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Summary
Summary
A major new biography of Duke Ellington from the acclaimed author of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong
Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington was the greatest jazz composer of the twentieth century--and an impenetrably enigmatic personality whom no one, not even his closest friends, claimed to understand. The grandson of a slave, he dropped out of high school to become one of the world's most famous musicians, a showman of incomparable suavity who was as comfortable in Carnegie Hall as in the nightclubs where he honed his style. He wrote some fifteen hundred compositions, many of which, like "Mood Indigo" and "Sophisticated Lady," remain beloved standards, and he sought inspiration in an endless string of transient lovers, concealing his inner self behind a smiling mask of flowery language and ironic charm.
As the biographer of Louis Armstrong, Terry Teachout is uniquely qualified to tell the story of the public and private lives of Duke Ellington. Duke peels away countless layers of Ellington's evasion and public deception to tell the unvarnished truth about the creative genius who inspired Miles Davis to say, "All the musicians should get together one certain day and get down on their knees and thank Duke."
Author Notes
Terry Teachout, the drama critic at The Wall Street Journal , is the author of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong and Satchmo at the Waldorf , a one-man play about Armstrong's life and times. He lives in New York City.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The revealing biography chronicles the life of the legendary jazz bandleader and composer, who conjured great music out of other men's ideas. Wall Street Journal critic Teachout (Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong) presents a charismatic, charming, debonair man who brought a new artistic depth to a disreputable popular entertainment-and a self-centered bastard who suavely manipulated everyone from his sidemen to his countless paramours. (His infidelities provoked his wife to slash him with a razor and a mistress to pull a gun when she caught him in bed with another woman.) Teachout's focus on his subject's creative process sometimes clashes with his assertion that Ellington was "the greatest composer in the history of jazz"; the unevenness of the Duke's oeuvre and his reliance on tunes appropriated from writing partner Billy Strayhorn and other band members without proper crediting raises the question of whether his "radically collaborative" methods really comport with our notion of a brilliant composer. Yet Ellington's crucial role as a shaper and solidifier of his band's improvisational musical outpourings comes through clearly in the book. Teachout neatly balances colorful anecdote with shrewd character assessments and musicological analysis, and he manages to debunk Ellington's self-mythologizing, while preserving his stature as the man who caught jazz's ephemeral genius in a bottle. Photos. Agent: Glen Hartley and Lynn Chu, Writers' Representatives. (Oct. 21) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In the selective bibliography of this comprehensive and well-researched life of America's greatest jazz and popular-music composer and orchestra leader, there are more than a dozen full biographies; memoirs by Ellington himself (however unreliable), by his son, Mercer, and by several band members; as well as innumerable profiles and a variety of ephemera. One might have thought yet another life, admittedly a synthesis, 40 years after the subject's death might be superfluous. In this addition to our music literature, however, Teachout, drama critic for the Wall Street Journal and author of, among other writings, a biography of Louis Armstrong (Pops, 2009), abundantly justifies the effort. Though respectful and musically knowing, Teachout presents the famously evasive and not altogether admirable Ellington (among other traits, procrastination, manipulativeness, and incorrigible womanizing) scars and all, including the rarely photographed one (rectified here) on his left cheek, inflicted by his jealous wife. It is Ellington's breathtakingly enormous musical contribution (1,700 compositions, from short pieces to major suites and sacred music) and his gift for collaboration, albeit often appropriation, that is the fitting focus of this important book. Included is a list of key recordings, all currently downloadable, a perfect accompaniment to one's reading of this entertaining and valuable biography.--Levine, Mark Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
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 rose to stardom in the 1920s - the aristocratic maestro took on a weighty double role: to lift jazz to the level of concert music and to win 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 facade. 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 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 allwhite 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 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 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 co-author. Professionally, Strayhorn seemed doomed to live in the shadows, in part because he was gay and had opted not to hide it. 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 or alcoholic. For all of Ellington's obsessive drive for control, he hadn't the nerve to discipline them. By the late '40 s 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 the 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 N.A.A.C.P., 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. DUKE A Life of Duke Ellington By Terry Teachout Illustrated. 483 pp. Gotham Books. $30. Ellington was 'an unknowable man who hid behind a high wall of ornate utterances.' JAMES GAVIN is the author of "Stormy Weather: The Life of Lena Horne." His biography of Peggy Lee will be published next year.
