300 PART 3 | FROM WORLD WAR I THROUGH WORLD WAR II
After World War II, Ellington enlarged his band, even as economic conditions
forced many big bands out of business. Touring both at home and abroad, playing
dances, concerts, and festivals, the band maintained a core of older favorites in its
repertory. Meanwhile, Ellington continued to write new compositions, including
the score to Otto Preminger’s fi lm Anatomy of a Murder (1959). In the 1960s Ellington
began to be noticed in the halls of offi cial American culture. He was awarded the
Presidential Medal of Freedom (1969), won honorary doctorates from universities,
and was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. In the years since his
death in 1974 he has been more and more widely recognized not only as a leading
fi gure in the jazz tradition but also as an important twentieth-century composer.
Strayhorn, Ellington’s close collaborator, observed that “Ellington plays the
piano, but his real instrument is his band.” Indeed, Ellington sought tonal “cha-
risma” from his players, and he worked to discover timbres that would seize
listeners’ attention. Encouraging his band members to develop distinctive per-
sonal timbres, Ellington then combined those colors with a painterly touch.
Experience taught him that some musicians revealed their inner selves most
deeply in their sound, and that audiences knew it. Audience response to the fi rst
note of a solo by alto saxophonist Johnny Hodges, for example, “was as big and
deep as most applause for musicians at the end of their complete performance.”
Ellington appreciated the collaborative role of his audiences. “I travel from
place to place by car, bus, train, plane,” he wrote, “taking rhythm to the danc-
ers, harmony to the romantic, melody to the nostalgic, gratitude to the listener.”
And he knew how rhythm can bring musicians and audience members into
sync: “W hen your pulse and my pulse are together, we are swinging, with ears,
eyes, and every member of the body tuned into driving a wave emotionally,Ellington as coloristK Edward Kennedy “Duke”
Ellington (1899–1974),
composer and bandleader,
in a publicity photo taken in
193 4.172028_12_280-304_r3_ko.indd 300 23/01/13 8:41 PM