Duke Ellington

Their life

Bandleader, pianist, and the most prolific American composer of his century — some 1,500 works, from three-minute records to suites, sacred concerts and film scores. He wrote for specific players rather than for instruments, building parts around the particular sound of Johnny Hodges's alto or Bubber Miley's growl, and held an orchestra together for nearly fifty years by treating it as an instrument he was composing on. He rejected the word jazz for his own output, preferring "American music," and refused to play segregated venues in the South long before it was safe or common to refuse. He was denied a Pulitzer in 1965 when the board overruled its own jury, and remarked that fate was being kind — fate did not want him to be famous too young.

Known for

• Leading one orchestra for decades
• Writing for individual players' voices
• Mood Indigo and Caravan
• Black, Brown and Beige
• Anatomy of a Murder score
• Sacred Concerts

The road they walked

Edward Kennedy Ellington was born in Washington, D.C., on April 29, 1899, into a Black middle-class family that took manners and ambition seriously. His father, James Edward, worked as a butler and later as a blueprint maker; his mother, Daisy, set the household's standards of dignity, and the nickname "Duke" came from a boyhood friend who admired his polish. He began piano lessons at about seven, but baseball interested him more. What turned him toward music was the ragtime and early jazz he heard around the city, and he began playing professionally as a teenager, also earning money as a sign painter. He left high school shortly before graduating, reportedly after winning an art scholarship to Pratt Institute that he never used.

In the early 1920s he moved to New York and joined the great Black migration that was remaking Harlem into a center of American culture. After a difficult start, he built a small band that landed a long engagement at the Kentucky Club in Times Square. There he began writing for the particular men in front of him: trumpeter Bubber Miley, whose growling plunger-mute style gave the band its "jungle" sound, and later players like Johnny Hodges, Harry Carney, Cootie Williams and Barney Bigard. In December 1927 the orchestra began its residency at the Cotton Club in Harlem, where radio broadcasts carried the band across the country, even though the club itself catered to a white audience and kept its Black patrons out. Ellington used the stage and the microphone to develop his own ideas.

From there he kept widening what a popular composer could attempt. "Mood Indigo," "Creole Love Call" and "Black and Tan Fantasy" came early, and in 1943 he premiered the long-form work "Black, Brown and Beige" at Carnegie Hall. In the early 1940s he worked with composer-arranger Billy Strayhorn, whose "Take the 'A' Train" became the band's theme. The Newport Jazz Festival performance of 1956 revived a career that some thought was fading, and from then on he wrote suites, film scores, including "Anatomy of a Murder" (1959), and, late in life, Sacred Concerts. He toured the world for decades, and held his orchestra together by treating it, as he put it, as his instrument.

How their story ended

Ellington died in New York City on May 24, 1974, at age 75, of complications from lung cancer and pneumonia. He kept composing and working nearly to the end, including on his Third Sacred Concert, and he led his orchestra until illness stopped him. His son Mercer took over the band afterward. Reports of his funeral put the attendance at some ten thousand people, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

In their words

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Tables where Duke sits

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