Sarah and I spent the holiday week in London, where we took in many wonderful things, including two absolutely extraordinary art and theater events.

Kerry James Marshall: The Histories at the Royal Academy offers a well-curated overview of an important American painter active since the late 1970s. The galleries tell a gripping story, grouping the work within genre and period.

The Academy
Invisible Man
The Painting of Modern Life
Middle Passage
Pantheon
Vignettes
Souvenirs
The Painting of Modern Life II
Africa Revisited
Wake/Gulf Stream
Red Black Green

One of the “Souvenirs” celebrates famous musicians who died in the 1960s; somewhat unexpectedly included among more famous names is house favorite Booker Little.

And from “Painting of Modern Life II” there is a proud cop, a work dated from right after the buzzwords “defund the police” entered the then-current political lexicon.

Sarah had previously known Marshall’s work much better than myself, but I’m catching up, for I left the exhibit exuberantly clutching the related coffee-table book. (The only other occasion where I’ve made a similar purchase was at MOMA after a Gerhard Richter retrospective.)

There is quite simply nothing like seeing Shakespeare in London, and both of us were left reeling by the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Twelfth Night at the Barbican.

Director: Prasanna Puwanarajah
Designer: James Cotterill
Music: Matt Maltese

starring

Freema Agyeman (Olivia)
Michael Grady-Hall (Feste)
Gwyneth Keyworth (Viola)
Samuel West (Malvolio)
Daniel Monks (Orsino)

Once again I am left with the impression that this playwright from so many centuries ago wrote scenes that still manage to encompass all of human behavior today. Puwanarajah’s contemporary take is hilarious and profound. Quite literally: I laughed, I cried.

We’d both rank both activities as a “must” for those in London. Twelfth Night is on through January 17, Kerry James Marshall until January 18.

In terms of the American public’s interest in classical music, the Eisenhower and Kennedy years were the height, a time when many young virtuosos produced beautiful and even bestselling LP records while playing well-attended concerts all over North America.

Several of the most imposing and virtuosic postwar American classical pianists also suffered more than their share of bad luck.

William Kapell: born 1922; died at 31 in a 1953 plane crash

Julius Katchen: born 1926; died of cancer at 42 in 1969

Gary Graffman: born 1927; mostly lost the ability to play with both hands in later 1970s

Byron Janis: born 1928; derailed by arthritis in the early 1970s

Leon Fleisher: born 1928; mostly lost the ability to play with both hands in early 1960s

John Browning: born 1933; had many wilderness years starting in the 1970s

Van Cliburn: born 1934; a major career drifted off in the 1970s

Gary Graffman died last month at 97, and thus the last living link to this American era is severed. (The great Bella Davidovich was born 1929 and is still alive; however, she emigrated to America from Russia in 1978.)

In addition to his work as practitioner and eventually as teacher (high-profile students included Lang Lang and Yuja Wang), Graffman also published an 1981 memoir, I Really Should Be Practicing, which included reminiscences of conductors Toscanini and Szell, violinist Heifetz, and scores of pianists. Graffman admired Hofmann and Rachmaninoff on the concert stage, but felt more influenced by performances and advice given by Schnabel, Rubinstein, Serkin, and Horowitz (Graffman studied intimately with the last two).

In terms of his recorded legacy, perhaps the concertos of Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev are standing the test of time more than the solo repertoire. Sviatoslav Richter thought the Graffman LP of Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini (with NY Phil and Bernstein) was excellent, going as far to declare that he wouldn’t play the work himself after hearing Graffman.

At the time of his first ascent, Graffman did not program much modern music, and from this vantage point it seems rather a pity that so little midcentury repertoire is represented in his discography alongside conventional LP recitals of Chopin, Schubert, Liszt, and etc.: Indeed, the only American composer recorded by Graffman in the early years was the somewhat obscure Benjamin Lees. An amusing page from I Really Should Be Practicing confronts this topic head on:

However, I just now learned there is a terrific late entry, the Alfred Schnittke Piano Quintet, a great work, recorded in 1998 with the Lark Quartet. As this piece of introspective chamber music was not really a virtuoso undertaking, Graffman was able to coax his injured right hand into action, and the result was a sensitive and stylistically acute performance.

