(Aug 5 2025) Does Jazz Have A Problem With Idolization?

Well it’s been a second! While I always intended to be consistent with these newsletter entries, July got the better of me. Over the last few weeks my wife graduated with her Masters which meant she finally had time to enjoy the wonderful scenery we have here in Washington and go for a number of mountain hikes with me (I even saw my first bear and bear cub!). We also moved house, I finally changed all of my business connections with Australia over to the United States, and to top it all off I have been putting together my new course on jazz styles. With that said, I’m now a bit more on top of it all and hopefully can jump back into weekly newsletter entries once again. No promises as I have a big archive trip coming up, but I’d like to be a bit more consistent once again.

In recent months I’ve dedicated most of my time to researching jazz history, submerging myself into books, documentaries, and the occasional dark corner of the internet where jazz geeks such as myself argue about the intentions of people we never personally knew. It has been a fascinating journey so far and I’m loving everything about the process. I’ve uncovered connections between arrangers I had never heard of and added a new level of complexity to my understanding of the art form. However what I’ve noticed is that there are really two streams in which information is portrayed. One which shows a large interconnected web of people, many of whom have been forgotten with time, and the other focusing on singular figures, elevating them to some kind of god in terms of their creative ability. Unfortunately, for most people, they are only exposed to the latter because it is far easier to convey than the former. There are many figures which certain commentators sit out on, namely Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker, but for the sake of this entry I want to focus in on someone that resonates a bit more with my interests of big band jazz: Duke Ellington. 

As someone who hasn’t given Ellington much time in the past, I really wanted to see what the big deal was during my current history deep dive. While I was familiar with a lot of his more well known works, my knowledge of his entire discography was generally quite limited until recently. Based on how Ellington is often portrayed, you would really think that he single-handedly redefined large ensemble jazz, first helping establish it in the 1920s and then constantly reinventing it every decade afterward. However, if you look closer the story is actually considerably more intricate. 

When Ellington first began writing, his music resembled the popular ragtime hits of the day and it wasn’t until he formed his first ensemble that the music started to shift in a different direction. His first major breakthrough was labeled as “jungle music,” very much a racialized label of the times that was used to draw white audiences to watch black performers at the Cotton Club. It seems that this new type of music may not have actually been purely his own and more a result of the collaboration between the members of the band. As time goes by, names like Bubber Miley, Ellington’s first star trumpet player who firmly established the foundations for using the plunger mute in a number of creative ways, generally are only remembered as performers and not as compositional forces to the same level as Ellington. Yet it was Miley who actually helped write some of Ellington’s early hits such as East St Toodle Oo and Black and Tan Fantasy. We will never know exactly how much Miley contributed but given that Ellington’s compositions sounded completely different prior to Miley joining the ensemble, one could guess that Miley had a considerable influence.

Of course Ellington was a highly creative writer and deserves to be remembered, but we must make sure that our understanding of him is more nuanced and gives respect to the collaborators who so clearly helped define Ellington’s success over the decades. If it weren’t for Miley, perhaps Ellington wouldn’t have gained such a large audience early in his career and could have been just another name lost to time like so many other artists.

So what do we do with this information? How do we teach people about figures like Ellington but in a way which respects those that may have helped along the way? Of course there is no simple solution, however I think those of us who choose to pursue jazz education as a career should take the time to really understand the people we teach about. We must also remember that while some artists have gone on to achieve a lot, almost always they didn’t exist in a bubble and that they lived lives with interactions and influences from so many different places. Now more than ever with AI generated information pulled from who knows where, it is up to us to make sure we understand the people we teach about and to do the research where necessary.

In just over a week I’ll be at the Smithsonian checking out a number of Ellington’s original scores among other manuscripts and will be able to see if there are any noticeable differences across his career. All of this is in preparation for my upcoming Arranging 102 online course where I walk through the musical characteristics of every major jazz style and how to capture them accurately in your own writing. Unfortunately if you are interested in joining the upcoming cohort it is actually fully booked, but I do plan on running it at least once more some time in 2026.

Thanks for taking the time to read this entry. I’ve been having a think about where to take this newsletter in the future and as I’ve been learning more about niche arrangers I figure I might jump into that topic for a few weeks. Like always, if you have any comments or feedback, I always love to hear them and if there’s something you want me to write about please let me know.

Until next time,

Toshi