Louie,
Interesting post. Very insightful analysis of Ellington, and definitely against the usual grain.
Regarding Coltrane, I think that at the end he was quite beyond nationalism of any sort, transcendant really.
BTW, you might want to check out the "Lists, Blogs, and the Flamewars of Yesteryear" post and discussion currently up over on MaxSpeak. You are mentioned, as is this blog.
Very nice post.
Quite an interesting take on Ellington.
I get impatient when people use terms too often, when talking about music as jazz is "revolutionary," while classical is "reactionary." That is associated with Maoism usually.
Kofsky presents a fairly damning indictment of Hammond as a sort of bourgeois Stalinist entrepeneur who directly exploited Billie and other musicians. If half of what he says is true, then Hammond's legend deserves considerable revision. However, I do recall a television interview of Hammond (done in the 70s, I think)in which he presented his disagreements with Ellington over band and audience integration in objective terms that were quite sympathetic to Duke. Also, Kofsky's book was generally, for me, a rather dry polemic that did not provide the best of what Marxism has to offer in cultural analysis.
This post was very great. I'd love to see more like it.
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