American composer, bandleader, and pianist who led essentially the same orchestra for nearly fifty years and produced, in the course of doing so, one of the major bodies of twentieth-century American music. Ellington was born Edward Kennedy Ellington in Washington, D.C., in 1899, the son of a butler at the White House and a deeply religious mother who insisted from his childhood that he was "blessed." The Ellington Orchestra opened at Harlem's Cotton Club in 1927 — a whites-only venue at which the Black musicians performed and the Black customers were turned away — and from that contradiction Ellington built a career-long project of asserting Black American culture as serious art on its own terms.
The compositional partnership with Billy Strayhorn, who joined in 1939 and remained until his death in 1967, produced most of the band's signature material; the line between Ellington and Strayhorn compositions is often impossible to draw cleanly, and Ellington was scrupulous in crediting Strayhorn even at moments when Strayhorn's homosexuality made him a less marketable name. Ellington consistently refused the label "jazz," preferring "American music" or "Negro music" — the refusal was deliberate and political: "jazz" was the category into which white critics and the recording industry sorted Black artists in order to keep them separate from the concert-music tradition where the major commissions and the cultural prestige sat.
The major extended works — Black, Brown and Beige (premiered at Carnegie Hall, January 1943, conceived as "a tone parallel to the history of the American Negro"), the Liberian Suite (1947), Such Sweet Thunder (1957, a Shakespeare cycle), the Far East Suite (1966), New Orleans Suite (1970) — and especially the three Sacred Concerts (1965, 1968, 1973), which Ellington called "the most important thing I have ever done," argued in music for what Hughes, Ellison, Hurston, and Baldwin argued in prose: that Black American expressive tradition was at the center, not the margin, of American culture, and required no permission to take itself seriously.