Luca Bragalini, a musicologist and academic historian, published Duke Ellington’s Symphonic Visions in Italian in 2025. It received plaudits from his fellow critics for its detailed interdisciplinary analysis of Ellington’s extended compositions as performed by various European symphonic orchestras in both live and studio settings. These included titles first released on Frank Sinatra’s new record label in 1963 and currently available on the Rhino CD-set Duke Ellington: The Reprise Studio Recordings (Disc III). The titles are: Night Creature (three movements), Non-Violent Integration (two movements), La Scala, She Too Pretty To Be Blue, and the longest track (at 14.05) Harlem. Bragalini also discusses (in forensic detail) what he terms “Duke’s prismatic music” – Black, Brown And Beige and Three Black Kings, composed by Ellington shortly before his death.
This newly translated edition has its strengths and weaknesses. The first of these are informed (but not original) re-examinations on the non-musical elements that shaped and coloured (no pun intended) Duke’s fertile imagination. In Harlem from the 1920s, he initially associated with its leading African-American lights such as James Weldon Johnson, W.E.B. Du Bois and Roi Ottley. Duke also responded to the forms and cadences of Harlem’s many black church services. Bragalini concludes that from these and other sources “Ellington perfected the most versatile conception of the blues found in the entire history of American music”.
But this painstaking book has its faults. With an unsuitably avuncular style, it is also didactic, discursive and repetitive. The (over) copious notes are far too detailed and should have been condensed in the appropriate chapters. If quantified – together with a seemingly endless bibliography and indexes of “works”, “titles” and “names” – they take up as much space as the actual text. Again, those readers with only a basic knowledge of music notation will gain little (if anything) from the numerous extracts of musical scores which feature on many pages. Bragalini’s prose style may have been distorted in translation for this revised and shortened text. An example (from La Scala) relates that “The ingenious dominant pedal in the opening bars immerses us in what is apparently a Mixolydian mode on G, disguising a sophisticated blues that is actually in C major.” I never knew that – and still don’t. There are also such circumlocutions as “To come straight to the point…”
To conclude on a more charitable note, Symphonic Visions contains five previously unpublished photos of Duke taken by an Italian journalist during recording sessions of La Scala, and the observation that “over his entire life , the Duke wore the costume of a benign and moderate character, a costume used to camouflage the man (and activist) Edward Kennedy Ellington”. A similar but more rewarding monograph from the same publisher is by Jack Chambers: A Tone Parallel To Duke Ellington: The Man In The Music (which I reviewed in June 2025).
Duke Ellington’s Symphonic Visions, by Luca Bragalini. University Press of Mississippi, 2025, 273pp. ISBN 9781496890156
