Duke Ellington started as a pool hall piano player and grew to become one of the great figures in American jazz performance. One of the first to use classical themes in jazz, Ellington is considered one of the its most innovative composers as well. (Many of his later numbers were written with his longtime collaborator Billy Strayhorn, who wrote Ellington's signature tune "Take the 'A' Train.") At the height of his career Ellington toured the world with his orchestra and composed many standards. His best known numbers include "Mood Indigo," "In A Sentimental Mood," and "It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing."
According to the official site of his estate, "Ellington got his nickname of "Duke" from a childhood friend who commented on his elegant manners, bearing, and dress"... Stevie Wonder's pop hit "Sir Duke" is a tribute to Ellington.
(b Washington, dc, 29 April 1899; d New York, 24 May 1974). American jazz composer, bandleader and pianist. He played with the Washingtonians at the Kentucky Club, New York (1923-7), then moved to the Cotton Club (1927-32) with an enlarged band under his leadership. He pioneered the ‘jungle’ style of big-band jazz and made over 200 recordings. In 1931 he experimented with extended composition in Creole Rhapsody followed by Reminiscin′ in Tempo and Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue. The band developed further (it now had 14 pieces) and toured in the USA and Europe (1933, 1939). Ellington's writing was based on the styles of individual band members and suffered from its changes of personnel in the mid-1940s. His extended compositions continued, for the concert hall (Black, Brown and Beige, 1943) and later for LP records (a series of ‘suites’). He wrote a film score and stage music and latterly mainly liturgical music. After he died his orchestra was taken over by his son, Mercer Ellington (b 1919).
Edward Kennedy Ellington (1899-1974), certainly America's most brilliant jazz composer, was considered by many to be one of the great composers of the 20th century, irrespective of categories.
On April 29, 1899, Edward Ellington, known universally as "Duke," was born in Washington, D.C. He divided his studies between music and commercial art, and by 1918 establishing a reputation as a bandleader and agent. In 1923 he went to New York City and soon became a successful bandleader. In 1927 he secured an important engagement at the Cotton Club in Harlem, remaining there (aside from occasional tours) until 1932.
Ellington's band made its first European trip in 1932. After World War II it toured Europe regularly, with excursions to South America, the Far East, and Australia. One peak period for the band was from 1939 to 1942, when many critics considered its performances unrivaled by any other jazz ensemble.
As a composer, Ellington was responsible for numerous works that achieved popular success, some written in collaboration with his band members and with his coarranger Billy Strayhorn. The Duke's most significant music was written specifically for his own band and soloists. Always sensitive to the nuances of tone of his soloists, Ellington wrote features for individual sidemen and used his knowledge of their characteristic sounds when composing other works. His arrangements achieved a remarkable blend of individual and ensemble contributions. However, because most of his works were written for his own band, interpretations by others have seldom been satisfactory.
With Creole Rhapsody (1931) and Reminiscing in Tempo (1935) Ellington was the first jazz composer to break the 3-minute time limitation of the 78-rpm record. After the 1940s he concentrated more on longer works, including several suites built around a central theme, frequently an aspect of African American life. Always a fine orchestral pianist, with a style influenced by the Harlem stylists of the 1920s, Ellington remained in the background on most of his early recordings. After the 1950s he emerged as a highly imaginative piano soloist.
Ellington was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1964. The City of New York gave him a prize and Yale University awarded him a doctor of music degree in 1967; Morgan State and Washington universities also gave him honorary degrees that year. On his seventieth birthday Ellington was honored by President Richard Nixon at a White House ceremony and given the Medal of Freedom. In 1970 he was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
Ellington continued to compose and perform until his death from lung cancer on May 24, 1974, in New York City. His band, headed by his son Mercer, survives him, but as Phyl Garland, writing in Ebony magazine, put it, the elder Ellington will always be remembered for "the daring innovations that came to mark his music - the strange modulations built upon lush melodies that ramble into unexpected places, the unorthodox construction of songs … ; the bold use of dissonance in advance of the time."
Further Reading
Peter Gammond, ed., Duke Ellington: His Life and Music (1958), contains some first-rate essays on Ellington. See also Barry Ulanov, Duke Ellington (1946), and George E. Lambert, Duke Ellington (1961). Gunther Schuller, The History of Jazz (1968), includes the most perspicacious and scholarly study of Ellington's recordings of the 1920s.
James Lincoln Collier, Duke Ellington, Oxford University Press, 1987.
Stanley Dance, The World of Duke Ellington,Da Capo, 1980.
Duke Ellington, Music Is My Mistress, Doubleday, 1973.
Mercer Ellington, and Stanley Dance, Duke Ellington in Person, Houghton Mifflin, 1978.
