Dr. James Latimer recounts the Artist Residency of Duke Ellington: Celebrating The Duke
UW-Madison Professor Emeritus James Latimer spearheaded the effort that brought Duke Ellington and his orchestra to Madison for a week of performances and classroom instruction in July 1972.
What Latimer was dreaming up was an artist-in-residency for Ellington complete with concerts and workshops presented by Ellington and his band members.By Jonathan Gramling
It just goes to show that having the right person in the right place at the right time can yield some wondrous results. UW-Madison Professor Emeritus of Music James Latimer was one of those fortunate people. Latimer had taught at Florida A&M for five years and lived in the Boston area where he played all genres of music with different bands including the Boston Symphony before he came to Madison as an associate professor of music.
And then in the spring of 1971, UW-Madison conferred an honorary degree to Duke Ellington, one of the finest jazz performers and overall musicians that America has ever produced. They needed someone to escort Ellington to Madison and ensure he made his next gig in Hammond, Indiana.
And so Latimer flew out to Michigan and first met Ellington while he was sitting playing music at a piano and taking notes. Things happened pretty quickly then and it wasn’t until their road trip to Hammond, Indiana that Latimer got to know Ellington.
“Driving from here to Hammond, we took what we used to call, in the old days, the turnpike, but is now the Interstate,” Latimer said. “There were the Fred Harvey rest stops over the turnpike and there still are. They had this whole roll of machines. You could buy something of everything. And so we were just fascinated by the candy machines and other things. We just had a ball. As a matter of fact, we arrived late in Hammond, Indiana because we were having a wonderful day driving around. He didn’t have an air of importance at all. The conversation was constant except he may have taken a nap or two. He was contemporary and a music personality. For instance, he was telling me about the poet Langston Hughes. His introduction to me about that subject was, ‘He’s the greatest house guest in the history of the world.’ He just gave information off the top of his head. He had a fabulous memory.”
And after the experience, Latimer did some research.
“I noticed in his literature and reading and trying to get acquainted with him that certain things had not been attended to,” Latimer said. “And I said, ‘We need to see more of him, the human side.”
What Latimer was dreaming up was an artist-in-residency for Ellington complete with concerts and workshops presented by Ellington and his band members.
“I wanted the university to acknowledge this multi-talented individual, to hear the band and to hear the band members, in their own words, comment on how this thing came about because actually, he did this for well over 50 years,” Latimer said. “He ran that organization of how many people and kept the machinery moving. Now he had a lot of help. But you have to have a brain, you have to have a leader. You have to have a conductor, if you will. And that is what he was. He did all of those jobs so magnificently and so naturally that I was just astounded because he just kind of a human mechanism in operation. And I just wanted to learn all that I could about him.”
Fortunately for Latimer, he did have that personal in because he spent those hours with Ellington on the road trip to Indiana. He decided to use that connection.
“I had to build the foundation here and the foundation there,” Latimer said. “But as I said, I had an initial in. I talked to his secretary at his headquarters a lot. Duke Ellington was always someplace else, so I had to connect up with him. And I just kept talking about the idea. It seemed so logical to me. And here we found committee support, internal support and so we just kind of let it unravel. “This is the next sequence of this thing. This needs to be done.” And that is how it came about. We just wrapped up the details as much as we could, contacted X, Y, and Z. I remember talking to the airlines that fly into Madison at the time. There was one, which I can’t recall the name. It flew into Madison. I remember selling him on the idea of carrying an ad about the festival during that portion of the year. That’s the extent that we went. We wanted everyone to know. We invited the world into Madison. Come in! You can even take a special class and get one credit.”
And Latimer had to convince Ellington that his sidemen could act as educators.
“At that time, with the energy that I had, I was like, ‘Okay, we’re going to do it.’” Latimer said. “’We’ll last through this. Just hang in there. It’s going to come about.’ I said that because he was particularly worried about his side men serving as lecturers at workshops because they had not done that kind of thing. I said, ‘They will be fine.’ But we had a lot of help. And the guys took to it. It was natural. They are before an audience every night. They don’t necessarily speak. But they were articulate. They knew the music. They had traveled all over the world. Here was this opportunity to say something besides notes that came out of their horns. I think they got a kick out of it.”
