When the ‘A’ Train Hit L.A.

Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington was born handsome, brilliant, blessed and lucky in Washington on April 29, 1899, a century ago this week. The centennial of his birth is being celebrated far and wide, an appropriate feting of the prolific artist who was treasured around the world and who has been called America’s greatest composer.

The Ellington sound was fresh, introspective and zestfully democratic; its multiple delights were accessible to everyone. And through 50 years of continuous touring, performing in hamlets and big cities all over the globe, he made new music anywhere and everywhere he went.

Quite memorably, several acknowledged masterpieces of the Ellington canon were created, or first recorded, right here in Los Angeles, including, in 1941, his theme song, “Take the ‘A’ Train,” which had been written by one of the newest members of the Ellington ensemble, 25-year-old composer-arranger Billy Strayhorn.

Yet this city seems mired in the fiction that Ellington developed his heralded bands and reached his creative peak exclusively on the East Coast.

True, he had the fortune of arriving in New York in 1923 as the Harlem Renaissance was in bloom. And it was there that he would shape his creative vision and where his considerable genius was first recognized.

But Ellington was here regularly between 1930, when he first came to Hollywood to appear with his band in movies such as “Cabin in the Sky” (1943), on up through his later sojourns composing soundtracks for movies, including “Anatomy of a Murder” (1959).

Ellington spent a major portion of his time here between 1939-43, making movie shorts, writing and performing with his “Great Band.” He had a fondness for Los Angeles, which was the home of what he recalled was one of his most memorable experiences as an artist, as a Negro, and as an American: his 1941 production of the musical stage revue “Jump for Joy.”

In his 1973 memoir “Music Is My Mistress,” Ellington asserted that his “sun-tanned revu-sical” was conceived as a theatrical work “that would take Uncle Tom out of the theater, eliminate the stereotyped image that had been exploited by Hollywood and Broadway, and say things that would make the audience think.”

“Jump for Joy” was, in effect, a distant and amazing precursor to “The Colored Museum,” the scathing 1986 production that put George C. Wolfe on the map.

“Jump for Joy” was also, perhaps, too far ahead of its time.

There were bomb threats at the theater, a cast member was beaten, and some controversial songs were subsequently dropped, including “I’ve Got a Passport From Georgia (and I’m Going to the U.S.A.).” Ellington admitted bowing to political correctness when they dropped a sketch that had “three colored guys sitting on a table in a tailor shop, sewing, and singing Jewish songs.”

The show closed after 12 weeks, victim to the burgeoning war, which claimed many of the performers as draftees, and to the economics of such a large production. Ellington attempted an abbreviated revival of the show two months later at the Orpheum Theater, but could not sustain it. Ellington’s only other related effort was another ill-fated revival in Miami in 1958.

But “Jump for Joy” is a marvel for the wealth of odd personalities and geniuses that were drawn into its orbit, and for the controversies sparked by its visionary, biting--if sweetly satirical--content and themes. And, finally, “Jump for Joy” is a marvel of the sheer virtuosity and commitment of its production staff and players--including Dorothy Dandridge, Herb Jeffries and Joe Turner. They were singular talents, most of whom counted it as the crowning achievement of their creative lives.

There had never been a production of its type on the West Coast--it was, some claim, the first musical play entirely conceived, written and produced in Los Angeles.

“Jump for Joy” was created when Ellington was 42. Joe Louis was then boxing’s heavyweight champion and, one year earlier, novelist Richard Wright had published his masterpiece, “Native Son.”

*

Ellington was by then an internationally acknowledged composing genius and bandleader. America had entered the Swing Era, poised between two world-historic moments--the Great Depression, which had ended circa 1938 as Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal had taken hold, and World War II, then raging in Europe.

Ellington and the band were on the West Coast, doing an extended engagement at a segregated Culver City ballroom called the Casa Manana. A couple of blocks away, MGM gag writer Sid Kuller was attempting to crank out a script for “The Big Store,” a Marx Brothers film. Annoyed by distractions on the set and enthralled by the swinging Ellington sound, Kuller spent his nights off the lot and under the spell of what Strayhorn termed “the Ellington effect.”

