Billy Strayhorn's Subway To Fame

It’s easy for documentary filmmaker Robert Levi to explain the attraction of his latest subject, composer/arranger Billy Strayhorn.

“[The story] had elements of glamour, film-noir, and a Tom Sawyer parallel,” he says effusively of Billy Strayhorn: Lush Life, which airs in February on PBS. “It was a wonderful opportunity to explore one of the very few meaningful relationships in the history of the arts and culture that had not been fully explored.”

The relationship is the one that existed between Strayhorn and jazz icon Duke Ellington, who served as a mentor and friend, and whose flamboyant persona often overshadowed Strayhorn, preventing the composer from getting his due as one of the great musical minds of the 20th Century.

Strayhorn, (1915-1967), worked with the Ellington band from the late ’30s until his death, and nearly every jazz fan can hum a few of his songs. He penned “Satin Doll,” “Something to Live For,” “Chelsea Bridge,” and “Take the A Train,” which became Ellington’s theme. Yet, in part due to his homosexuality, the composer kept a low profile.

“Billy Strayhorn had been such a loyal, deferential, party-line person that he made sure that he was never going to take any of the spotlight away from Duke Elllington,” explains Levi. “He did very few interviews; he was a true clandestine character in this array of oddball characters that surrounded the Duke Ellington enterprise.”

Levi tells the story via archival footage and photographs, interspersed with performances from leading jazz artists like Hank Jones, Dianne Reeves, Joe Lovano and Bill Charlap performing Strayhorn’s [compositions?]. Also, actor Dulé Hill (Psych, The West Wing) voices some of Strayhorn’s comments taken from public records.

Levi is a veteran miner of the Ellington mystique. His 1991 film, Duke Ellington Reminiscing in Tempo, won an Emmy, and the production of this work overlapped with the creation of a 10-part radio documentary on Ellington. In his youth, Levi, a native New Yorker, met Ellington, and the jazz legend remains a Bunyanesque character for him: “He was five outsized and brilliant personalities all at once.”

Levi doesn’t worry about ever running out of material. “The Ellington oeuvre is so rich and dense that no biographer will ever exhaust it,” he says. “It’s music built on compositional genius and 17 quirky personalities; What could be more attractive for a storyteller?”