Duke Ellington in the LP Era [Excerpt]

Jazz Perspectives, 2012

The Journal of American History, 2001

Journal of Popular Music Studies, 2005

There is a new laudatory trend in books being published on blues and its more commercial counterpart, rhythm and blues. The field for the last few decades has been almost the exclusive preserve of record collectors and true believers, who tended to write with a fan's enthusiasm and a fan's dedication to unearthing all the facts about the subject that could be found. Thus, we presently have many bookcases-worth of terrifically researched books, delineating the history of blues/rhythm and blues, but what has largely been lacking in them are evocative writing and a sense that the author has bothered to actually make sense of the subject in an analytical way. Until now, that is. An excellent example of this new trend is Arthur Kempton's Boogaloo (2003), an examination of soul music that is built wholly on the R&B research of his predecessors but which exudes vigorous prose and a compelling thesis. Another book reflecting this trend is Elijah Wald's Escaping the Delta (2004), an insightful examination of Robert Johnson and the country blues, which not only possesses great writing and wonderful analytical conclusions, but also brings to the table original research.

Musical Quarterly, 2013

2001

s compositions are significant to the study of jazz and American music in general. This study examines his compositional style through a comparative analysis of three works from each of his main stylistic periods. The analyses focus on form, instrumentation, texture and harmony, melody, tonality, and rhythm. Each piece is examined on its own and their significant features are compared.

Duke Ellington Studies Anthology, edited by John Howland, 157–76. New York: Cambridge UP., 2017

Throughout his career, Duke Ellington often referred to the process of writing music-meaning, the act of actually committing it to paper, using pencil and eraser. 1 Indeed, he left a large body of written music manuscripts. But the relation between Ellington's autographs and the performances and recordings of his orchestra is not straightforward. Clearly, Ellington's goal was performance. He never sought to publish his original orchestral scores in print, and this disinterest further obscured how performance and notation are connected in his music. This situation has led scholars to gloss over the role of notation in Ellington's music, thereby leading some writers to downplay its importance in his music practice. Moreover, mystifications and comparisons with classical music notation (frequently from a rather limited understanding of the latter practice) have often served to demonstrate Ellington's uniqueness.

Music and Politics, 2011

In 1960 Duke Ellington and his Orchestra recorded an album for the Columbia label titled Swinging Suites by Edward E. and Edward G. 1 (See Figure 1.) This album paired two multi-movement compositions created collaboratively by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn: The Peer Gynt Suites, which was an arrangement of five movements from Edvard Grieg's Peer Gynt Suites I & II, and Suite Thursday, a set of original compositions inspired by the similarly titled novel by John Steinbeck. 2 Until now, scholars interested in discussing "side one" of the Swingin' Suites album have focused on two topics: Who actually composed The Peer Gynt Suites: Ellington, Strayhorn or both? And how was the suite received by listeners when it was released in 1960? 3 With respect to the first topic, it appears that Ellington and Strayhorn composed their arrangement collaboratively, with Strayhorn serving as the lead creative force, a process that I will explain in more detail later in the article. As to the second topic-the work's reception-a straightforward assessment of this subject appears in an article by Mervyn Cooke titled "Jazz among the Classics, and the Case of Duke Ellington" in the Cambridge Companion to Jazz. 4 As Cooke explains, the Ellington/Strayhorn Peer Gynt Suites met with vehement protest from the Grieg Foundation in Norway and was consequently banned from public distribution via record sales, media broadcasts, and public concerts throughout Scandinavia for nearly a decade (figure 2). 5 The Grieg Foundation in Norway viewed the recording as an offensive attack on Grieg's musical reputation. In a debate published in the Oslo Aftenposten in 1964, the president of the Grieg Foundation called Ellington's Peer Gynt "ugly" and "uninspired," he even went so far as to say that "in Solveig's song" Ellington had made the Norwegian maiden "bray like a sow." 6 In the United States, the An earlier draft of this article was presented on 5 November 2010 as part of a session titled "Duke Ellington's Late, Extended Works: Some New Critical Perspectives" at the American Musicological Society's 76 th Annual Conference in Indianapolis, Indiana. As I noted at that time, this project could have never progressed without the groundbreaking work of David Hajdu and Walter van de Leur. I thank the latter, especially, for his descriptions of the manuscript sources currently held in the Billy Strayhorn Collection in Pittsburg, PA, since I was unable to gain access to these sources during my research on this project. 1 Columbia (Cl 1597). In England, the album was released as a Philips LP (BBL 7470

