But back to the context. As socially and politically reactionary as was the Washington of Ellington's early years of apprenticeship there, it was not provincial in matters of entertainment and the arts. It was not as cosmopolitan as New York, to be sure, but even so, it reflected much of the New Yorker's taste, perhaps to an extent comparable to that of a suburb of Manhattan. In fact, many Washingtonians were hardly, or only slightly, less regular patrons of New York cultural events than were residents of the five boroughs. Also, the quality of public education was such that even graduates of the outstanding segregated schools were academically qualified to satisfy the requirements of Ivy League and other elite Northern colleges and universities, generally considered to be the best in the nation.

Ellington, whose academic performance in visual art qualified him for a scholarship to Pratt Institute in New York, did not graduate from high school, dropping out in his senior year to seek his fortune as a piano player in a local dance band. And although he never took any courses at Washington's nationally renowned Howard University, he never seemed less formally educated than those who did. Moreover, the urbane deportment of his sidemen was no less impressive than that of those in the Jimmy Lunceford Orchestra, which actually began as a student band at Fisk University, a very prestigious undergraduate liberal arts college in Nashville, Tennessee. Nor was his orientation to technical precision ever at issue. On the contrary, his band is said to have impressed other musicians as being very thoroughly rehearsed from the outset.

In all events, Ellington never seemed to regard himself as a "young man from the provinces." And no wonder. When he and those who would become the nucleus of his great world-famous orchestra decided to go to New York and seek their fortune in the big time, they had not only heard but in a number of instances had made personal and professional contact with such headline Manhattan-based musicians as James P. Johnson, Luckey Roberts, Eubie Blake, Fletcher Henderson and Fats Waller, among others. After all, Washington's Howard Theater, which was more relevant to Ellington's destiny than Howard University, was not only the nearest thing in the nation to such New York Theatre Owners Booking Association­type circuit theaters as the Lincoln and the Lafayette, it was also the showcase for Washington's formally trained elite's cultural events.

And it should not be forgotten that when Ellington and his musicians presented themselves to New York as the Washingtonians, they seem to have had no fear of being mistaken for a bunch of hayseeds. Even Sonny Greer, the Manhattan-wise drummer from Long Branch, New Jersey, who had left a roadshow to join them several years before, seems to have had no objection to re-entering the New York scene as one of the Washingtonians.

The immediate impact of Ellington on New York was not comparable to that which King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Freddie Keppard and other musicians from New Orleans had on the city of Chicago, but in a matter of four years he was well on his way to a prominent status in the city, the nation and the world. Unlike the musicians from New Orleans who arrived in Chicago bringing a style of music that was not only revolutionary but immediately captivating, Ellington and his fellow musicians had come to New York to qualify as big-time professionals.

To which end he and the group of mostly Washingtonians that he was leading in the Hollywood Club in midtown Manhattan, on 49th Street between Broadway and 7th Avenue, were booked into the plush Cotton Club nightspot uptown, on Lenox Avenue at 142nd Street near the Savoy Ballroom, in 1927. Ellington had been in New York since 1923, during which time he had played in a significant variety of theaters and nightspots, including the Lafayette Theatre, Baron Wilkins's Exclusive Club and other uptown venues, and had also made regular rounds of the legendary rent-party sessions frequented by such top-flight Harlem stride virtuoso keyboard ticklers as James P. Johnson, Luckey Roberts, Willie the Lion Smith, The Beetle, the Lamb, Fats Waller and others. And there were also the tours he and his group had made in New England, during which they had been enthusiastically received on the circuits played by such well-established orchestras as those of Paul Whiteman, Vincent Lopez, Coon Sanders and Mal Hallett.

Meanwhile, Ellington had also begun to apply himself to becoming a professional writer of popular songs, and by the spring of 1925 he had written the music for a revue called Chocolate Kiddies, the production of which featured a band led by Sam Wooding, who took it on a European tour beginning in May of 1925. Also in 1924 he had started making recordings, and by the time he began his tenure at the Cotton Club he had already recorded such enduring Ellingtonia as "East St. Louis Toodle-oo," "Birmingham Breakdown," "Creole Love Call" and "Black and Tan Fantasy."

All of which adds up to the definitive working context (including the competition for bookings and recording dates and sales) of the natural history of the kind of composer Duke Ellington was to become. In New York, as in the Washington of his early apprenticeship, his approach to music was not predicated on the requirements of conservatory-oriented composers of what Americans refer to as the serious music of the concert halls. It was, rather, the product of the immediate and daily response to and interaction with the vernacular aesthetics of the world of popular entertainment that ranged all the way from folk-based minstrel fare through the wide variety of popular and novelty songs and the most elaborate production numbers of the more sophisticated nightclubs, hotel ballrooms and music halls.

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