Ellington’s newly stabilized all-star lineup included: Johnny Hodges, Barney Bigard, Ben Webster, Otto Hardwick and Harry Carney on reeds; Rex Stewart, Ray Nance, Wallace Jones, “Tricky Sam” Nanton, Lawrence Brown and Juan Tizol on brass; Jimmy Blanton on bass; Freddy Guy on guitar; Duke’s boyhood chum Sonny Greer on drums; and Ellington on piano. Two remarkable vocalists, Jeffries and the exquisite Ivie Anderson, supplemented the band. In years to come, this aggregation would be known by critics as the Webster-Blanton Band or, simply, the Great Band.

Kuller introduced himself to Ellington. Soon, after sets at the Casa Manana, the band and the writer’s Hollywood friends would trek up to his home in the Hollywood Hills and jam until dawn. In liner notes accompanying a 1988 Smithsonian Institution reissue of music from “Jump for Joy,” Patricia Willard recounted the project’s genesis, based on an interview with Kuller:

“ ‘Hey, this joint is sure jumping!’ screenwriter Sid Kuller exclaims, arriving at his door in the pre-dawn hours of a Sunday in early February, 1941. ‘Jumping for joy!’ Duke Ellington calls jubilantly from the piano across the Kuller living room. ‘Jumping for joy! What a great idea!’ cries Kuller, who exudes concepts, dialogue and lyrics so rapidly that they sometimes have trouble fitting into words. ‘A Negro musical--”Jump for Joy,” starring Duke Ellington.’ ‘Well, why don’t we do it!’ the partners chorus.”

Twenty thousand dollars, nearly half the financing required to mount the show, was raised on the spot, Kuller recalled. A roster of the well-heeled luminaries who assembled in Kuller’s home would include John Garfield, Groucho and Harpo Marx, Hal Borne, Lana Turner, Tony Martin, Mickey Rooney, Harry Ritz, Paul Francis Webster, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco and Skitch Henderson.

Forming what they called the “American Revue Theater,” the group began to mount the show. When word got out that the great Duke Ellington was doing a prideful and satirical revue with an all-Negro cast, uplifting the race and lampooning cultural stereotypes, dancers like Avanelle Harris, Alice Key and Ethelyn Stevenson (later Gordon), who had been performing in movies and on stage, flocked to the audition.

“Being chorus girls, we just automatically assumed we were the tops and were going to be in it,” said Key, who was known for her dazzling good looks and flaming red hair. “There wasn’t any question. And I was the first girl selected by the dance director, Nick Castle.”

Harris, a leggy beauty who had been dancing professionally since she was 6, recalled, “We were all more than anxious to be chosen. I imagined practically every girl in Los Angeles auditioned, and they only used 12.”

Ellington, Strayhorn and the band took up residence on 42nd Place and Central Avenue, in the 115-room Dunbar Hotel. Ellington wrote “Jump for Joy” on trains, buses and in his hotel bathtub. His writing methodology was unique, and he kept himself under the constant pressure of a deadline.

Ellington’s nephew Michael James, who spent many years on the road with his uncle, recalls how Ellington “would write under all conditions, ‘cause he’s in action all the time. So he developed a way of writing since he was never in the position of a Stravinsky or one of those guys who could just sit in a nice house somewhere and meditate in isolation. He had to create isolation.

“Duke’s thing was always a celebration of the Negro contribution. He was more concerned with an artistic rendering, whereas some of the other writers were interested in propaganda. They were concerned with the whole movement of equality in America that was going on in the Roosevelt years. ‘Jump for Joy’ wasn’t totally his creation. Liberal white writers who wanted to make a more blatant statement influenced him. [But] they had to do it in a way [Ellington] approved, and they did it cleverly.”

“Everyone wanted to be involved in the show,” said Key, in a recent phone interview from her Riverside home. “Different actors would come in and say, ‘I think you ought to do this,’ and ‘I think you ought to do that.’ And [Ellington and the producers] would let them have their fun, and then go back to what they intended.”

Mickey Rooney and his friend Sidney Miller had co-written a song for drummer Sonny Greer called “Cymbal Sockin’ Sam.” Poet Langston Hughes had written a long, poetic sketch called “Mad Scene From Woolworth’s.” Both were eventually cut.

