Strayhorn - A Mitchell-Ruff Interpretation

One summer night in 1967 as Dwike Mitchell and I played the Hickory House, a popular New York emporium, Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn strolled in together. To say that we were flattered would be an understatement.

A few nights later, when the Ellington orchestra had taken off on a string of cross-country one-nighters, Strayhorn was back at the Hickory House, alone. We knew he'd had surgery weeks before he came in with Duke, but was on the mend. He ate dinner while we played. I noticed him writing something on paper as I played the horn. He stayed on late into the night. The next night, he was back again, and over a drink during intermission he put a few technical questions to me about the French horn's range, its loudness, bent notes, and the use of the mute. A couple of nights later he showed up once more, this time with a message:

"Willie," Billy Strayhorn said, "can you come over to my apartment sometime soon and play something I've written for you and the French horn."

I was startled. Strayhorn had written something for me? "Is this afternoon soon enough?" I asked.

That afternoon, horn in hand, I called on the master composer, songwriter, and arranger. Strayhorn was seated at the Steinway. He still looked slightly frail from his operation, but he went right to work accompanying me as I played a passage of his new composition. It was a heavy work of dark sonorities, laden with surprising melodic turns that seemed to leap through daring rhythmic configurations into total unexplored crevasses of the diatonic scale. No light musical entertainment, this, and like his thoughtful Lush Life, the composition was overwhelmingly rewarding and masterful, but challenging.

He led me through the first movement of what he intended as a suite, taking it section by section until he was sure of what was needed. Then he used his eraser, tore away pages, re-sketched, and played through the new materials with me until he was nearly satisfied. I was in heaven. How did I get lucky enough to attract the notice of the composer of Take the A Train and Passion Flower. Nobody this important had ever written an original work for me or the Duo before.

Then more work with the manuscript, and we took a break for the dinner working on the stove; Strayhorn cooked as imaginatively as he wrote music. During the main course of lamb chops, fried corn, new peas, and yams, the phone rang. Ellington was calling from Omaha.

"Listen, Edward," his arranger said, "you called at a good time. I want you to hear something new. Gotta minute?" Strayhorn poured a generous slug of wine into my glass and signaled me to wash away the lamb chop and take up the horn. Performing an unfinished work long-distance for Duke Ellington with the grease of a lamb chop still on my embouchure made my blood rush. But I did as I was told.

When we had played all he'd written, Billy took up the phone and accepted Ellington's compliments graciously. More talk followed. Words like "transition," "modulation," "bridge," "coda," and "diminuendo" flew back and forth to Omaha. More scribbling. Then came the signal to rinse again and Strayhorn sat down to repeat with me the middle section. After we'd played a few bars of it through twice, there was further talk on the phone, and out came the eraser. Strayhorn expanded parts and added dynamics, while the receiver rested on the Steinway. There was no apparent rush and scurry. We played the new and very much improved version again and again. By then it was time for me to rush out to the Hickory House. I shudder to think how much that phone call cost the Ellington-Strayhorn duo. But that's the way we did it for the rest of the week, my horn and I at Strayhorn's, playing for Ellington somewhere out on the distant prairie.

Days later, when he had the suite set down in its final manuscript form, Strayhorn said, "Now I want to hear it with a real pianist. Call Mitchell!"

For the next several days, Mitchell and I came together to Strayhorn's apartment and worked at learning the suite. On the first day, Strayhorn sat beside Mitchell on the piano bench, propped the new manuscript on the music rack of his Steinway and turned to sections he wanted to discuss. With his elegant finger, he pointed to places in the score.

"What I've written here," he said to Mitchell, "is quite complete in the compositional sense. But I want this first meeting to feel to you like a fitting, as in "fit" a custom-made suit. The compositional elements should fit your hands, which are so much larger and more powerful than mine... You know how to make sections like these on this page as big and as rich in sonority as you can. But here in this interlude, let the horn ring through... Let Willie's sound kind of hover over it all, right there. And pause here, but only slightly... Over in this middle part, your line and the horn line are of equal importance. Balance is the key word; but that's the kind of thing you two do naturally anyway. I have left you space and, at the same time, given indications of essential details...?

By now Mitchell was alive with excitement. His large fingers trembled as he carefully shaped them to fit the powerful, two-fisted chords Stray had written to underscore the horn theme. And wham! Stray was up off the piano bench at the huge sound Mitchell made. He stomped the floor and beamed at Mitchell, "Hell yes!" he hollered.
That's what I had in mind; I just don't have the hands and strength to make it sound that way."

Mitchell's reaction to the compliment was almost sheepish. "Ohhh, I see more clearly now what Ruff has been trying to describe these past two weeks. It's a very beautiful and powerful piece, Billy."

When Ellington called later that afternoon, Strayhorn put the receiver close to the piano strings.

"Now, Edward, you'll hear the final setting, with Dwike Mitchell at the Steinway." And at last Billy Strayhorn's Suite for Horn and Piano took its place in our permanent repertoire.

