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Ellington, Edward Kennedy (“Duke”)
African American jazz pianist and bandleader; widely considered the greatest composer in the history of jazz.For nearly half a century Duke Ellington led the premier American big band, and through his compositions and performances he brought artistic credibility to African American Jazz. Ellington played the piano, but his orchestra was his true instrument. In the late 1920s he perfected an exotic style that was later termed jungle music. During the 1930s Ellington developed a lush approach to orchestration that introduced new complexity to the simplistic conventions of swing-era jazz. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s he struggled against the limitations of the three-minute 78 R.P.M. recording and the general adherence to twelve- and thirty-two-bar song forms, in the process vastly extending the scope of jazz. Personally and politically, Ellington preferred to avoid direct confrontation; yet he was active as far back as the early 1940s in the cause of racial equality.Ellington took what had begun as a vernacular dance music and created larger and more artistically challenging musical forms, exemplified in his three-movement composition Black, Brown, and Beige (1943). Due to the fame of Ellington-the-bandleader, Ellington-the-pianist is often overlooked. Yet particularly during the 1960s some of his most creative playing took place in small groups and demonstrated his willingness to engage such younger musicians as tenor saxophonist John Coltrane.
Musical Beginnings
Ellington was born to a middle-class black family in Washington, D.C., at a time when Washington was the nation's preeminent black community. Ellington began studying piano at age seven and quickly exhibited a gift for music. He began playing professionally as a teenager in a style derived from Ragtime, which had a particularly strong influence in the vicinity of Baltimore, Maryland, and Washington. By 1919 Ellington emerged as a leader of small groups that played for local parties and dances. Although ragtime pianists led most of these bands, the other musicians were mainly reading musicians who played in a sweet style and did not improvise.
Duke Ellington. Perhaps the greatest jazz composer of all time, Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington led the premiere big bands of his time, from the Cotton Club to the great era of big band, swing, and jazz music of the 1940s. This photograph is from sometime around 1946.
(Library of Congress.)
(Library of Congress.)
At the Cotton Club
In the fall of 1927 the Ellington orchestra secured a long-term gig at the Cotton Club, New York City's most prestigious nightclub. The club was wired to permit “live” remote radio broadcasts that gave Ellington nationwide recognition. The demanding stint at the Cotton Club also gave him a crash course in composing and arranging. Many of Ellington's early orchestrations involved little more than transposing note-for-note what he composed at the piano to the instruments of the band. While at the Cotton Club he became more adventuresome in his harmonies and voicings, and he began to experiment with changes in tempo and meter. By 1928 his orchestra had emerged as the nation's foremost jazz ensemble, surpassing the bands of Fletcher Henderson and King Oliver.During 1927 and 1928 Ellington made a series of recordings that epitomized the orchestra's first classic style. They featured the growling, plunger-muted solos of Miley and Nanton, who virtually defined the orchestra's jungle style. Miley also composed or cowrote several key songs, including the masterpieces “East St. Louis Toodle-oo” (1926) and “Black and Tan Fantasy” (1927). These songs and Ellington's lyrical “Black Beauty” (1928) became staples in the band's repertoire for years to come.Beyond the Boundaries of Dance Music
Ellington gained further exposure during the 1930s. The orchestra was featured in RKO's popular Amos ‘n’ Andy film Check and Double Check (1930). In 1931 Ellington wrote his first extended work, “Creole Rhapsody.” The Victor version of the song, recorded in June 1931, filled two sides of a twelve-inch 78 R.P.M. record and was eight-and-a-half minutes long. In the mid-1930s Ellington wrote the score for a nine-minute musical film, Symphony in Black (1935), which featured a young Billie Holiday and foreshadowed Black, Brown, and Beige.Devastated by the death of his mother in 1935, Ellington wrote Reminiscing in Tempo (1935) as his tribute to her. His most ambitious work to date, it was a unified composition that filled four album sides. None of Ellington's contemporaries in jazz had attempted such large-scale works. Among his important shorter compositions of this period were “Mood Indigo” (1930), “It Don't Mean a Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing” (1932), “Sophisticated Lady” (1933), and the haunting ballad “In a Sentimental Mood” (1935).During the mid-1930s new swing bands—under the leadership of Count Basie, Jimmie Lunceford, and such white bandleaders as Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw—threatened to eclipse the Ellington orchestra. Although Ellington's “In a Sentimental Mood” never became a hit, Goodman's simplified 1936 rendition did. Moreover, the personnel of the Ellington orchestra, normally quite stable, underwent considerable turnover during the mid-1930s.Despite these difficulties, the Ellington orchestra had many strengths, in particular its many talented soloists. Most swing big bands got by with two or three prominent soloists. During the mid-1930s, Ellington's orchestra featured nine significant solo talents: alto saxophonist Johnny Hodges, clarinetist Barney Bigard, baritone saxophonist Harry Carney, trumpeter Cootie Williams, cornetist Rex Stewart, trombonists Nanton and Lawrence Brown, vocalist Ivie Anderson, and Ellington himself on piano. Despite setbacks, the Ellington orchestra toured constantly during the Great Depression and made successful visits to Europe in 1933 and 1939.The Great Ellington Band: Early 1940s
By 1940 Ellington and his orchestra had overcome the difficulties of the mid-1930s. In 1938 Billy Strayhorn began his nearly thirty-year stint as Ellington's closest collaborator; he composed such memorable works as the orchestra's longtime theme, “Take the ‘A’ Train” (1941). Ellington himself had a burst of creativity that produced some of his most enduring compositions. He benefited from an outstanding group of musicians, including two vital new additions—tenor saxophonist Ben Webster and virtuoso bassist Jimmy Blanton. Among the orchestra's most important recordings of this period were “Ko-Ko” (1940), “Cotton Tail” (1940), and “I Got It Bad and That Ain't Good” (1941).In 1943 Ellington appeared at New York City's prestigious Carnegie Hall. He was the first African American bandleader to be so honored, and he responded with the forty-four-minute-long Black, Brown, and Beige: A Tone Parallel to the History of the American Negro, a path-breaking work in twentieth-century American music. Unfortunately, the ambitious piece broke the conventions of both classical music and jazz, satisfying neither audience. The critical response deeply disappointed Ellington; following his Carnegie Hall appearance (and an earlier run-through in Boston) he never performed the work in its entirety again.
