Was duke ellington gay

As the world celebrates Ellington's birthday, we look back on his openly gay pianist, composer, and friend Billy Strayhorn. Billy Strayhorn was a close contemporary of Duke Ellington for many decades. As a LGBT composer and pianist himself, he produced well-known pieces like “Take The ‘A’ Train” and “Chelsea Bridge.”. EDIT: Mistakenly called out Duke Ellington as gay, edited to remove.

Bessie Smith, Billy Tipton, Johnny Mathis, Ma Rainey, Jackie Shane, Billy Strayhorn (Ellington's right hand man), Ethel Waters, Cole Porter and Beverly Glenn-Copeland are some early jazz/soul/blues musicians who were LGBQT+ in their own right. While composing some of the most harmonically rich jazz of its time — often in Ellington's shadow — Strayhorn was an outlier in that he led an openly gay life as a black man in the s, an era.

Billy Strayhorn, pianist and writer with the Duke Ellington orchestra, was openly gay. It's been suggested that he was content to stay in the background of the Ellington orchestra in part because he did not want attention drawn to his personal life, but that's been disputed. This was one of my first interviews for a now-finished biography of his former employer, Chet Baker.

After gorging himself, grunting and burping, on Chinese food, he listened with me to a vocal recording that Baker had made in , when his singing suggested a shy little fawn. The jazz world is one of the last cultural frontiers of old-fashioned macho, and in it, homophobia runs rampant. They turn that on any target.

One guy in the et section makes some idiotic remark, they all collapse in laughter. But Strayhorn worked mostly behind the scenes, and until recently it was easy to think that jazz, like the Boy Scouts, had no gay element at all. The article infuriated Fred Hersch. The prevailing image of a jazz band involves a bunch of guys in tight quarters, holding their instruments like mighty swords, rarely letting anyone in too close.

What else? These are topics most people in the business—Albertson aside—would rather ignore. What counts is the music, they argue, not who anyone is sleeping with. A group of fans debated the subject this year on Jazzcorner. So many contributors pounced on him that he withdrew his postings. Imagine if I was really gay. The male-dominated jazz community was hardly so open-minded.

On Jazzcorner. He also brushed off a quote by the late bandleader Mercer Ellington, who told David Hajdu that his father, Duke, may well have had a sexual relationship with Billy Strayhorn. Hajdu caught plenty of heat for it. Since then, Hersch has used his musical prominence—he records frequently for Nonesuch, a prestigious classical label—to help numerous AIDS-related causes.

The jazz world is a microcosm of the real world. I know gay musicians who are in the closet who have become almost caricatures of the macho straight jazz musician—stylistically inhibited, emotionally constipated in their music-making. They were all straight, basically. Where does he think homophobia in jazz starts? Playing creative jazz music with someone demands a certain intimacy.

In either case, the best defense is honesty, says Andy Bey. Still boyish at 62, Bey is at a peak of acclaim after decades of obscurity. Bey went on to sing with such hard-bop leaders as Horace Silver and Gary Bartz. Who wants to be recognized by a bunch of assholes, anyway? What do you want from them?

what was duke ellington known for

What can they give you? At least I have an identity. He brings an intellectual clarity and a wealth of scholarship to both.