Ellington and the opposites

In Ellington’s masterpieces – compositions such as The Mooche, Harlem Air Shaft, East St. Louis Toodle-O, Jack the Bear and Concerto for Cootie – we meet vibrant energy and deep thoughtfulness, passion, and control. Again and again, his music swings with intensity, yet also with natural ease. Just think, for example, of Cotton Tail. Opposites are convincingly, beautifully together – joined in a way we hope they can be in our own lives.

There are, in Ellington’s finest works, a true composition of roughness and velvet smoothness; a sense of the orderliness of the world and its confusion. Sounds are heavy, yet also winsome in their lightness. Sounds are wide, but also edgy; painfully thrusting, yet also lovely, suffusing, tender. There is surprise after sonic surprise; at the same time, there is the beat and an unshakable continuity of musical design. We hear poise, elegance, sophistication; we are also in the presence of a sincere, “primitive” wildness that comes straight from the gut.

It is honest, stirring music. Duke Ellington, by putting opposites together, gives us the opportunity to have emotions about the world and the human self that are grand and logical and beautiful. I love him for it.

Earlier jazz literature has given illustrations of the presence of opposites in Ellington, though without seeing the large philosophic significance of that fact. Consider, for example, these words by the British critic Vic Bellerby, taken from Peter Gammond’s classic 1958 anthology of essays, Duke Ellington: His Life and Music. Bellerby describes how we can hear in Black and Tan Fantasy, a masterpiece of the 1920s:

When Bellerby says this music is both “desperate” and “dreamy,” yet these elements are “fused together,” he is pointing to the opposites in Ellington’s art. And we can see also in his words evidence for the Aesthetic Realism idea that art has within it the answers to the problems we face in life. How, for example, can we have integrity, even as we experience emotions that are so contradictory – pleasure and pain, anger and love? How can our “protests” and our sense of the world as deserving “hymn-like” praise go together? But that, as we can see through Bellerby’s description, is exactly what Ellington and his musicians do!

And doing it, they have achieved something big, aesthetically and ethically.

Like of the world

True art satisfies a great need. Eli Siegel was the philosopher who explained that everyone’s deepest desire is to like the world on an honest basis. In art, the conflicts we find in ourselves and in the world are resolved. We go deeper into the truth of things; we see the inseparability of opposites; we experience beauty.

Ellington’s suavity, his sensuality, his poignant lyricism, his sophistication, his sly and often politically subversive humor, his advocacy of the grandeur, scope and dignity of “Negro” life, even his inspired roughness (a.k.a. his “jungle style”) – all of these are put forward as central to his musical personality. They are all there; importantly so. Yet the most pervasive thing in Ellington, in my opinion, and the thing which ultimately matters most, is joy.

This joy is philosophic; it is present when the thing we yearn most to see, we do see: the profound friendship that is possible between ourselves and the outside world. It is the joy told of, in his own way, by the great English Romantic William Wordsworth in the “Prospectus” to his poem The Recluse:

This joy is not limited to bright, happy things; it takes them in but goes further. It has more courage. A true artist – and Ellington was that – proceeds, even in the midst of heartbreak, on the belief that the world will provide the material needed to express oneself sincerely and beautifully. Art is always the victorious discovery of the fittingness Wordsworth proclaimed.

Ellington’s love for the concrete, visual world

Ellington, who grew up in Washington, D.C., studied the visual arts in high school and was talented enough to earn a full scholarship to New York’s Pratt Institute. As it turned out, he didn’t go to Pratt; he made his career in music. But the feeling he had for the beauty and power of the visual world – the world of actual people, objects, and events – never left him. And he wanted his music to convey it.

On jazz terms, he was aiming after what Berlioz, Liszt, Strauss, and Rimsky-Korsakov likewise aimed for. Bach, too, with his Capriccio on the Departure of His Beloved Brother. Or, closer to home, Gershwin with his An American in Paris. Ellington preferred the term “tone parallel,” which he coined, to the European concept of the tone poem, but the idea in essence was the same: to create compositions which hold together well on strictly structural terms, yet express what the world is like, in terms of a specific story or picture.