Footnote one: My old DTM post Write It All Down name-checks Graffman and Benjamin Lees. (“While Benjamin Lees is also in the Prokofiev to Bartók tradition of Sessions to Kirchner, most of what I’ve heard is a comparatively ‘easy’ listen with the composer making a direct and uncomplicated argument. (Perhaps Lees shares something with the Argentinian Alberto Ginastera.) Gary Graffman was Lees’s high-powered advocate, and Lees credited Graffman with good ideas for the pulsating Sonata No. 4 (1963).”)

Footnote two: Graffman made headlines in 1964 when he canceled a concert in Jackson, Mississippi. A chapter of his memoir is dedicated to this event, and while the whole story is complicated, the short version is simple: Graffman refused to play in a segregated hall. Due credit to Graffman for taking a stand, and apparently it was the beginning of some local change, for he was the first classical artist to cancel on a series that was already under pressure from the jazz and popular music community. (1964 NY Times article.) The memoir makes it sadly clear that Graffman’s booking agent, Columbia Artists Management (a major player in the industry until the Covid pandemic), did not support the pianist. After the dust settled, Graffman needed a new agent.

(In a related topic, there have been many recent cancellations after the renaming of the Kennedy Center to the Trump-Kennedy Center.)

In 2025, the most widely read TT post was The Greatest Jazz Piano Albums of All Time.

My best article was published offsite, about Slugs’ Saloon in The Nation, with the side TT post, “Interstellar Hard Bop” also being quite popular—thanks again to editor Shuja Haider! Also general thanks to Mark Stryker, who cheerfully looks at many of my posts in advance (including both the Greatest Jazz Piano Albums and Slugs’) and invariably offers something helpful before I hit “publish.”

The main contribution to posterity was assisting Billy Hart for his memoir, Oceans of Time. Jabali’s latest album Multidirectional is also quite excellent if I do say so myself; nice to see it on several “best albums of the year” lists.

Among the premieres were a suite of James P. Johnson piano solos newly arranged for Mark Morris, The Benny Goodman Sextet for clarinet, string quartet, + piano and a Prelude and Fugue. (The fugue is a swinger; Anthony Tommasini suggested to me after, “Nice to hear the Swingle Singers” and I responded, “Exactly.”) Recorded but not released yet is Four Hand Piano Sonata for Hiroko Sasaki and myself alongside my four hand arrangements of Vivaldi and Ravel; also in the can is a set of Pop Songs by Matthew Guerrieri (this is the first time I have recorded the music of another composer “as is”). There were two nice European tours; the first was trio with Thomas Morgan and Kendrick Scott plus several few dates solo piano with the curated program “Into the Dark,” while the second tour was six gigs duo with Mark Turner. In New York, I played trio with Buster Williams and Billy Hart at Birdland and led a sextet with Jonathan Finlayson, Sam Newsome, Jacob Garchik, Peter Washington, and Kush Abadey at the Village Vanguard.

The wheel turns. In 2025, the two famous pianists I studied with as a teenager both passed away, Hal Galper and Jim McNeely.

Holiday music suggestion: Bach and more Bach. Welcome Alex Ross to Substack! Currently listening to Ross’s recommendation of an extraordinary new B Minor Mass by Pygmalion conducted by Raphaël Pichon.

2025 photos (taken by me unless otherwise noted)

Close encounter with a large turtle in Willow Grove, PA—Coffee cup in frame for size

Gig calendar

December 27, Vortex in London with Calum Gourlay and David Ingamells

January 2 + 3, Jazz Genius (new club in NYC) with Joe Martin and Billy Hart

January 8, The Century Room in Tucson with Colin McIlrath and Arthur Vint

January 9 + 10, Sam First in Los Angeles with Jermaine Paul and Jonathan Pinson

January 11, Black Cat in San Francisco with Mat Muntz and Scott Amendola

The previous post on Gene Lees with Lees’s toxic comments on Duke Ellington prompted thoughts of my old essay “Reverential Gesture,” posted on old DTM a dozen years ago in 2013.

The new edit below is a bit shorter than the original sprawling essay of 2013. At the time I should have gone for a briefer, more telling blow, but there is a bit of backstory….

I met Terry Teachout when he wrote a major feature about Mark Morris. It turned out that we shared interests outside of jazz, especially a keen appreciation for the authors Rex Stout and Anthony Powell. Teachout’s prose was stylish and to the point (his books on H.L. Mencken and Louis Armstrong are valuable) and he was a key member of the early blogosphere circa 2005. Around this time we became friends. Terry gave me some valuable advice when I first started blogging, including a core precept I still use all the time, “Don't write everything you know.”

