Celebrating late jazz icon Duke Ellington on his 125th birthday

This year marks 125 years since the birth of jazz legend Duke Ellington. 

The bandleader, composer and pianist died 50 years ago. In the new book “The Jazzmen,” biographer Larry Tye sets out to discover the men behind the music of Ellington, Louis Armstrong and Count Basie. 

Ellington grew up in Washington, D.C. A confident kid known then as Edward Ellington, he once told his relatives that one day the world would call him “Duke Ellington, ze grand, ze great, and ze glorious Duke Ellington,” Tye writes.

“[Ellington] told lots of stories over his life on where he got the nickname Duke,” Tye says, “but I’m convinced that he dubbed himself Duke because he had a sense of his aristocratic bearing and of going on to do things that would have a royal impact.”

Ellington later made his way to New York City and into a long-time gig as a band leader at the Cotton Club in Harlem during segregation. All three men Tye writes about — Ellington, Armstrong and Basie — were born within five years of each other and thrived during Jim Crow.

“[Ellington] didn’t like to be categorized. He didn’t like to be pushed into one way or another way. He wanted to explore everything,” his granddaughter Mercedes Ellington says. “And you can see in his music: He wrote operas. He wrote tone poems. He wrote popular songs. He wrote suites.”

Book excerpt: ‘The Jazzmen: How Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie Transformed America’

By Larry Tye

Duke Ellington’s version of racial subversion, while comparably low-pitched and non-confrontational, was straightforward.

He held benefits for the Scottsboro Boys, nine young Negroes unjustly convicted of raping two white woman in 1931, and for causes ranging from ending poll taxes to housing the poor. He desegregated venues across the country, from New York’s Paramount Theater, Memphis’ Orpheum, and St. Louis’ Avalon, to swank Ciro’s on Hollywood’s Sunset Boulevard, dance halls across Texas and Louisiana, and the Academy Awards. Duke collected a closetful of honorary degrees, including from Yale, but none touched him like the one from Dunbar, the elite all-Black high school in Washington. His 1929 radio broadcasts from Harlem’s Cotton Club were, in the words of historian Philip K. Eberly, “the first important national propagation of black music by a pop group” and “the first encounter most white Americans had with black music.”

Beyond the patrons of posh nightclubs, anyone who turned on a radio or read newspaper reviews bore witness to Ellington’s pushback against racist norms. Long before universities instituted Black Studies programs, Duke celebrated Black achievement and pride through tunes like “King Fit the Battle of Alabam,” suites such as “Black, Brown and Beige,” theatrical productions like Jump for Joy, and even his sacred concerts. As early as the 1920s, he proposed renaming jazz “Negro music”; while that didn’t happen, it’s how he always described his genre. He insisted on remaining publicly apolitical and non-partisan, but nonetheless was a masterful if clandestine influencer. “I started my own civil rights movement in the Thirties,” Ellington said looking back. “I don’t think there’s been any doubt how we felt concerning prejudice,” he added. “But still the best way for me to be effective is through music.”

Negro publications and white ones hailed him as a “race leader” beginning in the 1930s, and NAACP chief Walter White and top lawyer Thurgood Marshall both considered him a close friend. But with the dawn of the civil rights era in the 1950s, activists demanded more. In January 1951, when he was due to play to a segregated audience in Richmond, Virginia, the local NAACP chapter threatened to set up a picket line. Duke canceled the appearance, but said “vicious” boycotts like that threatened the livelihood of Black bands like his. He was mad and, uncharacteristically, he showed it. “What about the toilets and water fountain[s] in colored waiting rooms, why don’t they do something about that? Why pick on entertainment investments?” he asked reporters.

Even as he fumed, he learned. Starting in the 1950s he pushed back against playing to the whites-only crowds he’d once accepted as a fact of life everywhere from the Cotton Club to the Southland, and in 1961 he took another giant step. From then on, he wrote this clause into his contracts: “The artist or artists have the prerogative of canceling this contract, if in any instance an audience is segregated because of race or color.” It wasn’t iron-clad – he made exceptions in members-only clubs in places like Texas and Virginia – but he was doing more than most Black performers.

