the new face of a nation. In thirty years,a museum guide tells us, students today, their children

will be the first generation raised in the US,we nod our approval, his smile blooming,where white is no longer the majority, as it hasn't been

here in Queens since the nineties.The dancing woman was Elaine Anderson,a thirty-three-year-old socialite, her image printed

on the back jacket of the Columbia LP—The gal who launched 7,000 cheers. Whose fatherwas made rich by a shipwreck. Ellington's Helen

in a cocktail dress, platinum-blond bringerof glad news, who danced in ecstasyas the cameras turned away from the stage to find her.

They tell me I saved the night for the Ellington band.It's how you look at it, she said, her memoryheld like a clutch. The glass was half-filled—I caused it.

Half-empty—Gonsalves did.

Hawk-Man

I'm a man who believed that I died twenty years ago,and I live like a man who is dead already.

—Malcolm X

The still eyes of Malcolm X, stilled by an f-stop and shutter.Winter, 1965. Malcolm is leaving a car, gelatin-silver print,portrait of a tenant of fire. He stares into the camera

like a performer breaking scene, the sureness of his deaththe missive I read this morning after another chapterfrom Marable's best-selling biography, bookended

by Malcolm's Pan-Africanism and the firebombingof his East Elmhurst home. I don't have to read further;I know of the week to come—the fight to Detroit,

the Ford Auditorium, the interview where he'll name his timea time for martyrs. I know of the Audubon and the smellof smoke, folding chairs littered like leafets across the ballroom

floor. I've heard who and why as you've heard who and why,and that if it wasn't them it was surely someone else,so I've left the book open to the insert, Malcolm in...