We started yesterday with a walk in Rock Creek Park. There is a wide, flat trail (much wider and flatter than most) that you can access off 16th Street at Juniper, two short blocks west of Ohev Shalom Synagogue. It’s called the Valley Trail, and it more or less follows Rock Creek for miles. The pictures don’t show it, but there are hikers, walkers, runners, and dogs on the trail. Mainly dogs.
We then ran some errands and had a meal at the Sweetwater Tavern in Falls Church VA. Home in time to see the Caps beat Buffalo in overtime, and the Brewers take a two game World Series lead against Tampa Bay.
While we watched, I was reading Terry Teachout’s Duke, his 2013 biography of Duke Ellington, who grew up in DC’s Shaw neighborhood, just a few miles from here. It is an extraordinarily well researched book with (ready for this?) 83 pages of end notes and a detalied 14 page bibliography. Yet, Teachout is not afraid to say where documentation is missing or where he couldn’t find something. Of course, I won’t remember 10% of what is in the book, but no matter. It carries you right along.
A couple of interesting points made. Ellington, who was untrained, and was a poor sight reader, composed in a way very different from most. Where most composers start with a melody line and work the chords around it, Teachout said that Ellington would begin with the chord progressions. The melodies would come last, and often be based on a tune written by someone else. Ellington also did “band based” composing. By that, Teachout means that his music would be written with skills of the current members of his band in mind. And that there was never a final score for any piece, that Ellington’s compositions were always in motion, always “becoming”. Ellington was far from the perfect human being, he was jealous of his competitors (Teachout thinks that George Gershwin and Jelly Roll Morton were top competitors, each different in their approaches to their music).
He also gives a lot of credit to Billy Strayhorn, who was with Ellington for 25 years and wrote much of his music, although this was prettycwell hidden. Strayhorn was a sad figure – gay, when being gay was an embarrassment, very shy, thin and 5’3″. But an astounding musical talent and first class intellectual (something Ellington never pretended to be). And Strayhorn, to complicate matters, was diagnosed with a fatal cancer at 49 and died at only 52.
Terry Teachout, who you may remember as the Wall Street Journal’s long time drama and cultural critic, died young as well, in his mid-60s. He had been diagnosed, says Wikipedia, with congestive heart failure while still in his 40s, but perservered in his very active journalistic career.
Just to bring things home, while Ellington grew up 15 minutes from our house, Teachout (like Rush Limbaugh) was born in Cape Girardeau MO, and grew up in Sikeston MO, not too far from St. Louis. Okay, pretty far.
By the way, I am only in 1939 in the Ellington book. Duke is just turning 40.