The NAACP recognized those efforts in 1959 by awarding him its cherished Spingarn Medal, for “the highest or noblest achievement by an American Negro during the previous year or years.” (Previous winners included Martin Luther King Jr. and the Little Rock Nine, and the following year it was Langston Hughes). In 1971, Ebony would name him to its list of the “100 Most Influential Black Americans.” (Others on the list included Ralph Abernathy, who succeeded King as leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and Angela Davis, the Marxist, feminist, and activist.) The honor he likely relished most, however, was a Rochester newspaper’s commentary on the unifying magic of an Ellington concert in the divisive year of 1968: “Whites and Blacks mingled in a tribute that extinguished barriers of color or race; they stood shoulder to shoulder; they smiled at each other; some brought lightweight folding chairs; red-headed white kids played tag with spic and span black children around the pillars at one end of the plaza; white and black teenyboppers argued the merits of sax and clarinet. The magic of the Duke and his music made one people of them, one admiring people.”

But as momentum for civil rights picked up in the late 1950s and 60s, accusations and insults again were hurled his way, including from his son Mercer and other band members. Duke needed to be doing more, they said, and so this most private of men dipped his toes in, starting in Baltimore. In the winter of 1960, students frustrated with the snail’s pace of polite desegregation staged sit-ins demanding Negroes be served at whites-only restaurants and stores. Duke was performing at Johns Hopkins, and his hosts told him about the Blue Jay, a nearby eatery whose owner turned away Black students but said he’d serve a “proper nigger” like Ellington. Duke’s first reaction was a customary “no,” yet after listening to the young people’s persistent pleas, the sixty-year-old composer relented with a “let’s go.”

It was a turning point for the Blue Jay, the Hopkins students, and Duke. Newspapers across the country picked up the story, with headlines screaming, “Duke Ellington Joins Sitdowners; Can’t Eat,” and photos showing the rakish maestro being ushered out of the Blue Jay by a Baltimore patrolman. “We are happy that Duke Ellington saw fit to go into the restaurant and be refused,” wrote the Amsterdam News. “We are happy because when the restaurant refused Mr. Ellington, it had turned its racial bias full circle. Earlier, it had refused the little average ‘nobody’ Negro. But Duke Ellington is not a ‘nobody.’ Duke Ellington is a ‘somebody’ Negro. His name is almost as well known at Buckingham Palace as it is in Baltimore.”

His political narrative, like most chapters in Duke Ellington’s life, was rife with paradoxes. Was he the leftist his FBI file might suggest – supporting such alleged Communist or Communist-front groups as the All-Harlem Youth Conference and Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade? The House Committee on Un-American Activities also pointed fingers, while the Communist Party’s Daily Worker newspaper embraced the bandleader’s activities. The FBI’s thirty-six-page compilation did, however, include these lines from an article Ellington penned: “I’ve never been interested in politics in my whole life” and “the only ‘Communism’ I know is that of Jesus Christ.”

If anything, his politics increasingly skewed conservative and libertarian. Communism’s anti-religious bent were an affront to Duke’s faith. So was its anti-capitalism, because, said Mercer, his father “liked the idea of one day becoming rich.” He was for prayer in schools and against abortion on demand. In 1956 he recorded an ad for the US propaganda network Radio Free Europe proclaiming, “Jazz leaves lots of room for individual expression, and in the Communist-dominated countries, jazz and individual expression are two things that are not wanted.” And while he joined Count Basie and other celebrities in campaigning for Democrat Franklin Roosevelt in his last presidential campaign in 1944, twenty-five years later he warmly embraced Republican President Richard Nixon.

What seemed like contradictions were, in Ellington’s mind, dualities. Was his music jazz or Negro folk? Was his faith Methodist like his father, Baptist like his mother, or perhaps universalist? As for his politics, his conservatism fit naturally with his middle-class upbringing and his royal demeanor. Much as Satchmo was a mutineer disguised as a bootlicker, so Duke was a traditionalist masquerading as a hipster. He knew he couldn’t take up arms over every indignity, so he was strategic and at times Machiavellian. “I am a Negro and I brag about it every day,” he told a newspaper reporter back in 1941.

The Reverend King understood those paradoxes, said Marian Logan, which is why Duke and Martin embraced when they first met on that Chicago street corner “as though they [had known] each other forever.”

Adapted from the book “The Jazzmen” by Larry Tye. Copyright 2024 by Larry Tye. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.