I love Duke Ellington. I've loved him since middle school, when I was immediately overwhelmed with pride in this urbane and sophisticated black man. Living in an era where black men were thought of as unsophisticated and uneducated brutes, Duke dressed well, composed and played brilliant music, and rejected white American views of blacks as savage primitives. Although he was forced into profiting from the image of black inferiority to make a living in the 1920s and early 30s in his Cotton Club-era days, Duke must have been fully aware that the "jungle" music his band played for whites touring Harlem was an expression of black urban civilization. The appellation "jungle" was imposed by white club owners and people like his manager when he left Washington, D.C. for New York City, Irving Mills. Mills's exploitative contract with Duke gave him 50% ownership for just publishing his music, though Mills sometimes wrote lyrics for Duke's compositions. Either way, like blacks throughout American history, Duke could play the "Tom" to further advance his career and keep his band going.
In addition to dealing with a racist music industry, Duke was able to maintain relevant and essential in jazz for several decades: from the early 1920s in Washington until his death in New York in the 1970s. Duke never forgot his origins during this period either, identifying and composing material based on the urban black experience, blues music, ragtime, swing, and the lives of the New Negro described by Alain Locke during the Harlem Renaissance. Jazz musicians like Duke were the soundtrack for the literary and philosophical texts of the Harlem Renaissance, since their music was a fusion of the different experiences, musics, and cultures of the Southern Negro in the urban North. One must remember that most of the Negroes in Harlem during this period were recent migrants from the South and the Caribbean, so their combined experiences and regional cultures merged to form the black urban world of jazz and a discourse of counterculture espousing independent black art and literary forms not based on European standards. This is the period in which black poets used the blues form, black artists pursued independent and African-derived models for inspiration, and writers used the black vernacular and folk tradition to create something new instead of regurgitating the products of Western thought. Music, such as jazz, was also part of this innovative approach to black aesthetics. Duke Ellington and others, though entertainers at heart, also composed art music, suites, and experimented with various musical forms and genres to create something new based on the African-American and human experience.
Duke's role in innovative jazz music was part of this new black aesthetic. Always aimed at a general audience and with a message of happiness and joy in the human condition, Duke chronicled the history of Black America through his suites and compositions. He also embraced Latin and world music multiple times in his career. Hiring Juan Tizol, a Puerto-Rican trombonist, led to some of the first Latin-infused swing of the 1930s and 1940s (of course Latin influences have been present in jazz since the 1920s because of the Caribbean connections of New Orleans to the playing styles and rhythms of the West Indies). Compositions by Tizol like "Caravan" and "Perdido," for example, show Duke's willingness to try new things and use his orchestra as an instrument itself, through his arrangements for the band. Duke's band, under the influence of trumpeter Bubber Miley, was one of the first to develop "jungle music" in the 1920s by using plunger mutes to create growling sounds and effects that evoked African "savagery" for whites slumming it up in Harlem but were a stylistic effect creatively used by jazz musicians for decades. Indeed, these special sounds and often bluesy effects likely influenced the honking sounds of R&B and early rock saxophone playing, in addition to free jazz in the music of Ornette Coleman.
Furthermore, Duke's use of the orchestra as an instrument to create multiple textures or colors of sound in a recording is a technique Charles Mingus adopted for his own groups, which is self-evident on Mingus's Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, an epic suite exploring his musical roots: Ellington, Latin, classical, flamenco, and blues. Ellington also influenced the entire big band period of the 1930s and 1940s because he was composing "swing" numbers since the 1920s. Later in life, when bebop and its progeny dominated the jazz scene, Duke worked with contemporary musicians such as John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, and Max Roach to revive some of his older compositions in the newer jazz idioms and to illustrate that the older generation could still be avant-garde and experimental despite the perceived limitations of swing and big bands. He proved he could still write (with collaborations from Billy Strayhorn and others as well) and play with various suites dedicated to different continents as well, such as the Far Eastern Suite, which was well-received in the jazz community.
Duke's ultimate message of love and happiness was expressed by his desire to spread jazz around the globe. He willingly participated with the diplomacy jazz tours of the United States government despite ongoing civil rights setbacks to disseminate jazz because at its core it is celebratory music of the human capacity to create. The structure of the music is also very democratic because of the call and response tradition, and individual expression or improvisation within the group context. If that does not define a music rooted in innate human abilities to love, cooperate, and create for the sake of the collective then Duke Ellington's life was meaningless. His involvement in spreading jazz was also related to civil rights activism. Though his contributions are often overlooked, Duke's group traveled via bus across the country when Jim Crow was king. His band had to face racist whites at every possible corner, and his rise to fame and support for black causes was always present in his music. Indeed, many of his compositions draw on the realities of urban black life in Harlem, and one of his famous suites, Black, Brown, and Beige, based on African-American history, was performed at Carnegie Hall in the early 1940s. Moreover, Duke's message of love manifested itself in support for civil rights groups by benefit concerts and a growing pan-African consciousness reflected in song titles and styles, as the song "Fleurette Africaine" suggests.
Some of Duke's most important songs were not composed by him. In fact, I have heard that he false claimed some songs as his own, but regardless of those negligible errors, his musical legacy is defined by his ability to choose great musicians and organize them in a way to produce the best music of the swing era. Songs like "Solitude," "It Don't Mean a Thing If It Ain't Got that Swing," "Mood Indigo," "Things Ain't What They Used to Be," "Drop Me Off in Harlem," "Do Nothing 'Til You Hear from Me," "Fleurette Africaine," "Caravan," "Perdido," "Ad Lib on Nippon", "East Saint Louis Toodle-oo," "Jungle Nights in Harlem," and "In a Sentimental Mood" are proof of a legacy of musical genius in my book. Many of his songs have entered popular culture lexicon and are jazz standards.
"Take the A Train," a Billy Strayhorn number about taking the A train to get to Harlem, became the group's theme song in the 1940s.
"In a Sentimental Mood" is best heard in a duo performance of Duke and John Coltrane
"It Don't Mean a Thing If It Ain't Got that Swing" kicked off the swing craze
"Jungle Nights in Harlem," from the late 1920s, is an example of Duke's "jungle" phase with hot rhythms, muted brass, and wild clarinet glissandos that were meant to evoke imagery of primitive black Africans for white consumers at the Cotton Club.
Duke Ellington's famous performance of "Diminuendo in Blue" at Newport in the 1950s rightly deserves all the praise. Saxophonist Paul Gonsalves wails and wails and takes the audience into an almost religious experience, like an African-American revival. Pure ecstasy and joy here.
"Fleurette Africaine" deserves the critical praise as well, since this avant-garde gem features both Mingus and Max Roach, two new school musicians who nevertheless loved Duke Ellington since they grew up on his music.
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