1. Edward Kennedy Ellington, Music Is My Mistress (Garden City, N.Y., 1973), x. Mercer Ellington with Stanley Dance, Duke Ellington in Person: An Intimate Memoir (Boston, 1978), 171-72, describes the commissioning and writing of Music Is My Mistress . Mercer notes that Stanley Dance, Ellington's collaborator, had expected that it would be done with a tape recorder, following the same method they had used for articles, so he was surprised to find that Pop intended to write it himself. The manuscript that eventually materialized was undoubtedly unique. It was written on hotel stationery, table napkins, and menus from all over the world. Stanley became so familiar with the handwriting that he could often decipher it when Pop could not. That is the meaning of the minuscule credit at the beginning of the book, which they mutually agreed upon.

In the credit—part of the "Acknowledgements" printed on the verso of the title page—Ellington hails Dance as "Monarch Miracolissimo for extrasensory perception revealed in his amazing ability to decipher my handwriting." Mark Tucker, Ellington: The Early Years (Urbana, Ill., 1991), 310, reports about Music Is My Mistress that "large sections of the manuscript . . . written in longhand on hotel stationery from around the world—are now in the Smithsonian's Duke Ellington Collection." Tucker finds the work "invaluable for providing Ellington's own view of his career and development—often filtered through layers of protective coating, diplomatic tact, and historical self-consciousness." And he considers it ''especially rich in information about the early years." James Lincoln Collier, Duke Ellington (New York, 1987), in an opinion that suggests a less-than-careful reading, treats the autobiography as evidence "that Duke Ellington was a dreadful writer. . .. There is nothing in the interviews he gave," Collier contends, nor "in his book Music Is My Mistress . . . to suggest that Ellington was in any way the wise and ultimately sophisticated man he actually was" (295).

2. Ellington, Music , 468.

3. In "Homage to Duke Ellington on His Birthday," written for the Washington Sunday Star , 27 April 1969, Ralph Ellison highlights the "aura of mockery" surrounding Ellington and his persona, hinting also at its complexity.

Mockery speaks through his work and through his bearing. . .. He is one of the most handsome of men, and to many his stage manners are so suave and gracious as to appear a put-on—which quite often they are. And his manner, like his work, serves to remind us of the inadequacies of our myths, our legends, our conduct, and our standards. . .. For many years he has been telling us how marvelous, mad, violent, hopeful, nostalgic, and (perhaps) decent we are. He is one of the musical fathers of our country, and throughout all these years he has, as he tells us so mockingly, loved us madly. (See Ralph Ellison, Going to the Territory [New York, 1986], 225-26)

4. Tucker, Ellington , 24. Ellington dedicated his autobiography: "To my mother and father, Daisy Kennedy Ellington and James Edward Ellington."

5. In writing about musical associates, Ellington, who attributed much of his own success to his upbringing, lost few chances to praise the families in which these men were raised. Of Otto Hardwick he wrote: "His father and mother were wonderful people . . . Toby's background was solid and he never felt insecure, a wonderful feeling for any human being" (Ellington, Music , 50-51). Sonny Greer grew up "in a fine home, . . . wonderfully warm" (51). Jenny Carney, Harry's mother, was ''a lovely lady, and a good cook known for her warm hospitality" (111). The family of Ray Nance, who lived in Chicago, were "wonderful" and "hospitable" (162). As for Paul Gonsalves, Ellington says that he came "from a beautiful family in New Bedford, Rhode Island. His mother is beautiful, his sisters and brothers are beautiful, and all of his children are beautiful" (221).

6. Ellington, Music , 457.

7. Rex Stewart, who played with Ellington from 1934 to 1945, wrote in his autobiographical Boy Meets Horn , edited by Claire P. Gordon (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1991):

Ellington is the most complex and paradoxical individual that I've ever known. He is completely unpredictable, a combination of Sir Galahad, Scrooge, Don Quixote and God knows what other saints and sinners that were apt to pop out of his ever-changing personality. The above are the facets which he permits to be observed. Deep down under this facade there is the devout man, the one who reads his Bible every day and the caring family man who never forgets for a minute the ones he loves. And, at the same time, rarely did he forget or forgive anything. I could go on and on trying to describe this indescribable man. (156)

Stanley Dance, who delivered the eulogy at Ellington's funeral, noted on that occasion what a "complex human being" Ellington was, at once sophisticated, primitive, humorous, tolerant, positive, ironic, childlike (not childish), lionlike, shepherdlike, Christian. . .. I certainly would never pretend that I wholly knew this wonderful man, although I spent much time in his company and enjoyed his trust. . .. His various associates and friends knew different aspects of him, but never, as they readily admit, the whole man. (Quoted in Mercer Ellington, Duke Ellington , 217)

Mercer Ellington's book devotes most of Chap. 6 to a discussion of Ellington's character traits, which, he said, included taking "pleasure in manipulating people" (149), watching his health (149-52), being a spokesman for black Americans (152-53), being superstitious (153-54), having a tendency toward paranoia (157-59), remaining alert to the musical opinions of the younger generation (160-61), having bouts of despondency (164), being a good businessman who didn't want to be bothered with business details (162-68), maintaining dominance by knowing the weaknesses of those who worked with him, and being sparing in compliments to his men ("after fifty years of dealing with musicians his theory was that to praise them was to raise the price," 168).