Ron Frankl, Duke Ellington, Chelsea House, 1988.
Derek Jewell, Duke, A Portrait of Duke Ellington, Norton, 1977.
Ken Rattenbury, Duke Ellington: Jazz Composer, Yale University Press, 1991.
Born Edward Kennedy Ellington, April 29, 1899, in Washington, DC; died of lung cancer, May 24, 1974, in New York City; son of James Edward (a butler, carpenter, and blueprint maker) and Daisy (Kennedy) Ellington; married Edna Thompson, July 2, 1918; children: Mercer. Education: Left high school in his senior year; later received honorary diploma.
Career
Worked in a soda shop and as a sign painter, c. 1914-17; began playing in jazz bands, c. 1917; served as a U.S. Navy and State Department messenger during World War I; formed his first band, 1918; performed in Washington, DC and New York City during the 1920s; toured Europe in the 1930s; appeared many times at Newport Jazz Festival; concert performer and recording artist (primarily on Reprise and RCA labels) with his various bands until his death in 1974. Appeared in and/or wrote scores for films, including Check and Double Check, 1930, Murder at the Vanities, 1934, Anatomy of a Murder, 1959, Paris Blues, 1961, and Assault on a Queen, 1966.
Life's Work
Duke Ellington was a distinctive and pivotal figure in the world of jazz. While many critics agree that his flair for style far exceeded his raw musical talent, few dispute the significance of his impact on the music scene in the United States and abroad. A prolific composer, Ellington created over two thousand pieces of music, including the standard songs "It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)" and "Sophisticated Lady" and longer works like Black, Brown, and Beige and The Liberian Suite. With the variously named bands he led for more than fifty years, Ellington was responsible for many innovations in the jazz field, such as the introduction of "jungle-style" musical variations and the manipulation of the human voice as an instrument--singing notes without words. During the course of his long career, Ellington was showered with many honors, including the highest civilian award granted by the United States, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which was presented to him by President Richard M. Nixon in 1969. "No one else in the ... history of jazz," concluded critic Alistair Cooke in a 1983 issue of Esquire, "created so personal an orchestral sound and so continuously expanded the jazz idiom."
Born Edward Kennedy Ellington in Washington, D.C., on April 29, 1899, "Duke" earned his nickname at an early age to suit his aristocratic demeanor. He was brought up in a cultured, middle-class household: his father made blueprints for the U.S. Navy and served as a White House butler for extra income, and his mother, who hailed from a respected Washington family, set a dignified tone for the family to follow. "Ellington's parents lived by the ideal of Victorian gentility until they died," noted James Lincoln Collier in Duke Ellington, "and they raised Duke to it.... The view that he was special was cut into Duke's consciousness when he was very young.... [He] came into his teens, then, as a protected and well-loved child, growing up in an orderly household where decorous behavior was simply part of the air he breathed; he was confident in manner and sure that he had ... been born to high estate."
But Ellington matured at a time when attitudes and values were changing in America. The Harlem Renaissance--a period of heightened pride, interest, and activity in black arts and culture--was beginning to dawn. Rigid self-discipline was cast aside, and people began to indulge in the satisfaction of a variety of earthly desires. This newfound freedom to enjoy "good times," as Collier put it, had a profound influence on American music. The syncopated rhythms of ragtime, a wildly popular precursor of jazz that flourished in the late 1800s, gave way in the early 1900s to the blues of the Mississippi Delta area. New Orleans, Louisiana is generally regarded as the hot spot in music history where ragtime, blues, and other forms coalesced, giving birth to jazz. But, according to Collier, "it was not until 1915, when a cadre of white musicians brought it to Chicago, that [jazz] made a significant splash. The stir it created there encouraged an entrepreneur to bring ... the Original Dixieland Jazz Band to New York, where it also made a hit.... [Their] records became best-sellers, and the jazz boom began." And so the 1920s came to be known as the Jazz Age. The independent-minded Ellington fell in love with the sounds of the time. "Jazz is above all a total freedom to express oneself," he concluded, as quoted by Stanley Dance in Peter Gammond's Duke Ellington: His Life and Music.
Both his father and his mother could play the piano, and Ellington was exposed to music at an early age. The Ellingtons were strongly religious and hoped that if their son learned piano he would later exchange it for the church organ, but at first he showed little interest in music. He proved to be an uncooperative student of his ironically named piano teacher--Miss Clinkscales--and managed to wrangle his way out of lessons after just a few months.
As he grew older, Ellington became interested in drawing and painting. He won a prize from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for a poster he created, and was eventually offered a scholarship to the prestigious Pratt Institute in Brooklyn to study commercial art. But a latent interest in music kept him from pursuing a career in art. According to some biographers, Ellington's motivations to make it in the music world were far from pure: he apparently felt that he could earn more money as a bandleader than as an artist, and he noticed that pretty girls tended to flock around piano players.