While I am a devout liberal, I used to think that conservative voices were allowed in the choir (this was before the cult of MAGA and the current plight of American politics). I was happy that Terry Teachout was a political conservative, for I figured we needed people that will argue for the arts when conservatives control the board. On a more local level, I was impressed with how Terry fought polarization by being a sincere and polite stand-up gent. After he died in 2022, online tributes came in from a diverse cast of liberal friends including hilarious/scandalous writer Chelsea G. Summers and hard-headed television avatar David Simon.

Most of Teachout’s cultural criticism was down the middle. You wouldn’t usually guess Terry was a conservative from his knowledgeable comments on dance, theater, and classical music.

His Duke Ellington biography is different, for Teachout follows a certain reactionary tradition in the line of James Lincoln Collier and Gene Lees.

Lees dares to opine in the 1982 essay I linked to recently:

The praise of Duke Ellington had the odor of an attempted expiation of American guilt over the treatment of blacks. As if to hide this great national shame, sweep it under the carpet, deny its existence, everyone from presidents to television commentators seemed to be saying, “No, no, it’s not true. Look how we honor Duke Ellington.”

It is a sin that Lees wrote the above, for any amount of Duke Ellington music, from a pinch to an ocean, will ennoble and enrich any human. You don’t like affirmative action? Fine. Let’s talk about it. But wash out your mouth with soap if you dare sully Duke’s name with such discourse.

2012 was the height of a period I spent “interrogating the masters”: the DTM archive has 50 interviews, mostly of jazz greats, some who have since left us. I was friends with both Stanley Crouch and Terry Teachout—a position not held by everyone, for they passionately hated each other—and since I had given Stanley the floor on DTM, I thought I should interview Terry as well.

A few days before I went to Terry’s apartment for the interview, I read a galley of the yet-to-be-published Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington. Oh dear! I asked Terry few hard-nosed questions during the interview, but my conscience remained troubled. I just didn’t feel right promoting Terry’s book! My body betrayed me, reacting by catching a cold that wouldn’t go away. I vividly remember being in freezing Chicago, sick as a dog, playing with the Bad Plus at the Jazz Showcase, and cursing Teachout’s name. Could I withdraw the interview?

…Or…what if I wrote my own take on the topic?

The minute I decided to publicly distance myself from Teachout’s book with an opinion piece of my own, my cold cleared up and the work went fast. To his credit, Terry was unfazed when I sent him the piece in advance of publication. He corrected a few errors and said, “Go get ‘em, tiger!”

He also admitted to me privately that he was surprised at some of the reviews of his book, many of which drastically amplified his conservative subtext:

In The New York Times, James Gavin bumbled around trying to reduce Ellington to a “symbolic black figure” like Oprah Winfrey or Tyler Perry.

In The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik wrote a condescending and pretentious think piece that began on a frankly astonishing note: “Ellington was a dance-band impresario who played no better than O.K. piano, got trapped for years playing ‘jungle music’ in gangster night clubs, and at his height produced mostly tinny, brief recordings.”

After reading Teachout, John Winters managed to say of Ellington:

How did this man, a grandson of slaves, high school dropout, son of Washington’s U Street, and “somewhat better-than-average stride pianist largely devoid of formal musical training” scale such heights? Given that he was also short on melody-writing abilities and repeatedly failed at writing longer compositions, Ellington’s iconic status is more perplexing.

I mean, we are talking about Duke fucking Ellington, OK? Has Winters ever heard a Duke Ellington record? Get a grip on reality! There is such a thing as objective artistic truth!

So. My original “Reverential Gesture” was a balancing act, where I added in a lot of words trying to allow for my friend’s perspective.

Today, Terry’s dead, and I still like some of my old essay. Here’s a shorter, blunter edit.

REVERENTIAL GESTURE (new 2025 edit)

“I think all the musicians in jazz should get together on one certain day and get down on their knees and thank Duke.” – Miles Davis

In Music Is My Mistress, Duke Ellington wrote about his first time hearing his mentor, Willie “The Lion” Smith:

Sonny Greer and I were real tight buddies and, naturally, night creatures. Our first night out in New York we got all dressed up and went down to the Capitol Palace…

My first impression of The Lion – even before I saw him – was the thing I felt as I walked down those steps. A strange thing. A square-type fellow might say, “This joint is jumping,” but to those who become acclimatized – the tempo was the lope – actually everything and everybody seemed to be doing whatever they were doing in the tempo The Lion’s group was laying down. The walls and furniture seemed to lean understandingly – one of the strangest and greatest sensations I ever had. The waiters served in that tempo; everybody who had to walk in, out, or around the place walked with a beat.

