DUKE: A LIFE OF DUKE ELLINGTON by Terry Teachout
New York Times Book Review, Dec. 6, 2013
Eighty years before “branding” had become the familiar hard-nosed term for the packaging and selling of entertainers, Duke Ellington was a dreamlike synthesis of image, talent and social relevance. As a black jazz titan in a racist age — he began his rise to stardom in 1917—the aristocratic maestro took on a weighty double role: to lift jazz to the level of concert music and to earn respect for his race.
He triumphed on both counts. Ellington played piano, but his real instrument was the orchestra. The sound he created was a tapestry of bluesy textures, lowdown swing and solo instrumental voices that growled, cried or wailed. Ellington led the band with a majesty that made him seem truly royal. He moved quickly from the Cotton Club in Harlem to Broadway and Hollywood; his orchestra played Carnegie Hall throughout the ’40s; and he landed on the cover of Time. His compositions, from “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)” to the “Black, Brown and Beige” suite, glorified the black experience and earned him comparisons to Prokofiev and Stravinsky. All the while he had one crowning goal: to entertain “without compromising the dignity of the Negro people.”
His was a grand tightrope act. Dressed in tails, grinning broadly from the piano, he stayed ever suave and impeccable. Ellington couldn’t let the public see his flaws, and he had many, from his relentless womanizing to his penchant for hogging credit from his collaborators. He knew that a black man in his position had to seem superhuman; anything less might cause a response articulated by his comrade Lena Horne: “There go those black people messing up again.”
In his 1973 memoir, “Music Is My Mistress,” he merely polished the façade. A 1987 biography by James Lincoln Collier focused on the music and sidestepped the personality. Ellington’s newest biographer, Terry Teachout, clearly saw the challenge of writing about the enigmatic legend. In “Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington,” he calls Ellington “a riddle without an answer, an unknowable man who hid behind a high wall of ornate utterances and flowery compliments that grew higher as he grew older.”
Yet in his cleareyed reassessment of a man regarded in godlike terms, Teachout, the drama critic for the Wall Street Journal, delves behind “the mask of smiling, noncommittal urbanity that he showed to the world.” The facts and stories he relates aren’t new, but rarely have they had such a compelling narrative flow or ring of reliability. As in his last book, “Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong,” Teachout keeps his psychoanalyzing within safe limits; he contextualizes historically without sounding contrived, and honors his subject’s musical achievements through just the right amount of close analysis.
He traces Ellington’s cultivated veneer to his turn-of-the-century childhood in Washington, D.C. Middle-class blacks of the time, like his parents, knew that upward mobility depended on adopting the whitest mannerisms possible. Ellington’s father, a butler, dressed and spoke in a high-flown, fussy fashion; he and his wife, Daisy, groomed their son to do the same. A childhood friend seems to have christened the young Edward Kennedy Ellington “Duke,” thus sealing his air of eminence.
Jazz was blossoming in the form of ragtime, and he fell in love with its syncopated rhythms. Musically he was largely self-taught, and soon after he had started his first combos, he formed a concept that had little to do with ragtime. He unleashed it in 1927 at the Cotton Club, the gold ring for black entertainers. The room’s brilliantly staged variety shows gave a nearly all-white clientele an illusion of untamed Africa. Ellington’s sound — dubbed “jungle music” — thrilled audiences with its raw vivacity. The band’s dark, moaning horns held the essence of the blues; to Ellington, they evoked “the mass singing of slaves.”
He needed a powerful white champion to truly make it big, and he had found one in Irving Mills, a Jewish music publisher who managed the band. Mills helped polish its image for mass (i.e., white) dissemination; he handled the business side, while shielding the leader as best he could from racial blows. For this he extracted a heavy price — up to 50 percent of the band’s income. He also doctored many Ellington songs and took a co-writer credit. Ellington accepted it all as the necessary trade-off for stardom.
The formula worked. Hits tumbled out of him: “Mood Indigo,” “Sophisticated Lady,” “Solitude,” “Caravan,” “In a Sentimental Mood.” The pressured leader did most of his writing on the fly; he liked to compose piecemeal in rehearsals with the band, assembling songs like jigsaw puzzles. Ellington was no great melodist; his players’ improvised solos were often the source of his tunes. Some musicians sued him later.
One who stayed quiet was Billy Strayhorn, the composer and arranger whom the Ellington trombonist Lawrence Brown called “the genius, the power behind the throne.” Meticulously schooled and much more harmonically advanced than his employer, Strayhorn lifted the band to its highest refinement. Ellington called him “my right arm, my left arm, all the eyes in the back of my head,” but he had no compunction about robbing him of at least some of his glory; on many Strayhorn songs, including “Something to Live For” and “Day Dream," Ellington followed Mills’s lead and added his own name as coauthor. Professionally, Strayhorn seemed doomed to live in the shadows.
Teachout relates even the most dramatic episodes in the Ellington story with a poised impartiality. He doesn’t take a novelistic approach, nor does he describe music with the lyrical flights of fancy favored by such writers as Greil Marcus and Lester Bangs. Teachout writes in an earthbound style marked by sound scholarship and easy readability. He particularly shines in his portraits of Ellington’s renowned sidemen, including Jimmie Blanton, Ben Webster, Paul Gonsalves and Juan Tizol. As the largely unsung heroes of the band, they could be angry, sloppy and hung-over. For all of Ellington’s obsessive drive for control, he hadn’t the nerve to discipline them.
By the late ’40s the swing era had entered a decline, and so did Ellington. His prestige and his record sales sagged; many of his key musicians left. Ellington kept writing ambitious thematic works, but most were panned as pretentious and weak. He had one last blaze of glory, a surprise smash appearance at the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival. But the boost it gave him had faded by the ’60s. Rarely had Ellington allowed even a flash of bitterness to peek through, but he couldn’t hide it in 1965, when the Pulitzer Prize board members rejected a proposal by its music committee to give him a lifetime achievement award. Ellington denounced their snobbery toward nonclassical forms and hinted at possible racism.
In Teachout’s poignant last pages, the jazz giant is broke and passé, yet still addicted to a lonely life on the road with a band he couldn’t afford to maintain. When he died of pneumonia after a diagnosis of lung cancer, in 1974, he owed the I.R.S. more than half a million dollars.
Yet none of his missteps have dimmed the Ellington legend. Seldom overtly political, he preferred to lead by example. The need for symbolic black achievers — Oprah Winfrey, Quincy Jones, Tyler Perry and, of course, Barack Obama — is still with us; the NAACP, with its annual Image Awards, continues to honor blacks who in its view uphold a positive appearance. “Duke” humanizes a man whom history has kept on a pedestal.