Duke Ellington, the Jazz Legend Who Became a Diplomat

This article is adapted from The Jazzmen: How Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie Transformed America by Larry Tye, Mariner Books, 416 pp., $32.50, May 2024

His first overseas trip in 1933—to England, France, and the Netherlands—was a life-changer. The bandleader and composer helped elevate jazz’s stature from a popular novelty to an art on par with—and certainly more rollicking than—the staid classical styles familiar to snobbish Europeans. His new fans launched Ellington record clubs complete with lectures, recitals, and group discussions. The BBC paid the highest fee it had ever offered for a live broadcast by a band, and music writers back home echoed the raves published by the French and British press. Ellington’s record sales soared on both sides of the Atlantic.

Europe also gave Duke and his sidemen a respite from the strict racial segregation they had to endure in the United States, where the infamous Jim Crow laws still ruled. As drummer Sonny Greer recounted: “We stayed in the biggest hotels, baby. … They flew the American flag for us.” Duke never forgot his reception in Europe. “Jazz acquired the core of its international audience in the early ’30s,” he wrote in a 1959 magazine article. “Not as a woman of ill repute … but as an art form—the American art form.”

Ellington in Paris in 1939. Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images

Once bitten by the travel bug, Ellington would return to Europe and beyond for decades. He found a trip to Germany in 1950 particularly unforgettable. “I had occasion to drink beer with people who … had been seized by the Gestapo for playing or even possessing our records,” he recalled. (The Nazis had banned jazz as “degenerate music.”) He told another story of a brother and sister on a French farm who buried their jazz records when the German soldiers arrived. “The Nazis ransacked the house, then discovered the freshly turned earth,” Duke wrote. “They dug in, took out the records, and to the surprise of the frightened youngsters, all they did was wrap them back up, throw them over their shoulders, and march away.”

Ellington also had tender memories of London, where he met Prince Charles, Prince Edward, and, best of all, Queen Elizabeth II. A year after they were introduced in 1958, he composed for her The Queen’s Suite, a six-movement melody that draws on natural landscapes—a mockingbird in Florida, northern lights seen from a Canadian roadside, lightning bugs and croaking frogs along the Ohio River. He underwrote the exquisite recording himself, cut a single golden disc, mailed it to Buckingham Palace, and ensured that the piece would not be publicly released while he was still alive. After he died, the composition appeared on an album that won the Grammy Award for Best Jazz Performance by a Big Band.

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Analysis

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Howard W. French

The orchestra embarked on its first government-sponsored tour in 1963, part of a Kennedy administration charm initiative. The U.S. State Department targeted countries in South Asia and the Middle East that were close enough to the Soviet Union to be jittery in the wake of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. A special focus was Turkey, whose U.S.-supplied Jupiter missiles Washington had secretly bargained away in return for Russia removing its warheads from Cuba. The U.S. government’s cultural diplomacy offensive also came as U.S. racial violence was again making headlines worldwide. First there were bombings and riots in Birmingham, then civil rights leader Medgar Evers was gunned down, and in June 1963, Alabama Gov. George Wallace stood at the door of the University of Alabama to block Black students from entering while vowing, “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.” The jazzmen were deployed for a “kind of cultural diplomacy, soft propaganda,” wrote Charles Sam Courtney, a young foreign service officer assigned as Ellington’s escort in Turkey. It was “one of the ways that the foundation was laid for the thaw in Cold War relations that took hold in the 1970s, even as it undermined the Soviet dictatorship by demonstrating the vitality of American culture,” he said. Duke “wanted to contribute to a possible lessening of tensions in any way that he could.”

Ellington performs onstage with his orchestra in Lahore, Pakistan, on Oct. 30, 1963. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Ellington did contribute—and in ways the State Department planners could not have imagined. In Pakistan, the U.S. Embassy reported that “no other American visitor except Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy received such a popular ovation from the press in recent years.” In Iraq, both shows sold out despite an ongoing coup with a citywide curfew, interrupted phone service, and air force attacks on the presidential palace. Ellington’s performances provided calm amid the chaos and were, as the State Department attested, the “one cultural event that had the power to suspend the curfew.”

