Tourist Point of View? Musics of the World and Ellington's Suites

Abstract

Up until the late 1980s, the critical and scholarly consensus on Duke Ellington was largely that the composer's best work appeared before 1942. In the time spanning Ellington's arrival in New York in 1923 and reaching a putative apex approximately nineteen years later, two periods are the basis of that consensus: the years Ellington spent developing his style at the Cotton Club in Harlem in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and the period from roughly 1940 to 1942 when the ensemble designated the “Blanton–Webster Band”—named for bassist Jimmy Blanton and tenor saxophonist Ben Webster—made a celebrated series of recordings for Victor, recordings that also featured early contributions from composer and arranger Billy Strayhorn. In the notes for the 1986 reissue of those recordings, Mark Tucker wrote that they “represent the creative peak of a developmental process that had begun over 20 years earlier. The pieces they contain impress us today with their variety, imagination, and craft, also with their maturity of conception.”1 Those recordings and their predecessors also led Gunther Schuller to write, following Ellington's death in 1974, that the temporal constraints of the then-dominant commercial distribution medium, the 10-inch, 78-rpm disc, rather than being a hindrance, played an important role in making Ellington one of the United States' greatest composers: “He took this restriction and turned it into a virtue. He became the master in our time of the small form, the miniature, the vignette, the cameo portrait. What Chopin's nocturnes and ballades are to mid-nineteenth-century European music, Ellington's ‘Mood Indigo’ and ‘Cotton Tail’ are to mid-twentieth-century Afro-American music.”2 Schuller's praise here is measured, to be clear, for he aligns Ellington with a nineteenth-century composer not generally recognized for skill in long-form composition—arguably the sine qua non for classical composition in that century—and his phrasing condemns by omission the various “extended works” composed by Ellington, beginning in the 1930s and appearing with greater regularity after 1943.3

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