by David Hajdu
Unique in jazz history for sustaining a musical organization for decades, Duke Ellington engendered loyalty through liberation: one of the ways he kept his cats at home was by letting them loose to do their own projects—under his general supervision, whenever possible. As the big-band era receded in the early 1950s and a new musical era took form, Strayhorn wasn’t the only Ellingtonian with an itch for independence. Ellington’s star saxophone soloist, Johnny Hodges, was grumbling about leaving. “For a couple of years before he finally left [in January 1951], Johnny told Duke he was going to go,” recalled his wife, Cue Hodges. “Duke said, ‘What do you want to do? Make your own records? You can do that with me.’” With instrumental combos on the rise again, Ellington set out to revive the dormant small-band phase of his operation and launched a new label, Mercer Records, jointly owned by him, Leonard Feather, and the company’s namesake. Strayhorn had a minority position in the business, but his creative role was not insignificant. He was to serve as musical director and arranger as well as pianist on many of the label’s dates, and he would be given full credit for every aspect of his participation. The operation’s biggest problem was technical: Mercer Records produced 78 rpm singles—and not particularly good ones, acoustically—while record buyers were shifting to 331/3 rpm LPs. A few Mercer Records sessions, including some of Strayhorn’s most imaginative ones for the company, were released as albums before it folded less than ten months after it was launched. “We were releasing the right music the wrong way,” said Mercer Ellington.
Strayhorn was featured on several sides credited to Billy Strayhorn and His All-Stars (most notably a boppish version of Lester Young’s “Jumpin’ with Symphony Sid” and a hard-swinging “Hoppin’ John,” composed by Jimmy Hamilton), as well as in a small group called the Coronets, which included Ellingtonians Juan Tizol on valve trombone and Willie Smith on alto saxophone (the group’s high points were both moody Tizol compositions, “Moonlight Fiesta” and “She”). The Billy Strayhorn–Johnny Hodges Sextet backed blues singer Chubby Kemp on a handful of minor releases. Most notably, Strayhorn was responsible for several sessions featuring Al Hibbler and an extremely hip midsized band including alto saxophonist Benny Carter, bop trumpeter Red Rodney, and Max Roach—plus Mercer Records’ most original project, a ten-inch LP of piano duets by Strayhorn and Ellington, released, in a switch, under the name of the Billy Strayhorn Trio. (Alternating bassists Wendell Marshall and Joe Shulman completed the trios.) Issued in an altogether artless, text-only sleeve with (all lowercase) printing on one side, the album sold dismally—just a thousand or so copies, according to Feather. The record was no Strayhorn showcase, however; once more, it essentially proved how deftly Strayhorn could weave his voice around Ellington’s. Side by side at two grand pianos, Ellington and Strayhorn ran through some of their standbys—Ellington’s “Cotton Tail,” Strayhorn’s “Johnny Come Lately,” their collaboration “The ‘C’ Jam Blues,” a real blues jam in the key of D-flat they called “Bang-Up Blues”—shifting solo voices and appropriating each other’s voice with intuitive ease. The unmistakable masterpiece among this batch of tossed-off gems is “Tonk,” a precision two-piano adaptation of an intricate composition that Strayhorn had originally written for full orchestra but that was never recorded in that form (here, credited jointly to Ellington and Strayhorn).
After fourteen years of dueting with Ellington figuratively, literally, publicly, or secretly, Billy Strayhorn made his first steps out of Ellington’s sphere of influence in mid-1953. The first move was a small one, but in a propitious direction. Herbert Machiz, Strayhorn’s old colleague from The Blessed and the Damned, home from Paris and trying to build a New York theater career, put together a summer-stock production of Vernon Duke and John Latouche’s Cabin in the Sky and asked Strayhorn to supply the musical accompaniment. Having endured that hellish Paris experience together, both working in the wings for American geniuses of their art forms, Strayhorn and Machiz had kept in contact since returning from France. There were evident similarities in their family histories: no money, an abusive father, a nurturing female (in Machiz’s case, a maternal aunt) who encouraged the young boy to pursue the arts. “He was also theatrical, that kind of boy,” said his sister Miriam Machiz Dworkin. “He could entrance anyone and everyone.” Machiz, however, was as manically egocentric as Strayhorn was demure; before his Paris stint, he had been drafted into the army but was pulled out of basic training for “eccentric” behavior and assigned to duty producing entertainment in military hospitals. Strayhorn took on the summer-stock job with Machiz and brought in another friend from his theater experience, Luther Henderson, one of the arrangers who had worked on Beggar’s Holiday. Much like the Billy Strayhorn Trio, the two musicians performed the Cabin in the Sky score at two pianos offstage, accompanied by percussionist Dean Sheldon on drum kit and bongos. “Strayhorn loved the idea of four hands at pianos,” explained Henderson. “It’s very East Side. It’s Cole Porterish, it’s European, it’s English. Two pianos are very special, when they work. But one of the musicians has to be flexible and listen and feel and bend with the other one. One of the people has to be a Billy Strayhorn.”
