Book Review: Lush Life, by David Hajdu

by Alan Greenblatt

I have tried in this column only to write about current performances and releases, believing that the typical jazz proselytizer overwhelms potential initiates by insisting that you can't be a true fan unless you have absorbed fifteen CDs each by Armstrong, Ellington and Charlie Parker, plus good chunks of Basie, Billie, Miles, Monk, Mingus and Bill Evans, not to mention relatively minor figures from Fletcher Henderson to Wayne Shorter, personal favorites like Stan Getz and Dexter Gordon, don't get me started about Dodo Marmorosa and Davey Tough...

You get the point. I don't intend to go back and offer any kind of survey of the great works of the past, as they are voluminous; however, I thought in honor of this column's fifth anniversary I might write about a few worthy books and CDs of the past five years that I never got around to reviewing in a timely fashion.

"Lush Life," for example, David Hajdu's biography of Billy Strayhorn. Strayhorn was Ellington's amanuensis, a composer and arranger with the band for something like 35 years. Strayhorn wrote tunes as famous as "Take the 'A' Train," yet never received much public credit. He may have preferred it that way, as anonymity was a boon to the openly homosexual at the time.

When I saw Hajdu read from this book five years ago, he told a story about someone mentioning someone who knew Strayhorn back in his Pittsburgh days. The person couldn't remember the source's name exactly but said it was Jimmy and his last name started with an E and he worked on the railroad (or whatever). Hajdu, already aware of how stable a community Homewood was, started calling every E in the Pittsburgh phone book while sitting at his desk working on every stuff. He actually found the person, whose daughter answered the phone. "Is this the Jimmy E who worked on the railroad?"

That story made me afraid of reading the book. The current fashion in biographies is so much for the writer to fall in love with his research and not be able to keep any of it out of the book. We know the vintage of every glass of wine Hemingway ever drank, in five volumes.

I could see just by looking that Hajdu wasn't going to go on for 700 pages. But I was worried about him missing the forest for the trees.

Which he doesn't, of course. You feel like he's done his job, getting everything down, including the 1957 price of a martini at the Hickory House, but the details are well-selected. He doesn't feel the need to recreate every recording session. The research instead shows its value as Hajdu punctures myths and misinformation.

I like that he isn't too much of a Strayhorn partisan. He never makes the relationship with Ellington seem simple, merely exploitative, or anything like that. I think it works well, the way Ellington manages to take over the book at the end.

Hajdu can't quite get at the interior Strayhorn, although there are glimpses, since Strayhorn wasn't open and didn't leave letters or diaries. But Hajdu gives you a terrific surface. Strayhorn is kind of a prevailing spirit in his own life's story. His friends all talk about him; it's almost a pastiche -- except that Hajdu writes too well to call it that. Strayhorn is this lovely figure who made singers and musicians sound better than they'd known how to be -- so many of them speak to that -- and someone who created an atmosphere of fun or challenge for those around him. It's so moving, reading about these lives he touched, whether it's Jimmy Stewart or Lena Horne or the high school friend who remembers their walks and talks as a highlight of his life as an old man looking back decades later.

One of my coworkers was killed a few years ago. At the memorial service, so many of us told stories. At the end, his father stood up and said, "It's nice to know that a quiet person can touch so many lives." This book made me think again about that.

Hajdu elicited a quote from Diahann Carroll that is a wonderful short summary of another human being: "He was a beautiful, delicate little flower, just, you know, a genius, but a tortured genius. He was an unhappy person. His genius was so overwhelming that being in his presence was something you could never forget. You know, there's such a thing as feeling too much and hearing too much. He suffered from that. I got exactly the same feeling being in the presence of James Baldwin. Strayhorn had the ability to perceive other people better than most of us, and what he perceived wasn't always kind, particularly in relation to himself and the life he chose for himself. Strayhorn and Baldwin both knew the cruelness of the world, and that's what I thought was part of the enormous sadness beneath their exteriors."

There is a resigned melancholy to much of Strayhorn's work. He made tunes and arrangements that were complex but somehow mostly soothing, like Dutch still lives. Hajdu put together a compilation CD of Strayhorn material for Verve in conjunction with the book, but maybe the best place to start is with Ellington's tribute album, "...and His Mother Called Him Bill," which includes Johnny Hodges' incredibly elegaic reading of "Blood Count." Several musicians in recent years have released albums of Strayhorn material, including Joe Henderson's "Lush Life," an album that late in his career made Henderson a beloved star.