Biographer finds some dissonance in Ellington's life

Reviewed by Karl Stark
Posted: Sunday, October 27, 2013, 3:01 AM
A Life of Duke Ellington - By Terry Teachout (Gotham. 496 pp)

Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington was jazz royalty. He even eschewed the term jazz at times, although an unbelievable number of his 1,700 tunes remain jazz standards.

Ellington wrote orchestral suites, soundtracks for the movies, and scores for Broadway. In an era when many jazz players were seen as drug addicts, he was one of the first jazz players to be successfully marketed as a creative artist, and he's often considered one of the greatest American composers ever.

Or was he?

In his new biography, Terry Teachout, a former professional bassist who is the drama critic for the Wall Street Journal, politely chips away at the Ellington image. The debonair maestro is still charismatic, but the weight of this biography, billed as the first major one in 18 years, hits some unpleasant dissonance.

Those tunes Ellington is credited with writing turn out to have been done largely by his sidemen. Ellington never really succeeded on Broadway or in the movies. His suites often lacked real orchestral development, Teachout writes, and even his celebrated band - full of unique players - scuffled at times with poor discipline and a lack of fire.

Teachout's biography is full of such critical counterpoint. At different points. he calls Ellington "one of the supreme creative figures of the 20th Century" and "a major composer but not an influential one." Certainly, to have led bands as Ellington did through a largely segregated America over nearly a half-century of shifting tastes was a monumental feat.

Ellington's ace in the hole was the band's songbook. His many standards provided a steady stream of royalties that kept his groups together when others were fading.

Those bands - full of powerhouse players like Ben Webster, Johnny Hodges, Paul Gonsalves, Cootie Williams, Harry Carney, and Clark Terry - were integral to the way Ellington composed. The man was not a natural tunesmith, Teachout writes. But he was adept at picking up promising fragments from band members and remolding them into tunes that he then took for himself.

"Sophisticated Lady" from 1933 was typical. This standard was composed of themes from two of his sidemen: saxophonist Otto Hardwick and trombonist Lawrence Brown. Ellington spliced their licks together and reharmonized them. He offered both men $15 and kept the long-term rights. "I don't consider you a composer," Brown told Ellington early in their difficult relationship, according to Teachout. "You are a compiler."

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