Duke Ellington

Edward Kennedy Ellington was born in Washington, D.C., on the twenty-ninth of April 1899, the son of a Navy blueprint maker and a teacher. He took piano lessons from the age of seven, was nicknamed "Duke" in his teens for his sartorial precision, and formed his first orchestra in Washington in 1917.

He moved to New York in 1923. From 1927 to 1932 his orchestra was the house band at the Cotton Club in Harlem, broadcast nationally via the new NBC radio network. From 1932 onward he led the Duke Ellington Orchestra in continuous performance and recording until his death — fifty-one years of unbroken work, the longest sustained orchestral leadership in American musical history.

He composed more than three thousand compositions, including "Mood Indigo," "Sophisticated Lady," "It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)," "Take the A Train" (with Billy Strayhorn), "Black, Brown and Beige" (his 1943 Carnegie Hall suite on African American history), the Sacred Concerts of his last decade, and the score for Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder (1959) — the first Hollywood feature scored by a Black composer.

He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1969 from Richard Nixon, the French Legion of Honor in 1973, and thirteen Grammys (including the Lifetime Achievement Award in 1966). The Pulitzer Prize committee rejected his music for the special award in 1965 over the recommendation of its own jury; the controversy prompted a public restructuring of the Pulitzer music category. The Pulitzer board awarded him a posthumous special citation in 1999.

He died in New York on the twenty-fourth of May 1974, age seventy-five.

He is honored here as the composer whose orchestra was the longest sustained instrument in American musical history.