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• Born: 29 November 1915
• Birthplace: Dayton, Ohio
• Died: 31 May 1967 (cancer of the esophagus)
• Best Known As: Composer of "Take the 'A' Train"

For three decades, Billy Strayhorn was the composing and arranging partner of jazz great Duke Ellington. Strayhorn met Ellington in 1939; the bandleader hired him immediately and the two worked together until Strayhorn died in 1967. Strayhorn's compositions alone or with Ellington include "Lush Life," "Chelsea Bridge," "Johnny Come Lately," "A Flower Is a Lovesome Thing" and "Satin Doll." His most famous composition, "Take the 'A' Train," was inspired by the subway directions to Ellington's home for their first meeting. Strayhorn was born in Ohio but is often associated with Pittsburgh, where he spent a larger part of his childhood.

• Genre: Jazz
• Active: '30s - '60s
• Instrument: Piano

Biography

An extravagantly gifted composer, arranger and pianist -- some considered him a genius -- Billy Strayhorn toiled throughout most of his maturity in the gaudy shadow of his employer, collaborator and friend, Duke Ellington. Only in the last decade has Strayhorn's profile been lifted to a level approaching that of Ellington, where diligent searching of the Strayhorn archives (mainly by David Hajdu, author of the excellent Strayhorn bio Lush Life) revealed that Strayhorn's contribution to the Ellington legacy was far more extensive and complex than once thought. There are several instances where Strayhorn compositions were registered as Ellington/Strayhorn pieces ("Day Dream," "Something to Live For"), where collaborations between the two were listed only under Duke's name ("Satin Doll," "Sugar Hill Penthouse," "C-Jam Blues"), where Strayhorn pieces were copyrighted under Ellington's name or no name at all. Even tunes that were listed as Strayhorn's alone have suffered; the proverbial man on the street is likely to tell you that "Take the 'A' Train" -- perhaps Strayhorn's most famous tune -- is a Duke Ellington song.

Still, among musicians and jazz fans, Strayhorn is renowned for acknowledged classics like "Lotus Blossom," "Lush Life," "Rain Check," "A Flower Is a Lovesome Thing" and "Mid-Riff." While tailored for the Ellington idiom, Strayhorn's pieces often have their own bittersweet flavor, and his larger works have coherent, classically influenced designs quite apart from those of Ellington. Strayhorn was alternately content with and frustrated by his second-fiddle status, and he was also one of the few openly gay figures in jazz, which probably added more stress to his life.

Classical music was Strayhorn's first and lifelong musical love. He started out as a child prodigy, gravitating to Victrolas as a child, working odd jobs in order to buy a used upright piano while in grade school. He studied harmony and piano in high school, writing the music for a professional musical, Fantastic Rhythm, at 19. But the realities of a black man trying to make it in the then-lily-white classical world, plus exposure to pianists like Art Tatum and Teddy Wilson, led Strayhorn toward jazz; he gigged around Pittsburgh with a combo called the Mad Hatters. Through a friend of a friend, Strayhorn gained an introduction to Duke Ellington when the latter's band stopped in Pittsburgh in 1938. After hearing Strayhorn play, Ellington immediately gave him an assignment, and in January 1939, Strayhorn moved to New York to join Ellington as an arranger, composer, occasional pianist and collaborator without so much as any kind of contract or verbal agreement. "I don't have any position for you," Ellington allegedly said. "You'll do whatever you feel like doing."

A 1940-41 dispute with ASCAP that kept Ellington's compositions off the radio gave Strayhorn his big chance to contribute several tunes to the Ellington bandbook, among them "After All," "Chelsea Bridge," "Johnny Come Lately" and "Passion Flower." Over the years, Strayhorn would collaborate (and be given credit) with Ellington in many of his large-scale suites, like Such Sweet Thunder, A Drum Is a Woman, The Perfume Suite and The Far East Suite, as well as musicals like Jump For Joy and Saturday Laughter and the score for the film Anatomy of a Murder. Beginning in the 1950s, Strayhorn also took on some projects on his own away from Ellington, including a few solo albums, revues for a New York society called the Copasetics, theatre collaborations with Luther Henderson, and songs for his friend Lena Horne. In 1964, Strayhorn was diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus, aggravated by years of smoking and drinking, and he submitted his last composition, "Blood Count," to the Ellington band while in the hospital. Shortly after Strayhorn's death in May 1967, Ellington recorded one of his finest albums and the best introduction to Strayhorn's work, And His Mother Called Him Bill (RCA), in memory of his friend. ~ Richard S. Ginell, All Music Guide

Billy Strayhorn: Lush Life Buy this CD

Piano Passion Buy this CD

Cabu Collection Buy this CD

Lush Life [Red Baron] Buy this CD

The Peaceful Side Buy this CD

composer; jazz musician; pianist

Personal Information

Born William Strayhorn on November 19, 1915, in Dayton, OH; died of esophageal cancer on May 31, 1967, in New York; son of James Strayhorn, a factory worker, and Lillian Young Strayhorn.
Education: Westinghouse High School, Pittsburgh; attended Pittsburgh Musical Institute.

