Attack the unassailable: Duke Ellington

(1 Isn't Ellington's overbearing legacy becoming a problem? Instead of "1920's Jazz" we have "Louis Armstrong"; instead of "bebop" we have "Charlie Parker; and now, instead of "big-band jazz" we have "Duke Ellington." None of this advances rounded understanding.

(2 So did he rip off band-member riffs and claim them as his own compositions or not? It's at least a complex question.

(3 Was he eminently fair to Billy Strayhorn or not?

(4 Don't people cut the "Sacred Concerts" too much slack these days?

(5 Whatever Duke's ecumenical attitude, cozying up to Richard Nixon was too much.

The only thing that strikes me as being slightly negative about Ellington is that the constant bonhomie, the "everything's swinging" attitude, sometimes went too far. He probably did as much for black pride and race relations in the US as anyone, but he was famously averse to any overt confrontation or causing offence - I don't mean he should have joined the black panthers, but there were times especially post-war when he could have made a bit more noise about things. Which was, of course, his choice to make, and perhaps he was more effective being the acceptable face of black culture. And finally, he was revered by hotheads like Miles and Mingus for good reasons. Did anyone ever seriously have a bad thing to say about him?

Johnny Hodges, for one, quit the band over songwriting credit.

I haven't yet read David Hajdu's Lush Life, and will defer to anyone who has regarding Ellington's relationship with Strayhorn. If nothing else, "Take The A Train" must have been a cash cow for Strays. What were publishing royalties like back then?

Yes, Duke has been cannonized, most especially in the Ken Burns series, but he was awarded his genius status early. Ellington himself was charmingly, if not convincingly, self-deprecating.

And yeah, that image of a bloated, drug-fuzzed Duke stumbling uninvited into the White House to demand a DEA badge from Tricky Dick is just too painful.

Ha! Classic.

I'd recommend starting with this.

We've done the "my first Ellington" topic before, haven't we? The Far Eastern Suite would be my choice, or the Proper 4CD set for all the tunes that made him famous.

(and yes, people cut The Sacred Concerts entirely too much slack. I say this having performed them several times - ouch)

'defend the indefensible' was always poor thread phrasing regarding ppl who are praised and liked by critics and consumers (like dylan, say). I don't think 'attack the unassailable' is quite there either.

''This just proves the point I made at another thread: Duke is probably the only artist about whose music no one has a bad thing to say.''

I don't know abt that Tuomas. I think plenty of ppl would if they heard his music but much of his output was made pre-war so many ppl haven't bothered to chase it up (I've been mostly working backwards with jazz, got lots of 'free' stuff now but I've getting some reish's from blue note and so on). ppl who generally dislike jazz don't chase any of it up and spend any time with it, i reckon (prove me wrong please).

More of Adorno's essays on music have just been published (including new ones on jazz so i'd be interested if he actually gave any examples of the jazz that he hated, from the review it doesn't look like he singled out anyone like duke).

Well, okay, of course people who don't like jazz in general won't like the Duke, but then they're probably dissing jazz as whole, not Duke in particular. Among those who actually are interested in jazz, I've never heard or read anyone say "I don't like Duke's music", and that's something you can't say about Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, or even Louis Armstrong. This isn't to say Duke's music is bland, it just seems to appeal to every sort of jazz fan.

I think there's a point about the critical reputation of both Miles and Ellington that they are the brand names on large bodies of astonishing work, but it is work of a collaborative nature and the extent of their own responsibility for the quality of that work is very problematic. You can make a good case for them actually being minor partners in the work being produced under their name, at least at some stages in their careers.

Even critics rarely get to grips with this, partly because of the intrinsic complexity of the subject matter, partly because of deliberate obfuscation by the main players and partly because of our desire for heroes. Even where, say Strayhorn or individual musicians contribution is fairly undisputed, some kind of sleight-of-hand rationale can be found to justify why Duke/Miles deserves a giant chunk of the credit. This rarely works as powerfully in reverse -Strayhorn/Blanton/Webster/Evan/Evans/Shorter/Macero etc are rarely given credit for anything beyond their indisputable personal contributions.