Working in the theater without Ellington for the first time since Fantastic Rhythm, Henderson’s collaborator revived his old billing and went by the name of Billy Strayhorne. A few more of his old theater connections were in the all-black cast, including Juanita Hall and Bill Dillard, both of them Beggar’s Holiday veterans. “I was so happy to see Billy there,” recalled Dillard. “I knew the music would be taken care of and he would take care of me. We didn’t do very much rehearsing, so I made a few mistakes here and there. Billy covered them up before I even knew what I did.” One of the show’s dancers, Joyce Mordecai, was equally grateful for Strayhorn’s responsiveness. “A lot of things had to undergo quite a few changes as we went along, in terms of the rhythms and stuff,” explained Mordecai. “Billy was incredibly sensitive to what we needed as dancers and always made whatever changes were necessary in the music instead of telling us to change—that’s what you find nine times out of ten.” Just a stock revival, after all, the show got only one review, a bit of praise in Variety that singled out the music: “Song and dance are sparked by a three-piece pit combo that’s as good as any full-strength orch. Luther Henderson and Billy Strayhorne man the two pianos … [and] the drive they develop is almost incredible.”
Brainstorming backstage, much like everyone else in summer stock, Machiz and Strayhorn once drifted into a discussion of a dream project for Strayhorn, Bill Dillard recalled. “They were talking ideas. And Strayhorn started talking. He had this idea about doing this all-black show, and it had something to do with homosexuality. It was wild talk as far as I was concerned.” Strayhorn’s notion—a theatrical vehicle for both black and gay pride—was certainly extraordinary in 1953. Herbert Machiz happened to be working, however, on an extraordinary forum for extraordinary propositions. Shortly after Machiz returned to the States from Paris, he met, and soon moved in with, John Bernard Myers, an influential early dealer of abstract art renowned for his droll charm; Myers’s favorite word was marvelous, which he could infuse with a seemingly infinite range of meanings. “John exposed Herbert to the art world, and that gave Herbert the idea to start a new kind of theater, bringing together theater people and fine artists, and John was able and willing to pay for it,” said Myers’s business partner, Tibor de Nagy, a gallery owner. In February 1953, with Myers’s backing and administrative support, Machiz founded the Artists Theatre, a groundbreaking forum for interdisciplinary experimentation that was vital in establishing the experimental identity of Off Broadway. “At the time, there was no Off Broadway as we would come to know it,” recalled the playwright Lionel Abel (who wrote his now-classic Death of Odysseus for the Artists Theatre). “Off Broadway was a stepping stone to Broadway, where the daring work was supposed to be done. With the Artists Theatre and a few efforts like it, that turned around.”
In its first year, the Arti
sts Theatre presented, among other productions, new plays by Tennessee Williams, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and James Merrill, with sets designed by Larry Rivers, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, and Albert Kresch. “A lot of smart, very talented people trying to show that we were smarter and more talented than everybody else” is how Rivers depicted the group. Bringing to fruition his “wild talk” of a black-gay statement, Billy Strayhorn joined this heady roster and contributed the theater’s only play with music, a dramatic musical adaptation of Federico García Lorca’s tragic lament to doomed romance, The Love of Don Perlimplín for Belisa in Their Garden, to be performed by a black cast. “It was a terribly brave thing, very, very unusual for any time and absolutely unthinkable in 1953,” recalled Bernard Oshei, a young fashion designer who took on the task of costuming the show. “Of course, everybody thought of Lorca as the great gay martyr. Herbert and his boyfriend were the producers, and Strayhorn and I did the music and the costumes. I think the only key participants who were straight were Alfred Leslie [the set designer] and the leads, who were both black.” (Gladys Bruce, a newcomer, and Elwood Smith, a Juilliard-trained actor-singer, were the principals in the six-character cast.) Subtitled An Erotic Lace-Paper Valentine in Four Scenes, Lorca’s lyric allegory tells of a bittersweet romance rendered impossible by social convention.
