[Dixielandjazz] Duke Ellington book reviewed - San Francisco Chronicle

[Robert Ringwald]

'Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington,' by Terry Teachout (Gotham; 482 pages; $30)
by Tom Nolan
San Francisco Chronicle, November 3, 2013
Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington (1899-1974) -- the Washington, D.C.-born son of a
butler and grandson of a slave -- was a colossus of jazz: a composer-arranger-pianist-bandleader
"beyond category" and almost without peer in the five decades he bestrode, and helped
shape the nature of, America's indigenous music.
He was also that other thing essential to the getting and maintaining of a long career
in American popular culture: The Duke was a star, whose characteristic-seeming confidence,
elegant personality and visual flair were essential components of his public identity.
Rex Stewart, one of his longtime sidemen, described how Ellington looked when he
came onstage one night in the 1930s at Harlem's Cotton Club: "Duke made his dramatic
entrance attired in a salmon-colored jacket and fawn-gray slacks and shoes. The shirt,
I remember, was a tab-collared oyster shade and his tie some indefinable pastel between
salmon and apricot. The audience cheered for at least two minutes."
All elements of Ellington's colorful, complicated, oft-secretive life -- public and
private, musical and personal -- are brought to similar vivid life in this grand
and engrossing biography by New York writer Terry Teachout, whose previous book on
Louis Armstrong was also an indispensable summary.
"Duke," acknowledges Teachout, "is not so much a work of scholarship as an act of
synthesis, a narrative biography that is substantially based on the work of academic
scholars and other researchers." As such, it benefits from the perceptions and revelations
of earlier scribes such as musicologist Gunther Schuller and Ellington collaborator
Billy Strayhorn's biographer David Hajdu. What Teachout does with such materials
is not unlike what Ellington did with elements he found at hand: he shapes them with
individual skill into something of permanent worth.
The author is frank in demonstrating the sometimes problematic ways Ellington created
his works of lasting beauty. A brilliant composer and orchestrator, the Duke nonetheless
lacked the knack to craft the sort of pop-song melodies upon which the music business
was based; to compensate, he often appropriated tune fragments from his instrumentalists
(including Johnny Hodges, Barney Bigard and Cootie Williams), paying a small fee
in lieu of royalties for what would become such popular hits as "Mood Indigo," "Sophisticated
Lady," "Do Nothing Till You Hear from Me."
"I don't consider you a composer," trombonist Laurence Brown taunted Duke. "You are
a compiler." Teachout counters: "It took the mind of a composer to turn [those] fragments
into full-blown creations."
For decades, Billy Strayhorn went unacknowledged as a principal creator for the band,
being referred to instead as Ellington's "assistant," "aide de camp," "right-hand
man" and the like -- a situation the closeted Strayhorn for the most part tolerated
but which drove him to drink.
But that's the way it went with this charming sacred monster (Strayhorn's nickname
for "Edward" was in fact "Monster") who insisted on running his own show.
A former "spoiled child, and proud of it," Duke said of himself: "I'm easy to please.
I just want to have everyone in the palm of my hand." This included a wife he left
early on but never divorced, a mistress he lived with for years but refused to marry,
and innumerable other romantic partners. (Pianist Marian McPartland said Ellington
"had so much sex appeal it was almost frightening.")
The personal details are fascinating, but it's the music that counts, and Teachout
is especially good at describing and commenting on the compositions of a man who
when young also practiced visual art: "It is Ellington's command of instrumental
color that sets his work apart... with sonic combinations so innovative that they
defied accurate transcription.... He treated his sidemen as 'found objects' whose
one-of-a-kind timbres he used like the painter he had been."
In the classic "Harlem Air-Shaft," Teachout notes, "seemingly unrelated musical episodes
are shoved up against one another in the manner of a Cubistic collage."
Ellington was "a disciplined lyric miniaturist," the author states, "who knew how
to express the grandest of emotions on the smallest of scales." Like Renoir and like
Ravel, Teachout writes, the Duke "was an impressionist... who dealt not in ideas
but images, and the life that he portrayed in sound... was his inner life."
As for the innermost thoughts and secrets of this sardonic maestro: "Everyone knows
him -- yet no one knows him," Teachout concludes. "That was the way he wanted it."
Maybe so, but thanks to this frank and sympathetic biography -- whose every page
is studded with sharp phrases and keen insights -- we now seem to know Duke Ellington
as well as we ever will or need to.
__________
Tom Nolan is the author of "Artie Shaw, King of the Clarinet: His Life and Times"
(Norton).
-30-



-Bob Ringwald K6YBV
www.ringwald.com
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