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He, Too, Was America: Duke Ellington's Sepia Panorama

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When it comes to biography, the life of pianist, composer and bandleader Duke Ellington has presented a challenge worthy of its maestro's motto: “beyond category." Ellington was born in 1899 and died in 1974; in between, he merely led a world-class jazz orchestra for 50 years, wrote or co-wrote pieces that number in the thousands, and became one of the most significant artists the United States has ever produced—forget any mitigating prefixes such as “jazz" or “African-American." Yet those qualities defined much of what Ellington did and who he was, as he moved through a long stretch of American history in which both jazz and civil rights came to the forefront of the country's culture.

Given the scope of Ellington's story, it's no surprise that no single Ellingtonian book has really emerged as the “definitive" work about its subject. Mark Tucker's Ellington: the Early Years offers the most in-depth portrait of a particular period, while John Hasse's Beyond Category: the Life and Genius of Duke Ellington provides a serviceable overview of Ellington's entire career; the oral-history Reminiscing in Tempo and the anthology The Duke Ellington Reader (edited by Tucker) make for quasi-comprehensive narratives as well. Harvey Cohen's new book, Duke Ellington's America, is not a definitive biography either, but it may well be the definitive book about the role of race in Ellington's life and music.

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