Duke Ellington’s 1927 debut at Harlem’s Cotton Club has long been positioned as a landmark moment in his career. During his initial four-year tenure at the club, the bandleader’s orchestra rose to national and then international fame. Throughout this period, the growing critical and public interest in Ellington was fueled by both the ever-increasing brilliance of his compositions and his incomparable orchestra, as well as the innovative promotional strategies of his manager, Irving Mills. The building blocks for this unique career, though, were formed in the musical and cultural contexts of Ellington’s youth in Washington, D.C.; in his early years as a sideman and bandleader in both Washington and New York; and especially in his educational immersion in the world of Harlem entertainment.

Edward Kennedy (“Duke”) Ellington was born in April 1899 and raised in a loving, middle-class household in Washington’s thriving African-American community. In Ellington’s youth, Washington had the largest black population of any city in the country, and his racial pride and strong self-image were greatly shaped by the mores of this city’s significant black middle- and upper-class communities. His Washington years also laid the foundations of his growth and interests as a musician and composer.

Ellington’s family had a passion for music, and he loved to listen to his mother, Daisy, play hymns and light-classical / parlor pieces at the piano, including such favorites as C. S. Morrison’s 1896 “Meditation” and Ethelbert Nevin’s 1898 “The Rosary.” Ellington’s father, James Edward (known as “J. E.”), played both piano and guitar by ear, and favored opera arias and popular songs of the day.¹ When young Edward was around seven or eight, Daisy arranged for him to take piano lessons with a Mrs. Marietta Clinkscales, but as Ellington later noted, “At this point, piano was not my recognized talent.”²He was also exposed to black church music traditions, with his father attending the local African Methodist Episcopal Zion church, and his mother attending a Baptist denomination. In both, Ellington heard a range of popular hymns and spirituals, such as “Abide With Me” and “Nearer, My God, to Thee.”³ This music was quite important to him and richly informed his later extended compositions, such as Black, Brown and Beige (1943) and his three Sacred Concerts (1965, 1968, and 1973), as well as numerous smaller works.

Ellington liked to joke that he had two educations – one in the pool hall, and one in school.⁴ In Frank Holliday’s poolroom, he was able to observe a cross-section of Washington’s diverse African-American community and to overhear both talented pianists and conversations between “the prime authorities on every subject.”⁵ By the time he was 13 or 14, Ellington had begun to seek out performances by many of the region’s talented ragtime pianists. Of particular importance was a family vacation in the summer of 1913 to Asbury Park, New Jersey, where he was impressed by a young pianist, Harvey Brooks, who taught Ellington a number of elementary ragtime techniques. After this, Ellington was greatly inspired to return to learning the piano. He later said, “I played by ear then,” but acknowledged that he “couldn’t begin to play the tunes” of the pianists he admired.⁶ At the same time, he worked at a soda fountain called the Poodle Dog Cafe. When the cafe needed a new pianist, Ellington offered his services, but quickly realized that “the only way I could learn how to play a tune was to compose it myself and work it up.”⁷ Ellington thus wrote his first composition, Soda Fountain Rag (a.k.a. Poodle Dog Rag), and this creative act was intimately entwined with both necessity and his performance aspirations. Other ragtime-influenced piano compositions followed, including What You Gonna Do When the Bed Breaks Down? (1913) and Bitches’ Ball (1914). As the Ellington scholar Mark Tucker has noted, early works like Soda Fountain Rag were not fully composed, “set” compositions but instead “consist[ed] of a few musical ideas that serve[d] as a basis for improvised elaboration.” The young pianist regularly adapted such materials in new combinations, tempos, rhythms, and styles. In this period Ellington acquired his nickname, “The Duke,” when a friend remarked on his elegant clothes and noble demeanor. After he was goaded into playing a number at a dance, Ellington also discovered that “When you were playing piano there was always a pretty girl standing at … the end of the piano.”⁸ Though he was training to become a commercial artist as he began high school in 1913–1914, Ellington had found the key inspirations for his ultimate career as a composer-musician.