Both Charlie Chaplin and Orson Welles (who reportedly counted Ellington, along with himself, as the only genius he ever knew) asked to direct. Figures like poet Countee Cullen--a college friend of writer-lyricist Paul Francis Webster--dropped in on the set. Rehearsals at the Mayan were ‘round the clock. The company had big problems raising the additional capital to produce the show until funds were obtained through the efforts of John Garfield and producer Joseph Pasternak.

The production included original tunes by Ellington and composer Hal Borne. The expressionistic costumes, lights and sets were created by Rene Hubert, who headed the art department at 20th Century Fox. Kuller and fellow gag writer Hal Fimberg wrote the sketches. It was the first Hollywood production for Nick Castle, who would go on to fame as a choreographer for Fox. Ellington still had half the music to write two weeks before the revue’s premiere, and the work was continually revised, almost up to its closing night.

The sumptuous 60-member cast included tap dancers, ex-minstrel comics and Ellington singers Jeffries and Anderson, and newcomer Dandridge in an ingenue role. The versatile Marie Bryant, who would later go on to stage productions for the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, sang and danced. And a former parking lot attendant from the San Fernando Valley, with the unlikely name of Wonderful Smith, added his show-stopping comedic talents to the infectious brew. Smith’s original monologue was considered controversial, since it imagined a phone conversation between the president and a Negro--an unthinkable scenario for the day.

*

But the racial issues were not limited to relations with white America. The show caused various cast members to confront their own convoluted practices.

As Ellington recalled: “I had stopped all the comedians from using cork on their faces when they worked with us. Some objected before the show opened, but removed it, and were shocked by their success. As the audience screamed and applauded, comedians came off stage smiling, and with tears running down their cheeks. They couldn’t believe it.”

Dashing, light-featured Jeffries had been playing the minstrelsy game in reverse. All but white-skinned, Jeffries had--with the aid of dark makeup--become a matinee idol known as the “Bronze Buckaroo” (a sobriquet, he says, Ellington gave him), the first black singing cowboy.

But following the color-transcending ideals implicit in “Jump for Joy,” he stopped darkening his skin. This led, said Jeffries, to a meeting with one of the backers who had been aggressively working for the success of the show.

“I can recall him coming back to my dressing room,” the singer remembered. “He said, ‘Mr. Jeffries, I’m John Garfield. I’m now part of the show and looking at you up on the stage with Dorothy Dandridge, you don’t seem to fit the right shade. I’d like to have some makeup put on you.”

Jeffries says he later went out to do his number, “and Ellington was looking at me like my zipper was open or something. He was horrified. So when the first half of the show was over, he came flying backstage and said, ‘What the hell are you doing, Al Jolson?’ ”

Garfield, embarrassed, later apologized, Jeffries said, after discussing the matter with Ellington. Avanelle Harris, on the other hand, had an entirely different view of Garfield.

“He was a doll,” Harris defended, “and a very fine actor. People said he was radical. Radical for what? For lovin’ black people? For wanting them to be equal? That wasn’t radical, that was real.”

In her notes for the Smithsonian album (now regrettably out of print), Patricia Willard notes that, before opening night, “minor conflicts arose.” Willard recounts producer Henry Blankfort’s tale of how “red-haired actress-dancer Alice Key” burst into his office and complained, “Mr. Castle is insisting that we speak in dialect, and you guaranteed there wouldn’t be any of that in this show.”

Key, Harris and fellow chorine Gordon all refute the story.

“That’s not true at all,” Key says. “In the first place, the chorus girls, except for the two or three of us that they gave little lines to do in skits, didn’t have dialogue. Nobody spoke in dialect--that’s what the show was all about. And Nick Castle was a beautiful man. He just became a regular one of us. There was no color line.”

Tickets for the opening night performance ranged from 75 cents to $3, and the event was the ultimate of swinging Hollywood.

“Oh my God, you should have seen all the movie stars that were sitting there,” said Jeffries from his Palm Desert home. “Good Lord, I can’t name them all: the Barbara Stanwycks, the Robert Taylors, the Ava Gardners . . . “

“Billy Strayhorn had just written ‘ “A” Train’ and it was in the overture. When we heard ‘ “A” Train,’ we knew it was time to get onstage,” Harris said.

