On his 96th birthday Duke Ellington proclaimed 'beyond category' by critics of his great music

Jet, May 15, 1995 by Robert E. Johnson

Inimitable American composer Duke Ellington used the line linking his 1899 birth date to his 1974 death date and wrote over 5,000 songs. Some of them became classics that could be compared to music created by European composers like Bach, Beethoven, Delius, Haydn, Mozart, Tchaikovsky and Wagner.

As Duke's 96th birthday anniversary was observed around the globe with programs sponsored by the Duke Ellington International Jazz Society, the musical icon was proclaimed "beyond category" by some of his music critics.

Ellington once used the phrase to describe the great singer Ella Fitzgerald, says biographer Dr. John Hasse in his new book, Beyond Category: The Musical Genius Of Duke Ellington.

The legendary musician's acclaim was also noted in two recent books - The Duke Ellington Reader by Columbia University Assoc. Professor of Music Mark Tucker and Duke Ellington: Jazz Composer by music editor Ken Rattenburg.

"In the early thirties composers in the classical field began recognizing Ellington's talent," Tucker's book says. One was New York University Music Department Chairman Percy Grainger, who in 1932 "ranked Ellington as one of the three greatest composers in the history of music, sharing honors with J.S. Bach and Frederick Delius... Ellington, in fact, is a real composer of distinction, and the first Negro composer of distinction," the book adds.

During his 56-year career (1918-1974), the Washington, D.C.-born bandleader played before audiences in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, as well as the U.S. He received Grammy awards, honorary doctorates, and the highest civilian honors from the government of France. But he never received the most prestigious honor for American composers: The Pulitzer Prize. Ellington, then 60, responded with sarcasm: "Fate is being kind to me. It doesn't want me to be famous too young."

However, in 1969, President Richard Nixon awarded him the nation's highest civilian award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, at a special ceremony in the White House with the largest gathering of celebrities ever invited there to a private party. Nixon declared: "In the royalty of American music, no man swings more or stands higher than the Duke." The nation later honored him with a U.S postage stamp. In his lifetime, he is best remembered for composing and tailoring each part for a particular player. He explains:

"My men and my race are the inspiration of my work. I try to catch the character and mood and feeling of my people. The music of my race is something more than the American idiom. It is the result of our transplantation to American soil and was our reaction, in plantation days, to the life we lived. What we could not say openly we expressed in music. The characteristic, melancholic music of my race has been forged from the white heat of our sorrows and from our groping. I think the music of my race is something that is going to live, something which posterity will honor..." This will include such classics as Black, Brown and Beige, My People, Harlem and New World a-Comin'. Although Duke is best known for such hits as I Got It Bad (And That Ain't Good, It Don't Mean A Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing, Satin Doll, Mood Indigo, Sophisticated Lady and Billy Strayhorn's Take The A Train, he was proudest of his racial statement in his Play, Jump For Joy, which featured singer/actor Herb Jeffries and singer/actress Dorothy Dandridge. The anti-segregation musical drew protest hate mail from the South.

It was in the '60s when, according to Tucker, "many musicians who have even gone as far as to argue that he is the only great living American composer, that Ellington became more introspective and more openly religious." One of his earlier compositions, Come Sunday, is now included in the United Methodist Hymnal for church worshippers.

Calling himself "a messenger boy for God," he composed three concerts of sacred music, designed to fill cathedrals as was Handel's Messiah. The Third Sacred Concert in 1973 was performed at Westminster Abbey in London. He returned to New York and died of lung cancer on May 24, 1974.