How Duke Ellington Took Jazz From The Back Yard To Buckingham Palace

Because Duke likes peace and repose, he tries to avoid the endless controversies that go on in the world of jazz. The followers of jazz cannot even agree on the fundamental point of what it is. To keep out of this dispute in particular, Duke frequently says, when people try to pin him down, "I don't write jazz. I write Negro folk music." There are those who insist that the only "righteous jazz," as they call it, is performed by bands of no more than six or seven men whose music is as spontaneous, unpremeditated, and unrehearsed as that of Shelley's skylark. Yet the very aficionados who insist that all real jazz is improvised and that all the solos must be impromptu often claim that Duke's artistry is the genuine, blown-in-the-bottle stuff, brushing aside his own statement that almost all the music his seventeen-piece band plays has been scored. Partly because of this bickering, Ellington always feels that he has found sanctuary when he boards a train. He says that then peace descends upon him and that the train's metallic rhythm soothes him. He likes to hear the whistle up ahead, particularly at night, when it screeches through the blackness as the train gathers speed. "Specially in the South," he says. "There the firemen play blues on the engine whistle—big, smeary things like a goddam woman singing in the night." He likes, too, to sit next to the window, his chin in his hand, and, in a trancelike state, to stare for hours at the telephone poles flashing by and at the pattern of the curving wires as they alternately drop and ascend. Even at night, particularly if his train is passing through certain sections of Ohio or Indiana, he will remain at the window (shifting to the smoker if the berths are made up), for he likes the flames of the steel furnaces. "I think of music sometimes in terms of color," he says, "and I like to see the flames licking yellow in the dark and then pulsing down to a kind of red glow." Duke has a theory that such sights stimulate composition. "The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician," he says. "Things like the old folks singing in the moonlight in the back yard on a hot night, or something someone said long ago. I remember I once wrote a sixty-four-bar piece about a memory of when I was a little boy in bed and heard a man whistling on the street outside, his footsteps echoing away. Things like these may be more important to a musician than technique."

Reference: Visit website