`The vibrancy and rich, kaleidoscopic colours in his work reflected a 20th century of quicker movement, shortening distances, instant news.’ John Fordham assesses the legacy of Duke Ellington in his centenary month
I heard Duke Ellington and his Orchestra just once, at Westminster Abbey in October 1973. Ellington was 74, but though he looked a little drawn, and his eyes were pouched with pillows luxurious enough to refund him – for the countless nights’ sleep he’d missed in a half-century on the road – he was mostly as natty as his pictures from the glittering years, and the music glowed through the church like evening sunlight through stained glass.
Not that it was faultless: the libretto foregrounded too much of the homespun zealotry of Ellington’s later textual writing that contrasted sharply with his exultant, astonishing music. Yet the abbey was filled with sounds that nobody but Ellington could have brought there – the childlike serenity of Swedish singer Alice Babs’s melody on Every Man Prays in His Own Language, the ingenious choice of a recorder solo to follow it, whispering through the deep sonorities of the church, and his still-eager piano sneaking Things Ain’t What They Used to Be into the intro to The Majesty of God.
Only the long hair now straggling over Ellington’s collar signalled that the 1960s had been and gone – and only the absence from the bandstand of the much-loved faces that fans cherished from old album sleeves suggested that Ellington now lost more members of his musical family than he could daydream great nights past with and sustain that famous smile. Paul Gonsalves, one of the band’s remaining lynchpin saxophonists, had even been hospitalised with an epileptic fit that very day.
Reflecting on the centenary of his birth on April 29 1899, his granddaughter Mercedes Ellington told the press that her grandfather had been disappointed when he didn’t win the Pulitzer Prize during his lifetime, but he shrugged it off by saying, “Maybe God thinks I’m too young.” He won it last week – 25 years late.
Ellington was dying on that October day in Westminster Abbey – he died the following year. At his own insistence, few people knew of his condition. He had been told he had lung cancer the year before, and found himself up against an obstacle that wasn’t so easy to flirt, cajole, reason or dream his way around as he usually did. Neither could he invent an antidote to the problem in the elegant arches and parabolas of scrawled notes on crumpled sheet music in the back of a cab. But when the going gets tough .
Ellington danced that night. At the end of the concert he linked arms with his performers and leapt in the aisles. In his photograph on the cover of the Third Sacred Concert disc, his eyes are closed and he is smiling, as if he knew he had achieved something with a musical encounter that – despite under-rehearsal, absence of key players through ageing and illness, and a consequent reshuffle of the usual balance of the band to concentrate on vocals, piano and Harry Carney’s saxophone – had ended up as a typically Ellingtonian triumph.
The palette of free-spirited individuals he painted with was more restricted, but the balance of simple song and rich harmonies, of prescription and freedom, of urgency and tranquillity still raised hairs on the back of the neck.
October 24 1973 was United Nations Day, and the chairman of the UN made a speech at the gig. It was always United Nations day when the Ellington band played. The Pulitzer board as good as acknowledged that fact when it announced its belated tribute to Ellington’s lifetime achievement last week. They declared the prize was “in recognition of his musical genius, which evoked aesthetically the principles of democracy through the medium of jazz, and thus made an indelible contribution to art and culture”.
In a century that saw the jazz band expanding the materials and methods of music-making, Ellington was one of the most prolific and imaginative explorers of the new music’s potential. This was partly because of the sounds he imagined, its characteristic instrumentation and the shape its bluesy melodies could be stretched to make. But it was also partly because he was a collaborator, not a patriarch, for all his urbane charisma and single-mindedness.
His materials were the jazz idiom’s unique melodies and rhythms, but also the personalities and special signatures of its improvising soloists. He obliterated the sectarianism of “art” and “pop”.
He wrote, or co-wrote, thousands of compositions during a half-century of constant work, and developed that body of material without respite from the responsibilities of being a bandleader and performer himself. Ellington thus wrote on the road. There was always a piano in his hotel rooms, and he would compose on trains and in cars. He wrote music like a journalist, catching the clamour of 20th- century urban life, unable to finish anything without a deadline chattering in his ear.
Ellington was involved in some of the best- known songs of the century, like Creole Love Call, Sophisticated Lady, In a Sentimental Mood, I Got It Bad and That Ain’t Good and Caravan. The extent to which his collaborators, particularly Billy Strayhorn, Johnny Hodges and trombonist Juan Tizol, shaped these indelible melodies is impossible to accurately assess, because Ellington was an enabler as much as he was an orthodox composer. Melodies often came to him through listening to the improvisations of his musicians, repeating them on the piano and bouncing them back to the players for embellishment.
He composed in a faster and more reflexive way for a faster and more reflexive world. The vibrancy and rich, kaleidoscopic colours in his work reflected a 20th century of quicker movement, shortening distances, instant news. And it also reflected the democratising dynamics of jazz, that put the player first. But all these volatile chemicals would not have amounted to the Ellington contribution to music without the sorcerer himself, who knew just when to let a spontaneous reaction go critical, and when to douse it down.
He was born Edward Kennedy Ellington in Washington DC on April 29 1899. His mother Daisy Kennedy was the daughter of a police captain – “a real Victorian lady”, according to Duke’s sister, Ruth. His father James was a coachman, and eventually a butler, for a high-society Washington doctor. Though the 1890s had been a period of backlash against advances in black status following emancipation, and ambitious blacks found the obstacles stacking up, politicians in some areas were recognising that the black vote might count. Furthermore, Washington’s administration was seen as more committed to equality than most places in the Union.
