# Duke Ellington looms larger than ever: Photos, Videos

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2019/06/08/duke-ellington-looms-larger-than-ever-photos-videos/
- Published: 2019-06-08T16:36:03+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**The late Martin Williams, curator of the influential anthology _Smithsonian Collection
of Classic Jazz_ and one of America’s more perceptive and distinguished critics,
wrote in an[essay about the lack of scholarly work on jazz](https://books.google.com/books?id=XI3sTlcXdCoC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA297#v=onepage&q=One%20can%20take&f=false),“
One can take Music Appreciation A–1 in any third–rate college, taught by the worst
dolt on the music faculty, and learn something substantial about Bach, Mozart, and
Chopin,” because the curatorial selection and musical analysis is so well established.**

“Ellington may well be _the_ major figure in 20th American music,” Williams continued,“
but unless Americans do the requisite scholarly and critical work on him, he will
surely be forgotten.”[^(**1**)](https://www.sfcv.org/article/duke-ellington-looms-larger-than-ever#Williams_footnote)

Duke Ellington and his orchestra

The usually prescient Williams got this one wrong. While jazz scholarship is still
gaining momentum, some four decades after that dire prediction Ellington is in no
danger of obscurity, and the academy isn’t the force driving that “A” train. With
the recent passing of his 120th birthday [Edward Kennedy Ellington](https://www.sfcv.org/learn/composer-gallery/ellington-edward-kennedy-%E2%80%9Cduke%E2%80%9D)(
April 29, 1899 – May 24, 1974) looms larger than ever, occupying a singularly bright
spot in the American cultural firmament. To use his own highest phrase of praise
for a fellow musician, Ellington was “beyond category,” an artist who created a 
musical universe that continues to expand both through new interpretations of his
music and as a model for countless composers, arrangers and bandleaders in jazz 
and beyond.

Duke Ellington | _Credit: Duke Ellington Collection, Archives Center at the American
History Museum_

I was viscerally reminded again of Ellington’s gift for mining the wealth of postures,
poses, and philosophical stances in African-American vernacular culture watching
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s performance of _Night Creature_ in April as
part of the company’s annual Cal Performances residency. An early champion of Ailey
who attended one of the young choreographer’s first performances in New York City
in 1958, Ellington made a point of dropping by his rehearsals at the Clark Center
in the early ’60s, even catching some sessions at which he refined _Revelations_,
according to Ailey biographer Jennifer Dunning.

They collaborated several times over the years, and upon the maestro’s death in 
1974 Ailey created _Night Creature_ as part of a televised special celebrating Ellington’s
life and music. Ellington had premiered _Night Creature,_ a 1955 commission from
Don Gillis and the Symphony of the Air, in Carnegie Hall that year (though the three-
movement suite wasn’t released on record until 1963’s _The Symphonic Ellington on
Reprise)__._ It doesn’t rank among his best work, not even among his best work from
the mid-’50s but, scored for jazz and symphonic orchestra, it’s a vivacious piece
full of sass, playful eros, and strutting personality. The Ailey dancers embody 
the vivid menagerie of characters and their raucous nocturnal adventures, accentuating
Ellington’s gift for framing the particular personality of an instrumentalist.

No other bandleader has written such effective settings for the individual instrumental
voices in his ensemble. As a jazz composer, Ellington didn’t merely put notes on
paper, he created an orchestral language, based on the distinctive instrumental 
personalities at his disposal, most memorably Tricky Sam Nanton’s trombone growls
and smears, Johnny Hodges’s plush velvet alto saxophone, Lawrence Brown’s creamy
trombone, Harry Carney’s suavely commanding baritone sax, and Sonny Greer’s majestic
percussion.

While repurposing phrases and ideas generated by his players, Ellington specialized
in compact but incident-filled three to seven-minute miniatures, though his frequent
forays into extended forms were often misunderstood. Ellington wrote that _Night
Creature_ was one of his attempts “to try to make the symphony swing,” and he revisited
the suite often at pops concerts pairing his orchestra with symphonies.

The piece became fodder for one of the persistent charges leveled against Ellington’s
oeuvre by critics like James Lincoln Collier and, more recently, Terry Teachout,
who believe that Ellington never mastered working with longer forms. All too often,
Teachout, in his 2013 biography _[Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/307965/duke-by-terry-teachout/9781592408801/),_
takes Ellington to task for what he wasn’t, rather than recognizing the nature of
his genius, which leads to ridiculous claims like that Ellington “was a major composer
but not an influential one.” At the same time, Teachout writes that Ellington would“
treat the sections of his compositions as if they were separate pieces in a mosaic
that could be rearranged at will,” a compositional technique that has profoundly
shaped celebrated composers such as alto saxophonist/flutist Henry Threadgill and
pianist Muhal Richard Abrams.

In an interview with me several years ago, the great bassist Dave Holland said that
he tries to write “compositions with interesting shapes, that use different rhythmic
challenges, multilayered pieces that exist on a lot of different levels. See, music
can be simple and complex at the same time. Duke Ellington did it brilliantly. People
were dancing to the rhythms and went out singing his melodies because the rhythm
and melody were always so strong and powerful, but they carried an amazing amount
of complexity. That’s what I’ve been looking for.”

