A Duke Among Men

Illawarra Mercury

Saturday July 3, 1999

with DENNIS KOKS

``Boy, you're never going to amount to anything as long as you live." Well, his high school physical education teacher may have been right, to some extent.

Despite a rich and rewarding life, Edward Kennedy Ellington was only honoured with a posthumous citation from the Pulitzer Board this year - to coincide with the centennial of his birth.

Last year the qualifications for the music category were broadened to include jazz and under the new guidelines Ellington, who died in 1974, would have won the Pulitzer for his Far Eastern Suite.

Duke Ellington's childhood was a happy one. He was born on April 28, 1899, in Washington, DC. Elementary piano lessons introduced him to music, at the age of seven or eight, but at the time he preferred baseball. At high school he developed an interest in art, showing a flair for drawing and design. He won a poster competition for the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People which led to him being offered a scholarship to the esteemed Pratt Institute of Applied Arts in Brooklyn.

Despite his success in the visual arts, Duke retained an interest in music with a particular interest in ragtime piano. While on vacation with his mother in Philadelphia he heard a pianist named Harvey Brooks. This was a turning-point. He later recounted: ``When I got home I had a real yearning to play. I hadn't been able to get off the ground before, but after hearing Harvey I said to myself, `Man, you're going to have to do it'."

The year 1917 was a watershed. He formed his first band, The Duke's Serenaders and a move to New York, where he made his first recording, really fired his career.

Ellington's influence on music is pervasive. He never stopped exploring new dimensions, in the process writing possibly 6000 songs.

What made his band unique was that Ellington often wrote music specifically for his musicians ... underlining their individual strengths and originality.

Ellington had a long residency at the famed Cotton Club. Paul Whiteman and his arranger visited the club nightly for over a week, finally admitting they could not steal even two bars of the amazing music.