Choice Review
Teachout (theater critic for The Wall Street Journal) has, by his own admission, not conducted any new research in writing this book; rather, he has "synthesized" the extensive work of researchers, academic and otherwise, that has surfaced since the last comprehensive Ellington biography, John Hasse's Beyond Category (CH, Mar'94, 31-3712). Teachout is a skillful writer, and this volume is filled with pertinent information about a figure on everyone's short list of most important jazz musicians. However the author seems to have an agenda. Part of that agenda is to make clear how much Ellington profited from the ideas of his associates, while admitting that those ideas, without Ellington's genius in developing them, would probably have amounted to little. Teachout does not shy away from the somewhat different and complex musical, personal, and professional relationship between Ellington and Billy Strayhorn. Going to great lengths to try to get inside the mind of the always private and evasive Ellington, the author focuses on Ellington's skill in and proclivity for manipulating others, including his legendary love interests. Many will disagree with Teachout's opinions about both the music and the man, but this is a major work about one of the giants of American music. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers. K. R. Dietrich Ripon College
Kirkus Review
With this exhaustive, engaging study of the greatest jazz composer of his era, Wall Street Journal drama critic Teachout solidifies his place as one of America's great music biographers. Many have cited jazz as America's only true indigenous art form, so it is at once surprising and disheartening that major publishers are seemingly hesitant to champion books that tackle the subject--especially considering that when an author is allowed the freedom to dive into the life and music of a jazz titan, the results are often brilliant, something that Teachout demonstrated with his justifiably revered Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong (2010). After Armstrong, chronologically speaking, bandleader/composer/arranger/pianist Duke Ellington was jazz's next game changer. Aside from his undeniably astounding ear, Ellington, like Armstrong, was a personality, one of the rare jazzmen who was able to combine heady music with showbiz panache without diminishing his art. With his vibrant prose and ability to get into his protagonist's head and heart, Teachout captures this essence and charisma in a manner worthy of Ellington's complex yet listenable classic "The Queen's Suite." One of Ellington's most notable nonmusical qualities was his loyalty, and the author gives some of his longtime sidemen and compatriots--e.g., composer Billy Strayhorn and saxophonists Johnny Hodges and Paul Gonsalves--their due. Finally, as was the case in Pops, Teachout's musical analysis is spot-on, at once complex and accessible. It will be appreciated equally by those who have 100 Ellington albums and those whose awareness of the Duke is limited to his best-known tunes like "Take The 'A' Train" and "Satin Doll." Hopefully, the brilliance of Teachout's treatment will compel the industry to let authors take a crack at the lives of, say, Ornette Coleman, Count Basie and Charles Mingus. Like most Ellington albums, Teachout's in-depth, well-researched, loving study of this American treasure is an instant classic.]]]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Teachout (drama critic, Wall Street Journal; Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong) this time tackles the life, work, and music of Duke Ellington. Although Ellington wrote an autobiography (Music Is My Mistress) and has been profiled in several other books over the years, few of these get at the complexity of Ellington's private life and his personality as a bandleader. Teachout's writing is clear, the facts seem to be well supported both from previously published sources and from interviews, and some of the awareness that the author provides (e.g., the extent to which Ellington was a collaborative composer who used ideas from his band members) will expand readers' view of the man who was perhaps the greatest jazz composer of the 20th century. Photographs sprinkled throughout are well chosen to provide support to Teachout's points in the text. VERDICT Teachout gives much insight into Ellington's life, personality, working habits, and compositions. This work should appeal to Ellington enthusiasts as well as casual jazz fans.-James E. Perone, Univ. of Mount Union, -Alliance, OH (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
