Duke Ellington
We talked last week about the great Duke Ellington and his work with the equally great Ella Fitzgerald, whose birthday it was, without my noticing that this week is the 186th birthday of the Duke himself.
Born Edward Kennedy Ellington in Washington DC on April 29th 1899 he was an American jazz pianist, composer, and leader of his eponymous jazz orchestra from 1924 through the rest of his life, most notably at Harlem’s Cotton Club.
A master at writing miniatures for the three-minute 78 rpm recording format, Ellington wrote or collaborated on more than one thousand compositions; his extensive body of work is the largest recorded personal jazz legacy, and many of his pieces have become standards.
One of the most significant figures in spreading the popularity of jazz through the 20th century, no less a commentator than Gunther Schuller called him, “the most significant composer of the genre”. Ellington himself, though, thought that the jazz designation limited him. He referred to his compositions as simply “American Music”.
His nickname was awarded by a childhood friend who said his casual, offhand manner and dapper dress gave him the bearing of a nobleman, so he dubbed him “Duke”.
He was fortunate to share an era with some of the most significant innovators in early jazz – James P. Johnson, Luckey Roberts, Will Marion Cook, Fats Waller, and Sidney Bechet. He listened to and learned from them all.
By the end of the 1930s, Ellington had begun a nearly thirty five-year collaboration with his writing and arranging partner, Billy Strayhorn, the importance of which in the development of orchestral jazz can’t be overstated. He called him “my right arm, my left arm, all the eyes in the back of my head, my brain waves in his head, and his in mine”. Strayhorn, with his training in classical music, not only contributed his original lyrics and music but also arranged and polished many of Ellington’s works.
Ellington’s longer pieces began to appear as early as 1931 when h composed and recorded Creole Rhapsody (issued as both sides of a 12″ record for Victor and both sides of a 10″ record for Brunswick). A tribute to his mother, Reminiscing in Tempo, took four 10″ 78rpm record sides to record in 1935 after her death in that year. Symphony in Black (also 1935), a short film, featured his extended piece A Rhapsody of Negro Life and introduced Billie Holiday. It won the Academy Award for Best Musical Short Subject.
While he continued to play and record in the intervening years, and worked with many significant jazz and popular singers and musicians, his career seems to have gone into a slight downturn. But in July 1956, his appearance with his orchestra at the Newport Jazz Festival led to a major revival and regular world tours.
Always elegant and charismatic, his inventiveness with his orchestra made him a star. Ellington recorded for most American record companies of his era, performed in and scored several films, and composed a handful of stage musicals.
He was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize Special Award for music in 1999, “commemorating the centennial year of his birth, 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.”
There is surprisingly little of the Duke Ellington Orchestra on video, although you can find individual songs on YouTube. Here is the Duke Ellington Orchestra in a TV show – Bergen, Norway, 1969. The video is not good but the music is great.
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The post Ruth Leon recommends…. Duke Ellington – In Concert appeared first on Slippedisc.
