Duke Ellington

• 1. Introduction

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  Duke Ellington wrote his first composition in the summer of 1914, working as a soda jerk at the Poodle Dog Cafe in Washington, D.C. He had not yet learned to read or write music. The piece, "Soda Fountain Rag", he played as a one-step, two-step, waltz, tango, and fox trot. Listeners never knew it was the same piece. "I was established as having my own repertoire," he recalled. From that cafe counter, Edward Kennedy Ellington would go on to compose more than one thousand pieces, build the largest recorded personal jazz legacy in history, and refuse, for the rest of his life, to be categorized at all. Music critic Ralph J. Gleason would call him "America's most important composer". Gunther Schuller and Barry Kernfeld placed him as "the most significant composer" of jazz. Yet Ellington himself embraced a different phrase entirely: "beyond category". This documentary follows him from those poolroom piano lessons in Washington to the concert halls of Carnegie, from a 75-cent booking fee at the True Reformer's Hall to a posthumous Pulitzer Prize. The question at the center of it all is not whether Duke Ellington was great. The question is: what made him unlike anyone else?

• 2. Washington Roots

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  At the age of seven, Ellington began taking piano lessons from Marietta Clinkscales. Both of his parents were pianists. His mother Daisy played parlor songs; his father James preferred operatic arias. James made blueprints for the United States Navy. The family lived at 2129 Ida Place in Washington's West End neighborhood, and Daisy surrounded her son with dignified women to reinforce his manners and teach him elegance. His childhood friends noticed his casual bearing and dapper dress, and gave him the nickname "Duke". Ellington credited his friend Edgar McEntee: "I think he felt that in order for me to be eligible for his constant companionship, I should have a title. So he called me Duke."

  His serious interest in piano came not from lessons but from sneaking into Frank Holiday's Poolroom at the age of fourteen. The pianists there lit something in him. Among the players he listened to were Luckey Roberts, Eubie Blake, Claude Hopkins, and others who gathered in those rooms. He began imitating ragtime pianists not only in Washington but in Philadelphia and Atlantic City, where he vacationed with his mother. He heard some musicians who could not afford much sheet music play the sheets upside down for variation. Henry Lee Grant, a Dunbar High School teacher, gave him private lessons in harmony. Oliver "Doc" Perry taught him to read sheet music and project a professional style.

  In 1916, Ellington turned down an art scholarship to the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Three months before graduating from Armstrong Manual Training School, where he was studying commercial art, he dropped out. His first job had been selling peanuts at Washington Senators baseball games. His last formal commitment was to music.

• 3. Building the Band

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  Working as a freelance sign painter from 1917, Ellington used his day job to build a music business. When a customer asked him to make a sign for a dance or party, he would ask whether they had musical entertainment; if not, he offered to play. He also held a messenger job with the U.S. Navy and State departments, where he built a wide network of contacts. His first group, "The Duke's Serenaders", formed in late 1917; his telephone directory advertisement called them "Colored Syncopators". His first booking was at the True Reformer's Hall, where he took home 75 cents.

  The band included childhood friend Otto Hardwick, who moved from string bass through to alto saxophone; Arthur Whetsel on trumpet; Elmer Snowden on banjo; and Sonny Greer on drums. They played for both African-American and white audiences, rare in the segregated society of the time. When Greer was invited to join the Wilbur Sweatman Orchestra in New York City, Ellington followed him to Harlem. The move was difficult. The young musicians hustled pool by day and played whatever gigs they could find. Stride pianist Willie "the Lion" Smith introduced them to the scene and gave them some money. After a few months, they returned to Washington feeling discouraged.

  The turning point came in September 1923, with an engagement at the Hollywood Club at 49th and Broadway, which gave Ellington a four-year artistic base. Snowden left in early 1924, and Ellington took over as bandleader. In October 1926, he made an agreement with agent-publisher Irving Mills, giving Mills a 45% interest in his future. Mills arranged recording sessions on nearly every label of the era, including Brunswick, Victor, Columbia, OKeh, and others. The records were issued under a carousel of pseudonyms: "The Harlem Footwarmers", "The Jungle Band", "Whoopee Makers", "the Ten BlackBerries".