Every Ellington record I’ve ever heard has a unique ambience. Thick harmonic complexity sits deep inside blues and swing. It never feels “tight” or “over-organized.” There’s grease in every corner, but the deep sophistication is unmistakeable. Perhaps the walls and the furniture lean understandingly in response to this music.

My first Ellington was a tape of a live gig from the late ‘50s: “The Mooche,” “C Jam Blues,” “Sophisticated Lady.” It took one listen, really. Every time I’ve heard Ellington since, I’ve instantly known that sound. All professional jazz musicians know that sound.

Duke has a sound. Only Duke gets this sound.

How did he get it? I don’t know, and certainly Terry Teachout doesn’t either, for many of Teachout’s conclusions in Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington obscure rather than illuminate Duke’s genius.

Early on in the book, Teachout quotes Ellington on his lessons with music teacher Henry Grant:

I discovered that F-sharp is not G-flat. That was the end of my lessons…because I had found out what I wanted to know.

Teachout goes on to say, “If this is true, then he stopped short of grappling with anything beyond the basics of elementary harmony.” The paragraph finishes with one of Teachout’s most dire pronouncements.

He never learned from Henry Grant or anyone else how classical composers use harmony to articulate and propel large-scale musical structures, and the day would come when his lack of that knowledge served him ill.

More on the large-scale musical structures later on. For now, I’ll simply note that I’ve never hung out with a great jazz musician who doubted Duke’s grasp of form.

Furthermore, in what amounts to journalistic malpractice, Teachout takes that enharmonic moment from an obscure interview. The whole story as recounted in Music is My Mistress is much more important:

I was beginning to catch on around Washington, and I finally built up so much of a reputation that I had to study music seriously to protect it. Doc Perry had really taught me to read, and he showed me a lot of things on the piano. Then when I wanted to study some harmony, I went to Henry Grant. We moved along real quickly, until I was learning the difference between a G-flat and an F-sharp. The whole thing suddenly became very clear to me, just like that. I went on studying, of course, but I could also hear people whistling, and I got all the Negro music that way. You can’t learn that in any school. And there were things I wanted to do that were not in books, and I had to ask a lot of questions. I was always lucky enough to run into people who had the answers.

Duke seems to be saying that the sound of his community was as important as any kind of book learning. From where I sit, all the great Afro-American jazz of the 20th-century seems connected in communal circles, where all the masters draw strength from each other. That’s how Duke could work with everyone from Louis Armstrong to Coleman Hawkins to Mahalia Jackson to Charles Mingus to John Coltrane—collaborations that in every case produced at least one masterpiece track.

Teachout’s shrewd-sounding analysis of Ellington’s compositional process on pages 111 and 112 grant him homespun genius but little else.

An untrained musician who harmonizes a melody does so by superimposing it atop a series of chords….A musician who has studied counterpoint, by contrast, is trained to think of a chord progression not as a sequence of…chords but as a stack of horizontal ‘voices’ that are woven together contrapuntally.

Ignorant of the rules of classical voice leading, [Duke] worked out attractive-sounding chord progressions at the piano….Explains why his part-writing is full of unmelodic angularities, like the downward plunge in the third bar of the clarinet part of “Mood Indigo.”

Because he had no training in counterpoint…he thought exclusively in terms of vertical harmony, not horizontal melody…

The “downward plunge in the third bar of the clarinet part of ‘Mood Indigo’” is simply interesting chorale part-writing. It looks more like a Richard Strauss chord progression than anything else.

Of course, I’m playing into Teachout’s Eurocentric hands by dropping a name like “Richard Strauss,” for a composer like Strauss is simply not relevant. Ellington’s musical patterns are connected to the African Diaspora, where the sections of his band call and respond, hocket, and decorate. As everyone knows, the distinctive personalities of his musicians color the contrasting lines of the music further. Even a single, slow, simple trumpet statement takes on a whole world of mysterious emotion when played by Bubber Miley or Ray Nance. It’s hardly just Ellington: There’s just no truly enlightening way to bring conventional European contrapuntal analysis to classic jazz.