For a good deal of the twentieth century, especially in academic circles, a cool, structuralist philosophy of music prevailed. The idea that music was impelled by deep, large, and passionate feeling about the world and people was largely put aside. One could read journal article after journal article brimming with technical talk, and find an emotional desert.

Ellington’s view was very different. He wanted his music to be in touch with life always; to deal with and express his feeling about the concrete world. “In my writing,” he told Richard O. Boyer in a 1944 interview for The New Yorker, “there’s always a mental picture. That’s the way I was raised up in music. In the old days, when a guy made a lick, he’d say what it reminded him of. He’d make the lick and say, ‘It sounds like my old man falling downstairs’ or ‘It sounds like a crazy guy doing this or that.’ I remember ole Bubber Miley taking a lick and saying, ‘That reminds me of Miss Jones singin’ in church’.”⁷ And as Boyer reports it, Ellington then repeated nearly word for word what he said earlier: “That’s the way I was raised up in music. I always have a mental picture.” He wanted there to be no doubt where his aesthetic sympathies lay.

Among the compositions which illustrate this point is his Harlem Air Shaft of 1940. It is an amazing picture in sound of the sheer diversity of life found in a Harlem apartment building. But what is most noteworthy is not the cataloguing of the diversity of upper Manhattan life; it is how Duke Ellington “composed” it, bringing unity to that diversity through musically coherent form. That, I think, is what this piece is all about, and why it matters. It is his way of saying joyously, through the language of music: “World – bring on your diversity, your disorder. Bring on the way things get tangled up, and ugly with each other. We’ll find order there; we’ll find the unity; we’ll find beauty!”

In the Boyer interview Ellington tells us, “You get the full essence of Harlem in an air shaft.” The piece, he says, included musical images of barking dogs, an aerial falling down and breaking a window, “intimate gossip,” and energetic jitterbuggers dancing away – “always over you, never below you.” There are fights and lovemaking, someone cooking a great meal, and someone else, he noted, “doing a sad job” with a turkey. And, he said, “you can smell coffee.”⁸

How colorful this description is! Some of it, admittedly, may be exaggerated for the purpose of entertaining an interviewer. And Boyer himself clearly wanted to write an engaging piece. He gave it a striking title: “The Hot Bach.” But as I showed in a 2011 article for the Journal of Jazz Studies, what Ellington says is in the music, pretty much is there.⁹ Ellington was proud of his ability to get the tangible world into his compositions, and was right to be. It was a sign of his imaginative love for reality.¹⁰

Ellington scholarship, past and present

The Gammond collection of 1958, which includes the Vic Bellerby essay I cited earlier, has a historic place in Ellington scholarship. It was the first multi-author, full-length study of the composer. I am grateful for it; and in various ways, as I set this book in motion, I had it as my model. I wanted the authors to have diverse backgrounds. There are noted jazz musicians; professional critics; and musicologists, both academic and non-academic, including several not from the U.S. – which is fitting, since Ellington is an international figure. There is also a member of his immediate family: a nephew, Stephen James, who was in a position to see Ellington interact with his band in ways never before reported. I want also to take this opportunity to thank my associate editor, Evan Spring, whose keen eye for factual accuracy, and love for and knowledge of Ellington’s music, helped the book take form. I am hardly the only contributor to this volume who benefited from his careful observations.

