Clarence Page reflects on the life and legacy of Duke Ellington on his 100th birthday.

CLARENCE PAGE: The Duke turns 100 this April.

Duke Ellington died in 1974, but his music lives on in records and CD's, and in little echoes throughout the world of music. Duke Ellington was to modern music what Picasso was to modern art. He borrowed from Europe, Africa, and the Americas. He initiated new movements, and he grew through periods he associated with colors, like "Mood Indigo," "Diminuendo in Blue," and "Black and Tan Fantasy." Sweetness, violence, and dissonance form the colors on the palette he used to paint a portrait of his native land.

"Composers reflect their times," Ellington said. His times were turbulent. Like George Gershwin, his contemporary, Duke Ellington was a pioneer, an American original who gave new meaning to the word "classical." Thanks to artists like them, America in the early 20th century no longer had to look to the rest of the world for musical innovation. Now the world began to look to us. Unlike Gershwin, Ellington was black, at a time when race played a big role in determining his possibilities, and therefore, the way he looked at the world

Edward Kennedy Ellington was born just 34 years after the Civil War in a segregated southern town called Washington, D.C. His was a world of racial strife, African legacies, deeply held spiritual values, and an unflinching optimism about better days ahead for those who work for it. By the time Ellington was seven, he was considered a prodigy. In his teens, he led his own ragtime band.

In 1928, the young Duke Ellington replaced King Oliver at Harlem's Cotton Club, where blacks could perform but not sit down as customers. The young Duke made the best of that indignity. It gave him access into a new and powerful medium called radio. At 29 years of age, Duke Ellington quickly became a national star. For the next five decades, his band would grow and change, with such talented soloists as Johnny Hodges on alto saxophone, Ben Webster on tenor sax, Clark Terry on trumpet, and his most talented collaborator and second pianist, Billy Strayhorn. Ellington elevated jazz, the music of bars, speakeasies, and nightclubs, into an orchestral art form for the big international stage.

His biggest artistic adventure came in 1943, as the first black jazz band to play Carnegie Hall. Here, he unveiled an epic three-part symphony called "Black, Brown, and Beige." The message of his masterpiece was headlined in its subtitle: "A Tone Parallel to the History of the Negro in America." Alas, his ambitious mixture of classical and jazz pleased the fans of neither -- too far ahead of his time, perhaps. Ellington did not perform the number in its entirety again. The world was changing, too. The rise of rhythm and blues and rock'n roll crowded out the big bands. Yet Ellington held on with remarkable resilience. A new Billy Strayhorn dance hit, "Satin Doll," put the Duke back on the charts. He would work on new compositions right up to his death.

Ellington's musical legacy.

He would leave behind an historic legacy, almost 2,000 compositions representing almost every American musical form. Here in Washington, his hometown, Duke Ellington is remembered with a big stately bridge, an appropriate symbol for an artist who has bridged cultures and generations. In her novel, "Supporting the Sky," Washington writer Patricia Griffith once wrote that the bridge was haunted. "Just listen." She wrote. "When the wind blows up from the south, you can hear Ellington's piano." Standing here at the bridge, it's easy to believe. That's how loudly Ellington echoes in our memories.

I'm Clarence Page.