Duke Ellington

Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington led a big band continuously from the 1920s until his death in 1974 — through the Cotton Club years, the swing era, and every jazz revolution after — and used it the way other composers use manuscript paper. He wrote for his players’ individual sounds rather than for generic sections, and his collaborators stayed for decades, none more important than Billy Strayhorn, composer of the band’s signature “Take the ‘A’ Train” — the anthem of Harlem-bound Migration-era New York (Gioia 2011).

The catalog runs past a thousand pieces: three-minute marvels (“Mood Indigo,” “Sophisticated Lady,” “Ko-Ko”), the blues reimagined as orchestral color, and the extended suites — Black, Brown and Beige, his musical history of Black America, premiered at Carnegie Hall in 1943 — with which he simply ignored the wall between dance music and concert music.

Ellington’s relevance to this site’s web is the demonstration that the African American vernacular line — spirituals, blues, ragtime — could sustain composition of any ambition without leaving home. “Jazz” was a label he politely declined; he preferred, pointedly, “American music.”