Billy Strayhorn

If many would have trouble recognizing Tony Jackson (yesterday's entry), no Jazz lover will fail to recognize today's guest of honour: Billy Strayhorn.

He was born in Dayton, Ohio, but his family soon moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. However, he spent a big part of his childhood in Hillsborough, North Carolina, at his maternal grandparents, where his mother sent him to protect him from his father's drunken sprees. In an interview, Strayhorn said that his grandmother was his primary influence during the first ten years of his life. He first became interested in music while living with her, playing hymns on her piano, and playing records on her record player.

Strayhorn attended high school in Pittsburgh, studied classical music at the Pittsburgh Music Institute, wrote a high school musical, formed a musical trio and - still in his teens - composed a number of songs, the most notable being Something To Live For and what many consider to be his masterpiece, a song called Life Is Lonely, later renamed Lush Life.

Here's Something To Live For in a version by the great Nina Simone:

Lush Life has dozens of versions. Here are some of the more interesting ones. First, the incomparable Nat King Cole:

Here's Donna Summer, produced by Quincy Jones, in 1982:

Here's Linda Ronstadt, produced by Peter Asher (of Peter & Gordon) and orchestrated by Nelson Riddle, in 1983:

Here's an excellent version by Queen Latifah, in 2004:

Strayhorn met Ellington in December 1938, when the musician and his band performed in Pittsburgh. After the show, Strayhorn got Ellington's attention by telling him how he would have re-arranged his songs - and then, he proceeded to show him. Impressed by the young man's skills, Ellington invited Strayhorn to meet the band again in New York. It marked the beginning of a collaboration that spanned three decades.

Strayhorn's relationship with Ellington was always difficult to pin down: Strayhorn was a gifted composer and arranger who seemed to flourish in Duke's shadow. Ellington and the band were affectionately protective of the diminutive, mild-mannered, unselfish Strayhorn, nicknamed by the band "Strays", "Weely", and "Swee' Pea". Ellington may have taken advantage of him, but not in the mercenary way that others had taken advantage of Ellington; instead, he used Strayhorn to complete his thoughts, while giving Strayhorn the freedom to write on his own and enjoy at least some of the credit he deserved. Though Duke Ellington took credit for much of Strayhorn’s work, he did not maliciously drown out his partner. Ellington would make jokes onstage like, "Strayhorn does a lot of the work but I get to take the bows!"

Ellington was also a father figure for Billy: Strayhorn's own father was abusive, and Ellington saw and embraced his genius early on, when Strayhorn was only 23. In fact, they were really like family: shortly before Ellington went on his second European tour with his orchestra, in 1939, Ellington announced to his sister Ruth and his son Mercer that Strayhorn "is staying with us." Through Mercer, Strayhorn met his first partner, African-American musician Aaron Bridgers, with whom Strayhorn lived until Bridgers moved to Paris in 1947.

At the very least, Ellington always had the best things to say about Strayhorn. He once said: "Billy Strayhorn was always the most unselfish, the most patient, and the most imperturbable, no matter how dark the day. I am indebted to him for so much of my courage since 1939. He was my listener, my most dependable appraiser, and as a critic he would be the most clinical, but his background—both classical and modern—was an accessory to his own good taste and understanding." On another occasion, he said: "Billy Strayhorn was my right arm, my left arm, all the eyes in the back of my head, my brain waves in his head, and his in mine." In his autobiography, Duke Ellington listed what he considered Strayhorn's "four major moral freedoms": "freedom from hate, unconditionally; freedom from self-pity (even through all the pain and bad news); freedom from fear of possibly doing something that might possibly help another more than it might himself and freedom from the kind of pride that might make a man think that he was better than his brother or his neighbor."

Ellington wasn't the only one to speak of Billy in superlatives: "When Strayhorn came on the scene, he just blew us away," said Gerry Mulligan. "That's all I did— that's all I ever did—try to do what Billy Strayhorn did," remembered Gil Evans. Lena Horne was "madly in love with him". She thought he was a "beautiful, so handsome man" whose talent was "a gift from God." She wanted to marry him, but came to accept the fact that this would never be, because of the small matter that he was gay and also together with Aaron Bridgers at the time. He did, however, use his classical background to improve Horne's singing technique. He also helped her on a personal level: "Billy was the source of my consciousness raising," Lena said. "I had to learn to accept myself first, and that's what Billy helped me do."

Strayhorn participated in many civil rights causes. As a committed friend to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., he arranged and conducted "King Fit the Battle of Alabama'" for the Ellington Orchestra in 1963 for the historical revue (and album) My People, dedicated to King.

A few months before King's assassination, Strayhorn died from esophageal cancer, at 51. He was in the company of Bill Grove, then his partner of three years. Devastated after hearing the news, Ellington recorded a memorial album, And His Mother Called Him Bill, which included Strayhorn's beautiful piano balad Thank You For Everything, also known as Lotus Blossom. Ellington performed the song alone while the rest of his band was packing up, leaving him to reminisce about his creative soul mate, and the timeless music they made together.

There are some many great songs to choose from, so I decided to go with the jewel in the crown: the signature tune of the Duke Ellington orchestra, arguably the most famous of the many compositions to emerge from the collaboration of Ellington and Strayhorn. "Take the 'A' Train" was composed in 1939 and the title refers to the then-new A subway service that runs through New York City. The first (and most famous) commercial recording was made on February 15, 1941.

This is the original version:

This is Ella Fitzgerald collaborating with Duke Ellington:

Finally a word on the soundtrack of Otto Preminger's great movie, Anatomy of a Murder (1959). The jazz score of the movie was composed by Ellington & Strayhorn and played by Ellington's orchestra. Film historians recognize it "as a landmark—the first significant Hollywood film music by African Americans comprising non-diegetic music, that is, music whose source is not visible or implied by action in the film, like an on-screen band." The score avoids cultural stereotypes which previously characterized jazz scores and "rejected a strict adherence to visuals in ways that presaged the New Wave cinema of the '60s."

Here are the opening credits to Anatomy of a Murder: