Shaun de Waal
This year saw the centenary of the birth of the man considered by many to be the United States’s foremost composer. Duke Ellington was born in 1899 and died in 1974: his lifespan covered three quarters of this century, and more than 50 of those years were spent making wonderful music.
James Baldwin is reputed to have said that he was uncomfortable with the image of Michelangelo’s vision of God as a bearded white man in a pink nightie creating the world, but he could live with an Ellington-style God, one who elegantly conducted the cosmos into existence. It is an image to touch even the most irreligious.
Ellington found the label “jazz” constricting; his highest acclaim for anyone was that they were “beyond category”. He himself, and the vast body of music he created – more than 2E000 compositions – were indeed beyond category. Igor Stravinsky may run a close second as composer of the century, but second he is. Even Stravinsky could not communicate the limpid sensuous pleasure Ellington could conjure almost without thought.
Taking the fundamentals of jazz, as developed by Louis Armstrong and others in the early Twenties, Ellington expanded its vocabulary more than anyone else in the field and exerted an incalculable influence on all the popular music of his day and after – even Prince has declared his devotion.
At New York’s Cotton Club in the Twenties, Ellington’s orchestra played “jungle music” that stretched the limits of the form even as it entertained the hip club’s patrons; by the end of his career, he had composed suites, tone poems, sacred symphonies and (either alone or with his closest collaborator, Billy Strayhorn) many of the best-loved popular songs of the era. The soloists of his big band had their finest moments under his tutelage; many stayed with him for decades.
Ellington’s gift, exercised through the orchestra he led for half a century – which he constantly provided with new music to perform and record, even as he toured ceaselessly – was to create sounds of unparalleled complexity from a base of the most accessible popular music. In the work of no other composer of this century is pure enjoyment so embodied in structures of such dazzling innovation.
Looking for Ellington CDs in a well- stocked shop can be a baffling experience – there are simply so many. There is the dance music, the solo piano, the live orchestral dates, the compelling suites. If you want short, sharp jazz numbers delivered with incomparable grace, go for the earlier period or one of the live renditions such as Ellington ’56. If you simply want music of extraordinary beauty and diversity, choose The New Orleans Suite, The Latin American Suite, or his work blending jazz and classical orchestras on The Symphonic Ellington. If you want a sidelight on his amazing powers, find the angular meditations of Money Jungle, his improvisation with Charles Mingus and Max Roach, or his minimalist duet with bassist Ray Brown on This One’s for Blanton.
When Ellington died, Mingus paid him tribute by saying his music was the sound of love. And it’s true: one receives from his work the direct transmission of a vast, almost divine affection for all humanity, one that reaches right into your innermost soul. No other musician this century gave so much, nor had so much to give.