Some of Teachout’s readers might end up wondering if Duke could even write down sheet music! Let’s glance at two pages of Ellington manuscript, “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue, from 1937 (sent to me by Loren Schoenberg):

In his chapter on Billy Strayhorn, Teachout says part of Strayhorn’s contribution to the Ellington’s band sound were “widely spaced open-position quartal harmonies.” Teachout implies that Duke didn’t use fourth chords until after Strayhorn joined Ellington’s team: “Ellington, like the self-taught pianist-composer that he was, preferred close-position triadic harmonies that fall naturally under a pianist’s hands…”

However, “Diminuendo” predates Strayhorn’s time with Ellington and includes “widely spaced open-position quartal harmonies.”

To be fair, Teachout does cite “Diminuendo” as being an unusual Duke score (“The listener is taken aback”), which it is. But even if Ellington didn’t always write this big and thick, it is simply dangerous to make pat statements about what Ellington could or couldn’t do.

Teachout: “An untrained musician who harmonizes a melody does so by superimposing it atop a series of chords.” There’s no doubt that Duke often started with a familiar chord progression, for this is part of the jazz tradition. But on the other hand, who even knows the right changes to the biggest Ellington hits? I remember my first attempts to learn famous Ellington tunes: When I eventually heard the authentic Ellington versions, they seemed almost wrong, since the changes were so different than what were in the fakebooks and on many non-Duke records.

Indeed, normal jazz musicians who traffic exclusively in common practice materials usually reject Duke’s thick counterpoint. If you tried to play Duke’s notey piano part on “Do Nothing ‘Till You Hear From Me” behind an average singer, they’d probably fire you on the spot! That song has a good example of Duke’s occasionally baffling—because it’s so unusual—harmony. Ask five pianists what the harmony is on bar six of the bridge, and you’ll probably get five different answers. To be clear, I don’t think this unusual harmony has anything to do with a Teachout scolding word like “untrained,” it is just idiosyncratic and specific—part of the Duke Ellington sound.

Teachout writes that there are 1700 Ellington compositions. Most of the charts are stored are at the Smithsonian, in a vast overstuffed collection that sounds like the room of forbidden government secrets at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Duke composed in short score, grouping the brass and reeds together tightly except for baritone saxophonist Harry Carney, who often had his own line. (Teachout cites Duke’s son Mercer saying that an uninitiated person would have trouble deciphering them, but I have no trouble making sense of “Diminuendo and Crescendo” above.) Duke then passed on the music to his copyists. Juan Tizol and Tom Whaley were the best-known, although Walter van de Leur tells me he has identified around 100 copyists’ hands in the collection. (Duke never published a band score, and the piano or vocal editions are bare-bones, or even simply incorrect.)

After the music got on the stands, the composer and the players changed the parts. There are lots of stories about how new band members were confused by the book: Most of the charts seemed wrong or incomplete.

There was paper, but paper was only one part of the magic. Everyone in the Ellington band really understood the music from the inside. If you were in the Ellington fold, you knew this was your music, too: that you were essential to delivery of the message. This synergy must be one of the reasons why most of Ellington’s greatest sidemen never made immortal albums as leaders themselves. On some level, they were already fully realized in that famous Ellington Effect.

Teachout focuses at length on the provenance of hit tunes like “Mood Indigo” and “Sophisticated Lady,” arguing that various early horn players were responsible for some of the melodic shapes. This is incontestably true—and at least one, Barney Bigard, threatened to sue years after the fact.

It’s also the kind of thing that happens to every group after becoming wildly successful: Players present at the inception eventually attempt to acquire greater recognition for their efforts getting the train on the tracks.

But not one of Ellington’s early band members ever wrote a single hit tune or came up with a single memorable band arrangement on their own.

Billy Strayhorn—the man who gave the most, and who’s now sometimes portrayed as having received the least—offers telling evidence on his lone album as a leader, The Peaceful Side of Billy Strayhorn. Strayhorn gets a European string quartet to play backup harmony alongside his lyrical piano. It’s a enjoyable and mellow listen, but in the end the disc feels like a curio compared to Strayhorn’s work for the Ellington band.