Ellington lacked the self-discipline to engage in the formal study of the piano. However, he did begin to take the piano more seriously as a high school student, learning harmonies from his school's music teacher, Henry Grant. But Ellington never really learned to read music, and he could never play a musical selection for piano on demand. Ellington's son, Mercer, was quoted in Collier's Duke Ellington as having said: "The greater part of his knowledge was self-taught, by ear, and gradually acquired." Collier suggested that Duke's pride and stubbornness were at the root of his roundabout musical education. "This was the hard way of doing it, but it was the way [he] preferred, even if it would take him more time and cost him more energy."
Despite his unorthodox training, Ellington achieved the power to leave an audience spellbound. In an essay dated September 1957 in Duke Ellington: His Life and Music, Hughues Panassie noted, "Duke might not be one of the most agile or brilliant technicians of the keyboard, but what a great stylist he is!... He [puts] so much of his own spirit into the band.... He is an outstanding creator who puts all that is humanly possible into the greatest of jazz orchestras."
Around 1914, while working after school in a soda shop, Ellington wrote his first jazz song, "Soda Fountain Rag." He later dropped out of school to pursue his musical career, playing in jazz bands by night and supplementing his income by painting signs during the day. Often he managed to persuade club owners to let him paint the signs announcing the group's engagement. Around the same time, Ellington married schoolmate Edna Thompson, who had become pregnant with their son, Mercer.
Influenced by the style of earlier jazz artist Doc Perry, Ellington continued to work on his piano playing and, after the end of World War I, formed his own band. Critics contend that it was his band, rather than his piano, that was his true instrument. He composed not so much with a particular instrument in mind, but rather thinking of the current band member who played that instrument, suiting the music to the style of the player. The turnover rate in Ellington's band was not high, but due to the band's longevity many musicians and singers played with Ellington over the years, among them: saxophonists "Toby" Otto Hardwick, Harry Carney, Johnny Hodges, and Paul Gonsalves; trumpeters Artie Whetsol, Bubber Miley, and Cootie Williams; banjo players Elmer Snowden and Sterling Conaway; drummer "Sonny" William Greer; clarinet and sax player Barney Bigard; bass player Wellman Braud; trombonist Joe Nanton; vocalist Adelaide Hall; and pianist-composer Billy Strayhorn.
Ellington and his band, then known as the Washingtonians, began playing local clubs and parties in Washington, D.C., but during the early 1920s moved to New York City, where they secured steady work at the midtown Kentucky Club and, later, a three-year engagement at the popular Cotton Club. His notable compositions during this period included "Black and Tan Fantasy" and "Love Creole," both of which became jazz standards.
During the 1920s and 1930s, Ellington branched out into writing musical revues, such as Chocolate Kiddies, a success in Germany; playing in Broadway musicals, such as Florenz Ziegfeld's 1929 Show Girl; and appearing with his band in motion pictures, including the 1930 Amos and Andy feature Check and Double Check . Ellington's 1931 long piece, titled Creole Rhapsody, offered "confirmation of [his] emergence as a major composer," according to Collier. He soon added to the band's popularity with the legendary cuts "It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)" and "Sophisticated Lady."
Throughout the 1930s, Ellington also played the hot, primitive sounds of so-called "jungle music" and began experimenting with the infusion of Latin American elements into jazz. In 1939 Strayhorn joined Ellington's band, beginning a composition partnership that would last until the former's death in 1967. Strayhorn is perhaps best known for writing the band's theme, "Take the 'A' Train." The band's horizons expanded geographically in the 1930s as well--Ellington was well received on tours throughout the United States and in Europe.
In 1943 Ellington helped set up an annual jazz concert series at New York City's Carnegie Hall that lasted until 1955. Ellington was deeply involved with it each year and used the event to premier new, longer works of jazz that he composed. For the first concert, he introduced Black, Brown, and Beige, a piece in three sections that represented symphonically the story of blacks in the United States. "Black" concerned people of color at work and at prayer, "Brown" celebrated black soldiers who fought in American wars, and "Beige" depicted the African American music of Harlem. Other Carnegie Hall debuts included New World a-Comin', about a black revolution to come after the end of World War Il, and Liberian Suite, commissioned by the government of Liberia to honor its centennial.
The band's triumph at the Newport Jazz Festival of 1956 did much to broaden Ellington's audience. That year, Ellington's band was set to close the bill on the night of July 7th. Due to delayed starting times for earlier acts, the group did not take the stage until 11:45 p.m.--just 15 minutes before the concert was scheduled to end. Some members of the audience were already starting to leave. After performing an elaborate suite and a few standard works, Ellington led the band into "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue," highlighted by the improvisations of tenor saxophonist Paul Gonsalves.