8. Gunther Schuller, The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz, 1930-1945 (New York, 1989), 48, 157.

9. Tucker, Ellington , 259-72, is an appendix listing chronologically the "Compositions and Recordings of Duke Ellington, 1914-November 1927." According to Tucker, Ellington's output as a composer before 1923 consists of just two piano pieces and a song from the years 1914-17. A song called "Blind Man's Buff," for which Ellington wrote the music, was copyrighted in 1923 but never published. Ellington's first published song, "Choo Choo (I Gotta Hurry Home)," was issued by the Broadway Music Corp. on 5 September 1924, more than four months after his twenty-fifth birthday.

10. Edmund Anderson, a friend of Ellington's, recalled in an interview that later in life he had once suggested that the composer go to Juilliard and study theory formally. According to Anderson, Ellington replied: "Edmund, if I were to do that I think I'd lose everything else that I have. I would ruin everything" (Collier, Duke Ellington , 21-22). Ellington's early teacher was Henry Grant. See Tucker, Ellington , 59, 61-62.

11. Ken Rattenbury, Duke Ellington: Jazz Composer (London, 1990), 306-7, an appendix of "Ellington's Copyrighted Works," provides some statistics. He attributes 769 compositions to Ellington "as sole composer," 191 to Ellington "in collaboration with musicians in his employ," and 52 to Ellington "in collaboration with others," for a total of 1,012 works. In the second category, Ellingtonians who contributed 5 or more works are Barney Bigard (10), Johnny Hodges (23), Bubber Miley (5), Rex Stewart (8), Billy Strayhorn (102), Juan Tizol (8), and Cootie Williams (9). In a highly critical review of Rattenbury's book, Andrew Homzy questions the total of 1,012.

My rough count, from a nineteen-page ASCAP listing, yields 1,119 individual pieces. (This includes the few arrangements of public domain material, e.g., The Nutcracker Suite , that are more on the level of re-compositions or perhaps sets of very sophisticated variations. Still, many of these have fallen through the cracks because of sloppy business practices and the failure to register some pieces by Ellington's three major publishers. Nor is Ellington's last work, incidentally, the opera Queenie Pie , considered in either count.) (Andrew Homzy, Review of Duke Ellington: Jazz Composer by Ken Rattenbury, Notes 48 (1992): 1,241)

12. Paraphrased from Stewart in Derek Jewell, Duke: A Portrait of Duke Ellington (New York, 1977), 102; quoted from Rattenbury, Duke Ellington , 23.

13. Rex Stewart, Jazz Masters of the Thirties (New York, 1972), 97-98. A paper Mark Tucker delivered at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society in 1989 (Austin, Texas), challenged the view that Ellington composed only in the way described here. By the late 1930s, if not before, Ellington was also writing out some pieces in much greater detail, including even suggestions for "improvised" solos. (Gunther Schuller confirmed Tucker's point in a talk at the Smithsonian Institution on 27 April 1990.) Tucker found evidence for this side of Ellington's composing in the Smithsonian's Duke Ellington Collection. Of that collection, he notes: "After years of inaccessibility, Ellington's personal library of music and memorabilia was acquired by the Smithsonian in 1988. This collection will form the cornerstone for much future Ellington research, containing as it does an extraordinary cache of Ellington original scores, orchestral parts, and sketches." He adds that "after spending two months in the summer of 1988 surveying the collection, I found little relating directly to Ellington's life and music before 1930" (Tucker, Ellington , 312).

14. Ellington used the phrase in Music . See, e.g., page 54, where he writes of Arthur Whetsol: "As a trumpet player, he had a tonal personality that has never really been duplicated. Sweet, but not syrupy, nor schmaltzy, nor surrealistic, it had a superiority of extrasensory dimensions." And in a eulogy written the night Johnny Hodges died, Ellington said: "Johnny Hodges and his unique tonal personality have gone to join the ever so few inimitables—those whose sounds stand unimitated, to say the least—Art Tatum, Sidney Bechet, Django Reinhardt, Billy Strayhorn" (119).