Returning to the Gammond anthology, one of its most important essays is by Burnett James. Titled “Ellington’s Place as a Composer,” it asks where Ellington stands in relation to certain enduring artistic principles – principles not limited to jazz. Above all, James is dealing with the opposites of logic and emotion: of the need for music to have impersonal structural integrity, and also heartfelt personal feeling:

Notice the use by James of the phrase “all his best compositions.” Some fans of Ellington try to show their enthusiasm through blanket approbation. But this is not fair, and not accurate. Ellington toured constantly, performing on the average well over a hundred concerts or nightclub appearances a year, let alone dozens of dances and recording sessions. He had to snatch off-moments on a bus, or on a train at 2 a.m., to write his music. He had to oversee a myriad of complex business details, often on a daily basis. Perhaps no other composer ever worked under such physically demanding circumstances. Let us also remember that this was Ellington’s schedule, year-in, year-out, for roughly a half-century. Under these conditions, naturally some of his work falls short of the very highest standards. The extraordinary thing, given that exhausting schedule, is just how often superb music did emerge!

Ellington and rhythm

Rhythm is a key reason why Ellington’s best music is exactly that – superb! I think he knew it early on. His career-long focus on rhythm is clear enough from the title to one of his most famous songs: “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing).” It is a focus he shared with nearly all of the world’s great musicians. The legendary nineteenth-century conductor and pianist Hans von Bülow, for example, famously said: “In the beginning was Rhythm.” Charming words, and, in my opinion, a very respectful gloss on the Bible.

Why does rhythm deserve such intense praise? Because, as Eli Siegel explained in an essay titled “Conflict as Possibility,” through rhythm we can see the world as making sense.¹² In a true rhythm, we feel conflict as conflict, yet simultaneously as resolution.

In Duke Ellington’s powerful (and powerfully subtle) rhythms, contradictory qualities are set against each other: slowness and speed, acceleration and drag, jumpiness and glide. We hear momentum and sudden pause; the stop and go of things. We hear sustained sounds, and sounds that embody the fleetingness of things. We hear weighty, accented sounds, and sounds with enchanting lightness. The pace goes on in an unbroken manner, yet there are shocks that take us completely by surprise. There is the groove, whose steady repetitions give us confidence, and there are sounds which seem to come straight out of left field – sounds that remain eternally unexpected no matter how often we’ve heard the music.

An Ellingtonian rhythm can seem perfectly straightforward, yet complexity will nestle within, just waiting for us to notice it. Let me now give a technical example, which I find thrilling. It comes from my favorite work by Ellington, Concerto for Cootie, recorded in 1940, about four months before Harlem Air Shaft.

The example will be a single musical phrase: the famous seven-bar phrase that begins the trumpet’s melody. Incidentally, hardly anyone else in jazz ever used seven-bar phrases, let alone so gracefully.

It is well established that the core idea in this phrase, heard in measures 1 and 2, was a “warm-up” lick invented by Cootie Williams himself. Throughout his career, Ellington, with his keen ears, was quick to recognize the potential for compositional development in ideas percolating among the musicians in his band. Sometimes he gave formal credit to the band member who originated it; sometimes (not so honorably) he did not.¹³ At other times he would pay a player for the right to work creatively with his material. That was the case with this lick by Cootie (Example 0.1).

Example 0.1. Core thematic motif of Duke Ellington’s Concerto for Cootie.

Publishing rights administered by EMI Robbins Catalog Inc. (ASCAP) and Sony ATV Harmony (ASCAP).

It is a pattern of eight notes which divides naturally into groupings of seven and one. In measure 1, there are seven relatively swift notes that gently swing at a moderate pace. In measure 2, by contrast, there is a single sustained note. What did Ellington hear in this musical design that so intrigued and inspired him? The world as contradiction. Manyness, then unity; motion, then rest. But together we have one beautifully coherent musical phrase.

At first glance the phrase seems fairly simple, but there is a good deal of complexity just beneath the surface. We hear the complexity when we remember that rhythm cannot be isolated from melody; they interpenetrate in our experience of music. As we pay attention to this melody, the rhythm takes on new dimensions of liveliness.