Career

Jazz composer, arranger, and pianist. Composer and small-group jazz player, Pittsburgh, mid-1930s; composed song "Lush Life," 1936; hired as arranger, lyricist, and pianist, Duke Ellington Orchestra, 1939; composed numerous songs for Ellington Orchestra during ASCAP strike, early 1940s; compositions include "Take the 'A' Train," "Rain Check," and "Passion Flower"; collaborated with Ellington on orchestral compositions including Far East Suite, 1950s and 1960s.

Life's Work

Called "a nearly invisible genius" by Scott Yanow of the All Music Guide but an immensely important figure in jazz history, Billy Strayhorn spent much of his career as an associate of jazz composer and bandleader Duke Ellington. Strayhorn was the composer of several vocal numbers performed and recorded by Ellington's band, including "Take the 'A' Train" and "Lush Life," that went on to become familiar jazz standards widely known to pop fans as well; he was also a classically trained musician who was a crucial contributor to the large concert compositions that Ellington undertook later in his career.

Ellington, for his part, wrote in his autobiography Music Is My Mistress that Strayhorn was "my right arm, my left arm, and the eyes in the back of my head." Strayhorn further enjoyed a career apart from Ellington's group, and on top of all this he might be viewed as a pioneer in the emergence of gay culture in the United States. Among the most important of the many behind-the-scenes figures who have lubricated the musical interactions of the intensely collaborative jazz genre, Billy Strayhorn was one of jazz's most sophisticated musical thinkers.

Studied the Classics

Born William Strayhorn in Dayton, Ohio, on November 29, 1915, Billy Strayhorn was known simply as Bill during his years as a serious student of classical music in school. His father was an industrial worker and sometime janitor, and his family bounced around under difficult circumstances for much of Strayhorn's early childhood. In 1920 they landed outside Pittsburgh, attracted by the employment possibilities of the steel mills there. Strayhorn was often sent to Hillsborough, North Carolina, to visit his maternal grandmother, a church pianist who introduced him to music.

But it was in high school in Pittsburgh that Strayhorn's musical talents really began to blossom. Attending Westinghouse High School, Strayhorn at first studied classical music exclusively. "Billy was about as serious as they get," recalled Westinghouse music teacher Carl McVicker (who later taught jazz keyboardist Ahmad Jamal) to Strayhorn biographer David Hadju. "Earnest, hardworking, wanted to get ahead in music ... He was an intellectual... .He was a serious pianist and concentrated strictly on the concert repertoire." Toward the end of his high school years, Strayhorn performed two piano concertos with full symphony orchestra, and his classical training perhaps shows through in the complex harmonies found in some of his compositions. In the 1930s, however, the doors of the classical music world were largely closed to black musicians. Strayhorn persisted, taking courses at the Pittsburgh Musical Institute, but soon it became clear that more promise lay in a different direction. He composed a musical revue called Fantastic Rhythm, which had its beginnings in a high school senior-class presentation but expanded into a full-fledged professional show, and around the same time friends introduced him to the serious-minded jazz of pianist Art Tatum and other artists who saw jazz as a complex art music, rather than simply as accompaniment for dancers.

Hired by Ellington

Strayhorn's talents as a jazz composer and arranger grew quickly, and one of his most famous songs, "Lush Life," was completed in 1936. Although the song is generally identified with Duke Ellington, that was well before Strayhorn joined Ellington's organization. By December of 1938, when Ellington visited Pittsburgh, Strayhorn was ready to make the most of the opportunity of meeting him. Impressing the bandleader with letter-perfect renditions of (and even suggestions for improvement upon) some of his piano solos, Strayhorn was hired at first, early in 1939, as a lyricist and arranger. Ellington accurately predicted that the partnership would last a lifetime.

