The Highest Note in the Century Since His Birth, Duke Ellington Has Been the Most Important Composer of Any Music, Anywhere Blumenthal, Bob
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Document 1 of 1 The highest note In the century since his birth, Duke Ellington has been the most important composer of any music, anywhere Blumenthal, Bob. Boston Globe [Boston, Mass] 25 Apr 1999: 1. Abstract The late Duke Ellington, whose 100th birthday will be celebrated on Thursday, disliked the word "jazz." As he famously remarked, the only subsets of music he recognized were good and bad. Rather than stress categorical distinctions, Ellington preferred to celebrate artists and works that were, in another of his oft-quoted phrases, "beyond category." The magnitude of Ellington's legacy should be clear to all who can hear, and even to those who can only count. Just look at the numbers. From 1914, when he wrote "Soda Fountain Rag" as an aspiring pianist in his native Washington, D.C., until shortly before his death, on May 24, 1974, Ellington was responsible for nearly 2,000 documented compositions. From 1923, when he first gained employment in New York for his Washingtonians at Barron Wilkins's Harlem nightclub, he kept an orchestra together through boom andbust. The notion of writing for specific individuals as part of an ensemble reached its highest form of expression with Ellington. Rather than simply creating music for a three-piece trombone section, he crafted lines that fit the plungered growl of Joe "Tricky Sam" Nanton, the fluency of Lawrence Brown, and the warmth of Jual Tizol's valved instrument; and he applied this practice to every chair in the band. This led Ellington to collect musicians whose "tonal personality" (another favor-ite image) inspired him, ratherthan those who might simply blendinto an undifferentiated orchestral mass. Full Text The late Duke Ellington, whose 100th birthday will be celebrated on Thursday, disliked the word "jazz." As he famously remarked, the only subsets of music he recognized were good and bad. Rather than stress categorical distinctions, Ellington preferred to celebrate artists and works that were, in another of his oft-quoted phrases, "beyond category." So let's set aside the four-letter J word and the misguided contemporary substitute "American classical music," and simply declare that, in the century since his birth, there has been no greater composer, American or otherwise, than Edward Kennedy Ellington. Even this judgment shortchanges his achievements, which also include brilliantly orchestrating the music of others and, for a half-century and without interruption, leading one of the most eloquent ensembles in music history. The magnitude of Ellington's legacy should be clear to all who can hear, and even to those who can only count. Just look at the numbers. From 1914, when he wrote "Soda Fountain Rag" as an aspiring pianist in his native Washington, D.C., until shortly before his death, on May 24, 1974, Ellington was responsible for nearly 2,000 documented compositions. From 1923, when he first gained employment in New York for his Washingtonians at Barron Wilkins's Harlem nightclub, he kept an orchestra together through boom andbust. We tend to think of Ellington alongside others, both black and white, who led the groups of a dozen or more players that came to be known as big bands. Yet his achievement is different from that of Fletcher Henderson, Jimmie Lunceford, Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, and Woody Herman, and not simply because he wrotethe bulk of his group's music. El-lington also was determined thathis band would play on when theothers disbanded, and this inabil-ity to accept economic realitiesand become a sit-at-home composeris central to understanding hisgenius. The notion of writing for specific individuals as part of an ensemble reached its highest form of expression with Ellington. Rather than simply creating music for a three-piece trombone section, he crafted lines that fit the plungered growl of Joe "Tricky Sam" Nanton, the fluency of Lawrence Brown, and the warmth of Jual Tizol's valved instrument; and he applied this practice to every chair in the band. This led Ellington to collect musicians whose "tonal personality" (another favor-ite image) inspired him, ratherthan those who might simply blendinto an undifferentiated orchestral mass. During his first decade in New York, as he established his reputation first at the Kentucky Club and then the Cotton Club, Ellington went about the business of collecting these personalities. Trumpeters Arthur Whetsol, Bubber Miley, and Cootie Williams; reed players Barney Bigard, Harry Carney, and Johnny Hodges; the aforementioned trombonists; and bassist Wellman Braud were added one by one, each new voice providing new options. In time most would move on, and then Ellington would find someone new with something new to offer like Jimmy Hamilton, Clark Terry, and Paul Gonsalves. It was the combination of these voices that revealed new orchestral worlds. The