About a year and a half ago I received an email from Jack Chambers with a big attachment. It was the first draft of his upcoming book A Tone Parallel To Duke Ellington.
I read the 560 pages that Jack had sent me and I was stunned. It was another masterwork on Duke Ellington and joins Jack’s Ellington book Such Sweet Thunder which was issued in 2019.
Since I saw the draft, Jack has been working hard with his publisher University Press of Mississippi to finetune the book and now it is ready for preorder from the publisher at https://www.upress.state.ms.us/cart/en/quick-order. It is also available for order at Amazon and a couple of other sites.
It is expected to be shipped in mid March next year.
In a review on Substack, Ian Bradley is very flattering. “A Tone Parallel to Duke Ellington is original and stimulating, a significant contribution to the literature on the music of Duke Ellington. Written in an elegant and engaging style, the book offers new insight to Ellington scholars but at the same time offers an accessible point of entry to readers new to Ellington’s work, life, and times. Jack Chambers’ thematic approach sheds new light on Ellington’s achievements, making astute observations on their limits and offering much food for thought on Ellington’s legacy and its future.”
Here is Jack’s introduction to the book and the list of chapters,
This book explores Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington’s music thematically, collating topics, motifs, memes and predilections that caught his attention and inspired his restless muse. In presenting Ellington’s music linked by themes, as I do here, the music is embedded in the context in which it was created— historical, political, musical, biographic, personal, and, at best, immersed in the give-and-take of popular and critical tastes at the moment of their creation and beyond. It offers, I hope, a novel kind of accessibility.
Ellington’s music presents a daunting task because of its sheer volume. The numbers defy credulity: Ellington wrote more than 2,000 compositions in numerous genres, including jazz and blues, pop songs, big-band swing, revues, hymns, tone poems, soundtracks, suites, ballets, concertos and symphonies. He wrote music every day, on trains, buses, ocean liners, and in recording studios, green rooms and hotel suites. For 50 years, until his death in 1974, his band performed almost nightly, and recorded almost weekly. The soundtrack of his life is more fully preserved than perhaps any composer, Even his most devoted listeners continually discover novel gems in it.
For anyone who might be enticed to delve into it, where does one start? The themes in this book make very manageable entry points. The organization into themes will, I hope, bring new insights to listeners who already know Ellington’s music. Most of all, I hope it will provide entry-points for relative newcomers to Ellington’s 50-year creative journey.
Ellington’s music is grounded in times and places and situations more or less familiar to us and yet sublimated so that we see them freshly, as if for the first time. Looking at the man through the prism of his music provides a “tone parallel,” a phrase that Ellington favored, to the elusive composer himself. His music has its roots in dance-band rhythms, blues harmonies and pop-song melodies, but it is, at its best, so much more than any of those things. It quite literally rose out of them.
Though the emphasis is on the music, the life and times of the composer are woven into it in a particularly intimate way. For Ellington, music was grounded in the world. “We see an old man walking along the street,” Ellington told an unidentified interviewer in 1945 (p. 254), “we play a song that goes with the man.” Instead of conservatory titles like “Prelude in C-Minor” he chose “Prelude to a Kiss”; not “Concerto for Cello and Orchestra” but “Concerto for Cootie”; not “C-sharp étude” but “C Jam Blues.” That was Ellington’s way. His first biographer, Barry Ulanov, summed up his sensibility this way (1960, 168): “He has never failed to take compass points, wherever he has been, in a new city, a new country, a redecorated nightclub, to make his own observations and to translate these into fanciful narratives.” One of the delights of listening to his music comes from gathering impressions of the personal, social and historical circumstances that drew it forth.
The themes provide the context in which the music came into being, with enough biography to satisfy most music lovers, even those who come to the book knowing very little about Ellington’s life. Each chapter is more or less self-contained, with its own Playlist as a guide to the music discussed in it, and, in some cases, fuller listings for readers who might want to pursue a topic further. The themes naturally interact, and the order of the chapters is not
arbitrary. Earlier themes cover fairly long stretches of Ellington’s fifty-year creative span, thus charting movements and events and developments that shed some light on the trajectory of his career. Later chapters sometimes cover more specific themes, some of them from his last decades, which are less well studied but no less rewarding in the music that resulted. The “continuing autobiography” that was Duke Ellington’s music covers many themes.
The chapters, appendices and interludes in the book are:
1 Echoes of Harlem
2 48 Years with the Duke on Trains
Appendix: The Duke on Trains— the Complete Discography
Interlude 1— First Impressions of Duke Ellington Worlds and Years Apart
3 The Piano Player
Appendix: Piano Recitals annotated
4 Wordless Articulation
5 Ellington’s Music with Words
Interlude 2— Musicians’ Impressions of Duke Ellington Years and Genres Apart
6 The Lotus Eaters
7 Accidental Suites: Duke Ellington’s Hollywood Scores
8 Ellington in the Global Village
Interlude 3— Poets’ Impressions of Duke Ellington Ages and Styles Apart
9 Diamonds in a Glittering Heap
10 A Final Masterpiece, Reluctantly
11 The Missing Last Act of an American Composer
My final word until the book has been delivered by my postman: BUY IT!
Author: Ulf Lundin