He rode the A-Train into the Songwriter’s Hall of Fame.
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver Velez
Today marks the birthday of jazz composer, arranger, and pianist William “Billy” Strayhorn, known as "Strays" by the musicians he played with, and nicknamed “Sweet Pea” by Duke Ellington, born November 29, 1915 in Dayton Ohio. In 1984 he was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame
If you are familiar with the jazz composition, "Take the A Train," then you know something about not only Duke Ellington, but also Billy "Sweet Pea" Strayhorn, its composer.
Strayhorn joined Ellington's band in 1939, at the age of twenty-two. Ellington liked what he saw in Billy and took this shy, talented pianist under his wings. Neither one was sure what Strayhorn's function in the band would be, but their musical talents had attracted each other. By the end of the year Strayhorn had become essential to the Duke Ellington Band; arranging, composing, sitting-in at the piano. Billy made a rapid and almost complete assimilation of Ellington's style and technique. It was difficult to discern where one's style ended and the other's began. The results of the Ellington-Strayhorn collaboration brought much joy to the jazz world.
The history, of the family of William Thomas Strayhorn (his mother called him "Bill") goes back over a hundred years in Hillsborough. One set of great grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. George Craig, lived behind the present Farmer's Exchange. A great grand-mother was the cook for Robert E. Lee. Billy, however, was born in Dayton. Ohio in 1915. His mother, Lillian Young Strayhorn, brought her children to Hillsborough often. Billy was attracted to the piano that his grandmother, Elizabeth Craig Strayhorn owned. He played it from the moment he was tall enough to reach the keys. Even in those early years, when he played, his family would gather to listen and sing. In 1923 Billy entered the first grade in a little wooden school house, since destroyed. Soon after that, however, his mother moved her family to Pittsburgh to join Billy's father, James Nathaniel Strayhorn. Mr. Strayhorn had gotten a job there as a gas-maker and wire-puller. Charlotte Catlin began to give Billy private piano lessons. He played the piano everyday, sometimes becoming so engrossed that he would be late for his job. He also played in the high school band.
His father enrolled him in the Pittsburgh Musical institution where he studied classical music. He had more classical training than most jazz musicians of his time. Strayhorn lived a tremendously productive life. He influenced many people that he met, and yet remained very modest and unassuming all the while. For a time he coached Lena Home in classical music to broaden her knowledge and improve her style of singing. He toured the world with Ellington's band and for a brief time lived in Paris. Strayhorn's own music is internationally known and honored. It has been translated in French and Swedish. Some of Strayhorn's compositions are: "Chelsea Bridge," "Day Dream," "Johnny Come Lately," "Rain-check, and "Clementine." The pieces most frequently played are Ellington's theme song, "Take the A Train" and Ellington's signatory, "Lotus Blossom". Some of the suites on which he collaborated with. Ellington are: "Deep South Suite," 1947; the "Shakespearean Suite" or "Such Sweet Thunder," 1957; an arrangement of the "Nutcracker Suite," 1960; and the "Peer Gynt Suite," 1962. He and Ellington composed the "Queen's Suite" and gave the only pressing to Queen Elizabeth of England. Two of their suites, "Jump for Joy," 1950 and "My People," 1963 had as their themes the struggles and triumphs of blacks in the United States. Both included a narrative and choreography. The latter Strayhorn conducted at the Negro Exposition in Chicago in 1963. Another suite similar to these two was "A Drum Is a Woman." The "Far East Suite" was written after the band's tour of the East which was sponsored by the State Department.
Songwriters Hall of Fame: list of compositions
There is no question that one of the major contributions to world culture that has been gifted to us all has been jazz, born out of the black experience in the United States. At a time in our history when politics has turned the world upside down, installing white supremacists in the White House, many of us turn to music to help us get by, whether it is protest songs, gospel, R&B, or in my case — jazz. I was raised on jazz by my father, who grew up in the jazz world of Chicago. I will never forget the time when I was a small child and we were living on the campus of a small, segregated historically black college in Princess Anne Maryland, when we were descended upon by the entire Ellington band (not including Duke), some of whom were friends of my dad.
It is easy to love the music but not to think of the segregated conditions it was created and played in, in a world which treated black folks as a separate branch of humanity, never, no matter how talented or educated on an equal par with white people.
... Jim Crow was so accepted in the land that when Benny Goodman, during the 1930s, brought Teddy Wilson, and then Lionel Hampton, into his trio and quartets, it was briefly big national news. And Artie Shaw later hired Billie Holiday and Roy Eldridge, both of whom often met Mr. Crow when having to find accommodations separate from the white musicians when on the road.
When booked especially -- but not only -- in the South, members of black jazz bands had to be put up in homes or other places in black neighborhoods. Nor were they seated in restaurants outside of those neighborhoods. In a 1944 New Yorker profile of Duke Ellington, Richard Boyer told of a white St. Louis policeman enthusiastically greeting Duke Ellington after a performance, saying: "If you'd been a white man, Duke, you'd have been a great musician."
