[Dixielandjazz] "Duke Ellington's America" reviewed

[Robert Ringwald]

"Duke Ellington's America" reviewed

Ellington's Roiling, Musical America
"Duke Ellington's America" by Harvey G. Cohen. University of Chicago Press. 663 pp.
$40.
by Paul Jablow
Philadelphia Inquirer, April 11, 2010

Duke Ellington is in some ways a strange prism through which to view American history,
or even American cultural history, of the 20th century's middle decades.
Just as he described his music as "beyond category," so might one have described
his life and career. He was born and raised in Washington D.C., and lived in comfortable
if not opulent circumstances at the turn of the century. His struggles were more
artistic than personal as he fought to bring his music, and jazz as a whole, to a
place of acceptance if not complete "respectability."
Harvey Cohen, a faculty member at King's College in London, provides many intimate
glimpses of Ellington's life and times in an informative, if not always satisfying,
account of his career. But the devil is in the context, and while much of this story
is significant as social history, large parts will be important only to trivia mavens
or Ellington scholars.
"Ellington," Cohen writes, "mediated the tensions between popular and serious American
art, intellectual and popular culture, creativity and conformity." And it is in describing
these tensions that he is most successful, and in his nuanced account of Ellington's
role in the civil rights movement, where he always felt he could best further the
cause of racial equality through artistic success.
To provide some perspective about how far Ellington had to go to do this, Cohen notes
a 1930 Variety article predicting that an appearance that year on the Amos 'n' Andy
radio show would mark "the crowning point of his career."
Standing at the edge of the vaudeville minstrelsy era, Ellington eventually would
play at Carnegie Hall, appear at the White House, and tour under the sponsorship
of the State Department. Yet he was never able to fulfill a lifelong ambition: A
Broadway production or extended instrumental piece that would gain widespread commercial
or artistic success.
Cohen is particularly helpful in describing the prickly interplay between Ellington
and his first manager, a white man named Irving Mills, as it reflected the love-hate
relationship between the recording industry and black artists of the pre-World War
II era. But accounts of Ellington's disagreements with subsequent managers yield
little of interest. They could have happened with any artist.
And Ellington's fights with the Internal Revenue Service -- the natural result of
trying to support too many people on too little money -- take up space that could
have been devoted to his free-ranging relationships with women, without descending
into prurience.
Accounts of his State Department tours contain some fascinating vignettes, such as
the Soviet cultural ministry's objections to the body gyrations of band vocalist
Tony Watkins in a 1970 appearance. But they tell us virtually nothing about the real
"Duke Ellington's America" because that's not what these tours are really about.
Ellington's relationship to the civil rights movement was always complicated. Too
reserved for marches or fiery speeches, he once told reporters, "I started my own
civil rights movement in the Thirties. I went down South without federal troops."
The band usually traveled in its own Pullman car, making the trips safer than those
of many black bands, but only relatively so. A white manager was once shot at while
using a phone booth.
Sharing the hopes of many African Americans that World War II would lead to rapid
improvement in race relations, Ellington enthusiastically promoted the sale of war
bonds and recorded tunes such as "A Slip of the Lip (Can Sink a Ship.)"
Frequently welcomed to the White House under President Lyndon B. Johnson, he brushed
aside criticism from some civil rights leaders when he also accepted invitations
from Richard M. Nixon.
Cohen wisely stays away from coming off as an authority on the music itself, and
there is little material on the Duke's colleagues other than his virtual alter ego
of the 1940s and 1950s, Billy Strayhorn. But the book is particularly revealing in
its accounts of the "Sacred Concerts" of the 1960s and 1970s and how they paved the
way for jazz in the liturgy in general and black churches in particular.
While some critics -- including former Ellington vocalist Joya Sherrill -- saw the
concerts as close to blasphemy, Ellington was unperturbed. He never was religious
in the orthodox sense, and in any case did not follow a lifestyle that would have
been acceptable in most pulpits.
"He didn't give a damn what [the public] thought of him," his son, Mercer, once said.
"He was worried about what God thought of him."
__________
Paul Jablow is a former Inquirer editor and reporter with a long interest in jazz.


--Bob Ringwald
Amateur (ham) Radio call sign K6YBV
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