And so what resulted was a week in July 1972 of workshops in the afternoon and concerts at night. There were five concerts in all, four in Madison and one at UW-Milwaukee. And each concert featured a different kind of music.
“The concerts in Madison were at the Wisconsin Union Theater,” Latimer said. “There was Family Night at Camp Randall. The Camp Randall folks cooperated beautifully. Initially, there was some resistance from every department saying, ‘This is a crazy idea.’ But it worked. Each one of those concerts went off beautifully. And the Friday night concert was the closing one at the Union. And it was entitled Suite Night. He agreed to and actually produced a UWIS Suite. I was just overjoyed. As I said, at this distance 50 years from the events, I am still amazed that it came off. I’m delighted.”
Ellington was touring with some incredible musicians at the time.
“The band was a highly-polished unit,” Latimer said. “You had people like Charles Williams. He’s known as Cootie Williams. Mercer Ellington was there. They were fabulous stars in their own right. They were recording artists. Rufus Jones was the drummer then. And he went to Florida A&M where I taught for five years, I think. They were stars in their own right. And we were just so happy to have them here and for it to go so smoothly.”
And even though Ellington and his band were high powered, some local musicians got in on the fun. Latimer’s son Jim-Jim was a soloist during the Sacred Music night. But even though he is a musician in his own right, Latimer sat on the sidelines and watched the performances since he was the “conductor” of the week’s events.
Latimer was struck by Ellington’s brilliance and intelligence.
“As you listen to him during a concert, he can just recall all of this stuff all the time,” Latimer said. “He was a walking encyclopedia. He was truly down-to-earth great writers, whether you are talking the written word or the played sounds. He was top-notch and involved all the time. He carried portable equipment with him on tour. That was part of the entourage. You had to move the piano to wherever Duke was so that he could continue to scribble these notes. This went on for over 50 years. His room was at the Edgewater. And he had that portable piano in the room. It might have been a house piano. But it was in the room. If you go to that detail, this equipment is always available to him. And he would write, so I am told, from 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. But I can’t verify that, but I wouldn’t doubt that either. I saw with my own eyes not only in Madison, but other places as well.”
Ellington was also a compassionate individual, getting to know his bandmates and dealing with them as individuals to form a band that played with each other every day.
“He had great organizational ability,” Latimer said. “He would look after Paul Gonzalez. Paul had a drinking problem. And Duke kept him on his payroll until the man died. But he placed him in a strategic spot in the band so that he could keep his eye on him. And if he saw that he was going to need some help, he would make sure that it was there. He was counselor, psychologist,
psychiatrist, doctor, everything. That went on for years. Another thing, so I am told by Mercer, his son, that Duke had these star trumpet players — Cootie Williams and Cat Anderson amongst others — and Cat Anderson played everything an octave and a half higher than anyone else. It was a huge trumpet section. And Duke made part of Mercer’s assignment keeping those two personalities apart and upright so they wouldn’t clash with each other. Their musical styles were very, very different. They became a tool in his toolbox, so to speak. If he wanted this kind of a sound, he would say, ‘Cat, take that up and do this with it.’ That was his sounding board, his mechanism for creativity in the world, that band. He would select these individuals with a keen sense of, ‘Okay, I can use that.’ He was really a thinking machine. And I am so glad that I had the opportunity to observe him at reasonable length. I still play Ellington every day.”
Latimer still thinks about Ellington as he listens to his music.
“At 50 some odd years from the event, I’m still learning things,” Latimer said. “He was just world class. I think Togo, Africa issued a series of stamps of the world’s greatest musicians. And one was Johan Sebastian Bach and Ludwig Von Beethoven and down the line, Duke Ellington. This was 50 years ago. That’s Mozart. That’s Beethoven. That’s Ellington.”
Ellington truly is unforgettable.
The program cover for the Duke Ellington Festival
Duke Elliongton (r) gives Betty
Latimer (first wife of James Latimer aka Milele Chikasa Anana) a kiss while Latimer looks on