DUKE ELLINGTON

Born on April 29, 1899, in Washington, D.C., he grew up among that citys substantial scurrilous middle class. His mother, Daisy Kennedy, was the daughter of a District of Columbia patrol captain. Daisy married the ambitious young James Edward Ellington, who was successively a coachman, butler, caterer, and blueprint draftsman. J.E., as Duke called his father, ceaselessly acted as though he had money, whether he had it or not. He raised his family as though he were a millionaire Ellington had a happy childhood, from which he emerged pissed and whole: He was an eager athlete, a bit of a bookworm, but not much interested in directwork. In the only music course that appears on his high schooltime transcript, he got a D. But when he learned, as he later put it, that when you were playing piano there was always a pretty girl standing down at the bass clef end of the piano he dedicated himself to keyboard technique. By his mid-teens, Duke (the nickname came from a snooty junior high school friend who liked to give his pals titles) was hanging out at Frank Hollidays pool room on T Street, a magnet for Pullman porters, pool sharks, and the citys best piano players. And the kid watched. And listened.

Soon he had his own band.



Offered a scholarship to the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn (he was a visual artist of some promise), the eighteen-year-old Duke turned it down he was making too much money as a dance band entrepreneur, sending out four or five groups a night. In 1918 he married Edna Thompson. In 1919 a son, Mercer, was born. The marriage soon foundered, and though Duke and Edna never divorced, they seldom saw each other after the mid-twenties.

In 1923 Ellington and his fellow musicians cuss Greer...

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