Duke Ellington

Duke Ellington, the great jazz musician, died in New York on May 24, 1974, at the age of 75.

Edward Kennedy Ellington was born on April 29, 1899, in Washington, DC, where his father worked as a butler and later as a blueprint maker for the Navy. He had already started studying the piano in 1906 and at school showed signs of being gifted both musically and artistically. It was while he was at school that he gained the nickname “Duke”, supposedly on account of his sartorial elegance. By 1916 he was earning a living painting commercial signs by day and playing the piano at night in the so-called stride style then beginning to be popularized by James P. Johnson.

In 1917 he refused the offer of a scholarship from the Pratt Institute of Fine Arts in Brooklyn so that he could continue his music and in 1918 married Edna Thompson. The next few years he spent playing and organizing bands in Washington until 1922, when he made an abortive attempt to earn his living in New York. The next year he was back again leading a band at the Kentucky Club and beginning to make a name for himself. It was also at this time that he turned his attention to writing and composing in which field his greatest achievements were to lie.

In 1927 he was invited to bring his band to the Cotton Club, a famous night-spot of the time, where he stayed for five years.

In 1932 and in the next year he made a highly successful tour of Europe. From then until 1942 he made a profusion of fine records, the best of which are perhaps those dating from the early forties. The most popular of these, starting with “Mood Indigo” in 1930, were slow, occasionally sentimental performances, but they do not represent those most admired by other musicians.

In 1943 he inaugurated a series of annual concerts at the Carnegie Hall, at the first of which he presented a long work entitled “Black, Brown and Beige” the first in a series of larger-scale works such as “Deep South Suit”, “Blutopia”, “Liberian Suite”, etc.

Duke Ellington was undoubtedly the greatest composer in jazz, but the use of the world “composer” may confuse anyone accustomed to classical usage. Improvisation has always been more important in jazz than writing; the chief value of a jazz composition usually lies in the opportunities its harmonic framework gives to jazz soloists, which means that the composer is almost invariably subordinate to the musicians who interpret and elaborate on his work.

This never applied to Ellington for the simple reason that he always interpreted his own material through the medium of his orchestra.

No account of Ellington is complete without mentioning that he was one of America’s better song writers, having written such songs as “Mood Indigo”, “Caravan”, “Sophisticated Lady”, “Don’t Get Around Much Any More” and “I’m Beginning To See the Light”. All these brought him enough royalties in later years to enable him, it is said, to keep his beloved band on the road at a loss. He toured widely almost to the end – his last appearance in England shortly before his death was at a concert at Westminster Abbey.

All his life he had been honoured outside the jazz profession, from an early essay of praise by Constant Lambert to a special evening dedicated to him at the White House by President Nixon, though perhaps it was a greater tribute to have been awarded the French Legion of Honour. He received these, as he moved through life, with wit and dignity; when told that a prize many people had thought he would get had been awarded elsewhere, he merely commented that fate did not want him to be famous too soon.