Let’s see how. The first four pitches in this eight-note pattern are B♭, G, G♯, A. Then a C. Then – and this is the point to concentrate on – the final three pitches (marked “b” in Example 0.1) cover exactly the same ground as the opening four (marked “a”). As with the “a” notes, the “b” notes start with B♭ and end with A, but with a signal difference: the G♮ is now absent. As a result, there is a subtle “rush” as we push towards the final note in the phrase.

Remarkably – and this is the art of it – this compact, three-note version of the basic melodic idea (traveling from B♭ to A) is designed so that we experience it not only as an acceleration, but simultaneously as a “stretching out.” How does he do this? By making both halves of the phrase end on an A, but the second A is now a whole note, eight times longer than the first A.

So far I have only talked about two measures of music; still five to go! And at first, Ellington’s plan for developing that lick seems almost childishly simple. Measures 3 and 4 are in essence a repetition of what we’ve just heard. Measure 5 makes us feel that yet another simple repetition will be in store. But no – in this third presentation, when the final note arrives, it is not a sustained whole note as before, but passes by as quickly as the seven notes preceding it.

Technically, this short A – marked with an asterisk in Example 0.2 – is an elision. It is, at once, the conclusion of one melodic unit and the beginning of another. It is also the last note of one 7+1 rhythmic pattern and the initial note of another.

Example 0.2. Concerto for Cootie, opening trumpet melody, measures 5–7.

Publishing rights administered by EMI Robbins Catalog Inc. (ASCAP) and Sony ATV Harmony (ASCAP).

One further point to notice: this final group of 7+1 has a very different melodic contour than the earlier groups. They travel modestly, in tight circles: C as the highest note, G the lowest. Their compass is limited. By contrast, this fourth and last group swoops boldly down and up, spanning more than a full octave: from high A down to a low G♯. Yet what do we find right in its midst? C, B♭, G♯, A: the same notes in the same order (marked “c”) we heard back in measures 1, 3 and 5, only now an octave lower and shifted just a bit in rhythmic placement.¹⁴ It is wonderful, musically and ethically wonderful. Difference, this music tells us, is likewise sameness!

In February, 1925, soon after Eli Siegel won the prestigious poetry prize of The Nation magazine, the 22-year-old author was quoted in the Baltimore Sun on the subject of jazz, showing a respect for it as art without parallel for that time. He spoke of its “metaphysical ecstasy.”¹⁵ And in a column for the Baltimore American two months later, he continued to affirm the philosophic depth of jazz, pointing in particular to its rhythms, and its important, new, and thrilling junction of the subtle and the elemental.

When rhythm is great, I learned from him, it meets our primal need to see the world as both coherent and surprising. “As you hear sound you either get what you expect or you don’t,” he once said, “but since happiness is getting both what you expect and what you don’t, the best rhythms have both.” And in the essay, “The Aesthetic Center,” he gave a definition of rhythm that encompasses rhythm as it can be felt anywhere: “Rhythm is any instance of change and sameness seen at once.”¹⁶

The seven-bar phrase I’ve been considering from Concerto for Cootie is just the merest sample of the rich banquet of great rhythms we meet in the work of Duke Ellington. Such rhythms always show technical finesse, in the mathematical sense of the word technical. Yet the math is far from cold; great rhythms arise from, and also make for, great emotion. Great rhythms embody our deepest hopes. As Eli Siegel pointed out, to like life we need to find surprise in it, a sense of freshness and discovery; yet we also yearn for continuity, integrity, stability. We suffer when we lack either. The same person who feels bored at 2 p.m. can feel at 4 p.m. tossed around senselessly. He can feel, “When will this ever be over?” – yet moments later, say, as if it were the complete truth about the universe, “Nothing ever lasts.”

If this kind of split feeling was all life could provide – contradiction without coherence – a person would be justified in having a fixed contempt for the world. But Concerto for Cootie, and all music with true and powerful rhythm, gives the lie to that contempt. It has us experience a world we honestly can applaud. This ultimately is why we care for Ellington, and why we care for music. We want to know the truth about the world, and we want to feel that when we meet the truth, it will have beauty in it. Great composers and performers give us evidence that this is so – evidence we feel with physical immediacy.

