IF winter comes can spring be far behind? Composer, pianist arranger Billy Strayhorn's comparative winter was a long one, compounded of the mixed blessing of being gay, black and phenomenally talented, and life in a plush ghetto as the musical alter ego of one of the most distinguished and original American composers this century. Now, 30 years after his death from cancer at the age of 51, a posthumous spring is on the way works of his never previously recorded are on release and David Hajdu's impressive biography, movingly detailing his personal and professional life, reveals an artist much more considerable than has been previously recognised.
For Strayhorn lived in the long shadow of Duke Ellington, whose organisation - and inner circle - he joined in the late 1930s and with whom he had a chameleon like empathy in musical terms. Ellington, grandiloquent and charming, already hailed by the British classical composer and conductor, Constant Lambert, as the greatest popular composer since Strauss, epitomised the sophistication that was - probably - both a refuge and an artistic necessity for Strayhorn.
An aesthete to his fingertips but never a dilettante, Strayhorn was just out of college when he wrote one of his most famous pieces,
Lush Life. A beguiling marriage of highly individual melody, harmony and lyrics with a world weary, cafe society sensibility that another gay talent, Cole Porter, would have warmed to, it came to epitomise its onlie begetter as man and artist. It's redolent of a period and a social milieu - Thirties and Forties America and a smart aleck.
New York set that drank to keep its abstract verse from going dry - but, because it catches a universality behind its "five o'clocktails" veneer, somehow transcends it and, as a result, endures.
For someone who grew up on the wrong side of the tracks in early Twenties Pittsburgh - a loving mother shielded him from the drunken frustrations of a disappointed father - Lush Life is a remarkable achievement. But Strayhorn was not cut from any standard measure. His was a musical sensibility no less distinctive for being so apparently facile and for having the capacity to take on the colour of whatever was required. Had he been born white, or two generations later, a career in classical music would have beckoned; he wasn't, so he was forced, like even financially secure middle class black musicians, into jazz.
To someone like this Ellington was probably seductive on several levels. The Ducal love you madly ambience - part cynicism, part charm, part protective colouring, part whatever turns you on attitude - must have been a haven to a gay, black and gifted composer. And there was the professional reputation, not to mention the finances. Ellington, darling of the dancers at the Apollo in Harlem and the white critics, had street cred uptown and downtown, while his organisation picked up the tab for Strayhorn's almost sybaritic pleasure in pink shirts and fine food and drink for almost three decades, giving him a financial security rare for most artists.
There's no free lunch, of course. Despite the volume of composing and arranging Strayhorn produced for the Duke - much of it among the finest in the Ducal canon - Ellington was often careless to the point of exploitation about giving him credit and copyright. Even where the boss acknowledged him frilly, the perception was that the lieutenant was merely carrying out the dictates of his master's voice.
It went further than that. The music cognoscenti knew Strayhorn's worth, but when Sinatra tried to recruit the by now somewhat unwilling Ducal lieutenant, Ellington, with breathtaking cynicism, scuppered the move. The cumulative result, for Strayhorn, was a partial but persistent artistic eclipse, and a frustration hidden behind a perennial cool, emotionally released by the persistent alcohol abuse that, likely, bequeathed him the oesophagal cancer that killed him.
As Hajdu reveals, the truth was more complex and more affirmative of Strayhorn's real artistic stature Not alone did he write the Ellington orchestra's debonair, unbuttoned signature tune, Take The A Train and tone poems like the diaphanous Chelsea Bridge (inspired, typically, by a Whistler painting, though Whistler never painted that particular Thames subject), but he also achieved extended works for which Duke got more credit than he did.
The Shakespearean Such Sweet Thunder suite is one example; there was joint credit, but Ellington got all the acclaim. There are other instances. As Hajdu reveals, much of the Duke's later output was really by his in house amanuensis. Strayhorn, hooked from his childhood on Ravel, Debussy and Cesar Franck, married his classical background and inclinations more successfully - and individually - with jazz than his boss did.
This is not to belittle Ellington so as to exalt his Admirable Crichton. Strayhorn, as Hajdu's book unveils, was both a Ducal seryant, a co equal and more than either. Possibly he was, even more than Duke, culturally and emotionally displaced. Like Ellington, he wasn't middle class and white. And, like him, he was classically trained both belonged to an emergent New World culture that still looked to the Old World for respectability. Unlike Duke, he had little childhood security and he was gay. It's to Hajdu's immense credit that he, manages to give all of these implications, somehow, a run for their money without, for a moment, reducing Strayhorn to an aesthetic, social, sexual and racial symbol. Strayhorn deserves - and gets - much more than that in this exceptional biography.