A Bottomless Well (Duke Ellington)

Abstract Duke Ellington liked to claim he won his job at the Cotton Club in December 1927 because he showed up three hours late for the audition, as did the owner, who heard only Ellington and none of his rivals. After five years of touring or working in arson-prone saloons, it was the luckiest of breaks. Radio broadcasts transmitted from the gangster-owned, segregated (blacks on stage, whites at the tables) Harlem nightclub were relayed across the country and ultimately the world, bringing him instant recognition. The long engagement enabled Ellington to double the size of his orchestra, encouraged a daring prolificacy, and provided him with a daunting apprenticeship working with top-flight choreographers, songwriters, dancers, singers, comics, set designers, and other professionals involved in developing the Cotton Club’s slick and sexy revues. Ellington responded with a wry, insinuating music—erotic, exotic, and, at once, ironic and ingenious. He invented his own instrumental voicings and found uncanny soloists whose virtuoso embellishments seemed to burble from the ravishing brew like the nighttime chatter of an urban jungle. Some considered Ellington’s music as salacious as the serpentine dancing it accompanied, but music lovers in and out of the academy heard in it a fresh, audacious musical language and a genius for sultry melodies and startling harmonies. Ellington tapped into something recondite, almost occult, yet accessible—unshackling characters as shadowy as “The Mooche” and as seductive as “Black Beauty,” while issuing injunctions on the order of “Rockin’ in Rhythm” and “It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing.”