Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington by Terry Teachout

(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.

“Many Ellington fans will feel Teachout has gone too far” when he suggests that the man’s ambitions outstripped his talents, said Ted Gioia in The Dallas Morning News. “But give Teachout his due”: He has taken on a legend who worked hard to keep his private life secret and has torn through the veil. When Ellington died in 1974, at age 75, the New York Times’ front-page obituary didn’t even correctly identify the bandleader’s wife. Teachout has not only tracked down the woman who was holding Ellington’s hand when he died, he seems to have the scoop on all of Ellington’s affairs and flings, as well as his professional feuds and quarrels.

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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.”