Reminiscing in Tempo: A Portrait of Duke Ellington

Nicholsons lively, unconventional biography of the great jazz composer, bandleader and pianist amounts to a kind of jazz collage. Keeping third-person historical narrative to a minimum, Nicholson (Billie Holiday) presents Ellingtons life through block quotes, arranging bits and pieces of some 70 years worth of painstakingly gathered interviews, Variety articles, press releases, handbills and even declassified FBI files into a composite narrative of the Dukes life. Among the notables whose words turn up are longtime Ellington collaborator Billy Strayhorn, show business impresario Irving Mills, saxophone great Johnny Hodges, New York congressman Adam Clayton Powell and, of course, Ellington himself. These accounts give a remarkably coherent picture: the Duke was widely beloved and clearly driven, a musician whose energy, appetites and inventiveness remain startling a quarter century after his death. Rich in personal anecdote and period detail, Nicholsons book charts Edward Kennedy Ellingtons childhood among Washington, D.C.s African-American middle class, his rise to fame in the storied speakeasies of Depression-era Harlem and his lifelong devotion to his crafta commitment that remained firm even as swing, and then rock n roll, threatened his cultural prominence. Nicholsons prodigious (and well-footnoted) archival research and his thoughtful orchestration of source material, let him combine accessibility with scholarly authority. The books title comes from a 1934 number Ellington penned to mourn the death of his mother; it sums up the sweetly nostalgic mood that this richly detailed biography creates. Illustrations. (May)