Duke Ellington

His mother was the daughter of two people who had been enslaved, his father drew blueprints for the Navy, and both played piano, she parlor songs, he operatic arias. A childhood friend decided that anybody he spent that much time with needed a title, and called him Duke. The boy preferred baseball and sold peanuts at Senators games. At 14 he began sneaking into Frank Holiday's poolroom to hear the pianists, and in the summer of 1914, working a soda fountain, he wrote his first piece by ear because he could not yet read music. In 1916 he turned down an art scholarship. He left high school three months short of a diploma and painted signs, asking every customer who ordered one for a dance whether they had a band.

He took over Elmer Snowden's band in 1924 and on December 4, 1927 opened at the Cotton Club, where a weekly radio wire carried him out of Harlem across the country. He wrote or co-wrote more than a thousand pieces, most shaped to the three minutes a 78 would hold and to the players in front of him — Clarinet Lament for Barney Bigard, Jeep's Blues for Johnny Hodges, Echoes of Harlem for Cootie Williams. From 1939 he worked with Billy Strayhorn, whose Take the A Train became the band's theme. He kept pushing past the three-minute limit: Black, Brown and Beige at Carnegie Hall in January 1943, the Far East Suite, three Sacred Concerts, an unfinished opera. He kept the orchestra on the road for 50 years, paying for it out of songwriting income when the box office would not.

The engagement that made him was a whites-only room in Harlem where his band supplied what the trade called jungle style, and where Brunswick issued his records as The Jungle Band. In 1926 he signed 45 percent of his future to the agent Irving Mills, who then routinely put his own name on Ellington compositions. Billy Strayhorn joined in 1939 and stayed 35 years, arranging, rehearsing the band, sitting in at the piano and writing the theme song, and for years the publicity went out under Ellington's name alone. Ellington joked onstage that Strayhorn did the work and he took the bows, and he did not stop his publicists. Strayhorn, who was gay and easy to overlook, told friends how much it cost him. When the collaboration was renewed in 1956 it was on terms the younger man found better.

In 1965 the Pulitzer music jury put him forward and the board gave no music prize that year. He was 66, and said fate did not want him famous too young. The Pulitzer came in 1999, 25 years late. So did the truth about the record that revived him: Ellington at Newport, cut in 1956, was largely re-recorded in a studio the next day with crowd noise added, and nobody told the buyers. The real concert tape waited until 1999 too. More than 12,000 people came to the funeral at St. John the Divine. His son Mercer ran the orchestra for another 22 years. In 2009 he became the first African American to appear alone on a circulating US coin.

Duke Ellington's life against the full span of the corpus.

• East St. Louis Toodle-Oo song
  The band's first theme, built on Bubber Miley's growl trumpet 1926
• Mood Indigo song
  Later rebuilt at length for his first LP 1930
• Jump for Joy other
  A full-length revue on African American identity, 122 performances in Los Angeles 1941
• Black, Brown and Beige song
  Premiered at Carnegie Hall on January 23, 1943 and reviewed badly 1943
• Sacred Concerts other
  Three of them, from 1965 to 1973 — he called the work the most important thing he had done 1965
• Far East Suite album
  Written with Billy Strayhorn out of the band's world tours 1966

• 1914 aged ~15 Writes Soda Fountain Rag by ear while working at the Poodle Dog Café He played it as a one-step, a waltz, a tango and a fox trot so listeners would not notice.
• 1917 aged ~18 Forms the Duke's Serenaders and takes home 75 cents from his first date
• July 2, 1918 aged 19 Marries Edna Thompson at 19 Their son Mercer was born the following March. Ellington left the household in 1938 but never divorced her.
• 1924 aged ~25 Takes over the band after Elmer Snowden leaves
• December 4, 1927 aged 28 Opens at the Cotton Club in Harlem He had to grow the band from six pieces to 11 to get the audition.
• 1939 aged ~40 Billy Strayhorn joins, hired as a lyricist
• January 23, 1943 aged 43 Premieres Black, Brown and Beige at Carnegie Hall It began an annual series there and set the pattern of his long works being received coolly.
• July 7, 1956 aged 57 Paul Gonsalves plays 27 choruses at Newport and the crowd goes up It put Ellington on the cover of Time and gave him the best-selling album of his career.
• May 24, 1974 aged 75 Dies in New York of lung cancer and pneumonia at 75

• George Gershwin 1898–1937
  Composer who fused jazz, popular song, Broadway, and concert music into a distinctly American style. shared the Show Girl stage in 1929
• John Coltrane 1926–1967
  Saxophonist and composer whose technical and spiritual explorations transformed modern jazz. recorded a quartet album with him in 1962
• Frank Sinatra 1915–1998
  Crooner and actor whose voice and charisma made him one of the best-selling music artists of all time. recorded Francis A. and Edward K. with him in 1967
• Ella Fitzgerald 1917–1996
  Singer whose technical command and interpretations helped define jazz and the Great American Songbook. spoke at his funeral
• Martin Luther King Jr. 1929–1968
  Baptist minister and civil rights leader whose nonviolent activism ended legal segregation in America. dedicated the revue My People to him