Undefeated Champ

It was a typical jazzmen's drinking contest of the Prohibition era. Through the night, Cornetist Rex Stewart and Trombonist Joe Nanton matched half pints of gin with each other--and a referee. By 9 a.m., the only one left standing was the referee, who happened to be Bandleader Duke Ellington. Recalling the incident last year in his autobiography Music is my Mistress, Ellington wrote, "I don't drink booze any more. I retired undefeated champ about 30 years ago."

Booze was about the only thing the Duke ever retired from. He was an unceasing forward mover in a career that spanned two World Wars, that took him from the streets of his native Washington, D.C., to dinner dates at the White House and that saw him compose such jazz classics as Sophisticated Lady, Caravan and Don't Get Around Much Anymore. Said the late Billy Strayhorn, who composed the Duke's theme, Take the A Train: "He not only doesn't live in the past, he rejects it, at least as far as his own past accomplishments are concerned."

The Gift. Ellington burst on the jazz scene in 1927 at Harlem's Cotton Club. Right into 1974 he kept a 16-piece band circling the globe. "What would I do sitting in one place?" he asked a few years ago. "How would I get to hear the new things I write? What reason would I have to retire from the road?" Only illness. Two months ago, Ellington entered Manhattan's Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center with lung cancer, then developed pneumonia. Last week, only a month after his 75th birthday, Edward Kennedy Ellington died.

He left as a legacy the most distinctive single body of composition in all of jazz. Where he got the gift even he could not say for sure. His father was a butler who worked up to caterer and then became a blueprint technician. As a boy, Duke showed more aptitude for painting than music. Piano lessons were a chore. "Before I knew it, I would be fashioning a new melody and accompaniment instead of following the score," he said. Indeed he never became a virtuoso pianist; his talent was as a leader, arranger and composer. By the age of 14, he had written his first song, Soda Fountain Rag. Soon he was fronting a band that played dances and receptions.

In 1922 he made the move to New York, where he would eventually come to epitomize all that was elegant and dignified about jazz. But in those days he was a tough blade. In Chicago, where he frequently dropped in to play, there was a standing order: "Duke Ellington is not to be bothered in the Loop." It stuck, because it came from Al Capone.

It was a fast life, and early on the Duke developed an ability to compose anywhere--restaurants, buses, hotels, even taxis. He wrote his first big hit, Mood Indigo, in 15 minutes while waiting for his mother to fix dinner. Many of his early works shimmered with exotic "jungle" colors, achieved through the clever use of mutes, slurs and growls, that were intended to romanticize the African roots of jazz. Later works such as Warm Valley and Dusk took on subtle pastels and sophisticated shapes. Ellington's style and reputation eventually transcended jazz, and he even performed with major symphony orchestras.

In his later years, the Duke lived a life that for a jazz musician at least, was almost monastic. If wrestling with a new work, he would write all night in his apartment on Manhattan's West Side. Parties? "I just don't have time to be a social cat." Since the death of Strayhorn in 1967, Ellington's closest intimates were his son Mercer, who played trumpet in the band and served as road manager, and his sister Ruth, president of Ellington's publishing firm Tempo Music. Ellington's marriage to Mercer's mother, his high school sweetheart, Edna Thompson, was short-lived. Though never lacking for female companionship, he did not remarry.

If he was lonely, it never showed--except, perhaps, when he was backstage waiting to go on, looking weary from the day's travel, the bags under his eyes heavier than usual. Out in the spotlight, he was a new man, the fingers dancing merrily over the piano keys, the face lit up with joy. Duke Ellington once said, "My reward is hearing what I've done." It was everybody else's reward too.

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