One hundred years ago today, Duke Ellington was born in Washington D.C., and if every city or town where he and his band performed during his lifetime were to commemorate him by hearing a song f his again, the earth would resonate with music. It should not be possible, today of all days, to walk down Broadway or look out over the rooftops of Harlem without hearing in the streets the sound of an Ellington composition. But even if you have to listen in your own mind, you will hear, if you listen closely, the echo of a pulse he memorialized again and again in music.
Ellington was partial to giving brief verbal accounts of the moods his songs captured. Reading those accounts is like looking deep into the background of an old photo of New York and noticing the lost and almost unaccountable details that gave the city its character during Ellington's heyday, which began in 1927 when his band made the Cotton Club its home. ''The memory of things gone,'' Ellington once said, ''is important to a jazz musician,'' and the stories he sometimes told about his songs are the record of those things gone. But what is gone returns, its pulse kicking, when Ellington's music plays, and never mind what past it is, for the music itself still carries us forward.
Ellington's body of work is enormous, and enormously influential. For many years he was so prolific that you cannot help wondering whether he got down even a fraction of what he heard in his head. If you judge his ambition by the contours of his recorded music, then he was a vastly ambitious man, always probing outward, across genres, from the last musical outpost he inhabited, without ever abandoning the blues, which he helped transform. His personal stature was stately, almost diplomatic in later years, and there was a curious irony in the way he would introduce, with a precise, unlocalized diction, a song that he and his band would use to scorch the room. This is a good day to remember the uprising in the heart that a big band could cause, and especially the big band led by Duke Ellington.
WORK CITED: "Duke Ellington's Centennial." New York Times [New York, New York] 29 Apr. 1999. Print.
Ellington was partial to giving brief verbal accounts of the moods his songs captured. Reading those accounts is like looking deep into the background of an old photo of New York and noticing the lost and almost unaccountable details that gave the city its character during Ellington's heyday, which began in 1927 when his band made the Cotton Club its home. ''The memory of things gone,'' Ellington once said, ''is important to a jazz musician,'' and the stories he sometimes told about his songs are the record of those things gone. But what is gone returns, its pulse kicking, when Ellington's music plays, and never mind what past it is, for the music itself still carries us forward.
Ellington's body of work is enormous, and enormously influential. For many years he was so prolific that you cannot help wondering whether he got down even a fraction of what he heard in his head. If you judge his ambition by the contours of his recorded music, then he was a vastly ambitious man, always probing outward, across genres, from the last musical outpost he inhabited, without ever abandoning the blues, which he helped transform. His personal stature was stately, almost diplomatic in later years, and there was a curious irony in the way he would introduce, with a precise, unlocalized diction, a song that he and his band would use to scorch the room. This is a good day to remember the uprising in the heart that a big band could cause, and especially the big band led by Duke Ellington.
WORK CITED: "Duke Ellington's Centennial." New York Times [New York, New York] 29 Apr. 1999. Print.
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