The Ellington Century
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- $25.99
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- $25.99
Publisher Description
Breaking down walls between genres that are usually discussed separately—classical, jazz, and popular—this highly engaging book offers a compelling new integrated view of twentieth-century music. Placing Duke Ellington (1899–1974) at the center of the story, David Schiff explores music written during the composer’s lifetime in terms of broad ideas such as rhythm, melody, and harmony. He shows how composers and performers across genres shared the common pursuit of representing the rapidly changing conditions of modern life. The Ellington Century demonstrates how Duke Ellington’s music is as vital to musical modernism as anything by Stravinsky, more influential than anything by Schoenberg, and has had a lasting impact on jazz and pop that reaches from Gershwin to contemporary R&B.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Esteemed composer and musician Schiff (George Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue) flexes his authorial muscles once again with a self-confessed "bundle of love letters" to the late, great jazz pianist and big band leader Duke Ellington. In true jazz fashion, Schiff exults, "I allowed myself to be disorderly and intuitive, as if I were improvising." But Schiff is nevertheless rather methodical in walking the reader through Ellington's groundbreaking sound counting bars, tapping tempos, expounding on transitions, and always reveling in the music. A gifted painter in his youth and an artist in every sense, "Ellington called many of his compositions tone parallels' or portraits'; his music linked sounds and images." Schiff compliments this notion with quotations from Copland, Schoenberg, Rilke, Rimbaud, and Zola to contextualize and highlight the "complex web of sensory associations" and ultimately conceive a "jazz panorama" made up of the technical elements of Ellington's unique style. Dissecting the form of perhaps his most famous "mood" composition, "Mood Indigo," Schiff addresses the "syntax" and "imagery" of the piece; evoking "love, tears, the railway." Always musically rather than autobiographically focused (even links to Kandinsky are made on artistic terms, not social), Schiff plainly argues the accessibility of Ellington's "Symbolist aesthetic." Drawing parallels with the sophisticated, calculated compositions of Debussy, while still acknowledging the juxtaposition of improvisation and "Arcane modernism," Schiff's ode to Ellington is a joy.