The world is present – yet we can diminish it

In the lengthy New Yorker portrait of Ellington by Richard O. Boyer quoted earlier, we find evidence that during Ellington’s lifetime some people did sense the philosophic importance of his work. For example, Boyer reports how in 1939, during Ellington’s second tour of Europe, his music was talked of in Paris as revealing “the very secret of the cosmos” and expressing “the rhythm of the atom.” Boyer tells also of how the poet Blaise Cendrars enthusiastically declared: “Such music is not only a new art form, but a new reason for living.”¹⁷ Yes, it is! And because Ellington’s music has in it a new way to make sense of the world’s contradictions – a new way of revealing a structure in the world that we can honestly esteem – then to say it gives us “a new reason for living” is only right.

Composers are not always the best judges of their own work, and sometimes Ellington did not see clearly enough the size of his own creative achievements. For example, at times he reworked masterpieces in ways that weakened them. Not always, of course; I think the 1937 rewrite of Birmingham Breakdown is even stronger than the 1926 original. I also think the mid-30s revisions of Black and Tan Fantasy and East St. Louis Toodle-O are important in their own right, casting valuable new light on the originals.

But what happened to “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)” is a different story. In the 1932 Brunswick recording, there is one of the very greatest musical effects in all of modern music. It happens at the coda. Until then, the piece has been hard-driving, edgy, thrusting – sharp and definite. The key rhythmic pattern has been a $$ figure played eight times in a row in a dynamic cross-rhythm that conflicts with the underlying $$ beat: Doo-wah, doo-wah, doo-wah, doo-wah, doo-wah, doo-wah, doo-wah, doo-Wah! Then at the coda, the brass continue that relentless $$ pulse, but suddenly they are all alone. The rhythm section has dropped out. The brass now pulse 40 times in a row – 5 times longer than before – and on just a single chord: a tonic A♭6. What a difference this makes! What up to now has been edgy and insistent is suddenly transformed into its very opposite, while remaining audibly the same figure. The brass pulse – do they ever! – but simultaneously engage in a smooth decrescendo. As a result, we meet both ongoing energy and the world as yielding, hazy, growing faint. The music seems to spread out horizontally into space, to dissolve into distant memory. Yet, as we are equally aware, it’s exactly the same $$ figure!

This is great rhythm. We are experiencing reality, at the same time, as hard and soft, energetic and calm. It is as beautiful, I believe, as anything in Ellington.¹⁸ Unfortunately, nearly all later performances of the composition sacrifice this amazing coda. They push forward loudly to the end. The result is something shallower, more blatant, as that mysterious 40-fold repetition of the tonic chord is no longer to be heard.

To my ear, it is a great loss. We seem to be experiencing a less profound world, a less surprising world, a world with less cohesion among its elements. If I am correct, a question then arises: Why did it happen?

No one fully knows. Certainly the practical, down-to-earth Ellington saw a need to keep up with the times, and mostly these rewrites occurred during a hard-swinging period in jazz history when audiences expected those kinds of driving endings. Even so, perhaps this is not the complete story. We ought to consider whether here, and in some other rewrites, Ellington, without consciously intending to do so, made decisions which lessened the power of his music.

As I said earlier when I spoke about myself and what I learned from Aesthetic Realism, it is essential for a person to learn about the fight we all have between respect and contempt. “There is a disposition in every person,” wrote Eli Siegel “to think he will be for himself by making less of the outside world.”¹⁹ Duke Ellington, I believe, could prefer in his weaker moments something smooth over something authentically challenging; the attractive surface to the puzzling and mysterious depths. It is a universal temptation we can all succumb to.

As we honor Duke Ellington, one of the greatest artists ever in the field of music, it is important – and also kind – to ask: Which way of meeting the world and thinking about people supported the best in him, the art in him? Which way impeded it?