15. Ellington's reliance on others for much of his musical and sonic material has led James Lincoln Collier to contend that it is "not necessary to see Duke Ellington as a 'composer' in the narrow sense of the word." Rather, following Billy Strayhorn, Collier calls Ellington "an improvising jazz musician" whose instrument "was a whole band" ( Duke Ellington , 306). Elsewhere, Collier tries another tack: "It does not hurt to think of Ellington not so much as a dramatist, as Beethoven was, or an architect, as was Bach, but as a planner of meals" (141).

16. Quoted in Rattenbury, Duke Ellington , 23. Ellington, Music , 214, confirms Stone's point. (Perhaps it should be noted that Ellington's sketches of individuals in this book appear under the heading "Dramatis Felidae"—"Cast of Cats.") He writes:

The cats who come into this band are probably unique in the aural realm. When someone falls out of the band—temporarily or permanently—it naturally becomes a matter of "Whom shall we get?" or "Whom can we get?" It is not just a matter of replacing the cat who left, because we are concerned with a highly personalized kind of music. It is written to suit the character of an instrumentalist, the man who has the responsibility of playing it, and it is almost impossible to match his character identically. Also, if the new man is sufficiently interesting tonally, why insist upon his copying or matching his predecessor's style?

17. Schuller, The Swing Era , 48.

18. Martin Williams, The Jazz Tradition , new and rev. ed. (Oxford, 1983), 107, makes the same point in different words. "Ellington was so attuned to the sounds of his men," he writes, "that the very originality of his textures and the daring of his harmonic language were determined not in the abstract but in his inquisitiveness about, let us say, how this reed player's low A-flat might sound when juxtaposed with that brassman's cup-muted G."

Schuller, Swing Era , 49n., pays special tribute to Ellington's piano playing, calling him "a rhythmic energizer of the orchestra" but, above all, "possessor of the most remarkable piano tone and touch." Schuller writes:

Perhaps one needed to have stood close to Ellington's piano-playing to fully appreciate the remarkable fullness and depth of his sound. I had that privilege many times, and I can say with total conviction that, with but very few exceptions ... I have never encountered a pianist, jazz or classical, who could command at once such purity of tone and range of dynamics and timbres as Ellington. He had a way of playing what I call "deep in the keys" to produce the clearest, most controlled impact of the hammer on the strings and, as a result, the fullest purest resonance of those strings. Ellington could play the most forceful piano, matching his entire orchestra at full tilt; and yet I never heard him force or bang, as so many pianists do when they venture into the ff range. His tone and projection were such that with one chord or a few fill-in notes he could energize the entire orchestra. And in addition he could combine his basic piano sonority with all manner of timbral sonorities; one heard trumpets, saxophones, horns, oboes, even strings in his playing.

19. The phrase, apparently coined by Billy Strayhorn, was used in an interview he gave in 1952. Schuller uses it in his analysis of Ellington's career. And Ken Rattenbury uses it as the title of his first chapter. Tucker, Ellington , which covers Ellington's life and work through 1927, calls the orchestra's recording session for Vocalion on 26 November 1926 "a turning point in Ellington's career." The recordings he made from that time on, Tucker explains, "differed in several fundamental ways from those that had come before." First, they were of Ellington's own music; second, they were made for labels aimed at distribution beyond the "race" market; third, rather than published songs, Ellington was beginning to record original instrumental pieces; and finally, they show how, in collaboration with key figures in the ensemble, Ellington was "coming into his own as a composer" (211-13).

20. Ellington, Music , 261. He also wrote, more ornately: "Billy Strayhorn said we were exponents of the aural art. Ours is the responsibility of bringing to the listener and would-be listener—as to those unwilling to be listeners—some agreeable vibration that tickles the fancy of the eardrum" (447).

21. Ellington, Music , 227. Ellington recalled a memorable example of rhythm taking over the whole atmosphere of a nightclub. During the 1920s, as he walked down the steps of the Capitol Palace in Harlem to hear Willie "The Lion" Smith and his group, he realized that "everything and everybody seemed to be doing whatever they were doing in the tempo The Lion's group was laying down. The walls and furniture seemed to lean understandingly—one of the strangest and greatest sensations I ever had. The waiters served in that tempo; everybody who had to walk in, out, or around the place walked with a beat" (Ellington, Music , 90).