Teachout’s comment is more nuanced than some of his readers realize. “No more than Beethoven or Stravinsky was Ellington a natural tunesmith: His genius, like theirs, lay elsewhere.” I agree: those three aren’t like Schubert or Monk, where each moment seems full of catchy song. Beethoven, Stravinsky, and Ellington all assembled memorable final statements out of whatever they needed. In Beethoven and Stravinsky’s case, part of it was local folk song; in Ellington’s case, part of it was his horn player’s hot licks.

Indeed, even if they were more reliable, playing through the published piano/vocal Ellington anthologies would be less interesting than playing through the anthologies of George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, or Cole Porter.

The issue of “who wrote what” may be most problematic in terms of copyright. But if you were in the band, you were on salary, and you weren’t fired unless personal problems became extreme. Strayhorn didn’t pay rent or most of his bills. To some, this arrangement may look like a velvet cage, where the comfort of the Ellington Effect dissuaded his stable from venturing forth on their own, especially since they wouldn’t get royalties for previous contributions.

But would 20th-century music be that much richer if Duke’s stars had tried harder to leave? Hodges left and came back a few times; his own albums are great, but not as great as Ellington’s. Apparently Hodges and Ellington grew to hate each other, the way family members nursing long-standing grievances can grow to hate each other. Still, they managed to set aside their differences most of the time. There are stories about Hodges miming “pay me more” onstage; there are also interviews where Hodges praises his employer to the skies.

Teachout writes about Norman Granz and quotes Granz on Ellington:

Granz had tried without success to make Duke Ellington, Inc. a wholly owned subsidiary of JATP. His proposal sounded plausible enough on paper: “Why don’t you give up the band and I’ll pay you a weekly salary…and any time we get ready to tour, well, then, you can hire the cats and you can pay them more and be sure to get them, then the rest of the time they’ll find other gigs to do. And you can devote your time to writing.” But he failed to grasp what was apparent to to anyone conversant with Ellington and his ways. “It was obvious when I was smarter about the band,” he later said, “that he needed [it] just for his compositions, to hear what they sounded like…I think the public recognizing the great Duke Ellington leading a great band—and Duke was obviously the most imposing of bandleaders—I think that was necessary to satisfy his ego.”

As on so many banal Granz-produced JATP gigs and even more banal Granz-produced Pablo recordings, Granz shows no understanding of how to generate the ineffable. Ellington unquestionably had a huge ego, but the “on and off” arrangement Granz was proposing would have broken up Ellington’s family.

You can’t break up the family, even if they drive you crazy sometimes. Only the family can get—as the Duke’s comment about the Lion in Harlem suggests—“the walls and furniture to lean understandingly.” Modern detective work into Duke’s sources and economic arrangements has value for specialists, but it’s important not to lose track of the holistic nature of the final product.

On one hand, there’s a pile of amazing Duke Ellington records with quick work documented on the job: shorter danceable numbers and his galaxy of star soloists in perfect harmony with the aesthetic. There are too many of these fantastic Ellington records, really! Few of us will listen to them all, even though each one seems better than the next.

On the other hand, there are a certain amount of larger Ellington compositions where he is stretching the form and apparently putting his hat into the ring as a “great composer.” These longer pieces are Teachout’s red meat. He really doesn’t like them, and, to be fair, he’s not the only one. The band apparently didn’t like playing them, and I personally don’t listen to them as much as the more conventional Ellington jazz tracks.

A Tone Parallel of Harlem is famous; it is completely written out and moves through many moods and tempos in 14 minutes. It’s all Ellington except the very short Max Steiner-ish coda, which is by Billy Strayhorn. (That attribution comes from private correspondence with Walter van de Leur.) Like all superior music, the better you know it the more impressive Harlem becomes. After reading Teachout you might think that Duke could barely figure out basic voice-leading, but, my god, Harlem is full of advanced counterpoint.

Teachout says the tunes in Harlem aren’t great. I wouldn’t go that far, but admit there’s a rather foursquare element to a slow minor-key sequence near the end, reminiscent of many static moments in Franz Liszt. The last “churchy” tune really works to bring it home, though.

Teachout’s comparison of Harlem to Gershwin’s An American in Paris is acceptable. However, he stops short of noting that Harlem is much more authentic than American in Paris.

While I decry James Gavin’s perspective on Duke as a symbolic figure (as written in The New York Times on the occasion of Teachout’s book), in the case of A Tone Parallel to Harlem there is moving extra-musical significance in this transfiguration of a legendary neighborhood. It’s a work that sits comfortably next to Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, and many other thinkers and artists fighting on at least two fronts in the first part of the 20th century.