Notes, 2005

Jazz Perspectives, 2012

Pianist, composer and bandleader Edward Kennedy ("Duke") Ellington (1899-1974) emerged on the New York City jazz scene in 1923. Within just a few years, the Ellington band's original repertoire and performances were attracting much critical attention. A common theme of the discourse surrounding Ellington from the 1920s was the comparison of his repertoire with European classical music. These judgements were always imposed from outside, for although Ellington expressed an admiration for classical composers, he frequently asserted his desire not to associate his own works with the classical tradition. At one point in his career, he even stated that "I am not writing classical music, and the musical devices that have been handed down by serious composers have little bearing on modern swing." 1 Ellington composed prolifically in the jazz idiom for the entirety of his performing career (which ended with his death in 1974), and critical and scholarly evaluations of his works using classical music criteria were further fuelled by a series of large-scale compositions that he produced from 1943. 2 Critical assertions of classicism in Ellington's repertoire have almost universally focussed on the subtleties and sophistication of his composition-with "composition" referring to the predetermined and usually notated sections of the work. 1 Duke Ellington, "Certainly It's Music!" in The Duke Ellington Reader, ed. Mark Tucker (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 246-248. Ellington qualified his statement by explaining: "That I owe a debt to the classical composers is not to be denied but it is the same debt that many composers, for generations, have owed to Brahms, Beethoven, Debussy and others of their calibre. They have furnished us with wholesome musical patterns in our minds and have given us a definite basis from which to judge all music, regardless of its origin." Ibid., 247. 2 Although earlier works such as "Rockin' in Rhythm" (1931)-in rondo form-borrowed from classical formal techniques, only the 1940s larger-scale works were performed in classical venues. Examples of these works include Black, Brown and Beige (1943), The Perfume Suite (1944), Deep South Suite (1946), Liberian Suite (1947) and The Tattooed Bride (1948)-all of which were composed for performances at the traditionally classical venue Carnegie Hall.

The Musical Quarterly, 2013

From his early "jungle-style" and "mood" pieces to his later extended works and suites, the function and meaning of programmatic and narrative elements in Ellington's music has generated a wealth of critical commentary and debate among critics, scholars, and fans. To take a recent example, Brent Hayes Edwards has argued for the primacy of the "literary imperative in the Ellington oeuvre," observing that Ellington was "consistently concerned with 'telling tales' in language, not only in sounds-or more precisely in both: spinning stories in ways that combined words and music." 1 While Ellington's oeuvre does have some pieces that are almost literally descriptive-such as the trains in "Daybreak Express" and "Happy-Go-Lucky-Local"-the correspondence between program and music does not move along direct or literal paths. Even in the most avowedly programmatic and literary-based works that Edwards examines, such as Black, Brown and Beige (1943) and Such Sweet Thunder (1957), the relation between program and music is seldom straightforward and often elusive. Indeed, the evidence for those supposedly programmatic works often runs contrary to the fanciful stories offered by the composer. For instance, Ellington introduced the three-movement The Tattooed Bride (1948) as a "musical striptease" about a man who during his honeymoon finds out that his bride is tattooed repeatedly with the letter W, "in different sizes and shapes and places." 2 The autograph scores, however, are curiously titled "Kitchen Stove," "Omaha," and "Aberdeen," which leaves one to wonder what the composer truly had in mind while writing the music. 3 Similarly, the 1944 Perfume Suite tries, in Ellington's words, "to capture the character usually taken on by a woman who wears different. .. blends of perfume.. .. We divided them into four categories: 'Love,' 'Violence,' 'Naïveté' and 'Sophistication,' " 4 but the