I stand on the train platform. Cold, gray weather presses down. Dystopian headlines fill the news; angst-inducing messages shake my phone. But ignoring it all, I tap my toe and bop my head. The music I am listening to leaves me helpless to do anything else. Fellow commuters eye me warily. “Should we stay away from this guy? Is he crazy?” In a sense, yes: I am crazy about Duke Ellington.
This month — Monday, to be precise — marks the 125th anniversary of Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington’s birth; we should celebrate him in every way imaginable. Make his birthday a national holiday. Rename Washington’s bigger airport Duke Ellington International, as has been suggested. Close the banks and turn off social media. While we’re at it, compel schoolchildren to learn “Satin Doll” on the recorder.
It is ridiculous to speak, except in personal terms, of discovering Ellington. He arrived on the American music scene a century ago and achieved enduring stardom. He is doubtless the greatest composer and band leader this country has produced. Talking about his music as a discovery is like saying, “That Shakespeare fella sure could write, couldn’t he?” In my defense, I plead having been raised on a diet of punk rock and MTV. I am making up for my tardiness with the zeal of a convert.
Even now, Ellington’s music maintains its magic. I defy you to listen to “Drop Me Off in Harlem” or “Festival Junction” (the Ellington at Newport version) and not tap your feet. It’s not possible. You will smile and feel better about life despite yourself. Here is music that never prods us to feel angry, anxious or injured; instead, it has a quality that feels scarce these days: exuberance.
His music does things I didn’t think were possible. For example, I never knew music alone (without words) could be funny. Yet in Ellington, one hears riffs and counterpoints — clever musical winks — that have unmistakable humor. At other times, sections of his band sound engaged in conversation, the horns countermanding each other as if disputing a point. It is a stunning effect.
Ellington, the man, was a study in paradox. Lordly in manner, he was the grandson of an enslaved person. Married to his high school sweetheart at 19, he set up housekeeping with other women, then cheated prolifically on them. A musical revolutionary, he presented as a dapper conformist. He wanted his music to, as he told an interviewer, “express the future when, emancipated and transformed, the Negro takes his place, a free being, among the peoples of the world,” and saw it as his duty to “act in behalf of the race.”
Yet he had to endure Adam Clayton Powell Jr. calling him a “musical sharecropper.” Exploited by his manager Irving Mills, Ellington did no small amount of exploiting himself. Indeed, his great collaborator Billy Strayhorn called him by the nickname “Monster.” A genius need not be a saint.
But most fascinating of all is Ellington’s talent — the way he used his band as an instrument, taking diverse riffs and assembling them into a singular driving force. Musically, Ellington always saw the big picture and gave it life. Sideman Rex Stewart once described him arranging horns during a rehearsal. Instructing trumpeter Cootie Williams, Ellington said, “Hey Coots. You come in on the second bar, in a subtle manner growling softly like a hungry little lion cub that wants his dinner but can’t find his mother.”
My Ellington conversion began one night about 20 years ago. I was living in New York City; a woman I was dating got tickets to see the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra play Ellington. I reeled in anticipatory boredom. To me, “big band” meant old men playing Lawrence Welk in tuxedos. (Couldn’t she have gotten Rolling Stones tickets?) That night taught me never to underestimate my own ignorance. Nothing prepared me for the music’s sheer heat and power. It ravished me: the way the musicians — under the direction of Wynton Marsalis — synched perfectly together yet gave room to individual virtuosity. These guys — it dawned on me — rocked.
I went out the next day and bought an Ellington box set on compact disc. (Remember those?) These days, I stream his oeuvre and vary it with vinyl. So much of today’s cultural product celebrates injury and grievance. But 125 years after Ellington’s birth, the Duke’s music has lost not one particle of its precious exuberance.
Eric Herman is a former reporter turned communications consultant at Avoq and lives in Evanston.
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