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Duke Ellington: a Jazz Legend

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Early life and musical beginnings, breakthrough and success, impact and legacy.

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Duke Ellington

An originator of big-band jazz, Duke Ellington was an American composer, pianist and bandleader who composed thousands of scores over his 50-year career.

(1899-1974)

Quick Facts

Duke ellington's band, who was duke ellington.

A major figure in the history of jazz music, Duke Ellington's career spanned more than half a century, during which time he composed thousands of songs for the stage, screen and contemporary songbook. He created one of the most distinctive ensemble sounds in Western music and continued to play what he called "American Music" until shortly before his death in 1974.

FULL NAME: Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington BORN: April 29, 1899 BIRTHPLACE: Washington D.C. DEATH: May 24, 1974 (age 75) SPOUSE: Edna Thompson (m. 1918-1967) CHILDREN: Mercer Ellington ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Taurus

Born on April 29, 1899, Ellington was raised by two talented, musical parents in a middle-class neighborhood of Washington, D.C. At the age of seven, he began studying piano and earned the nickname "Duke" for his gentlemanly ways. Inspired by his job as a soda jerk, he wrote his first composition, "Soda Fountain Rag," at the age of 15. Despite being awarded an art scholarship to the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, Ellington followed his passion for ragtime and began to play professionally at age 17.

In the 1920s, Ellington performed in Broadway nightclubs as the bandleader of a sextet, a group which in time grew to a 10-piece ensemble. Ellington sought out musicians with unique playing styles, such as Bubber Miley, who used a plunger to make the "wa-wa" sound, and Joe Nanton, who gave the world his trombone "growl." At various times, his ensemble included the trumpeter Cootie Williams, cornetist Rex Stewart and alto saxophonist Johnny Hodges. Ellington made hundreds of recordings with his bands, appeared in films and on radio, and toured Europe on two occasions in the 1930s.

Ellington's fame rose to the rafters in the 1940s when he composed several masterworks, including "Concerto for Cootie," "Cotton Tail" and "Ko-Ko." Some of his most popular songs included "It Don't Mean a Thing if It Ain't Got That Swing," "Sophisticated Lady," "Prelude to a Kiss," "Solitude" and "Satin Doll." A number of his hits were sung by the impressive Ivie Anderson, a favorite female vocalist of Ellington's band.

'Take the A Train'

Perhaps Ellington's most famous jazz tune was "Take the A Train," which was composed by Billy Strayhorn and recorded for commercial purposes on February 15, 1941. "Take the A Train," the "A" referring to a subway line in New York City, took the place of Ellington's previous signature tune "Sepia Panorama."

It was Ellington's sense of musical drama that made him stand out. His blend of melodies, rhythms and subtle sonic movements gave audiences a new experience—complex yet accessible jazz that made the heart swing. Ellington's autobiography, Music Is My Mistress , was published in 1973. Ellington earned 12 Grammy awards from 1959 to 2000, nine while he was alive.

At the age of 19, Ellington married Edna Thompson, who had been his girlfriend since high school, and soon after their marriage, she gave birth to their only child, Mercer Kennedy Ellington.

On May 24, 1974, at the age of 75, Ellington died of lung cancer and pneumonia. His last words were, "Music is how I live, why I live and how I will be remembered." More than 12,000 people attended his funeral. He was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, New York City.

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Duke Ellington’s Artistry and Artifice: How the Jazz Icon Engineered His Own Image

By maria popova.

Even though he surrounded himself with a formidable entourage of deft PR custodians, he was ultimately his own best publicist — a man who employed the same charisma that made him an incredible entertainer in making his off-stage image as credible as possible, despite its assiduous artifice and methodical manipulation. Teachout writes:

That was Ellington’s way. He talked not to explain himself but to conceal himself. Even Ruth, his adoring younger sister, said that he “definitely wasn’t direct. He wasn’t direct with anybody about anything.” Yet he talked so fluently and impressively that nearly everyone believed him, save for those who had reason to know better.

