HAPPY BIRTHDAY DUKE

BY GREGORY ENNS

The arched doorway was wide open but it seemed nobody was home. No cars were in the gravel driveway, a rare occurrence at the A.E. Backus Studio in Fort Pierce. Inside, I could only hear the strains of Johnny Hodges wailing soulfully on his alto sax from a record spinning on the stereo. The music was a pretty good sign that the old man was at home.

If the great Backus, Florida’s pre-eminent landscape painter, wasn’t in his studio painting or on his wrought-iron chaise lounge reading the paper, you could usually find him holding forth in the kitchen. And there he was this day, leaning back in one of his captain’s chairs, his hands over the sides of his face, a few rums under his belt. He was so absorbed with the music of the Duke Ellington Orchestra and its greatest sideman that it almost seemed as if he were having some kind of religious experience. I hated to interrupt him, so I just sat and listened until Hodges’ silence rousted Backus back to consciousness.

Like generations of children growing up in Fort Pierce, I spent a big part of my childhood at Backus’ studio, a sort of community center for kids who didn’t have any organized activities after school. If you spent time at the studio, you learned to appreciate the music of Ellington. Or perhaps more correctly: you didn’t learn to appreciate it as much as you came to know it by osmosis, for Backus often had Ellington playing on his stereo.

Although he came from a musical family, nearly all of whom could play an instrument, Backus never took up music himself. Nevertheless, he had varied and sophisticated tastes, devoting many of his waking and painting hours listening to his stereo. During the day, while painting at his easel in his studio, he stayed tuned mostly to an easy-listening station, often whistling along with the music. But in the afternoons, after the painting had been done, he’d turn to the music he loved and his expansive — if not shabby — collection of records.

A man of few possessions, Backus seemed only to indulge himself in 33 rpms, all of which were kept untidily in a large bookshelf near his stereo. In there, you could find “Madame Butterfly” and “Carmen” and “The Mikado” and a small collection of Stravinsky. There were even obscure albums like “Gus Mancuso and Friends,” a title by a jazz euphonium player. It was obvious the ones Backus listened to the most, for they were scratched from repeated playing. They sat barely housed in jackets reinforced with masking tape or totally exposed with no jackets at all. To most of these dowdy and orphaned albums belonged the music of Edward Kennedy Ellington, born 110 years ago come April 29.

Walking into the studio that day was my most vivid memory of Backus’devotion to Ellington, although there were many more. There was, for example, the big argument that nearly cost Backus his friendship with Bob Stevenson, a Stony Brook anthropologist who’d often visit him in the winter. The topic of debate: Who made the biggest contributions to music in the 20th Century? Stevenson touted Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones while Backus hailed Ellington and his orchestra. Then there was the week of mourning (and drinking) Backus observed the year Johnny Hodges died in 1970.

My own exposure to Ellington through Backus made me a modest fan. By my senior year in college, I had started my own small collection of Ellington, beginning with a 1957 album called “Ellington Indigos” that my older brother, Michael, had given me. Though tightly orchestrated, unlike much of the Ellington music I’d come later to appreciate, it was a terrific introduction to the world of Ellington and featured some of his greatest artists, including Hodges, tenor saxophonist Paul Gonsalves, violinist and trumpeter Ray Nance and baritone saxophonist Harry Carney.

My appreciation for Ellington continued but was heightened by Backus’ death in 1990. Like many of the kids who grew up at the studio (now called Backus Brats), the music of Ellington was consoling in the years following his death.

Though I knew vaguely about the music of Ellington, I never knew much about the musician himself until 1997. That was the year the James L. and Jack Knight Foundation was offering a mid-career fellowship at the University of North Carolina to journalists who wanted to take a break and pursue a semester of any subject of their choosing.

Prodded on by my boss at the St. Petersburg Times to apply for the fellowship (did she need a break from me?), I came up with a proposal. Perhaps inspired by the great Stevenson/Backus debate, I submitted a plan to study Ellington and where he ranks among 20th century American composers. To my surprise, I was awarded the fellowship and headed off to Chapel Hill with my wife and three kids for four months of immersing myself in the world of Duke Ellington.

During my time at Chapel Hill, besides attending jazz and composition classes and studying under Ellington scholar Jim Ketch, I read more than 20 books — all the UNC and Duke libraries had at the time — on Ellington and his sidemen. I also had the opportunity to meet and interview several of Ellington’s sidemen, including the trumpeter Clark Terry and drummer Louie Bellson.

I ended up writing a research paper on my findings and basically concluded that because Ellington wrote in the jazz idiom, the biggest development in 20th century American music, that he was certainly the most original composer and ranked with the likes of Aaron Copland, Charles Ives, Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Kern, George Gershwin and Richard Rodgers.

That was my scholarly conclusion. But I guess I also had second tier of research going. I wanted to find out why the music of Ellington would bring somebody like Backus to a near-religious stupor.

In this informal research, for example, I learned what tune (“Jeep’s Blues”) Backus was listening to that day at the studio. Though I remembered the tune clearly blaring from the stereo, I never knew its name. I also learned that several researchers had studied the mystical quality of Hodges’ playing, with at least one concluding that it was likely due to his Cherokee ancestry. Ellington himself revealed the connection Backus may have had to the music when he said of Hodges: “His sultry solos were not done in an attempt to blow more notes than anybody else. He just wanted to play them in true character, reaching into his soul for them and automatically reaching everybody else’s souls.”

There were numerous similarities that I could draw between Ellington and Backus. Both transcended the barriers of race in their time. Ellington, who was African-American, celebrated black America in his music and broke many racial barriers of the day, including performing at Carnegie Hall. Backus, who was white, was color blind where skin tone was concerned and was one of the few people to throw racially integrated parties in the Jim Crow South. More importantly, he also inspired and nurtured the Highwaymen movement of
African-American landscape painters.

Both artists seized the visual subjects closest to them for inspiration. For Ellington, a train or car ride or the smells and sounds of a Harlem airshaft could prompt a composition. In fact, Ellington had showed talent as a painter while younger and won a scholarship to the prestigious Pratt Institute of Art. He also returned to painting toward the end of his life. His sense of the visual was carried into his music and he often composed with a picture or something in mind. Even today, some researchers compare his compositions to an impressionistic painting.

Backus, too, seized on those things closest to him for artistic inspiration: a hibiscus, a palmetto hammock or a nearby poinsianna tree. One of his favorite quotes was, “Seize upon that which is nearest and make from it your work of art.”

Both artists were prodigious and incapable of fatigue, at least where their art was concerned. Ellington wrote more than 1,000 pieces of music in his career and never rested on his laurels. For example, a few days after President Richard Nixon hosted Ellington’s 70th birthday at the White House in 1969, Ellington was back on the road, performing at a high school in Middle America.

Backus, whose works were owned by presidents, senators and captains of industry, continued to paint until the day he died at age 84 in 1990, a half-finished painting remaining on his easel.

During my research, the similarity that most struck me was their approach to endings. It seemed like a melancholy fell on Backus as he approached the ending of a painting. Often, it would sit on his easel for days untouched, with just a few strokes needed for completion.

So, too, for Ellington, who died in 1974. During my interview with trumpeter Clark Terry, he told me that Ellington asked him to write the ending to “Newport Suite” because Ellington never liked to write endings, viewing the art of his music instead as a state of becoming.