The Eulogy of Duke Ellington, 5/27/74

Part I

It is hard to do justice in words to a beloved friend, especially when the friend was a genius of the rarest kind.

So, first, the basic facts of his temporal existence: Edward Kennedy Ellington "Duke" Ellington, born in Washington, DC, 1899, died in New York, 1974.

Now some might claim him as a citizen of one or the other of those cities, but he was not. In the truest sense of the phrase, he was a citizen of the world. That is a cliche perhaps, but how few are those who deserve it as he did. He was loved throughout the whole world, at all levels of society, by Frenchmen and Germans, by English and Irish, by Arabs and Jews, by Indians and Pakistanis, by atheist and devout Catholics, and by communists and fascists alike.

So, no, not even this city in which, as he said, he paid rent and had his mailbox - not even New York can claim him exclusively for its own.

Of all the cities he conquered - more than Napoleon, and by much better methods - I remember particularly Buenos Aires when he went there the first time. He had played his fincal concert and sat in the car outside the theatre before going to the airport. People clutched at him through the opened windows, people who were crying, who thrust gifts on him, gifts on which they hadn't even written their names. It was one of the few times I saw him moved to tears.

As a musician, he hated categories. He didn't want to be restricted, and although he mistrusted the word "jazz," his definition of it was "freedom of expression." If he wished to write an opera, or music for a ballet, or for the symphony, or for a Broadway musical, or for a movie, he didn't want to feel confined to the idiom in which he was the unchallenged, acknowledged master.

As with musical categories, so with people categories. Categories of class, race, color, creed and money were obnoxious to him. He made his subtle, telling contributions to the civil rights struggle in musical statements - in Jump For Joy in 1941, in the Deep South Suite in 1946, and in My People in 1963. Long before black was officially beautiful - in 1928, to be precise - he had written Black Beauty and dedicated it to a great artist, Florence Mills. And with Black, Brown and Beige in 1943, he proudly delineated the black contribution to American history.

His scope constantly widened, and right up to the end he remained a creative force, his imagination stimulated by experience. There was much more he had to write, and would undoubtedly have written, but a miraculous aspect of his work is not merely the quality, but the quantity of it. Music was indeed his mistress. He wroked hard, did not spare himself, and virtuatlly died in harness. Only last fall, he set out on one of the most exhausting tours of his career. He premiered his third sacred concert in Westminster Abbey for the United Nations, did one-nighters in all the European capitals, went to Abyssinia and Zambia for the State Department, and returned to London for a command performance before Queen Elizabeth. When people asked if he would ever retire, he used to reply scornfully, "Retire to what?"