Rag’ or some old, old tune. Otherwise I stuck to 100 percent Duke Ellington.” That wasn’t quite true—Ellington recorded many Mills-published songs by other hands—but in the main he stuck to his own work, a policy that was to make him unique among his fellow leaders. In a crowd of soon-to-be-familiar faces, he stood out as the only one, black or white, who wrote or cowrote most of the songs that his musicians played. Nobody had to tell him what that meant and would continue to mean, both as a musical opportunity and as a source of income. Music Is My Mistress contains a half-page list of the things that Irving Mills claimed to have done for Ellington, and the first item on it was his insistence that Ellington “make and record only [his] own music.”
Mills said that he immediately recognized Ellington to be “a great creative artist—and the first American composer to catch in his music the true jazz spirit.” He also understood what it would mean to have under exclusive contract a popular bandleader who, like Ellington, wrote his own material. Whenever the Washingtonians performed, whether in person or on record, they would be promoting a catalog of songs that were written by their leader and published by Mills Music Inc., which reaped the lion’s share of their sheet-music sales and performance royalties. In addition, Mills grasped early on that Ellington’s soloists were part and parcel of his composing method and that their ability to generate tunes that their leader turned into full-length songs could also be profitably exploited: “We gave every man in the band an opportunity to write. . . . They came in with ideas, and Duke helped to develop it and give it the style.”
If the Washingtonians had sounded the same way in November of 1926 that they did on the records they cut earlier in the year, then Mills’s ability as a talent scout would have bordered on the prophetic. But the hiring of a new trombonist had made a big difference: Joseph Nanton, always known as “Tricky” to the members of the band and “Tricky Sam” to the public, replaced Charlie Irvis, and by November he was, after Miley, the band’s principal solo horn. Born in New York of West Indian parents in 1904, Nanton was intellectually curious to a degree unusual among jazz musicians of the period. Rex Stewart, who got to know him in the thirties, described the trombonist as a “thinking, knowledgeable man” with the melancholy face of a basset hound and an unquenchable taste for liquor, which he quietly sipped on the bandstand: “He was well acquainted with such erudite and diverse subjects as astronomy, how to make home brew, and how to use a slide rule. He could recite poetry by ancient poets that most of us never knew existed, and he knew Shakespeare.” He also knew what to do with a plunger: His muted solos had a raw, vocalized quality that bore a startlingly close resemblance to human speech. (Unlike Miley and most other plunger-mute players, his preferred sound was not “wah-wah” but “yah-yah.”) Nanton spent the next two decades in Ellington’s trombone section, and in time his playing became the most recognizable color on the composer’s palette.
It mattered, too, that Ellington was now working with a bigger band. The Club Kentucky bandstand was so small that it would hold only seven musicians, so he took the opportunity to add three new men when the Washingtonians toured New England in the summer of 1926. Working with this group had taught Ellington how to use the expanded tonal resources of a ten-piece band to the best advantage, and when Irving Mills and Vocalion Records invited him to show what he could do, Ellington brought all ten players into the studio and led with the strongest card in his hand. “East St. Louis Toodle-O,” the Washingtonians’ first electrical recording, had been written for the larger band the preceding summer, and it makes arresting use of the wider range of tone colors
Mills said that he immediately recognized Ellington to be “a great creative artist—and the first American composer to catch in his music the true jazz spirit.” He also understood what it would mean to have under exclusive contract a popular bandleader who, like Ellington, wrote his own material. Whenever the Washingtonians performed, whether in person or on record, they would be promoting a catalog of songs that were written by their leader and published by Mills Music Inc., which reaped the lion’s share of their sheet-music sales and performance royalties. In addition, Mills grasped early on that Ellington’s soloists were part and parcel of his composing method and that their ability to generate tunes that their leader turned into full-length songs could also be profitably exploited: “We gave every man in the band an opportunity to write. . . . They came in with ideas, and Duke helped to develop it and give it the style.”
If the Washingtonians had sounded the same way in November of 1926 that they did on the records they cut earlier in the year, then Mills’s ability as a talent scout would have bordered on the prophetic. But the hiring of a new trombonist had made a big difference: Joseph Nanton, always known as “Tricky” to the members of the band and “Tricky Sam” to the public, replaced Charlie Irvis, and by November he was, after Miley, the band’s principal solo horn. Born in New York of West Indian parents in 1904, Nanton was intellectually curious to a degree unusual among jazz musicians of the period. Rex Stewart, who got to know him in the thirties, described the trombonist as a “thinking, knowledgeable man” with the melancholy face of a basset hound and an unquenchable taste for liquor, which he quietly sipped on the bandstand: “He was well acquainted with such erudite and diverse subjects as astronomy, how to make home brew, and how to use a slide rule. He could recite poetry by ancient poets that most of us never knew existed, and he knew Shakespeare.” He also knew what to do with a plunger: His muted solos had a raw, vocalized quality that bore a startlingly close resemblance to human speech. (Unlike Miley and most other plunger-mute players, his preferred sound was not “wah-wah” but “yah-yah.”) Nanton spent the next two decades in Ellington’s trombone section, and in time his playing became the most recognizable color on the composer’s palette.
It mattered, too, that Ellington was now working with a bigger band. The Club Kentucky bandstand was so small that it would hold only seven musicians, so he took the opportunity to add three new men when the Washingtonians toured New England in the summer of 1926. Working with this group had taught Ellington how to use the expanded tonal resources of a ten-piece band to the best advantage, and when Irving Mills and Vocalion Records invited him to show what he could do, Ellington brought all ten players into the studio and led with the strongest card in his hand. “East St. Louis Toodle-O,” the Washingtonians’ first electrical recording, had been written for the larger band the preceding summer, and it makes arresting use of the wider range of tone colors
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