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longer than most marriages. Sonny Greer, Otto Hardwick, and Arthur Whetsel, all of whom played in the Duke’s Serenaders, spent most of the rest of their professional careers working with Ellington and were playing with him long after he left Edna. They admired him both as a man and as an artist. Greer described him as “sharp as a Gillette blade . . . I’ve never seen another man like him. When he walks into a room, the whole place lights up.” Hardwick thought him “brilliant,” though he spoke with amusement about Ellington’s character: “Another remarkable thing about him is his passion for people. He’s warm-hearted, of course, but that’s not what I mean. He likes to manipulate. It’s not like using someone, it’s more like a game. Besides, what he does for you is beneficial. What he tries to get you to do—it’s good for you, if you do it.” All three men did what he wanted, and profited from it. They were the first in the long line of musical individualists who hitched their wagons to his star.
    Hardwick and Whetsel were U Streeters, and both of them had gone to Dunbar High, where they acquired the same patina of good manners that served their future boss so well, just as their playing had a surface sheen that became a valued part of his musical palette. Hardwick, born in 1904 and always called “Toby” by his friends, started out as a bassist but took up C-melody saxophone at Ellington’s urging, later switching to alto saxophone. His slick, slightly oily tone and smooth lip slurs are among the most memorable instrumental colors to be heard on “Black and Tan Fantasy” and “Sophisticated Lady,” and though Johnny Hodges, who had a more up-to-date style, was to replace him as the band’s star saxophone soloist, Hardwick’s playing in the reed section was always instantly identifiable. As for Whetsel, Ellington appreciated his self-discipline and loved the gentle muted trumpet tone and “aural charisma” that light up “Mood Indigo” and can be heard to lovely effect on any number of other Ellington recordings of the twenties and thirties: “When he played the funeral march in ‘Black and Tan Fantasy,’ I used to see great, big ole tears running down people’s faces . . . his tonal character has never been duplicated, it was such a fragile thing, nobody has really had his gentility, fragility.”
    Of the three, Greer was closest to Ellington, so much so that Mercer “thought of him as a member of the family.” Greer felt the same way: “Duke Ellington was like my brother, and I was like his.” Born in New Jersey sometime around 1895, he was a pencil-thin dandy who had worked in vaudeville as a teenager and thereafter played the drums with a stick-twirling flash rooted in his early stage experience. He hustled in poolrooms when jobs were scarce, but his musicianship was sufficiently honed to keep him busy. Greer moved to Washington in 1919 and started playing as a relief man in the pit band of the Howard Theatre the following year. Ellington, who met him around that time, was impressed that he had worked in New York: “Anybody who had been to New York had the edge on us.” The two men started playing together not long afterward, and before long the association became permanent. Ellington’s loyalty outlived Greer’s ability, and though he finally nudged the drummer out of the band in 1951, he kept his old friend on the payroll for years afterward.
    For all his crowd-conscious flamboyance, Greer’s main goal was to make his fellow musicians look good. “I always strove for delicacy,” he said. “I always tried to shade and make everything sound beautiful. It was my job to keep the band in level time, to keep slow tempos from going down and fast tempos from going up. Those things meant more to me than solos, which I rarely took.” A time came when his methods sounded outmoded to younger ears. Gene Lees called his playing “slushy,” while Johnny Mandel compared him