The Duke

Born in Washington, D.C. a century ago, Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington is a titanic figure in 20th century music. He was an ordained original in two distinct areas--as a composer whose thousands of enormously varied works range from classic songs to long-form suites of unprecedented ambition and scope, and as a bandleader who led one of the most inventive orchestras in jazz from the early Twenties to his death in 1974. Among the countless centennial tributes to Ellington has been a yearlong celebration by New York City's Jazz at Lincoln Center. "It's been wall-to-wall Duke, around the clock," says artistic director (and Pulitzer Prize--winning jazz musician) Wynton Marsalis, who remembers the Duke:

I didn't like or care about Duke Ellington's music when I first heard it. As a typical American kid and a victim (continued on page 238)The Duke(continued from page 142) of target marketing, I had my music. Music for teenagers. It's all you heard on the radio. You played it and you danced to it. Duke Ellington was considered old--actually, to the few of my peers who had ever even heard of him, he was ancient. His was Geritol music, ballroom dancing music, big band music, stuff from the swing era. I could have seen him when I played the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival in 1970, when I was nine. (To be honest, I didn't play so much as I held my horn and tried to look as if I were playing.) He was there too, but no way was I hip enough to go hear him. Even if I had, I wouldn't have been able to appreciate it, because my tastes weren't developed to the point of listening to a musician of his age, let alone really hearing him.

But years later, when I was in New York, a writer friend of mine, Stanley Crouch, came to my house and left a Smithsonian collection of Duke Ellington recordings. That was back when people had LPs, and this set contained six or seven records. I began listening to it every day, and at each new song I would think, Damn, I didn't know Duke Ellington did that. He did innovative things in the Thirties that I thought had been achieved only by musicians of the Sixties. There were also technical things I didn't even know were a part of the art of jazz--like a certain way of writing counterpoint from New Orleans horn polyphony, or using blues dissonance to make the music groan and holler, or applying quick, interesting modulations and conception of form to construct long compositions. Yes, that Smithsonian collection, with insightful musical analysis by Gunther Schuller, made me realize that Duke was more than just a name, or somebody who wore beautiful suits and had a bevy of fine women.

Ellington combined different styles, embraced music from all over the world without fear and wrote about many aspects of human interaction that had never found their way to a ledger line. As Crouch likes to say, from the outhouse to the penthouse--and, I would like to add, from caviar to the chitlin switch. Duke was something. He revered originality and helped create American music as we now know it.

Man, Duke wrote so much bad shit, it's unbelievable. He recorded about 800 albums. Eight hundred. Even if you recorded 800 sad L.Ps, that would be an achievement. But each one of his records sounds better than the last one you heard, and you were already overwhelmed.

Some so-called experts have looked at his life and have come up with all kinds of theories about why he was able to do what he did. They say because Duke Ellington's mom said he was great, that made him believe it. They say he had an upper-middle-class upbringing and thus had a sense of hierarchy, in which he was at the top of the food chain. They said he was lucky enough to have a great band that was responsible for the high quality of his music. Don't be fooled by the bull. The truth is, Duke created himself. When he was up late at night, writing those millions of pieces of music--there was nothing in his upbringing that would make him want to do that much work. Writing music is fun and all, but at a certain point it's work, too. It's just like playing ball: You might like to run, but by the time you get to the fourth quarter, your legs start telling you to sit down. With music, your back, mind and concentration love to tell you what to do. Writing music is much harder than it looks. The mountain of music that Duke wrote represents pure desire. And will and perseverance.

Duke Ellington was innovative, but he wasn't just innovative. He was a great craftsman. He didn't just invent one signature style and repeat it ad nauseam. And he didn't try to separate himself from his signature styles, either. He continued to write great music, in his style, for 50 years. He wrote so much good music it's difficult for me to select the best ones, but I'll just name a few pieces from throughout his career: Black and Tan Fantasy (from the early days), Mood Indigo (the first great blue mood piece he composed), Caravan (which he wrote with Juan Tizol). And in the late Thirties and early Forties, his work with the band that featured Jimmy Blanton and Ben Webster produced masterpieces like Cotton Tail and Ko-Ko (a great minor blues), The Flaming Sword (with rhythms that influenced a lot of Afro-Hispanic music). And there are his beautiful ballads, of course: Sophisticated Lady and In a Sentimental Mood (the classic Ellington hits), Take the A Train (a Billy Strayhorn composition, but it became Duke's theme song), Rockin' in Rhythm (a composition that codifies a lot of the most expressive devices of the swing era) and Creole Rhapsody (his first real long piece on record, which led to Black, Brown and Beige and The Tattooed Bride, a masterpiece). And then in the Fifties came the Harlem suite, which was commissioned by Arturo Toscanini and is in my estimation Duke's greatest long-form piece. He embraced the world with such albums as Midnight in Paris, The Far East Suite, The Latin American Suite and the Afro-Eurasian Eclipse suite. Yeah. And that was before We Are the World and the Internet.

He wrote more new music than anybody but always continued to play his earlier compositions. Unlike many 20th century artists, he didn't fall victim to the constant quest for the new, the novel. You never saw him trying to appeal to younger people by doing things that make older people look foolish and out of style. Some grandfather or father might go out and get psychedelic pants or try to speak the slang of the day. Duke didn't do that. At a certain point, many jazz musicians wanted to imitate rock musicians, so they put on strange glasses and wore crazy clothes, playing loud-ass electronic music and saying all kinds of dumb shit in interviews. Duke Ellington didn't do that. That's not to say he didn't use rock beats--he did, but he heard rock as a type of music, not as a way to prove his hipness or woo the young.

Duke's perseverance was rewarded at the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival, where he played Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue, one of his blues masterpieces from 1937. The crowd was whipped into a frenzy, and Duke's career received a much-needed boost. But he didn't have to compromise his identity to succeed. In the 20th century, even certain masters of European tradition turned their backs on themselves in search of recognition for creating a new philosophy, a new this, a new that, supposedly to push music forward. But the funny thing is, you don't push music forward or backward. You just play it or write it. Duke Ellington did both.

As a musician, here's how I look at it: It's as if we were all speaking in little phrases, in grunts, but we weren't really communicating. And then someone stepped forward and spoke clearly, teaching us how to speak. Duke not only taught us how to speak--he showed us how to express ourselves as well.

There were great jazz musicians before him, such as Jelly Roll Morton, but Duke Ellington was the first who was capable of understanding the implications of the many different styles of music that existed in our country. He heard what everyone was playing, and he understood what they wanted to play. He formulated a language and codified it--the musical language of America. But in addition to that, he realized things about the people who would speak the language. He made technical innovations, yes, but he also had a depth of perception into the human condition possessed by few people in the history of art.

When we finally start to understand ourselves and the art of this century, we will recognize that the closest comparison to Duke Ellington's achievement would be that of Homer. The Iliad and The Odyssey codified the language of the ancient Greeks, and those works served as a wellspring of mythic information that gave inspiration to generations of artists after Homer. And, at the same time, they gave the people of Greece an objective image of who they were. That's what Duke did. He laid it out there, for us to discover who we really are. And he also told us that when we finally discover that, it's a wonderful thing.