The Ellington Effect

Last week saw the launch of a Kickstarter Project for The Ellington Effect: a proposed series of five books covering the music of Duke Ellington's music over the course of his career by David Berger, an acknowledged expert on Maestro's work.

David writes...

I'm excited to announce the official launch of my project to write a new, 5-part book series, The Ellington Effect, that analyzes in depth the music of the great Duke Ellington.  As you may know, in the course of my career I have spent a considerable amount of time studying and transcribing the music of the masters, no small part of which has been Duke's.  This project is a culmination of much of that study, and will go deeper than any other publication ever has into everything that is happening in this complex panoply of beauty that is Duke's body of work.

Please check out the Kickstarter page that has all the information about the plans for the book series and what we have to do to make it happen.  It's a momentous project for me personally, but also an exceptionally important resource for the world to have.

Thanks for your support!

The Project

“Duke Ellington’s music, more than anyone else’s, expresses what it feels like to be an American.” – Albert Murray

Academia celebrates the great composers: Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, and so on—all Europeans who created music out of their unique cultural backgrounds. But as a country, Americans have failed to recognize the importance of our own music beyond the popular arena.

In jazz, Americans have had a number of brilliant composers—Jelly Roll Morton, Horace Silver, Benny Golson and Charles Mingus, to name a few—but none can compare to Duke Ellington, whose work created and codified the language, leading the way for every jazz musician who followed. Duke’s 50-year career spanned several eras and styles, with music that remains both innovative and grounded in tradition.

So, why has Ellington not been given the same level of respect as Europe’s geniuses? Could it be national or racial prejudice? Not enough time for perspective? The collaborative nature of his music? His stature as a pop and cultural icon? Yes, but there’s also something accorded most great composers that Ellington has gotten very little of —serious, published scholarship. A few books discuss his music. Some include analysis, but there has yet to be a book that examines his full scores in depth, getting beneath the surface techniques and exploring what makes this music at once uniquely personal, American—and universal.

We are creating a set of five volumes, each dealing with one era of Ellington’s work:

• Flaming Youth: 1924-1930
• The Age of Invention: 1931-1939
• Lightning in a Bottle: 1940-1943
• Extended Abstraction: 1944-1956
• Citizen of the World: 1957-1974

Each volume will include analyses of 8-10 scores. The books will be available in both print and kindle formats.

The Background

Duke Ellington's music has set the standard for which I have aspired to in my own composition, arranging, and band leading for the past fifty years.  It inspires me, and listening to it brings me unending joy.  I love sharing this with other musicians and non-musicians alike.

I've been transcribing and studying Duke Ellington's music for the past fifty years.  I taught a 2-semester graduate course at the Manhattan School of Music on Ellington's oeuvre.  We used my scores and recordings for analysis.  I contributed two chapters to The Cambridge Companion to Duke Ellington.  One chapter, "The Land of Suites," covered his extended works, and the other was entitled "In the Process of Becoming," which told the stories of how a few of his pieces developed after the initial writing of the score.  In 2014 I published Creative Jazz Composing and Arranging Volume 1, in which I analyzed four of my own compositions in great detail.  This gave me the idea to write a similar book analyzing Ellington's scores.  But, I didn't want to limit it to just a few scores since Ellington has such a large catalog of compositions (about 1500) written over a 50-year span.  This led me to the idea of doing a series of five volumes, each one focusing on the music of a decade or so.  With recent changes in the copyright law, every year new titles enter the public domain, therefore eliminating any barriers that pertain to copyright permission.  Lastly, at the time of writing this I am 70 years old and would like to pass on what I have learned to future generations while I am still able to.

I haven't started writing the analyses yet, although I have written little pieces of analyses for performance notes and program notes over the years.  But one major step I have already completed for this project is nearly 500 transcriptions of complete Ellington scores, upon which the analyses will be based.  Many of these have been published, and for those that haven't, I'm in the process of putting my pencil scores into notation software so that they are publishing-ready. 