His publicists — who dubbed him “Harlem’s Aristocrat of Jazz” — took great care to echo and amplify the image Duke himself was projecting, pitching him not only as a mere jazzman but as a true artist bearing the seal of approval of the era’s glitterati. They issued actual publicity manuals that were sent out to the managers of theaters and ballrooms where Ellington performed. One read:

Sell Ellington as a great artist, a musical genius whose unique style and individual theories of harmony have created a new music. . . . Ellington’s genius as a composer, arranger and musician has won him the respect and admiration of such authorities as Percy Grainger, head of the department of music at the New York University; Basil Cameron, conductor of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra; Leopold Stokowski, famed conductor of the celebrated Philadelphia Orchestra; Paul Whiteman, whose name is synonymous with jazz, and many others.

Ellington was especially attached to the idea of serving as a spokesperson for African Americans — an aspiration admirable enough on the surface, but only if unbridled from ego and self-inflation, something of which Ellington was far from innocent given the amount of personal publicity he poured into his objective. To support this goal of his, another publicity pamphlet emphasized his presentability in addition to his talent:

He is as genial as he is intelligent, always creates a good impression upon newspaper people with whom he comes in contact and invariably supplies them with good copy for their stories.

Ellington’s lifelong desire to “act on behalf of the race,” as he himself put it, was an expression of his own life’s contradictions — the son of a butler and the grandson of a slave, he carried himself with an air of regality; a high school dropout, he made a special effort to teach himself the etiquette and manners of high society. Teachout notes the effect of this deliberate application:

For all his polish, it was his artistry, not his personality, that was the source of his enduring appeal. But it was the personality that made white people who might not otherwise have done so give him a second glance, and in time it opened doors of opportunity through which few other blacks had been allowed to pass.

And yet beneath the persona Ellington projected lay a person of swelling imperfection — he shamelessly “borrowed” creative material from his band musicians without sharing the royalties or accolades, and had ceaseless extramarital and extra-extramarital affairs, cheating on his wife Edna with his longterm lover Evie, on whom he cheated with countless other women. (So intense were the private passions around his publicly muzzled affairs that, at one point, Edna attacked him with a razor after finding out he had been sleeping with another woman, reportedly his Black and Tan co-star Fredi Washington. What Edna didn’t know was that Duke had a regular habit of checking into several hotels, handing out keys to different women, only later deciding which hotel room he wanted to ravage for the night.) Teachout puts it rather bluntly, but certainly not an unwarranted observation given the evidence of Ellington’s life:

Underneath his soigné exterior, Ellington was a self-centered hedonist who lived a nomadic existence in which everything was subordinated to his art — and, insofar as possible, his pleasure.

Teachout cites the recollection of producer John Houseman, who worked with Ellington on his first Broadway show, Beggar’s Holiday :

At the time I worked with him the Duke had abandoned all attempts to organize his own life. Between late-night engagements with his band, concerts, recordings, interviews, composing and other activities he had turned over the scheduling of his days and nights to his wife, his manager and other associates. They woke him up when it was time, fed him, laid out the right clothes for him, transported and delivered him on time for whatever engagement he was committed to, picked him up, changed his clothes, delivered him once more, fed him again and finally put him to bed. In this way, he explained, by ceasing to concern himself with time and space, he was able to preserve his energy and his sanity.

And yet, Teachout argues, Houseman mistook Ellington’s meticulous manipulation of his people-machinery for mere passivity — instead, he was hard at work controlling every aspect of his life:

What Houseman did not see was that Ellington sought to exert the maximum possible amount of control over everyone in his life — by stealth. “What you need to do is wake up after two o’clock, make phone calls, but don’t move an inch,” he told [his son] Mercer Ellington. “Just lie flat on your back and phone, and tell everybody everything that has to be done, and lay all your plans without going out anywhere. . . . When you come downstairs you’ll have prepared your day, and you’ll be The Greatest!” After he died, Mercer found a handwritten note among his father’s papers in which Ellington summed himself up in three lapidary sentences: “No problem. I’m easy to please. I just want to have everybody in the palm of my hand.” His selfishness was unswerving, though it did not exclude benevolence, if only on his own terms.

Teachout, however, takes great care not to dim the enormity of Ellington’s talent in light of his immutable imperfection, noting instead that he used the former as a vehicle for both exorcising and tucking away the latter:

He was, like Chopin, Paul Klee, Jorge Luis Borges, and Flannery O’Connor, a disciplined lyric miniaturist who knew how to express the grandest of emotions on the smallest of scales, and who needed no more room in which to suggest his immortal longings.

