A 1941 Billy Strayhorn number whose lyric gives subway directions to Harlem (1941)
'Take the "A" Train' — the orchestra's signature theme, written by Strayhorn, not Ellington.
Popular music · Jazz & blues
Duke Ellington
1899–1974 · American
Big-band jazz; the Cotton Club orchestra
Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington led his orchestra for almost fifty years and wrote well over a thousand pieces, composing not for instruments in the abstract but for the particular players in his band. He disliked the word jazz, preferring to call good music "beyond category", and his suites and sacred concerts pushed the big band towards the concert hall.
How to spot them
- ▸Real name Edward Kennedy Ellington, born in Washington DC; 'Duke' from his boyhood dandyism
- ▸Piano and pen; he composed for named soloists — Johnny Hodges on alto, Harry Carney on baritone, Bubber Miley's growl trumpet
- ▸The Cotton Club in Harlem, 1927–31, and the so-called 'jungle' style
- ▸Billy Strayhorn, his writing partner from 1939, wrote the band's theme
- ▸The phrase 'beyond category'; his motto for audiences, 'We love you madly'
Songs & albums
A 1932 song arguing that without a certain rhythmic lilt music means nothing at all (1932)
'It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)' — it named an era four years before the era began.
A 1930 piece first aired as 'Dreamy Blues', then renamed for a deep shade of blue (1930)
'Mood Indigo' — famous for its inverted voicing, with clarinet at the bottom of the chord.
A 1932 ballad portrait of a woman of weary elegance and diamonds (1932)
'Sophisticated Lady' — Ellington said it was inspired by three of his old schoolteachers.
A 1936 co-write with valve trombonist Juan Tizol, a minor-key vamp evoking a desert procession (1936)
'Caravan' — the Latin-tinged standard revived by the 2014 film Whiplash.
A three-part 1943 Carnegie Hall suite subtitled 'A Tonal Parallel to the History of the Negro in America' (1943)
'Black, Brown and Beige' — his most ambitious extended work, coolly received at the time.
A 1956 festival performance in which Paul Gonsalves played 27 tenor choruses in the gap between two halves of a 1937 piece (1956)
'Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue' at Newport — the comeback that put Ellington on the cover of Time.
Quick-fire facts
- •Resident at Harlem's Cotton Club from 1927 to 1931, with nationwide radio broadcasts that made the band famous
- •Billy Strayhorn joined in 1939 and stayed until his death in 1967; Ellington's elegy for him was 'Blood Count' on the album …And His Mother Called Him Bill
- •The Pulitzer music jury recommended him for a special award in 1965 and the board refused it; he remarked that fate did not want him to be too famous too young
- •He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Richard Nixon at a White House party on his 70th birthday in 1969
- •A posthumous Pulitzer Prize Special Citation followed in 1999, the centenary of his birth
- •He wrote three Sacred Concerts between 1965 and 1973, the first premiered at Grace Cathedral, San Francisco
- •His 1957 suite with Strayhorn, Such Sweet Thunder, sets twelve Shakespearean portraits
- •He died of lung cancer on 24 May 1974; his funeral filled the Cathedral of St John the Divine in New York
- •He appears on the 2009 District of Columbia quarter, the first African American depicted alone on a circulating US coin
Drill it — 8 cards
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Sources
- Harvey G. Cohen — Duke Ellington's America
- Duke Ellington — Music Is My Mistress