With his customary regal manner, Duke, smiling coolly, answered, "I guess things would have been different if I'd been a white man." Later, Duke told me how, when he was touring the deep South from 1934 to 1936, he sidelined Jim Crow.
It should come as no surprise that Strayhorn was dedicated to civil rights.
A man of passionate beliefs, Strayhorn became a committed civil rights advocate and was a close friend of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In 1963, he arranged and conducted the Ellington Orchestra in “King Fought the Battle of 'Bam” for the historical revue My People, dedicated to Dr. King.
One of the other aspects of Strayhorn’s life, which is now being explored and discussed in both film and biography was that he was openly gay. There have also been articles like this one in The Advocate.
He Wrote the Songs: “Prolific Gay Composer Billy Strayhorn-Who Penned Music for Nat King Cole and Duke Ellington-Finally Gets His Due in a New Documentary and CD”
Because he remained hidden in plain sight, Strayhorn could conduct his personal life, including sharing a brownstone with his partner for many years, under less scrutiny. Not that this completely shielded him from discrimination in the hurly-burly, heterosexual world of jazz. He often had to write out individual charts of his pieces for every band member, as Ellington's official copyist refused to do so for him. Likewise, the bandleader's homophobic publicist made sure Duke got the lion's share of the credit--and press--for their later collaborations.
Lush Life also follows Strayhorn's adventures outside of his boss's immediate orbit: traveling to Paris to write music for an ill-fated Orson Welles stage production of Faust starring Eartha Kitt (who makes a brief cameo here); becoming involved in civil rights with his platonic love and secondary muse, Lena Horne; cooking beans and ham hocks in beer at house parties.
At the time of his death in 1967 only one state, Illinois (1962) had repealed sodomy laws on their books.
Prior to 1962, sodomy was a felony in every state, punished by a lengthy term of imprisonment and/or hard labor. In that year, the Model Penal Code (MPC) — developed by the American Law Institute to promote uniformity among the states as they modernized their statutes — struck a compromise that removed consensual sodomy from its criminal code while making it a crime to solicit for sodomy. In 1962 Illinois adopted the recommendations of the Model Penal Code and thus became the first state to remove criminal penalties for consensual sodomy from its criminal code,[5] almost a decade before any other state. Over the years, many of the states that did not repeal their sodomy laws had enacted legislation reducing the penalty. At the time of the Lawrence decision in 2003, the penalty for violating a sodomy law varied very widely from jurisdiction to jurisdiction among those states retaining their sodomy laws. The harshest penalties were in Idaho, where a person convicted of sodomy could earn a life sentence. Michigan followed, with a maximum penalty of 15 years imprisonment while repeat offenders got life.
The PBS series Independent Lens aired a documentary about Strayhorn. It won an Emmy at the 29th Annual News & Documentary Emmy Awards (2008) for Best Documentary.
Today, historians and scholars agree that Billy Strayhorn remains one of the most under-recognized American composers in history. Born in 1915, Strayhorn chose to live openly as a gay black man. It was perhaps this decision—and his lifelong devotion to Ellington—which contributed to his near anonymity as a major American composer. Ironically, Strayhorn is the composer of many of the world’s most defining and recognizable jazz standards. While Ellington is arguably the most influential and celebrated jazz composer of the 20th century, Strayhorn is unrecognized. BILLY STRAYHORN: LUSH LIFE poses answers to the question of who was Billy Strayhorn, and why is he still relatively unknown?
Strayhorn was openly gay during a highly homophobic era. He was active in civil rights before it became a popular cause. Yet, as courageous as he could be, Strayhorn found it a challenge to receive a fair share of the unique musical achievements and the considerable profits he helped to generate. On the surface, their partnership seemed perfect. Ellington's ebullient charm led him instinctively to the spotlight, while writers speculated that Strayhorn shied from a more public role, both to maintain his privacy and to avoid being persecuted for his homosexuality. Recent scholarship, however, challenges this assumption, asserting that Strayhorn lived an openly gay life and deeply enjoyed concert performances.
BILLY STRAYHORN: LUSH LIFE not only emphasizes the vast contributions Strayhorn made to Ellington’s oeuvre, but also features his own newly discovered compositions, with world premieres of his music featuring singers Elvis Costello and Dianne Reeves, pianists Hank Jones and Bill Charlap, saxophonist Joe Lovano and guitarist Russell Malone. With interviews, performances and archival footage, BILLY STRAYHORN: LUSH LIFE showcases Strayhorn’s gifts and illuminates the issues that deprived him of deserved recognition.
