[Dixielandjazz] Duke Ellington - A Life By Terry Teachout

[Steve Voce]

I agree about Rem. In Tempo and Creole Rhapsody, Marek. Not Duke's best. And it was not my dear pal Joe Wilder, it was Alec Wilder - both of them, incidentally, amongst the finest musicians produced in America.

Cheers,
Steve 

Sent from my iPad

> On 26 Oct 2013, at 20:30, Marek Boym <marekboym at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> DEar Steve,
> I really like your review, even though I am not sure whether I agree with the "apposite" in connection with describing "Ko-Ko" as the Duke's "greatest three minute masterpiece."  But de gustibus non disputandum est.  I definitely have other preferences.
> I have never liked the really long compsitions, but both "Reminscing in Tempo" and "Creole Rhapsody" seem to belie Joe Wilder's evaluation.
> Cheers
> 
> 
>> On 26 October 2013 19:03, Steve Voce <stevevoce at virginmedia.com> wrote:
>> Here's my review of Terry's new book from the November Jazz journal.
>> Steve Voce
>> 
>> *DUKE *
>> 
>> A Life of Duke Ellington, by Terry Teachout. Gotham Books. 467 pages, hb $30. Available from Amazon.co.uk, £16.27. ISBN 978-1-592-40749-1
>> 
>> For years discussion has raged in the world of music over whether Duke Ellington was a composer or not. His longer works seldom showed much development and were usually thought to be unconvincing. Terry Teachout has a potent quote from Alec Wilder, who /was /a composer.
>> 
>> 'To me the works of Ellington in terms of composition extend only as far as the song form extends, that is the 32 measure convention of Broadway and the radio, with slight extensions and variations...'
>> 
>> There have been more books written about Duke Ellington than about almost any other jazz figure. As the author points out, Ellington was famous long before the Swing Era and long after the big bands had faded away. Duke could claim to have been, if not the major figure, one of the two major figures in the music (interestingly, Teachout has already written a similarly thorough biography of the other).
>> 
>> Although, as Juan Tizol points out in this one, the Duke was a poor reader, he was a minor genius and a most interesting man, so there is room for this latest in the series of accounts of his life. Mr Teachout's is probably the most absorbing of them all. His research has been thorough and he has assiduously followed up every anecdote and incident with the result that his book is very satisfying to read and full of tested fact about the maestro. Yet, despite the welter of detail, the writing style is so good that this is a memorable experience, as well as being probably the definitive biography. You don't need another one, because everything is here and delivered with style and accuracy (the author can be forgiven for, like everyone else, attributing the ban on US musicians in Britain to the Musicians' Union rather than, as was the case, the Ministry of Works).
>> 
>> Duke was a late starter. His first recordings in 1926, which I reviewed recently in this magazine, were stilted at a time when Armstrong, Bechet, King Oliver and James P Johnson had already made jazz recordings that showed them at or near their best. However, Duke soon caught up and overtook his rivals -- at the time he was the only bandleader who wrote most of the material that his musicians played. There's an extensive and revealing account of Duke's relationship with Irving Mills and his time at the Cotton Club. In February 1929 CBS started broadcasting the band coast to coast from the Cotton Club and thus it became widely known outside New York. (The number of radio listeners jumped from 16 million in 1925 to 60 million in 1930).
>> 
>> The author doesn't pull any punches on Duke's behalf, and easily penetrates the facade that Ellington presented to the world. Although he would have been pleased with the thoroughness of the profile, I don't think Duke would have appreciated its frankness (would Count Basie have worn a corset?).
>> 
>> Duke liked to assume power over his situations. 'I'm easy to please. I just want to have everybody in the palm of my hand,' he said.
>> 
>> 'What you need to do is wake up after two o'clock, make phone calls, but don't move an inch,' he told his son Mercer. 'Just lie flat on your back and phone, and tell everybody everything that has to be done, and lay all your plans without going out anywhere... when you come downstairs you'll have prepared for your day, and you'll be the Greatest.'
>> 
>> The major sidemen are comprehensively dealt with individually. Mr Teachout has calculated that 900 musicians passed through the band.
>> 
>> Billy Strayhorn is portrayed at length. The book reiterates the fact that Duke shifted segments of compositions in a way that bewildered his associates. In 1953 he did this to one of Strayhorn's pieces and Strayhorn was so upset that he left the band for two and a half years.
>> 
>> I had known for many years that Ellington had alienated Lawrence Brown for life by interfering in his marriage. The full horror of the matter as detailed here is jaw dropping. Mr Teachout also looks into John Hammond's role, not just in his relationship with Ellington, but with other jazz musicians including Rex Stewart.
>> 
>> Overall Teachout's analysis of the music is good and his focus on the 1940 /Ko-Ko /as 'the greatest of Ellington's three-minute masterpieces' is apposite. But was Duke's beautiful and simple /Across The Track Blues /really 'one in which the unmediated emotions of the authentic bluesman are transformed into the musical counterpart of a colour-field abstraction, then put in a handsome frame and hung in the Ellington museum for the purpose of quiet contemplation'? Nevertheless, such pomposo is rare, and on the same page the author makes the telling point that Ellington 'was a major composer but not an influential one.'
>> 
>> Teachout explains lucidly the ASCAP and BMI battle of 1941. Although Ellington was and wanted people to think of him of as apolitical, the book reveals much about his connections to the intellectuals and Communists in the Hollywood movement with the show 'Jump For Joy' in the early '40s. His first Carnegie Hall concert in 1942 and the subsequent ones given there drew an enormous amount of publicity. We think of Ellington as working the band on a shoestring, but at this time he had a lot of money and the men were well paid. Additionally all the attention hooked him a 25-week residence at New York's Hurricane Club and two years of broadcasts from the city. This saved a fortune in travelling expenses.
>> 
>> George Avakian, everyone's favourite record producer, was more than just a friend when, in 1950, he brought Ellington and the LP form together. 'I had carte blanche, we were making gigantic profits on the popular albums, and anything I wanted to do, I didn't have to ask any questions.' It was a new Ellington Era, emphasised by the recruitment of Paul Gonsalves to the band in 1950 and the departure of Johnny Hodges, Lawrence Brown and Billy Strayhorn the next year. Newport was not far ahead.
>> 
>> There is a list of 50 key recordings that is uncontroversial, an imposing bibliography and 80 pages of meticulous source notes.
>> 
>> Books on Ellington by Barry Ulanov (1946), Peter Gammond (1958) and Derek Jewell (1977) seemed comprehensive in their day but soon became outdated. Several later books depended sometimes on industrious journalistic compilation. Stanley Dance's 'World of Duke Ellington' was written from the point of an insider but was by no means a history. John Edward Hasse's 'Beyond Category' (1993) is probably the nearest parallel to Teachout but obviously, working two decades later, Teachout has the advantage of later research.
>> 
>> It seems to me that there can be little more about Duke Ellington to uncover and that Teachout's book, as in the case of his earlier one on Armstrong, is the masterwork.
>> 
>> Steve Voce
>> 
>> 
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