The Duke Ellington collective

Stephen Brown
Published: 2 May 2012
tls


David Schiff
THE ELLINGTON CENTURY
336pp. University of California Press. #24.95 (US $34.95). 
978 0 520 24587 7

It wasn't easy being Duke Ellington: every night, along
with your tuxedo and your Brylcreem, to put on a mask of
urbane sophistication, to say "I love you madly" even when
playing to a segregated audience in some Southern dance
hall, to give that audience music that was popular in part
because of the prejudices it reinforced - the "jungle"
style - even as it glowed with a brilliance only available
to talent, intelligence and disciplined study. It sounds
as though it could all have been a cynical exercise, but
it was in fact the opposite, sustained by Ellington's
ferocious integrity. He was never shy about making clear
that his music came out of the entirety of the African
American experience, "Black, Brown and Beige" as one of
his compositions has it, and even though his relationship
with the public was conducted behind a carapace of irony
it seems he did love his audiences madly. I talked with
someone who had heard the band in Carbondale, Illinois,
and had gone up afterwards to get Ellington's autograph.
They chatted. The man was charmed. Some fifteen years
later, the band played Carbondale again, and afterwards my
acquaintance went back up to re-introduce himself. There
was no need - Ellington remembered his name.

That his band was Ellington's instrument has become a
cliche, but it is a misleading one. An instrument is a
passive object that takes its energy from its operator.
That's not how Ellington worked. He was a tremendous
talent-spotter, and part of what kept that talent close by
was his willingness to let it have its voice, and more, to
highlight and showcase it, and most importantly, to
involve it in the creative process. We tend to fetishize
originality and ownership (as though Rubens painted every
inch of his canvases), but the Ellington band was in large
part a collective. The perks of belonging to it were
enormous. Steady work with great musicians, Ellington's
incomparable ability to feature his performers, his
unending loyalty to them, the opportunity he gave them to
be heard, recorded, broadcast around the world. There were
drawbacks as well. Whatever came out of the Ellington
studio bore Ellington's name. The exception was work by
his longtime collaborator, Billy Strayhorn. But their
collaboration was so close that their contributions are
often inseparable.

In effect, then, there was the Ellington- Strayhorn kernel
collective, and then moving out in a widening circle, the
Ellington-and-his-band collective. And that was located
within a larger, informal collective, with writers of
musical theatre and popular song on the one hand, and jazz
musicians and other big bands on the other, everybody
happily stealing from everyone else. Well, they weren't
always happy. The great alto saxophone player Johnny
Hodges left the Ellington band partly because he felt that
his musical contributions weren't getting the credit they
deserved. After five years on his own, he came back.

for the rest of this, go to http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1029573.ece

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