When the curtain went up, maestro Ellington was seated in tails, at a grand piano, swinging the opening tune while the ensemble, arrayed in the full panoply of American identity and style, paraded onstage singing “We’re the Sun-Tanned Tenth of the Nation.”

According to Willard’s reconstruction, thunderous applause greeted the open and close of each act, which were a series of musical and comic vignettes, framed by dramatic blackouts. When Key came onstage with Anderson to do the now-classic Ellington-Webster tune “I Got It Bad and That Ain’t Good,” it was one of the show’s great moments.

Some of the numbers had to be cut because of threats of violence. One of the offending songs, “I’ve Got a Passport From Georgia,” featured Borne’s music and lyrics by Webster and Ray Golden that read: “I’m goin’ where life’s a cinch’ / Where the cravat’s a correct tie /Where you wear no Dixie necktie / tie / Where the signs read, ‘Out to Lunch,’ not ‘Out to Lynch.’ ”

Some of the cast was furious that the songs were omitted. “That song was funny,” said Avanelle Harris. “They said they would bomb the theater, and we were mad as hell. We wanted to do the song anyway. All of us were very politically minded. All of us had to break into films and legitimate theater, and we were politically inclined to fight for the right thing. And this show was a godsend to us.”

As Ellington explained in his autobiography: “The show was done on a highly intellectual level--no crying, no moaning, but entertaining, and with social demands as a potent spice.

“The Negroes always left proudly, with their chests sticking out.”

The show lasted for 101 performances, folding on Sept. 27, 1941, and Ellington was deeply disappointed that “Jump for Joy” never made it to Broadway.

As John Edward Hasse explained in his invaluable Ellington biography, “Beyond Category”: “Whether the demise was the fault of the show’s unevenness resulting from 15 co-creators, the strong competition from touring national shows in nearby Los Angeles theaters or ‘Jump for Joy’s’ strong, positive images of black people and its protest, however subtle, of white racism--the fact is the show was no longer profitable. . . . ‘Jump for Joy,’ however socially pioneering, exuberantly appealing, and teeming with inventive and moving moments, had short-lived impact.”

*

The Great Band did not last two years after “Jump for Joy.” By 1942, Jimmy Blanton was dead of tuberculosis, and soon Barney Bigard, Ivie Anderson, Herb Jeffries and Ben Webster would leave the band.

“It was just one of those things,” said Michael James of the perplexing failure of the show. “It was just ahead of its time.”

“I was more proud to have been in that show than any show I have ever done in my life,” said Key, firmly. “It just meant so much to me.”

“We probably would have done it for free,” Harris said. “Just the idea, because it was so different for us to sing about our people and what we were doing. It was uplifting. We felt we were doing something that was important--to make a change.”

It was that kind of sentiment, and the belief that “Jump for Joy” had some modern-day resonance, that inspired the Chicago-based Pegasus Players to revive the revue in 1991, on the show’s 50th anniversary.

“It’s about people being free to be who they are, and I think that’s just as relevant today,” said Pegasus artistic director Arlene Crewd son, who worked with the since-deceased Kuller on the revival. “And you can’t get better music today. It doesn’t sound dated--not a bit. And the ideas are not outdated either.

“Certainly, it’s not as cutting edge as a lot of African American work that’s being done today, I mean, how could you expect it to be?

“But people threatened their lives for putting on this piece. In that sense, it [allows us] to look back and understand how cutting edge that was then and still, how much of the things that were being lamented are still true today.”

*

* Buddy Collette’s 10-piece ensemble will perform a free “Tribute to Duke Ellington” today at 3 p.m. at the Madrid Theatre, 21622 Sherman Way, Canoga Park, (818) 347-9938. On Thursday at 10 a.m., the intersection of 42nd Place and Central Avenue, adjacent to the Dunbar Hotel, will be renamed “Duke Ellington Square” in a ceremony that is open to the public. Also on Thursday, UCLA launches its Ellington Centennial Celebration, which includes concerts Thursday and Friday evenings at Royce Hall, (310) 825-2101, and a symposium all day Friday and Saturday at Schoenberg Hall Auditorium, (310) 206-1464.

*

The Smithsonian Institution’s Duke Ellington Archive is accessible on the Internet and the site includes two short film excerpts from “Jump for Joy,” at: https://www.si.edu / organiza / museums /nmah / archives / d5301a.htm