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Duke Ellington on Tour
Later Musical Works and Social Activism
Neither Ellington nor Strayhorn were dissuaded from creating other large-scale jazz suites, including the Liberian Suite (1947); Harlem (1951); the Festival Suite (1956); Such Sweet Thunder (1957), a musical tribute to Shakespeare; Suite Thursday (1960), which paid tribute to author John Steinbeck; and the Far East Suite (1966). Ellington also composed film scores for Anatomy of a Murder (1959) and Paris Blues (1961).In 1965 Ellington broke new ground with his first Concert of Sacred Music, commissioned by San Francisco, California's Grace Episcopal Church. In the concert, the Ellington orchestra was joined by the Grace Cathedral Choir; the Herman McCoy Choir; singers Jon Hendricks, Esther Marrow, and Jimmy McPhail; and tap dancer Bunny Briggs. “In the Beginning, God,” Ellington's opening movement, won a 1966 Grammy Award for best original jazz composition. In 1968 Ellington composed a Second Sacred Concert. At the time of his death he was preparing a third.From the early 1940s Ellington was active in the emergent Civil Rights Movement, although his role has largely been overlooked. In 1941 he wrote the score for the groundbreaking musical Jump for Joy, which challenged the demeaning stereotypes of African Americans in Hollywood films and throughout American popular culture. Jump for Joy had a buoyant sense of optimism that is suggested in such numbers as “Uncle Tom's Cabin Is a Drive-In Now.”Ellington's speaking voice, like his musical one, was eloquent and complex. He disliked head-on confrontation. As Ellington biographer John Edward Hasse observed, Music Is My Mistress, the composer's 1973 autobiography, contains “hardly a negative word,” passing in silence over various personal conflicts and his negative encounters with Jim Crow segregation. This indirection was equally evident in his political activism. During the Carnegie Hall premiere of Black, Brown, and Beige, Ellington looked out on the formally attired ranks of New York's elite and declared: [W]e find ourselves today struggling for solidarity, but just as we are about to get our teeth into it, our country is at war, [so, of course], we … find the black, brown, and beige right in there for the red, white, and blue.”Though stressing African American patriotism, Ellington—in his distinctly oblique way—voiced black aspirations for racial equality and integration. In 1951 Ellington premiered Harlem, which he regarded as his most successful extended work, at a benefit concert for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Two months before the concert he wrote to President Harry S. Truman, stating that concert proceeds would “help fight for your civil rights program—to stamp out segregation, discrimination, [and] bigotry.” He suggested that Truman's daughter, Margaret Truman, serve as honorary chair for the event. Ellington biographer Hasse noted that Truman or someone on his staff wrote on the letter “an emphatic ‘NO!’ in inch-high letters, underlined twice.”Ellington's Later Career
During the 1950s and 1960s Ellington and his orchestra led a split existence. They debuted substantial extended works in concerts and recordings, but they also endured a grueling schedule of one-night stands in which the orchestra reprised old hits with what bordered on formulaic playing. An inspiring performance at the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival helped draw the orchestra out of a creative slump. Ellington also found inspiration in a series of small-group recordings, such as Money Jungle (1962), featuring bassist Charles Mingus and drummer Max Roach, or Duke Ellington and John Coltrane (1962), a classic collaboration between two of the seminal figures in jazz.In these years, Ellington faced the loss of several long-term orchestra members, including the irreplaceable Johnny Hodges, who died in 1970. But the greatest loss was that of Billy Strayhorn, who died of throat cancer in 1967. In And His Mother Called Him Bill (1967), Ellington paid tribute to his longtime collaborator with a set of Strayhorn compositions; the emotional recording sessions yielded one of the orchestra's last great albums. In 1969 President Richard Nixon presented Ellington with a Medal of Freedom at a gala seventieth birthday party.Ellington gave little sign of slowing down in the early 1970s, but in 1973 he learned that he had lung cancer. Even after he was hospitalized in the spring of 1974, he continued to work on new compositions. Following his death, some 65,000 people came to view his body, and more than 10,000 turned out for his funeral. In subsequent years Ellington's reputation has continued to grow. He is rightly acclaimed as one of the greatest of American composers.See also Film, Blacks in American; Music, African American.Sign up to recieve email alerts from African American Studies Center
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