SHADOW DUKE

By Christopher Porterfield

Most people know that the composer of Take the "A" Train and Satin Doll and of orchestral suites like Such Sweet Thunder was Duke Ellington. But most people are wrong. The composer, or in many cases the co-composer, of those and dozens of other hallmarks of the Ellington sound was a dapper, diminutive musicians' musician named Billy Strayhorn. From 1938 until his death of cancer in 1967, Strayhorn was Ellington's artistic alter ego--bolstered and publicly praised by the Duke but working always in his shadow, less an employee than a member of his extended household.

In Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 306 pages; $27.50), David Hajdu suggests why someone with such talent would settle for such anonymity. Strayhorn was homosexual; in that era the only way he could live an openly gay life was to keep out of the public eye. Hajdu gives Strayhorn his belated due as a distinct musical voice and an engaging, if conflicted, personality. Strayhorn's taste and wit, his relentless drinking, his lovers, his activism in Harlem cultural life and the civil rights movement, his generosity--all are sensitively evoked. "He was just everything that I wanted in a man, except he wasn't interested in me sexually," singer Lena Horne told Hajdu. "We were in love, anyway. He was the only man I really loved."

--By Christopher Porterfield