Will the American jazz composer, pianist and bandleader Duke Ellington (1899-1974) still receive the Pulitzer Prize that was withheld from him in 1965? A petition initiated by jazz critic Ted Gioia tries to make it happen. According to Gioia, the ‘blot on the history of the Pulitzer Prize’ has a good chance of being erased: the online petition launched in July on change.org has already been signed more than 61,000 times.
Signatories include prominent American composers such as Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Caroline Shaw, David Lang, Tania Léon, John Adams and his near-namesake John Luther Adams. Many of them are past winners of the prize themselves. John Adams wrote on Twitter: ‘In interviews I am often asked who I think is the greatest American composer. If I then say: Duke Ellington, I get a gracious smile: ‘Haha, but seriously, who do you really think…’ And then I say: I just said that.’
Edward Kennedy ‘Duke’ Ellington was nominated by an independent jury for a lifetime achievement award in 1965. However, the Pulitzer Organization did not accept the nomination and decided not to award any prize at all that year. Two of the three judges, including Winthrop Sargeant, music critic of time and The New Yorkerthen resigned in protest.
Rhythmic Vitality
The then 66-year-old composer reacted to the rejection with a wit that is typical of him: ‘Fate is kind to me, it doesn’t want me to become famous at too young an age.’
The Pulitzer Organization never explained its refusal. Gioia assumes that the board found it too controversial to give the prestigious music prize, which in the 1960s went to composers such as Elliott Carter, Samuel Barber and George Crumb, to an African-American jazz musician.
Duke Ellington has built up a rich and extensive oeuvre over fifty years, composed to the body of the soloists in his orchestra. Some key figures (including baritone saxophonist Harry Carney) remained loyal to him from the late 1920s until his death. Titles like Black and Tan Fantasy, Mood Indigo, Ko-Ko, Take the ‘A’ Train, Harlem Air Shaft and Cotton Tail the composer himself regarded as ‘beyond category’. Reflecting on African-American life, they are distinguished by rhythmic vitality, melodic ingenuity and beautifully dissonant harmonies.
The first Pulitzer Prize for a jazz musician went to trumpeter Wynton Marsalis in 1997 for his Blood on the Fields, an oratorio on the history of slavery. Two years later, Ellington was posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize Special Citation on his 100th birthday.
According to Ted Gioia, the Pulitzer Prize board has so far not responded to the petition.
Ellington in the Netherlands
Duke Ellington performed eleven times in the Netherlands between 1933 and 1973. The debut was on July 25, 1933 in the Kurhaus in Scheveningen, where visitors flocked to the aisles to hear the music they had only known from 78 rpm records until then. The closing followed on November 18, 1973 in De Doelen in Rotterdam, when Ellington was already terminally ill but nevertheless made a European tour of 31 concerts.