The Washington experiences that left the greatest impact on his growth as a musician were the lessons he learned – both directly and through observation – from the city’s pianists. In addition, as Tucker has noted, Ellington found lifelong artistic and professional inspiration in the city’s black historical pageants, the elder professional musicians who encouraged his early bandleading endeavors, and the so-called “Washington pattern” of black composer-bandleaders.⁹ This “pattern” involved the pursuit of multifaceted careers (as bandleaders, performers, composers, and songwriters), a professional demeanor that commanded cross-racial respect, and the active promotion of black vernacular idioms through original compositions. Tucker points to the older musician-bandleaders Will Marion Cook, James Reese Europe, and Ford Dabney – all central figures in both New York and Washington entertainment across Ellington’s youth – as the three most likely career models for the aspiring pianist-composer. Following this “Washington pattern” across his career, Ellington pursued a diverse creative life that spanned work as a pianist and bandleader, work in musical theater and nightclub revues, and the composition of vernacular-based concert works.

Among the many musicians Ellington knew in his teens, the two most important were Oliver “Doc” Perry and Henry Grant. Both were generous, intelligent, “conservatory” musicians who took an interest in Ellington and impressed him with their deep respect for both formal (classically trained) and vernacular (“the cats who played by ear”) musicians. Perry, a ragtime pianist whom Ellington called his “piano parent,” taught the young pianist rudimentary ragtime and popular-music score-reading skills and chord theory.¹⁰ Grant taught music at Ellington’s high school and generously gave him private lessons in harmony, a gesture which the budding musician later felt “lighted the direction to more highly developed composition.”¹¹ Ellington’s associations with such supportive, older musicians also led to performance opportunities that set him on track for a career in music rather than art.

These early piano jobs further awakened his skills as a businessman, and a notable lesson came during a job as a substitute pianist for a socialite party. Though Ellington provided the actual entertainment, the original pianist, to Ellington’s amazement, still collected 90 percent of this engagement’s $100 fee. As he recalled, “the very next day” he “arranged for a Music-for-All-Occasions ad in the telephone book,” and Ellington-the-entrepreneur was born.¹² His entertainment agency provided both music – which led to the formation of his first band – and advertisement, with Ellington creating posters to advertise events.

In his autobiography, Ellington remarks that in his Washington youth “it was New York that filled our imagination. We were awed by the never-ending roll of great talents there … in society music and blues, in vaudeville and songwriting, in jazz and theatre, in dancing and comedy.” He adds that “Harlem … [had] the world’s most glamorous atmosphere. We had to go there.”¹³ Ellington further recounts a long list of Harlem’s entertainers as well as its famous nightclubs, ballrooms, and theaters. While he and his Washington friends were deeply entranced by the seductive folklore of black Harlem, across their teenage years in the 1910s, this world was only just coming into being.

In a 1925 essay, the famous African-American author James Weldon Johnson notes that, in the 1890s, “the center of [Manhattan’s] colored population had shifted to the upper Twenties and lower Thirties west of Sixth Avenue.” Johnson adds that the black population moved again in the next decade, this time up to an area around West 53rd Street.¹⁴It was during this latter era that New York’s African-American entertainment traditions first took shape in a variety of stage productions. The black pioneers in Broadway musical theater, the nascent recording industry, and the later dance band industry of the 1910s emerged around the West Indian-born comic Bert Williams and his vaudeville partner George Walker. In late 1897, the young composer-violinist (and former Washingtonian) Will Marion Cook approached Williams and Walker with the idea of mounting an all-black musical called Clorindy, or, The Origin of the Cakewalk. Cook’s hour-long show opened – without Williams and Walker, due to a prior engagement – in July 1898 at the Casino Theatre Roof Garden on Broadway at 39th Street. This production sparked an African-American entertainment renaissance that produced a decade-plus string of all-black musical theater hits. Another member of the Williams-Walker creative team was Will Vodery, who shared duties as musical director, composer, and arranger with Cook. The successes of Williams, Walker, Cook, and Vodery were not alone. In particular, James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson, in partnership with the performer Bob Cole and the conductor James Reese Europe, mounted serious competition.

Ellington was greatly impressed by the business acumen, cross-racial success, and race-oriented artistry of both Cook and Vodery. He gratefully acknowledged on numerous occasions that across the 1920s both men generously provided him with professional advice as well as “valuable” informal lessons in harmony, counterpoint, and orchestration. Even though the precise nature of these “lessons” is unknown, Cook and Vodery were undeniably important professional friends, role models, and mentors for the young composer across his early years in New York. Ellington’s emergence as a Washington bandleader in the mid-teens was also shaped by the broader cultural influence of these older musicians.

