Mercedes Ellington’s Dance for the Duke
The dancer, choreographer, and arts leader talks about her grandfather’s impact on her life and career.
This is another piece I wrote for Jazz at Lincoln Center’s concert program, in this case for their annual gala which will be held Apr. 30, hosted by Dave Chappelle and honoring the legacy of Duke Ellington. It was an honor and pleasure to talk with Duke’s granddaughter, who forged her own creative path as a dancer and choreographer. Probably like most people, I wondered why her father, the bandleader Mercer Ellington, would have named her for a car. But, of course, there’s a better explanation. The word mercedes is Latin and Spanish for “mercies.” Given her humility, warmth and charm, as well as her resilience during a long and distinguished career in a very challenging artistic field, the name fits.
“I didn’t have a regular family,” Mercedes Ellington says. The granddaughter of famed pianist, bandleader, and composer Duke Ellington, she now serves as the family historian and the founder, CEO, and artistic director of the Duke Ellington Center for the Arts. But while Ellington has played an important role in preserving her grandfather’s legacy, she says that she didn’t meet Duke in the first years of her life and then didn’t quite know what to call him during their first encounters.
“When I first met him and started to know who he was, it was at the Apollo,” Ellington says. “My grandmother used to take me and I would spend the day there because they used to have a show and a movie and a show and a movie. I would be so fascinated with it all. The orchestra members would sit with me so that I would have people around who knew me. They would have fried chicken brought backstage. That was one of the happiest days of my life. And I remember after the night was over, we'd go to this wonderful posh restaurant down the street which had tablecloths, and we'd have a big, huge meal there too. My grandfather would go around tasting what everybody ordered.”
Later, Ellington would accompany Duke on his tour of Russia, but for her—as a dancer and choreographer—that trip was more about dance than about music. “I was doing a show on Broadway called No No Nanette,” she says. “It was such a big opportunity because I had always wanted to be a ballerina and, of course, Russia is the home of the ballet. When I heard that the band was going there for a five-week State Department tour, I said, ‘You're not going without me.’ I knew I couldn't stay five weeks away from my show, but they gave me two weeks off.”
Mercedes traveled with the orchestra to Moscow, Saint Petersburg (then Leningrad), and Minsk—and then she had to come home. However, she got to see a performance of Swan Lake by the student company of the Russian Royal Ballet. “It was incredible,” she recalls. “It was like being in another world.”
The trip became famous for a decidedly non-musical reason. “We requested Coca Cola to take on the trip, but they turned us down,” she explains. “But the famous actress Joan Crawford was a big fan of Duke Ellington and she was married to Alfred Steele, the president of Pepsi Cola, and they complied with the request. That’s how Pepsi became the first Russian soft drink.”
Although Duke was proud of Mercedes’ pursuit of dance as a career, he had different ideas about her direction. “He thought mainly of me having a career similar to Josephine Baker,” she says. “He couldn't understand the importance of me getting a job on Broadway as a chorus dancer, nor later on. When I did get a job as the first Black June Taylor dancer on The Jackie Gleason Show, that was also a chorus job. It was not what he thought I should be doing. He wanted me to move to Europe because he knew that I would not be hired as a Josephine Baker type here in America because of my skin color. But I disobeyed him.”
Ellington, who studied dance with Martha Graham and José Limón at Juilliard, would go on to participate in numerous Broadway and theatrical productions, including West Side Story, Sophisticated Ladies, The Night That Made America Famous, and Play On! In addition to appearances with the Duke Ellington Orchestra, she’s toured all over the world with her tap dance company BalleTap USA, and has also been involved in Ballroom Dance competitions.
Despite her different career path, Mercedes found much to learn from her bandleading grandfather, the consummate performer. “It was his persistence about life in general, and the way he handled himself in front of an audience,” she says. “It wasn't just him playing the music or standing there waving his hands for conducting. There was always repartee with the orchestra members. I think he was a frustrated actor.”
The jazz vocalist Hilary Gardner wrote an excellent profile of Mercedes for the Juilliard School, where Ms. Ellington studied dance and choreography. Read that story here.
You can read back issues of the concert programs from Jazz at Lincoln Center, with stories about Rene Marie, Ruben Blades, Dianne Reeves, Anat Cohen, Sherrie Maricle, Joshua Redman, Brianna Thomas, Jon Faddis, ELEW and many others, here.
Great piece Lee. Really enjoyed. Look forward to more.