The Cambridge Companion to Duke Ellington ed. by Edward Green

Abstract

The Cambridge Companion to Ellington. Edited by Edward Green, associate editor Evan Spring. (Cambridge Companions to Music.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. [xx, 294 p. ISBN 9780521881197 (hardcover), $90; ISBN 9780521707534 (paperback), $29.99; ISBN 9781316190463 (e-book), $24.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliographic references, index.The Cambridge Companion to Ellington is the first volume in the Cambridge Companions to Music series to be devoted to a single jazz musician. (A companion for jazz overall, The Cambridge Companion to Jazz edited by Mervyn Cooke and David Horn, was published in 2002.) Ellington is an excellent choice to be featured in this series because he enjoyed a long career in which he produced many masterworks (and a few guilty pleasures, too), and because his status as a composer fits in well with the classical music composers featured in the other Companion volumes. Is he the most influential composer of the twentieth century, as the volume's editor Edward Green asserts? Perhaps, although probably not according to the syllogism that Green uses (p. 1). He says that since Ellington is the greatest composer in jazz, and that since jazz has had more impact worldwide than any other form of modern music, then Ellington is the most influential composer. That argument assumes that greatness equals influence. It would also hold true only as long as jazz continues to have universal impact. If it turns out that samba has had the greatest impact, then one could argue that Antonio Carlos Jobim should replace Ellington as the most influential composer of the twentieth century.But we need not fear for Ellington's legacy, because it will endure as long as his recorded performances remain available. He was a prolific composer and recording artist for nearly fifty years; the fifth edition of W. E. Timner's annotated discography Ellingtonia: The Recorded Music of Ellington and his Sidemen (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2007) fills over 650 pages. Furthermore, his papers are now maintained by the Smithsonian Institution, notated editions have been published, and a rich secondary literature has been written (some of it among the best writings about jazz). A novice may feel swamped by the sheer mass of materials.The chief service that The Cambridge Companion to Ellington provides is to point out the main works for each era in Ellington's career. For that reason, the second part (of three), Duke Through the Decades, is the most valuable portion of the book. Each decade of Ellington's activity, starting with the 1920s and ending with 1960-74, is examined in an individual chapter. The authors discuss social context, biographical circumstances, musical trends, and representative compositions and recordings, with endnotes pointing to primary and secondary literature. These five chapters are handled expertly by Jeffrey Magee (1920s), Andrew Berish (1930s), Anna Harwell Celenza (1940s), Anthony Brown (1950s), and Dan Morgenstern (1960s-1970s).Other fine studies round out the book. David Berger contributes two essays, the first of which is a consideration of composition as becoming, using Ellington's KoKo and Jack the Bear as case studies; the second is an exploration of Ellington's suites, including some of his extended works that are otherwise rarely discussed. Will Friedwald examines Ellington's songs as a group, taking into account the words that the singers sang with the notes that the band played. Bill Dobbins treats Ellington's contributions to jazz piano styles. Benjamin Givan argues persuasively that Ellington used the twelve-bar blues not as a static form, but as a dynamic tool with which he produced some music that was not strictly blues but rather, as Givan quotes the composer (p. …