From Chapter 5 Black and Tan also marked-literally-a transition in Ellington's private life. After 1928 his left cheek bore a prominent crescent-shaped scar that is easily visible in the film's last scene (and in the photograph reproduced on the cover of this book). Though rarely mentioned by journalists, it made fans curious enough that he felt obliged to "explain" its presence in Music Is My Mistress : I have four stories about it, and it depends on which you like the best. One is a taxicab accident; another is that I slipped and fell on a broken bottle; then there is a jealous woman; and last is Old Heidelberg, where they used to stand toe to toe with a saber in each hand, and slash away. The first man to step back lost the contest, no matter how many times he'd sliced the other. Take your pick. None of Ellington's friends and colleagues was in doubt about which one to pick. In Irving Mills's words, "Women was one of the highlights in his life. He had to have women. . . . He always had a woman, always kept a woman here, kept a woman there, always had somebody." Most men who treat women that way are destined to suffer at their hands sooner or later, if not necessarily in so sensational a fashion as Ellington, whose wife attacked him with a razor when she found out that he was sleeping with another woman. Who was she? One possible candidate is Fredi Washington. The costar of Black and Tan had launched her theatrical career in 1922 as a dancer in the chorus of the original production of Eubie Blake's Shuffle Along. Sonny Greer later described her as "the most beautiful woman" he had ever seen. "She had gorgeous skin, perfect features, green eyes, and a great figure. When she smiled, that was it!" Washington was light enough to pass for white but adamantly refused to do so, a decision that made it impossible for her to establish herself in Hollywood, though she appeared with Paul Robeson in Dudley Murphy's 1933 film of Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones (for which her skin was darkened with makeup) and starred in Imitation of Life , a 1934 tearjerker in which she played, with mortifying predictability, a light-skinned black who passed for white. Ellington never spoke on the record about their romantic involvement, but Washington later admitted to the film historian Donald Bogle that she and Ellington had been lovers: "I just had to accept that he wasn't going to marry me. But I wasn't going to be his mistress." Their relationship was widely known at the time in the entertainment world, enough so that Mercer Ellington could write in his memoir of "a torrid love affair Pop had with a very talented and beautiful woman, an actress. I think this was a genuine romance, that there was love on both sides, and that it amounted to one of the most serious relationships of his life." Reprinted by arrangement with GOTHAM BOOKS, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, A Penguin Random House Company. Copyright © TERRY TEACHOUT, 2013. Excerpted from Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington by Terry Teachout All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
| Prologue "I Want To Tell America" | p. 1 |
| 1 "I Just Couldn't be Shackled": Fortunate Son, 1899-1917 | p. 21 |
| 2 "Soft and Gut-Bucket": Becoming, a professional, 1917-1926 | p. 36 |
| 3 "Only My Own Music": With Irving Mills, 1926-1927 | p. 55 |
| 4 "The Utmost Significance": At the Cotton Club, 1927-1929 | p. 73 |
| 5 "I Better Scratch Out Something": Becoming, a Genius, 1929-1930 | p. 95 |
| 6 "A Higher Plateau": Becoming, a Star, 1931-1933 | p. 117 |
| 7 "The Way the President Travels": On the Road, 1933-1936 | p. 142 |
| 8 "Swing is stagnant" Diminuendo in Blue, 1936-1939 | p. 161 |
| 9 "The Eyes in the Back of My Head" With Billy Strayhorn, 1938-1939 | p. 184 |
| 10 "The Sea of Expectancy": The Blanton-Webster Band, 1939-1940 | p. 201 |
| 11 "A Message for the World": Jump for Joy, 1941-1942 | p. 220 |
| 12 "I Don't Write Jazz": Carnegie Hall 1942-1946 | p. 235 |
| 13 "More a Business than an Art": Into the Wilderness, 1946-1955 | p. 257 |
| 14 "I Was Born In 1956": Crescendo in Blue, 1955-1960 | p. 283 |
| 15 "Fate's Being Kind to Me": Apotheosis, 1960-1967 | p. 309 |
| 16 "That Big Yawning Void": Alone in a Crowd, 1967-1974 | p. 335 |
| Afterword | p. 363 |
| Appendix: Fifty Key Recordings by Duke Ellington | p. 365 |
| Select Bibliography | p. 369 |
| Source Notes | p. 383 |
| Permissions | p. 465 |
| Index | p. 467 |
| About the Author | p. 483 |
