WASHINGTON -- You can see him from a block away, his profile dominating a brilliantly colored, 24-foot by 35-foot mural.
The eyes with their familiar bags underneath seem to follow passers-by along this revitalized stretch of U Street. In this painting, Duke Ellington looks as if he might have been up all night, composing, thinking about music.
Ellington, born 100 years ago today, grew up here. He lived in the 1200 block of T Street, a block from where this mural casts a steady eye over the old neighborhood. G. Byron Peck, a Washington-area muralist, painted the mural in 1997 with the help of local children. It is based on a picture taken during Ellington's later years, before his death in 1974.
"This is more of a mood photo. That's why we like it. It's more somber, more meditative," says Peck, standing beneath his piece. "It has more to do with the community than with jazz. It was a good community project."
The community, once the heart of black Washington, is trying to recapture some of its past glory. The riots that tore through Washington after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination in 1968 started a block from here.
Before then, U Street was not unlike Baltimore's Pennsylvania Avenue. It was the "main stem." The nightclubs and pool halls were here. Businesses, strong churches and civic clubs were here.
Think of old West Baltimore around Druid Hill Avenue and McMechen Street, move it 40 miles south and you have the neighborhood of Ellington's youth. It was a nurturing black community, filled with professionals and strivers.
Though Edward Kennedy Ellington was born on April 29, 1899, in what is now called DuPont Circle, he was raised around U Street. His parents, Daisy Kennedy Ellington and James Edward Ellington, "enveloped him with affection," author John Edward Hasse says during a telephone interview. Hasse's biography of Ellington is called "Beyond Category: The Life and Genius of Duke Ellington" (Simon & Schuster, 1993). "He said his feet didn't touch ground until he was 8 years old."
He was born to be an aristocrat, born to wear a tuxedo and sip champagne. In his autobiography, "Music Is My Mistress," Ellington says his father "always acted as though he had money, whether he had it or not. He raised his family as though he were a millionaire." A photo taken when Ellington was 4 years old shows him looking like a prep candidate for the nearest military academy.
"Do I believe that I am blessed?" Ellington once wrote. "Of course I do! In the first place, my mother told me so many, many times."
Washington was the center of black America at the time of Ellington's birth. It had the nation's largest and, at least by local conceit, most sophisticated black population. Even as American race relations underwent a terrible period marked by oppressive laws, riots and lynchings, communities such as Ellington's worked to instill pride in their children and protect them against the outside world's slights and horrors.
"They didn't discuss, evidently, lynchings or less evil forms of racism, bigotry and discrimination," Hasse says of Ellington's parents. "They shielded Ellington from most such problems. He grew up with a great cushion of love and, I think, a great sense of possibility."
The U Street community instilled in its young people the same lessons West Baltimore gave Thurgood Marshall, Clarence M. Mitchell Jr. and Juanita Jackson. In "Beyond Category," Hasse quotes Ellington's own reminiscences about lessons learned from an eighth-grade teacher:
" No matter where you go or what you do, you are representing your race and your responsibility is to command respect for the race."
Hearing the music
Growing up, Ellington heard the music that was standard fare 100 years ago. His was the last generation before phonographs and radios brought music into homes at the flick of a switch. People made their own music during Ellington's childhood. Both of his parents played piano. His father sang in a barbershop quartet.
"It was genteel, middle-class music," says Hasse. "It's not syncopated. It's not something you would find in vaudeville."
At 7 he started taking piano lessons from the appropriately named Marietta Clinkscales. He wasn't interested. Practicing piano was no fun compared to playing baseball with friends on an old tennis court near 16th Street. Sometimes President Theodore Roosevelt rode by on horseback and waved.
Early on, Ellington gravitated toward the visual arts. In high school he studied commercial art at Armstrong Manual Training School. Around that time he also went back to the keyboard. He realized that if he played well, he'd always have a pretty girl standing at the bass end. But he didn't learn music in school. He got a D in the one music class he took at Armstrong.
"I like to say that Ellington was a student of a conservatory without walls," says Hasse. "He mostly learned by teaching himself, listening to other pianists, observing piano rolls."
He became a regular at Harry's Pool Hall on T Street and other spots where Sticky Mack, Blind Johnnie, and The Man With A Thousand Fingers performed a million tricks on the keyboard. They played Scott Joplin's "Maple Leaf Rag," Eubie Blake's "Charleston Rag," early blues and whatever else might be making the circuit from Southern barrelhouses to New York City bars.
This was not the world of Ellington's parents. His father worked as a driver, butler for a prominent white family, and a blueprint draftsman. His mother grew up in Washington's black middle class. Her father had been a District of Columbia policeman. This did not keep Daisy Ellington from proudly responding to her son's early musical success.