22. Ellington, Music , 453.

23. Tucker, Ellington , quotes Otto Hardwick, a member of "The Duke's Serenaders," on this subject: "All of a sudden, around 1918, we began to get a lot of 'dicty' jobs. We would all pile into my Pullman automobile ... and Duke would direct us to drive to an embassy or private mansion. Other times we would go out to Manassas, Culpepper, Warrenton, or Orange [Virginia], for fancy balls and society receptions. This was Meyer Davis territory and none of us was able to figure out how Duke was muscling in." According to Tucker, Ellington's "promotional efforts and attractive personal qualities" were partly responsible, and so was "his experience working under Louis Thomas" (56), a black bandleader who, as one musician recalled, managed to get "all the society work around Washington'' in the years 1915-20 (48).

24. Mills's importance to Ellington's career is generally acknowledged, though Music Is My Mistress assigns him only a small role (and no place in the "Dramatis Felidae"). In an interview in Down Beat magazine (1952), Mills said that his strategy for Ellington was "aimed at presenting the public a great musician who was making a lasting contribution to American music" and to make Ellington's "importance as an artist the primary consideration" (quoted in Tucker, Ellington , 201, who adds that Ellington had begun to court a "sophisticated image" in Washington well before he went to New York or met Irving Mills). On the matter of record labels, Tucker notes that Ellington's orchestra in 1927 "appeared on two labels with race series aimed at black buyers—Vocalion and OKeh—but also recorded for three with a wider network of distribution: Brunswick (Vocalion's parent company), Columbia and Victor" (212). According to Mercer Ellington, Duke Ellington , the radio wire from the Cotton Club engagement brought the band and its music to national attention, which allowed Mills "to engineer the first trip to Hollywood" for the film Check and Double Check (1930), featuring the radio comedy team of Amos 'n' Andy (34). In 1929, while appearing at the Cotton Club, the band also performed in the Ziegfeld-produced Show Girl on Broadway, with music by George Gershwin. (In 1929, Fletcher Henderson and his orchestra were considered for an appearance in Vincent Youmans's Great Day . According to Rex Stewart, Boy Meets Horn, 118 , Mills tried to keep Henderson out of Great Day . See chap. 3 above, n. 106.) Jewell, Duke , 47, calls the Chevalier event "a coup ." And Mercer Ellington notes that it was "the first time" he'd seen the band play in a theater, "just sitting there, going from one number to another.... I can remember becoming aware of Chevalier's importance" (45). As for the European tour, Louis Armstrong had anticipated Ellington by a year, but by all accounts the Ellington tour, sponsored in part by British bandleader Jack Hylton, was more successful. See Jewell, Duke , 48. Finally, Mercer Ellington, Duke Ellington , 33-41, is an illuminating discussion of "all the maneuvers and stratagems that helped push Pop to the top" (41). Mercer credits press agent Ned Williams with especially effective and faithful service on Ellington's behalf from 1931 until the break with Irving Mills in 1939.

Ellington, Music , 82, attributes the idea for "Creole Rhapsody," the first of his extended works, to Mills. As he tells it:

When we were playing the Oriental Theater [in Chicago, in 1931?] Irving Mills came to me one day with an original idea. He was always reaching toward a higher plateau for our music. "Tomorrow is a big day," he said. "We premiere a new long work—a rhapsody." "Really?'' I replied. "Okay." So I went out and wrote Creole Rhapsody , and I did so much music for it that we had to cut it up and do two versions. One came out on Brunswick and the other, longer one, on Victor. Irving almost blew his connection at both companies for recording a number that was not only more than three minutes long, but took both sides of the record. That was the seed from which all kinds of extended works and suites later grew.

Gunther Schuller, Early Jazz: Its Roots and Development (New York, 1968), 354, finds in Ellington's piece "some subtle 'borrowing' from Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue ."

25. Schuller, Swing Era , 49, describes Ellington's balancing act as "an extraordinary tightrope walk" but without bringing the audience into it. "Evidently," he writes, Ellington "had a phenomenal instinct for allowing a degree of individuality and creative freedom within the framework of his musical conception."

26. Ellington, Music , 460. In the self-interview near the book's end, Ellington poses the question: "Does inspiration come from sorrow, frustration, and disappointment? It has been said that great love songs have followed a broken heart or the end of an affair. Do emotions such as love, anger, loneliness, or happiness affect composition?" And he answers: "I think the artist's true position is that of an observer. Personal emotion could spoil his pièce de résistance ."

27. Ellington, Music , 93, describes, for example, Ellington as a budding young pianist going to hear James P. Johnson play in Washington's Convention Hall. "I was always a terrific listener. I'm taller on one side than the other from leaning over the piano, listening. This time I listened all night long." Mercer Ellington, Duke Ellington , 160, reports:

As he traveled and moved among people, he was always alert to opinions of all kinds. When he and Harry Carney pulled into a gas station to fill up, there would often be youngsters hanging around, and he'd get into conversation with them and find out what they listened to on the radio and records.... When they stopped for something to eat, he'd note what was on the jukebox and what was being played. In this way he was always better informed than some may have imagined.

