Every so often I tell myself I'll work through the works from the 20s through to the 70s. But I always get stuck on the extraordinary late 20s recordings and the even more extraordinary 1940-42 band.
For someone to maintain such a high level of consistency over 50 years is amazing. For that person to not only write a major portion of the bands repertoire but also run it, rehearse it, play excellent piano in it and just manage to keep it together is mind-boggling.
And those peak periods contain recording after recording that deserve to be called masterpieces. I love big band music but Ellington's best music has a magic that puts it in a class of its own. Fletcher Henderson developed the standard style of big band arrangement and perhaps Benny Goodman perfected the stylish presentation of that standard kind of performance. But Ellington simply amazes, not with size or power but with the ability, again and again, to write a line that is breathtaking in it's simplicity yet utterly sublime melodically, harmonically and texturally.
Ellington was surely the greatest American musician of the 20th century by quite a margin. Armstrong, Coltrane and Parker introduced breathtakingly new technical innovations but, almost immediately, proved fairly easy to copy with reasonable credibility. Ellington is one of a kind.