Like all the Artists Theatre productions that year, Don Perlimplín was produced at the cozy Amato Opera Theatre on Bleecker Street. “We didn’t charge Herbert or anybody else very much money,” recalled Sally Amato, co-owner of the theater with her husband, Anthony. To stimulate attendance for all the Artists Theatre productions, only season tickets were offered; for $7.50, one could see the entire season’s program of six plays. Though Don Perlimplín opened on election night—the New York mayoral race went to Robert F. Wagner, Jr., “young scion of the New Deal”—the four hundred or so seats of the Amato were filled that evening and for the two following weeknight performances. “That one was one of the best of the Artists Theatre productions, as I recall,” said Oshei. “I thought it was delightful, and it had a finished and polished look to it.” Oshei’s costumes, standard nineteenth-century period outfits rented from a theatrical supply shop, added a bit less flair than did the sets by Alfred Leslie, the fiery young abstract expressionist who once boasted, “Art begins with me.” In place of realistic sets, Leslie positioned five oversized canvases (ten feet wide and eighteen feet high) at points on the stage; on each, he had painted a stylized version of a work by another painter, by Velázquez, for instance, and by the American landscape artist Albert Pinkham Ryder. “I envisioned each space sort of with an historical motif going back into some segment of some artist or some element of the Western world, whatever. I was thinking of all the Western artists of the past and using elements of their work in order to create the ambience of a particular space,” said Leslie.
Strayhorn composed four main pieces for the fifty-minute production, some parts set to passages of Lorca’s text. (Only two of the Strayhorn compositions, “Wounded Love” and “Sprite Music,” were titled on the manuscript.) Musically, Strayhorn’s Don Perlimplín ranks with the richest of his jazz work, an original achievement of dizzying beauty and sophistication. As performed by Strayhorn himself on piano, the instrumental music woven through the play served the dual purposes of inspiration and expression, according to Alfred Leslie: “It was like he knew exactly what the actors needed to bring out the character and the scene.”
Theater became the fulcrum of Strayhorn’s disengagement from Ellington and emergence on his own. Just as the frustrations of Strayhorn’s stage experiences with Ellington contributed to his urge for independence, the small triumphs of his first solo dramatic efforts stimulated him to pursue the theater. He immersed himself in Broadway productions of the 1953-54 season, catching The Trip to Bountiful, Kismet, and two plays rich in gay subtext that Strayhorn took friends to see repeatedly: Robert Anderson’s melodramatic Tea and Sympathy and In the Summerhouse by Jane Auer Bowles (wife of composer-writer Paul Bowles, an intimate of Strayhorn’s friend Oliver Smith). In the Summerhouse gave Strayhorn a new favorite phrase of ironic repartee: “Describe it to me, darling.” A few months after Don Perlimplín, in early summer 1954, Strayhorn set his creative sights on Broadway. For a theme, he applied his adventurism to one of his own passions again, and set out to write a musical incorporating elements of jazz. For a collaborator, he engaged his Juilliard-trained friend Luther Henderson. “We both had the theater bug and a bit of experience, so we decided to sit down and write a Broadway show,” recalled Henderson. “At that time, Broadway was pretty square, and we thought we were pretty cool. This was the time of Dizzy Gillespie——‘Oo-Bop-She-Bam’ and all that stuff—so we thought we would write, I guess you’d say, a bebop musical. Not bebop music necessarily, but with that feeling, that coolness, that hipness. One of the things we talked about was looking at the world through rose-colored glasses. We fancied ourselves as pretty savvy about things. So we decided that that would be our theme. What’s reality? What’s perception? What’s the difference? And what does love mean with this going on? And we called the thing Rose-Colored Glasses.”