28. Ellington, Music , teems with references to his appreciation of "artistry"— as in his father's speech, for example. Ellington called his father "a wonderful wit," adding: "he knew exactly what to say to a lady," and "whatever place he was in, he had appropriate lines" (12). He found a similar flair in his mother who, as a cook, "had the knack, talent, imagination, and exciting skill of a pure artist'' (390). In Frank Holliday's pool room on T Street, social center of the neighborhood where he grew up, the same quality abounded. Gamblers there skillfully manipulated the cards. "Interns used to come in, who could cure colds. And handwriting experts who would enjoy copying somebody's signature on a check, go out and cash it, and bring back the money to show the cats in the poolroom what artists they were. They didn't need the money. They did it for the kicks. There were also a couple of pickpockets around, so smooth that when they went to New York they were not allowed in the subway. At heart, they were all great artists" (23).

Ellington well understood that these manifestations of artistry applied to the theatrical vocation he had chosen. In 1923, he and other members of his Washington band performed with Wilbur Sweatman in vaudeville. "It was another world to us," he recalled. "We'd sit on the stage and keep a straight face. I began to realize that all cities had different personalities.... I also learned a lot about show business from Sweatman. He was a good musician, and he was in vaudeville because that was where the money was then" ( Music , 36). The challenge of theatrical effect for Ellington lay in convincing the audience, which he called "the other side of the realm that serves the same muse I do" (465). Ellington analyzed Frank Sinatra's success in these terms: "Every song he sings is understandable and, most of all, believable, which is the ultimate in theater" (239). He saw himself as practicing a trade akin to that of actors and actresses. "The theater," he wrote, "is a place for skill. Some people say, 'I don't see how he can play that part every night without going out of his mind!' It may be a wild, dramatic part, but the actor doesn't necessarily have to throw his emotions into it, because he has studied how to make the people believe that he is doing all that suffering. It is one of the arts, and all the arts have similar qualities" (463).

29. Ellington, Music , 80.

30. Schuller, Swing Era , 46, comments: "The orchestra's ability to survive the wear and tear of literally thousands of one-night stands, of an endless succession of bus-, train-, and plane-trips, must be counted as one of the minor miracles of human physical endurance."

31. Stanley Dance, The World of Duke Ellington (New York, 1970), 61.

32. Lawrence Gushee, Notes to Duke Ellington 1940 (Smithsonian Collection recording DPM 20351, 1978), [2].

33. Gene Lees, Waiting for Dizzy (New York, 1991), 10, writing about a group of compact disc reissues of recordings from the 1920s by Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, Ellington, Red Nichols, Jelly Roll Morton, Bessie Smith, Joe Venuti, Eddie Lang, and others, stresses another trait. Lees finds the music on these albums "almost universally joyous" and "enormous exuberant fun."

34. Gushee, Notes to Duke Ellington 1940 , [2].

35. Oklahoma City native Ralph Ellison recalls the impression that Ellington and his men made when they visited his home town in Ellison's youth. "Where in ... any white community," he asks, "could there have been found images, examples such as these? Who were so worldly, who so elegant, who so mockingly creative? Who so skilled at their given trade and who treated the social limitations placed in their paths with greater disdain?" (Ellison, Going to the Territory , 220). Stanley Crouch, Notes of a Hanging Judge: Essays and Reviews, 1979-1989 (New York, 1990), 54, notes the efforts of Ellington and others to replace with "images of class, taste, and discipline" jazz's earlier "shady connections" with vice and superficiality.

36. Strayhorn's comment, appearing in an article in Down Beat (July 1952), is quoted in Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff, Hear Me Talkin' to Ya: The Story of Jazz as Told by the Men Who Made It (New York, 1955), 224, and in Rattenbury, Duke Ellington , 21.

37. Quoted in Schuller, Early Jazz , 350.

38. Williams, Jazz Tradition , 106.

39. Ellington, Music , 54, wrote of Arthur Whetsol that when illness forced him to retire from the band in 1937, "he left behind an echo of aural charisma that I can still hear."

40. Ellington, Music , 462. This was not a nostalgic comment, for in 1973 Ellington found "the caliber of musicians ... higher today." In earlier days, he added, if a player could be identified by his tone quality, he "didn't even have to read. Nowadays, the same guys play in symphonies, dance bands, and radio and television studios."

41. Ellington, Music , 118.

42. Except for those in exx. 22 and 23a-b and table 4, the recordings cited in this chapter may all be heard on The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz , revised ed. "Dusk" (ex. 22) is on Duke Ellington 1940 (Smithsonian Collection); "Braggin' in Brass" (exx. 23a-b) on Duke Ellington 1938 (Smithsonian Collection); and "Old Man Blues," diagrammed in table 4, is on The Indispensable Duke Ellington , vols. ¾ (French RCA).