Ellington could, at times, have a mechanical way of flattering people – a false kind of smoothness. (There is an honest smoothness.) Often, in his last decades, he told audiences, “We love you madly.” Did he really mean it? One can say it was just a necessary part of “show biz.” But Ellington was an artist, and art depends on sincerity.

It might seem strange to say of a man who never attended a conservatory, and was largely a self-taught musician, that Ellington in his weakest music could fall into a formalistic manner, at once too stiff and too limp. This manner mars, in my opinion, many of his late suites and Sacred Concerts. In various ways, they can be too smooth, too predictable. Far too often their sonic textures are overly soft, lacking sufficient grip or edge, and there is an insufficient presence of forward-driving rhythmic impetus.

This excessive softness, smoothness, and predictability does not ask enough of an audience. How different are the best compositions of Ellington! As they please us, they simultaneously ask more of us, inspire us. They push against complacent, ego-imposed boundaries.²⁰ They embody the principle of respect, which, in terms of etymology, means “Look again!” Respect is an inherently critical state of mind; we can always see more meaning in reality. If we don’t find it, says the art of the world, it isn’t reality’s fault, but our own.

One can listen, for example, to Daybreak Express, Ko-Ko, The Clothed Woman, or The Far East Suite (a late work collaboratively created with Billy Strayhorn), and feel moment-by-moment on the edge of discovery. Repeated listening does not alter the feeling; it verifies it. The better one knows this music, the livelier and more surprising it grows, and the greater value we find in it.

And Ellington kept searching, with beautiful pride and modesty. Just days after he was honored at the White House on his 70th birthday with the Medal of Freedom, the highest possible civilian honor, he said in an interview for the Voice of America: “I think I am an up-and-coming musician struggling for a new note just like everybody else.”

Jazz and the principle of contradiction

As this essay draws to an end, I want to bring our attention once again to that early masterpiece, Black and Tan Fantasy, and relate it to one of the most important things ever said about jazz. This statement, which concerns the collective ethical impulsion out of which jazz emerged, is in an unpublished essay by Eli Siegel, likely written in the mid-1960s, titled “The Novel of Our Time and Jazz.”²¹ The chief thing in his essay is a showing that jazz has the power to bring together in a coherent and pleasing way the most primal opposites in human emotion: our being for and against the world; our respect and our contempt; our YES and NO to reality.

Jazz, the essay indicates, arose from the human need to integrate these opposites, and from the start has accented the idea of contradiction:

Through snarling timbres, off-key blue notes, and melodic phrasing and rhythmic patterns that can never be predicted, jazz says NO! to complacency and a phony sense of comfort. Jazz, as Siegel explains, does this in order to say even more fully YES! to the self that wants to see the world with justice, largeness, surprise, and accuracy. “Jazz at its best,” he writes, “contradicts … in order to say there is something more.” He continues:

Technically, Ellington’s 1927 Black and Tan Fantasy, through a welcoming of the principle of NO, comes to an even more powerful assertion of YES. Contradiction pervades this composition, as it does in The Mooche, written a year later. The “NO-and-YES” principle, in fact, is present so overtly in four early works of Ellington – Black and Tan Fantasy, The Mooche, East St. Louis Toodle-O, and Birmingham Breakdown – that, as Eli Siegel noted, these four compositions could be considered movements of a single symphony.

As Black and Tan Fantasy begins, the roughness of the brass, with their B-flat minor blues chorus, is followed by Otto Hardwick’s winsome and sweetly flowing solo on alto sax. So different these are, and how dramatic their connection! On the very last beat of the opening 12-bar blues, Sonny Greer crashes, yet immediately mutes, the cymbal. This sudden thrust of percussion separates these two ever-so-contradictory ways of feeling the world – the dark, ominous way, and the charming, brightly yearning way – even as it joins them.

