Duke, Diaspora, and his Muses

On a recent trip to New York City, my husband and I took a pilgrimage up to the Harlem corner of Central Park to visit the statue of Duke Ellington. After visiting the statue, we walked through a vibrant community dominated by immigrants from the African diaspora and had lunch at a wonderful Senegalese restaurant we’d found on a previous visit.

I reflected on the greater implications of Duke’s monument as I ate my lovely lamb peanut stew (itself a marker of diaspora, given that peanuts, a New World crop, are now a staple in many sub-saharan African cuisines).

At the time of its unveiling in 1997, there was some controversy about the nine naked female figures holding up the platform under Duke and his piano. The controversy was about the nudity of the figures, which the sculptor explained symbolized the Muses whose inspiration Duke drew upon.

I don’t have any problem with the nude human form, though it is a marker of the patriarchal attitudes of our culture that women’s naked bodies belong to the public, while penises tend to be confined to museums or represented as sexless appendages on cherubs. What I did think a lot about as I reflected on the statue is whether the Muses—faceless, idealized, European women—were really the appropriate foundation for a man such as Duke.

Jazz is an indigenous American art form, and as such is defined by birth in the diaspora. Once Europeans colonized this land, everything that followed was a result of miscegenation: our language adopting and repurposing words, our cuisine growing from the native bounty and the fruitful ideas of immigrants, our culture constantly shifting and expanding to accommodate new ideas and reevaluate old ones, and even our families blending their genetic heritage into something uniquely American.

Jazz was birthed from the spirituals sung by newly minted Christians and the blues played by a freed people who were still not free, and thus it cannot be separated from the African roots of its originators. But jazz didn’t come alive in Africa or in any other part of the African diaspora. Jazz is America’s classical music, formed from a uniquely American environment and history. Early jazz musicians incorporated rhythms and patterns from their African roots, but also the European classical training many of them received at school as well as the folk and popular music of a wide swath of America.

Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington was American to his core. He grew up with two pianist parents in Washington, D.C., steeped both in European classical music and popular music. He himself considered his music to belong to the larger category of “American Music” rather than a more specific “Jazz” idiom. He welcomed players from the Caribbean into his band and incorporated their sound. At the same time as he honored his African-American culture and his adopted community of Harlem, he also composed music inspired by Homer and Shakespeare.

He was a complicated, nuanced artist who would be difficult to pin down through simple imagery.

Such were my thoughts as we sat in a Senegalese restaurant in an African diaspora neighborhood of America’s greatest melting pot city—or perhaps the mixed salad is the better metaphor. I pondered those naked Muses that serve to lift Duke above the reach of spray paint and young lovers armed with pocket knives. What would I, if I were a sculptor charged with designing the monument, take as my inspiration? I would need nine figures to hold him high and support his greatness, nine figures to show the influences that raised him above others.

Grudgingly, I’d agree to include a Muse, but she’d be clothed and playing an instrument. Homer, who wrote the world’s most enduring songs, and Socrates, who asked us to think about who we are, would stand as her equals in art and life (and they’d wear clothing, too!).

Next I’d have a group of three African musicians, one of them a woman singing to her baby who might be soon stolen from her, one a drummer who could make an instrument from any cast off materials found in the New World, and finally a musician blowing a traditional reed instrument to signify the importance of air in jazz.

The last group would include some who directly inspired Ellington. Scott Joplin, whose ragtime music gave Duke his early paying gigs, would bear the weight of a Black man performing popular music when he wasn’t allowed to enter the concert hall through the front door. Debussy, a favorite of Duke, would represent the foundational influence of European classical music on jazz. And Billy Strayhorn would represent the long collaborations that prove that artistic genius doesn’t just land blindly.

Let’s face it: Great art does not come from three idealized nude women who visit young men in the night, much as many young artists of all genders wish it would. To honor a great American musician and composer like Duke Ellington, I would want to show the reality of the world that birthed this great musician and supported him, literally and figuratively.

Great art as practiced by great artists comes from everyone in the environment around them—the ugly and hateful who try to beat them down, the ignored and unsung who give without asking for return, the teachers and employers and audiences who demand the artist’s best and then demand more.

Great artists are birthed from mothers who nourish them and fathers who influence both by their presence and absence. They are birthed from educators and mentors. They are birthed from competition and collaboration with their peers. They are nurtured and challenged by audiences.

But despite our cultural beliefs about genius, great artists never do arise magically from a visitation of the Muses. Duke Ellington may stand at that corner of Central Park as if sprung fully formed from Manhattan granite, but his genius would be better represented by the real diaspora of culture, thought, and music that nurtured him as he grew into the great artist he would become.