Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington (1899-1974) was born in Washington, D.C., and learned his trade at the piano in its ragtime cafés. He came to New York in 1923 and, from 1927 to 1931, led the house band of the Cotton Club in Harlem, broadcast across America night after night.

He wrote for the players in front of him, not for a section: the growl of a trumpet, the silk of Johnny Hodges’s alto, Harry Carney’s baritone at the bottom of every chord. In 1939 Billy Strayhorn joined him, and for almost thirty years the two wrote as one; Strayhorn’s Take the “A” Train became the band’s signature.

At Carnegie Hall in 1943 he played Black, Brown and Beige, a history of Black America in music. At Newport in 1956 Paul Gonsalves blew twenty-seven choruses of Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue and the crowd rose to its feet. Then came the suites, from Such Sweet Thunder to the Far East Suite, and from 1965 the Sacred Concerts, played in cathedrals.

He left more than a thousand compositions, and called his band his instrument. “There are simply two kinds of music,” he wrote in 1962, “good music and the other kind.”

Kind Words

I know of nothing in Ravel so dextrous in treatment as the varied solos in the middle of the ebullient Hot and Bothered and nothing in Stravinsky more dynamic than the final section.

Constant LambertMusic Ho! A Study of Music in Decline, 1934

Now there, to me, is the most perfect band in existence.

Clare FischerDownBeat, 19 October 1967, on “Agra” from the Far East Suite

He just seems to have a sixth sense about things turning out so good.

Louie BellsonDownBeat, “Blindfold Test”, around 1964

Snapshots

At the Howard Theater, Washington, around June 1946. William P. Gottlieb
The orchestra at the Aquarium, New York, November 1946. William P. Gottlieb
In concert at the Concertgebouw, Amsterdam, March 1961. Nationaal Archief
A night-club map of Harlem, 1932, with the Cotton Club. E. Simms Campbell, Library of Congress
With Django Reinhardt, on his tour with the band, New York, 1946. William P. Gottlieb
Arriving at Schiphol for concerts in The Hague and Amsterdam, February 1963. Nationaal Archief
With Kay Davis, the band’s singer, on tour in the Netherlands, April 1950. Nationaal Archief

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