Duke Ellington Studies ed. by John Howland (review)

Duke Ellington Studies is the second volume on Duke Ellington published by Cambridge; the first is The Cambridge Companion to Duke Ellington, edited by Edward Green (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). According to John Howland, he and Green planned the second volume as a companion to the first. While The Cambridge Companion to Duke Ellington is a comprehensive reference work, Duke Ellington Studies is much narrower in scope, but it presents new perspectives on the standard Ellington literature, performing a complementary role, as intended. For example, there is much focus on Ellington's music and activities from the 1950s and afterward, and one important aspect of the new perspectives comes from critiquing jazz historiography. The other difference is that Howland's discussions of class discourse provide the conceptual framework of the new volume, while aesthetic realism was the organizational idea of the earlier Cambridge publication.

Phil Ford's essay explores Ellington's image-making in his interwar short films, which demonstrated his desire to "give an American audience entertainment without compromising the dignity of the Negro people" (Ellington, interviewed in 1935, quoted on pp. 30–31). Ford characterizes Ellington's image as elegant and dignified: "the emblem of a certain kind of African American glamor" (p. 1). Interestingly, Ford compares Ellington to Barack Obama, calling them both "consummate artists of image" (p. 2) in their ability to move beyond the negative racial representation of African Americans. Describing Obama's image as "an updated form of Ellington's careful self-stylization" (p. 27), Ford further states that "the prophetic images that Ellington manipulated ended up helping to get Obama elected" (p. 31). Among other illustrations, this chapter includes a photograph from the films—one that illustrates a negative stereotype of African Americans (from Black and Tan [1929])—but it would be enlightening to also show a picture of Ellington's dignified mien.

In his essay, Howland discusses the issue of middlebrow cultural rhetoric, which significantly contributed to promoting a culturally elevated representation of Ellington as a "serious" jazz composer. Although his chapter shares common themes with Ford's essay, including the construction of Ellington's public image and his relation to art and entertainment, Howland focuses more on reception history, stating that he is not interested in "debating whether or not Ellington's musical sophistication was middlebrow" (p. 39); he later explains that "the sophisticated, artful music of the Ellington orchestra overall . . . is difficult to nail down as something being directly middlebrow" (p. 74).

The most significant aspect of this chapter is Howland's critique of canonization and jazz historiography. He argues that "Ellington's centrality to Jazz Studies has much to do with his historiographic construct as THE quintessential jazz composer" and traces it back to the late 1920s marketing promotion by Ellington's manager, Irving Mills, which helped to position Ellington as "a pillar of the jazz canon and a 'genius' composer 'beyond category'" (p. 71).

There is room for clarification in this article for a better understanding of the issues. For example, Howland characterizes Ellington's music as "artful entertainment" (p. 75) without elaborating on what constitutes "artful" in terms of specific musical characteristics. He also places Ellington's concert jazz works in the context of symphonic jazz without defining these terms or providing criteria for them.

Walter van de Leur's chapter is a good example of an area that is relatively overlooked in Ellington scholarship: a study of his manuscripts. The title of the chapter, "'People Wrap Their Lunches in Them': Duke Ellington and His Written Music Manuscripts," however, causes some confusion by including both the words "written" and "manuscripts," doubly emphasizing that it refers to written sources. It is perhaps an effort to counter the common notion that jazz is essentially oral music. Although a summary of the basic issues of music notation, including its limitations and ambiguities, is useful, an actual in-depth discussion of Ellington...