(Gotham, $30)
Duke Ellington “has always been a little hard to figure,” said Chris Foran in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. He embodied civilized refinement on stage but struggled offstage to juggle all of his extramarital affairs. He is widely celebrated as one of the greatest composers in jazz history but is known for having lifted many of his best ideas from musicians under his employ. Critic Terry Teachout, a former bassist, focuses mostly on Ellington’s music in this rigorously researched biography, showing “again and again” how the great bandleader appropriated others’ riffs and melded them into tunes that have become jazz standards. And though Teachout “doesn’t exactly decode the Duke,” his “exhaustive mining of archives” gives us a fuller portrait than we’ve ever had.
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“Still, it’s hard to judge Ellington’s tangle of paradoxes too harshly,” said Maria Popova in BrainPickings.org. Born the son of a butler in Washington, D.C., Ellington had the talent and polish that enabled him to dream of becoming a cultural ambassador for his race, and the flaws we learn of here have the effect of “enriching rather than discrediting his legacy.” Ellington was no doubt a self-centered hedonist: He routinely secured hotel rooms for multiple mistresses and decided only later which woman to sleep with. But if he kept his real self hidden behind his stage self, “here’s the thing: We all do.”
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