The piece brought listeners to their feet. "It was solid jazz, blazing hot," proclaimed Collier. "Four men went out and played ... for six minutes and blew the joint away.... [The audience was] shaken by the music, and those who were there would never forget it.... Within weeks Ellington's picture was on the cover of Time. The record of the Newport concert sold in the hundreds of thousands and became Ellington's biggest seller."
Ellington continued to compose throughout the 1960s, writing scores for various motion pictures and garnering an Academy Award nomination for the score of the 1961 film Paris Blues, which featured Paul Newman and Sidney Poitier as lovestruck musicians in Paris. Two years later, Ellington was appointed by President John F. Kennedy's Cultural Committee to represent the United States on a State Department-sponsored tour of the East, including Syria, Jordan, Afghanistan, India, Ceylon, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon. Aside from performing in concert on the tour, Ellington lectured on the history of jazz, famous jazz musicians, and the state of American race relations.
During the mid-1960s Ellington and his band, ever innovative, started to perform jazz-style sacred-music concerts in large cathedrals throughout the world. The first was in San Francisco's Grace Episcopal Cathedral in 1965 and included In the Beginning God. Ellington featured another lineup of sacred songs at his 1968 concert in New York City's Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine and went on to perform at St. Sulpice in Paris, Santa Maria del Mar in Barcelona, and Westminster Abbey in London.
Duke Ellington was active as a performer and composer until his death from lung cancer on May 24, 1974, in New York City. His compositions such as "Mood Indigo" and "In a Sentimental Mood" remain jazz standards more than half a century after their introduction. Following Ellington's death, his son, Mercer, who had been serving as the band's business manager and trumpet player, took over its leadership. But as Phyl Garland, writing in Ebony magazine, put it, the elder Ellington will always be remembered for "the daring innovations that came to mark his music--the strange modulations built upon lush melodies that ramble into unexpected places; the unorthodox construction of songs...; the bold use of dissonance in advance of the time."
Awards
Spingarn Medal from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 1959; Academy Award nomination for the score of Paris Blues, 1961; Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS), 1966; Grammy Awards in several categories, including jazz composition and jazz performance--big band, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1976, and 1979; Presidential Medal of Freedom from Richard M. Nixon, 1969; inducted into NARAS Hall of Fame, 1990; elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
Works
Selective Discography
Afro-Bossa, Reprise, 1963.
Happy Reunion (recorded 1957-1958), Sony, 1991.
At Newport, Columbia House Legends of Jazz Program, 1993.
The Beginning (recorded 1926-1928), Decca.
The Best of Duke Ellington, Capitol.
(With the Boston Pops) Duke at Tanglewood, RCA.
Early Ellington, Everest Archives.
The Ellington Era (two volumes), Columbia.
Fantasies, Harmony.
Hot in Harlem (recorded 1928-1929), Decca.
The Indispensable Duke Ellington, RCA.
In My Solitude, Harmony.
Short Compositions
"Black and Tan Fantasy," 1927.
"Creole Love Call," 1927.
"Hot and Bothered," 1928.
"Mood Indigo," 1931.
"It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)," 1932.
"Sophisticated Lady," 1933.
"Drop Me Off at Harlem," 1933.
"In a Sentimental Mood," 1935.
"Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue," 1937.
"Caravan," 1937.
"Empty Ballroom Blues," 1938.
"Concerto for Cootie," 1939.
Other short compositions include "Soda Fountain Rag," "Solitude," "I Got It Bad and That Ain't Good," "When a Black Man's Blue," "Rockin' in Rhythm," and "The Blues Is Waitin'."
Long Compositions
Creole Rhapsody, 1931.
Black, Brown, and Beige, 1943.
New World a-Comin', 1945.
The Deep South Suite, 1946.
The Liberian Suite, 1947.
The Tattooed Bride, 1948.
Harlem, 1950.
Night Creature, 1955.
Festival Suite, 1956.
My People, 1963.
The Far East Suite, 1964.
Further Reading
Books
Collier, James Lincoln, Duke Ellington, Oxford University Press, 1987.
Dance, Stanley, The World of Duke Ellington, Da Capo, 1980.
Ellington, Duke, Music Is My Mistress, Doubleday, 1973.
Ellington, Mercer, and Stanley Dance, Duke Ellington in Person, Houghton Mifflin, 1978.
Frankl, Ron, Duke Ellington, Chelsea House, 1988.
Gammond, Peter, editor, Duke Ellington: His Life and Music, Da Capo, 1977.