“Extra-musical significance” seems like a rather obvious observation, but Teachout doesn’t make it. The closest Teachout gets is by choosing an appropriate line from Paul Lawrence Dunbar for the biography’s epitaph: “We wear the mask that grins and lies.”

Teachout delights in judging Ellington’s large-scale music in an absolute and Eurocentric fashion, and if you think the sociological aspect is understood, then perhaps his perspective is refreshing. For myself, I do not think the sociological aspect of A Tone Parallel to Harlem is understood well enough at all, even in 2025, let alone when the piece was written in 1950.

(On topic: Gershwin’s An American In Paris has always sounded fine played by any moderately talented classical musicians on the planet, whereas the same group of players will flail helplessly with the version of A Tone Parallel to Harlem orchestrated by Ellington’s friend Luther Henderson. To this day, American classical music conservatories do not produce players who can play American music.)

Another obvious observation Teachout doesn’t make concerns the vast canvas of Black, Brown, and Beige. “Come Sunday” is a masterpiece tune that still resonates: It is even included in many modern hymnals. Teachout doesn’t discuss “Come Sunday,” but how many 45-minute works by any American composer from the 20th-century have produced an excerpt of such continued relevance? (Thanks to Darcy James Argue for making this point in conversation.)

Social context and hit tunes aside, Terry is asking a loaded question. At the very least, every commentator who knocks Harlem or Black, Brown, and Beige should also take a harsh look at contemporary orchestral versions of jazz by Gershwin, Darius Milhaud, Igor Stravinsky, Karl Amadeus Hartmann, Leo Ornstein, Samuel Barber, George Antheil, Paul Hindemith, and Leonard Bernstein. By that standard, Ellington is winning the day, hands down!

Teachout thinks that Aaron Copland is America’s greatest classical composer. Copland isn’t everybody’s choice as top dog, but he’s a useful enough place to start thinking about what really matters in American music.

Copland’s “jazziest” piece, the Piano Concerto from 1926, is nothing but cornball trash in the backbeat sections. This is unsurprising from a composer who in 1927 wrote in “Jazz Structure and Influence” that “[jazz] began, I suppose, on some negro’s dull tomtom in Africa.” In the same article, Copland goes on to cite musical examples from Gershwin and novelty pianist Zez Confrey—but offers no examples from black musicians. Copland also seems to think the Charleston rhythm is in mixed meter, lol. (Seriously: he writes it 3/8 + 5/8.)

Is it unfair to throw young Copland under the bus for not understanding jazz in the late 1920s? Perhaps, especially since he claimed to be a devout admirer of Ellington later on.

They are different systems with different goals. Like anyone else working in the European manner, Copland the composer stands alone, with his interpreters placed far back in the shadows. But it has always been impossible to talk about Ellington without his musicians. Even a casual fan knows the names Billy Strayhorn and Johnny Hodges—and they always have. More committed fans know about all the major members of his family—and they always have.

Indeed, Ellington shined an eternal light on many who might otherwise have been footnotes at best. One example is Ernie Shepard, the only bassist aside from Jimmie Blanton discussed at length in Music Is My Mistress. Like Blanton, Shepard died young, which is a real shame, because on records like The Great Paris Concert he sounds simply incredible. It’s only thanks to Duke hiring him and writing about him that posterity knows his name.

Another example is Rufus Jones, the drummer who powers The Far East Suite and other terrific late Ellington works in such a distinctive fashion. It was a new era, and Duke needed a someone truly conversant with even-eighth grooves. Ellington again singles him out in his autobiography.

Terry Teachout does not mention Rufus Jones in Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington.

Aargh! There’s so much that Teachout simply doesn’t understand about jazz! The big “I am a great composer” works from Ellington are almost a feint, a political action, a way to gently note to a racist establishment drunk on high art as the only art: “Black people are people too.”

The nuts and bolts of the Ellington legacy are each and every bar on all those thousands of records. It’s a sound.

Part of that sound is the blues. Teachout muddies that issue as well:

Like James P. Johnson, Fats Waller, and the other East Coast stride pianists of his generation, Ellington had only a limited feel for the traditional blues idiom.

