(Above: A 32-year-old Queen Elizabeth meets Duke Ellington at the Leeds Festiva. 1958)
When Gary Crosby became the first British jazz musician to be awarded the Queen’s Medal for Music in 2018 after having already been appointed an OBE in 2009, he was surprised by the Queen’s knowledge of his genre. “During our conversation about her appreciation of music and instruments, I was just floored for a minute when she began talking about how they're amplified ," he told host Cerys Matthews on BBC Radio Two during his Blues Show. "I just sat there and thought, 'Is this for real? The Queen is speaking to me about re-amplification of acoustic string instruments.” She told him that it specifically bothered her when acoustic instruments were used at festivals and concerts which resulted in their over-amplification. “It’s just never going to sound the same, is it?” she asked, this woman whose life was about never being too loud or inappropriate which even informed her view of music. This week England is coming to terms with her death. It’s just never going to be the same, is it?
Queen Elizabeth grew up in the era of big band music - Tommy Dorsey, Count Basie, and the Brits Fred Elizalde, Ray Noble, Harry Roy and Jack Hylton. But Duke Ellington. was her favorite. She and Prince Philip danced privately to Ellington on their honeymoon and continued to dance privately to him during their marriage. When Prince Philip died, I thought of their having danced to Ellington in drafty castle bedrooms. I like to think that part of that ritual was not asking a servant to put on the record but taking one out where they secretly hid their Ellington stash and did it themselves as they then danced in each others arms remembering those first days after their marriage. I’m sure the marriage at times could be drafty itself. Ellington warmed them up just as their love of him warms the memory of them as people and not just characters in their country’s narrative who had to be coldly stalwart in staying the course and doing their duties. Ellington, the quiet man of jazz as they were the quiet royals of England, was their kind of guy. They must have overlooked his appropriating the peerage title because, like them, he was dignified with a regality that was more than hereditary; it registered as instinctive. He may not have inherited the the title of Duke, but damn if it didn’t perfectly fit. Elizabeth had no thoughts of being queen during her childhood when she was beginning to dream about who and what she could be in life - maybe something to do with horses - until her uncle abdicated and her father became king in 1936 when she was ten years old. In a twist of fate - an unexpected turn of the monarchical narrative that would foreshadow others in the familial subplot that is always a part of it - she did inherit the royal title, but damn if it didn’t fit perfectly. And she always wore it sensibly, whether she was a young glamorous queen or a troubled mother in middle-age or in her dowager years not playing the dowager but walking her Corgis in Scotland and heading for the horses back in England and through it all dancing to Ellington with her husband.
She and Ellington met at the Leeds Festival in 1958, which usually focused on classical music. Ellington hadn’t been back to England since his first tour there in 1933 when he ran into discrimination even though he was there under the sponsorship of British big band leader, Jack Hylton, and The Radio Times was trumpeting his arrival as “the aristocrat of Harlem and “the world’s finest syncopator.” Upon that arrival having been in London for only a few hours, he and Hylton headed to the BBC Radio Studios to have a conversation about their upcoming shows. “Do you think this jazz will have a permanent place in the annals of music?” Hylton asked him. Ellington responded, “Well, of course, jazz has got to be taken seriously, and it has to be serious and descriptive in order to be accepted by serious musicians. It is the only music that is able to describe the present period in the history of the world. I don’t think that any other tempos or any other melodies are expressive of this age as much as jazz is, and for this reason - if for no other - I think that our jazz of today will live on for years to come.”
When the Queen was introduced to Ellington they held up the receiving line at the Leeds Festival for a few minutes so she could express her admiration for his work and he could flirt. She asked him if it were his first time in England. He told her about his 1933 trip but “that was way before you were born,” which was sheer flattery since she had been born in 1926. They both knew he had overdone it a bit - which happens with flattery when you’ve realized too late that you are actually flirting. She realized it around the same time Ellington did and decided to play along. “She gave me a real American look,” he recalled, “as if to say, ‘very cool man, but that was a bit too much.” But he went even further after she told him that she regretted that she had been unable to attend any of his concerts on the tour. Melody Maker, reporting on the Festival and their encounter, told its readers that Ellington’s “face puckered into a huge smile,” another sort of American look when sophistication gives way to a naif’s needy joy. “In that case, your Majesty, I’d like to write a very special composition for you—a real royal suite,” he said, confirming his crush by offering to document it.
Ellington later that night sketched out the six movements in what he would call The Queen’s Suite. He and his collaborator, Billy Strayhorn, conceptualized the composition around the wondrous beauty that Ellington had encountered in the natural world during his travels, which included the mysterious call of a mockingbird in Florida, a balletic swarm of hundreds of lightening bugs along the Ohio River which seemed to be choreographed to a chorus of bullfrogs, and the Northern Lights suddenly encountered on a deserted stretch of a long and lonely Canadian roadway. He and his band recorded The Queen’s Suite in 1959. A master was prepared at Columbia Records Studios, a gold disc which Ellington sent privately to Queen Elizabeth. Ellington retained the rights to the work and demanded that it not be released to the pubic until two years after his death. He reimbursed Columbia Records the $2500 it cost to make the recording as a promised gift to the queen. No one but a few in his inner circle knew of the composition when he was alive. When it was finally released in 1976 along with two other compositions under the title The Ellington Suites, it won the Grammy for Best Jazz Performance by a Big Band. Ellington’s longtime producer, Irving Townsend, claimed the composer worked harder on the piece than anything else he’d ever seen. My favorite section of The Queen’s Suite is “The Single Petal of a Rose.” It is a lone Ellington playing the piano with a resolute, realistic longing - but longing nonetheless. It is a kind of lullaby for it hoping it will finally sleep. Maybe he had more than just a crush.
You can listen to Ellington playing “The Single Petal of a Rose” here.
This is great--thank you.