Duke Ellington

BIOGRAPHY

While Edward Kennedy Ellington received music education (from a Mrs. Clinkscales) from childhood, he exhibited at least as much young talent as a visual artist. His doting mother encouraged these aspirations, but the suave teenager enjoyed the socializing that was available when he played piano for dances. When he got together with similarly inclined young men Sonny Greer, Otto Hardwicke, and Arthur Whetsol, he was their choice to lead a dance combo and try their luck in the quickly developing new music, jazz.
In its second attempt to break into New York City’s music scene, this group began to get steady work, in 1923. Soon the band had residencies, first at the Kentucky Club, and then at the Cotton Club in Harlem. After a time it was being broadcast nationally and exploring the medium of jazz records. But it took the addition of two rhythmically daring, extroverted soloists, Bubber Miley and Joe Nanton, to give this unit another kind of impetus. "Black and Tan Fantasy", its first great tune, represented one of the most sophisticated attempts of its time to foist on a well-heeled, segregated audience—what the band played to nightly at the Cotton Club—something more than it expected.

Ellington returned his band to the recording studios constantly over the years (his association with Victor began in 927). "Mood Indigo" (1930) became an especially big hit, and "Creole Love Call" (1927) and "Creole Rhapsody" (1931) showed experimental sides to Ellington’s compositional instincts, the first using a wordless vocal part and the second making use of an extended form.

The unique Ellington alchemy was as much about the way that he mixed his instrumental timbres as it was about the instruments themsleves. The orchestra soon filled out with distinctive soloists Harry Carney, Barney Bigard, Johnny Hodges, and Cootie Williams—all of whom became among the most admired players in jazz. Soon thereafter Lawrence Brown and Rex Stewart joined, and by the mid-Thirties the band sported dozens of instantly recognizable tunes, such as "Sophisticated Lady", "Solitude", "It Don’t Mean a Thing (if It Ain’t Got That Swing)", and "In a Sentimental Mood".

Ellington also found time to develop his percussive piano-playing style, which was immediately identifiable.

The Ellington orchestra had toured the South and twice visited Europe by the late Thirties, and it had swelled to fifteen pieces. Its skillful balancing of danceable entertainment with innovative band voicings made Ellington an idol in Harlem and elsewhere. The band, however, had one more artistic plateau to mount. Within a few months, in 1939–40, three more terrific talents joined the fold: Billy Strayhorn, whose vast compositional and arranging contributions have yet to be fully counted; Ben Webster, a tenor saxophonist with a powerful sound; and Jimmy Blanton, the most harmonically advanced bassist of the era.

This edition of the orchestra, known as the Blanton–Webster band (1940–42), seemed to be cutting a hit a week. "Ko-ko", "Conga Brava", "Concerto for Cootie", "Cotton Tail", "Harlem Air Shaft", "All Too Soon", "In a Mellotone", "Warm Valley", "Across the Track Blues", "Take the 'A' Train", "Jump for Joy", "Chelsea Bridge", "C-Jam Blues", "Main Stem"... all recorded for Victor, and of such diversity that they alone equaled the career output of any three bands of the Swing Era. Of course, " 'A' Train" became synonymous with the era.

A January 1943 Carnegie Hall concert was the first of a number of such annual affairs. Promoted as a relief benefit for the Russian war effort, Ellington unveiled the most controversial music of his career: a forty-plus-minute symphonic work, Black, Brown, and Beige—a "tone parallel" to the history of the African-American struggle. While Ellington premiered new, extended compositions at his subsequent annual concerts, his frustration at the reception of this 1943 work convinced him not to perform it live again in its entirety.

From the early Fifties, Ellington chose to map out his extensive musical works in the studio, pioneering in the use of the LP format. He added, to his earlier revue scores, new works for theater, ballet, television, and the cinema. Suite Thursday and the Shakespeare-inspired Such Sweet Thunder were highlights among his extended LP works in this period.

Ellington’s hits, however, were no longer innovative, with "Satin Doll" (1953) epitomizing an artistic middleage. His orchestra suffered defections and seemed even vulnerable to the change in jazz tastes in the Fifties, which had wiped out lesser large ensembles. But a raucous performance at the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival won back the critics and, soon, the larger public, when the concert was issued on LP.

In the Sixties Ellington became the most-honored jazz artist but was increasingly a victim of his orchestra’s popularity, as he drove it around the world to meet ever-growing constituency. Domestically as well as overseas—in Europe (a dozen times, including, in 1971, the Soviet Union), the Middle East and the subcontinent, Japan, West Africa, South America, and Australia—the crowds demanded the old hits. The only refuge in which he could create something new was still the studio, only by the middle of the decade he turned for thematic inspiration to God—creating liturgical works that he said were his greatest achievement.

Ellington received honorary doctorates from Howard and Yale Universities, and he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Honor in 1969, the year of his seventieth birthday, which he celebrated at the White House. He continued to work on new, extended pieces even on his deathbed.