Duke Ellington

Duke Ellington led a band for fifty years and treated it like an instrument he was playing. He wrote not for trumpet or saxophone in the abstract, but for the specific men in his orchestra – their tones, their quirks, the particular growl one player got from his horn. No one composed that way before him, and the music came out sounding like nobody else’s.

He came up in the 1920s at Harlem’s Cotton Club, where the band’s “jungle” sound made its name. But Ellington kept reaching. He wrote three-minute masterpieces and extended suites, sacred concerts and film scores, always elegant, always swinging, always unmistakably him. “Mood Indigo,” “Take the ‘A’ Train,” “Sophisticated Lady” – the songbook is enormous.

Part of his genius was Billy Strayhorn, his writing partner for nearly thirty years, so close that it’s often hard to say where one man’s pen stopped and the other’s began. Together they gave the big-band form a depth nobody thought it could hold.

Ellington carried himself like the aristocrat the nickname promised – gracious, witty, impeccably dressed – and he meant every bit of it. He insisted jazz was America’s classical music, and across a half-century of work he made the case better than any argument could.