In 1910, black Broadway’s core members formed the Clef Club, the premier New York booking agency and trade union for black musicians. With James Reese Europe as its president, the Clef Club was at the forefront of providing music for a major dancing craze that ran from 1913 to 1919. Though black stage productions on Broadway waned during the mid-to-late teens, these syncopated orchestras maintained a prominent presence of black performers in white entertainment venues up through 1919. This white market demand for black bands spread to other cities with major African-American communities, including Washington, and provided many young musicians with opportunities both to perform in, and join, established ensembles, and to organize their own dance bands. Ellington was active in both areas, but even during this period of his growing success, he had his sights set on New York.

Ellington’s star-struck impression of black New York was centrally tied to Harlem’s rise as the epicenter of the black entertainment community. This uptown relocation came at the end of 1913, when Europe and other musicians broke from the Clef Club to found the Tempo Club, a second black booking agency. Whereas the Clef Club was based in Midtown, the Tempo Club was founded in Harlem. This shift was central to the birth of Harlem entertainment proper, and paralleled the influx of African Americans into this neighborhood. New York’s top all-black and mixed-race nightclubs similarly moved up to Harlem across the mid-to-late teens.

Ellington’s first personal encounter with the world of Harlem entertainment came in Washington in November 1921, after a friend dared him to play his rendition of the Harlem pianist James P. Johnson’s virtuosic composition Carolina Shout for Johnson himself. Johnson was impressed, and became a friend and supporter of the young pianist. Through similar Washington encounters, Ellington began to associate with other key New York musicians.

New York’s black entertainment renaissance of the 1920s took root on Broadway stages following the immense success of the 1921 all-black musical Shuffle Along, by the stage duo of Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles, along with the pianist Eubie Blake and his singing partner, Noble Sissle. This production was the catalyst for a second wave of all-black musicals across the 1920s. While Shuffle Along’s success increased white interest in black entertainment in Harlem, fashionable white audiences had ventured up to Harlem’s black cabarets from the very beginnings of the community’s nightclub scene in the mid-1910s. It was in this earlier period that a celebrated virtuosic piano tradition took shape in and around Harlem’s new nightclubs. By the early 1920s, James P. Johnson was the chief exponent of this early jazz idiom, which was known as stride piano. Johnson’s 1918 and 1921 piano rolls of Carolina Shout laid the foundations of jazz piano for a generation of pianists – including Ellington – who learned the work note-for-note from these rolls.

Despite the rising profile of Harlem nightlife, several major setbacks for New York’s black entertainment community occurred in the late teens. First, the 1917 New York arrival of the (white) Original Dixieland Jazz Band (the “ODJB”) marked the beginning of a nationwide white interest in jazz-related music (as distinct from ragtime). Shortly thereafter, a group of arrangement-heavy, white dance bands rose to prominence and began to distance themselves from the rough-edged, New Orleans-style, improvised “hot” jazz of the many bands that followed the ODJB model. These “sweet” dance orchestras included the bands of Art Hickman and Paul Whiteman, among others. An important turning point in the racial makeup of New York’s music scene occurred in 1919 when the Hickman ensemble displaced the black orchestra of Ford Dabney (a Clef Club member) at theater impresario Florenz Ziegfeld’s Broadway roof garden restaurant. After this, there were still a number of smaller Midtown/Broadway nightclubs and dance halls that featured black jazz-oriented bands. By the early 1920s, Harlem nightclubs began to feature both small bands and the aforementioned piano performers. Within time, these bands were also backing ever more elaborate floorshow revues. By the mid-1920s, many of these nightclub revues aspired to be just as lavish as their Broadway stage counterparts, and this ambition led to larger orchestras and the rise of black big band jazz. This is the precise context of Ellington’s rise to fame.

