It is inarguable that Ellington, an African American pianist and orchestra leader, headed up one of the most beloved ensembles of the big band era. Sargeant characterizes jazz as “primitive wails and thumps” exuding the “sincerity and naïve charm of primitive paintings.”Īmong today’s critics and scholars, though, the debate over jazz’s aesthetic depth turns on specific and nuanced, yet politically fraught, questions like, for instance, “Did Duke Ellington compose great music?” Jazz was born just over a century ago in a distinctly African American context-in rollicking ragtime bars, and in brothels, and on the streets of New Orleans’s Storyville-and at times its harshest critics have invoked the rhetoric of racial prejudice. When Professor David Schiff set out, a few years ago, to write his new book, The Ellington Century, which probes the musical mastery of jazz legend Duke Ellington (1899–1974), he knew that he was tilting against long-ingrained suspicions.
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