A 1941 power struggle between U.S. radio broadcasters and the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) had the side effect of inaugurating one of Strayhorn's most fertile periods as a songwriter; the songs of Ellington himself, an ASCAP member, were withheld from radio, so Ellington turned to the nonmember Strayhorn for new vocal compositions. Several of the pieces Strayhorn produced in 1941 and 1942 became pop standards, including "Rain Check, "Chelsea Bridge," and "Passion Flower," but the most famous of all, "Take the 'A' Train," was initially discarded by Strayhorn as too similar to the style of rival bandleader Fletcher Henderson. Ellington's brother Mercer retrieved the song from a trash can, and it went on, in both vocal and instrumental arrangements, to become the Ellington Orchestra's signature. Many of Strayhorn's more than 100 songs were extremely sophisticated and complex, well suited to the treatment they later received from avant-garde jazz artists such as John Coltrane.

Collaborated on Orchestral Works

In the years after World War II, as the interests of young American dancers shifted from big-band swing toward rhythm-and-blues and rock and roll, Ellington aimed more often to create large concert works of a semiclassical nature--an enterprise that was of course very comfortable for the classically oriented Strayhorn. The two composers worked together on adaptations for the Ellington Orchestra of such classical works as Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite and on original compositions in the same vein, such as the acclaimed Far East Suite. Part of the impetus for the interest in Strayhorn's work that grew in the decades after his death was the realization that Ellington was more than just a jazz artist; he was one of the most significant American composers for orchestra, and Strayhorn contributed a great deal to what Ellington accomplished.

Despite his long association with Ellington, Strayhorn maintained an independent career. He recorded several albums as a jazz pianist, composed a series of musical shows for a benevolent association in New York's Harlem neighborhood that were major events in the uptown social season, and wrote songs for vocalist Lena Horne. Horne had a romantic interest in Strayhorn, but got nowhere owing to Strayhorn's homosexuality--which was, unlike that of almost every other creative artist of his day, openly practiced. Some have speculated that Strayhorn was willing to stay largely behind the scenes with Ellington because his secure place in Ellington's organization gave him the chance to be honest about his sexual orientation. Late in life Strayhorn contributed music to a never-realized theatrical presentation based on the works of the gay Spanish playwright, Federico Garcia Lorca.

Stricken with cancer of the esophagus, Strayhorn died on May 31, 1967. A deeply shaken Ellington wrote (as quoted by Strayhorn biographer David Hadju) that "the legacy he leaves, his oeuvre, will never be less than the ultimate, on the highest plateau of culture." Although at the time Strayhorn was rarely numbered among the pantheon of jazz greats, fellow musicians were well aware of his importance and had paid tributes to him by recording albums of his compositions even before his death. Ellington's own tribute, entitled And His Mother Called Him Bill, was released as a memorial to Strayhorn's career and is considered one of his finest pieces of work by jazz critics.

Works

Selected discography

• Historically Speaking: The Duke, Bethlehem, 1956.
• The Billy Strayhorn Septet, Felsted, 1958.
• Live!, Roulette, 1958.
• Billy Strayhorn/Johnny Dankworth, Roulette, 1958.
• Cue for Saxophone, Verve, 1959.
• The Peaceful Side, United Artists, 1961.
• Lush Life, Red Baron, 1964.
• The Billy Strayhorn Songbook, Concord Jazz, 1997.

Further Reading

Books

• Collier, James Lincoln, Duke Ellington, Oxford University Press, 1997.
• Contemporary Musicians, volume 13, Gale, 1995.
• Hadju, David, Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1996.
• Tucker, Mark, ed., The Duke Ellington Reader, Oxford University Press, 1993.

Periodical

• Down Beat, September 1996, p. 10.

Online

• All Music Guide, http://www.allmusic.com.

— James M. Manheim

For more information on Billy Strayhorn, visit Britannica.com.

(William Thomas Strayhorn), 1915–67, African-American jazz composer, arranger, lyricist, and pianist, b. Dayton, Ohio. Classically trained, he was drawn to jazz, and early in his career composed a number of songs. Among these was Lush Life (1938), written just before he met Duke Ellington, with whom he became a lifelong collaborator. By 1939 Strayhorn was writing songs, creating arrangements, and sometimes playing piano for the Ellington orchestra. Strayhorn's compositions include “Take the A Train,” the group's theme, and such standards as “Chelsea Bridge,” “Satin Doll,” and “Passion Flower.” His sophisticated approach and his introspective, nuanced, and impressionist-tinged style meshed beautifully with Ellington's own. It is sometimes difficult to tell which of the Duke's works have passages by the younger man, and some of Strayhorn's material has been mistaken for Ellington's. Openly gay in a homophobic era and business, Strayhorn avoided the spotlight, and his achievements and contributions to the Ellington sound were not fully understood by the public for many years. After “Stray”'s untimely death, Ellington paid tribute to him in And His Mother Called Him Bill (1967), an album of Strayhorn's compositions.

Bibliography

See biography by D. Hajdu (1996); study by W. Van De Leur (2001).

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