Several months later, while I was living in Los Angeles and teaching at UCLA, my phone rang and Ellington's voice surprised me; it was afternoon, the wrong time for him to call. But Strayhorn had died a few weeks before, and Ellington's life and most of his old habits had changed. Nobody among his friends could have guessed how much the loss of Strayhorn, his greatest artistic ally, would cost him. Still, his voice that day sounded the same as ever, only better, more enthusiastic than I'd heard him in a long time.

"Strayhorn had such an extraordinary musical life in New York," Ellington began; he was in no mood for small talk. "He should have a fitting memorial here. He was a New York composer; I mean, what other New Yorker wrote Take the A Train and Upper Manhattan Medical Group? I'm establishing a Billy Strayhorn Memorial Scholarship at The Juilliard School, and we're going to kick it off with a gala: the dream concert, man.

"Imagine a program with Stray's friends: Lena Horne, Tony Bennett, Willie 'The Lion' Smith, Joe Williams, Clark Terry, Lou Rawls, Carmen DeLavallade, Geoffrey Hoder, and of course all his many friends in my band?

I interrupted, "That sounds like a concert I dont want to miss. Count me in for a ticket."

"Oh no," said Ellington, "that's not what we had in mind. I want you and your partner on the stage to play that fabulous suite Strayhorn wrote for you two. I still hear that music coming from Stray's apartment on the phone. The concert will be at Lincoln Center on Sunday, October 6. I'll get back to you later about a rehearsal time."

On the day of the performance, at Philharmonic Hall, Ellington's rehearsal plans were still sketchy; there was only enough time for the singers and dancers to do a quick run-through with the orchestra. Mitchell and I made ourselves comfortable backstage, cooled our heels and 'visited' with the stars. Carmen DeLavallade and Miss Horne charmed us all with their beauty.

By show time, everything was in readiness, and the program began with Duke and the orchestra on stage. The artists waiting backstage could hear that the band sounded great. Lena Horne said, "Listen to them! They're playing their hearts out for Strayhorn."

Smiling at Miss Horne, Duke said, "I think your public is properly primed and ready for you now, darling. Ready?" Then he suddenly scooted back to the front of the orchestra, cut off their large resonant chord, and went to the microphone. When he announced Lena Horne, the audience roared. Willie the Lion snatched off his derby hat, slapped his thigh, and exploded out of his chair.

"You can't beat him! That guy just can't be beat. I don't care how you cut it. My Gawd! You see what he just did? He's got a dozen world-class artists, a million dollars' wortha talent waiting right here in this wing, and he hasn't said a word to anybody about the order of the program. Only he knows who's on next; he's making it up as he goes along, I tell ya. You can't beat experience, man. You know what I call him? 'The Master of Situations'!"

For more than two and a half hours we all watched as Ellington mastered the situation: playing out his dream concert, dishing up his musical feast with the flair of the consummate host-presenter. One surprising delicacy after another showed his practiced attention to texture, color, and, above all, timing. The dancing was tastefully placed and balanced, and there was proportion to the singing and the instrumental performances.

Then Ellington pointed to Mitchell and me in the wings at the side of the stage and went to the microphone to share with his audience just how it was that he'd been the first person to hear Strayhorn's new suite, long-distance. Willie the Lion eased up to my ear and whispered: "Now go out there and kill 'em for Strayhorn."

The suite we were about to play was written during Strayhorn's short but stunningly introspective final creative outburst. Another of his most serious compositions, Blood Count, was also a product of that period, and like Blood Count, the suite thunders with highly autobiographical overtones, the moods of a vibrant musical career shutting down.

As Mitchell and I began to play, I was oblivious to our Lincoln Center surrounding. I was hearing Strayhorn in his apartment, leading us through the music; talking us through the transitions; showing me when to bring out a counter line, when to make my horn's voice match the heavy piano sonorities he'd written for Mitchell. Strayhorn's powerful presence was there on the stage with us, giving directions, and making us play better than we knew we could. The spell was broken for me only as the last note lingered and died and Joe Williams and Tony Bennett led the applause there among the performers in the wings.
As soon as we left the stage, Dizzy Gillespie, who had been down in the audience, burst through the dressing room door. "Mitchell and Ruff! Man! I didn't even know Stray had written that music for you guys. What a compliment to you. He sure as hell wrote it, didn't he? And you two played it so fabulously, the three of us have to make a record together some time soon!"

Ellington ended the concert with a sensational string of selections by the orchestra. Then all the artists assembled to link hands in a long line across the stage and bow long and low with Ellington.

Afterward, in a moment of quiet, Duke gave a wise wink to us all. "Strayhorn," he said, "smiled tonight."

Who ever gets lucky enough to play even a small part in a Strayhorn smile? Not only that, Dizzy Gillespie and the Duo cemented an alliance that night that lasted to the end of Dizzy's life. Other of these concert recordings are scheduled for reissue on the Kepler Label during the 50th anniversary year of the Duo.

— Willie Ruff