43. Mercer Ellington, Duke Ellington , 25, writes:

There are three basic elements in the growl: the sound of the horn, a guttural gargling in the throat, and the actual note that is hummed. The mouth has to be shaped to make the different vowel sounds, and above the singing from the throat, manipulation of the plunger adds the wa-wa accents that give the horn a language.... In the Ellington tradition a straight mute is used in the horn besides the plunger outside, and this results in more pressure. Some players use only the plunger, and then the sound is usually coarser, less piercing, and not as well articulated.

Mercer notes that "the chief exponents of growling in the band" were trumpeters Miley, Cootie Williams, and Ray Nance and trombonists Joe "Tricky Sam" Nanton and Tyree Glenn. Nanton, he recalled, "made such a science of distortion that he would sometimes use a soda bottle when he was playing in the dressing room, thereby changing the fundamental positions of the slide." Other trombonists like Lawrence Brown and Quentin Jackson "did very well ... when they growled on trombone, but they moved their tuning slide, something that Tricky, Cootie, and Ray Nance never did. Where Tricky was unique was in the way he could make his sound so sheer that someone once likened it to tearing paper."

44. Ellington, Music , 106.

45. Gunther Schuller, in Early Jazz , 326-29, discusses "East St. Louis Toodle-Oo" at some length. Schuller follows Roger Pryor Dodge's lead in praising Miley not only for his inventive sound but for his "enormous contribution to pure classic melody in jazz." Miley and Ellington are listed as co-composers of "East St. Louis Toodle-Oo." Mark Tucker, Ellington , concludes with a longer description of the piece (248-57), tracing and comparing several different recordings and printed versions. Tucker sees Miley as a seminal figure in Ellington's development as a composer, especially through his mastery of the spirit of the blues. "Miley's hot trumpet filled a special function in Ellington's compositions," he writes. "When the tempo slowed down and the lights dimmed, it was Miley's turn to step forward and play the blues. Inspired by the soul in Miley's horn, Ellington fashioned pieces that went beyond hot jazz and made his band sound like no one else's. In the process he discovered new paths as a composer'' (231).

46. Ellington, Music , 419-20, writes:

During one period at the Cotton Club, much attention was paid to acts with an African setting, and to accompany these we developed what was termed "jungle style" jazz. (As a student of Negro history I had, in any case, a natural inclination in this direction.) Its most striking characteristic was the use of mutes—often the plumber's everyday rubber plunger—by Bubber Miley on trumpet and Joe "Tricky Sam" Nanton on trombone. They founded a tradition we have maintained ever since. This kind of theatrical experience, and the demands it made upon us, was both educative and enriching, and it brought about a further broadening of the music's scope. We, too, began to think in terms of concert and theater.

Collier, Duke Ellington , 92-93, attributes so-called jungle music to Mills's and Ellington's perception "that the band had to have an identifiable and consistent style that could be promoted through clever publicity." For him, Ellington's jungle music was nothing more than "a gimmick ... suggested by the fact that the Cotton Club was at one point using a lot of 'jungle' skits as excuses to introduce erotic dances—shake dances and shimmies performed by the club's dancers, like Freddi Washington and Bessie Dudley, wearing little besides feathers and beads, supposedly to suggest jungle attire." But Mark Tucker, in a paper delivered at the American Musicological Society's annual meeting in Cleveland (1986), showed how, over the years, Ellington transformed jungle music from a floor-show convention (in the 1920s) to an important part of his expressive vocabulary as a composer (late 1930s and 1940s).

47. Ellington, Music , has only restrained praise for Williams, who, he writes, entered the band in 1929 and "soon became one of our most outstanding soloists. He began to use the plunger mute, one of our major tonal devices, and he used it very well" (121). Schuller, Swing Era , 53, notes that on a 1932 remake of "Creole Love Call" (1927), Williams "takes over Miley's old chorus with the plunger and growl, but towards the end of the performance he also breaks into a new role as the first of Ellington's trumpets to develop a prominently displayable high register." Later, Schuller goes on to say that, by 1935, ''the increasing technical skills and musical sophistication" of players like Armstrong, Williams, Hodges, and others was making the notion of jazz "as a collectively improvised form of musical expression" outdated. From that time forward, what Schuller calls "the concerto idea" takes hold, in which composers and arrangers write pieces featuring outstanding soloists like these men (84). "Concerto for Cootie" is one of many products of that impulse.

