The ROLI guide to Duke Ellington
Revisiting the life and times of a jazz-music icon
Duke Ellington is surely one of the twentieth century’s most important musical figures — not only for his influence on the world of jazz, but also classical music, pop, and beyond. We're a little late but, as April 29th this year marked 126th anniversary of his birth, we thought it an ideal time to look back on his life and work, including some of his most popular compositions available to learn in the ROLI Learn app.
Born Edward Kennedy Ellington in 1899, the soon-to-be Duke (nicknamed for his graceful mannerisms and impeccable sense of style) grew up in Washington, D.C., the son of two piano-playing parents. Despite originally aspiring to be a painter, he picked up the piano himself as a teenager before joining a band locally. Eventually, he split his time between his hometown and New York City, before deciding on the latter and forming his own band in 1924. Over the next few years, largely through playing in radio-broadcast performances at the Cotton Club in Harlem, he rose to prominence, gaining widespread fame by age 30.
The 1920s and 1930s were a booming time for jazz music in New York. Part of a broader revival around African-American music, art, literature, fashion, and more, now known as the Harlem Renaissance, it’s from this period that some of Duke Ellington’s best-loved compositions originate.
Aided by worldwide radio play, the band began to tour internationally by the early 1930s, including a stint at the London Palladium. Ellington’s band had grown considerably, and he was well-renowned during this time. Conducting from the piano, he now led an orchestra of fourteen other players, comprising brass, woodwind, and rhythm sections.
Despite Ellington’s growing reputation and newfound popularity among white audiences, particularly in college towns where young white people were beginning to embrace swing dance styles that had originated in Black communities, touring in Jim Crow-era USA was fraught with difficulties for the majority-Black band. On one 1934 stint, it’s reported, the band was forced to travel in private rail cars to ensure access to facilities in the segregated South.
By the early 1930s, the swing dance craze had become a full-fledged phenomenon among Black and white audiences alike, driving both record sales and bookings for the band. Jazz was music, said Ellington, “but the swing is business.”
1932’s “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)” is today considered a jazz standard, with versions having been recorded by everyone from to Django Reinhardt to Thelonious Monk — a pianist upon whom Ellington had a great deal of influence and, in turn, was influenced by. Ellington himself recorded the song with Louis Armstrong in 1961, but it’s the version with Ella Fitzgerald, singing lyrics by Irving Mills (also Ellington’s agent and publisher), that’s best known today.
“It Don’t Mean a Thing” was originally composed during the intermission of a performance at the Lincoln Tavern in Chicago, where, legend has it, nobody was dancing until the band played this piece. The title was taken from a quote by Ellington’s one-time trumpet player, Bubber Miley, who sadly died later the same year the track was released.
Like “It Don’t Mean a Thing” two years earlier, “In My Solitude” was another quick composition destined to become a classic (“I don’t need time, what I need is a deadline!” Ellington once said). Penned during a 20-minute break before a recording session, this 1934 composition has also been recorded many times over the years. Ella Fitzgerald also recorded this one, and Billie Holiday did so several times, gradually making it her own in the process.
It’s worth noting that while it’s the songs that we commonly remember today, much of Ellington’s output was originally instrumental, with lyrics added later by his collaborators. One repeated collaborator was Emmanuel Kurtz, aka Manny Curtis (also credited as Mann Curtis or Manny Kurtz), an American lyricist who wrote over 250 songs for various artists. The most well-known of his collaborations with Ellington is 1935’s “In a Sentimental Mood” — one of many songs for which the aforementioned Irving Mills also claimed a co-credit, and therefore a share of publishing money, despite minimal creative input.
According to Ellington, the music for this song had also been composed incredibly quickly, and again under some pressure, this time during an altercation at a party in Durham, North Carolina. "I was playing piano when another one of our friends had some trouble with two chicks,” he explained in an interview at the time. “To pacify them, I composed this there and then, with one chick standing on each side of the piano."
Ellington’s collaborations weren’t limited to lyricists. He also recorded tunes written by, or with, other members of his band. The most well-known of these, and almost certainly the most influential, is 1936’s “Caravan”, reckoned by some counts to be the most covered piece of music in history. Co-written with Puerto Rican trombonist Juan Tizol, who had joined Ellington’s band in 1929, this jazz standard has gone on to be recorded by at least 500 different musicians.
“Caravan” is particularly notable for a recent resurgence in interest, having been featured in many Hollywood movies. It’s been used twice by Woody Allen, appears on the soundtracks for Chocolat and Ocean’s Eleven, and composer and arranger John Wasson’s version plays a prominent role in Whiplash.
The prominent lead trumpet in the original “Caravan” recording was played by long-time band member Charles “Cootie” Williams, for whom Ellington conceived the 1940 instrumental “Concerto for Cootie” — designed to show off its namesake’s virtuosic playing. The concerto eventually became “Do Nothing till You Hear from Me”, later gaining lyrics by songwriter Bob Russell.
Ellington’s 1944 recording of the track was an instant hit, staying at number one on the R&B charts for eight weeks and reaching number six in the pop charts too. It’s since been performed by legends like Nat King Cole, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Nina Simone, and Sammy Davis Jr. There’s even a Mary J. Blige cover on 2001 AIDs benefit compilation Red Hot + Indigo.
In the early 1940s, bebop began to emerge, its complex rhythms and harmonies gradually becoming the predominant sound of jazz. Together with the impact of World War II, industrial action, and the rise of solo stars like Frank Sinatra, this heralded the end of the big-band era. Ellington, who had begun to fulfil his ambitions of stretching the jazz form into longer, more elaborate compositions with themes of African-American identity and historical injustices (beginning with 1943’s “Black, Brown and Beige”), was not immune to the effects of this decline.
Despite a more muted reception to his output and the loss of several key band members, Ellington’s continued compositional royalties enabled him to continue recording and touring, particularly in Europe, at a time when other orchestras had been forced to disband. During the post-war period, he also presented the score for his symphonic work Harlem to then-President Harry Truman, and composed the music for an Orson Welles stage production in Frankfurt, which featured a young Eartha Kitt singing Ellington’s song “Hungry Little Trouble”.
If the decade following the end of World War II represented a lull in Ellington’s career, the band’s 1956 appearance at the Newport Jazz Festival was the emphatic beginning to a new era of success for the composer. Now the stuff of jazz legend, the band was scheduled for two performances, with the first cut short owing to the late arrival of several band members. Following the festival’s other acts, the band returned to the stage to close the program with another two-part set.
Ellington and his band ran through several of their songs to a relatively lukewarm reception before he introduced 1937’s "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue,” which would feature an improvised interval by saxophonist Paul Gonsalves. This saxophone solo, backed solely by bass, drums, and the piano, turned the performance around and revitalised Ellington’s career. Gonsalves played an exuberant 27-chorus-long solo that whipped the crowd into a frenzy before the rest of the band rejoined. Despite pleas from the festival’s organiser, Ellington continued to extend the performance for several more songs before finally closing the show with his trademark, “You are very beautiful, very sweet, and we do love you madly."
The concert was soon released as an album that became the best-selling release of Ellington’s career, kicked off a renewed wave of recognition, and resulted in his appearance on the cover of Time magazine shortly thereafter.
In the wake of this newfound success, the latter period of Ellington’s career saw some of his most creative and critically acclaimed work. During the early 1960s, he worked on several influential film scores and also began to collaborate more frequently with other prominent musicians, including Louis Armstrong, John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, and Max Roach. He also worked together with former rival band leader Count Basie, combining their two orchestras in 1961 for First Time! The Count Meets the Duke.
This remarkable recording made at 30th Street Studio in New York features Ellington’s orchestra in the right stereo channel and Basie’s in the left. A particular feature of this track, and much of the album, is the interaction between Ellington and Basie’s two piano parts.
Duke Ellington received great recognition during the latter part of his life and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Nixon in 1969. He had been shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize for Music several years earlier, but it was decided that no prize would be awarded that year. “Fate is being kind to me,” he said at the time, then aged 66. “Fate doesn't want me to be famous too young.” Ellington died in 1974, and eventually received his Pulitzer, posthumously in 1999, the hundredth anniversary of his birth.
Tributes to Duke Ellington flowed freely following his passing, with memorials created in both Washington, D.C., and New York, and bridges, schools, and concert halls named in his honour. In 2009, he was also depicted on the reverse side of the District of Columbia quarter, making him the first African-American person to appear by themselves on a circulating US coin.
Countless fellow musicians have also professed the influence that Ellington had on their own work and music at large. Perhaps the best known examples of these are Miles Davis’s half-hour long "He Loved Him Madly”, Charles Mingus’s (who had once been fired from Ellington’s band) ”Duke Ellington's Sound Of Love”, and Stevie Wonder’s “Sir Duke”, which topped the Billboard 100 on its release in 1977.
Learn to play like Duke Ellington
All of the songs embedded in this article are available to learn right now in the ROLI Learn app. Combined with ROLI Piano or Piano M, a subscription to ROLI Learn gives you everything you need to learn jazz standards, legendary classical works, and contemporary hits.
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