A certain kind of jazz critic repeatedly bangs this drum, claiming that stride pianists—and select others including Art Tatum, Coleman Hawkins, and Dizzy Gillespie—are somehow not comfortable with the blues.

In my kinder moments, I can understand why they consider, say, Jimmy Yancey “really the blues” and James P. Johnson “not really the blues.” But most of the time I think it shows a real outsider’s perspective on the music.

One the great tracks is “Across the Track Blues” from 1941.

Teachout sounds so superficially compelling when he writes…

“Across the Track Blues” is portrait of the blues, one in which the unmediated emotions of the authentic bluesman are transformed into the musical counterpart of a color-field abstraction, then put in a handsome frame and hung in the Ellington Museum for the purpose of quiet contemplation

…but, in the end, this comment is patronizing. Any blues by Aaron Copland, Morton Gould, or Samuel Barber might be an abstract portrait of the blues, but “Across the Track Blues” is the real deal.

Ellington expanded what was possible within the folkloric form. That’s part of what made him such a genius: he could find new shades of blue!

In Jump For Joy: Jazz at Lincoln Center Celebrates the Ellington Centennial, 1899-1999, former Ellington bassist John Lamb says,

You know what Duke told me? He said, “Man, everything I do is the blues…” As a musician, I understood the sound. I seemed to fit into whatever he wanted done, and I belonged there. Technically speaking, I didn’t know the things Duke did; I’d have to study it. But in my head, having lived the types of experiences that Black people live, and musicians lived, I understood the music.

Drummer Sonny Greer can get dissed and dismissed by the same crew that worries about the blues stuff. Teachout knows better than to take on that hatchet job himself; he sends in others like Johnny Mandel (a genius songwriter) and Gene Lees (a questionable jazz critic) to do that job for him, and then undercuts the hatchet job by saying that Lees and Mandel heard Greer too late for clear assessment.

It’s all pretty ridiculous. Greer sounds incredible on records with Ellington, no hemming or hawing is required. My favorite is “Harlem Air Shaft” with a few marvelous snare breaks.

To state the obvious: White commentators should be extra-careful to tread lightly when discussing blues sensibility or canonical black drummers. Go to school first and gain some basic reverence. Then you can weigh in.

I am of decidedly mixed opinion when considering writer Gene Lees, a famous and influential person in his day. Lees’s ego knew no bounds and his comments on race are startlingly tone-deaf. Still, it is of undoubted historical value to have the JAZZLETTER archive preserved on Donald Clarke’s website.

JAZZLETTER was widely read by a generation older than myself. It was quite literally a one-man operation: Lees typed it up and mailed it out. Blogging before blogging!

As a kid I looked at all the Gene Lees books and eventually dismissed him as a charlatan. Now I see him in a bit more of a holistic light; anyone who wrote the lyrics to “Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars” isn’t all bad, and the book Meet Me at Jim and Andy’s remains pretty amusing.

For those that want to cut to the chase and see Lees at his worst, the May 1982 issue has Lees on Duke Ellington, an essay that wanders between actual malevolence (the piece starts with an attack on son Mercer Ellington?!) and pointless bumbling (“Ellington wrote 1000 songs, which of course is just not that much”). What Lees and the rest of the anti-Ellington crew never seem to get is simply how good every single Ellington record is. Like there are literally almost no bad Ellington records! The Ellington discography is a vast luminous archive of good listening straddling the whole American experiment! HOW DID DUKE DO IT? NOBODY WILL EVER KNOW.

The phrase “telling on themselves” could have been coined for this horrible Gene Lees essay, “Reflections on Duke.”

Speaking of controversial writers, today is the birthday of Stanley Crouch, someone who probably would have punched Gene Lees in the face if he had only gotten the chance. I just looked over the obit I wrote for NPR five years ago. At the time I thought it was the best thing I’d written, and I still stand by every word.

(My only regret is that my original framing, “Three Choruses for Stanley Crouch,” was not used by NPR. If the essay is ever reprinted, I will fight for that title, for it is a deliberate lift from the style of both Crouch and Albert Murray.)

The movie based on the great book by Mark Stryker is now streaming on Prime!

The film moves at a brisk and engaging pace, taking us through the history of the city and the history of the music. The Best of the Best is not just be a must-watch for fans, but also a superb introduction to jazz for the uninitiated. One of the memorable quotes from the documentary comes from great bassist Rodney Whitaker: “We make cars, and we make jazz musicians.”

Official website.