For viewers who can't get enough of Ken Burns's latest documentary extravaganza, Jazz, here is a book that explores an undeveloped theme in the series: religion. According to biographer Janna Tull Steed, one of the great jazz impresarios, Duke Ellington, was highly influenced by his Christian faith.

Duke Ellington: A Spiritual Biography Janna Tull Steed Crossroad 192 pp., $19.95

Duke Ellington's orchestral sound was completely original. He knew each of his players, their strengths and weaknesses, and wrote with each instrument in mind. Duke's compositional technique was like the painter choosing color combinations and fitting them into the whole. Conductor André; Previn once commented that when band–leader Stan Kenton waved his arm to get a large string ensemble to make a certain sound, he and every studio arranger knew exactly what he had done, but when Duke Ellington lifted a finger toward three horns to make a blended sound, no one could figure out what he was doing. The intimate, close–harmony arrangement of Mood Indigo, for example, is a painting in sound, using the most unusual combination of a trumpet, a trombone, and a clarinet in a tight voicing hitherto uncharted in either jazz or classical orchestration. Where did all this creativity and originality come from?

Nearly thirty years after his death, many aspects of the music of Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington (1899–1974) are still being brought to light. Janna Tull Steed's Ellington: A Spiritual Biography is a welcome addition to the growing body of research on the jazz master. While she recounts the major events of his life, she does so with a special emphasis. Far more than previous accounts, Steed highlights Duke Ellington's religious convictions. Her thesis is simple and argued without hagiographic overdraw. "His great passion and work sprang from an awareness of the presence of God in all of life," she maintains. The narrative of biblical Christianity, particularly in its African–American version, is the underlying explanation for the astonishing artistic achievement of this foremost American musician.

Most jazz audiences know Duke Ellington as an urbane, stylish entertainer and public personality. But he also had deep roots in the Christian faith. Brought up by godly parents in Baptist and A.M.E. Zion churches, he knew all the hymns and Bible stories by heart. He read his Bible every day and prayed regularly. Although his schedule often precluded being in church on Sunday morning, he often attended mid–week services, or just walked in to sit in the pew for inspiration. Throughout his career he took material from gospel tunes and wove them into music. The presence of a forgiving God was always real to him, as can be witnessed by a line in one of his songs: "Forgive us our necessities, and the hunger that makes them necessary."

Steed does not so much reveal surprising new episodes from Duke's life as she underscores the importance of the Christian dimension throughout. For example, the nine–minute film Symphony in Black: A Rhapsody of Negro Life from Paramount Studios, produced in 1935 (and which could be justly called the first music video) expresses Ellington's view of suffering. It contains four segments, "The Laborers," with workers rhythmically stowing cotton bales onto a boat; "A Triangle," featuring the as yet undiscovered Billie Holiday singing the blues; the mournful "A Hymn of Sorrow," a church service where the congregation is in grief; and finally "Harlem Rhythm," a joyful celebration, featuring the great dancer Snake Hips Tucker. The film superimposes scenes of Duke composing at the piano, the Ellington orchestra, melodramatic incidents from African–American life, singers and dancers, all to the compelling sounds of jazz.

Ellington had himself lost a child as a young father. He wanted "Hymn of Sorrow" to be a gift that suggests healing to his listeners. He further wanted audiences to know something of the plight of black people. When asked his thoughts about Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, he candidly reckoned it was not true to the life of the people. Duke wanted "Hymn of Sorrow" last, because he had "put into the dirge all the misery, sorrow, and undertones of the conditions that went with the baby's death," but the studio prevailed and ended the Symphony on an upbeat. The film's editors managed to focus away from the tiny casket beneath the pulpit so that no one would feel uncomfortable. But Steed points out that the heart of Ellington's message goes well beyond a description of the oppression of his own people. It was about the suffering, the sin and the guilt of all humankind.

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Duke Ellington would define the essence of orchestral jazz. Part of his achievement is attributable to his ability to work within circumstances that would not appear favorable to the creation of serious art music. In his years at the Cotton Club (1927–1931), where the orchestra came into its own, he developed a style variously dubbed as "jungle music," and "hot–against–cool." The club featured black musicians and waiters, but only allowed white customers, giving them an evening of exotica unlike anything else in the entertainment world. Rather than taking umbrage at the tacit connection of the darker race and primitivism, Ellington took advantage of the opportunity to create new sounds and to improvise with great freedom. He responded to the artistic challenge of balancing soloists against the whole. He also found ways to keep the feeling of spontaneity alive while controlling the overall development within a set musical structure. Among the great compositions to emerge from that period were, "The Mooche," "Black Beauty," and "East St Louis Toodle–Oo."

Even though business was good, and his music began to acquire a world class reputation, what drove him was his "incarnationalist" artistry. Knowing himself to be a child of God, he believed that wisdom and joy came from seeing the "reflection and miracle of God in the wonder and beauty of the world." And he found that wonder and beauty in some unlikely places, as some of his song titles would attest: "Apes and Peacocks," "Harlem Air Shaft," "Eerie Moan."

One of the signs of his genius was the longevity of the orchestra members. Musicians of high quality stayed with his band longer than usual in the profession. He lavished attention on each member and wrote music featuring the particular strength while eclipsing the deficits of each instrumentalist. His Christian faith came through in the way he took time to nurture every member of the group.

