[Dixielandjazz] Duke Ellington - Wall Street Journal

[Robert Ringwald]

Duke Ellington, King of Jazz
by Terry Teachout
Wall Street Journal, October 11, 2013
The latest musical to hit Broadway is also the oldest musical in
town. "After Midnight," the Duke Ellington revue that debuts this
month, is a homage to the spectacular stage shows at the Cotton
Club, the swanky Jazz Age nightspot whose shady owners billed it
as "The Aristocrat of Harlem." Some of the Ellington-penned
numbers in "After Midnight," like "Black and Tan Fantasy" and
"Creole Love Call," are now close to nine decades old -- yet
they're as arrestingly fresh and original-sounding today as they
were in the Roaring Twenties.
What makes Ellington's music sound so powerfully, unmistakably
individual? To begin with, he was the first jazz composer to
write music that used the still-new medium of the big band with
the same coloristic imagination brought by classical composers to
their symphonic works. "You know, Stan Kenton can stand in front
of a thousand fiddles and a thousand brass and make a dramatic
gesture, and every studio arranger can nod his head and say, 'Oh,
yes, that's done like this,'" said Andre Previn, one of his
best-informed admirers. "But Duke merely lifts his finger, three
horns make a sound, and I don't know what it is!"
Nor were Ellington's innovations limited to the field of
orchestration. What set him apart was not his virtuoso command of
instrumental timbre but how he used it. Mere arrangers took pop
songs and dressed them up in new colors and harmonies, but
Ellington, though he recorded his share of engagingly catchy
hits, was better known and more widely esteemed for the pieces in
which he used the language of jazz to say things that it had
never said before.
Previn compared him to Stravinsky and Prokofiev; Percy Grainger
compared him to Bach and Delius; Ralph Ellison likened him to
Ernest Hemingway. Within the tight confines of a single 78 side,
he spun "tone parallels" (a phrase he coined) to every imaginable
human emotion. He and the 900 musicians who passed through his
band sang of joy and loneliness, passion and despair, faith and
hope.
Like Ravel and Renoir, Ellington was an impressionist, an artist
who dealt not in ideas but images, and the life that he portrayed
in sound, related though it was to the world around him, was his
inner life. As Cezanne put it, his goal was "not to paint the
subject but to 'realize' sensations." He looked, listened and
felt, then transformed his feelings into music.
Ellington's work had a near-pictorial quality that bore little
resemblance to the extroverted dance tunes played by most other
jazzmen in the 1920s. His 1,700-odd compositions included musical
portraits of pretty women, tap-dancing comedians, express trains,
Shakespearean characters and the unsung heroes of his
long-despised race, and he made it sound as if writing them were
easy. "I just watch people and observe life," he said, "and then
I write about them."
Ellington sought and got from his sidemen a loose, festive
ensemble sound that was far removed from the clean precision of
the popular big bands of the swing era. He had no interest in the
smoothly blended playing that leaders like Benny Goodman and
Artie Shaw demanded from their groups. He preferred instead to
hire musicians with homemade techniques that were different to
the point of apparent incompatibility, then juxtapose their
idiosyncratic sounds as a pointillist painter might place dots of
red and green side by side on his canvas, finding inspiration in
their technical limitations.
At the same time, his miraculously concise musical cameos had an
architectural wholeness that is all but unique among early jazz
compositions. A disciplined lyric miniaturist, Ellington could
express the grandest of emotions on the smallest of scales, and
he knew how to fuse written ensembles and improvised solos into
fully integrated musical structures that are, like the exquisite
"Mood Indigo," as simple-sounding and unforgettable as proverbs.
Yet they were tossed off with seeming casualness. Sometimes he
worked "on" his players in much the same way that a choreographer
makes a ballet "on" his dancers, passing out or dictating scraps
of music, then shaping and reshaping them on the spot into a
piece that would later be reduced to written form. Only a genius
could have worked in so haphazard a way.
In addition to being an artist of the first rank, Duke Ellington
was a seductively charismatic, impenetrably enigmatic character
with a tabloid-friendly love life. But it is his music, not his
personality, for which he continues to be known today. He was to
jazz what Aaron Copland was to classical music -- the great
American composer -- and his three-minute masterpieces will be
remembered for as long as jazz itself is remembered.
__________
Terry Teachout, the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal, is
the author of "Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington," from which this
excerpt is adapted. His other writings include "Pops: A Life of
Louis Armstrong" and "Satchmo at the Waldorf," a one-man play
about Armstrong.
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-Bob Ringwald K6YBV
www.ringwald.com
916/ 806-9551

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