The highest compliment Edward Kennedy Ellington knew how to pay to a fellow musician was to refer to him as being \u201cbeyond category.\u201d If any label could possibly capture the essence of Ellington himself, it would be that one. In a career spanning five decades, the man they called \u201cDuke\u201d put an indelible stamp on 20th-century American music as an instrumentalist, as a composer and as an orchestra leader. Equally at home and equally revered in the Cotton Club and Carnegie Hall, if any musician ever defied categorization, it was Duke Ellington. Fifty years after becoming a household name, and without slowing down professionally until the very end, Edward Kennedy \u201cDuke\u201d Ellington died on May 24, 1974, at the age of 75.<\/p>\n
One of the keys to understanding Duke Ellington\u2019s persona is to know how and when he received his noble nickname. Unlike Elvis Presley and Aretha Franklin, who were called the King and Queen of their respective genres because of their professional accomplishments, Edward Ellington became the Duke because of his suave demeanor and elegant bearing while still a schoolboy in Washington, D.C. As Studs Terkel put it, \u201cHis casual, offhand manner, his easy grace, and his dapper dress gave him the bearing of a young nobleman.\u201d The same qualities would remain with Ellington throughout his adult life.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Even if Ellington had limited himself to being a composer, he would deserve a reputation as one of the 20th century\u2019s best purely on the strength of \u201cMood Indigo\u201d (1930), \u201cIt Don\u2019t Mean a Thing (If It Ain\u2019t Got That Swing)\u201d (1932), \u201cSophisticated Lady\u201d (1933) and \u201cDo Nothing Till You Hear from Me\u201d (1940). But Ellington was much more than a composer. His Duke Ellington Orchestra served as an incubator for some of the greatest instrumentalists of the jazz age and became famous for a sound that no other orchestra could mimic. As the conductor\/composer Andre Previn once said in comparing Ellington to another jazz orchestra leader of far more modest talent: \u201cStan 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, \u2018Oh, yes, that\u2019s done like this.\u2019 But Duke merely lifts his finger, three horns make a sound and I don\u2019t know what it is.\u201d<\/p>\n
The style of music that brought him to fame passed in and out of fashion over the decades following his commercial peak, but Ellington himself was never content to work within that style anyway. Over the course of his career, Ellington never stopped pushing himself into new territory, from long-form orchestral jazz compositions to sacred church music. \u201cEvery morning you wake up, it\u2019s a new day, isn\u2019t it?\u201d he once said. \u201cIs there any reason why a human being shouldn\u2019t be influenced by a new day?\u201d Jazz historian Ralph Gleason called him \u201cThe greatest composer American society has produced.\u201d Duke Ellington himself would likely have been satisfied with simply \u201cbeyond category.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The highest compliment Edward Kennedy Ellington knew how to pay to a fellow musician was to refer to him as being \u201cbeyond category.\u201d If any label could possibly capture the essence of Ellington himself, it would be that one. In a career spanning five decades, the man they called \u201cDuke\u201d put an indelible stamp on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3506],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6817","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6817","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6817"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6817\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6817"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6817"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6817"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}