Dr. Bob Prescribes Duke Ellington

Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington (1899-1974) was an American jazz pianist and composer, someone who led his eponymous jazz band (or “orchestra,” as he preferred to call it), for what was a record-making 51 years: from 1923 until his death in 1974.

He was born and raised in Washington D.C.  He moved permanently to New York City in 1923, and it was there that he became famous: as the leader of the house band at Harlem’s Cotton Club from 1927 to 1931.

A brilliant composer of songs – many of which are today standards of the Great American Songbook – Ellington began composing extended works (what he generally referred to as “suites”) in the mid-1930s.  By the time of his death in 1974, he had written and collaborated on over one thousand musical works, by far the single largest body of written work in the jazz repertoire.

When we left off in yesterday’s Music History Monday, Ellington had just become a household musical name thanks to his band’s weekly national broadcasts from the Cotton Club in New York City.  Ellington remained at the very top of the American musical heap through the 1930s and mid-1940s.  And then.

And then came the late-1940s and 1950s, and with those years, a new generation of post-World War Two music fans and consumers: young music fans and consumers who didn’t give a rat’s rump for big band swing music, which they perceived as their parents’ music. Big bands dropped like flies and disbanded, leaving only a very few to scratch out a living in what quickly became a “nostalgia” market.

Duke Ellington’s band was one of those few survivors, due primarily to Ellington’s categorical refusal to stop making music with his band:

“It’s a matter of whether you want to play music or make money.  I like to keep a band so I can write and hear the music next day. The only way you can do that is to pay the band and keep it on tap, 52 weeks a year. If you want to make a real profit, you go out for four months, lay off for four and come back for another four. Of course, you can’t hold a band together that way and I like the cats we’ve got. So, by various little twists and turns, we manage to stay in business and make a musical profit. And a musical profit can put you way ahead of financial loss.”

I’d point out the obvious: a big band is an expensive proposition, with its high payroll and costs of transportation.  And sadly, a “musical profit” will not put food on the table or gasoline in the tour bus.  Nevertheless, Duke Ellington managed to keep his band together through the advent of rock ‘n’ roll and what appeared to be the end for large jazz ensembles playing swing music.  And then.

And then Ellington’s orchestra performed at the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival and his career and his band were reborn!…

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