Duke was not only the composer of some 3,000 individual songs, he also wrote a number of longer pieces, often based on poetic or historical themes. Black, Brown and Beige is a 57–seven minute long suite (pared down to 45 for the recording) meant to take the audience on a musical journey from Africa, into slavery, then Harlem and beyond. It was premiered at Carnegie Hall in 1943, before a host of dignitaries and musical personalities. Duke dropped the first section, which would have described the horrendous voyage on slave galleys in a "symphony of torture." Perhaps he was anxious not to counter the patriotism required during the war years (the considerable proceeds all went to Russian war relief). So the piece began, similarly to Symphony in Black, with "Work Song," a "song of burden" reflecting the times of slavery. The hero, named Boola, discovers a Bible, teaches himself to read it, and then passes the Word of God around secretly, huddled under a tree while the white folks went to church. All this gets expressed in the spiritual "Come Sunday," which remains one of Ellington's most beautiful compositions. Mahalia Jackson's passionate rendering, when she cries out, "Please look down and see my people through," defies description. In the following sections we are brought to discover the contributions of blacks to American life, and then emancipation, and integration, concluding with life in Harlem.

Black, Brown and Beige did not enjoy the universal praise of the critics. It was an uneven composition, written in some haste. But it represented the attempt to expand jazz into more than the three–minute song required by 78 records. One particularly severe critic opined that "the whole attempt to view jazz as a form of art music should be discouraged."

Perhaps jazz is not the best noun to describe Duke's music. He personally did not care for the term. He was once asked by Leopold Stokowski what it was he was striving for in music. "I am trying to express American music as I hear it and know it," was his reply. He believed that there were only two kinds of music: good music and the other kind. So while African–American roots are clearly present, Ellington's music managed to incorporate Europeans sounds along with those of the great American folk music of his immediate heritage. He listened to Erik Satie and knew the music of Igor Stravinski. He loved the British composer Delius. He also drew inspiration from the natural world. He once wrote a melody based on a bird call he had heard in Florida.

Ellington was deeply concerned for civil rights and wrote songs about Martin Luther King, Jr. Jazz and religion, he believed, are instruments for unity and freedom, or at least they ought to be. He was also an internationalist, taking numerous tours around the world as a music ambassador. He did a concert in Japan whose benefits went to disaster relief for their recent earthquake. The orchestra was often surprised and gratified at the welcome reception the media gave them abroad, compared to the meager exposure at home. Most of all, Duke Ellington was a musician, an artist who believed God had blessed him and had called him to bless others.

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In the last decade of his life Ellington wrote three Sacred Concerts. These had been somewhat neglected until recent years. Steed is a theologian and a musician. She has promoted and performed these pieces herself. Ellington debuted the first in 1965, premiering it in Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, as part of the building's consecration. It was a combination of previously written material with new works. The opening number, "In the Beginning, God," would win a Grammy Award the next year. Neither was this composition nor the two sequels a Mass. Rather, the idea was to compose an oratorio that could fill a large church, one that could awaken congregations to the spiritual dimension of life through American music.

This first Concert was performed over 50 times in the following years, in such places as Coventry Cathedral and Constitution Hall. Ellington had wanted to break down the walls between the sacred and the secular. Although in typical African–American manner, he was reticent to jazz–up traditional hymns, he gladly wrote worship music in a jazz idiom. He was understandably miffed when the Baptist Ministers Conference of Washington, his hometown, publicly refused to endorse the Concert because of its "worldliness."

Encouraged by the wider acceptance of this music, however, he wrote a Second Concert of Sacred Music which premiered at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York City in 1968 before an audience of six thousand people. Ellington later wrote that he regarded this concert as "the most important thing I have ever done." It should be noted, especially to music critics, that he did not say he had written the best music of his career, but simply that he attached the greatest significance to the realization of this piece. According to Barry Ulanov, who was present at the premiere, Ellington was deeply moved by the audience's obviously appreciative response.

The Third Sacred Concert took him the better part of the year 1973, the last year of his life, to write. When asked why it took him so long, he replied, "You can jive with secular music, but you can't jive with the Almighty." The premiere was at Westminster Abbey at a concert sponsored by the United Nations. More meditative than the first two, this composition concentrates on prayer and love. Steed rightly describes these concerts as works in progress and helpfully shows the evolution from the more preached style of the first to the more inward style of the third. We could wish she had analyzed Duke's theology in more depth. For example, what is meant by his describing heaven as "Just the ultimate degree to be"? Is his view of God pantheistic, as some have suggested, or was he Christ–centered and incarnational? Perhaps these questions come too close to imposing strictures on the musician who was moving, as Steed puts it, from understanding religion as "getting it down right," to a "prayerful contemplation of the love and beauty of God."

Steed does not shy away from describing Duke's flaws. He could use people, lead women on, joke when he needed to be serious. But she reminds us that even his character flaws are magnifications of the struggles of the age. His faith in God's love enabled him to transcend the conflicts, and his music showed the rest of us how to arrive to heaven, a place truly beyond category.

William Edgar is professor of apologetics at Westminster Theological Seminary.

NOTE: For your convenience, the following product, which was mentioned above, is available for purchase:
• Duke Ellington: A Spiritual Biography, Janna Tull Steed

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