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Jazz Perspectives
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Duke Ellington's America

Peter Kenagy Published online: 15 Jan 2013.

To cite this article: Peter Kenagy (2012) Duke Ellington's America, Jazz Perspectives, 6:1-2, 265-267, DOI: 10.1080/17494060.2012.721296 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17494060.2012.721296

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Jazz Perspectives, 2012 Vol. 6, Nos. 12, 265267, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17494060.2012.721296

Book Review
Duke Ellingtons America. By Harvey G. Cohen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. ISBN-13: 978-0-226-11263-3 (hardcover). 688 Pp. $40.00. Ellington poses great challenges for the biographer, wrote Mark Tucker in 1989 in his highly critical review of James Lincoln Colliers Duke Ellington.1 Previous Ellington biographies such as those by Barry Ulanov, Stanley Dance, Collier, and John Edward Hasse,2 as well as Ellingtons own Music is My Mistress,3 left musicologists Scott DeVeaux, Burton W. Peretti, Tucker, and others, wondering if anyone could, in one volume, offer historical and musical accuracy, respect for musicians, and insightful, reasoned criticism.4 Since 1993, when the best of Ellington writing was represented by Tucker in Selected Commentary and Criticism (19641993),5 jazz studies has continued to extend its scope.6 New works have developed poststructural and postmodern, cultural, social, and literary theories, while giving credence to insider perspectives and minority voices. But, while the passage of time has made jazz into a vital discourse in the humanities, general biographers have an increasingly tough job. Harvey G. Cohen has taken up the Duke Ellington biography challenge and linked Ellingtons entire life to twentieth-century American culture. The stated purpose in Duke Ellingtons America is to reveal Ellingtons achievements and contributions . . . in the context of the pragmatic realities he faced and skillfully manipulated . . . in the ckle world of popular music (2). The book revolves around racial, social, and economic themes, rather than musical ones. It brings together the literatures of jazz and American studies for students and serious listeners, and is free of the blatant racial insensitivity, misinformation, and opinionated commentary that marred other biographies, most notably Colliers. Cohens book offers a more neutral perspective, and contains a wealth of sources drawn from the Smithsonian Institutions National Museum of American History, the Library of Congress, the Schomburg Center for
Mark Tucker, Notes Second Series 45, no. 3 (March 1989): 499502. James Lincoln Collier, Duke Ellington (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Stanley Dance, The World of Duke Ellington (New York: C. Scribners Sons, 1970); John Edward Hasse, Beyond Category: The Life and Genius of Duke Ellington (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993); Barry Ulanov, Duke Ellington (New York: Da Capo Press, 1975, reprint, New York: Creative Age Press, Inc., 1946). 3 Edward Kennedy Ellington, Music is My Mistress (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1973). 4 Scott DeVeaux, Musical Quarterly 76, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 121135; Mark Tucker, Notes Second Series 45, no. 3 (March 1989): 499502; Burton W. Perreti, Popular Music 14, no. 3 (October 1995): 383385. 5 Max Harrison, Ralph Ellison, Martin Williams, Albert Murray, Gunther Schuller, Lawrence Gushee, and Stanley Crouch, in The Duke Ellington Reader, ed. Mark Tucker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 385445. 6 University of Chicago Press jazz books since 1993 begin with: Ronald Radano, New Musical Figurations: Anthony Braxtons Cultural Critique (1993); Paul Berliner, Thinking in Jazz: The Innite Art of Improvisation (1994); Ingrid Monson, Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction (1996); and continue up to: George Lewis, A Power Stronger than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (2008); Walton Muyumba, The Shadow and the Act: Black Intellectual Practice, Jazz Improvisation, and Philosophical Pragmatism (2009).
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Book Review

