'Duke' reveals the music behind Ellington

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Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington By Terry Teachout Gotham, 364 pp. 3 stars Bill Desowitz Wall Street Journal drama critic Terry Teachout follows up his acclaimed Louis Armstrong biography (Pops) with a thorough

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Wall Street Journal drama critic Terry Teachout follows up his acclaimed Louis Armstrong biography (Pops) with a thorough and fascinating portrait of the greatest jazz composer of the 20th century, Duke Ellington (1899-1974).

Teachout peeks behind Ellington's elegant if enigmatic persona, explores the strengths and weaknesses of his celebrated musical craft in great technical detail (which might be frustrating to follow for the casual reader) and offers a larger African-American perspective.

Best-known for such standards as Sophisticated Lady, Mood Indigo, Take the A-Train, It Don't Mean a Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing and Don't Get Around Much Anymore, Ellington helped popularize jazz around the world with simple yet dynamic melodies. Although he had a voracious appetite for food, drink and women, he lived for his music and was in his prime in the '30s, '40s and '50s. He let nothing distract him: composing, recording and performing with a talented if temperamental band (progressing from the Cotton Club to Carnegie Hall).

The son of a butler and genteel, churchgoing mother, Ellington grew up pampered in a middle-class neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Indeed, his stylish dress and "princely" manner earned him the nickname "Duke" as a youngster. He was drawn to ragtime and played piano at dances and parties before moving to Harlem in 1923 at the height of the cultural renaissance.

Ellington wasn't formally trained or even well-versed in classical music, so he found it difficult to write hummable tunes or structurally develop themes with any complexity. But he could meld together disparate musical fragments from his band members' solo performances, mastering a "mosaic method of composition." While not a flagrant plagiarist, Ellington still took most of the credit.

Ellington's best collaborator, though, was Billy Strayhorn, a young, talented, classically trained composer, who represented the musical refinement that Ellington sought. When they first met in 1939, Ellington gave Strayhorn directions to his Manhattan apartment from the A-Train, which the protégé quickly turned into the popular song. For nearly 30 years, Strayhorn helped elevate Ellington's craft.

But Ellington was nothing if not ambitious and for a decade struggled with his answer to George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, eventually composing the magnum opus, Black, Brown and Beige, which he premiered at Carnegie Hall in 1943. The 45-minute symphony, which was critically panned by the classical establishment, was Ellington's most personal statement about the African-American experience.

Teachout suggests that Ellington extended beyond his reach, but at his best painted pictures in sound "with a feel for orchestral color as sure as anything to be heard in the music of Debussy or Ravel."

The biographer also finds it significant that the "status-conscious child of the black middle-class" chose to draw a direct parallel "between self-image and skin tone in a work that celebrated the history of his race."

Now that Teachout has written about these two jazz giants, how would he characterize them? While Armstrong was open and unguarded, Ellington revealed only what he wanted you to see in an effort to maintain respectability. Not surprisingly, Teachout finds mystery more intriguing than likability.

Bill Desowitz is the author of James Bond Unmasked.

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Obama bio reveals juicy tidbits, much more

You've probably already seen headlines and articles triggered by the juicy details in David Maraniss' Barack Obama: The Story, about the president's pot-smoking school days or his college girlfriend's recollections of his "sexual warmth" and emotional "coolness."

But there's far more to this revealing and deeply reported coming-of-age story, a term usually applied to novels. The book, which will go on sale Tuesday, is not a traditional biography.

Obama doesn't enter the narrative until page 165, when he's born Aug. 4, 1961, in Honolulu. The first six chapters explore his family roots in Africa and Kansas, where his great- grandmother, Ruth Dunham, who was married at 15, committed suicide at 26. Her sons would go to live with their grandparents, "setting a generational pattern," Maraniss writes, "that would be repeated a half-century later."

The book ends in 1988, when Obama enters Harvard, emerging from "the chaos of peripatetic forebears," a childhood in "distant Hawaii and more distant Indonesia," and "rootless feelings of a double outsider as a biracial and cross-cultural kid" who barely knew his Kenyan dad.

Maraniss, an associate editor at The Washington Post whose books include First in His Class, about the young Bill Clinton, is a good writer and a great reporter. He marvels at the improbability of Obama's story but stops short of celebrating.

The book is more about personality than policy or politics. At times, it reads like a novel filled with stories too unlikely for fiction. But if it's exhaustive, it can be exhausting in its details.

It explores Obama's "determination to avoid life's traps." It presents him as a product not just of his family, but of his times and of the places where he grew up, including the home he found in Chicago. It warns that "to view him primarily through a racial lens can lead to a misinterpretation of the root cause of his feelings of outsiderness."

I suspect that if the president, whom Maraniss interviewed, had time to read all 641 pages, he would not be angry enough to sue. But he might find the book too revealing to thank the author. Which makes it the best kind of political biography.

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