In light of ongoing racial injustice and the Black Lives Matter movement, universities have been pressured to better represent a more diverse music, to include more Black composers. But too often they’re only picking composers who write in the European tradition. Duke Ellington never seems to come up and yet he’s the most important American composer—not just as an African-American; he outdoes everyone.
There are so many memorable Ellington songs, like “Sophisticated Lady,” “Satin Doll,” “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” “In a Sentimental Mood,” and “Do Nuthin’ Till You Hear From Me.” His biographers count more than a thousand songs that he wrote or collaborated on. I counted nine Grammy Awards between 1959 and 1979.
Most of those songs were written to pay the bills, to keep his orchestra together so he could write and perform more artful, elaborate creations—detailed, complicated pieces of music: operas, ballets, concertos. He’d take a melody from one of those and make a song out of it that Irving Mills or someone else would write lyrics to, and they’d publish it and get someone to sing it and often it would be a hit and he’d make the money he used to keep paying the band—which he did for five decades. “Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me” is one of those tunes. It was originally titled “Concerto for Cootie” featuring trumpeter Cootie Williams. “Night Train” was originally “Happy Go Lucky Local,” part of a suite of pieces he wrote depicting trains around America, which is not what you think of when you think of that cute little pop song.
Ellington recorded more than 2,000 pieces of music. Some of them were 15 to 20 minute suites. His discography is hundreds of pages and covers everything from film scores to string quartets to secular music and religious music. There were partnerships with people like Mahalia Jackson and Louis Armstrong—and of course, Billy Strayhorn—and suites portraying music of other countries, and toward the end in the early ‘70s—he died in 1974—he was using rock ‘n roll beats and rhythms and filtering them through his African-American experience.
Ellington was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1965 unanimously by the three-member Pulitzer panel, but the governing board refused to give it to him because he was a Black jazz musician. The three members protested and quit; still the Prize was awarded to someone else. Ellington was nearing 70 at that point and when they interviewed him about it he said, “I know what’s happening. Fate doesn’t want me to be famous at such a young age.” He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize posthumously in 1999.
For more on the Duke, listen to our Music Life and Times podcast, episode 5 at https://musiclifeandtimes.podbean.com/