Looking Up to Duke

Looking Up to Duke

Q. While I’ve passed the Duke Ellington Memorial, at Fifth Avenue and 110th Street, many times on the bus, it was only recently that I saw it from street level. The ornamental pillars supporting it are so tall that they obstruct the view of the statue. Why are they so high?

A. The all-bronze memorial’s 25-foot height reflects two styles: those of Ellington, the jazz great whose sophistication made him a towering musical presence, and the sculptor Robert Graham, whose works include monuments to Charlie Parker in Kansas City, Mo. (18 feet), and Joe Louis in Detroit (24 feet). Graham died last December, and Ellington in 1974.

The unveiling of Ellington’s memorial in 1997 concluded an 18-year crusade by Bobby Short, the cabaret pianist and a sophisticated institution himself, who died in 2005. He had seen a bust of Louis Armstrong in a park in Nice, France, and wondered why New York had nothing similar for a black American jazz titan. He began raising funds, and Graham convinced him that the original plan, a modest bust of Ellington, would not be suitable. “He felt it should be something grand and elegant, the way he perceived Duke Ellington to be,” Mr. Short said in 1997.

Mr. Graham said in an interview that year, “The structure of the piece has to do with measures and harmonies and dissonances. The piece is not static. It has cantilevers. As you walk around it, it becomes other things.”

Each of the memorial’s three 10-foot columns supports three nude female muses, who in turn support a disk on which rests a grand piano and an 8-foot statue of Ellington himself. ”In Rome, you have to be an emperor to get a statue of this size and magnificence,” Henry J. Stern, the parks commissioner at the time, said at the 1997 unveiling.[NYT]