Deifying the Duke

"(Over)praising Duke Ellington" by Terry Teachout, in Commentary (Sept. 1996), 165 E. 56th St., New York, N.Y. 10022.

No one questions the greatness of Duke Ellington (1899-1974), but the nature of his greatness is now at the center of a debate that also touches on issues of race and culture in America.

On one side is a small band of critics, including essayist Stanley Crouch, who have challenged the critical consensus on the composer and bandleader. The standard view is that Ellington's post-World War I1 output was much less successful than the music he produced during the late 1930s and early '40s, and that he was not at his best in extended compositions. Crouch argues that Ellington and his orchestra were at their peak in the 1950s and '60s, when he was chiefly occupied with the multimovement suites and Tan Fantasy" (1927) and "The Mooche" critics deemed inferior. (See WQ, Summer (1928). "By the mid-'30s, the Ellington band '96, pp. 134-135.) On the other side are was consistently producing some of the finest those, such as Teachout, Commentary's music in jazz, and from 1940 to 1942, music critic and a former professional jazz Ellington turned out a steady stream of com- musician, who defend the consensus view. positions, among them 'KO-KO,' 'Concerto for He believes that Crouch and his allies are Cootie,' 'Harlem Air Shaft,' and 'Warm Valley' exaggerating Ellington's greatness, in part out (all from 1940), which were justly hailed as of a misguided impulse toward racial mythol- masterpieces," Teachout notes. ogizing and in part out of musical ignorance. By then, however, he argues, Ellington's

Aside from piano lessons for a few months "fertile musical imagination had in certain when he was seven years old, Ellington had no ways outstripped his homemade technique" formal schooling in music, Teachout says. But of orchestration. As his scores became more within a few years of his emergence as a band-complex, he started to use assistants who leader in the 1920s, the full extent of his talent "'extracted' instrumental parts from his became strikingly evident. Composing direct- rough sketches. This practice continued in ly "on" his band, using it as a laboratory in varying degrees throughout Ellington's which he taught himself to orchestrate, life . . . as did his reliance on collaborators, Ellington produced and recorded many scores both acknowledged and anonymous." of remarkable originality, including "Black Billy Strayhorn, with whom Ellington worked closely starting in 1939, had exten- sive formal training in music. Strayhorn got full composing credit for some of the Ellington band's best-known recordings, including "Take the 'A' Train" and "Chelsea Bridge" (both 1941), and collaborated on many other works-"a fact Ellington himself admitted far more readily than did many of his admirers," says Teachout. Crouch, he adds, has given Ellington sole credit for sev- eral joint Ellington-Strayhorn compositions.

"Part of what led Ellington to employ bet- ter-trained musical collaborators," Teachout says, "was his own lack of technical assur- ance-the same thing that led him, in gen- eral, to shun longer forms." Most of Ellington's so-called extended works, the author maintains, "are actually suites whose purported structural unity is more a matter of clever titling (The Perfume Suite, A Drum Is a Woman) than anything else, and which are extremely uneven in musical quality."

While all of Ellington's long pieces "con- tain passages of great beauty and originality, none-with the possible exceptions of Reminiscing in Tempo and The Tattooed Bride-can be said to 'work' structurally," Teachout argues. To refuse to acknowledge Ellington's limitations, he concludes, is only to diminish his true achievements.