• 4. The Cotton Club Years

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  In September 1927, King Oliver turned down a regular booking as the house band at Harlem's Cotton Club. The offer passed to Ellington after Jimmy McHugh suggested him and Irving Mills arranged an audition. Ellington had to expand from a six to eleven-piece group to meet the requirements, and the engagement began on December 4. Weekly radio broadcasts from the Cotton Club gave Ellington national exposure to an exclusively white and wealthy clientele.

  Trumpeter Bubber Miley was a member of the orchestra for only a short period, but he reshaped its entire sound. As an early exponent of growl trumpet, Miley shifted the group away from sweet dance band music toward what contemporaries called "Jungle Style". In October 1927, Ellington and his orchestra recorded with Adelaide Hall; one side in particular, "Creole Love Call", became a worldwide sensation and gave both artists their first hit record. Miley had composed most of "Creole Love Call" and "Black and Tan Fantasy". An alcoholic, Miley had to leave the band before they gained wider fame. He died in 1932 at the age of 29, but he was an important influence on Cootie Williams, who replaced him.

  Australian-born composer Percy Grainger was among the early admirers. He wrote: "The three greatest composers who ever lived are Bach, Delius and Duke Ellington. Unfortunately, Bach is dead, Delius is very ill but we are happy to have with us today The Duke." During the Cotton Club years, Ellington also began collaborating with Will Vodery, Florenz Ziegfeld's musical supervisor, whom Ellington later credited with deepening his harmonic resources and introducing him to the serious appreciation of Delius, Debussy, and Ravel.

• 5. Strayhorn and the Creative Peak

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  Billy Strayhorn originally joined Ellington in 1939 as a lyricist. Nicknamed "Sweet Pea" for his mild manner, he quickly became something far more essential. Ellington described him in one of his most quoted passages: "my right arm, my left arm, all the eyes in the back of my head, my brain waves in his head, and his in mine." Strayhorn's classical training let him not only contribute original music but arrange and polish many of Ellington's own works. He could fill in for Duke conducting, rehearsing, playing piano, on stage, and in the recording studio.

  At the same moment Strayhorn arrived, two musicians joined who defined the orchestra's creative peak. Bassist Jimmy Blanton was effectively hired on the spot in late October 1939 when Ellington dropped in on a gig of Fate Marable in St. Louis, before he even knew Blanton's name. Blanton transformed the role of the double bass in jazz, allowing it to function as a solo and melodic instrument. Terminal illness forced him to leave by late 1941 after around two years. Ben Webster joined in 1939 and stayed through 1943, becoming the orchestra's first regular tenor saxophonist and expanding the saxophone section to five players for the first time.

  From this period came a cascade of recordings: "Cotton Tail", "Main Stem", "Harlem Air Shaft", "Jack the Bear". Strayhorn's "Take the 'A' Train", a hit in 1941, became the band's new theme. Ellington's long-term aim was to extend the jazz form beyond the three-minute limit of 78 rpm recording, and with Strayhorn's help he did. Black, Brown and Beige debuted at Carnegie Hall on the 23rd of January 1943, dedicated to telling the story of African Americans and the place of slavery and the church in their history. It began an annual series of Ellington concerts at Carnegie Hall over the next four years.

• 6. Newport and the Second Act

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  By 1955, after three years of recording for Capitol, Ellington lacked a regular recording affiliation. Andre Previn had said in 1952 that Duke could lift one finger, three horns would make a sound, and no one could explain what it was. But the commercial landscape had shifted after World War II. Big band bookings shrank. Swing gave way to solo singers. Club owners found smaller groups more cost-effective.

