Duke Ellington
Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington was born in Washington, D.C. on April 29, 1899. His career as a popular musician began in his adolescence when he performed jazz pieces on the piano in an ice-cream parlor in Washington, and after that formed his own jazz group. In 1923 he came to New York where he soon thereafter formed a jazz band which performed at the Kentucky Club in Harlem. Discovered by Irving Mills, the publisher, Ellington was booked for the Cotton Club where he remained several years and established his fame as an outstanding exponent of real jazz—as pianist, conductor of his orchestra, composer, and arranger. He has since joined the all-time greats of jazz music, acclaimed in night clubs, on the Broadway stage and Hollywood screen, over the radio, on records, and in triumphant tours throughout the music world.
As a composer Ellington is famous for his popular songs (“Mood Indigo,” “Sophisticated Lady” and so forth) and short instrumental jazz pieces (Black and Tan Fantasy, Creole Rhapsody, East St. Louis Toodle-oo, etc.) All this falls within the province of either popular music or jazz, and for this reason cannot be considered here.
Ellington has also produced a rich repertory of larger works for orchestra which have a place in the permanent library of semi-classical music in the same way that Gershwin’s larger works do. Skilfully utilizing the fullest resources of jazz techniques, styles, and idioms, Ellington has created in these larger works an authentically American music. He himself prefers to consider many of these works as “Negro music” rather than jazz; nevertheless, in their blues harmonies, jazz colorations, and melodic and rhythmic techniques these works represented jazz music at its very best.
Perhaps the most distinguished of these symphonic-jazz works is Black, Brown and Beige, an extended work which Ellington introduced with his orchestra in Carnegie Hall, New York, in 1943, and which he described as a “tonal parallel of the Negro in America.” The first movement, “Black,” is a musical picture of the Negro at work, singing at his labors on the docks and levees in the slavery period before the Civil War. An alto saxophone solo brings on a plangent Spiritual, “Come Sunday.” The second movement, “Brown,” represents the wars in which Negroes have participated. A tenor solo sings an eloquent blues of the unsettled condition of the Negro after the Civil War. The contemporary Negro is the inspiration for the finale, “Beige,” utilizing jazz idioms and styles in portraying the period of the Twenties, Thirties and Forties. Many facets of Negro life are drawn in brief musical episodes, including the Negro church and school, and the Negro’s aspiration towards sophistication. The work ends on a patriotic note, prophesying that the Negro’s place in the American way of life is secure.