Mike Westbrook: my journey with Duke Ellington

In Roland Pertwee's 1928 play Interference, there’s a scene in which a murderer revisits the scene of his crime. From a neighbouring apartment music is playing. In a Torquay theatre sometime in the 1940s, off-stage in the wings, my job in Interference was to put a 78 record on the turntable at the right moment. The music was Duke Ellington’s 'Black and Tan Fantasy'. A new world of sound opened up for me. My father, himself an Ellington fan, bought me a 10 inch LP of Duke’s 1940s band, every track a masterpiece. I’ve still got it, scratched and torn, a reminder of my first encounter with 'Ko Ko', 'Conga Brava', 'Concerto for Cootie', 'Bojangles' and 'Harlem Air Shaft'.

The last time I saw the Ellington Orchestra was in 1973. Kate and I went to see them at The Rainbow, Finsbury Park. A former Astoria Cinema whose ‘Hispano-Mooresque’ décor would surely have pleased Duke, The Rainbow was now a rock venue and a blackened shell. The band at first looked out of place, as if they’d strayed into the wrong era. Not a velvet drape in sight. By then Duke was seriously ill, and the band diminished. No Hodges, Woodyard, Clark Terry, Ray Nance, and no Cat Anderson.

This could have been a sad evening, but it was a marvellous concert. The repertoire was much the same as the English Concert album of the previous year, nothing new. But from the first entry of the unison saxophones, the Ellington sound took over that space with sheer physical presence. If some loved voices were missing there was still the defiant, primal shout of Cootie’s trumpet taking us to the heart of jazz, the mercurial creativity of Paul Gonsalves, and the majestic baritone of Harry Carney.

As a self-taught musician, my education has been through listening, improvising, and writing for my band. I listen to Duke’s music, but have never formally studied it.

I have done arrangements of some of his tunes, and I include an Ellington or Strayhorn piece on a solo gig. 'Lush Life' has long been in Kate’s repertoire.

To copy or emulate Duke, I wouldn’t know where to start. The message I took from him was, ‘freedom’. His music infiltrated my work. Never more so than in a recent composition 'Says The Duke'. With Kate’s lyric, it was recorded ‘remotely’ during lockdown by her Granite Band. The style was not strictly Ellingtonian. Subsequently in a revival of On Duke’s Birthday, I arranged it for The Uncommon Orchestra with many Ducal quotes and references. On the other hand my approach with 'IDMAT', a more experimental piece, was to take just as a starting point the Ellington tune 'It Don’t Mean a Thing' ['IDMAT' is on the Westbrook Orchestra album Catania – Ed].

Being in New York on 29 April 1983 inspired my composition On Duke’s Birthday. Local radio stations played Ellington all day. I added two ‘birthday’ sections to the piece that I was working on at the time, After Smith’s Hotel. The following year, jazz festivals in Amiens and Angoulême commissioned a composition marking the tenth anniversary of Duke’s death. I adapted existing material from a 17 to an 11-piece band, and wrote three new sections. I based it around The Brass Band: Phil Minton, Kate, Chris Biscoe, Danilo Terenzi, Tony Marsh and me. I added Stuart Brooks, Brian Godding, Georgie Born and Steve Cook and a newcomer, Dominique Pifarely. That gave me four brass and an unusual section of violin, cello and one saxophone. This became one of my favourite line-ups. These were improvising musicians, not conventional section players. They brought a freshness to the music that is evident on the album, recorded at the premiere in Amiens.

Duke seemed unconcerned about posterity. Like any dedicated artist he pursued his vision through changes cultural, social and political. Too busy writing to theorise, he was not forthcoming about his methods. “Too much talk stinks up the place” he said. How the music came together was between him, the piano and his trusted musicians. To the public he presented it nonchalantly, as though composing was the easiest thing in the world.

The academisation of jazz takes it out of the street and puts it into the museum. Trying to replicate the Ellington Orchestra, however skilfully done, is just a technical exercise. As artists we need to learn from the past without being enslaved by it. Originality, finding one’s own voice, is the key; bearing in mind the words of Thomas Carlyle, “the essence of originality is sincerity, not novelty”.

No-one was more respectful of the past than Duke, or more faithful to his roots, yet his music was moving ahead to the very end. He took risks and was not afraid of controversy. He railed against categorisation in music. He took the African-American tradition with its energy and expressive freedom, rooted in the community, melding it with the structures and harmonies of contemporary European music. And he bridged the gulf between high art and popular entertainment. Though I think Duke sometimes misjudged his audience: at the Rainbow we didn’t need reminding of his hits or the lead trumpet player's impersonation of Louis Armstrong in Hello Dolly. Or was Duke telling us jazz snobs, "Don’t forget where this music comes from, I haven’t!”? Ellington juggled with the dual roles of popular entertainer and serious composer. He jived with A and B cultures and invited us to enjoy it all.

A turning point for John Surman and me, struggling to play jazz in the late 1950s, was Peter Russell’s arrival in Plymouth. His Hot Record Store was in Union Street, the city’s red-light district which served the Naval base and docks of Devonport. The shop’s location must have pleased Peter, with its echoes of the Storyville district of New Orleans. Never imposing his taste, Peter had ways of making us aware of things we needed to hear. One day I went into the shop and he had on the turntable the title track of Ellington’s Blues in Orbit – one of the sounds that changed my life. Equally miraculous is Duke’s setting of The 23rd Psalm from Black, Brown and Beige featuring Mahalia Jackson, a combination of voice and orchestration that I find extraordinary.

'La Plus Belle Africaine' was one of the highlights of the Rainbow concert. An arrangement stripped to the essentials, put together with the master’s touch, with a passionate baritone solo by Harry Carney. In a version recorded live at the Côte D’Azur in 1966, there is a remarkable arco bass solo by John Lamb, fantastic drumming by Sam Woodyard and great stuff from the ‘piano player’.

I’m a lifelong fan of Duke’s piano playing. On Money Jungle it is great to hear him really upfront, in the company of Charles Mingus and Max Roach. Always open to new ideas, Duke was well aware of the Bop revolution. Its influence can be heard in his work, but his orchestral vision would never fully accommodate such a distinct style. On an extended treatment of the Strayhorn classic 'Take the 'A' Train' from Ellington Uptown, Betty Roché’s vocal is a nice tip of the hat to Bop.

Throughout much of the concert at The Rainbow, Paul Gonsalves sat slumped in his chair at the end of the sax section. In the middle of a fairly routine blues, he rose to his feet and played a chorus. As he was nowhere near a microphone not a note of his solo was audible. The number ended and he sat down. A shock of disappointment, almost of grief, gripped the audience. Maybe Duke sensed this. Anyway he went to the piano and started to play 'Happy Reunion'. Attention was focused on the hunched figure of Gonsalves, one of the great tenor saxophonists, playing acoustically in that vast auditorium, still nowhere near a microphone. This was the solo we needed to hear. A blessing and, as it turned out, valediction. We listened in profound silence, fearing to lose a single nuance of his playing. The Rainbow held its breath. It’s possible that outside, the London traffic paused in its tracks too. It should have.