  Ellington's appearance at the Newport Jazz Festival on the 7th of July 1956, changed the trajectory. He had abruptly ended the band's scheduled set because four key players arrived late, then called "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue", two tunes from the band's book since 1937. Tenor saxophonist Paul Gonsalves played a 27-chorus marathon solo that whipped the crowd into a frenzy. Ellington played way beyond the curfew despite urgent pleas from festival organizer George Wein to stop. The concert made international headlines, became one of only five Time magazine cover stories dedicated to a jazz musician, and produced an album that became the best-selling LP of Ellington's career.

  What purchasers of that album did not know was that only about 40% of the music was actually from the concert. Ellington felt the musicians had been under-rehearsed and assembled the band the next day to re-record several numbers with the addition of faked crowd noise. The unaltered concert recording was not properly released until 1999. The Newport revival led to a new recording contract with Columbia Records, a European tour in 1958, festival appearances at the new Monterey Jazz Festival, and projects including Such Sweet Thunder (1957), based on Shakespeare's plays and characters, and The Queen's Suite (1958), dedicated to Queen Elizabeth II.

• 7. Film, Collaboration, and Sacred Work

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  Ellington's score for Anatomy of a Murder (1959), a courtroom drama directed by Otto Preminger and featuring James Stewart, was recognized as a landmark: film historians identified it as "the first significant Hollywood film music by African Americans comprising non-diegetic music". The score avoided cultural stereotypes and rejected strict adherence to visuals in ways that influenced the New Wave cinema of the 1960s. Ellington appeared in the film himself, fronting a roadhouse combo. Paris Blues (1961), featuring Paul Newman and Sidney Poitier as jazz musicians, earned Ellington a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Score.

  The early 1960s saw Ellington record with a wide range of musicians: Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins, John Coltrane (both for Impulse!), and a session with Charles Mingus and Max Roach that produced Money Jungle (1963). He worked with Swedish vocalist Alice Babs and South African musicians Dollar Brand and Sathima Bea Benjamin. He wrote an original score for a production of Shakespeare's Timon of Athens at the Stratford Festival in Ontario, which opened on the 29th of July 1963.

  In September 1965, Ellington premiered the first of his Sacred Concerts. He created a jazz Christian liturgy. Although the work received mixed reviews, he performed it dozens of times and considered it "the most important thing I've done". Two further Sacred Concerts followed in 1968 and 1973. The Steinway piano on which the Sacred Concerts were composed is now part of the collection of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. Like Haydn and Mozart, Ellington conducted his orchestra from the piano, always playing the keyboard parts when the Sacred Concerts were performed.

• 8. Final Years and Legacy

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  Ellington turned 65 in the spring of 1964 but showed no sign of slowing down. He continued to record the Far East Suite (1966), New Orleans Suite (1970), The Afro-Eurasian Eclipse (1971), and the Latin American Suite (1972), most of it inspired by world tours. In August 1972, he recorded several solo piano tracks at Mediasound Studios in New York with then brand-new assistant engineer Bob Clearmountain; that session remained unreleased until 2017, when Storyville Records issued it as An Intimate Piano Session. He worked on his only opera, Queenie Pie, about a black beautician in the 1930s, until the end, but did not finish it.

  Ellington died on the 24th of May 1974, of complications from lung cancer and pneumonia, aged 75. At his funeral at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, attended by over 12,000 people, Ella Fitzgerald said: "It's a very sad day. A genius has passed." He was interred at the Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. Charles Mingus, who had been fired by Ellington decades earlier, wrote the elegy "Duke Ellington's Sound of Love" a few months after his death. Stevie Wonder wrote "Sir Duke" as a tribute, released on Songs in the Key of Life in 1976. Miles Davis created his half-hour dirge "He Loved Him Madly" one month after Ellington died.

  In 1999, a quarter century after his death, Ellington was posthumously awarded a Special Pulitzer Prize "commemorating the centennial year of his birth, in recognition of his musical genius, which evoked aesthetically the principles of democracy through the medium of jazz". That same year, the United States Mint issued a commemorative coin featuring Ellington, making him the first African American to appear alone on a circulating U.S. coin. His son Mercer kept the Ellington band alive for 20 years after Duke's death, until Mercer died in 1996.