Jewell, Derek, Duke: A Portrait of Duke Ellington, Norton, 1977.
Rattenbury, Ken, Duke Ellington: Jazz Composer, Yale University Press, 1991.
Periodicals
Crisis, January 1982.
Ebony, July 1969, p. 29.
Esquire, December 1983.
Newsweek, May 12, 1969.
New York Times Magazine, September 12, 1965, p. 64.
Progressive, August 1982.
Reader's Digest, November 1969, p. 108.
A permanent exhibit titled Duke Ellington: American Musician was installed at the Smithsonian's Museum of American History, Washington, DC, in the late 1980s; a larger exhibit, Beyond Category: The Musical Genius of Duke Ellington, was scheduled for display at the Museum of American History from April through September of 1993 before traveling throughout the United States.
(click to enlarge) Duke Ellington. (credit: Reprinted with permission of Down Beat magazine)
(born April 29, 1899, Washington, D.C., U.S. — died May 24, 1974, New York, N.Y.) U.S. pianist, bandleader, arranger, and composer. He formed his band in 1924 in Washington, D.C.; by 1927 it was performing regularly at the Cotton Club in Harlem. Until the end of his life his band would enjoy the highest professional and artistic reputation in jazz. First known for his distinctive "jungle" sound — a description derived from the use of growling muted brass and sinister harmonies — Ellington increasingly integrated blues elements into his music. He composed with the idiosyncratic sounds of his instrumentalists in mind. Many of his players spent most of their careers with the band; they included saxophonists Johnny Hodges and Harry Carney, bassist Jimmy Blanton, trombonists Tricky Sam Nanton and Lawrence Brown, and trumpeters Bubber Miley and Cootie Williams. Pianist Billy Strayhorn was Ellington's frequent collaborator. Ellington composed a massive body of work, including music for dancing, popular songs, large-scale concert works, musical theatre, and film scores. His best-known compositions include "Mood Indigo," "Satin Doll," "Don't Get Around Much Anymore," and "Sophisticated Lady."
(1899-1974), composer, bandleader, and pianist. Born Edward Kennedy Ellington in Washington, D.C., Ellington developed his keyboard skills by listening to local black ragtime pianists; he composed his first piece, "Soda Fountain Rag," around 1915. A successful professional musician by the early 1920s, he left Washington in the spring of 1923 for New York, which was his home base for the rest of his life. Between December 1927 and 1931 his orchestra held forth at Harlem's Cotton Club, where regular radio broadcasts, together with an active recording schedule, helped him establish a nationwide reputation.
In such compositions as "Black and Tan Fantasy" (1927), "Mood Indigo" (1930), "Solitude" (1934), and "Echoes of Harlem" (1935), Ellington emerged as a distinctive composer for his ensemble, employing the rhythms, harmonies, and tone colors of jazz to create pieces that vividly captured aspects of the African-American experience. At the same time he sought to broaden jazz's expressive range and formal boundaries in such extended works as Reminiscing in Tempo (1935), Black, Brown, and Beige (1943), and Harlem (1951).
An essential feature of Ellington's composing method was to write with specific instrumentalists in mind, often drawing them into the creative process by building entire pieces out of their musical ideas. This practice began in the 1920s, with Ellington drawing inspiration from such players as saxophonists Johnny Hodges and Otto Hardwick, trumpeters Bubber Miley and Cootie Williams, and trombonist Joseph Nanton. Another important contributor to the Ellington orchestra's sonic identity was the composer and arranger Billy Strayhorn, who worked closely with Ellington from 1939 until his death in 1967. Strayhorn was responsible for the band's famous theme, "Take the A Train" (1941), and in later years collaborated with Ellington on such projects as Such Sweet Thunder (1957) and the Far East Suite (1966).
During the 1930s Ellington began the pattern of regular touring--including trips to Europe in 1933 and 1939--that he maintained throughout his career. His orchestra performed in concert halls, nightclubs, and theaters, with Ellington appearing before the public as a composer and songwriter, entertainer, bandleader, and eventually global ambassador of American music.
Although many saw Ellington primarily as an exponent of big-band jazz, his compositional achievements, prolific output (estimated at over fifteen hundred works), and expressive range set him apart from others in the field. He wrote scores for musicals, films, television, and ballet and in the 1960s produced a series of sacred concerts combining his orchestra, choirs, vocalists, and dancers. Ellington was successful, as few others have been, in reconciling the practical function of a popular entertainer with the artistic aspirations of a serious composer. His rich legacy consists of hundreds of recordings, his many pieces that have entered the standard repertory, and his musical materials now preserved in the Duke Ellington Collection at the Smithsonian Institution.
Bibliography:
Stanley Dance, The World of Duke Ellington (1970; reprint, 1981); Duke Ellington, Music Is My Mistress (1973).