Timeline

Completion of this Kickstarter campaign successfully will allow me to dive into the writing of volume one immediately.

I estimate it will take me several years to write each volume.  There will be editing and production work after that.

• April 29, 2020: Duke Ellington's birthday--the campaign ends
• May 2020: I begin writing
• May 2022: Finish draft
• April 2023: Editing and proofing finished
• January 2024: Design and layout finished
• November 1, 2024: Prerelease copies sent to reviewers and reward recipients
• December 15, 2024: Book launch

Budget

This fundraising campaign is a matching funds situation.  A donor has offered to put 50,000 euros (~$55,000 USD) toward this project if we are able to raise 25,000 euros (~$27,500 USD) ourselves, to prove there is enough interest.  Funds raised beyond the budget required to produce volume 1 will go toward creating subsequent volumes in the series.

Format

Volume 1 begins with a list of 23 techniques that remain constant in Ellington's music from 1924 to 1974.  Each technique will be discussed in the context of each piece.  In addition to these 23 features, I'll also be discussing motivic development, balance of elements, the use of opposites, and many other compositional techniques and considerations.

To make a food analogy, it's as if these 23 techniques are ingredients a chef might use. Many chefs utilize some or all of these ingredients, but only a master chef has the imagination and courage to constantly create innovative, thoroughly satisfying dishes that simultaneously honor the culture and build on its traditions.

Each chapter will be dedicated to an analysis of a single composition.  Pieces included in Volume 1:

• Choo Choo
• East St. Louis Toodle-oo
• Birmingham Breakdown
• Black And Tan Fantasy
• Black Beauty
• The Mooche
• Awful Sad
• Ring Dem Bells
• Old Man Blues
• Mood Indigo

About the Author

Jazz composer, arranger, and conductor, David Berger, is recognized internationally as a leading authority on the music of Duke Ellington and the Swing Era. Conductor and arranger for the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra from its inception in 1988 through 1994, Berger has transcribed over 750 full scores of classic recordings, including more than 500 works by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn in addition to hundreds of other classic jazz recordings.

In 1996 Berger collaborated with choreographer Donald Byrd to create and tour Harlem Nutcracker, a full-length two-hour dance piece that expands the Tchaikovsky/ Ellington/Strayhorn score into an American classic. The 15-piece band assembled to play this show has stayed together as the David Berger Jazz Orchestra. The DBJO actively performs Berger’s music on tours throughout the United States and Europe.

Berger has written music for numerous jazz groups of all sizes, symphony orchestras, singers, dancers, television, Broadway shows and films and has served as conductor and musical director for dance companies, TV and stage shows.

Following a career as a trumpet player, Berger served as adjunct professor at a number of jazz studies programs in the New York metropolitan area including The Juilliard School, Manhattan School of Music, The New School, and William Paterson University. He has written dozens of etude books for Charles Colin, as well as jazz composing and arranging books for his own publishing company, Such Sweet Thunder.

Risks and challenges.

Writing the book, while it is a massive undertaking that will most definitely require several years to complete, is the most straightforward part of this process. I have a strong sense for how the writing will proceed, as I have published four books already with my own publishing company, and I also recently completed a book for another publisher that will be released this year. I have been researching Duke Ellington's music for the entirety of my 50-plus-year career, so the research is not a limiting factor. Two of my already published books serve as direct models for the format of the new Ellington book series, so the path forward is extremely clear. I also have three other books currently in process, the first two of which are 90% complete. The third is in an early stage. These are much smaller projects than this Ellington book series, but finishing these secondary projects will affect the time I can devote to the Ellington Effect project to a certain extent. The biggest challenge in this project is the fundraising portion. As an author and musician, this comes least naturally to me, and luckily I have some support from friends and collaborators. But reaching this goal is the only way to unlock the matching funding from a donor, so the biggest risk is that we will not reach the goal amount that unlocks the matching funds. Another challenge involved in this project is pitching the book to large academic publishers, including several university presses. In the event that I can't get a major publisher for the project, I'm prepared to self-publish as I have done with my previous books.