The title of the PBS documentary is also the name of a major biography of Strayhorn’s life and music. Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn, by David Hajdu
David Hajdu is the music critic for The Nation and a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Before joining The Nation in January 2015, he served for more than ten years as the music critic for The New Republic. He is the author of Positively 4th Street (FSG, 2001), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; The Ten-Cent Plague (FSG, 2008), a finalist for the Eisner award; and Heroes and Villains, also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He lives in Manhattan with his family.
The book was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award
Billy Strayhorn (1915-67) was one of the greatest composers in the history of American music, the creator of a body of work that includes such standards as "Take the 'A' Train." Yet all his life Strayhorn was overshadowed by his friend and collaborator Duke Ellington, with whom he worked for three decades as the Ellington Orchestra's ace songwriter and arranger. A "definitive" corrective (USA Today) to decades of patchwork scholarship and journalism about this giant of jazz, David Hajdu's Lush Life is a vibrant and absorbing account of the "lush life" that Strayhorn and other jazz musicians led in Harlem and Paris. While composing some of the most gorgeous American music of the twentieth century, Strayhorn labored under a complex agreement whereby Ellington took the bows for his work. Until his life was tragically cut short by cancer and alcohol abuse, the small, shy composer carried himself with singular style and grace as one of the few jazzmen to be openly homosexual. Lush Life has sparked an enthusiastic revival of interest in Strayhorn's work and is already acknowledged as a jazz classic.
Lest we think only older folks are performing Strayhorn classics — here’s a cover of Lush Life by Queen Latifah.
There are too many videos of Strayhorn’s music, and too many artists who have covered his songs and compositions to post here today. Many are listed here.
Enjoy.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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It was 1990, and black America had been in the throes of Republican leadership for a decade. The Cold War had not begun to cool. Mandela—viewed then as a revolutionary leader of the African National Congress trying to destroy the white-minority racist apartheid regime of South Africa, not the cuddly teddy bear of reconciliation of a democratic one-party state that would define him later—had been recently freed thanks to a worldwide movement on his behalf. A critic in the crowd asked tough questions about Mandela’s support of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and Cuban leader Fidel Castro.
I remember Mandela’s words as if it was yesterday: “One of the mistakes that some political analysts make is to think that their enemies should be our enemies. That we can’t and will never do.” The crowd exploded in applause for almost a minute after the first sentence. When was the last time a black leader sounded that intellectually decolonized on national television? Since Stokely Carmichael in the late 1960s?
“We have our own struggle, which we are conducting,” Mandela patiently explained, “… and our attitude toward any country is determined by the attitude of that country to our struggle.” More thunder from the crowd.
And then to the point: “Yasser Arafat, Col. Gaddafi, Fidel Castro support our struggle to the hilt,” not just in rhetoric. “That is the position.”
Fidel Castro, who died on Friday at the age of 90, believed in and actively supported liberation struggles that freed oppressed people, from the Motown era to this morning. Because of that belief, he had a special relationship with African people, including African Americans.
Don Rojas, a longtime activist who was a former press secretary for Grenadian Prime Minister Maurice Bishop, a Marxist revolutionary politically inspired by Castro, remembers this era well in an email comment this afternoon: “His concrete support to the liberation struggles in Southern Africa will go down in the annals of history as one of the most amazing demonstrations of solidarity in modern history.”
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Two-year-old Zeka screams as a health worker measures the circumference of her arm while another holds her legs and presses her flesh. The nurses agree: Zeka has clear signs of edema, a swelling condition caused by extreme hunger.
“She will live, but she needs to go to hospital. The situation in this area is much worse than when we were here just a few weeks ago.
“It looks like 10% of children here are now malnourished. It will certainly get worse,” said chief health assistant Ane Banda, who is leading a government assessment of rural areas near Nsanje, close to the Malawian border with Mozambique.
“We have not eaten for days,” said Zeka’s mother, who has been living off wild fruit, water lilies and the kindness of neighbours but has been told to attend a food handout in her village the next day.
Malawi is one of seven southern African countries on the brink of starvation and in a situation that the UN says needs requires immediate action.
It has been devastated by a combination of a long drought caused by a strong El Niño weather cycle and climate change. Successive maize harvests have failed, leaving communities there and in Zambia, Congo, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and elsewhere, desperate for food.
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At first, the mood at the demonstration staged on a high school playing field in the city of Aba, Nigeria, was almost festive. Dozens of demonstrators, calling for Biafran independence, waved red, black and green flags, and danced, clapped and chanted. Within hours, the military moved in and opened fire with live bullets.
The flags toppled and were picked up by soldiers who used the wooden flagpoles to beat protesters who had fallen, as others fled. The scene plays out on a video taken by a witness and offered to the rights group Amnesty International.
The protest on Feb. 9 received little international attention at the time, but a report last week by Amnesty International has cast a spotlight on the incident and an ongoing conflict that has gone largely unnoticed outside Africa.