Ellington, Duke (Edward Kennedy Ellington), 1899-1974, American jazz musician and composer, b. Washington, D.C. Ellington made his first professional appearance as a jazz pianist in 1916. By 1918 he had formed a band, and after appearances in nightclubs in Harlem he became one of the most famous figures in American jazz. Ellington's orchestra, playing his own and Billy Strayhorn's compositions and arrangements, achieved a fine unity of style and made many innovations in the jazz idiom. Many instrumental virtuosos worked closely with Ellington for long periods of time. Among his best-known short works are "Mood Indigo," "Solitude," and "Sophisticated Lady." He also wrote jazz works of complex orchestration and ambitious scope for concert presentation, notably Creole Rhapsody (1932), Black, Brown and Beige (1943), Liberian Suite (1947), Harlem (1951), and Night Creatures (1955), and composed religious music, including three sacred concerts (1965, 1968, and 1973). Ellington made many tours of Europe, appeared in numerous jazz festivals and several films, and made hundreds of recordings. In 1969 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Bibliography
See his memoirs, Music Is My Mistress (1973); M. Tucker, ed., The Duke Ellington Reader (1993); biographies by B. Ulanov (1946, repr. 1976), J. L. Collier (1989), M. Tucker (1991), J. E. Hass (1993), and A. H. Lawrence (2001); S. Dance, The World of Duke Ellington (1970); M. Ellington (his son) and S. Dance, Duke Ellington in Person (1978).
A twentieth-century African-American jazz composer, songwriter, and bandleader; his real first name was Edward. Ellington's most popular songs include “Mood Indigo,” “Satin Doll,” “Sophisticated Lady,” and “Don't Get Around Much Anymore.”
Representative Albums: "The Best of the Duke Ellington Centennial Edition," "Duke Ellington Meets Coleman Hawkins," "The Duke's Men: Small Groups, Vol. 1"
Representative Songs: "Take the "A" Train," "Mood Indigo," "Caravan"
Biography
Duke Ellington was the most important composer in the history of jazz as well as being a bandleader who held his large group together continuously for almost 50 years. The two aspects of his career were related; Ellington used his band as a musical laboratory for his new compositions and shaped his writing specifically to showcase the talents of his bandmembers, many of whom remained with him for long periods. Ellington also wrote film scores and stage musicals, and several of his instrumental works were adapted into songs that became standards. In addition to touring year in and year out, he recorded extensively, resulting in a gigantic body of work that was still being assessed a quarter century after his death.
Ellington was the son of a White House butler, James Edward Ellington, and thus grew up in comfortable surroundings. He began piano lessons at age seven and was writing music by his teens. He dropped out of high school in his junior year in 1917 to pursue a career in music. At first, he booked and performed in bands in the Washington, D.C., area, but in September 1923 the Washingtonians, a five-piece group of which he was a member, moved permanently to New York, where they gained a residency in the Times Square venue The Hollywood Club (later The Kentucky Club). They made their first recordings in November 1924, and cut tunes for different record companies under a variety of pseudonyms, so that several current major labels, notably Sony, Universal, and BMG, now have extensive holdings of their work from the period in their archives, which are reissued periodically.
The group gradually increased in size and came under Ellington's leadership. They played in what was called "jungle" style, their sly arrangements often highlighted by the muted growling sound of trumpeter James "Bubber" Miley. A good example of this is Ellington's first signature song, "East St. Louis Toodle-oo," which the band first recorded for Vocalion Records in November 1926, and which became their first chart single in a re-recorded version for Columbia in July 1927.
The Ellington band moved uptown to The Cotton Club in Harlem on December 4, 1927. Their residency at the famed club, which lasted more than three years, made Ellington a nationally known musician due to radio broadcasts that emanated from the bandstand. In 1928, he had two two-sided hits: "Black and Tan Fantasy"/"Creole Love Call" on Victor (now BMG) and "Doin' the New Low Down"/"Diga Diga Doo" on OKeh (now Sony), released as by the Harlem Footwarmers. "The Mooche" on OKeh peaked in the charts at the start of 1929.
While maintaining his job at The Cotton Club, Ellington took his band downtown to play in the Broadway musical Show Girl, featuring the music of George Gershwin, in the summer of 1929. The following summer, the band took a leave of absence to head out to California and appear in the film Check and Double Check. From the score, "Three Little Words," with vocals by the Rhythm Boys featuring Bing Crosby, became a number one hit on Victor in November 1930; its flip side, "Ring Dem Bells," also reached the charts.
The Ellington band left The Cotton Club in February 1931 to begin a tour that, in a sense, would not end until the leader's death 43 years later. At the same time, Ellington scored a Top Five hit with an instrumental version of one of his standards, "Mood Indigo" released on Victor. The recording was later inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. As "the Jungle Band," the Ellington Orchestra charted on Brunswick later in 1931 with "Rockin' in Rhythm" and with the lengthy composition "Creole Rhapsody," pressed on both sides of a 78 single, an indication that Ellington's goals as a writer were beginning to extend beyond brief works. (A second version of the piece was a chart entry on Victor in March 1932.) "Limehouse Blues" was a chart entry on Victor in August 1931, then in the winter of 1932, Ellington scored a Top Ten hit on Brunswick with one of his best-remembered songs, "It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)," featuring the vocals of Ivie Anderson. This was still more than three years before the official birth of the swing era, and Ellington helped give the period its name. Ellington's next major hit was another signature song for him, "Sophisticated Lady." His instrumental version became a Top Five hit in the spring of 1933, with its flip side, a treatment of "Stormy Weather," also making the Top Five.
The Ellington Orchestra made another feature film, Murder at the Vanities, in the spring of 1934. Their instrumental rendition of "Cocktails for Two" from the score hit number one on Victor in May, and they hit the Top Five with both sides of the Brunswick release "Moon Glow"/"Solitude" that fall. The band also appeared in the Mae West film Belle of the Nineties and played on the soundtrack of Many Happy Returns. Later in the fall, the band was back in the Top Ten with "Saddest Tale," and they had two Top Ten hits in 1935, "Merry-Go-Round" and "Accent on Youth." While the latter was scoring in the hit parade in September, Ellington recorded another of his extended compositions, "Reminiscing in Tempo," which took up both sides of two 78s. Even as he became more ambitious, however, he was rarely out of the hit parade, scoring another Top Ten hit, "Cotton," in the fall of 1935, and two more, "Love Is Like a Cigarette" and "Oh Babe! Maybe Someday," in 1936. The band returned to Hollywood in 1936 and recorded music for the Marx Brothers' film A Day at the Races and for Hit Parade of 1937. Meanwhile, they were scoring Top Ten hits with "Scattin' at the Kit-Kat" and the swing standard "Caravan," co-written by valve trombonist Juan Tizol, and Ellington was continuing to pen extended instrumental works such as "Diminuendo in Blue" and "Crescendo in Blue." "If You Were in My Place (What Would You Do?)," a vocal number featuring Ivie Anderson, was a Top Ten hit in the spring of 1938, and Ellington scored his third number one hit in April with an instrumental version of another standard, "I Let a Song Go out of My Heart." In the fall, he was back in the Top Ten with a version of the British show tune "Lambeth Walk."
The Ellington band underwent several notable changes at the end of the 1930s. After several years recording more or less regularly for Brunswick, Ellington moved to Victor. In early 1939 Billy Strayhorn, a young composer, arranger, and pianist, joined the organization. He did not usually perform with the orchestra, but he became Ellington's composition partner to the extent that soon it was impossible to tell where Ellington's writing left off and Strayhorn's began. Two key personnel changes strengthened the outfit with the acquisition of bassist Jimmy Blanton in September and tenor saxophonist Ben Webster in December. Their impact on Ellington's sound was so profound that their relatively brief tenure has been dubbed "the Blanton-Webster Band" by jazz fans. These various changes were encapsulated by the Victor release of Strayhorn's "Take the 'A' Train," a swing era standard, in the summer of 1941. The recording was later inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.
That same summer, Ellington was in Los Angeles, where his stage musical, Jump for Joy, opened on July 10 and ran for 101 performances. Unfortunately, the show never went to Broadway, but among its songs was "I Got It Bad (And That Ain't Good)," another standard. The U.S. entry into World War II in December 1941 and the onset of the recording ban called by the American Federation of Musicians in August 1942 slowed the Ellington band's momentum. Unable to record and with touring curtailed, Ellington found an opportunity to return to extended composition with the first of a series of annual recitals at Carnegie Hall on January 23, 1943, at which he premiered "Black, Brown and Beige." And he returned to the movies, appearing in Cabin in the Sky and Reveille with Beverly. Meanwhile, the record labels, stymied for hits, began looking into their artists' back catalogs. Lyricist Bob Russell took Ellington's 1940 composition "Never No Lament" and set a lyric to it, creating "Don't Get Around Much Anymore." The Ink Spots scored with a vocal version (recorded a cappella), and Ellington's three-year-old instrumental recording was also a hit, reaching the pop Top Ten and number one on the recently instituted R&B charts. Russell repeated his magic with another 1940 Ellington instrumental, "Concerto for Cootie" (a showcase for trumpeter Cootie Williams), creating "Do Nothin' Till You Hear from Me." Nearly four years after it was recorded, the retitled recording hit the pop Top Ten and number one on the R&B charts for Ellington in early 1944, while newly recorded vocal cover versions also scored. Ellington's vintage recordings became ubiquitous on the top of the R&B charts during 1943-1944; he also hit number one with "A Slip of the Lip (Can Sink a Ship)," "Sentimental Lady," and "Main Stem." With the end of the recording ban in November 1944, Ellington was able to record a song he had composed with his saxophonist, Johnny Hodges, set to a lyric by Don George and Harry James, "I'm Beginning to See the Light." The James recording went to number one in April 1945, but Ellington's recording was also a Top Ten hit.
