Because Ellington never denounced [sic] the role of entertainer for the role of artist (and in fact seemed to relish both), because he never embraced an avant-garde or self-sacrificing artistic identity, because his disposition was consistently genial and upbeat, many observers have taken him less seriously as an artist … Ellington, through his work and his carefully cultivated image … offered convincing evidence that American music could offer something original and lasting.

Over sixteen chronologically ordered chapters, covering topics from ‘Washington/New York’, through ‘Credits/Exit Mills’, and the ‘1963 State Department Tour’ to ‘Fighting Nostalgia’ and ‘Final Days’, the author addresses questions of class, economics, racial prejudice, commercial enterprise, and the diversity of the American musical scene. He provides a clear summary of Ellington’s origins in black, middle-class, turn-of-the-century Washington, DC, and a supportive family environment – though, as Ellington himself later recalled, ‘I could play the dances, but I couldn’t mingle with all the high-falutin’ fancy chicks from the university’. Nevertheless, by the age of twenty he had acquired enough experience of, and insight into, the music business to have decided to become his own manager and booker, choosing the material and the gigs, collecting the fees and paying the musicians. It was the start of an enduring career which took him first to New York and Harlem in 1922, and subsequently to the rest of America, Europe, India, and Asia over the next fifty years.

Cohen is especially acute in his analysis of Ellington’s connections to, and differences from, the Harlem Renaissance. He draws an instructive comparison between Ellington’s position and that of Langston Hughes: they both ‘fulfilled the goals … more than any other figures, even if both were largely dismissed by the Renaissance leadership of the 1920s and 1930s’. But even allowing for different times, different attitudes, it is still disconcerting to read now the pontifications of Howard University Professor Alain Locke, who sneered at the ‘trashy type’ of jazz common in the clubs, declaring that popular black jazz, blues, and ballads would never be viewed as ‘great Negro music’.

In contrast to this blinkered view was the fact that the Ellington band’s residency at The Cotton Club attracted celebrities from every cultural and social sphere, while his stature as composer and performer was recognised by such peers in the classical music world as Leopold Stokowski and Percy Grainger. Given Cohen’s attentiveness to social and cultural positioning, it is perhaps a strange oversight that he ignores their origins. In fact, he even describes Stokowski (born in London) as ‘one of the premiere [sic] American figures in the classical music world’; and his account of Grainger’s championing Ellington’s music is slipped into one brief sentence: ‘Perhaps the most prestigious pre-England rave [sic] emanated from Percy Grainger, director of the music department of New York University.’

The actual details are rather more intriguing. Grainger invited Ellington to speak and perform with his band at a 1932 lecture series, and introduced Ellington as a member of a triumvirate whose other members were Bach and Delius (this was the same Grainger who maintained that all great composers were Aryan and blue-eyed!). Moreover, the event was important enough to be documented in a photograph (not in the book) showing Ellington at the keyboard, with an admiring Grainger and Irving Mills standing by. (The paucity of photographs and complete lack of a select discography and bibliography are puzzling.)

The presence of Mills in this photograph is also revealing, as it would have provided significant support for Cohen’s wide-ranging documentation and analysis of his role in managing and promoting Ellington from 1926 until the late 1930s. As far back as 1946, Ellington’s first biographer, Barry Ulanov, had spelt out the complicated role Mills played in developing Ellington as a brand name:

When Mills stepped in, accident and chance stepped out; big business took over and the rise of the Ellington orchestra was made inevitable. That with this rise should also come serious disillusionment for the men in the band … that, too, was inevitable.

Cohen’s exploration of the complexities of the personal and business dealings of Mills and Ellington is fascinating. He examines contracts, teasing out the connections between the band and its separate members, recording companies and the music publishing business; and explores the problematic questions related to Mills’s receiving composing credits on a number of pieces. Not only in this section, but also throughout the book, he colours his forensic narrative with smartly chosen anecdotes and illustrative incidents. We learn that the music writer Mike Levin branded Ellington’s 1946–49 output ‘frightful trash’; that Ellington’s move to Columbia in 1947 was part of a deliberate process of reinvention, but was also related to the fact that the company had perfected the process of creating LPs, which was in sync with Ellington’s interest in writing and recording extended pieces; that the first 101 LPs the company released included no jazz whatever; that Orson Welles once hired Ellington as a consultant for a projected film on the history of jazz; that Duke Ellington Inc. operated at a loss for four of the seven years from 1953–60.

Ellington himself commented in 1964 that ‘the way we operate just doesn’t make sense, and a lot of people look at me like I’m an idiot … As a business man I certainly must be’. But Cohen, in a chapter titled ‘Money’, provides an analysis of the web of contracts, record, and publishing deals with the sort of deftness that would have certainly qualified him to be Duke’s financial adviser. Crucial here is the vexed question of composers’ royalties, an area where Ellington certainly seems to have been open to criticism; and Cohen provides a vivid picture of how the brilliant saxophonist Johnny Hodges (described by one commentator as an ‘absolute song factory’) would ‘roll his fingers at Ellington […] nonverbally complaining about the lack of royalties’ when songs such as ‘Don’t Get Around Much Anymore’ and ‘I Let a Song Go out of My Heart’ were played by the band.

If there were one criticism to be levelled at Cohen’s approach, it would be that – to continue with the money motif – the music itself is sometimes short-changed. The nine-minute work Symphony in Black from 1934, surely of some importance in a study which addresses the role of the black artist in America, is ignored, as is Ellington’s first piano piece, Soda Fountain Rag, from 1917. Such Sweet Thunder, his 1957 tribute to Shakespeare, is discussed over a page, but the Ellington and Strayhorn takes on Tchaikovsky and Grieg are passed over in a sentence. This is odd, especially since one might usefully explore possible links between so many of Ellington’s short pieces without words (which have always seemed to me to resemble miniature tone poems) and piano works such as Grieg’s Lyric Pieces. Odder, though, is the total omission of the work which introduced Ellington to a European, and most emphatically, Berlin audience in 1924: the show Chocolate Kiddies (a title which, on several grounds, would nowadays never make it past the politically correct desk of the marketing department).

To offset this, however, there is the painstaking analysis of the civil rights issues involved in Ellington’s controversial, and apparently misreported ‘we ain’t ready’ interview from 1951; the shocking account of his first visit to Yale in the 1930s, which prompted a student in the dining hall to walk out, asserting: ‘I don’t eat with niggers’, set against the fact that, some thirty years later, Ellington received an honorary degree from the same institution; and his rejection for the award of a special Pulitzer Prize in 1965. Cohen never loses sight of the foci of his study, which make it indispensable reading for music historians and cultural commentators: the connections between, and the tensions within, the personal/artistic and the political/social; Ellington’s ability to cross cultural and musical boundaries; the fact that his was the first band to present successfully dancing and listening music; his openness to new musical styles (though Cohen seems to have overlooked Ellington’s droll, if slightly unfair, comment on bop: ‘like playing Scrabble with all the vowels missing’); above all, the fact that, as his collaborator Billy Strayhorn once noted: ‘Ellington plays the piano, but his real instrument is the band.’