Working a few nights a week for about a month at Strayhorn’s apartment, Henderson and Strayhorn developed ideas for the show’s principal scenes, along with sample sections of dialogue; Henderson’s wife, Steffi, would type (and edit) the partners’ creations, drawing from her husband’s notes. To celebrate a good day’s work one night, Strayhorn and Henderson went out to hear Ram Ramirez, the pianist and co-composer of the Billie Holiday signature song, “Lover Man,” who was playing a club date in Greenwich Village. Feeling particularly cool, they each ordered the faddish drink at the time, a zombie (two ounces dark rum, two ounces light rum, one ounce 151-proof rum, one ounce Triple Sec, one teaspoon Pernod, one ounce lime juice, one ounce orange juice, one ounce papaya juice, one teaspoon grenadine, mixed over cracked ice and sprinkled with sugar). “That was the ultra-cool thing of the day,” said Henderson; indeed, urban folklore had it that New York City law prohibited the sale of more than one zombie per customer. Strayhorn and Henderson broke the law five times. “We were feeling pretty fantastic,” said Henderson. “One of us said to Ram, ‘Hey, Ram, man, how about letting us do a number?’ And he said, ‘Sure.’ You know, we were Billy Strayhorn and Luther Henderson—this should be interesting. So we sat down at the piano bench, and we went at it. We were inspired. We were way out—avant-garde—countermelodies, relative keys, two different tempos at the same time. It was genius, or so we thought. We finished the number with great flourish, and we stood up, and everybody in the place was just staring at us. We walked out of the place, and the next morning, Ram called me, and he said, ‘Man, don’t you ever do that to me again! You guys almost got my ass fired. What the fuck did you think you were playing?’ So Strayhorn and I gave up zombies and went back to gin.”
Rose-Colored Glasses was a surreal romp around the Land of Ool-Ya-Coo, peopled by whimsical eccentrics such as Brother Big Eyes, a grinder of lenses for eyeglasses, and the object of his blind affection, Honey Ooh La La. “It wasn’t Finian’s Rainbow, but it was that kind of thing,” explained Henderson. “Brother Big Eyes traveled around the Land of Ool-Ya-Coo grinding lenses for people, and he came on these crazy characters like Papa Doo Dah and Johnny No Love. It wasn’t realistic at all. It was supposed to be like a dream. Very cryptic, very weird.” The main set, as imagined by Strayhorn, was a colossal pair of horn-rimmed glasses dominating the stage, a perhaps unintended evocation of his own face. Innovatively, some of the dialogue was to be recitative; bringing a bit of jazz into the musical theater, Henderson and Strayhorn wanted some instrumental accompaniment to be improvised each night. Such was the intent of the following first-act passage written by Strayhorn, in which Brother Big Eyes describes himself:
Once upon a time there was a man named Brother Big Eyes,
At least that’s what everybody called him.
He was a queer
-looking duck:
Kinda funny
Kinda sad
Kinda quiet
Kinda … well, kinda MA-A-AD!
Well, Brother Big Eyes had a little trailer
Hitched to the back of his bicycle
And from this trailer he conducted his business,
Quite a business it was, for, you see,
Brother Big Eyes made magic glasses.
He ground them, tinted them
And polished them himself.
You could get them ready-made,
Right off the rack,
Or tailor-fitted
To suit your own individual psyche.
A few of the show’s songs came from the collaborators’ respective trunks: they finagled ways to wriggle in Henderson’s pert “Hey, Cherie” (later recorded by the Ellington Orchestra), as well as Strayhorn’s “Let Nature Take Its Course” from Fantastic Rhythm and “Lush Life,” which they chose, in a break from Broadway convention, as a quiet and bittersweet finale to the show. Among the new numbers, Henderson wrote five on his own: “It All Depends on Your Point of View,” “Hip Hoe Down,” “Hey, Cherie,” “Well, Well,” and “You, You, You.” One song was a Henderson-Strayhorn collaboration—“Got No Time” (music by Henderson, lyrics by Henderson and Strayhorn)—and Strayhorn wrote both words and music for nine: “Brother Big Eyes,” “Ool-Ya-Coo,” “Cottage on the Hill,” “If I Can’t Have You,” “Beauty and Talent,” “Looking for a Male,” “Still in Love with You,” “Love Has Passed Me By, Again,” and “Oo, You Make Me Tingle.” The most intricate and mature of these was surely “Love Has Passed Me By, Again,” a grim lament over unrequited love in the mode of “Something to Live For.” Several, such as the bouncy romantic duet “Still in Love with You” and the sexy “Oo, You Make Me Tingle,” were solid, hummable show tunes. (The remaining songs are incomplete or lost.) Sung by Brother Big Eyes, “Ool-Ya-Coo” distills the central notion of Rose-Colored Glasses in one verse:
