Ellington, Duke

Date of Birth: Apr. 29, 1899

Date of Death: May 24, 1974

Biography from Current Biography (1970) Copyright (c) by The H. W. Wilson Company. All rights reserved. Ellington, Duke Apr. 29, 1899-May 24, 1974 Composer; band leader; pianist     The single most impressive body of composition in American jazz is the lush, complexly harmonic repertoire that band leader-pianist-composer Duke Ellington has produced over the past half century. The Ellington canon comprises more than 900 published pieces, ranging from such popular classics as "Satin Doll," "Sophisticated Lady," "In My Solitude," "Don't Get Around Much Anymore," "Mood Indigo," and "I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart" to sacred music, symphonic pieces, and incidental music for plays and motion pictures. Most of the compositions are written expressly for his own orchestra, a remarkably cohesive, long-lived unit that is, more than the piano, his true instrument. The orchestra, which has played in virtually all of the world's great concert halls, records on the Reprise and RCA Victor labels.     Jazz critic Ralph Gleason has called Ellington "the greatest single talent ... in the history of jazz" and predicted that in the future "Duke's music will be studied in the schools and critics will grant him his true place beside the great composers of this century." At a symposium on Ellington held at the University of California at Berkeley in the autumn of 1969, composer Gunther Schuller, president of the New England Conservatory of Music, described him as "certainly the greatest American composer."     The name Duke--an allusion to his elegant dress and aristocratic manner--was given to Ellington by childhood friends. He was born Edward Kennedy Ellington in Washington, D.C., on April 29, 1899 to James Edward Ellington, a blueprint maker in the Department of the Navy, and Daisy (Kennedy) Ellington. The father moonlighted as a butler to raise his son and his daughter, Ruth, in middle-class comfort, and Ellington has said that he was "terribly spoiled" by his mother. The family was devoutly religious. "I didn't go to one church each Sunday," Ellington has recalled. "I went to two. My mother was a Baptist and my father a Methodist. I was raised in love, and love is the number one aura of God."     Growing up, Ellington manifested a talent for painting, especially for watercolor. At Armstrong High School in Washington he won a poster contest sponsored by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and he was offered an art scholarship by Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. But his attraction to music prevailed. Rejected by a piano teacher when he was seven--because of his incorrigible adventuring into off-tone chords--Ellington taught himself to play on the family player piano, using as his models ragtime "stride" pianists he heard in and around Washington. Slowing down the player mechanism, he learned to imitate note by note such piano rolls as "Carolina Shout," done by James P. Johnson. Later he did some formal study under Henry Grant, music instructor at the old M Street High School (now Dunbar High School) in Washington.     After school, Ellington worked as a soda jerk, a job that inspired his first composition, "Soda Fountain Rag," which he created in 1915 by ear, since he did not yet know how to read or write music. In his senior year he quit high school and began playing occasional gigs at night while earning a steady living painting commercial signs by day. In 1918 he formed his own band--at first called the Duke's Serenaders and later the Washingtonians--with Otto Hardwick on bass and saxophone, Artie Whetsol on trumpet, and Elmer Snowden on banjo. The following year drummer Sonny Greer and banjoist Sterling Conaway joined the combo, which had no difficulty finding engagements at society balls and embassy receptions in and around Washington. "I would play the '[Soda Fountain] Rag' as a one-step, two-step, waltz, tango, and fox trot," Ellington has recalled. "Listeners never knew it was the same piece. I was established as having my own repertory."     In 1922 Ellington, with Hardwick and Greer, ventured to New York briefly to play in Wilbur Sweatman's band, and the following year the Washingtonians moved permanently to Manhattan, where the combo acquired, over the next decade, Fred Guy (banjo), Bubber Miley (trumpet), Sam Nanton (trombone), Harry Carney (baritone saxophone), Rudy Jackson (clarinet), Johnny Hodges (alto saxophone), and Lawrence Brown (trombone). (Carney, Hodges, and Brown are still with the orchestra.) After opening at Barron's nightclub in Harlem, the group moved to the Kentucky Club in midtown. As the Kentucky Club Orchestra it recorded such Ellington compositions as "Black and Tan Fantasy" and "East Saint Louis Toodleoo." While at the Kentucky Club, Ellington wrote his first revue score, for Chocolate Kiddies, which ran in Germany for two years (1924-26) but never reached Broadway.     The style of Ellington the composer--who has always written with his own sidemen, particularly the soloists, in mind--matured during the 1920's, partly in interaction with his expanding band and partly under the informal guidance of the older black composers Will Vodery and Will Marion Cook. But Ellington would not, as Cook advised, enter a conservatory. "Many students of Ellingtonia," Phyl Garland observed in Ebony (July 1969), "have considered that it was this lack of indoctrination into formal techniques that enabled him to devise 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 rivaled in their sensitivity only by the classical compositions of the French impressionists; the bold use of dissonance in advance of the time that has earned for him the admiration of formal composers like Igor Stravinsky."     Miss Garland linked Ellington's reliance on "mother-wit" in his prodigious compositional output to his limited piano technique. Referring to such giants of the piano as Art Tatum and Willie (the Lion) Smith, Ellington has said, as quoted by Miss Garland: "I never could play anything I heard them play although they all tried to teach me. So I had to sit down and create something that fit under my fingers."     The national reputation of Ellington and his band was established when, during a five-year engagement (1927-32) at the Cotton Club--the Harlem cabaret popular with cafe society in the Prohibition era--their performances were regularly broadcast over the CBS radio network. During interruptions in the Cotton Club booking, the Ellingtonians toured the RKO vaudeville circuit, played in Flo Ziegfield's Broadway revue Show Girl (1929), and performed in the two-reel movie Black and Tan (RKO, 1929) and the Amos 'n Andy feature film Check and Double Check (RKO, 1930).     Through such recordings as "Rockin' in Rhythm," and "It Don't Mean a Thing," Ellington became almost as well known in Europe as in the United States. The band toured Europe in 1933 and again in 1939. On the second tour it played such Ellington numbers as "Harmony in Harlem," and "Riding a Blue Note" before full, enthusiastic houses in France, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. In Hollywood in the middle and late 1930's it appeared in the films She Got Her Man (Universal, 1935), Murder at the Vanities (Paramount, 1935), and The Hit Parade (Republic, 1937).     Although he has become resigned to it, Ellington has always regretted the prevalence of the term jazz, partly because of its former associations with bordellos and speakeasies and partly because he considers it inappropriate. "I don't write jazz," he once said, "I write Negro music." Conscious of the "very deep African roots" of so-called jazz, he deliberately sought in his early works to create "jungle" colors through the use of slurs, growls, and mutes. In the 1930's, as Nat Hentoff observed in the New York Times Magazine (September 12, 1965), "the exoticism faded and he concentrated instead on perfecting a more supple, sophisticated orchestral language through which his lyrical bent and mocking wit appeared more and more prominently."     In the 1930's Ellington also broke away from the traditional three-minute composition (geared to the 10-inch, 78-r.p.m. record) with "Creole Rhapsody," "Reminiscing in Tempo," and other, even longer pieces. At the same time he continued to produce such concise evocations of moods, persons, and places as "Harlem Air Shaft," "Bojangles" (Bill Robinson), and "Portrait of Bert Williams." And he began creating miniature concertos around soloists, such as "Clarinet Lament," written for Barney Bigard.     At Carnegie Hall in 1943 Ellington conducted the premiere performance of his Black, Brown, and Beige Suite, a tonal history of the Negro in America, and on the same podium five years later he introduced two other major works, The Tattooed Bride and Manhattan Murals. During the 1940's he also composed the music for the stage productions Jump for Joy (Mayan Theatre, Hollywood, 1941) and Beggar's Holiday (Broadway Theatre, New York City, 1946), and he and his band played in the film Cabin in the Sky (MGM, 1943). His Liberian Suite was written on commission from the government of Liberia on the occasion of that African country's centenary, in 1947.     Ellington's extended symphonic jazz work Harlem, commissioned by Arturo Toscanini for the NBC Symphony Orchestra in 1950, was described by Phyl Garland in Ebony as "a moving reflection of black life and black moods." Ellington himself conducted the work in a concert at Carnegie Hall in 1955 that also included his New World a'Comin' and Night Creature, and the following year he and his band made the first of several appearances at the Newport Jazz Festival. At Town Hall in April 1957 he conducted performances of his "Such Sweet Thunder," "Cop Out," "Sonnet for Sister Kate," "Lady Mac," "Sonnet for Caesar," "The Telecasters," and "Sonnet for the Moor." The following month A Drum is a Woman, a teleplay with music by Ellington, was presented on the United States Steel Hour over the CBS network.     The Ellington band played an engagement at the Basin Street East nightclub in New York City in 1961, and the following January it gave a concert at the Museum of Modern Art that incuded Ellington's compositions "New York City Blues," "Blue Belles of Harlem," and "Reflections in D." Ellington's tour of the Middle and Far East for the United States Department of State in 1963 was the subject of a documentary shown on the CBS television network in 1964.     The three-man 1965 Pulitzer Prize music jury, failing to settle on a single work worthy of the prize that year, recommended instead that a special citation be given to Ellington for his "long-term achievement in the field." When the Pulitzer advisory board ignored their recommendation in making its awards in May 1965, two of the judges, Robert Eyer and Winthrop Sargeant, resigned. When reporters asked Ellington for his reaction, he replied: "Fate's been kind to me. Fate doesn't want me to be famous too young."     In June 1965 the Ellington orchestra played its leader's Far East Suite at the White House Festival of the Arts, and the following month Ellington conducted the New York Philharmonic Orchestra at Lincoln Center in the first public performance of his suite The Golden Broom and the Golden Apple. At Grace Episcopal Cathedral in San Francisco on September 16, 1965 he conducted his orchestra in his first sacred concert, which included the musical sermon "In the Beginning God." The concert was repeated at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York City the following Christmas, and that performance was taped by CBS-TV and telecast on January 6, 1966. An all-new second sacred concert was presented at the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City in January 1968. On July 20, 1969, the day following the first moon landing, Ellington and a contingent from his band performed over the ABC-TV network his ten-minute composition for piano, bass, drum, and voice, "Moon Maiden," commissioned for the occasion by ABC.     In August and September 1969 Ellington worked at the Rainbow Grill in New York City with ten of his sidemen--including such veterans as alto saxophonist Johnny Hodges, tenor saxophonist Paul Gonsalves, clarinetist Russell Procope, and trombonist Lawrence Brown, and such newcomers as bassist Paul Kondziela and drummer Rufus Jones--and singer Joya Sherrill. (Ellington, it might be noted, was the first jazz master to use singers instrumentally in wordless vocals.) The full roster of the orchestra today also includes baritone saxophonist Harry Carney and trumpeters Cootie Williams and Cat Anderson. The rate of turnover is low because Ellington pays his sidemen exceptionally well and also because, as Harry Carney told Phyl Garland, "he's a master at psychology." Carney explained: "He pays attention ... to the individuals. He knows about the moods of people and allows for that. He doesn't go in for regimentation.... And he's very easygoing. He loves music and he loves people."     In an interview during the Rainbow Grill engagement, Ellington told Bob Micklin of Newsday (August 13, 1969): "The writing and playing of music is a matter of intent.... You can't just throw a paint brush against the wall and call whatever happens art. My music fits the tonal personality of the player. I think too strongly in terms of altering my music to fit the performer to be impressed by accidental music. You can't take doodling seriously." The musician said that he was currently writing an opera, tentatively titled "Queenie Pie," about a wealthy Harlem lady, a manufacturer of beauty products, who keeps a succession of young men. In October 1969 Ellington, at the request of President Nixon and under the partial sponsorship of the United States Travel Service, embarked with his band on a round-the-world goodwill tour.     "Take the 'A' Train," one of the staples in the Ellington band's repertoire, was composed not by Ellington himself but by Billy Strayhorn, Ellington's chief arranger and associate composer, from 1939 until his death in 1967. As John S. Wilson observed in the New York Times (June 25, 1967), Strayhorn was Ellington's "musical alter ego to such an extent that neither man, in retrospect, could be sure who wrote what part of anything they had worked on together." Thomas L. Whaley now assists Ellington in arranging.     Ellington wrote the incidental music for the 1963 Stratford (Ontario) Shakespeare Festival production of Timon of Athens; the score for the musical comedy Sugar City, and the incidental music for the films Anatomy of a Murder (Columbia, 1959), Paris Blues (United Artists, 1961), and Assault on a Queen (Paramount, 1966). For the Paris Blues score he was nominated for an Academy Award. A Billy Strayhorn memorial album cut by the Ellington band for RCA Victor, And His Mother Called Him Bill, was chosen "the best performance by a large group" by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences in 1968. For their recordings the Ellingtonians have also garnered numerous Grammy awards, and Ellington has won first place or top rank repeatedly in polls or selections made by the magazines Esquire, Down Beat, and Playboy. In 1966 the Republic of Togo issued a postage stamp honoring Ellington. His other honors include the Bronze Medal of the City of New York, the N.A.A.C.P.'s Spingarn Medal, and the Presidential Medal of Honor, bestowed upon him by President Nixon at a party at the White House on the occasion of Ellington's seventieth birthday. He was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1970.     A tall man, Duke Ellington is distinguished in bearing, urbane and gracious in manner, and serene in disposition. Having few intimates, he generally keeps his own counsel, and even when he has to criticize his sidemen during a session he does so obliquely (and effectively). He is permissive toward his men, but always in control when the music begins. By a short-lived marriage to Edna Thompson, contracted in 1918, Ellington has a son, Mercer, who is a trumpeter and road manager with his father's band. Ellington's sister, Ruth, runs the music publishing company he owns, Tempo Music. His granddaughter, Mercedes, is a dancer who has performed often in network television productions.     According to Nat Hentoff in Show (August 1964), Ellington tends to be "superstitious." By philosophy and temperament the musician is a nonworrier who diverts negative emotions into energy for his work. But he is solicitous about his health almost to the point of hypochondria, according to some observers. He stopped drinking alcoholic beverages several years ago, is never without a supply of pills and vitamins, and tries to get nine or ten hours sleep a day. His waking hours are seldom spent on anything but his music. "I just don't have time to be a social cat," he has remarked. Still interested in painting, he is, he says, "always buying material and making plans, but the paints just sit around and collect dust." Ebony 24:29+ Jl '69 pors; N Y Times Mag p64+ S 12 '65 pors; Show 4:71+ Jl-Ag '64 pors; Washington (D.C.) Post mag p10+ My 20 '62 pors; Biographical Encyclopaedia & Who's Who of the American Theatre (1966); Dance, Stanley. The World of Duke Ellington (1970); Who's Who in America, 1970-71

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