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Billy Strayhorn (1915-1967)
Few composers have been so unjustly overlooked as Billy Strayhorn. If he is mentioned at all, it is usually as a footnote to the glorious career of that other African-American composer in whose shadow he worked: Duke Ellington. Generally seen as Duke’s assistant, Strayhorn in truth was a highly imaginative composer-arranger in his own right, who wrote and orchestrated a significant portion of the Ellington orchestra’s repertoire. Strayhorn’s work was outstanding in terms of harmonic and melodic invention, orchestration, and structural ingenuity, fusing compositional conceptions that stemmed from European classical music with more American idioms. Still, his music was firmly rooted in his African-American heritage. Strayhorn sought to express a complex emotional life through his music, and many of his works mirrored his still-waters-run-deep-personality.
William Thomas Strayhorn -- born in 1915 in Dayton, Ohio -- grew up in Pittsburgh, where he started to play the piano at an early age. His gravitation to classical piano music, along with an interest in literature and the arts, was quite uncommon for someone who lived in one of the Steel City’s poorest districts. Strayhorn took classical piano lessons and theory classes. Once in high school he worked his way up through the school’s classical aggregations and eventually made it to soloist of the Senior Orchestra, performing piano concertos. After his high school graduation in 1934, he realized that his career perspectives as a black classical pianist were grim and so he turned to idioms considered more acceptable for an African American: theater music and jazz. While still in high school Strayhorn had started to compose as well. One of his best known compositions stems from this period: Lush Life, a through-composed song with exceptionally urbane lyrics, given that the author was still in his teens. The work displayed Strayhorn’s ability to “marry melody, words and harmony” as Ellington once said, and it foreshadowed the eloquence of his later scores. With his trio the Mad Hatters, modeled after Benny Goodman’s group, Strayhorn truly directed his efforts to jazz and improvisation, incorporating into his writing and playing what he learned from jazz recordings and radio. He also wrote arrangements for a number of territory bands in the Pittsburgh area, and thus, when Strayhorn joined Ellington in 1939, he was an experienced composer-arranger. Though at first his tasks were unspecified, within a year Strayhorn was a full working partner of Ellington, taking care of the music for all the so-called Ellington small-units, and of virtually all the vocal arrangements for the Ellington orchestra. Behind the scenes, Strayhorn soon contributed significantly (though still uncredited) to the other repertory. The 1941 recordings of Take the ‘A’ Train, Chelsea Bridge and Raincheck first introduced Strayhorn to Ellington’s larger audience. In the decades that followed, Strayhorn provided the orchestra with numerous compositions and arrangements, collaborating with Ellington on film scores, theater shows and so-called suites, including Such Sweet Thunder and the Far-East Suite.
Away from Ellington’s orchestra, Strayhorn composed a significant number of works for a wide variety of ensembles and occasions. In his final works, composed when he was already terminally ill with cancer, Strayhorn returned to a more classical style. Unlike his other compositions, pieces such as Blood Count and Suite for the Duo lack any gentleness. They seem to express the disillusionment of a composer who was dying before his time, and had never received the recognition he deserved.
Only after his death it turned out that Strayhorn had written much more than was performed or recorded. Hundreds of compositions and arrangements, often of superb quality, had been shelved. The Dutch Jazz Orchestra made a selection and recorded four CDs of previously unknown works. © Dutch Jazz Orchestra Billy Strayhorn - Dutch Jazz Orchestra CDs Special thanks to Gregory and Thelma Morris,
and the staff of The Archives Center, Smithsonian Institution.
Books
David Hajdu. Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn.
New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1996.
Walter van de Leur. Something to Live For: The Music of Billy Strayhorn.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Scores
Copyright © 2009, Dutch Jazz Orchestra. All rights reserved.
