The New Yorker:

The musician saw most jazz writers as part of a white world that offered Black musicians adoration but denied them basic equality.

By Richard O. Boyer

Duke Ellington and the sixteen other men in his jazz band are rather surprised at the research that has been expended on bringing to light the drunks, hangovers, and frolics of their youth. The research has been done by earnest historians who are eager to determine the precise connection between dissipation and the creation of art. It is a source of mild regret to Duke and his colleagues that their escapades simply did not have that purple extravagance which is supposedly in the best tradition of jazz. Try as they would, Hugues Panassié, the French critic, and Robert Goffin, the Belgian critic, could not discover about Ellington and his band anything to match the attractive degeneracy of Buddy Bolden, a famous early cornettist and the Paul Bunyan of the jazz world, who kept himself so busy with the ladies that he had little time left for music, or of Leon Rappolo, an early clarinettist, who became insane from smoking marijuana, or even anything to equal the career of Bix Beiderbecke, another famous cornettist, who died in 1931 of drink. Ellington is apologetic. He feels that if he had only known years ago the artistic importance of his infrequent sprees he would have paid more attention to them and remembered more for posterity. He regrets that he did not know at the time that his befuddlement was the stuff of history. He can dredge up little for the archives. “I should have kept a diary,” he says.

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