Duke Ellington was born 100 years ago this month. Richard Cook celebrates the achievements of a jazz genius
Everything about Duke Ellington was extravagant. He acquired his nickname, legend has it, through his aristocratic bearing, even as a teenager; and in his person, his manner and his music, he suggested American life at its grandest. Yet Ellington was a black man and his music was jazz, two matters that should have stood him at some remove from high culture. It has taken the best part of the 100 years since he was born for his eminence to be as widely acknowledged as it is now, but his case is unarguable.
Nobody, not Copland nor Berlin nor Bernstein nor Gershwin, comes close to matching Ellington's achievements, as composer and performer alike. There may be others in jazz whose singularity is even greater than Ellington's. It is easy, for instance, to side with Bing Crosby's affectionate portrayal of Louis Armstrong as "the beginning and end of music in America". Or perhaps Charlie Parker's art, intolerably brilliant, is revelatory in a way that someone of Ellington's dignity stood aside from. But the breathtaking multiplicity of his music is unsurpassable.
He ran his orchestra for 50 years, and across thousands of concerts and recording dates, it was his sounding board - the rich, spellbinding instrument that seemed to sing his ideas back to him. Ellington was a vociferous pianist, but he would often drop out during a tune and listen to what his men were playing. It was an orchestra filled with distinctive voices, which Ellington deployed like choristers to their individual parts. Harry Carney, the baritone saxophonist who joined in 1926 and stayed until his leader's death in 1974, was the sonorous anchor of the reed section and the musician whose tone came to exemplify Ellington's sound palette: deep, hale, magisterial. Carney died only a few months after his boss, his work done.
The legacy is so vast that it can seem as intimidating as the rest of jazz history put together: almost 2,000 individual compositions, enshrined in countless studio and live recordings, broadcasts and transcriptions. No working musician has ever been so intensively documented, something which is itself a 20th-century phenomenon: the first time a major composer has been so lionised, even if much of it was entirely serendipitous. Ellington never stopped composing from "Soda Fountain Rag" (1913, and a piece he never played at a studio session) to the great suites and sacred concerts of the 1960s and 1970s, but he also found time to arrange pop tunes such as "The Sidewalks of New York", the music from Mary Poppins, Peer Gynt and The Nutcracker. There were film scores, TV specials, ballets, Broadway shows (although he was chastened when his wonderful 1940s score Jump for Joy never made it to Broadway itself). At different times, he combined his orchestra with those at symphonic centres such as Paris, Hamburg and Milan; the La Scala Orchestra he had only a single day with, so he started writing a piece at 10am and finished in time for the recording at five.
It was a different music business when Ellington made his way forward, although even then he had help: he acknowledged the pushing done by his early manager and agent Irving Mills, who got Ellington into the Cotton Club in 1926, a turning point for him. Mostly, though, he found a touch that could make the industry work for him. Although he wrote for the orchestra, many of the signature Ellington tunes became pop standards in their own right, and a royalty source which paid for whatever else he wanted to perform: "Do Nothing Till You Hear from Me", "Satin Doll", "Sophisticated Lady". Oddly enough, his enduring theme tune "Take the 'A' Train" is not an Ellington composition but a theme by Billy Strayhorn, the collaborator whose work so closely resembles Ellington's that the true authorship of many of their pieces is unclear. Duke could have retired from the road and lived handsomely from a songwriter's income. Instead, he was still playing for dance dates in the 1960s when the next engagement might have been at Carnegie Hall. No performer today would consider such a punishing schedule; Ellington kept it up for five decades.
He showed no special loyalty to a single record label in that time; every major company must have some Ellington somewhere in its back catalogue, and most of it will be reappearing in his centenary year. But one can scarcely ignore the extraordinary set that BMG-RCA is releasing this month, a remastered collection of its entire Ellington holding, spreading across 45 years and running to 24 CDs. For once, here is a set that justifies its gigantic spread: from the vigorous, bustling music of the late 1920s to the jostling sounds and rhythms of late masterpieces such as The Far East Suite, this is Ellington in all his numerous guises. Especially fine are the three-minute masterpieces made by the band of the early 1940s, which most hold as the definitive Ellington orchestra: a roll-call of flawless miniatures where Duke honours the virtues of the swing era and transcends its formulas with the most glittering writing of his career. Critics were often perplexed at Ellington's later dependence on long-form writing at the expense of the wit and economy of these pieces. Duke was hurt by criticism, but he rarely showed his temper; his elegance was his armour.
It is interesting to ponder on how this urbane, knowing man would have greeted his centenary celebrations. As a public figure, he spent his life behind a series of elaborate masks of his own making, obliquely handling issues of race and artistic legitimacy in his own vaguely sardonic way. When questioned about such matters, he preferred to say things like "Too much talk stinks up the place" or "There's only two kinds of music, good and bad". "Jazz" was a word he disliked, but he made no issue about it. He let his work speak for itself. It remains a humbling achievement.
Edward Kennedy Ellington was born on 29 April 1899; "The Duke Ellington Centennial Edition: the complete RCA Victor recordings 1927-1973" is released as a limited edition on 6 April
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