blends were lush, mysterious, and idiosyncratic enough to confound the most schooled musicians. Andre Previn once summarized what Ellington did by noting, "Another bandleader can stand in front of a thousand fiddles and a thousand brass, give the down beat, and every studio arranger can nod his head and say, `Oh, yes, that's done like this.' But Duke merely lifts his finger, three horns make a sound, and nobody knows what it is." Yet those arrangers who, over time, have grown acclimated to Ellington's music often find it easier to transcribe than most, because the individual lines of each trumpet, trombone, and reed player stand out with such distinction. Ellington was not above expanding upon ideas that his musicians minted, which led to charges that they, and not he, deserve credit for many of the band's most famous numbers. Yet without Ellington's input, these classics would have remained little more than intriguing melodic snippets. "Cootie used to warm up with the melody that became `Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me,' " Clark Terry said in explanation of the process. "Duke heard him do that consistently and made a tune out of it. Cootie would have never composed that thing; he knew nothing about adding the harmonies to it. Same thing with Bigard, who used to warm up with the melody that became `Mood Indigo.' Duke took that and made `Mood Indigo' out of it. Duke was a compiler of ideas. He knew how to take insignificant little things and make something out of them." Ellington was also a compiler of images, which is the second key to his achievement. Raised in the relative comfort and stability of Washington's black professional class, and imbued with notions of dignity and cultural pride that would illuminate all of his music, he was a keen observer of his immediate community and the wider world that he encountered once his band began to tour. "Everything had a picture or was descriptive of something. Always," he once told Stanley Dance in reference to his compositions; and while in time this attitude led him to portray everything from the Northern Lights as observed from a Canadian highway to the Taj Mahal, his greatest subject was his community, in all of its particulars. While he might write pieces about famous or historic figures, the bulk of Ellington'smusic portrayed the everyday menand women who composed his audi-ence. From the outset of his career, even when creating what the Cotton Club billed as "jungle music," Ellington was celebrating the dignity of African-Americans, to the point that he titled a 1928 composition "Black Beauty" when most people of color considered "black" a pejorative. His concept was built upon a foundation of the blues, nurtured during a brief 1926 affiliation with the great New Orleans soprano saxophonist Sidney Bechet, and taken through endless permutations during the next five decades. "Black and Tan Fantasy" and "Creole Love Call," two of his earliest classics, brought nobility and complexity to the blues, just as "Sepia Panorama" and "Ko-Ko" would over a decade later. Several of Ellington's titles reveal that, even when working in the "short form" of the three-minute 78 rpm record, he was taking an overview that placed individual vignettes in a larger cultural context. There have been debates regarding whether he was as successful when writing longer works such as "Creole Rhapsody" (1931), "Reminiscing in Tempo" (1935), and "Black, Brown and Beige" (1943); and the frequent ability to break these suites into a series of individual "tunes" has led some to question Ellington's bona fides as a "serious" composer. Yet his gift for juggling sonority and structure, for cramming a volume of detail within a page of music, is unrivaled by more traditionally schooled or openly ambitious writers. Works like "Harlem Air Shaft" carry a weight of overlapping voices and images worthy of his friend Orson Welles, whose "Citizen Kane" is nothing if not Ellingtonian in its vibrancy and multilayered flair. Leading a mere "dance band" also stood in the way of Ellington's gaining the imprimatur of cultural guardians such as the Pulitzer committee, which granted him a posthumous prize last month after specifically rejecting his candidacy for a citation in 1966 (already 30 years after such an award was due). A dance-oriented rhythm did remain at the heart of Ellington's output, and in such classics as "Rockin' in Rhythm" (1930) and "It Don't Mean a Thing" (1932) anticipated the swing craze by several years, but the Ellington Orchestra always did more than play for dancers. It supported stage shows upon its arrival in New York, broadcast live on radio from the Cotton Club beginning in 1927, made its first film appearance in 1930, began including concerts in its regular itinerary in 1932, visited Europe on the first of several international tours a year later, provided music for the theatrical production "Jump for Joy" in 1941, and ultimately was responsible for movie soundtracks, symphonic collaborations, and programs of sacred music.