In some ways, we’re better placed today to appreciate Ellington’s music than at 
any time since his death. The advent of the compact disc sparked massive reissue
proejcts. Literally hundreds of Ellington’s recordings are readily available, from
his seminal 1920s sessions for Brunswick, Okeh, and Vocalition to his late extended
works recorded for Reprise and RCA, such as his classic collaboration with Billy
Strayhorn _The Far East Suite_.

![](https://i0.wp.com/www.sfcv.org/sites/default/files/styles/reduced_size/public/
u45884/ellington_strayhorn_aside1.jpg?w=640&ssl=1 "Duke Ellington (L) with Billy
Strayhorn")

Duke Ellington (L) with Billy StrayhornAs a sidenote, the question of Ellington 
and Strayhorn’s partnership is a subject for an entire book, but it’s become clear
over the years, as scholars have examined their original scores, that the two men
threw a web of mystification over the nature of their working relationship. For 
decades, the common wisdom held that it was difficult if nigh impossible to tell
where one man’s work ended and the other’s began, but Strayhorn’s extraordinary 
body of compositions has become a much more distinct realm in the land of Ellingtonia.
It’s a mark of Ellington’s genius that the rightful elevation of Strayhorn as a 
first-rank composer hasn’t detracted from his reputation.

Young musicians today are delving into Ellington’s music in ways that weren’t possible
before. Through the efforts and funding of Jazz at Lincoln Center, transcriptions
of Ellington’s score are now widely available to high school and college jazz programs.
And the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, under the direction of trumpeter Wynton Marsalis,
has done excellent work interpreting such obscure extended Ellington works as _The
Deep South Suite_ (where you can hear an early iteration of rhythm and blues in “
Happy-Go-Lucky Local,” which became “Night Train” when it was recorded years later
by former Ellington saxophonist Jimmy Forrest).

Raised in a very proper Washington, D.C., house when that city was the undisputed
center of African-American culture, Ellington early on displayed an artistic side.
At 17, he won a scholarship to study art at the Pratt Institute but decided to pursue
music instead. By the mid-’20s, he had made the move to New York and gradually started
gathering around him the singular musicians upon whom he built his orchestra.

Duke Ellington and the Washintonians, 1925: Sonny Greer, Charlie Irvis, Elmer Snowden,
Otto Harwick, seated, Bubber Miley, and Duke Ellington.

Trumpeter Bubber Miley, with his audacious growl, was one of the first key players,
quickly followed by New Orleans clarinetist Barney Bigard, trombonist Tricky Sam
Nanton and alto saxophonist Johnny Hodges. In 1927, Ellington landed a job at the
Cotton Club and recorded his first signature pieces, “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo,”“
Creole Love Call,” and “Black and Tan Fantasy,” a powerfully evocative soundscape
unbeholden to the dance floor. Employing growling plunger mute smears and vocalized
effects, Ellington’s orchestra created these “jungle sound” pieces as accompaniment
for often racist stage shows in a Harlem nightclub that banned black people from
attending, a cauldron that burnished Ellington’s urbane and ironical sensibility
to a dazzling sheen.

For the next half-century, he produced an unprecedented flow of music. Without particularly
concentrating on it, Ellington penned a couple dozen popular songs that stand up
with the best of Berlin, Gershwin, and Arlen. He maintained his band, which he thought
of as his instrument, with the royalties from his songwriting so that he could continue
to write his suites, “[tone parallels](https://books.google.com/books?id=Zc4Lh9KC2MIC&lpg=PA151&ots=1U663yYeYa&dq=Ellington%27s%20tone%20parallel%20concept&pg=PA151#v=onepage&q=Ellington's%20tone%20parallel%20concept&f=false)”(
Ellington’s equivalent to a tone poem), sacred music, and whatever else moved him.
It’s a body of work without parallel in the 20th century, an accomplishment that
went largely unheralded by the high art establishment.

In 1965 the Pulitzer Prize music jury voted unanimously to present Ellington with
a “special citation for long-term achievement,” a proposal immediately shot down
by the Pulitzer board. In public, the 66-year-old composer dismissed the snub with
characteristic cool, famously remarking “Fate’s being kind to me. Fate doesn’t want
me to be too famous too young.” In private, he told critic Nat Hentoff, “In this
country, jazz has always been the kind of man you wouldn’t want your daughter to
associate with.” The Pulitzer committee did finally come around, awarding him a 
posthumans Special Citation in 1999 on the occasion of his centennial. Rather than
being forgotten, Ellington was lending a little luster to the fighting-for-relevance
Pulitzer.

Ellington receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Nixon, 1969

![](https://i0.wp.com/www.sfcv.org/sites/default/files/styles/reduced_size/public/
u45884/Duke_Ellington_feature_header1.jpg?w=640&ssl=1)

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