Duke Ellington, Live at the Aquacade

Fate’s being kind to me. It doesn’t want me to be too famous too young.

Duke Ellington

A paycheck. A nadir. Hired as accompaniment for sequined swimmers in an amphitheater in Queens. To keep the band working. A footnote.

I was born at Newport in ’56, Ellington was fond of saying. Born again, to be fair, ushered by Paul Gonsalves’s twenty-seven chorus solo and a white woman’s dance. Born aloft a tritone, tethered to the breath of the thirty-six-year-old’s tenor sax. Though just months earlier,

Sir Duke was made to descend to the speckled stage of the Aquacade, in the heart of Queens. For six weeks, Ellington and his orchestra—minus Gonsalves and Willie Cook, minus Rick Henderson, Dave Black, and Britt Woodman, each replaced by members of the Local 802—played medleys behind a forty-foot screen of water. “Mood Indigo” bleeding into “Solitude,” “The Mooche” giving over to “Perdido,” then “Take the ‘A’ Train,” a rose to the stitching of Bed-Stuy to Harlem, to black modernity. Picture it: the nearly all-white crowd, working men and wives, their sons and daughters, cheering every lift and gasping at the fireworks filling the night sky. 1955. A boy shifts in his seat. His eyes dart from the divers to the dancing waves pink as cotton candy. His mind wanders. And Ellington, tired and aloof, pushes his way through an old arrangement of “Sophisticated

Lady.” He won’t return for a second set, excused while another conductor leads the band augmented by strings. To hell with it,

Ellington mutters, lighting another cigarette in his dressing room, Newport still an undiscovered country. America’s Debussy, alone, unaccustomed, wiping the sweat from his forehead with an embroidered handkerchief, four miles and four years from the East Elmhurst home of Malcolm X.

Here are the relics of our future. Here is the future of us all, the new face of a nation. In thirty years, a museum guide tells us, students today, their children will be the first generation raised in the U.S., we nod our approval, his smile blooming, where white is no longer the majority, as it hasn’t been here in Queens since the nineties. The dancing woman was Elaine Anderson, a thirty-three year old socialite, her image printed on the back jacket of the Columbia LP— The gal who launched 7,000 cheers. Whose father was made rich by a shipwreck. Ellington’s Helen in a cocktail dress, platinum-blonde bringer of glad news, who danced in ecstasy as the cameras turned away from the stage to find her.

They tell me I saved the night for the Ellington band. It’s how you look at it, she said, her memory held like a clutch. The glass was half-filled—I caused it.

Half-empty—Gonsalves did.