Ellington first traveled to New York in February 1923. He and his friends, drummer Sonny Greer and saxophonist Otto Hardwick, had been hired as backing musicians for the clarinetist Wilbur Sweatman’s engagement at Harlem’s Lafayette Theatre. During their short stint with Sweatman, Greer, Hardwick, and Ellington circulated among Harlem’s entertainment community, and most particularly James P. Johnson’s social circle. Ellington was soon introduced to several musicians who later joined his first New York bands, including trumpeter James “Bubber” Miley and trombonist Joe “Tricky Sam” Nanton. After their money and gigs ran out, Greer, Hardwick, and Ellington headed back to Washington. By the summer of 1923, however, they returned with the band of banjoist Elmer Snowden. After several minor fiascos and a spot of good luck, Snowden’s band landed a prime spot at Barron’s Exclusive Club up in Harlem. While Ellington largely played for dancers at Barron’s, he had the opportunity to work as a rehearsal pianist for the Connie’s Inn revues (also in Harlem), an engagement that launched his education on the workings of Harlem’s burgeoning musical revue tradition. By late summer, he had also partnered with the lyricist Jo Trent in a new songwriting venture. In the fall of 1923, Snowden’s orchestra relocated to the Hollywood Club (on 49th Street near Broadway), a small Midtown venue popular among white musicians and Broadway celebrities. Ellington quickly assumed control of the band, and the venue’s name changed not long after to the Kentucky Club. The Washingtonians, as they were called, soon began to develop a more “hot” sound with the addition of such new band members as Miley and Nanton.

Ellington’s early, pre-Cotton Club compositional efforts from this period ideally reflect the entire breadth of mid-1920s black entertainment trends. Through his partnership with Trent, Ellington hoped to break into the lucrative songwriting business of black Tin Pan Alley. The composer was indeed quickly befriended by such influential black songwriters as Maceo Pinkard. Pinkard notably arranged for the Washingtonians’ first recording session, which included such early Ellington-penned instrumental compositions as Rainy Nights and the train-themed Choo Choo.¹⁵ While fairly routine fare for the day, these early recordings do exhibit small innovative details – and the distinctive instrumental voices of his band members – that were later transformed into hallmarks of Ellington’s work for the Cotton Club. With this future in mind, it should be noted that the Trent-Ellington partnership contributed several songs – such as “Jim Dandy,” “Jig Walk: Charleston,” and “Deacon Jazz” – to a new stage revue, Chocolate Kiddies. This production was meant to emulate the success of two earlier nightclub revues, the 1922 Plantation Revue and the 1922–1923 Plantation Days, both of which went on to Broadway stage runs and lucrative European tours (Chocolate Kiddies only accomplished the latter). Ellington was equally successful in the dance band realm, and during this initial foray to New York, his Washingtonians even entered the nascent medium of radio through local broadcasts from the Kentucky Club. The band additionally began to pursue vaudeville work. In sum, these various career developments illustrate Ellington’s growing abilities to navigate the increasingly fluid boundaries between dance bands, Tin Pan Alley song publishing, the record industry, radio, and New York nightclub and stage entertainments.

In mid-to-late 1926, Ellington began his professional association with Irving Mills, a well-connected white music publisher, impresario, and talent manager.¹⁶ Together they built the Ellington orchestra into one of the top dance orchestras of the day, black or white. Through his diligent and persistent promotion of the bandleader across the late 1920s and 1930s, Mills was able to advance Ellington’s career up a ladder of ever more prestigious accomplishments. The end goal of these efforts can be seen in Mills’s 1930s advertising manuals, which boldly demand that promoters “sell Ellington as a great artist, [and] a musical genius whose unique style and individual theories of harmony have created a new music.”¹⁷ This “musical genius” image had its roots in Ellington’s early years with Mills, over 1926 and 1927, when the bandleader was finding his unique voice as a composer. This individuality partially emerged in a number of mid-1926 recordings, but it is with the November 1926 recordings of such instrumental compositions as East St. Louis Toodle-O and Birmingham Breakdown – and especially the April 1927 Black and Tan Fantasy – that his characteristic early voice as an orchestral jazz composer fully blossomed. Notably, these arrangements were recorded more than half a year before these same numbers became cornerstones for the exotic sound of his Cotton Club “jungle music.”

In October 1927, the Ellington orchestra joined the Lafayette Theatre’s Jazzmania stage revue. It was this engagement that caught the attention of the songwriter Jimmy McHugh, who was busy developing a new floorshow revue at the Cotton Club in Harlem. At the encouragement of McHugh (who had ties to Mills), Ellington and his band were hired as the club’s new orchestra. As the story goes, the Cotton Club’s gangster associates freed Ellington from a conflicting contract by telling a theater owner to “be big or you’ll be dead.”¹⁸

With his employment at the Cotton Club, Ellington had moved to the epicenter of 1920s Harlem entertainment. The club’s regular radio broadcasts – which were primarily features for the band – soon spread the bandleader’s music and name across the country.¹⁹ For the club’s glamorous revues, he contributed band arrangements for songs by the club’s white composing staff as well as his own distinctive compositions as instrumental background music for select show numbers. The band additionally provided music for dancing. Ellington’s new Cotton Club fame led to national and international tours for the band, work in various Broadway and Hollywood musical productions, and many other high-profile opportunities.