Arguably the most accurate, succinctly eloquent description of Ellington’s elusive personhood comes from Rex Stewart, cornetist of the Duke Ellington Orchestra:

Ellington is the most complex and paradoxical individual that I’ve ever known . . . a combination of Sir Galahad, Scrooge, Don Quixote, and God knows what other saints and sinners that were apt to pop out of his ever-changing personality.

Indeed, Ellington was a bundle of inner contradictions — the kind we all grapple with by virtue of being human , only his were far more numerous, more entangled, and more full of friction than average. Teachout writes:

He was at once deeply (if superstitiously) religious and a tireless philanderer who, in the words of an admiring friend, had the sexual appetite of “a romping, stomping alley cat.” He pretended to be a devoted family man for the benefit of the ever-vigilant press, he deserted Edna, his first and only wife, later settling into a long-term relationship with a Cotton Club showgirl whom he chose not to marry (he never divorced Edna) and on whom he cheated as often as he liked.

In fact, one of Ellington’s most pressing publicity concerns was keeping his affairs out of the papers — information he felt would greatly compromise the very presentability and wholesomeness he worked so hard to craft in order to feel like he belonged in high society. As Teachout observes, he went to great lengths to make sure “his fans saw only what he wished them to see, and nothing more.” At one point, he even went as far as paying off gossip columnists and placing expensive ads in newspapers to prevent his relationship with Evie from being reported.

In addition to crafting his public personality, he was equally meticulous about his appearance. Always clad in the latest fashion, he straightened his hair and even wore a corset. His sleek “conk” hair style, however, was particularly paradoxical and a visceral testament to both his cultural obliviousness to anything other than himself and his choice of personal vanity over the civil rights cause he alleged to stand for:

Ellington wore his hair in a “conk,” a style created with a hair-straightening process that made use of hot lye. Straight hair, or “good hair,” was as highly valued by middle-class blacks of his generation as was light skin, and they were willing to endure much for it. Black newspapers were full of ads for products that promised to rid the user of “kinky woolly hair. . . . All hipsters in Harlem are using superior hair straightener.” No amount of shame was too much to bear in the quest for good hair. Every jar of Kongolene, one of the most popular hair-processing products of the day, was decorated with a logo on which the initials KKK were, fantastic as it may sound, clearly visible. Most of the top black bandleaders of the period, including Ellington and Cab Calloway, wore conks (Louis Armstrong and Lionel Hampton were prominent exceptions) long after the style had been repudiated by a new generation of politically conscious musicians. “We were against kinky hair in those days,” recalled the jazz trumpeter Joe Wilder. “We didn’t have better sense. . . . You know there was no pride in nappy hair in those days. We all wanted straight hair—we wanted people to think we had good hair.” In time Malcolm X came to see the conk he had worn in his youth as an unnatural act of “self-degradation.” He wrote contemptuously of the practice in The Autobiography of Malcolm X , taking care not to mention Ellington (whom he admired) by name: “You’ll see the conk worn by many, many so-called ‘upper class’ Negroes, and, as much as I hate to say it about them, on all too many Negro entertainers. . . . I don’t see how on earth a black woman with any race pride could walk down the street with any black man wearing a conk—the emblem of his shame that he is black.” But Ellington would never stop straightening his hair, oblivious of the impression that it made on younger blacks for whom “good hair” was a badge of dishonor.

In another manifestation — perhaps the manifestation — of his paradoxical desire for wide public visibility and tightly controlled private invisibility, Ellington even wrote an autobiography, aptly titled Music Is My Mistress and released a year before his death. (How much of his decision was creative and how much commercial will remain a mystery, but Doubleday did pay him a $50,000 advance for it, equivalent to about $319,000 today.) But rather than using it as a final saving grace of honesty, Ellington used it to further conceal rather than reveal the truth of who he really was — perhaps, in a less cynical view, simply because it was a truth that eluded him more than anyone. Teachout finds the book’s intentional evasiveness especially frustrating:

He of all people should have left behind a frank memoir, one in which he told the story of how a somewhat better-than-average stride pianist largely devoid of formal musical training managed to turn himself into a great composer — for that is what he was, and why he matters to us today.

