Jazz Country: Ralph Ellison in America

2Jazz Icons Ellison on Duke Ellington,Louis Armstrong, and Charlie Parker

Duke Ellington wrote music . . . in all 12 known keys and some keys that are still unknown; wrote music about romantic nights under Paris skies; . . . wrote music to accompany movies, television shows, ballets, broadway shows, and the exercise of horizontal options; wrote music to be played in gymnasiums, street parades, charades, wrote sacred music about the human experience; if it was experienced, he stylized it; in other words, Duke Ellington had a lot on his mind. —Wynton Marsalis, in Beyond Category: The Life and Genius of Duke Ellington, by John Hasse He manifested the rhythmic gait known as “swing,” transformed a polyphonic folk music into a soloist art, established the expressive profundity of blues tonality, demonstrated the durable power of melodic, harmonic improvisation, and infused it with irreverent wit — for to enter the world of Louis Armstrong is, as Constance Rourke wrote of Whitman, “to touch the spirit of American popular comedy.” — Gary Giddins, Visions of Jazz: The First Century American Masters: Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington played special roles in Ellison ’s development. In “Homage To Duke Ellington,” an occasional piece for the Sunday Star to honor Duke Ellington on his seventieth birthday, Ellison writes: “I remember Ellington from my high school days in Oklahoma City, first as a strangely familiar timbre of orchestral sounds issuing from phonograph records and radio. Familiar 2Jazz Icons Ellison on Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Charlie Parker e l l i n g t o n , a r m s t r o n g , a n d p a r k e r ||| 33 because beneath the stylized jungle sounds . . . there sounded the blues, and strange because the mutes, toilet plungers, and derby hats with which I was acquainted as a musician had been given a stylized elegance and extension of effect unheard of even in the music of Louis Armstrong.” Ellison was studying classical music at the time —“harmony and forms of symphonic music”— and concluded: “And while we affirmed the voice of jazz and the blues despite all criticism from our teachers because they spoke to a large extent of what we felt of the life we lived most intimately, it was not until the discovery of Ellington that we had any hint that jazz possessed possibilities of a range of expressiveness comparable to that of classical European music.”1 Ellison recalls his boyhood encounter with the Duke: “Then Ellington and his great orchestra came to town — came with their uniforms, their sophistication, their skills, their golden horns; . . . came with Ivy Anderson and Ethel Waters singing and dazzling the eye with their high-brown beauty and with the richness and the bright feminine flair of their costumes and promising manners. They were news from the great wide world, an example and a goal.”2 In his homage to Duke Ellington, Ellison harshly criticizes the Pulitzer Prize Committee’s advisory board, who, in 1965, rejected a recommendation to give Ellington a special award for his forty years of contributions to American music. In American cultural history, Ellingtonholdsanexaltedplace.ThehistorianE.A.Hobsbawnwrites, “Nobody but the Duke (in a peculiarly anarchically controlled symbiosis with his musicians) has produced music which is both created by the players and fully shaped by the composer. He has been so unique and so far ahead of his time that even jazz musicians sometimes fail to appreciate his originality, surprised to find some revolutionary device of modern jazz anticipated in the early 1930s.”3 Hobsbawn’s assessment of Ellington’s talent and influence is right on target. But his assessment benignly ignores the influence of Louis Armstrong on the development of jazz in general and Ellington’s orchestra in particular. Bothmusicalgeniuses,EllingtonandArmstrongwerefromwholly different backgrounds. Ellington was born in Washington, D.C., in 1899. His mother, Daisy Kennedy, was herself a native of Washington , and, unlike Ellington’s father, a high-school graduate. His father , James Edward Ellington, a native of North Carolina, was resourceful and hardworking. He held a series of jobs and, Ellison has noted, sometimes served as a butler at the White House.4 Ellington led a comfortable middle-class life. In his biography of Ellington , John Hasse reports: “According to Rex Stewart, who later played cornet with the Duke Ellington orchestra, people who lived in Northwest [Ellington’s Washington neighborhood] were the lightercomplexioned people with better-type jobs, such as school teachers, postmen, clerks or in government...