Suggesting No True Feeling (James Lincoln Collier on Duke Ellington)

A note on terminology: In the interests of continuity between quotations and the main text, I have used the term "Negro" throughout this article. I would not have made this choice were there not many instances of Ellington himself using this term, and instances too of members of the jazz community in recent years using this term (notably Stanley Crouch and Wynton Marsalis). Needless to say, I approach Ellington and his music with the deepest respect, and any terminology is employed with the full force of that respect.

The biography is, in essence, both the most objective and subjective of books. The New Oxford American Dictionary defines "biography" as simply "an account of someone's life written by someone else"; as such, it sounds quite objective indeed. The facts, the figures, all merely recorded by another hand. Literary photographs, as it were, showing exactly what happened and when. But the Greek roots of the word "biography" give more insight into the purpose of these accounts: bios, meaning life, and graphia, meaning writing: "life-writing."

"Life-writing" is certainly what biographer and jazz historian James Lincoln Collier does in Duke Ellington, published in 1987. Throughout the book, which is, as all jazz biographies must be, an examination of both the man and the music, Collier emphasizes Ellington's power not as a musician or a composer, but merely as a strong "character":

He lacked the melodic inventiveness of a Bix Beiderbecke, a Johnny Hodges; many of his most famous melodies were supplied to him by members of his band. His sense of larger form, of musical architecture, was notoriously weak; the most persistent criticism of his longer works, where lack of form would be most noticeable, was that they were "rambling" and "incoherent." And... he did not have the exquisite rhythmic sense of a Louis Armstrong, a Benny Goodman, a Lester Young, that makes even the simplest and most direct of melodies swing..... How can this be? How can a man with no easily discernible gift produce a body of music so important?