The Seven Ages of Duke

The Seven Ages of Duke

Here’s a handy cut-out and keep guide to the various stages of Duke’s career. With apologies to W. Shakespeare Esq….

The Standards

Duke Ellington and His Famous Orchestra came roaring out of the 1920s. A self-proclaimed 'primitive' artist, Ellington said that he made use of those materials nearest to hand. In Duke's case this was the talents of the musicians. Trumpeter Bubber Miley was the 'big bang' of the Ellington universe and Ellington's relationship with Miley formed Duke's approach - composer and catalyst, creating during  this period those songs most associated with Ellington’s name such as  Mood Indigo, Sophisticated Lady, In A Sentimental Mood, etc. 

The Blue Period

Mid- to late-30s may well have been the period of Ellington’s music which drew Billy Strayhorn, in particular, towards the flame. British composer Constant Lambert drew a direct line between the music of Ellington and that of Delius in particular – but also Ravel and Debussy. It was that Impressionist aspect of Ellington’s music the classically-trained Strayhorn took up and ran with so brilliantly in the forties and fifties.

The Swing Era

Talking of Billy Strayhorn, he was a good friend and mentor to Bill Finegan (his mother, also, called him Bill), chief arranger for Glenn Miller. In that fastidious reed sound, the quotation from other musical sources, the complexity of the arrangements, you can hear Strayhorn’s tutelage. Anyway, the period of Miller’s great commercial success coincided perfectly with the the era of what many consider to be the greatest incarnation of Ellington’s band, the Blanton-Webster band named for revolutionary bassist Jimmie Blanton and tenor saxophonist Ben Webster. Jack the Bear, Ko Ko, Sepia Panorama and Strayhorn’s Take The ‘A’ Train all date from this period when ‘jazz’ and popular taste coincided to incendiary effect. They say that the Swing Era was ten years behind Ellington but Duke, ever the chameleon, reflected these developments in his own music.

The Suites

Beginning with Black, Brown and Beige in 1943, a ‘tone parallel’ as Ellington called it to the history of the black American, the mid-to late forties saw a whole series of longer form pieces – The Perfume Suite, The Deep South Suite, New World A-Comin', The Symphomaniac, The Tattooed Bride as Ellington and Strayhorn stretched their wings.

Water water everywhere, nor any drop...

They were hard times for the big bands as the flame of the Swing Era guttered and all but burnt out in the early fifties. Ellington lost key men – Billy Strayhorn and Johnny Hodges for a while – Tricky Sam Nanton, the plunger trombonist and Ellington’s drumming man from the beginning, Sonny Greer. The replacements – Louie Bellson, Willie Smith were brilliant technicians but I don’t think had the soul of the originals. If Ellington’s band ever had a tendency to sound like all the other big bands, then this was the period that happened, yoked to an unsatisfactory contract with Capitol Records. The sound of their Melrose Studios was superb but high fidelity recreations of former glories was not how Ellington rolled. The low point must have been playing for the swimmers at Billy Rose’s Aquacade.

The Renaissance

Hodges and Strayhorn returned. Tenor saxophonist Paul Gonsalves’s barnstorming twenty-seven choruses at Newport 1956 saw the Ellington band renew itself in the public consciousness. Classic albums – the Shakespearean suite Such Sweet Thunder, Anatomy of a Murder et al – followed. Ellington was back and roaring across all six continents.

The Dissolution

Even Ellington could not defy gravity forever. Billy Strayhorn was lost to cancer in 1967, Johnny Hodges died in 1970. The old man kept going but the road was taking its toll. Don’t think that even as the band began to break up there weren’t more than moments of brilliance and beauty, however – The New Orleans Suite, The Latin American Suite. Ellington was performing, making, writing music to the last which came on 24, May, 1974.  His extended work The River is prophetic, however. Musicians have continued to return to the source and Ellington's music in all its protean glory continues to renew and refresh itself, ever finding new audiences.