Black Culture, the Oral History of American Music at Yale University, African American newspapers, interviews, and extensive nancial records. The book is comprised of sixteen chapters from Ellingtons birth to death,7 twelve black-and-white photographs, notes and index, an index of musical works referred to in the text, and no other charts, scores, tables, or graphs. Ellingtons story begins here with his roots in the elite black community of Washington, D.C. of the 1900s, where notions of representing a great and proud race were instilled on every level at home, church, school, and in the commercial district of the Shaw neighborhood. A central theme of the book is how the core values established in his youth had consequences for his musical and professional life as it played out on stage, in the media, and in private dealings with his band and extended family. When Cohen later essays the literary and poetic intent in Ellingtons Black Brown and Beige8 in the 1940s, he connects Ellingtons muting of the programmatic framework to his conservative Washingtonian upbringing. This illustrates how Ellingtons vision of black history in America, as represented in BBB, was more a mediating of racial tensions than an agitation. The business strategy and marketing concept that manager and partner Irving Mills established for Ellington beginning in 1926 also inuenced Ellington and the future success of his organization. Long after the two men went their separate ways, the royalties from these early years created a cash ow that nanced Ellingtons bands permanent life on the road and in the studio, funded pet projects, and paid extended family members bills. Cohens use of the records in the Smithsonian Institutions Duke Ellington Collection adds new detail to our understanding of the arrangements between Mills and Ellington and how they played out over time, and his coverage of the subject is further backed by an array of literature on the growth of advertising, lm and entertainment industry business models, and African American and Jewish intersections in the period. As Ellington is famously known for keeping the orchestra on the road for over fty years, we now learn more of the hidden human and nancial costs that made that possible. We read that Ellington avoided retirement and kept up appearances out of necessity, even when the IRS was garnishing the orchestras income for back taxes. As the book ventures into the later years of Ellingtons life, Cohen provides evidence for Ellingtons continued productivity by listing many infrequently discussed compositions and describing the constant travels. He shows that Ellington maintained a level of musical success into the later stages of his career by pursuing new types of projects that were artistically sound, though not always popular, and continued ghting nostalgia in his longstanding operation. The book constantly presents dollar gures and other nancial information. An appendix with statistics and visual representations of some of the information would
Chapter: Washington/New York; The Marketing Plan; Serious Listening; Credits/Exit Mills; Swingin; Black, Brown, and Beige; Postwar Struggles; Reinvention and Nadir; Rebirth; Money; My People; 1963 State Department Tour; Sacred Concerts; Fighting Nostalgia; 1970s State Tours; Final Days. 8 This chapter previously appeared as: Harvey G. Cohen, Duke Ellington and Black, Brown and Beige: The Composer as Historian at Carnegie Hall, American Quarterly 56, no. 4 (December 2004): 10031034.
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be helpful to chart the rise and fall of income over timeroyalty income versus performance income, for exampleor trends in performing venues and locations. Page 424 notes that the US government paid Duke Ellington, Inc. $175,355 (or almost 1.2 million in todays dollars) for a fourteen-week State Department tour in the 196364 season, comparable to what would be made on the road in the US during the same time span. But the reader will not be able to easily compare these interesting gures to other tours and performances, or to the amount the IRS was extracting from Ellington at the same time. One who takes Burton Perettis quotation from the books back jacket at face value will expect sensitive coverage of all of Ellingtons albums and compositions, and might reasonably anticipate more than one sentence devoted to the collaborative album with the Count Basie Orchestra First Time! Count Meets the Duke from 1961 which Cohen writes off as a gimmicky Battle Royal (342). This middle-career meeting of the Basie and Ellington bands must offer more food for thought than a single sentence, but the Basie and Ellington relationship goes untreated because we have to move on to other albums. This problem is a symptom of the scope of this book; it is about Ellington the individual and culture in the broad sense, not about his relationships with musicians and music. Cohens descriptions of music generally leave one wanting more. When discussing original compositions recorded in 1947 for the Columbia 10-inch album Mood Ellington, he writes, Perhaps most impressive and historically important was The Clothed Woman. He fails to mention the pieces freely atonal character or why John Edward Hasse referred to it as probably [Ellingtons] foremost composition for piano (284). Though he cites Gunther Schuller and Mark Tucker as experts throughout on musical content, his engagement with their foundational works of Ellington scholarship is lacking since he steers clear of any musical discussion. The vast majority of sources date to the late nineties, and do not include recent work that has tied musical analysis with social research and theory so effectively. It may be fair to say that DEA doesnt deal with the last ten years of insider jazz scholarship. Ellingtons achievements and contributions, offered here, while informatively and meticulously documented, are hardly any new news. There is little revealing or new information about the relationship of Ellington to Billy Strayhorn, Johnny Hodges, to minor band members, or to younger generations of musicians coming up near the end of Ellingtons life. Ellington appears in the center, isolated, and Cohen doesnt question his character as historically unshakable and triumphant. A thorough Ellington in American culture type of study may seem attractive to college or general readership interested in the American twentieth century, but Cohens work tends to simply bolster inherited notions of Ellingtons upbringing, his prolic genius, marketing savvy, commitment to life on the road despite nancial woes, and his status beyond category. Peter Kenagy

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