And yet Teachout finds “at least one undeniable truth” revealed in the self-interview with which Ellington, this “improbably gaudy bird of paradise,” ends his autobiography:

Q. Can you keep from writing music? Do you write in spite of yourself? A. I don’t know how strong the chains, cells, and bars are. I’ve never tried to escape.

But if an answer to Ellington’s elusive character is ever to be found, perhaps it offers itself up in the verse with which he closed Black, Brown and Beige , his multimovement piece about the black experience in America, which he spent a decade crafting — and more than a decade pitching for publicity, long before the piece was finished, or even started. The proclamation was intended as commentary on the question of race relations addressed by this particular piece and his general public persona, but it endures as one that ultimately reveals the agony of the private person who remained unseen, even by himself, beneath the public veneer of charisma and bravado:

And so, your song has stirred the souls Of men in strange and distant places The picture drawn by many hands For many eyes of many races. But did it ever speak to them Of what you really are?

Still, it’s hard to judge Ellington’s tangle of paradoxes too harshly given it was merely a magnified — however exponentially — version of our shared humanity. As a 1944 New Yorker profile of him put it, he was a man who had “a stage self and a real self.” This is the thing: We all do — with those who live in the spotlight, the public persona and the private person are just much more easily delineated and discernible, the contrast between them thus starker. But all of us, especially today, are equally our own publicists as we craft our public personae with every Facebook status shared and every Instagram photo uploaded, using those increasingly as tools to conceal as much as to reveal. Fittingly, Rex Stewart remarked of Ellington that he had “apparently learned to give more of himself in public but less in private” — a tendency to which it’s all too easy to succumb as we too explore and manipulate our own boundaries of visibility and invisibility.

Dimensional, thoughtful, and rigorously researched, Duke is an enthralling read from cover to cover, revealing through the specificity of one conflicted life the universality of the human condition and our constant struggle for integration, for wholeness, for reining in our angels and our demons into a unity of self, both public and private.

— Published October 21, 2013 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2013/10/21/duke-ellington-terry-teachout/ —

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Ellington and American Optimism

For his 70th birthday, Duke Ellington was invited by President Richard M. Nixon to a state dinner at the White House. In honor of the occasion, Ralph Ellison wrote an essay, ''Homage to Duke Ellington on His Birthday,'' which was published in The Washington Star on April 27, 1969. It appears in a new anthology, ''Living With Music: Ralph Ellison's Jazz Writings,'' which was edited by Robert G. O'Meally. Here is an excerpt from that essay:

For more than 40 years Duke Ellington's music has been not only superb entertainment but an important function of national morale. During the Depression, whenever his theme song ''East St. Louis Toodle-oo'' came on the air, our morale was lifted by something inescapably hopeful in the sound. Its style was so triumphant and the moody melody so successful in capturing the times yet so expressive of the faith which would see us through them. And when the ''Black and Tan Fantasy'' was played, we were reminded not only of how fleeting all human life must be, but with its blues-based tension between content and manner, it warned us not only to look at the darker side of life but also to remember the enduring necessity for humor, technical mastery and creative excellence.

And how many generations of Americans, white and black, wooed their wives and had the ceremonial moments of their high school and college days memorialized by Ellington's tunes? And to how many thousands has he brought definitions of what it should mean to be young and alive and American? Yes, and to how many has he given a sense of personal elegance and personal style? A sense of possibility? And who, seeing and hearing Ellington and his marvelous band, hasn't been moved to wonder at the mysterious, unanalyzed character of the Negro American -- and the white American's inescapable Negro-ness?

Even though few recognized it, such artists as Ellington and Louis Armstrong were the stewards of our vaunted American optimism. Their music was a rejection of the chaos and license that characterized the so-called Jazz Age, and which has returned once more to haunt the nation. Place Ellington with Hemingway, they are both masters of that which is most enduring in the human enterprise: the power of man to define himself against the ravages of time through artistic style.

