Duke Ellington and His World [Hardcover]

A. H. Lawrence (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 041593012X | ISBN-13: 978-0415930123 | Publication Date: March 30, 2001 | Edition: First Edition

Based on lengthy interviews with Ellington's bandmates, family, and friends, Duke Ellington and His World offers a fresh look at this legendary composer. The first biography of the composer written by a fellow musician and African-American, the book traces Ellington's life and career in terms of the social, cultural, political, and economic realities of his times. Beginning with his birth in Washington, DC, through his first bands and work at the legendary Cotton Club, to his final great extended compositions, this book gives a thorough introduction to Ellington's music and how it was made. It also illuminates his personal life because, for Ellington, music was his life and his life was a constant inspiration for music.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Inspired by the lyrics of Stevie Wonder's 1976 hit "Sir Duke," this work contains an interesting and controversial mix of material. Lavezzoli, a musicologist and jazz musician, has interviewed Ellington colleagues (e.g., drummer Butch Ballard) and aficionados (e.g., recording technician and collector Jerry Valburn) to gain some insight into the great bandleader's music. Interspersed among those dialogs are chapters on musicians that Lavezzoli believes Ellington influenced. The author's choices of Frank Zappa, Prince, Sly Stone, George Clinton, James Brown, and Ravi Shankar will certainly arouse controversy among rock, funk, soul, and Hindustani purists; however, presenting Ellington through the work of stylistically dissimilar musicians forces the reader to listen to Ellington with new ears. Still, the approach is unusual and makes for a rather loose read. This is recommended for larger public libraries and may be of interest to smaller libraries with significant popular music book collections. [Ellington fans should also note that this month, Routledge will publish A.H. Lawrence's Duke Ellington and His World: A Biography (ISBN 0-415-93012-X. $35), which Schirmer was originally slated to publish in 1999. Schirmer, however, dropped the book at the last minute. LJ ran a review of that edition in 11/15/99. Ed.] James E. Perone, Mount Union Coll., Alliance, O.
- James E. Perone, Mount Union Coll., Alliance, OH
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

A workmanlike portrait of the legendary composer/pianist/bandleader. The author, who played jazz professionally before giving it up to attend college, initially planned to publish a series of socio-biographical interviews of Harlem musicians before being pre-empted by Nat Hentoffs Hear Me Talkin to Ya (1966). After Ellington's death in 1974, Lawrence decided to organize his material around this revered jazz master, but its origins show: capsule biographies of virtually every musician who ever worked in the Duke Ellington Orchestra, though quite interesting in themselves, interrupt the narrative flow and make it difficult to focus on Ellingtons life and career. However, Lawrence does a decent job of outlining the basic facts. Born in 1899 into a middle-class Washington, D.C., family, Edward Kennedy Ellington acquired a sense of strong racial pride from his high school principal, a noted African-American historian. Though his elegant clothes and demeanor won him the nickname Duke while he was still a teenager, and though he would be hailedespecially in Europeas a composer equal to Ravel and Stravinsky, Ellington never denied his roots and was proud to write and play Negro folk music, as he remarked during his wildly successful tour of England in 1933. Hits like Mood Indigo and Take the A Train, as well as his more ambitious suites, reflect Ellingtons refusal to accept limits on his creativity. Lawrence describes all the music lovingly; hes particularly sensitive to the contributions individual band members like trumpeter Bubber Miley and arranger/composer Billy Strayhorn made to the unique Ellington sound. His coverage of the Dukes personal life seems an afterthought. Frequent references to Ellingtons narcissism dont provide an especially useful key to his character. Most performers are narcissistic; few shared the stage as graciously as Ellington. Jazz buffs will appreciate Lawrence's solid knowledge of the art forms history and key participants; general readers looking for a good biography will be disappointed. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 492 pages
• Publisher: Routledge; First Edition edition (March 30, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 041593012X
• ISBN-13: 978-0415930123
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.5 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 1.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,775,914 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Odd, January 4, 2006

By 

bukhtan (Chicago, Illinois, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Duke Ellington and His World (Hardcover)

