Jeff Pilchard
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thread 1/10
Fourth this month on my list of books that have helped me in the ongoing task of getting over myself and my White supremacist upbringing (I need to catch up a bit--this week has been busy): Beyond Category: The Life and Genius of Duke Ellington.
01:02 PM - Feb 09, 2024
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Jeff Pilchard
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thread 2/10
I had started listening to jazz a little back in Maryland (the University of Maryland Eastern Shore has a *great* jazz station--WESM 91.3 FM--available on Radio Garden). Then I moved to SF and got caught up in opera and in baroque music. But in the last few years, I've gone back to jazz . . .
01:02 PM - Feb 09, 2024
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Jeff Pilchard
A
thread 3/10
(and music by Black American composers in general), and it's been a revelation. Looked at thru the prism of White supremacy, jazz is a niche interest. Looked at more objectively . . . Oh. My. God. What I have been missing out on. What White people miss out on in general . . .
01:02 PM - Feb 09, 2024
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Jeff Pilchard
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thread 4/10
. . . when they don't recognize the deep Americanism of jazz. (And that goes for Black American composers in classical veins, too--Copland's Appalachian Spring is a tidbit compared to the symphonies of William Grant Still and the recently-rediscovered Florence Price.
01:02 PM - Feb 09, 2024
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Jeff Pilchard
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thread 5/10
Why this music isn't in every grade-school music course . . . well, I know why.)

But Ellington. Ellington's music--especially from the swing era--was exactly the kind of music my father loved.
01:02 PM - Feb 09, 2024
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Jeff Pilchard
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thread 6/10
And not just big band music in general (the White, denatured version of swing), but the music of the Black bandleaders--Ellington, Basie, Calloway. I believe, tho', that White supremacy kept him from acknowledging their true greatness and originality.
01:02 PM - Feb 09, 2024
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Jeff Pilchard
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thread 7/10
It didn't do to praise Black people too much (not that he would've acknowledged that unpleasant fact, either).

But Ellington. Again: Oh. My. God. He was the greatest of the bandleaders from the 1920s thru the 1960s--longer and more successfully than any other.
01:02 PM - Feb 09, 2024
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Jeff Pilchard
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thread 8/10
To keep a jazz orchestra together for nearly fifty years--it's hard to imagine how difficult that must have been at times. And then he is, IMHO, *the* greatest American composer, in any genre. (Pace Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copeland, and the Gershwins . . .
01:02 PM - Feb 09, 2024
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Jeff Pilchard
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thread 9/10
. . . but they were all working in established traditions--Ellington was making it up as he went along.) Hasse's biography of Ellington charts that long creative arc--again, from the '20s right thru to the end of the '60s. Ellington's music is incomparable--
01:02 PM - Feb 09, 2024 (Edited)
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Jeff Pilchard
A
thread 10/10
dramatic, nuanced, extraordinarily complex, and all this even when he was writing for a popular audience. His later, less audience-driven music . . . well. 'Harlem' is just one wonderful example. There are plenty of great jazz instrumentalists in Ellington's era, but only one great composer.
01:02 PM - Feb 09, 2024
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