Duke Ellington’s Revolutionary Music

by Michelle Lyu.

Duke Ellington in India, 1963

Today, the white image of the West imprints heavily on the minds and spirits of the world’s people and especially the youth. The American elite relentlessly export a materialistic culture to the world, knowing that to control culture is to control the dreams of the youth and limit humanity’s possibilities for the future. But America’s true culture has always been Black, created in the struggle for freedom, and, though it is rarely appreciated, it is the key to the future. 

DUKE ELLINGTON composes The River in 1970 as a tone poem set in twelve movements, a musical ballet. Water, the allegory for the religious experience of life: birth as the Spring, maturity a quest through life’s rapids and streams, and finally death as reconvening with the Sea, where one arrives at a “HEAVENLY ANTICIPATION OF REBIRTH.” Alvin Ailey orchestrates choreography for the music, his dance personified by the beautiful movements of prima ballerina Cynthia Gregory. The River achieves a new height of artistic completeness that reflects Ellington’s vision of the world and its people in the modern period. Ballet is no longer the providence of Europe alone, but becomes Black, joining with the creative striving of humanity as a whole. 

In preparation for The River, Ellington studied the symphonic canon on water music, listening to mostly great European works such as Debussy’s La Mer. But what he created was of a new quality altogether, beyond the white imaginary. When water passed through Ellington’s hands, nature transformed into an allegory for the worldview and strivings of the human being, moving beyond the concern of the natural world alone as was often the focus of European symphonies. Ellington’s nature is closer to African and Asian than European civilization, such as ancient Chinese landscape painting where nature serves as metaphor for the inner life of the human being. Ellington centralizes the ordinary human being in the makings of history, then advances human consciousness: depicting how he thinks, strives and acts. For Ellington, the new human being is concerned with freedom: a total freedom for all people from the realities of poverty, white supremacy and war. 

Duke Ellington was born in 1899, shortly after the Emancipation of four million enslaved Black workers in 1863. His grandparents were slaves, and his parents labored serving white folk. He grew up under the shadow of Jim Crow and with the memory of the betrayal of a greater democracy from the unfulfilled Reconstruction period. When he began to tour, he and his musicians were humiliated by segregation in both the North and South, playing for white people who coveted their artistry but scorned their humanity as Black men. These were unforgettable realities for Duke which formed the backbone of his moral consciousness, where he recognized his freedom would be at the price of a lifelong struggle against white supremacy. 

Duke Ellington’s orchestra was formed by Black men who were like him, dedicated to creating a new civilization through music that was the formerly enslaved Black worker’s message of freedom to the world. These deep loyalties to the freedom of Black folk and all humanity, an unspoken but unbreakable common striving, and Duke’s leadership for this purpose, made possible the orchestra’s rapid development and constant expressions of new and creative genius. 

The Ellington Orchestra was itself like a complete human being that was constantly searching, changing, thinking and moving forward in creative and surprising ways; it possessed a unified self-consciousness that allowed for it to be deeply democratic. Each musician held an integral place in the organization, together forming the body and the soul of the orchestra. This was a revolutionary break with the traditional European orchestra, which was far more formal and static in its professional employment and artistic expressions. 

Duke carried unique pressures as bandleader, needing to pay his musicians and secure work for his orchestra, and also to father or guide his musicians to become disciplined men. His leadership protected and nurtured the natural genius of the orchestra’s members, such as composer Billy Strayhorn and saxophonist Johnny Hodges, whom he described as pure artists. When Hodges played, “He just wanted to play them in true character, reaching into his soul for them, and automatically reaching everybody else’s soul.” Ellington’s defense of pure artistry and beauty was a defense of Black genius that would otherwise have withered in a white supremacist social order that had no place for them. 


The ballad Reflections in D becomes a solo dance in Alvin Ailey’s celebration of the Negro centennial in 1963. Lotus Blossom is composed by Strayhorn, often played by Duke as solo piano or as the finishing piece to his symphonic performances, its gracious melodies a perfect tribute to their visionary union. Mood Indigo “is just a story about a little girl and a little boy.” It is an eternally modern story composed in 1930. “They are about eight and the girl loves the boy. They never speak of it, of course, but she just likes the way he wears his hat. Every day he comes to her house at a certain time and she sits in her window and waits. Then one day he doesn't come. Mood Indigo just tells how she feels.” 

Recognizing Europe’s symphonic language could not contain the experience of the Afro American and darker humanity, he created a new musical language altogether. This new music, which has been called jazz and Black music and can be called revolutionary and world music, is a prism to see the world as it really is and to make possible what can be. In a time when material progress has outstripped moral progress, Ellington investigates realities of modern life and discovers how human energy can be concentrated toward great achievements to resolve these problems. In Harlem Air Shaft one hears this pulsing faith. 

His compositions dedicated to New York could speak for Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata or any bustling city crowded with human life, “So much goes on in a Harlem air shaft. You get the full essence of Harlem in an air shaft. You hear fights, you smell dinner, you hear people making love. You hear intimate gossip floating down. You hear the radio. An air shaft is one great big loudspeaker. You see your neighbor’s laundry. You hear the janitor’s dogs. The man upstairs’ aerial falls down and breaks your window. You smell coffee. A wonderful thing is that smell…” 

Duke Ellington loved civilization itself. His first Asiatic suite, The Far East Suite was written for the majesty and beauty the orchestra encountered on their 1963 tour across Asian civilization: Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and India. He loved India and her people, observing how many “look like the Strayhorn family in this land, where so many races and religions are represented.” Throughout the 20th century but especially during the height of the Civil Rights and world anti-colonial movements, Afro American music was known and beloved by the world, a concrete bond that celebrated humanity’s common struggle for freedom. 

It is in this spirit that Ellington’s music lives. What if the world’s children today were raised hearing the intelligent and pure melodies of America’s true artists? 

The European Renaissance was the first ushering of the world into modernity, but it did not address humanity’s problems of war, poverty and the color line. The anti-slavery struggle delivered the gift of a second birth, of colored and world modernity, which gives us the ideas, language and strategies to bring the world closer to the end of its greatest evils. Duke Ellington is the musical originary of this journey, and the struggle he began is ours to inherit and carry forward. 

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Michelle Lyu is a member of the Saturday Free School for Philosophy and Black Liberation and an organizer of the recent conference "Seizing Our Future: The Revolutionary Music of Ellington, Mingus, Sun Ra and Bootsy" in Philadelphia.