$; Copyright 2001. Random House

Today in History: Duke Ellington

Duke Ellington image set

Comments by William P. Gottlieb on Photograph of Glen Gray and Duke Ellington (streaming audio)

Choo-choo (I gotta hurry home) song by Duke Ellington (streaming audio)

Duke Ellington historical newspaper coverage

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Harlem rent parties (oral history transcript)

Duke Ellington stories from America’s Library

Duke Ellington on the National Film Registry: Jam Session (1942) Now See Hear! blog December 1, 2015

Duke Ellington’s Film Debut  Library of Congress Blog April 29, 2013

Happy Birthday Sir Duke  In the Muse blog April 29, 2010

Duke Ellington Biography (PBS)

Giants of Jazz: Duke Ellington in exclusive interview from CBC’s Hot Air archive  (primary source audio and video recordings and background text)

Duke Ellington: Quotes by a Jazz Legend Essay

To analyze the achievements and influence of Duke Ellington, I have selected 12 of his quotes.

“ I’m sure critics have their purpose, and they’re supposed to do what they do, but sometimes they get a little carried away with what they think someone should have done, rather than concerning themselves with what he did.”

This quote demonstrates Duke’s attitude to critics. For me, this quote allows to see Duke in another dimension: not as a musician but as a subject in the music business with its specific problems such as the contradiction between critics and musicians. Duke despised music critics for their habit to tell musicians what to play, and he took a stand against this.

“ Love is indescribable and unconditional. I could tell you a thousand things that it is not, but not one that it is. Either you have it or you haven’t; there’s no proof of it.”

The selected quote allows to perceive Duke as an individual. It is known that love was much of an inspiration for Duke, and a lot of his songs are devoted to it. Duke described love as a feeling that cannot be described or measured; so is his music.

“ By and large, jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn’t want your daughter to associate with.”

This passage brings up the reputation of jazz: back then, it was considered immoral and threatening for public morals. Duke by no means supported this view; however, in this quote, he ironically admits that the public is suspicious of jazz.

“ The word [jazz] never lost its association with those New Orleans bordellos. In the 1920s I used to try to convince Fletcher Henderson that we ought to call what we were doing ‘Negro music’. But it’s too late for that now.”

To continue the reflections on the problem of the reputation of jazz, Duke proposes to replace the name “jazz” with “Negro music,” for the former is compromised (Hentoff par. 3). Nevertheless, his great achievements, along with those of his contemporaries, have changed the reputation of the word. Thanks to him, nowadays, the word “jazz” evokes mostly positive feelings.

“ People do not retire. They are retired by others.”

This saying belongs to the 75-year-old Duke, who was asked about his retirement (“A Tribute to Duke Ellington 1899-1974” 44). This one is among the most inspirational Duke’s quotes. Being already a legend of his times, Duke did not stop working, traversing the barriers of age.

“ There are two kinds of worries – those you can do something about and those you can’t. Don’t spend any time on the latter.”

This quote adds to the inspired mood: having all his rich experience in music business, Duke shares his wisdom with others, and it does sound convincing.

“ How can anyone expect to be understood unless he presents his thoughts with complete honesty? This situation is unfair because it asks too much of the world. In effect, we say, “I don’t dare show you what I am because I don’t trust you for a minute but please love me anyway because I so need you to. And, of course, if you don’t love me anyway, you’re a dirty dog, just as I suspected, so I was right in the first place.” Yet, every time God’s children have thrown away fear in pursuit of honesty-trying to communicate themselves, understood or not, miracles have happened.”

In the selected expression, Duke presents his thoughts on communication. He believed that all humans were inherently alone but were given the greatest gift – communication. The only necessary thing is to venture to be honest, and then miracles can be done. It is exactly what Duke was doing through his music – talking to people with complete honesty.

“ In music, as you develop a theme or musical idea, there are many points at which directions must be decided, and at any time I was in the throes of debate with myself, harmonically or melodically, I would turn to Billy Strayhorn. We would talk, and then the whole world would come into focus. The steady hand of his good judgment pointed to the clear way that was fitting for us. He was not, as he was often referred to by many, my alter ego. Billy Strayhorn was my right arm, my left arm, all the eyes in the back of my head, my brainwaves in his head, and his in mine.”

These words are Ellington’s sincere tribute to his friend and collaborator, Billy Strayhorn. The two musicians have been working in close collaboration for thirty years, producing the pieces of world jazz classic, but Duke has been receiving credit for them as the more famous one. In this quote, Duke openly admits that the role of Strayhorn was no less than his own.

