Duke Ellington
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This paper will discuss the career and musical accomplishments of Duke Ellington, the renowned musician and showman who proved to the world that jazz could and should be considered as a serious form of music. Edward Kennedy Ellington, who was later to be known as "Duke," was born to a middle-class family in Washington, D.C. on April 29, 1899. Growing up in comfortable surroundings with plenty of love and attention, the young Ellington received much encouragement which helped him to embark on a creative career. In fact, "marked as a special child, he started on piano at seven and soon cultivated the poise, flair for leadership, and ducal charm that earned him his title" (Sales 78). The love and support he received in his early life gave Ellington an unshakable faith in himself. He soon developed a goal to become truly great at something; by the time he was a teenager this was manifested as a full-blown desire to become a great musician. The young Ellington exhibited an uncanny strength of determination in pursuit of his goal. Even while a teenager, he would proudly say to his mother, "I'm going to have everybody in the world call me Duke" (George 31). The teenage Ellington became fully absorbed in his piano studies and he soon learned to master the styles of a number of well-known players of the time. His first musical love was a new style which emerged around the turn of the century and came to be known as "ragtime" (Collier 15). In fact, many of Ellington's later
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on's musical ideas, which encouraged him to become even more involved in merging jazz with "serious" music (Sales 81). During the 1930s and 1940s, Duke Ellington made the greatest contributions of his career in terms of musical composition. His writing at that time helped people to take jazz more seriously because "he didn't just do something improvisational or interpretive; he treated his music with a seriousness and composure that made it very special" (George 170). Ellington was a great composer of jazz music because he used all the traditional elements of music to arrive at a unique sound all his own. For this reason, it has been said that "Ellington and his musicians achieved a variety of expression that was far beyond the reach of other jazz of the time and that has been approached by few since" (Oliver, Harrison, and Bolcom 267).
One unique element of Ellington's compositional style was the way in which he was able to merge improvisation, where musical solos are made up on the spot, with composing and arranging, where musical ideas are written out in advance. It has been noted that Ellington was the first jazz composer to write out solos for his instrumentalists, just as "Puccini might fashion an aria for an opera" (
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Approximate Word count = 1688
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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