April is Jazz Appreciation Month. Often referred to as the most uniquely American style of music, and even the original American art form, jazz is inextricably linked to African American history and culture. This month, we celebrate jazz and honor its most famous practitioners, including a man called Duke. 

A pivotal figure in jazz, Duke Ellington was a musical pioneer who generated an extensive body of work over his 50-year career, composing over one thousand arrangements. Best known as an originator of “big band” jazz, his accolades and awards are many and his impact is far-reaching. 

Ellington was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Richard Nixon. Upon his passing, President Nixon released a statement that “. . . the wit, taste, intelligence, and elegance that Duke Ellington brought to his music have made him, in the eyes of millions of people both here and abroad, America’s foremost composer. We are all poorer because the Duke is no longer with us.” 

Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington was born in 1899 in Washington, D.C., then home to the nation’s largest urban African American population. Both of Ellington’s parents played the piano and enrolled him in lessons at age seven. He quickly showed early signs of what would become an unequaled talent for jazz melody. Heavily inspired by blues and ragtime pianists during his adolescence, Ellington was playing professionally as part of a small jazz band in Washington by the time he was 17. He was a hit as a piano player and a composer, and soon moved to play in the bright lights of New York City.

Ellington formed his own band, the Washingtonians, who secured a regular engagement at Harlem’s famous “whites-only” Cotton Club in 1927. This was a major turning point in Ellington’s career, as Cotton Club performances were broadcast almost nightly, bringing his music to wider audiences. At the same time, however, African American performers had to enter the club through its back doors and couldn’t interact with white customers. 

Released in 1932, his song “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)” became the anthem of the nation’s Swing Era. Ellington and his orchestra soon were internationally famous—and decided to take their show on the road. Beginning in the 1930s, Ellington and his band dazzled audiences across the United States and Europe. 

Despite their popularity and fame, the band faced racial discrimination everywhere they went. When they traveled in the South, Ellington had to hire a private rail car to avoid the crowded, poorly maintained cars on “colored-only” trains. Restaurants refused to serve his all–African American ensemble. During a tour of the United Kingdom in 1933, the band scrambled to find boarding homes in London when hotels turned them away because they were Black.

Ellington used his growing influence to support the struggle for racial justice. He demanded that the dance halls he played provide equal access to African American youth, and held benefit concerts for the Scottsboro Boys, nine African American adolescents falsely imprisoned for rape in 1931. Eventually, he refused to play for segregated audiences. 

He believed in the power of African American excellence to subvert the negative stereotypes popularized by blackface minstrelsy. His extraordinary talent silenced racist beliefs that African Americans were inferior or unintelligent and derogatory comments that African American music was “jungle music.” He garnered the kind of recognition and respect previously reserved solely for white composers.

For Ellington, music was a persuasive and more palatable form of activism. He used his compositions to introduce white audiences to stories of racial injustice and highlight the beauty and challenges of African American life. 

“You can say anything you want on the trombone, but you gotta be careful with words,” he said in 1944. Later, he wrote, “What we could not say openly, we expressed in music.” 

On January 23, 1943, at Carnegie Hall, Ellington delivered a virtuoso performance of his most impactful work, “Black, Brown and Beige: A Tone Parallel to the American Negro,” for an audience that included both celebrities like Frank Sinatra and working-class African Americans. They all listened, captivated, as Ellington’s music expressed the complexity of the African American experience, from the horrors of slavery to the cultural renaissance and activist struggles of the 1920s, 30s, and 40s.

When big bands declined in popularity after World War II, Ellington used the royalties he earned from composing to financially support his bandmates. But he wasn’t out of the spotlight for long. His triumphant performance at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1956 reminded the world of his prodigious abilities. In the 1960s and 1970s, Ellington also performed as a “jazz ambassador” on cultural diplomatic missions for the U.S. State Department. 

Ellington’s music consistently reflected his strong beliefs. When asked about composing a civil rights work in the 1960s, he famously replied, “I did my piece more than 20 years ago when I wrote Jump for Joy.” The all-Black musical revue, he later said, was “. . . done on a highly intellectual level. No crying, no moaning, but entertaining, and with social demands as a potent spice.” 
 
On May 24, 1974, Ellington died of lung cancer in New York City, leaving behind a remarkable body of work. Among his credits are hits like “In A Sentimental Mood,” “Sophisticated Lady,” “I Got It Bad (And That Ain’t Good),” “I’m Beginning To See The Light,” “Prelude To A Kiss,” and “Satin Doll.” Today, he is recognized as one of the greatest jazz composers of all time and one of the most significant cultural figures in American history.

 The Museum has an extensive collection of items related to Ellington’s life and career, including a print of the 1929 short film Black and Tan Fantasy, which stars Ellington and is based on his song of the same name, a 1938 program and menu from the Cotton Club with a large illustration featuring Ellington at his piano, and a playbill of Ellington’s Sophisticated Ladies from the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre. This month, the 125th anniversary of the Duke’s birth, we are honored to share these treasures with the world.

Image Credits: 
All images collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.