Duke Ellington

From his perch at the Cotton Club during the Roaring Twenties through the Vietnam era, Duke Ellington was a towering figure in American music. While three-minute standards like "It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)" and "Sophisticated Lady" helped to define the course of big band jazz for a generation of listeners, Ellington refused to stop there. Aided by the classically-trained Billy Strayhorn, he began to see himself in the early Forties as a composer "beyond category."

Over the next twenty years, a remarkable artistic flowering included concert works influenced by the orchestral tradition (Black, Brown and Beige), musical theater (Jump for Joy), and ambitious suites incorporating non-Western and literary influences (the Shakespearean Such Sweet Thunder; The Far East Suite).

Even as the popularity of jazz waned in the postwar era, the Ellington Orchestra maintained a rigorous touring schedule, culminating in a remarkable performance at the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival that yielded the beststelling Ellington at Newport. From then on, Ellington was perceived as an eminent ambassador of American culture, as likely to be at the Johnson or Nixon White House as on a State Department tour of the Middle East.

When the Pulitzer Prize music jury could not select any suitable candidates for the second year in a row in 1965, a special award for Ellington was proposed. However, according to then-administrator John Hohenberg, "the Pulitzer Board... did not take the Ellington nomination seriously because it did not conform to the terms of the music award at the time, which was for an original work of music in its larger forms by an American composer." Although Hohenberg believed that the Board would have awarded the Music Prize to the eligible Far East Suite, this option was not brought to the floor. (Hohenberg, The Pulitzer Diaries, 147)

Instead, no award was given.

The oversight soon leaked to Ellington, who expressed his frustration in a phone conversation with critic Nat Hentoff. "I'm hardly surprised,” he said, “that my music is still without official honor at home. Most Americans still take it for granted that European-based—classical music, if you will—is the only really respectable kind. By and large, in this country, jazz has always been the kind of man you wouldn’t want your daughter to associate with.”

Despite the oversight, Ellington remained prolific until his death on May 24, 1974. Twenty-five years later, the Pulitzer Prize Board awarded the composer a posthumous special citation in commemoration of the centennial of his birth. The award certificate was accepted at the annual Pulitzer Prize luncheon by daughter-in-law Lene Ellington and grandson Paul Ellington.

Other Biographical Resources

First published in Rolling Stone in 1974, Ralph J. Gleason's "Farewell to the Duke" received the prestigious ASCAP/Deems Taylor Award that year. Invoking the streetwise wisdom of Nelson Algren (“If society denies someone their reality, then they’ll structure their own reality”), Gleason offers a near-definitive portrayal of Ellington as a complex avatar of modernism who was ultimately defined by his many contradictions.

More comprehensive overviews of Ellington's life may be found in Terry Teachout's Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington (Avery, 2013) and John Edward Hasse's Beyond Category: The Life And Genius Of Duke Ellington (Da Capo, 1995), with the latter drawing upon Hasse's curatorial work at the National Museum of American History. David Hajdu's Lush Life (North Point Press, 1997) is a pathbreaking life of Billy Strayhorn.