Terry Teachout’s Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington (Gotham, $30) vividly brings to life the composer, pianist, and bandleader who “knew how to express the grandest of emotions on the smallest of scales, and who needed no more room in which to suggest his immortal longings.” Teachout (author of the wonderful Pops on Louis Armstrong) also shows Ellington the enigma: cool, suave, and charismatic in public, yet distant and selfish, sporting a Don Juan complex in private. But above all, it’s about the music: Ellington’s apprenticeship on D.C.’s U Street and in Harlem’s Cotton Club, and the decades-long, non-stop journey of composing and traveling with his orchestra. Working with his inspiring soloists (and later, Billy Strayhorn), Ellington composed a body of work, song by song, suite by suite, that is unsurpassed.
- Andras G.