For an eager, young pianist like Ellington, trips to the pool halls and other clubs provided lessons in virtuosity, style and showmanship. The Man With A Thousand Fingers and his contemporaries never played anything straight. They threw in trills, frills, personal tricks to dazzle the crowd. This world of hustlers and piano busters became Ellington's university.
He remembered writing two songs during that period. Neither survived because he could not read or write music as a teen-ager. He wrote "Soda Fountain Rag" the summer of 1913, when he was a soda jerk at the Poodle Dog Cafe on Georgia Avenue. The other song, "What You Gonna Do When the Bed Breaks Down?" had these lyrics:
"Tried it on the sofa, tried it on the chair, tried it on the table, didn't get nowhere, What you gonna do when the bed breaks down? You've got to work out on the floor."
A 'Duke' and his music
He had already picked up "Duke" as a nickname. He was stylish, elegant, the perfect "Washingtonian." Hasse writes that Ellington often slipped out at night and went driving around town in his father's car to impress friends and girls. Then he would refill the gas tank to the exact level it had been before the evening's excursion.
He and his musical friends also turned Room 10 of the True Reformer's Hall, a local meeting place, into their informal clubhouse.
"Just being together, playing together, was all that mattered then," Otto Hardwick, a contemporary of Ellington, said in an interview that is part of the Smithsonian Institution's collection of Ellington memorabilia. "There wasn't any money involved, not to speak of."
In 1916, Ellington entered and won a poster contest sponsored by the NAACP. First prize was a scholarship to the Pratt Institute of Applied Arts in Brooklyn. Ellington declined the offer. Music had taken over his life. He formed bands, managed bands, sent them out for society dances and parties. He dropped out of high school in February 1917, just three months shy of graduation.
By October 1919 he had established himself well enough to run an advertisement for a group of "Colored Syncopaters" known as "The Duke's Serenaders." The ad promised "Irresistible Jass furnished to our select patrons." Most likely the band played waltzes, fox trots, tangos, instrumental rags and popular tunes.
Later, Ellington brought a visual artist's eye for color to his own musical compositions, says Reuben Jackson, an archivist with the Smithsonian Institution.
"There's not a big gap between what a painter does with a palette and what he could do with Cootie Williams' trumpet, or Johnny Hodges' saxophone," says Jackson. "I really think a lot of what he has done had to do with his translation of the visual medium."
'Shout' turns up his volume
One of the great stories of Ellington's youth involves James P. Johnson, the Harlem stride pianist. Sometime between 1918 and 1920, a friend with a player piano invited Ellington over to listen to Johnson's pianistic tour-de-force, "Carolina Shout." The effect was immediate.
"I went back everyday and listened," recalled Ellington.
He had his friend slow the tempo. Slowly, day by day, through excruciating patience, Ellington learned Johnson's showpiece.
"He could watch each key go up and down and then he would actually put his fingers on the keys and learn it, you could say, mimetically. It wasn't by ear, but touch," says Hasse. "He memorized the movements as well as the notes."
George Gershwin, Lil Armstrong and other pianists from the early part of the century used piano rolls in the same way as Ellington.
In November 1921, Johnson came to town. Ellington's buddies urged their hometown hero to get up on stage and try to "cut" the master. "Cutting contests," instrumental duels, were a staple of black music circles. Ellington didn't stand a chance against Johnson, who though only five years his senior was a veteran of Harlem piano battles against Luckey Roberts and Willie "The Lion" Smith. That didn't stop Ellington. He went up and played "Carolina Shout."
"[Johnson] went along with the whole scene, and when I finished he applauded, too," Ellington recalled.
That night, Ellington took the master to the city's entertainment district. He stayed with Johnson all night, hovering by whatever keyboard the older musician happened to play. The tour ended at 10 a.m. the next day.
"He said what he learned that night could have constituted an entire semester in a conservatory," says Hasse.
By then, Ellington had married Edna Thompson and had a son, Mercer. But family life was not for him. In March 1923, he and two friends moved to New York City and Harlem, the new capital of black America. They stayed a few months, before coming home with barely a dollar between them.
By summer, Ellington was ready for another try. This was the beginning of the "Roaring 20s," F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Jazz Age," the era of prohibition and the "Harlem Renaissance." The whole country danced the "Charleston," another tune penned by James P. Johnson.
Friends already in New York told Ellington there was work waiting for him. He packed his bags and headed north in grand style, riding on a first-class ticket and buying an expensive meal. When he arrived, the job had disappeared.
This time, he did not go back home.