It explained the stature of Daisy Kennedy’s father within the community – and this background, coupled with James Ellington’s fascinated familiarity with middle-class mores, did much to impart to their son Edward his legendary sophistication and repudiation of second best. Daisy Kennedy doted on the boy, and encouraged the elegant manner of speech, classy clothes and dignified sense of self-worth that led to the nickname “Duke”.
He would stand on the steps of the house and make his cousins bow, saying: “I am the grand, noble Duke; crowds will be running to me.” Though the young Ellington was briefly given piano lessons at around the age of eight, he showed no particular promise for music in his early years, and the indications were that painting would be his preference.
He married Edna Thompson in 1918 and had a son, Mercer, who carried on the Ellington band after his father’s death. Ellington put his aptitude for art to material use by starting a sign-painting business. But dance music was beginning to boom in Ellington’s teens, and it was as natural for the boy to get together with friends and try to replicate it as it is for teenagers to copy, for better or worse, the sound of a pop hit today. Those early piano lessons, and a growing concentration on the technicalities of music that intensified around 14, allowed him to find his way around popular rags and dance tunes, and a local band he formed with friends was eventually called The Washingtonians.
By the early 1920s, Ellington was hearing that dance musicians were doing good business in New York, and moved there to try his luck.
It was tough at first, but the “Harlem Renaissance”, a briefly flourishing New York- based cele-bration of African-American culture, was encouraging a receptive climate for black art. There was also a flourishing fashion for “symphonic jazz”, a hybrid music of classical orchestral effects and more or less substantial jazz references that pointed the way to jazz forms extended beyond the popular song or the blues. Black semi- classical composers like Will Vodery and Will Marion Cook were powerful forces in this movement.
It was, unsurprisingly, a white bandleader – Paul Whiteman – who was sold as the king of symphonic jazz. But, though Whiteman’s band was strong and the arrangements often vivid, he was slow to appreciate the magic ingredient the fledgling northern jazz orchestras needed. Ellington, who aspired towards uptown life but wasn’t living it, had better access, by race, class and economics, to the real news. And he wasn’t as nervous as Whiteman, with his conservative, high-rolling audiences, of the raw and earthy music coming up from the South. Ellington hired the raucous, bluesy trumpeter James “Bubber” Miley, a declamatory King Oliver disciple who could make a trumpet sound like a sob or a guffaw, the imperiously passionate soprano saxophonist Sidney Bechet (who had worked with Will Marion Cook), and the serpentine trombonist “Tricky Sam” Nanton. With this line-up, the Washingtonians were reborn.
The breakthrough, as the world now knows, was a long residency at the Cotton Club in Harlem. During this time what was now the Duke Ellington band sensationally evolved from a dance outfit that featured bold splashes of primary colour from New Orleans over a clunky Dixie two-beat, to a revolutionary orchestra capable of miniature symphonies – not derived from respectful watered-down classical borrowings, but conceived from the ground up and dominated by new materials from the cutting edge of Twenties and Thirties jazz.
In the Cotton Club years, the band was often providing impressionistic, painterly music for live revues – that was how early classics like The Mooch, Rockin in Rhythm and Mood Indigo were made. But as the swing craze took off in the mid-1930s, the Ellington band showed it could blast the opposition out of the doors in a packed ballroom, as well as play for the late-night clinches with the help of one of the most sensitive and poignant romantic saxophonists of all time, Johnny Hodges.
Though big-band swing was eclipsed by tight wartime economics and the rise of the more cerebral and intricate bebop in the Forties, the decade saw the Ellington band at its very best, and featuring sensational soloists like the breathy and sensuous tenor saxophonist Ben Webster, the sonorous baritonist Harry Carney, and trumpeters like Cat Anderson who could scorch paint. Billy Strayhorn seemed to have become part of Ellington’s brain, and a stream of dazzling music poured from the orchestra, including Concerto for Cootie, Harlem Airshaft and Take the A Train.
Ellington and Strayhorn were now borrowing classical-music harmonies and ambitious manipulations of key, but reinventing them with vocabularies infused with jazz feeling and intonation, and allowing the creative tension between the improvisers and the score to breathe and stretch. The rhythm section also became more conversational and counter- melodic, thanks in part to the emergence of a short-lived double-bass pioneer, Jimmy Blanton.
By the 1950s, all the big bands were in economic difficulties, and the rise of rock’n’roll was the writing on the wall for swing as the sound of the Western world’s pop. Even Ellington’s star waned during the decade, before rising again with a comeback at the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival that had his name humming the wires again, and his face on the cover of Time magazine. Out of nowhere (though some say inspired by a woman he liked the look of in the crowd), saxophonist Paul Gonsalves blasted 27 consecutive blues choruses out of Ellington’s Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue, a tour de force that was both pure jazz spontaneity and a wake-up call to anybody who thought it was only rock’n’roll that could get them leaping in the aisles.
A new popularity inspired Ellington, and the invention of the long-playing record also encouraged the conception and recording of even more extended pieces. Such Sweet Thunder, a dedication to Shakespeare, made the conjunction of classical materials and jazz more equal than formerly; Ellington wrote a number of longer pieces inspired by his world travels; and as he grew older he devoted himself increasingly to his sacred music, which he came to regard as the culmination of his life’s work.
“In recognition of his musical genius, which evoked aesthetically the principles of democracy through the medium of jazz, and thus made an indelible contribution to art and culture,” says the Pulitzer board.
Too true, but it waited until it was sure the world agreed before it stuck its neck out. Fortunately, enough people to matter realised all of that within Duke Ellington’s extraordinary lifetime. He gave the world the most unified, optimistic, sensuous and generous vision of what being “an American” could mean. The 21st century might judge that he was naive about that, but it won’t subtract a shred of magic from the immense body of music he left us.