So much happens in the middle of this work, including a bouncy passage for two clarinets and a very humorous solo by Joe “Tricky Sam” Nanton, in which he imitates the neighing of a horse. Then there’s the great conclusion, which shows the principle of contradiction in yet another form. This is now a B-flat major blues, until it cadences by quoting Chopin’s famous “funeral march.” Miley’s horn, throughout this blues chorus, is at once intense and easy: insisting on the rough blue notes that contradict the major key, but with a rhythm that bounces. His trumpet is in a triumphant register, but played with a mute, so that impediment is simultaneously honored.

And that tone of Bubber’s! – sweet and edgy at once, consoling and critical. We sense he’s talking to us, and we can ask: “What is Miley trying to tell me and why do I feel so good hearing it?” I think he’s saying NO! to smoothness, to our desire to be complacent. And that NO! makes for a great YES! which we hear as the band twice shouts encouragement to continue. It’s as if they’ve gotten more life through his insistent criticism, and they’re shouting “Amen” with all the gusto that affirmation can have in African-American churches. Even in the face of a funeral, this is a YES! to life; to the world; to God. And let us not forget, Duke Ellington was a deeply religious man.

Seeing jazz and Ellington truly

In my opinion, Ellington’s music, including the contributions of his magnificent band of soloists, is some of the most exhilarating and liberating music ever come to. So it is both astonishing and cautionary to look back a half-century and see how, while Ellington was still alive, his artistic grandeur made many people feel uncomfortable.

To take the most notorious example, consider the very public snub the Pulitzer Committee gave him in 1965 when they denied him their prize, despite the recommendation of their own panel of musical experts. Ellington’s response? – one we can all learn from. Said the 66-year-old composer: “Fate is being kind to me. Fate doesn’t want me to be famous too young.”

I admire Ellington for coming up, apparently spontaneously, with those words. Faced with elitism, he answered with authentic “class” – with the kind of honest smoothness I wrote of earlier. In this statement, Ellington gave a graceful, yet still sharply ironic NO! to the snobbery of the Pulitzer Committee, and in the process affirmed what the art of music really asks of us. Not pursuit of awards and fame, but love for the sheer possibilities of sound – the world of glorious sound not yet heard; a world of new value.

Ellington’s anti-snobbism can also be seen in his oft-quoted maxim that there are only two kinds of music: “Good, and the other kind!” It showed too in his happy desire to share the spotlight. What other major composer would program as the theme song of his ensemble a composition by another man – Billy Strayhorn’s masterpiece of swing, Take the “A” Train – and do so for decades?

Ellington, at various points in his career, did a great deal of coordinated musical composition; for example, early on with Bubber Miley. Meanwhile, in the actual moments of jazz performance there is “spontaneous collective composition” – that is, the principle of improvisation. Everyone in the band is affected by what everyone else is doing: each musician asserting himself while welcoming the unexpected ideas of the others.

This beauty is present in all of world music, but it is particularly obvious in jazz. And it has an ethical meaning: if people dealt with each other on that basis in everyday life, what a different and far kinder world we would have! There is an insistence on public sincerity, and likewise, an insistence on a deep, loving attentiveness to how others wish to express themselves. Jazz depends on reciprocity: on profound and accurate listening joined with a vibrant, personal, expressively just response. And so, the foundations of authentic social justice are to be found in the procedures of authentic jazz.

Ellington called himself “the world’s greatest listener.” This statement can seem like hubris, and surely some exaggeration is present. Ellington, in a candid moment, would undoubtedly have admitted that he often listened to music more deeply than, in everyday moments, to the people around him.²² Even so, I think there is in his words something we all can, and should, learn from. There’s a proud assertion of humility. There’s a man saying he’s proud to be affected by the world outside himself, including the people he meets and the musicians he works with; happy to yield to that world and have its meaning penetrate him deeply.

Ellington had the power to hear, within specific sounds, what reality-as-a-whole is like. He had the power to organize those sounds into wonderfully coherent structures unfolding in time – enduringly fresh and everlastingly satisfying musical forms.

We are his beneficiaries.