son, spoke of his “limited vocabulary,” and a strong scent of snobbery hangs over what some of his acquaintances had to say about him. What Ellington made of so rough-hewn a character can only be imagined, but he is not known to have uttered a disagreeable word about Mills, and most of those who knew the man believed his contribution to black music to be largely positive. Not all: John Hammond worked for Mills in 1934 and later claimed to have seen at the time “how tremendously Duke was being exploited.” In 1936 he wrote an article for the New Masses in which he declared that Mills’s way of doing business with songwriters was “as ingenious as it [was] unfair to the author and composer.” But he also praised Mills years later as “a man who saved black talent in the 1930’s, when there was no one else who cared whether it worked or not.”
It is unclear when Mills and Ellington first crossed paths. In 1973 Ellington said that they met “during [his] first six months in New York” and that he sold an unspecified number of blues songs to the Mills brothers for “fifteen or twenty dollars” apiece. In 1940 he remembered it differently: “The band had been at the Kentucky Club about three and a half years [i.e., late in 1926] when I first met Irving Mills. We were playing the St. Louis Blues, and he asked what it was. When I told him, he said it sure sounded nothing like it. So maybe that gave him ideas.” Mills recalled the song that he heard as Ellington’s “Black and Tan Fantasy,” and in 1937 he told a reporter for Time that as soon as he heard the Washingtonians, he “signed the Negro pianist to a contract on the back of a menu.”
This much is certain: Duke Ellington and His Kentucky Club Orchestra, as the band was billed by Vocalion, its new record company, reported to Room 1 of Brunswick Studios in midtown Manhattan on November 29, 1926, to cut two issued instrumental sides, “East St. Louis Toodle-O” §§ and “Birmingham Breakdown.” Not long after that, Ellington signed a personal management contract with Mills, and for the next thirteen years their fates would be entwined.
• • •
In later years Mills was crystal clear about what he had seen in Ellington in 1926. He had already figured out that one of the most effective ways to plug the songs that he published was to arrange for them to be recorded by suitable singers, and since a growing number of those songs were being written by and for blacks, he also needed a black band with a suitable leader. At first he tried Fletcher Henderson, but Henderson was insufficiently reliable:
He never had the same men twice, or he didn’t have the arrangements ready, or there were always some little things that didn’t make the date perfect. It was not good for the band, not good for the singer. So much for Fletcher Henderson. When I heard Duke play, I heard not only Duke, but I fell in love with every individual man as a soloist. . . . I left the club and was so intrigued with the possibilities of the band that to make sure that I’d get them to record, I went back to the club. I dated up Duke to come to the office and arrange the recording.
“A great creative artist”: Irving Mills, Percy Grainger, and Ellington at New York University, 1932. Throughout his thirteen-year association with Duke Ellington, Mills promoted the bandleader as “a great musician who was making a lasting contribution to American music,” emphasizing the fact that his jazz compositions were admired by noted classical musicians like Grainger
----
The “possibilities” of which Mills spoke a half century later centered on Ellington’s compositions. From the outset of their association, Mills promoted Ellington both as a bandleader and as a composer, something that had never before been done in jazz. “Every now and then the record companies wanted me to make outside tunes,” Mills later explained, “so occasionally I would make a ‘Twelfth Street
It is unclear when Mills and Ellington first crossed paths. In 1973 Ellington said that they met “during [his] first six months in New York” and that he sold an unspecified number of blues songs to the Mills brothers for “fifteen or twenty dollars” apiece. In 1940 he remembered it differently: “The band had been at the Kentucky Club about three and a half years [i.e., late in 1926] when I first met Irving Mills. We were playing the St. Louis Blues, and he asked what it was. When I told him, he said it sure sounded nothing like it. So maybe that gave him ideas.” Mills recalled the song that he heard as Ellington’s “Black and Tan Fantasy,” and in 1937 he told a reporter for Time that as soon as he heard the Washingtonians, he “signed the Negro pianist to a contract on the back of a menu.”
This much is certain: Duke Ellington and His Kentucky Club Orchestra, as the band was billed by Vocalion, its new record company, reported to Room 1 of Brunswick Studios in midtown Manhattan on November 29, 1926, to cut two issued instrumental sides, “East St. Louis Toodle-O” §§ and “Birmingham Breakdown.” Not long after that, Ellington signed a personal management contract with Mills, and for the next thirteen years their fates would be entwined.
• • •
In later years Mills was crystal clear about what he had seen in Ellington in 1926. He had already figured out that one of the most effective ways to plug the songs that he published was to arrange for them to be recorded by suitable singers, and since a growing number of those songs were being written by and for blacks, he also needed a black band with a suitable leader. At first he tried Fletcher Henderson, but Henderson was insufficiently reliable:
He never had the same men twice, or he didn’t have the arrangements ready, or there were always some little things that didn’t make the date perfect. It was not good for the band, not good for the singer. So much for Fletcher Henderson. When I heard Duke play, I heard not only Duke, but I fell in love with every individual man as a soloist. . . . I left the club and was so intrigued with the possibilities of the band that to make sure that I’d get them to record, I went back to the club. I dated up Duke to come to the office and arrange the recording.
“A great creative artist”: Irving Mills, Percy Grainger, and Ellington at New York University, 1932. Throughout his thirteen-year association with Duke Ellington, Mills promoted the bandleader as “a great musician who was making a lasting contribution to American music,” emphasizing the fact that his jazz compositions were admired by noted classical musicians like Grainger
----
The “possibilities” of which Mills spoke a half century later centered on Ellington’s compositions. From the outset of their association, Mills promoted Ellington both as a bandleader and as a composer, something that had never before been done in jazz. “Every now and then the record companies wanted me to make outside tunes,” Mills later explained, “so occasionally I would make a ‘Twelfth Street
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