The Power of Words. A happy 100th for the Duke

2.20.99
A happy 100th for the Duke
By M.J. ANDERSEN
Journal Editorial Writer

      SOME YEARS AGO, before there were CDs, I bought my first Duke Ellington album. Half of one side was devoted to an uncut 1950 concert performance of "Mood Indigo," which goes on for more minutes than I have ever bothered to count.
      Those familiar with the brief melodic line of "Mood Indigo" might wonder how this can be; I would have wondered myself, before hearing it. But somehow, Ellington manages to keep the ear engaged, through innumerable repetitions.
      A saxophone hands off the melody to the horns. A waltz tempo creeps in. Everyone stops for a piano cadenza. Then the whole thing begins again, with a female vocalist: "You ain't been blue. . . ."
      The arrangement is something like a musical almanac: Here is how to get a "wa-wa" sound; a theater overture goes like this; now grab your honey and dance. "Mood Indigo" is made to contain the world.
      Duke Ellington, it is now pretty much agreed, is the jazz kingdom's colossus. And though the 100th anniversary of his birth is not until April, the celebration has begun. Special performances and tributes are planned throughout the year; CD makers are stocking the stores with an avalanche of reissues.
      This is by no means bad news for fans of Ellington, who once was decidedly in eclipse. The dance craze that for years fed jazz bands finally faded. By the summer of 1955, the Duke Ellington orchestra found itself performing at an aquatics show in Queens.
      However, an unlikely revival occurred the next year, at the Newport Jazz Festival. Ellington and his orchestra ignited an audience that thought it had moved on.
      This Ellington, the late Ellington, is the one with almost cartoonish bags under his eyes, and an air of gentle fatigue. He has given years of his life to composing and performing, and it shows.
      The early Ellington is something else though: dignified, elegant, heart- stoppingly handsome. His main job seems to be that of icon. This Ellington, well known through radio and recordings, was invited to Herbert Hoover's White House, at the time, a singular honor for an African American.
      Edward Kennedy Ellington grew up in Washington, D.C. He showed no special early genius, though he did take a few piano lessons; as a teenager, he hoped to become a commercial artist.
      Then somehow, his sense (cultivated by his mother) that he was singled out for something special was transposed to music. He dropped out of school, picked up some jobs playing the piano, and started dispatching dance bands across the city.
      In 1923, he moved to New York, determined to make it in the only place that counted. Four years later, his band won the coveted booking at the Cotton Club. The job was extremely demanding, drawing six nights a week on Ellington's talents as a pianist, composer and band leader, the last being perhaps the most essential.
      Steeped in the drinking ethos of the Prohibition era, jazz musicians were not always reliable. Yet Ellington managed to hold a group together night after night, "getting cats out of bed" when needed, bridging the gap compositionally when someone was missing.
      He tended not to employ virtuosos; instead, he listened carefully to his players' individual sounds, and contrived ways to blend them. One admiring musician once said that when Ellington wrote a part for you, it fit like a glove.
      The Cotton Club was where whites (and whites only) went to sample the flowering of black creative expression known as the Harlem Renaissance. (The perverse segregation also flowed the other way, with white bands performing for all-black audiences.)
      At the time, many aspiring African Americans distanced themselves from "black music," fearing that its unrefined sound might discredit the race. There was thus an uneasy split between the writers of the Harlem Renaissance and their musical counterparts.
      Yet the undeniable pull of jazz was breaking down racial barriers that seemed impervious to other forces. Duke Ellington's music was a kind of prelude to integration.
      The early recordings are in some ways the most fascinating; they capture a musical genre in the process of formation. The sound is daring, idiosyncratic, almost giddy with freedom.
      A good example is the solo saxophone passage in an Oct. 26, 1927, recording of "Black and Tan Fantasy." The sound bears an uncanny resemblance to the human voice; the saxophone seems almost literally to peek around the corner before imparting an item of racy gossip.
      Especially in the early years, the self-taught Ellington incorporated the sounds nearest to hand. These came largely from popular sources. Jazz has been said to contain the blues; ragtime; stride piano; pop chorus singing; field hollers; hymns; Irish reels; German marches; Italian songs; French opera; Spanish dances; Creole music; minstrel songs. Ellington, the great listener and adapter, worked it all in. And though he lacked conservatory training, he learned from those who had it, eventually borrowing from classical sources such as Debussy.
      Somewhat like Shakespeare, Ellington is everywhere and nowhere in his work. Though he was an able pianist, it has been said that his chief "instrument" was his orchestra, a community of sound he labored to hold together from one decade to the next, despite the impracticality.
      Through the orchestra, Ellington helped shape an art form that is one of the few genuinely native American creations. With African-American sources as its bedrock, jazz demanded, on behalf of Ellington and his race: "We will be heard." But that was just the opening riff on an even longer improvisation - "We will be one" - that springs just as truly from Ellington's work.

      M.J. Andersen is a Journal editorial writer and columnist.

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