Jazz is considered primarily a musical style defined by solo improvisers, and rightly so. But, it would be a mistake to diminish the important rôle played by composers and arrangers in that style. If Louis Armstrong is the apotheosis of the former, then surely Duke Ellington is the preëminent of the latter. Composer of perhaps two thousand songs, jazz suites, film scores, and later in life, even liturgical music, he used his long-touring big band as a vehicle for the development of some of the most sophisticated jazz ever written. If there is one gift out of a plethora that should be singled out, it is his acute sensitivity to the unique talents of the men who played for him. He once famously said: “You can’t write music right unless you know how the man that’ll play it plays poker . . . .” He skillfully exploited the variety of their individual tone colors and performing styles just as a master painter blends disparate colors into an artistic whole. Unorthodox creativity in scoring created the “Ellington sound.” All one has to do is to think of his evergreen “Mood Indigo,” wherein he turns the traditional spaces occupied by clarinet, trumpet, trombone (top to bottom, respectively) upside down. “Mood Indigo” would not be the same piece at all in our musical consciousness without the unique sound of muted trumpet on top, trombone with “plumber’s friend” mute in the middle, and the soft, very low clarinet on the bottom. His ear for sound color was right up there with Debussy, Stravinsky, and Ravel.
His career started with the small ensemble associated with his move to New York in the early1920s. An early example from that time of his blossoming originality is the evergreen Black and Tan Fantasy. By the late 1920s his work with a larger ensemble at the famous Cotton Club firmly established him as an important jazz composer. In the fecund decade of the thirties he was producing perhaps his most creative and lasting works.
His rare gift for managing to keep his big bands together over the years, both in the artistic and economic sense, provided him with the ideal artistic palette for his compositions. Replete with some of the great jazz soloists of Ellington’s time, his bands featured an adroit balance between his large-scale compositional constructs and the artistic freedom of the improvisation skill of his musicians.
As time went on he tended to more and more elaborate musical works—he called them “long form” compositions. In 1943 he inaugurated a series of concerts in Carnegie Hall that showcased his growing artistic ambitions—they continued until the early 1950s. By then, the diversity and breadth of this evolving musical vision led him eventually to compose full-length film scores, more large-scale suites, musical comedies, and an opera. While early jazz was centered on improvisations based upon the largely sixteen measure popular song, Ellington style grew to employ the familiar structural elements of classical symphonic music: extended and complex forms, various developmental procedures, and nuanced and variegated musical timbres.
Accordingly, in 1950 the eminent conductor, Arturo Toscanini, commissioned Ellington for a work for jazz band for the NBC Symphony that was to more or less depict the broad panoply of New York City. As it turned out, Toscanini never conducted it, but the composer did in 1951 in a benefit concert for the NAACP, in a version for large jazz orchestra. A few years later it was orchestrated for symphony orchestra by the fine composer and Broadway arranger, Luther Henderson. He was a long-time collaborator with Ellington and orchestrated many of the composer’s works.
Later known as simply “Harlem,” the tone poem was described by Ellington as a “tone parallel to Harlem.” It’s not a narrative work in a common scheme of tone poems, but rather an episodic series of impressions of what one may have encountered while walking around in Harlem, street by street.
The composer, himself, described the scenario:
“We would like now to take you on a tour of this place called Harlem. It has always had more churches than cabarets. It is Sunday morning. We are strolling from 110th Street up Seventh Avenue, heading north through the Spanish and West Indian neighborhood toward the 125th Street business area. Everybody is nicely dressed, and on their way to or from church. Everybody is in a friendly mood. Greetings are polite and pleasant, and on the opposite side of the street, standing under a street lamp, is a real hip chick. She, too, is in a friendly mood. You may hear a parade go by, or a funeral, or you may recognize the passage of those who are making Civil Rights demands.”
He goes on to describe and mention black luminaries Jackie Robinson, Thurgood Marshall, Langston Hughes, and Bill Robinson. Later he told an audience that in the middle of the work, “ We find ourselves . . . in front of a church on Easter Sunday morning, witnessing an Easter parade, a little sadness, a little gladness, a dazzling satin doll, but moving on progressively.” In many ways the last four words are a kind of cue to the man’s unique musical genius and optimistic philosophy of life.
Ellington was indeed jazz’s most important composer and arranger—that we all know. But, as this expansive work admirably shows, his talent was not restricted to one style, one time, or one medium. American music would have been lamentably impoverished without his music near its core. The composer of Sophisticated Lady was indeed a “sophisticated gentleman” and giant of American musical life.
–Wm. E. Runyan
© 2026 William E. Runyan