With the end of the war, Ellington's period as a major commercial force on records largely came to an end, but unlike other big bandleaders, who disbanded as the swing era passed, Ellington, who predated the era, simply went on touring, augmenting his diminished road revenues with his songwriting royalties to keep his band afloat. In a musical climate in which jazz was veering away from popular music and toward bebop, and popular music was being dominated by singers, the Ellington band no longer had a place at the top of the business; but it kept working. And Ellington kept trying more extended pieces. In 1946, he teamed with lyricist John Latouche to write the music for the Broadway musical Beggar's Holiday, which opened on December 26 and ran 108 performances. And he wrote his first full-length background score for a feature film with 1950's The Asphalt Jungle.
The first half of the 1950s was a difficult period for Ellington, who suffered many personnel defections. (Some of those musicians returned later.) But the band made a major comeback at the Newport Jazz Festival on July 7, 1956, when they kicked into a version of "Dimuendo and Crescendo in Blue" that found saxophonist Paul Gonsalves taking a long, memorable solo. Ellington appeared on the cover of Time magazine, and he signed a new contract with Columbia Records, which released Ellington at Newport, the best-selling album of his career. Freed of the necessity of writing hits and spurred by the increased time available on the LP record, Ellington concentrated more on extended compositions for the rest of his career. His comeback as a live performer led to increased opportunities to tour, and in the fall of 1958 he undertook his first full-scale tour of Europe. For the rest of his life, he would be a busy world traveler.
Ellington appeared in and scored the 1959 film Anatomy of a Murder, and its soundtrack won him three of the newly instituted Grammy Awards, for best performance by a dance band, best musical composition of the year, and best soundtrack. He was nominated for an Academy Award for his next score, Paris Blues (1961). In August 1963, his stage work My People, a cavalcade of African-American history, was mounted in Chicago as part of the Century of Negro Progress Exposition.
Meanwhile, of course, he continued to lead his band in recordings and live performances. He switched from Columbia to Frank Sinatra's Reprise label (purchased by Warner Bros. Records) and made some pop-oriented records that dismayed his fans but indicated he had not given up on broad commercial aspirations. Nor had he abandoned his artistic aspirations, as the first of his series of sacred concerts, performed at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco on September 16, 1965, indicated. And he still longed for a stage success, turning once again to Broadway with the musical Pousse-Café, which opened on March 18, 1966, but closed within days. Three months later, the Sinatra film Assault on a Queen, with an Ellington score, opened in movie houses around the country. (His final film score, for Change of Mind, appeared in 1969.)
Ellington became a Grammy favorite in his later years. He won a 1966 Grammy for best original jazz composition for "In the Beginning, God," part of his sacred concerts. His 1967 album Far East Suite, inspired by a tour of the Middle and Far East, won the best instrumental jazz performance Grammy that year, and he took home his sixth Grammy in the same category in 1969 for And His Mother Called Him Bill, a tribute to Strayhorn, who had died in 1967. "New Orleans Suite" earned another Grammy in the category in 1971, as did "Togo Brava Suite" in 1972, and the posthumous The Ellington Suites in 1976.
Ellington continued to perform regularly until he was overcome by illness in the spring of 1974, succumbing to lung cancer and pneumonia. His death did not end the band, which was taken over by his son Mercer, who led it until his own death in 1996, and then by a grandson. Meanwhile, Ellington finally enjoyed the stage hit he had always wanted when the revue Sophisticated Ladies, featuring his music, opened on Broadway on March 1, 1981, and ran 767 performances.
The many celebrations of the Ellington centenary in 1999 demonstrated that he continued to be regarded as the major composer of jazz. If that seemed something of an anomaly in a musical style that emphasizes spontaneous improvisation over written composition, Ellington was talented enough to overcome the oddity. He wrote primarily for his band, allowing his veteran players room to solo within his compositions, and as a result created a body of work that seemed likely to help jazz enter the academic and institutional realms, which was very much its direction at the end of the 20th century. In that sense, he foreshadowed the future of jazz and could lay claim to being one of its most influential practitioners. ~ William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide
