How Sweet It Is, As Duke Honoured At Last

Sydney Morning Herald

Wednesday April 14, 1999

John Clare

As the centenary of Duke Ellington's birth approaches, the qualifications for the music category in the Pulitzer Prize have been broadened in his honour. A special citation is his, posthumously. John Clare profiles one of this century's oddest, grandest "dukes".

The Duke of Ellington (born Duke Edward Kennedy Ellington) was a royalist, of course, and never lost the opportunity to extend gallantries to Queen Elizabeth. In 1959, he agreed to bring his peerless orchestra to play at an arts festival in England, only because he had been assured that the Queen would be there. When she asked how long it had been since his last visit, he replied, "1933, Your Majesty; years before you were born."

The Queen smilingly demurred, and it was noted that she spoke with the Duke longer than with any of the other distinguished composers and performers. Ellington was so overwhelmed that he took his orchestra into the studios back in New York and recorded The Queen's Suite. Of this, he had one vinyl copy made from the master tapes, and it was delivered to Buckingham Palace. Nothing would induce him to play it in public or have any other copies made in his lifetime. It wasn't until 1990 - 16 years after Ellington's death - that it appeared on CD, along with two other brief but quite fascinating suites recorded in 1970 and 1972.

Who knows whether the Queen ever listened to it more than once, or if she wore it out and drove the corgis mad? It is astonishingly beautiful music (as beautiful in its own way as a Pulitzer Prize). The titles of the six little pieces hint at Ellington's vivid sense of the sonic and the visual (he had once considered a career in painting): Sunset And The Mocking Bird, Lightning Bugs And Frogs, Northern Lights, and so on. Northern Lights is perhaps the most beautiful and ingenious of the pieces. He did not write it. The story of its composition sheds further light on one of this century's oddest and grandest "dukes".

Ellington had been driving in Canada with his baritone saxophonist Harry Carney (who had been with the Duke from the age of 16) when the Northern Lights began their display. Here is Ellington's description: "It seemed to us as though we were two short men standing behind two tall men at a magnified Radio City while a stage production was on. We could not see the players, only shadows and reflections of performers passing back and forth before a brilliantly lit backdrop . . . It was the greatest stage production I had ever seen, and it went on and on until I had occasion to get out of the car . . . I looked up, and straight up over my head the same thing was going on. It was eerie, and rather terrifying. Billy Strayhorn did not see this, but he wrote the music after I told him about it."

Ellington's genius as a composer and arranger for small ensembles was well established before Billy Strayhorn joined him in 1939 as his composing and arranging partner and sometime lyricist, and in any case his original and highly inventive piano style would have put him in the pantheon of greats even if he had not written a note. Nevertheless, the telepathic bond between the two was so strong that they often could not tell who had written what. Therefore, the Pulitzer Prize belongs in part to the small, shy, very black, classically trained and gay Strayhorn, who was known by band members as Sweet Pea, after the baby in the Popeye comic strip, because of his sweet nature.

In fact, the large, suave, ivory-coloured ladies' man and self-taught composer who led the band drew from everything around him - the rhythms of trains and buses as the band crisscrossed America (Ellington would often fall asleep with pages of slithering manuscript spread about him on the floor while the train rocked on into the night), the sounds in a Harlem Airshaft (the title of one of his 1930s masterpieces) and, on several occasions, phrases he pinched from his great musicians as they improvised (these became starting points or motifs in more elaborate compositions). Indeed, the ghosts of all the great Ellingtonians should be taking a bow.

It could not have happened without Ellington's unique and absolutely central genius, just as the Beatles could not have happened without Lennon and McCartney, but this was in many ways a rich collaborative method of composition. The lead and ensemble voicings sound the way they do because Ellington was writing for the timbral and expressive qualities of specific musicians, some of whom had been with him since the earliest days. Miles Davis told me that he thought that this was both his strength and his limitation. Davis's great collaborator Gil Evans wrote for somewhat more neutral forces of great jazz/session musicians. Combined with his much greater knowledge of classical forms, this, in theory, made him more flexible. Yet those who knew Evans said that in his last years, he listened to nothing but Ellington and his friend Miles Davis.

Ellington played certain old favourites again and again. In his own words, this subsidised his new compositions, but the old warhorses also underwent a constant process of transformation, sometimes subtle, sometimes quite radical. Not only did new generations of musicians (always with that core of old-timers) improvise on them, but they were constantly being re-composed. To complicate things, Ellington directed his soloists to retain elements of previous improvisations because the people expected to hear them (they were now part of the composition).

All the great orchestras have an organic feeling. I am fortunate enough to have heard Klemperer conducting the LSO in a great period, among many other wonders, but the Ellington orchestra was really something else. A raised finger or a Ducal nod were enough to call up the miracle. The air would abruptly fill with swirling energy, and overtones that were barely audible on the recordings would shift spectrally. When teenager Charles Mingus heard the orchestra in Harlem, he screamed and had to be restrained from leaping off the balcony.

Ellington's compositions may number as many as 6,000. A set of some 26 discs is being issued this month, covering his period with RCA alone. Recordings for CBS of the complete 1956 Newport Festival performance will also be issued. For five nights in the Avery Fisher Hall in New York this week, the New York Philharmonic will play Edvard Grieg's Peer Gynt Suite in juxtaposition with the Ellington version of the same, played by the Lincoln Centre Jazz Orchestra led by Wynton Marsalis. Why Ellington should have done his own version of Grieg is another puzzle, but the effect, according to reports, is quite spectacular.

The program also includes arrangements by Marsalis, for jazz orchestra and symphonic forces, of such Ellington masterpieces as A Tone Parallel To Harlem and Happy Go Lucky Local. Repeat performances involving the Boston, London, Amsterdam and Moscow symphonies will occur in the respective cities. And, of course, The Queen's Suite and Far East Suite are still available at specialist shops, such as Sydney's Birdland.

The Pulitzer Prize Board has bestowed two awards on publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux - in fiction for The Hours, a novel by Michael Cunningham, and in non-fiction for Annals of the Former World, by John McPhee.

The prize for drama was given to Wit, an off-Broadway play about a woman battling cancer by Margaret Edson.

The prize for poetry went to Blizzard of One, written by Mark Strand (Alfred A. Knopf), and the prize for music went to Melinda Wagner's Concerto for Flute, Strings and Percussion.

The history prize was awarded to Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, by Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace (Oxford University Press).

The biography award went to Lindbergh, by A. Scott Berg (G. P. Putnam's Sons).