Duke Ellington - jazz genius

By Graham Reid

Elsewhere


Few statements about music can be delivered unequivocally but here's one: Edward Kennedy Ellington was one of the greatest composers of last century.

And no discussion need be entered into. Other than to observe he didn't "compose" in the traditional sense: most of his best-known songs were written with collaborators, his instrument was an orchestra, and his gift was as part of a collective. His genius was more akin to that of a movie director than a painter.

Given that, Duke Ellington (1899-1974), aka the Duke, could only have found his expression in jazz.

Writer and critic Leonard Feather used to argue jazz was the classical music of the 20th century because in it you could hear the diversity and dissonance of a century of turmoil, and something of the human condition.

Last year was the centenary of Ellington's birth, but while classical critics were hailing anniversaries of the Finnish composer Alka Seltzer, or the Italian Strepto Cocci, Ellington's genius went right past most because they consigned him to "jazz." Big mistake.

Ellington was of jazz, but bigger than it. He wrote elaborate suites which reached thematically from the Middle East to Latin America; complex music for orchestra; liturgical music; blues and pop standards.

Not all were successful - there's a strong argument his forte was the four-minute miniature, and the extended works don't hold up - but it's impossible to imagine a world without Sophisticated Lady, It Don't Mean A Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing, Black and Tan Fantasy and dozens of others. Even if he didn't "write" them, they are Duke's.

James Lincoln Collier's 1987 biography outlined the argument against acceptance of Ellington into the pantheon of great composers: he relied heavily on Billy Strayhorn for arrangements and musical advice; he was a good but not brilliant pianist; lacked musical knowledge and the self-discipline to acquire it; and, because he wrote at rehearsals and took ideas from the musicians as they improvised around his often-unformed ideas, one observed, "I don't consider you a composer. You are a compiler."

But it was precisely because of the jazz milieu, that collective art, that he could find his expression. He wrote for specific musicians and their tone, intuitively knew how to place tonal colour in harmony or counterpoint, and managed to find (although Collier and others say more by accident than astuteness) those who could embellish, improvise on and give character to what he wrote.

While we may have been first to see the light this century, we're behind in celebrating Ellington's centenary. But he should be on our minds in the coming weeks.

Wynton Marsalis - another you wouldn't dismiss as only a jazz musician - will be at the Aotea Centre presenting a programme of Ellington's work with the jazz orchestra from New York's Lincoln Center.

But it's a measure of the flexibility of Ellington's music that New Orleans gris-gris and voodoo-pop man Dr John has an Ellington album out.

Duke Elegant finds the good doctor in excellent form, reconfiguring a dozen Duke tunes into distinctive, funky-butt, Nawlins grooves.

With a tight trio of bass, drums and guitar, and guests Ronnie Cuber (sax) and Cyro Baptista (percussion), he takes his piano and singing B3 organ through gumbo-fied treatments of I'm Gonna Go Fishin', Perdido, Don't Get Around Much Anymore, Solitude, Satin Doll and others, all of which prove, you could argue, that it ain't up to much if it don't funk ya up.

Duke's work can, and has been, orchestrated and jazz-rocked, soul-funked and distilled to its essence for solo guitar. It is a template and finished tapestry.

Narrow minds unthinkingly impose a hierarchy on the arts. You know the kind of thing: opera at the top, jazz around the lower-middle regions behind string quartets, and rock music - with the honourable exception of the Beatles - at the primordial depths.

Ellington gives the lie to such nonsense. He was, simply, a great American composer who worked in a serious, cooperative art.

You can analyse his music, re-interpret it or simply whistle it. More than a quarter of a century after his death, people still are.

As Dr John says in the liner notes to Duke Elegant: "You want to know the ticket to immortality, write a bunch of tunes that people keep on singin' and playin'."

Duke did.

* Dr John's Duke Elegant (EMI) is available now.

* Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra play the Aotea Centre, Saturday March 4.