The region in southeast Nigeria saw a deadly civil war and starvation in 1967 after it declared itself an independent country, Biafra. The government imposed a food blockade, and around 2 million people died, mostly from starvation.
Renewed calls for secession have sprung up in recent years, led by a separatist group, the Indigenous People of Biafra, which emerged in 2012. The pro-Biafra movement involves mainly the Igbo people, a group that long has felt marginalized and neglected by Nigerian governments.
The Amnesty International report, released Thursday, accused Nigerian security forces of a “chilling campaign” of torture and killings to clamp down on a pro-Biafran independence movement. Between August 2015 and August 2016, Nigeria’s military killed at least 150 pro-Biafran protesters, according to the report, warning the actual numbers killed could be much higher.
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If you’re black and work for the federal government, you were among a small, but very anxious, crowd of election night viewers who watched the results stream in with all the intensity of a football fan who had just bet his house on a bad playoff game. As any chance at an Electoral College victory vanished for Hillary Clinton, disbelief and the bottomless horror of what lurks around the corner quickly set in.
Less than two weeks after the four political horsemen rode in, your greatest fears were confirmed: President-elect Donald Trump, along with gloating congressional Republicans, wasted little time in announcing ambitious plans to further downsize the federal government.
For black folks—particularly black middle-class families that have historically (despite segregation and institutional hostility) relied on public sector jobs as a solid form of professional growth and upward mobility—this latest development might well be viewed as the end of their economic world as they know it. (See the Center for American Progress’ Farah Ahmad’s observations about that.)
We did see this coming. Congressional Republicans in recent years have been escalating longtime efforts to scale back the role, size and impact of the federal government, or what they’ve mordantly drilled into the public brain as “federal government overreach.”
White voters ate that up in droves this year as 2016 became the defining moment for that war. Ironically, only two (and a half, when counting the Maine split) states out of the 20 most dependent on federal funding were not Donald Trump Electoral College pickups. From battle cries for Affordable Care Act repeal to forcing government shutdowns that, politically, never backfired, Republicans spent an entire two terms of the Obama White House railing against the exaggerated “evils” of federal encroachment.
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A university professor examines how the term was viewed by her diaspora students. Ebony: Who Gets to Be African-American?
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uring this year’s presidential campaign, there was no shortage of conversation around race and voting, and political pundits often generalized about groups of voters, reducing, say, all Black, Latino or female voters into a single, shared mindset.
Such generalization is not only inaccurate, but excludes important dialogue within and around communities.
After all, who gets to be African-American? In the winter of 2004, as the first African-American woman at Macalester College to receive tenure, I was asked by some of my Black students to attend a discussion about life as an African-American student on a majority-white campus. What ensued instead was wholly unexpected—and preoccupies me to this day as a full professor at Northwestern University, who writes, lectures and publishes extensively on Black identities in the U.S and Europe.
Instead of sharing and then bonding over experiences of bigotry, the students began to discuss the ways they felt estranged from one another. The first student to speak had been born in Nigeria but raised in the United States, and felt that she was sometimes viewed as “not really” African-American. Another student responded that the “Nigerian-American” student enjoyed the distinct advantage of having two parents who “shared a common culture.” She, by contrast, had to contend with a mother from the Caribbean and a father who was West African—which meant endless discussions and debates around the dinner table about Blackness…but a Blackness that did not tally with the expressions, views, and cultural knowledge enjoyed by her “African American” classmates from Kindergarten on up.
Finally having a space in which they could talk about differences in Blackness, their confessions and reflections continued until the time came for them to return to their dorms to study.
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Voices and Soul
by
Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
We are not born American, anymore than we are born Christian, Muslim or Jew. We are not born a Hindu or a Jain, a Sikh or an Atheist. We are not born French, Ugandan, Chinese or Uzbek. We may become those things in time, but at birth, we are from Dust. When we die, we become Dust. Can anyone really, with the naked eye, divide one particle of Dust from another? Can our differences be so great that those differences are easily made out in a maelstrom of particles dusted across the Universe? What does it mean then, to be American? To be French or Ugandan? To be Chinese or Uzbek? What does it mean to be a Christian, a Muslim or a Jew? A Hindu or a Jain? A Sikh or an Atheist? Human ego, small-minded bigotry or national identity might demand that we are special, the few among the many. But as it was in the Beginning, so it shall be in the End, we are nothing more than...
Common Dust
And who shall separate the dust What later we shall be: Whose keen discerning eye will scan And solve the mystery?
The high, the low, the rich, the poor, The black, the white, the red, And all the chromatique between, Of whom shall it be said:
Here lies the dust of Africa; Here are the sons of Rome; Here lies the one unlabelled, The world at large his home!
Can one then separate the dust? Will mankind lie apart, When life has settled back again The same as from the start?
Georgia Douglas Johnson
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