Highlighting Collaboration in the Music History Classroom through the Duke Ellington Orchestra

Abstract

Abstract:In order to strengthen perceptions of jazz as high art, early jazz criticism, and later the young field of jazz studies, often presented Duke Ellington as a remarkably strong individual composer by drawing parallels between him and canonical composers of Western art music. While this narrative served an important twentieth-century purpose in celebrating his art in particular and the broader arenas of jazz and African American music in a cultural environment that often positioned such music as primitive, unrefined, or overly commercial, it bears revisiting in a twenty-first-century context, especially as it does not easily account for Ellington's well-documented practice of collaborative composition. This study explores what Ellington's music can teach us about community, collaboration, loss, and healing through close readings of works as performed before and after the deaths of featured Ellington Orchestra members, drawing on multiple recordings of various solos in reference to the sidemen's written books to tease out the relationship between Ellington's notated and sounding music.