Duke Ellington's Rooted Cosmopolitanism

“Leadership Mastery, Jazz Style” will be a recurring feature of this blog.

The series begins with Duke Ellington.

Here’s a frame for why this series is important.

Why?

One clear principle of Tune In To Leadership is the leadership potential of every single person.

You have an individual fingerprint and unique footprint that’s yours alone, correct?

That’s evidence that you are unique in the world.

One of the primary practices in jazz is developing your unique voice, your sound.

Having a unique approach to leadership is an extension of this practice.

The descriptive titles we’ll give to the artists will center on one defining facet of their leadership style. In the case of Duke, we highlight his cosmopolitan approach.

The Rooted Cosmopolitan: Duke Ellington 

Maestro Duke Ellington

Ellington, the greatest American composer and big band leader of the 20th century, captured in sound the feeling tones, idiomatic nuance, and global range of American life like no other. Rooted in a black American ethos, Ellington integrated the varying styles of jazz—and the voices and personalities of the specific musicians in his band—into his own grand style and musical conception.

Cosmopolitan means being a widely learned, sophisticated citizen of the world rather than narrowly provincial and insular. Suave and debonair, Ellington was the epitome of urbane refinement. Yet because Ellington had proud, firm roots in his ethnic culture—hear his tone parallel to the history of the American Negro, “Black, Brown and Beige”—he wasn’t unmoored from his origins. Ellington was a rooted cosmopolitan.

His cosmopolitan gifts shine brightly on “The Symphonic Ellington,” “The Nutcracker Suite,” and Grieg’s “Peer Gynt Suite” as well as his take on the music of lands he visited over a half-century of world travels. Compositions such as “The Far East Suite,” “The Latin American Suite,” and “The Afro-Eurasian Eclipse” exemplify his deep listening beyond his own vernacular culture, adapting those international experiences into his own black American idiom.

Ellington’s nephew Michael James would tell me that his uncle was a master psychologist. Ellington was comfortable with people from all places and all walks of life, from hustlers to housekeepers and waiters to the Queen of England. Yet he always kept a reserve, a place of composed solitude. Perhaps this was due in part to the wise advice Michael told me Duke shared with him: “Never let someone else’s sickness become your own.”

Grandmaster Leader

As a grandmaster leader, Ellington brought out the very best in the musicians who played in his orchestra. Billy Strayhorn, Duke’s alter-ego in a healthy competition of co-creation, composed classic songs for the band, including their theme song, “Take the ‘A’ Train.” The superb improvisations of band members such as Johnny Hodges, Ray Nance, Juan Tizol, Harry Carney, and Paul Gonsalves were featured on numbers the maestro wrote with their unique sound in mind.

Members of his big band never sounded as good by themselves as they did with him—proof of the extraordinary container of collaborative leadership mastery Ellington designed for posterity. Duke Ellington, cosmopolite par excellence, wasn’t only a citizen of America and the world; he was a citizen of the cosmos.