Bill to study composition, and we studied every composer and every system of arranging and writing—Berlioz, Strauss, Schoenberg, and so forth. I was then to learn that there was this link between Schoenberg and Ellington. They'd lived apart, never been associated with each other, were practically ignorant of each other's works, yet there was an absolute parallel. —Mercer Ellington The century of aeroplanes has a right to a music of its own. —Claude Debussy Let's begin medias res fashion, midway through that up-in-the-air century, on April 28, 1957, a day before Duke Ellington's fifty-eighth birthday, when Such Sweet Thunder premiered at New York's Town Hall. With its brash, brassy, backbeat-driven opening, “Such Sweet Thunder,” the title track of the twelve-movement suite by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, drops us off at the vibrant center of twentieth-century music, the intersection of high art and popular entertainment: African, American, and European traditions, improvised performance, and rigorous composition.