I found this book reasonably entertaining, approaching, you might say "attacking", Duke Ellington from a psychologizing angle. Interesting. Few people ever really knew Ellington, and the ones who did didn't talk much about him, at least not in any revealing way. And the man was clearly an affable narcissist, with a tendency to be passively cruel to band members and some family members. If this personality hadn't existed, Thomas Mann would have invented him, with a little help from Freud. And of course there's nothing wrong with taking a figure so frequently deified down a couple of pegs. So the author's tack seemed, for the nonce, acceptable.
Unfortunately, I noticed quite a few oddities, in dates, attribution of composer credit, and elsewhere. I also wondered how this guy could have interviewed all these old timers, this late in the era. And I'd never heard of a trombonist of this name who played with Benny Carter, Luis Russell etc. in the Forties. And though I'm a thorough Ellington fan and personal admirer, I'm no scholar. So I had to wait till I stumbled on the "brief" by Steven Lasker, who is a scholar, to realize what a hoax this book is. Stick "depanorama stratemann lasker lawrence routledge" into the google search engine. You'll get a issue of the Duke Ellington Music Society bulletin from late 2001. Read it before you buy this book.
Routledge didn't originate the contract on this book. They bought it from some other outfit. Routledge used to be a standard issue publisher of unreadable academic jabber of the paramarxist school, parasitizing on English universities. In the last few years they've tried to break into the American popular market. Hence opportunistic stuff like this.
There's a Duke Ellington industry out there, appealing to scholars, musicologists and plain enthusiasts of good music. So there are bogus reissues on CD and preposterous books like this. The same thing happens with Mark Twain; you come to expect it. But damn Routledge for getting involved in the seamy side of it as they scramble to find a place in the dwindling high end market.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Travesty In Blue, May 4, 2001

By 

Andrew Homzy "homzy2" (Montreal) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Duke Ellington and His World (Hardcover)

A. H. Lawrence has written a book filled with errors on almost every page. Lawrence's lack of scholarship will seriously call into question the lack of Routledge's editorial integrity if not its motives - unless the publisher decides to recall the product.

If you really want to see this book, wait until it is remaindered or piled on the "free" table - that should be soon.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Mighty subject through a very narrow lens, May 8, 2004

By 

souldrummer (Washington, DC United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Duke Ellington and His World (Hardcover)

Duke Ellington is such a towering subject that any book about him contains some items of interest. This is the first full length biography I've read on Ellington, although I did take a course with Mark Tucker, author of "The Ellington Reader" in college. This book is written by a psychologist and a musician of the 1940s, not a researcher, and the previous reviewers have criticized him for a lack of research. Lawrence relies heavily on Sonny Greer and Mercer Ellington as interview subjects and there may be the value in skimming through this biography. As a drummer, the story of how Greer got his magnificent drum kit that you see in all of the 30s and 40s footage of the Ellington brought me a smile. Stories like this lead me to believe that Lawrence would have been better served facilitating a memoir of Sonny Greer and some of his musical contacts [he admits that he was trying to do this until Hentoff's "Hear me Talkin' to Ya came out in his introduction] than writing a flawed biography of Ellington, a towering figure who deserves a thorough scholarly biography like the one that Lewis Porter did for John Coltrane.

The book has two other big flaws. First, the 50s and 60s are really quickly treated and he will go through a year of the band's life in a couple of pages. I personally was first drawn to Ellington's music through this musically rich period and while the creation of some of Ellington's key suites like the Far East Suite is mentioned, I would have liked a better sense of what life in the band was like at this time.

The biggest problem, here, however, is that Lawrence the psychologist intervenes at times and leaves the reader with a sour taste in his mouth. I do not need speculation on the psychological nature and "narcissistic" elements of Ellington's personality. I'd rather get detailed research as to what happened in his personal life from varied sources and allow me, the intelligent reader, to draw my own conclusions. The fact that the last paragraph of the book concludes with a statement of his "profound narcissism" and how Ellington just wanted "everybody in the palm of my hand", diminishes the ultimate musical and spiritual legacy that Ellington left behind.

Right now, I don't see a major full length biography of Ellington on the market that I can completely endorse. This book has some value as a quick, though flawed, overview of the band while introducing members like the great Sonny Greer.

2 stars.

--SD