CHAPTER 12 | FOUR GIANTS OF EARLY JAZZ 299
her word for it.” He started piano lessons at seven, studied commercial art in high
school, and began playing piano professionally with Washington-area dance
orchestras at seventeen. He seems always to have had a talent for leadership.
In 1923 Ellington moved to New York. For the next several years he led groups
in midtown clubs. He also began to record. Late in 1926 Ellington hired as his man-
ager Irving Mills, who belonged to a white music-publishing family. Personal con-
nections with bootleggers enabled Mills to book Ellington and his musicians into
the Cotton Club in Harlem, where the band entertained white audiences, playing
for dancing and fl oor shows over the next three years (1927–30). It was here that
Ellington hit his stride as a composer. Working with such distinctive-sounding
Ellington’s sidemen musicians as saxophonists Harry Carney and Johnny Hodges,
clarinetist Barney Bigard, trumpeters Bubber Miley and Cootie Williams, and
trombonist Joe “Tricky Sam” Nanton, he fashioned an ensemble that, while play-
ing a varied repertory, specialized in his own original music. Between 1932 and
1942 Ellington traveled the United States, made two successful European tours,
and recorded extensively with a fourteen-piece orchestra: six brass (three trum-
pets, three trombones), four reeds (two alto saxophones plus a tenor and a bari-
tone sax, all doubling on clarinet), and a rhythm section of four (his own piano,
plus double bass, guitar, and drums). Through these years he produced larger
works to complement his short instrumental pieces and popular songs such as
“Mood Indigo,” “Sophisticated Lady,” and “Take the A Train” (the latter composed
by Billy Strayhorn, who joined the band as a composer and arranger in 1939). In
1943 Ellington began a series of annual Carnegie Hall concerts with Black, Brown,
and Beige, a fi fty-minute suite in fi ve large sections, commemorating the history of
African people in the New World. (We’ll have more to say about Ellington’s concert
music in chapter 13.)New YorkEllington’s sidemenK The Fletcher Henderson
Orchestra, New York,
1924–25. The trumpet
player in the middle of
the back row is Louis
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