"The Duke’s Blues" by Stanley Crouch, in The New Yorker (Apr. 29 and May 6, 1996), 20 W. 43rd St., New York, N.Y. 10036.

Duke Ellington (1899–1974) maintained longer than any other Western composer. an orchestra for nearly a half-century— (The orchestra that Prince Esterházy of Austria provided in the 18th century for Franz Joseph Haydn lasted only 29 years.) But critics have often said that after Ellington’s "greatest period," 1940–42, there was a falling off, that he exceeded the limits of his talent in his later, more extended compositions. Crouch, a New York writer and critic, begs to differ.

Ellington wrote and recorded hundreds of compositions and arrangements between 1924 and 1973, and, Crouch argues, they "make the case for their creator as the most protean of American geniuses," whose achievements in music rival those, in other media, of Herman Melville, Ernest Hemingway, Fred Astaire, and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Like Bach and Handel, Crouch says, Ellington "was an inveterate recycler." He extended earlier brief melodies, written in the 78-rpm era, into 15-minute masterpieces such as "Tattooed Bride" (1948). His earlier "tonal portraits" of uptown New York—including "Echoes of Harlem," "Harmony in Harlem," and "Harlem Speaks"—evolved into the 14-minute "Harlem" (1950), which was his favorite longer work. "It is one of Ellington’s most thorough and masterly explorations of blues harmony," Crouch says.

"It is true," the author admits, "that the early ’40s were a kind of golden period for the Ellington Orchestra. In 1939, Ellington had brought the marvelous composing talent of Billy Strayhorn into the organization and was soon rewarded with Strayhorn’s ‘Take the A Train.’ " About the same time, bassist Jimmy Blanton and tenor saxophonist Ben Webster joined the Ellington organization and were prominently featured in such classics as "Jack the Bear" and "Cotton Tail."

But Ellington’s sensibility was always the determining one—"which is why the music maintained its identity through so many changes in the players, no matter how strong their individual personalities," Crouch points out. The Afro-Hispanic and exotic rhythms from around the world that Ellington explored in such Blanton-Webster classics as "Conga Brava" and "The Flaming Sword" were "the basis for such greater works in the ’60s and ’70s as "Afro-Bossa," "The Far East Suite," and "The Togo Brava Suite." Ellington also brought "new authority and depth" in his later years to his arrangement of popular songs, Crouch says.

The finest European concert musicians are expected to get better with middle age, Crouch says, but jazz musicians are supposed to decline after they leave youth behind. "In fact," he maintains, "Ellington’s greatest band existed not in the ‘40s but between 1956 and 1968.... Beginning in the middle ’50s, what he got from Johnny Hodges, Paul Gonsalves, Harry Carney, Lawrence Brown, Ray Nance, Cootie Williams, Russell Procope, Jimmy Hamilton, and the others could only have been achieved by men who had lived beyond 40 or 50." By then, they had developed a matchless intimacy with their horns, and had experienced most of the joys and sorrows of life. "It’s all in their playing," he says.