Rattenbury, Duke Ellington , carries a detailed analysis of the piece, with copious musical illustrations (164-201). Along the way, he describes some of the different tone qualities Williams employs, including: "plunger-muted (closely), with a pronounced vibrato frequently developed into a lip trill and a trace of growl"; "plunger-muted (closely), with almost no vibrato and with no throat growl"; "plunger-muted, with the plunger cup ... freely manipulated around the half-open position, and with a dramatic increase in volume, a savage growl, and exaggerated vibrato"; a "quiet, cool vibratoless delivery"; and a section "played with a superb tone on open trumpet" (187-89).

48. Ellington's autobiography says little about Carney as a "tonal personality," but Mercer Ellington, Duke Ellington , 65-66, makes comments that certainly apply to the opening of "Ko-Ko." Mercer notes Carney's "massive tone," which, he writes, "not only gave the saxophone section a depth and roundness no other had, but it gave the whole ensemble a rich, sonorous foundation that proved inimitable." Schuller loves Ellington's trombone section; in fact, by the fourth paragraph of his long chapter, "Duke Ellington: Master Composer," he is discussing its members, noting the Ellington band as "the first to acquire a permanent trombone trio." Lawrence Brown, Juan Tizol, and "Tricky Sam" Nan-ton, as Schuller notes, "were all totally different from each other in their musical conception: unique individual voices." And yet, he notes, "this trio of uniquely distinctive personalities could, when necessary, blend chameleon-like into a single sonority" ( Swing Era , 47). That is what they do when playing the sharply articulated harmonies that begin "Ko-Ko."

The dedication of Schuller's book reads: "For Edwin and George—and Marjorie—and in memory of the incomparable Lawrence Brown."

49. Schuller, Swing Era , 116, comments that here the sound of Tizol's valve trombone "makes it the non-pareil instrument for the occasion. A saxophone would have sounded ordinary," he explains (not noting that saxophone "calls" seem to demand responses from another section of the orchestra), "and on the slide-trombone this riff in that register and that tempo is virtually unplayable. It lies perfectly on the valve-trombone."

50. Ellington wrote that he composed "Mood Indigo" (1930) with an electronic effect in mind. Remembering that an earlier recording of " 'Black and Tan Fantasy' with the growl trombone and growl trumpet" had touched off "a sympathetic vibration or mike tone,'' he thought to himself, " 'maybe if I spread those notes over a certain distance ... the mike tone will take a specific place or a specific interval in there.' It came off, and gave that illusion" ( Music , 80). Schuller waxes personal on the subject of "Dusk," devoting several pages of Swing Era (122-26) to an analysis with transcriptions. He finds it "one of those pieces that go beyond the confining labels of jazz, dance music, and light entertainment." For Schuller, "Dusk" strikes a "plaintive[,] nostalgic mood, an image of loneliness at eventide, a night of longing about to descend." And he adds: "It is deeply affecting, gently, subtly disturbing, perfect in its utter simplicity. It is music that haunts you—it has haunted me since I first heard it some forty-five years ago, and it never fails to move me. Though it pleads and supplicates, it never whimpers; it is never sentimental"

51. Schuller, Swing Era , 94.

52. See also Schuller, Swing Era , 95.

53. The song, with words and music by Hughie Prince and Don Raye, was published in 1941. See Roger Lax and Frederick Smith, The Great Song Thesaurus , 2d ed., updated and expanded (New York, 1989),

54. Schuller, Swing Era , 104-5, describes this introduction, including a diagram of the textural buildup.

55. In an interview with Stanley Dance in the late 1960s, Ellington talked about some of the impulses that lay behind his music. "Everything" that Bubber Miley and Joe Nanton played, he recalled, "represented a mood, a person, a picture." He explained: "As a matter of fact, everything we used to do in the old days had a picture." For example, "the guys would be walking up Broadway after work and see this old man coming down the street, and there was the beginning of 'Old Man Blues.' Everything had a picture or was descriptive of something. Always" (Dance, World of Duke Ellington , 7). Whatever its inspiration, the main strain of "Old Man Blues" strongly suggests the harmonic progression of Jerome Kern's "Old Man River," from Show Boat (1927). The correspondence is especially strong in the bridge.

56. Schuller, Early Jazz , 351, notates the break.

57. Schuller, Swing Era , 128n., discusses Ellington's lifelong "difficulty with endings."

58. Gunther Schuller, the closest student of Ellington's extended works, deals with "Creole Rhapsody" (1930-31) in Early Jazz , 352-53, and "Reminiscing in Tempo," "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue," and the much longer "Black, Brown, and Beige" in Swing Era , 75-83, 90-92, and 141-50. Schuller acknowledges that "Black, Brown, and Beige" and most of Ellington's later large compositions are not uniformly successful, and he devotes pages 149-57 to a forthright discussion of what they show about Ellington as a composer.

