[Dixielandjazz] "Duke Ellington's America" reviewed

[Harry Callaghan]

Bob:

Do you remember when Duke appeared at the White House to have a medal
presented to him by Richard Nixon?.  I didn't have a VCR then but I
have it on audio tape.

The Prez praised him and then said something like  "I am pleased to
present this award to Edward Kennedy.........(long pause, with
chuckling in the crowd).........Ellington

Harry.

On 4/12/10, Robert Ringwald <rsr at ringwald.com> wrote:
> "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
> rsr at ringwald.com
> Fulton Street Jazz Band
> 916/806-9551
>
> Check out our latest recording at www.ringwald.com/recordings.htm
>
> Doesn't "expecting the unexpected" make the unexpected expected?
>
>
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