Arts and Letters

To describe Edward "Duke" Ellington as having been a great jazz musician—or even as the most distinguished of jazz composers—is to do him an injustice. His music, his vision went far beyond the confines of jazz and are, in fact, as the French would say, hors de catégorie. Duke himself rebelled against the stigmatization of jazz—albeit in his own uniquely dignified, sophisticated, and subtle way. In the 1920s they grouped him with the "hot jazz" musicians. When Duke's music eluded that label, they called it ''junglistic" music. And in the thirties they tried to ensnare him in the swing movement. Later, because his always original harmonic language had already anticipated by a decade the so-called bop movement, they tried to relocate him in be-bop and modern jazz. When he began writing religious services, multi-sectional tone poems and extended works with symphony orchestra, they finally abandoned trying to label Duke's music and began to call it "Ellington music."

Perhaps that is the only accurate way to characterize his music. For never was the saying truer that the man is the music, and the music is the man. From the very beginning (in the mid and late twenties) he was a musical poet, his keen ear absorbing the sounds of the black urban milieu in which he grew up, his imagination subsuming the rich folklore of his Afro-American heritage in his own creative terms.

His talents were protean, as were his energies and—not unrelated—his musical output. Statistically, the latter is numbered conservatively in the thousands, while qualitatively it equals the highest achievements our culture can offer. As an orchestra leader, Duke survived nearly 50 years (!) of touring, including incalculable numbers of one-night stands. Wearied by years and decades of sleepless nights, pursued by fans and critics who wanted to know "how he did it," Duke in later years showed the strain sometimes backstage—before a concert or a show—of a life as an itinerant musician. But the moment he stepped onto the stage, he became transformed. No one has ever galvanized an orchestra from the keyboard the way Ellington did. Indeed, among my own many personal memories of Duke as a friend, composer and performer, none haunts me more than the vision of Duke striding from the wings to the piano—which was always set at such an angle that he could see everybody in the band (even though it meant that most of the audience saw only his back)—striding in a burst of energy that compelled you to think of some elemental force. Duke always played deep into the keys; that's how he elicited such a powerful but unforced sonority from the instrument. He would strike the first chord before he was even fully seated. And instantly, radiating out horizontally from the Steinway, there would flow such electrons of energy as to immediately set the entire band into swinging motion. It was as if his fingers reached out through the piano, touching and energizing every player—and, of course, the audience.

But our fondest reminiscences are best reserved for the compositions—a staggering list of masterpieces from Black and Tan Fantasy in the late 20s through Mood Indigo, It Don't Mean a Thing If It Ain't Got that Swing, Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue (and all the other "blue" pieces) to Cotton Tail and Black, Brown and Beige and the other tone parallels—as he called them—of black history, and finally the religious services of the last years.

In his best creations, Ellington was wholly original—in a way I believe not applicable to any other artist associated with jazz or Afro-American music. He was a true and grand innovator in that traditional sense of innovation which touches all aspects of an art. Certainly in the realm of harmony, Ellington remained unequalled, creating unforgettable moments unique in twentieth-century music. In matters of form and rhythmic structure—where jazz was mostly, and still is, content with 32-bar song and 12-bar blues formats—Ellington was ever the explorer and innovator, bursting asunder all traditional bounds and confounding his colleagues as well as the critics and jazz experts. Hand in hand with harmonic innovation came Ellington's subtle and unparalleled ear for timbre, and an uncanny ability to cast his harmonics precisely in terms of the wholly unique personalities in his orchestra. For this—the orchestra more than the piano—was Ellington's instrument. And his mastery of it was total, as was his reliance on it and devotion to it—for he maintained an orchestra for 47 years, often at great financial risk. But it was a luxury we might all envy him, for not since the days of Haydn and Esterhazy has a composer had his instantly available orchestra, to practice on, as it were.

Still, to most of us, Ellington the man was an enigma, an impenetrable complex of paradoxes and contradictions. He carried the mantle of Dukedom with genuine royal dignity, impeccable taste and a legendary linguistic elegance, all of which could not altogether hide what is in any case revealed in Ellington's music. He was one of those rare human beings whom it was impossible not to love.