Dear Friends!
I wanted to share with you…
The Players, The Educators, Those in the Know, The Closet DJs, The Historiographers, The Lovers of Swing, The Topographers, Those Who Act For Diversity, People with an Affinity for Sweat Pea,The Ellingtonophiles!
You will Love This Madly!
Duke Ellington & Billy Strayhorn’s Map of the World
(A Peterson Learning concept)
This inkling of an idea began about 6-7 years ago, during my graduate thesis research on Long Form Jazz Compositions while I was at Rutgers University.
I actualized the idea this year as a way to teach about the grandeur of Duke Ellington, both his life and his music. With the research assistance of the 4th-8th Grade students at St. Peter’s School, in Philadelphia, we populated my list of songs that Duke Ellington & Billy Strayhorn wrote canonizing places all around the world on a Google Map.
Each “Marker” has a link to Ellington’s song about its place and a blurb (student chosen) about that location.
Ellington was a cultural ambassador for the United States, traveled extensively with his band for over 50 years and was a true writer/composer who wrote about the world and the people around him.
The incredible diversity of his ear is shown here as is his love of humanity and culture.
(I offer “Ellington & Strayhorn’s Map of the World” to anyone interested in using it as a teaching tool, as a workshop in which I guide students towards creating their own version of the map or share my research list for teachers to use in creating their own version of the lesson.)
95+% of the links are Youtube links. I do not own any rights to the music or videos and this map is designed as a teaching tool. I apologize for any commercials that pop up, I avoided them where possible.
Some explanation of my process and what’s in the Map.
There are about 150 works by Ellington & Strayhorn that I found thematically linked to locations.
I used Ellington’s composition list from his autobiography “Music is My Mistress”, the recorded “Titles” page from Ellingtonia plus the liner notes and wikipedia pages for individual works in my research.
Many people have co-writing credits on these songs but Billy Strayhorn was Ellington’s major collaborator and at a certain point they are just composing together.
They are inexorably linked.
Ellington wrote about where he was and whom he was with.
The most songs about one place were Harlem (15+!) where he lived and achieved his first success, New Orleans ( a musical and collaborator influence), the Delta (The Blues) and Washington DC (his Birthplace).
He also wrote about people and loved to romanticize everything.
So many of Ellington’s works are about his people (the people of the World) and people of color generally. He wasn’t a vocal activist but he wrote his music to highlight the beauty of culture and introducing people to those cultures is a step towards creating bridges between cultures. Many of his suites, as well as his religious works, are dedicated towards honoring that culture, people of color, the blues, Civil Rights and the experiences of African Americans. It is perhaps his most concentrated subject to compose about.
Aside from people and location based tributes there are some other more conceptual forms of tribute on this map too.
Ellington arranged his own versions of existing works of others like Tchaikovsky’s “The Nutcracker” and Grieg’s “Peer Gynt Suite” and a medley of Beatles songs this type of tribute was placed in where the original composer was from as a tribute to them.
He also created to tributes to Art, Artists, Shakespeare, Jazz Festivals etc.
In those cases the decision making was more careful placing links in the place (or venue) the music was composed for or debuted at, i.e Newport Jazz Festival Suite.
A work like “Such Sweet Thunder” was conceptually difficult a Shakespeare tribute written for a Shakespeare Festival in Canada with each movement representing a different tribute to a different play. In this case a link to the entire suite was marked where the Festival took place, individual markers for the location of each movement was placed in the location the play took place and “Circle of Fourths” a tribute specifically for Shakespeare was placed in Stratford-upon-Avon. It’s a fascinating example of an iconic genius interpreting another iconic genius!
Ellington frequently re-wrote and renamed material, some works may be more famously known as other titles.
Several works I was unable to locate recordings for, some only had electronic versions of the score with no recorded versions by Ellington.
I debate about including a map layer of unrecorded/unfound works.
Many of these works were based on conceptual locations, like “The River” (in my research the initial idea was based on the Mississippi River) and students chose their own location (in this case The Amazon River) and certain works were regional, like “The Far East Suite” which was marked by the students’s choice of location.
I didn’t take any just song with “river” or “beach” in its title – just ones that were clearly meant as a tribute something.
Songs with “Creole” or “Delta” were clearly meant to be tributes to New Orleans Creole culture or the Mississippi Delta and those songs were placed in those locations.
Any works about Space, The Moon etc. students were suggested to choose a location with a connection to those places: Observatories, biggest telescope, Cape Canaveral etc.
Some locations, like “Hyde Park” (Chicago? probably – Connecticut?) could be multiple locations and I could not find specification as to which place it was originally intended for.
Many works had sneaky titles, Acapulco = Oclupaca or Uwis = University of Wisconsin, or were portraits of a club, person, work of art etc. and I tried to research those threads and choose the best location.
Ellington himself connected his portraits of people to locations. For example in his New Orleans Suite he includes 4 portraits of people from there: Mahalia Jackson, Wellman Braud, Sydney Bechet & Louis Armstrong.
Ellington was the King of Jazz Suites, off-hand he composed 30+ long form works. These very often were aimed at large regions, like in “The Afro Eurasian Eclipse”. If an individual movement was aimed at a more specific location, like “Didgeridoo” was for Australia, then both the entire work, placed in a generally central location for the region, and specific movements were marked in their primary area.
Finally I stashed several Easter Eggs as little treats within this map. Hopefully fun, though they may stretch my original concept a little bit – by not being Ellington songs or not being musical but some other interesting tribute to Ellington himself – in fact who knows maybe I will also add other peoples tributes to Ellington as a layer too.
Found Sounds 