Duke Ellington
The Life of a Pioneer One of the greatest jazz composers that has ever lived is, arguably, Duke Ellington. Born Edward Kennedy Ellington in Washington D.C. in 1899. By the age of 17 was playing professionally. In 1923 he moved to New York City where he started recruiting people for his orchestra. He started off with an average jazz band of ten people but through the thirties and forties that number greatly expanded. He started playing in small nightclubs, theaters, and on the radio. His biggest break is considered to be when he got the chance to play at one of the most popular nightclubs of the time in Harlem, The Cotton Club, when another performer (King Oliver) turned down the offer, from that day forward Duke Ellington become a well known name in the jazz world. Ellington's first compositions were considered to be very stiff and jerky rhythmically as was all jazz music of the era and in his music you could hear a strong tie to New Orleans music. In 1924 the first recordings were made, these seemed to be the recordings of a jazz musician who was headed in the wrong direction and some did not consider him to be a jazz musician at all. When we look back on those recordings now we see that all they were was an inauspicious beginnin
g for some major talent. With the addition of Bubber Miley a strong folk influence was added in with the New Orleans sound. Miley helped Ellington affirm his calling as a leader of the jazz orchestra. Ellington's music began to show the expressive depth and increasing sophistication he is famous for. His ideas of harmony, melody, orchestral color, and form came from the music around him. Ellington would listen to the music of the time and end up turning it into his own jazz style. When he first started writing music he would devise a harmony and melody on the piano and from there assign a line to a different instrument in his orchestra. Over the years he learned how to write for what some people consider to be his greatest instrument, the orchestra. This was accomplished because he realized that he had to take everything he had ever learned from people such s Miley, Redman, and Henderson, even his own innate urbanity and sophistication and start over with a new approach to Big Band Jazz. His approach to the Big Band Jazz was a new one, even though the idea was not. In the past people had tried and failed when they would take an existing orchestra and add a few jazz soloists. Ellington on the other hand took a small show band or pit band and turned each person in the orchestra into a jazz artist. In the past jazz consisted of much improvisational work that at times seemed out of control. Ellington's theory was that a song should not consist entirely of improvisation but should not be very strict either. His performances turned out to be larger than the sum of each of its parts because of his discipline of improvisation and how he extended the orchestration so that they complimented each other and both became enhanced. Ellington learned to think directly as a jazz orchestrater, he was now looking at scores as a whole and not writing for one main part or instrument. Ellington had made his primary instrument the orchestra. He had started to become a pioneer of jazz music. This now was a completely new challenge for what he was doing there was no presidents to follow and no models to compare to his music. Ellington also started writing for the horns themselves. He was not creating a melody on the piano for them anymore now he wrote so that the horns could perform with the best sound possible. A final thing he began doing that had not been done before is using more flexible rhythms for a newer sound. In his orchestra he helped the soloists and players a
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Approximate Word count = 1661
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)
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