ComfortComes

The Man and His Mistress

Above my desk hangs a poster of Ella Fitzgerald singing at the Downbeat Café in 1949. Sitting at the table closest to the stage is Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman. Benny seems mildly entertained (does he know who he’s listening to?) but the Duke’s smile says it all. His eyes are joyful, his energy real, and the pleasure he takes from listening to a fellow musician is obvious. Ella quite possibly was at that moment singing one of his songs.
Perhaps there is no composer in the history of American music who has earned greater notoriety and worldwide respect than Edward Kennedy Ellington. His musical career spanned almost six decades and produced a plethora of astounding compositions ranging from the plunger mute “jungle sound” of the early years to the Sacred Concerts performed in cathedrals around the world in the 1960’s. One cannot touch upon the compositions of Ellington without also considering the collaboration between himself and Billy Strayhorn, whose partnership proved to be one of the most artistically productive of all time. The resulting sound of the Ellington band was one that cannot be easily categorized or described; it changed with the times and forever remained an entity to be shaped and stretched by the limitless boundaries of a creative mind.
Edward Kennedy Ellington was born in Washington D.C. in 1899. Musically he was brought up on church services and piano lessons, but his real fascination with music began as a teenager when he started sneaking into a local pool hall with friends and first heard stride pianists at work. While vacationing in Philadelphia one summer, he heard a pianist named Harvey Brooks who inspired him to start taking his piano playing more seriously. It was during this time that a friend nicknamed Edward “Duke,” for no reason really except to give him a classier social image. At home he soon befriended local musicians and became well-known around town for sitting in for them on occasion; occasions which led to the meeting of famous stride pianist James P. Johnson and the formation of a friendship that led Duke to move forward in his career.
By 1923 Duke’s band was playing regularly at the classy Kentucky club in New York City and had developed a sound that set them apart from other bands of the day. The sound produced by horns “growling” in a wah-wah style with plunger mutes came to be known as “jungle” music. The group gained reputation by playing with visiting musicians such as Sidney Bechet and after forming a managing partnership with Irving Mills, the band soon secured a spot at the prestigious Cotton Club in Harlem. It was from this nightclub that America first heard the band over the radio. Mills saw to it that Duke only recorded his own music and hassled white-only record companies to include him in their catalogue. The band began appearing in Hollywood movies and set off to travel abroad. Gaining fans among the likes of the Prince of Wales, Prince George, and the Duke of Kent, Duke Ellington and his musicians were becoming one of the most sought-after bands in the world.
Seeing as how the band’s first European tour was received so enthusiastically by jazz fans, Ellington reasoned that he might be able to experiment with his music more upon returning to America. His piece entitled “Rude Interlude” was a composition nearly without a melody that relied on a solemn chord progression. The piece also contained a wordless vocal by Louis Bacon. Amongst critics comparisons began to arise between the work of Duke Ellington and that of British-born composer Frederick Delius, who was known for his rich and sensual harmonic sequences. Soon Duke Ellington’s pieces and general style of writing inspired further comparisons to classical composers. In the New Statesman there appeared an article written by Constant Lambert declaring, “I know of nothing in Ravel so dexterous in treatment as the varied solos in the middle of the ebullient ‘Hot and Bothered’ and nothing in Stravinsky more dynamic than the final section. He gives the same distinction to his genre as Strauss gave to the waltz or Sousa to the march.” A friend of Duke’s, Edmund Anderson, recalled playing for Duke the music of the classical composers and marveling at Duke’s astonishment upon hearing it. He had never listened to Ravel or Debussy before, but expressed extreme appreciation for the utter beauty of their work. Said Ellington of his personal musical taste, “I like 100 percent of Tatum, 100 percent of Bechet, about 100 percent of Oscar Peterson, 100 percent of Delius, Stravinsky, Debussy. If I don’t like 100 percent of Ravel, I guess it’s because I haven’t listened too well to some things.”
The camaraderie among the instrumentalists in the Duke Ellington band was strong. They felt that they were a part of a family and were well paid and taken care of by Duke. Ellington, in fact, wrote pieces with specific players in mind. He would study how they played and write the music around them, such as trumpeter Cootie William’s feature, “Concerto for Cootie.” The compositions made most famous by Duke Ellington, however, were songs such as “Satin Doll,” “Mood Indigo,” “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing),” and “Sophisticated Lady.” Most of this music was written while on the road, on the back of napkins at dinner, or at the last minute in the studio. If he didn’t like how a piece was coming together, he was known to rip it up and flush it down the toilet, claiming that if it was any good then he would remember it later.
Ellington and Billy Strayhorn became a collaborative force in the 1940’s. The two were so compatible artistically that upon considering one of their pieces it is hard to say exactly which part of the contribution belongs to Strayhorn and which to Ellington. In New York in 1963 a hospitalized Strayhorn was telephoned by Duke with an idea for a project. Duke gave him the title of the song and a few verbal instructions from which to work from and when Strayhorn sent the finished product back to Duke, who had also completed it at the same time, the two discovered that they had started and finished the piece on the same two notes. They had also both made use of the same six note melodic theme, of which only two notes differed. Ellington described their remarkable relationship as “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.”
The future world-wide travels of the Duke Ellington band provided great inspiration to the composer, who was known to write suites unique to the country he had visited, such as the Far East Suite, the Virgin Islands Suite, and the Queen’s Suite. Another interesting genre of composition that Ellington explored later in life was his sacred music. Upon being invited by the Dean of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco to play a concert of sacred music, Ellington took to writing what he would describe as the most important thing he ever did or would do. The music was not traditional church music or a blending of secular and sacred, but pure Ellingtonian. “Now I can say out loud to all the world what I’ve been saying to myself for years on my knees,” he noted. It seems that the sacred concerts are representative of the depths of the reaches of Ellington’s music; not constrained to any one genre, powerful and far-reaching.
Among other honors, Duke Ellington was awarded the Emperor’s Star of Ethiopian, the Legion of Honor, the President’s Gold Medal, and the presidential Medal of Freedom. He was also considered for a Pulitzer Prize and won 13 Grammy awards.
At his funeral service in 1974 more than 12,000 people attended. One of his musicians gave the address, stating that “he was loved throughout the whole world, at all levels of society, by Frenchmen and Germans, by English and Irish, by Arabs and Jews, by Indians and Pakistanis, by atheists and devout Catholics, and by Communists and Fascists alike.” Ella Fitzgerald noted, “It’s a very sad day… A genius has passed.”

He left the world with approximately 3,000 compositions that covered almost as many moods, genres, tonalities and movements. His love of the music is laid out clearly for the listener to enjoy and today its influence is heard everywhere. Duke Ellington himself said it most eloquently: “Lovers have come and gone, but only my mistress stays…she is ten thousand years old. She is as modern as tomorrow, a brand-new woman every day, and as endless as time mathematics… Music is my mistress, and she plays second fiddle to no one.”
.