Behind the scenes, however, things were less serene. On the one hand, the Ellingtonians were “almost without exception excellent ambassadors and representatives of an America which the world might better know, for its profit and our own,” as newly minted foreign service officer and Ellington handler Tom Simons recorded in his official report on the trip. But on the other, Simons saw them as “the worst disciplined big band in America.” The jazzmen preferred raucous cabarets to embassy receptions, nighttime carousing to daytime sightseeing, and unmarried women to other kinds of companions. They rightfully wondered, Simons recalled, why they played almost exclusively for “prestige audiences” and other Americans, rather than ordinary people “clustered around tea-shop radios.” They also wondered “why they should be sent halfway around the world, at significant expense, to play for people who already liked jazz.” Simons lived in perpetual fear that, “were some private activities of group members to become public, this publicity would hurt the image, not only of the group, but of the nation which they necessarily represented at every moment.”

Ellington gets a kiss from a showgirl at a club in Paris during a party thrown for his 70th birthday on Nov. 21. 1969. Keystone/Getty Images

Duke himself was even more of a conundrum. “He is a gentleman from head to toe, entirely concentrated on his music, his comfort and his reputation,” said Simons, who’d just earned his doctorate in history from Harvard. But the bandleader couldn’t get dressed without a valet, canceled offstage functions at the last minute, suffered perpetual real or imagined illnesses, and never even tried to rein in band members who were boozing, carousing, and ignoring Simons’s entreaties. Then there was Fernanda de Castro Monte, “a lady whose presence [with Ellington] was a constant source of acute embarrassment and apprehension to American officials,” Simons wrote. The worry was that a relationship with a “strikingly blonde” white woman would touch a third rail back home. “Ellington also insisted, to the general hilarity of those who were so informed, that the lady was a writer helping him to translate a libretto into French,” Simons recalled, with “no evidence at any time that this claim had any basis whatsoever in fact.” The State Department thought about dispatching a higher-ranking official “to separate Duke from Fernanda,” Simons recalled in an interview with the author 60 years later, but that turned out not to be necessary. “Both Ellington and his friend were conscious of the dangers of adverse publicity which her presence brought with it,” Simons wrote in his report. “They were willing to do anything to avoid them, short of separating.”

Ellington’s tour to the Soviet Union in 1971 wasn’t the first cultural exchange between Cold War adversaries, but visits by American jazz bands were a new sort. At the time, Russians joked that cultural exchanges meant that “we’ll send our violinists from Odessa and the Moscow Symphony Orchestra to New York, and you send us your New York Philharmonic violinists from Odessa who’d emigrated to America.” These hard-drinking, hard-playing trumpeters, drummers, and bass players were an entirely different sort—patently American and, for the Soviets, totally exciting.

Hedrick Smith, who’d started as Moscow bureau chief for the New York Times just before Ellington got to Moscow, saw the local reaction through a ground-level lens. Through his journalism and research for what became a bestselling book, Smith knew that Russians had for centuries veered between two competing cultural and political currents—between antipathy to the West and a desire to become more like it, between anti-Westerners and Westernizers. When the State Department “sent these jazz guys to the Soviet bloc as American ambassadors, they were tapping into [that] wellspring of fascination, admiration, excitement, energy, of Communist-educated but Western-curious youth,” Smith told me. “The Soviet system had built up an ideological and psychological firewall. But the jazz broke through it. The music broke through it. Ellington broke through it.”

Ellington found the world so embracing that he considered not just visiting but living overseas. But despite the indignities he endured at home, he felt too American to live anywhere else for long. Jazz, Duke told the world, was “the American Idiom,” and he demonstrated his patriotism during and after World War II by performing at military bases, helping the U.S. government peddle war bonds, and taping shows for Armed Services Radio. While any musician could do that, few could compose music that, like the freedom-loving anthems of Aaron Copland and George Gershwin, was unmistakably a product of the American spirit. In Duke’s case, it grew out of a belief that the American promise of a more perfect union—one that included Blacks like him—was both possible and inevitable. “We are something apart, yet an integral part,” he once said. As Americans continue to struggle with racism and the long shadow of slavery, Ellington’s vision and life still resonate today.