“ My attitude is never to be satisfied, never enough, never.”

This expression can be considered Ellington’s motto. Fifty years of working in music were a life without satisfaction. Having already written numerous pieces, received multiple awards, and been recognized as a jazz legend, Duke never stopped until his death.

“ On becoming more acquainted with the word of the Bible, I began to understand so much more of what I had been taught, and of what I had learned about life and about the people in mine.”

This quote shows Duke as a man of deep religious faith, which was a notable feature of many black artists of his time. Faith was an essential part of his art. He has composed three Sacred Concerts in his life, and it is known that he considered these works the most important.

“ Put it this way: Jazz is a good barometer of freedom… In its beginnings, the United States of America spawned certain ideals of freedom and independence through which, eventually, jazz was evolved, and the music is so free that many people say it is the only unhampered, unhindered expression of complete freedom yet produced in this country.”

This saying is especially interesting, for it demonstrates that Duke considered jazz one of the outcomes of the emergence of America’s freedom ideal. Despite the moralists’ distrust to jazz, Duke believed it do be a significant component of American freedom.

“ What is music to you? What would you be without music? Music is everything. Nature is music (cicadas in the tropical night). The sea is music, the wind is music. The rain drumming on the roof and the storm raging in the sky are music. Music is the oldest entity. The scope of music is immense and infinite. It is the ‘esperanto’ of the world.”

This quote allows to comprehend what Duke thought of music as such. Not only does he consider nature an infinite “musician,” but he also believes that music is a universal language for people of the world. If it is so, then Duke was a global ambassador.

In his professional life, Duke Ellington was active as both a composer and performer. To my opinion, it is not only hard but also senseless to separate these roles from one another and define Duke as either a performer or composer. Having worked out something innovative, unusual, unheard of as a composer, he immediately brought it to life as a performer. As I am convinced, this fact is an essential component of his popularity, as well as it is among the reasons, for which Duke was able to achieve such a success as a jazz musician and be remembered and revered for decades after his death.

Many jazz musicians of those times have become famous and are known as jazz legend nowadays. However, Duke Ellington has a special place among other musicians and composers, having earned global admiration and respect. Aside from writing great music and being an active, candid, honest person, Duke has brought jazz up to a higher level, making it more sophisticated and organized. He has introduced new combinations of instruments, creating more energetic compositions than those common for jazzmen before him, thus influencing other musicians.

Ellington has synthesized various elements of music such as ragtime, blues, European music, etc. These innovations allowed him to write jazz music for a variety of settings: nightclub, ballroom, theater, cathedral, concert hall, and cinema (“Duke Ellington,” par. 2). Thanks to Duke Ellington, jazz has emerged from a chaotic music direction to a serious, complicated music style.

Works Cited

“A Tribute to Duke Ellington 1899-1974.” Ebony Sept. 1974: 43-45. Print.

Duke Ellington . n.d. Web.

Hentoff, Nat. “Duke Ellington’s Mission.” Jazztimes 1999. Jazztimes . Web.

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IvyPanda. (2021, March 26). Duke Ellington: Quotes by a Jazz Legend. https://ivypanda.com/essays/duke-ellington-quotes-by-a-jazz-legend/

"Duke Ellington: Quotes by a Jazz Legend." IvyPanda , 26 Mar. 2021, ivypanda.com/essays/duke-ellington-quotes-by-a-jazz-legend/.

IvyPanda . (2021) 'Duke Ellington: Quotes by a Jazz Legend'. 26 March.

IvyPanda . 2021. "Duke Ellington: Quotes by a Jazz Legend." March 26, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/duke-ellington-quotes-by-a-jazz-legend/.

1. IvyPanda . "Duke Ellington: Quotes by a Jazz Legend." March 26, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/duke-ellington-quotes-by-a-jazz-legend/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Duke Ellington: Quotes by a Jazz Legend." March 26, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/duke-ellington-quotes-by-a-jazz-legend/.

• Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway
• A Life Beyond Category: Duke Ellington
• Leadership Attributes of Duke Ellington
• Franz Schubert: His Life and Music
• How to Become a Professional Musician?
• Music of 17th/18th Century
• "The Life and Times of Sun Ra" by John Szwed
• George Frideric Handel: Life and Contribution

Why the Harlem Renaissance Still Matters Today

This essay about the Harlem Renaissance highlights its significance as a cultural and intellectual movement in the 1920s and 1930s that celebrated African American creativity and challenged racial injustice. It discusses how Harlem became a hub for jazz, visual arts, and literature, with figures like Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Duke Ellington, and Aaron Douglas pushing artistic boundaries and fostering a sense of pride and resistance among African Americans. The essay explains the Renaissance’s impact on later civil rights movements, emphasizing its role in using art to fight for equality and change. Through this movement, African American voices found new platforms for expression, reshaping American culture and inspiring future generations.

How it works

At a period when racial injustice and segregation were pervasive in America, the Harlem Renaissance was a booming assertion of African American creativity and intellect rather than merely a cultural reawakening. The streets of Harlem were alive with a newfound energy in the 1920s and 1930s, from the jazz clubs where Duke Ellington’s orchestra performed till the wee hours of the morning to the salons where authors such as Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes discussed politics and art.

There was more to this era than merely entertainment.

It was a powerful declaration of rights and identity. Authors such as Hurston and Hughes created storylines that transcended simple storytelling. They created stories that portrayed the hardships and unwavering tenacity of an African American community that is frequently ignored by the larger society, painting realistic portrayals of what it was like to live as an African American. They made it clear in their statements that Black lives are full with interesting experiences that should be heard.

Then there was the music—oh, the music! Imagine the sound of Louis Armstrong’s trumpet cutting through the smoky air of a packed Harlem nightclub. Jazz became the soundtrack of the era, pushing artistic boundaries and challenging the racial divide. This music wasn’t just a backdrop to the Renaissance; it was a key player, reshaping American culture and how music was experienced. It showed that creativity knows no color line.

Visual arts flourished too, with artists like Aaron Douglas using bold colors and geometric designs to illustrate the vibrancy and complexity of Black life. His art wasn’t just beautiful; it was a form of resistance and a declaration of pride.

The ripple effects of the Harlem Renaissance can still be felt today. It laid some of the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement, instilling a sense of pride and a call for equality that would echo through generations. It showed how art could be a catalyst for change, how the pen and the brush are as mighty as any march or protest.

Now, why should we care about the Harlem Renaissance today? Because it teaches us about the power of voice and the importance of cultural expression. It reminds us that art can confront social issues and that it can unite us across the divides of race and class. Most importantly, it shows us that even during times of immense hardship, creativity can thrive and pave the way for change.

The Harlem Renaissance wasn’t just a moment in history; it was a movement that reshaped American culture and inspired countless artists, musicians, and writers to keep fighting for their place at the table. That’s why we still celebrate it, talk about it, and learn from it. Because those voices from Harlem’s streets, they’re still speaking to us, reminding us to listen, learn, and keep pushing forward.

Cite this page

Why the Harlem Renaissance Still Matters Today. (2024, May 12). Retrieved from https://papersowl.com/examples/why-the-harlem-renaissance-still-matters-today/

"Why the Harlem Renaissance Still Matters Today." PapersOwl.com , 12 May 2024, https://papersowl.com/examples/why-the-harlem-renaissance-still-matters-today/

PapersOwl.com. (2024). Why the Harlem Renaissance Still Matters Today . [Online]. Available at: https://papersowl.com/examples/why-the-harlem-renaissance-still-matters-today/ [Accessed: 17 May. 2024]

"Why the Harlem Renaissance Still Matters Today." PapersOwl.com, May 12, 2024. Accessed May 17, 2024. https://papersowl.com/examples/why-the-harlem-renaissance-still-matters-today/

"Why the Harlem Renaissance Still Matters Today," PapersOwl.com , 12-May-2024. [Online]. Available: https://papersowl.com/examples/why-the-harlem-renaissance-still-matters-today/. [Accessed: 17-May-2024]

PapersOwl.com. (2024). Why the Harlem Renaissance Still Matters Today . [Online]. Available at: https://papersowl.com/examples/why-the-harlem-renaissance-still-matters-today/ [Accessed: 17-May-2024]

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