Duke Ellington

Duke Ellington: The Orchestra Was the Instrument

In 1965 the Pulitzer board shortlisted him and then gave no music prize at all that year. He was sixty-six, had written something over two thousand pieces, and had been leading the same orchestra for four decades. His response was a shrug in public: "Fate is being kind to me. Fate doesn't want me to be famous too young." In 1999 the same board awarded him a Special Pulitzer, "in recognition of his musical genius." He had been dead for twenty-five years.

Washington

Edward Kennedy Ellington was born on 29 April 1899 in Washington, D.C., to James Edward and Daisy Kennedy Ellington, both of whom played the piano. The nickname came from a childhood friend, Edgar McEntee, who thought the boy's bearing deserved a title.

He started lessons at seven and would rather have played baseball; he sold peanuts at Washington Senators games. The conversion happened at fourteen, when he sneaked into Frank Holiday's Poolroom and heard the local pianists work. His first composition, "Soda Fountain Rag," was written in the summer of 1914 while he was working as a soda jerk. In 1916 he turned down an art scholarship to the Pratt Institute.

The commercial instinct arrived early. Working as a sign painter in 1917, he would ask customers ordering signs for a dance whether they had arranged the music yet — and then supply that too. It was a one-man vertical integration, and it built him a network before he had a band.

The Cotton Club

He moved to Harlem in 1923. By that September the group was at the Hollywood Club at 49th and Broadway on what became a four-year engagement, first as Elmer Snowden and his Black Sox Orchestra, then as the Washingtonians; Ellington took over as leader in early 1924 when Snowden left.

The break came in September 1927, when King Oliver turned down a residency at the Cotton Club and it fell to Ellington instead. The band opened there on 4 December 1927. What mattered was not the room but the wire: weekly radio broadcasts carried the orchestra out of Harlem and across the country, and for the first time a Black bandleader had a national audience arriving in people's houses every week.

The music of those years was shaped by the trumpeter Bubber Miley, whose growl technique produced the so-called "jungle" style heard on "East St. Louis Toodle-Oo" (1926). Miley died in 1932, aged twenty-nine. His sound outlived him by fifty years.

Writing for People, Not Instruments

Ellington's method was unlike anyone else's, and he stated it plainly: "The writing and playing of music is a matter of intent... My music fits the tonal personality of the player." He did not compose for alto saxophone; he composed for Johnny Hodges. "Jeep's Blues" was written for Hodges, "Echoes of Harlem" for Cootie Williams.

This only works if the players stay, and they did. Harry Carney was in the band for nearly all of its forty-seven years. Around him passed Hodges, the trombonist Lawrence Brown, the clarinettist Barney Bigard, the valve trombonist Juan Tizol, the tenor player Ben Webster from 1939 to 1943, the violinist Ray Nance from 1940, and — for two transformative years, 1939 to 1941 — the bassist Jimmy Blanton, who changed what a jazz bass was for. PBS puts the aesthetic well: rather than blending his players into one homogeneous sound, Ellington "believed in letting the dissonant voices of each musician play against each other."

The three-minute records of these years became permanent: "Mood Indigo" (1930), "It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)" (1932), sung by Ivie Anderson, "Sophisticated Lady" (1933), "(In My) Solitude" (1934).

Strayhorn

Billy Strayhorn joined in 1939, hired as a lyricist, and stayed until 1967. He became something for which the language has no clean word. Ellington's own attempt: "my right arm, my left arm, all the eyes in the back of my head, my brain waves in his head, and his in mine."

Strayhorn wrote original compositions, arranged, and frequently stood in for Ellington at the piano or on the podium. His "Take the 'A' Train" (1941) replaced "East St. Louis Toodle-Oo" as the orchestra's theme — which is to say that the tune most people identify with Duke Ellington was written by somebody else.

Carnegie Hall and the Long Form

Ellington had mastered the three-minute 78 and resented its limits. "Creole Rhapsody" (1931) and "Reminiscing in Tempo" (1935), written after his mother's death, pushed at the format. Then, on 23 January 1943, he premiered *Black, Brown and Beige* at Carnegie Hall — an extended work on African American history and the legacy of slavery, played by a dance band in a concert hall. It launched annual Ellington concerts there through 1947.

The gesture was as much political as musical: it insisted that this music belonged in the buildings where America stored the art it took seriously.

Newport, 1956

By the mid-fifties the big bands were finished and Ellington was regarded as a survivor rather than a force. Then, on 7 July 1956 at the Newport Jazz Festival, the tenor saxophonist Paul Gonsalves played a twenty-seven-chorus solo bridging the two halves of "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue" and the crowd went past curfew. The resulting album, produced by George Avakian, became Ellington's best-selling record and put him on the cover of Time — an honour a jazz musician almost never received.

The last two decades were the most restless. The first Sacred Concert, premiered in September 1965, built a Christian liturgy out of jazz; Ellington called it "the most important thing I've done," and two more followed in 1968 and 1973. The touring suites — *Far East Suite* (1966), *New Orleans Suite* (1970), *The Afro-Eurasian Eclipse* (1971), *Latin American Suite* (1972) — were the work of a man in his seventies still processing new territory into new music.

Why Duke Is Called a Genius

The word was used about him at the moment of his death by someone qualified to judge: Ella Fitzgerald's public statement was simply, "It's a very sad day. A genius has passed." The Pulitzer board used it too, though only in 1999. The critic Ralph J. Gleason called him "America's most important composer" — not its most important jazz composer.

The faculty in question is unusual and specific. Ellington composed for particular human beings rather than for abstract instruments, and to do that he had to keep an orchestra together for forty-seven years and hold in his head the exact tonal personality, range and temperament of every player in it. That is a compositional method no one else has sustained at that scale, and it produced a body of work — over two thousand pieces, across popular song, extended concert works and sacred music — that runs from "Mood Indigo" to a jazz liturgy.

The counter-case goes to authorship. Ellington's music was collectively made to a degree that unsettles the romantic idea of a genius: Bubber Miley's growl defined the early style, sidemen supplied melodic material that emerged under Ellington's name, and Billy Strayhorn — who wrote the band's theme tune — was a co-author whose credit never matched his contribution. His extended works divided critics, and the Pulitzer board's refusal in 1965 shows that the establishment of his own lifetime did not accept the case being made here. The honest formulation is that Ellington was a genius of organisation as much as of invention: the greatest talent-shaper American music has produced, who also happened to write the tunes.

Legacy

He died on 24 May 1974 of lung cancer and pneumonia, aged seventy-five. More than twelve thousand people came to the funeral at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

The honours had come steadily near the end: a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1966, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1969, the French Legion of Honour in 1973, and fourteen Grammys in all between 1959 and 2000, three of them posthumous. On 24 February 2009 he became the first African American to appear alone on a circulating United States coin, on the District of Columbia quarter — a Washington sign painter's son, finally on the currency.

Achievements

• Spingarn Medal — 1959
• Presidential Medal of Freedom — 1969
• Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award — 1966
• Grammy Trustees Award — 1968
• Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• Notable work: Just Squeeze Me (But Please Don't Tease Me)
• Notable work: It Don't Mean a Thing
• Notable work: Solitude
• Notable work: Black, Brown and Beige
• Instruments: piano