Wildness and Order Duke Ellington’s “Happy Go Lucky Local”

This article (with musical links) looks at one of the important compositions of Duke Ellington from the mid-1940s through the perspective of Aesthetic Realism, the philosophy founded by the American critic and poet Eli Siegel. The basis of this approach is that when a work of art in any fi eld is good or beautiful, the reason is that it puts opposites together, opposites that are in the structure of reality as a whole and that every person is hoping to make sense of. This is true of Ellington’s “Happy Go Lucky Local”: it is wild and organized, repetitive and surprising, cacophonous and orderly. It is musical evidence that diffi cult, even unbearable things can be seen with form, seen beautifully.