Duke at 100: An Ellington Centennial Page

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APRIL 29, 1899 ◆ WASHINGTON, D.C.

DUKE AT 100
An Ellington Centennial Page

Welcome ◆ His Life ◆ The Pulitzer ◆ The Centennial ◆ Twelve Records ◆ Ellington's Washington

◆ WELCOME ◆

Edward Kennedy Ellington was born in this city one hundred years ago, and I have been thinking about him all year.

My name is Warren Warfield. I am sixty-five years old. For thirty-four years, from 1958 until I retired in 1992, I taught band in the Washington public schools: junior high for a while, high school for most of it. I taught a great many young people to read music and hold a horn properly, and the ones who stuck with it, I taught to swing. I did that mostly with Duke Ellington's music.

I heard the Ellington orchestra in person for the first time at the Howard Theatre when I was seventeen, and I can't tell you the date, only that it was winter and I had saved for weeks and sat in the balcony. When the saxophones stood up together the sound went right through the seat and into my spine. I had been playing clarinet for six years by then. I went home that night and practiced until my mother came downstairs and made me stop. I heard the band four more times over the years, the last in 1971. Each time I went home and practiced.

Every one of my school jazz bands played Ellington. C Jam Blues first, because it's built on two notes and any band can learn it in a week and sound good doing it. Then Take the 'A' Train, Satin Doll and In a Mellow Tone. The students thought it was old music when we started. By spring they didn't think about how old it was at all. That's Ellington.

This page is my contribution to his centennial: his life in brief, the story of the Pulitzer Prize, a listening guide of twelve records for anybody starting out, and a page about Ellington's Washington, the city that made him.

◆

◆ HIS LIFE ◆

1899	Born April 29 in Washington, to James Edward and Daisy Kennedy Ellington, in his grandparents' house in the West End. A boyhood friend starts calling him "Duke" for his manners and the way he carried himself, and it sticks.
1906	Piano lessons, at seven, with a teacher named Mrs. Clinkscales. He would rather play baseball.
1914	Working as a soda jerk, he writes his first piece, Soda Fountain Rag. He's a gifted artist, too, and later turns down an art scholarship to Pratt Institute to play music.
1923	To New York, with a group of Washington musicians. Within a few years he is leading the band.
1927	Opens at the Cotton Club in Harlem on December 4. The radio broadcasts from the club carry the band across the country. Creole Love Call, then Mood Indigo in 1930.
1930s	It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing), Sophisticated Lady, Solitude, In a Sentimental Mood. The songs everybody knows, though most people couldn't tell you who wrote them.
1939	Billy Strayhorn, a young composer from Pittsburgh, joins him. For almost thirty years they write together so closely that even the musicians in the band couldn't always say whose was whose.
1940-42	The great band with Jimmy Blanton on bass and Ben Webster on tenor. In 1941 a dispute between the radio networks and the songwriters' society kept Ellington's own tunes off the air, and the band turned to Strayhorn's music instead, including *Take the 'A' Train*, which became the theme.
1943	Carnegie Hall, January 23: the premiere of Black, Brown and Beige, his long portrait of Black American history.
1956	Newport, July 7. Late at night, Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue, with Paul Gonsalves taking twenty-seven choruses on tenor, and the crowd on its feet. Next month he's on the cover of Time. People who had written him off stop doing that.
1965	The first Sacred Concert, at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. Two more follow, in New York in 1968 and at Westminster Abbey in 1973. He said they were the most important things he ever did. And the Pulitzer business; see below.
1967	Strayhorn dies in May. That summer the band records an album of his music.
1969	On his seventieth birthday, April 29, President Nixon gives him the Presidential Medal of Freedom at the White House, and throws him a party there.
1974	Dies in New York on May 24, at seventy-five. More than ten thousand people come to his funeral at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. His son, Mercer, takes over the band.

◆

◆ THE PULITZER ◆

In 1965 the Pulitzer Prize board had a music jury of three, and the jury recommended that Duke Ellington be given a special citation for the whole body of his work. The board turned it down, and gave no music prize at all that year. Two members of the jury resigned over it.

Ellington made a joke of it. Fate, he said, didn't want him to be too famous too young. He was sixty-six. People laughed, and the people who knew him said he was angrier than he ever let on. I was thirty-one that spring and teaching my seventh year, and I remember standing in front of my students and telling them about it, and not being able to explain it.

This year, on April 12, thirty-four years late and twenty-five years after he died, the Pulitzer board gave Duke Ellington a special citation, in honor of the centennial of his birth and his musical genius. I read it in the Post at the kitchen table, and my wife, Thelma, says I didn't say a word for about five minutes. I was glad. I was also thinking of a great many people who had waited on that institution, and others like it, for a very long time.

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◆ THE CENTENNIAL ◆

It has been a fine year to be an Ellington man. There have been concerts all year, here and in New York and everywhere else, the radio stations have been playing him, and young players are learning the music who might never have found it otherwise.

On his birthday, Thursday, April 29, eleven of my former students came to our house in the evening, the ones who still play, some of them in their fifties now, some of them teachers themselves. Thelma made a cake, a pound cake, which was what my mother always made. We pushed the sofa back against the wall and played C Jam Blues in the living room, and then Take the 'A' Train, and then the trumpet player from my class of 1974 played Come Sunday by himself, and that was the end of the evening, because nobody wanted to follow that.

If you've never really listened to Ellington, this is the year. Start with my twelve records. If you're in Washington, come see where he started. And if you're in New Orleans, where all of this began, go hear the Crescent City Stompers play the old traditional style that came before him.

Visitors since April 29, 1999

Twelve Records ◆ Ellington's Washington

Write to me at [email protected].
I answer every letter, though not always quickly.

Last updated September 6, 1999