As far as Miles goes, I can't really agree there either. People split up Miles' work into different eras, according to who was in the band. Somebody like Shorter has writing credits on more songs than Miles does during the time they worked together. Critics talk about how his elliptical composition set the tone for that quintet. Critics worship Macero as one of the first electronic/studio composers, a revolutionary producer etc. There are box sets devoted to the collaborations of Gil Evans and Miles Davis. Anyone who played in Miles' band basically got a license to start his own band under his own name afterwards.

You're partly right, obviously we should be praising the Duke Ellington big band(s) as well as Duke himself. But there's another issue: in Duke's music I think the best thing are not the compositions but the arrangements, and he was responsible for them, no? The same could actually be said about Miles as well, and I think Gil Evans and Teo Macero have nowadays gotten the credit they deserve; it wasn't probably at the time those records were released, though.

I'd imagine there would be some people who would attack his actual playing and his small group appearances. Um, but not me. Money Jungle and the Coltrane/Ellington record are brilliant...his playing can be surprisingly modern, and even though he doesn't have a lot of chops he plays smarter instead of harder.

I think this is a matter of debate. Some people like the sound on Never No Lament, some people don't. With this reissue (as well as on the massive Centennial edition), RCA took a different approach to the remastering than they had done on the previous reissues. The previous approach (which is common in CD reissues of early recordings) was to simply lop off all the frequencies above a certain range. This causes most the hiss and crackle of the old recordings to disappear, but it takes the high end of the sound with it, causing the sound to lose clarity, brightness, realism, etc. I have many reissues that were remastered that way. The reissue on Never No Lament is different, and IMO, better. Instead of simply lopping off all the high frequencies, what they did was to only remove the high frequencies when there are no instruments in the original recording playing in that range. So in other words, during low-frequency passages, the hiss disappears - but it reappears somewhat on high-frequency passages, such as when the trumpets play in higher registers. So basically, they have made the tradeoff that you get a bit more surface noise in certain sections, but the recording has a lot more life and sparkle to it. Don't just take my word for it - the AMG review calls the sound on this reissue "stellar".

A case could be put that Miles was the junior partner in the vast majority the work for which he is most celebrated. I think that would be an extreme position but it is arguable. I'm not denying that good close-focus work hasn't been done trying to disentangle who was responsible for what, both in the case of Miles and Duke, but my point is that even well-informed critics who understand these things tend to revert to how things are branded in delivering career summaries.

This is a tentative theory, and I'd probably need to read harder and think harder about this stuff to satisfy myself beyond doubt, but I think there is an odd believing-two-contradictory-things-at-once thing going on here. Critics can conclude that "The Birth of the Cool" has more to do with Lewis than Davis, or that "Kind of Blue" has more to do with Bill Evans than Davis (and so on and so on throught to Marcus Miller) but in their summing up Miles's career will revert to an implicit assumption that Miles is responsible for all the work released under his name.

Perhaps one could go so far as to make a case that Miles was a junior partner in all the work for which he was most celebrated... but then one would have to believe that he was a very very lucky guy, to have been involved in so many pivotal moments in jazz without playing a major role in any of them.

This is a fact of language and life, not ILM! No harm intended.

I have more records by Miles Davis than any other artist and more of my favourite records are "by" Miles Davis than any other artist. I'm fascinated by the question of "how much does his career have to do with Miles being a great artist (which IMO he obviously was), how much is being in the right place at the right time, how much does it have to do with establishing a marketable persona that meant major talents playing difficult-to-market music could earn a living wage in his band, how much of it had to do with a CV (from playing with Parker as a teenager onward) that meant that being in his band would inevitably enhance a new talent's credibility and career, how much does it have to do with his personality, as talent spotter, as chance taker, as man who doesn't take shit from anybody, as bully, as charlatan, as liar, as appropriator of other people's work, as street operator, as egomaniac etc, etc. Any conclusions I may have drawn are provisional, fragile and subject to drastic alteration from moment to moment, so I'm not much interested in setting out a position I want to defend, I'm just saying, with no claim to originality, "you can look at things this way". I see parallels with Duke, whose music and life I admittedly know much less about.