Like Cook’s and Vodery’s work in the teens, Ellington’s Cotton Club-era compositions and arrangements drew unusual cross-race critical praise for his abilities as a “serious” composer working in popular entertainment. From the late 1920s forward, this critical literature routinely positioned the 1926 and 1927 recordings of East St. Louis Toodle-O and Black and Tan Fantasy as both watershed moments for the bandleader and the first true expressions of his unique voice as a composer. These compositions represent ideal early examples of the “Ellington Effect,” to borrow the famous phrase coined by Ellington’s later writing partner Billy Strayhorn. In this expression, Strayhorn meant to capture both Ellington’s habit of composing and orchestrating specifically for the unique musical talents of his band members, and the distinctive greater whole that was produced when these individual instrumental voices sounded together in the performance of his compositions.²⁰ Both of these early compositions also immerse the listener in the haunting “jungle music” idiom of the Cotton Club era. As heard in these two compositions, the “jungle” idiom owed a great deal to the combination of Ellington’s orchestrations, the collective expression and instrumental voices of his performers, and, most especially, the growl-and-plunger brass contributions of Miley (who was credited as a co-composer on both numbers) and Nanton.

When the critic R. D. Darrell first reviewed the April 1927 Brunswick record of Black and Tan Fantasy, he commented on its “amazing eccentric instrumental effects,” emphasizing that such “stunts” were “performed musically, even artistically.”²¹ Five years later, Darrell noted that in this first listening he “laughed like everyone else over [the recording’s] instrumental wa-waing … But as I continued to play the record … I laughed less heartily … In my ears the whinnies and wa-was began to resolve into new tone colors, distorted and tortured, but agonizingly expressive.”²² This transformation in Darrell’s view of Black and Tan Fantasy – from “novelty” record to a more culturally elevated “composition” – ultimately laid a major foundation for later critical arguments that held jazz to be an art. This early Ellington criticism – which often provocatively compared Ellington’s rich “orchestral technique” to the music of such classical composers as Igor Stravinsky and Frederick Delius, among others – was quickly recycled as promotional fodder by Mills Artists to reinforce Ellington’s growing public image as a “respected” composer. The English critic Constant Lambert’s 1934 book, Music Ho!, also played a major role in the journalistic reception of Ellington as a “serious composer.” Lambert notably states here that Ellington “is a real composer, the first jazz composer of distinction.”²³ In a related trend, from the late 1920s onwards, there were regular press accounts of Ellington’s social and professional encounters with classical musicians – such as his widely reported 1932 invitation from the noted composer Percy Grainger to have the Ellington band perform in a lecture-demonstration in Grainger’s New York University music appreciation class. With such favorable publicity, Ellington’s music came to be positioned as the very definition of new, culturally elevated “jazz composition.”

As Tucker has argued, the originality of a number like East St. Louis Toodle-O was only achieved after Ellington’s “long experience playing Tin Pan Alley pop songs, hot jazz numbers, and the blues.” In finding his own voice, he “had evoked a style that drew upon all these genres, as well as African-American folk music, both secular and sacred … But in a way, even before setting foot in the Cotton Club door, Duke Ellington had arrived.”²⁴ As Tucker further emphasizes, the bandleader’s early years at the Cotton Club formed the “final important phase of his musical education” through his on-the-job immersion in the production processes of the club’s floorshow revues.

Early and mid-century highbrow–lowbrow cultural rhetoric regularly insisted upon rigid distinctions between the spheres of art and entertainment, with the former field retaining great cultural privilege and status, and the vast latter arena being typically viewed (from above) as a cultural wasteland. What is unusual in early Ellington criticism is the readiness of his proponents to characterize him as a “real composer” and to compare his arrangements and compositions to the work of revered classical composers. Such loosely supported comparisons of jazz and classical compositions were key elements in these efforts. While such cultural rhetoric proclaiming the art of both jazz and Ellington’s music was clearly advantageous for his career, and while his early Cotton Club years were central to his training, growth, and fame as a composer, Ellington himself found earlier models for appreciating the art of black popular music – and ultimately jazz – in the work and professional ideologies of his Harlem entertainment mentors and peers. In this tradition, popular music could indeed aspire to be artful entertainment.