59. First recorded in New York City on 20 September 1937, the work began to show up on Ellington broadcasts in the mid-1940s, according to Jørgen Grunnet Jepsen, Jazz Records, 1942-[1969]: A Discography (Holte, 1964-68), 3:406ff. On 7 July 1945, for example, "Diminuendo in Blue" and "Crescendo in Blue" were performed in a New York City 'radio broadcast with "Carnegie Blues" sandwiched in between (406). In broadcasts recorded in October of the same year, the two pieces were separated by ''I Got It Bad (and That Ain't Good)" (410). Jepsen lists nine recorded performances between 1945 and 1951; in six of them, the two flank a third item. ("Transblucency" is the centerpiece listed on pages 413, 414, and 416.) On 7 July 1956, at the Newport Jazz Festival, the Ellington orchestra gave its most famous performance of "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue." That night the two parts were separated by Paul Gonsalves's extended solo: twenty-seven choruses based on the twelve-bar blues. The performance, which drew an ecstatic audience reaction, is credited with boosting the band's fortunes and has taken its place in jazz lore. Mercer Ellington, Duke Ellington , 112, describes its impact succinctly.

60. Since bar 5 (17), however, was exactly what the ear expected, it could be understood as an addition only after the fact.

61. Standard blues practice puts calls at the beginnings of phrases, i.e., in bars 1, 5, and 9 of a chorus. In Chorus 3, however, after appearing in bars 1 and 5, the calls return at three-bar intervals (bars 8 and 11).

62. Dance, World of Ellington , 84.

63. Schuller, Swing Era , 90-92, is of two minds about the work. On the one hand, he admires the conception as "one of Duke's most ambitious efforts ... remote from the world of popular tunes and 12-bar blues (even though based on blues changes)." Schuller is also impressed that "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue," in "its original 1937 form[,] was ... a full-fledged written composition with virtually no improvisation." He finds it "relatively demanding in structure and harmonically, technically complex." On the other hand, he finds the 1937 performance lacking, especially in "the more complex full-orchestra episodes," which seem to him "beyond the performance capabilities of the 1937 Ellington band, particularly in respect to intonation." Moreover, Schuller thinks the work lacks thematic inventiveness. "The dichotomy between the innocuousness of the melodic-thematic material and the comparatively sophisticated and perhaps overly complex fragmentation of underlying component material," he writes, "constitutes a weakness of the work, although an interesting risk-taking one." Elsewhere in his book, however, he cites "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue" approvingly, as evidence of (1) Ellington's ambition as a composer ("the struggle, the torment, and the anguish," 93); (2) his playing with "unusual phrase structures" (118); (3) his achievement of "concerted constructive logic" (131) and progress in "structural unity" (147); and (4) his ability to do without programmatic effects in longer works (152). Near the end of his book, moreover, Schuller cites "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue" as a "historic breakthrough creation" and one of "the dozen or so major stations in the development of jazz in the twenty years between 1926 and 1946." Other Ellington pieces on his list were "Mood Indigo,'' "Reminiscing in Tempo," and "Cotton Tail" (840).

64. Gushee, Notes to Duke Ellington 1940, [2].

65. Mercer Ellington, Duke Ellington , 94.

66. Schuller, Swing Era , 78, in discussing "Reminiscing in Tempo," writes that in this work, "more than ever before, [Ellington] was trying to break out beyond the narrow categorizations of the commercial world which by an accident of fate he was forced to inhabit. He was determined more than ever before, to avoid the trap into which the market place and the obsession for labeling were trying to lure him."

67. Stewart, Jazz Masters , 96, reminds his readers of the performers' role in this process. "In the Ellington organization," he wrote in the 1960s, "there is the combined knowledge of these gifted artists, who by virtue of years of experience are able to create, on the spot, any mood that they choose."

68. Mercer Ellington, Duke Ellington , 169, describes what occupied Ellington "in his later years." "He really didn't have time to go around listening to musicians. He had to keep his ear to the ground in a different sense. He was too busy checking prices and the politics of the music industry. When he could throw that stuff out of his mind, he was busy with the commissions he had accepted."

69. Ellington, Music , 463.

70. Ellington, Music , 459.

71. Ellison, recalling his days as a high-school student in Oklahoma City, describes the impact of Ellington's music on him and his musician friends. "We were studying the classics then," he remembers, "working at harmony and the forms of symphonic music. And while we affirmed the voice of jazz and the blues . . . it was not until the discovery of Ellington that we had any hint that jazz possessed possibilities of a range of expressiveness comparable to that of classical European music" ( Going to the Territory , 220).