If you love jazz, you know Duke Ellington, whose big band was a kind of heartbeat of the genre for fifty years, beginning with the 11 piece orchestra he led that became the house band at Harlem’s Cotton Club in the 1920’s. With more than a thousand compositions to his credit, including still familiar standards like In a Sentimental Mood, Mood Indigo and Sophisticated Lady, critics have called him the most important composer America has yet produced.
His work boxes a compass of musical forms, from jaunty three minute tunes written to fit on one side of a 78RPM disc, to extended suites and symphonic pieces. When asked why he continued touring and recording with his orchestra when already well into his seventies, he is said to have explained it was “So I can hear in the morning, what I wrote night before.”
What is His Lordship the Duke doing headlining our wine column this week? It has to do with what may be his most well-known, occasionally controversial and, I think, oft misunderstood quote: “If it sounds good, it is good.” Its punch and brevity give it the force and utility we associate with epigrams, readily applicable to many things and situations. Give just it a slight twist, for example, and you could have “If it tastes good, it is good,” a motto adopted by many to sum up both their approach to wine and their main means of making judgments about it. But the thing about epigrams is that while memorable and useful in their way, they are often more pithy than truthy.
Context will have its say, too. In this case, Ellington was responding to a question having to do with the variety of novel musics, including rock and modern jazz, that was veering off in new directions, much of it far from the elegantly scored and meticulously arranged orchestral composition that was his style. To his credit, the maestro was more welcoming to new music than other luminaries of his era. His “If it sounds good, it is good” remark was intended to underscore his belief in the open-ended character of music, capable of endless variation, interpretation, bends, turns and reorganization. From a plaintive air played on a shepherd’s pipe to Bach, Bartok and boogie-woogie, there has always been something good to listen to.
It’s a fine thing to be liberated from too narrow views about which musics or wines have a right to be taken seriously by virtue of their source or style alone. But it’s quite another to judge among things of at least potentially equal value which may be good, less good, or not good at all. These are deep waters, admittedly, but I’ve found the following two propositions both safe and useful as we think, write and talk about wine here in the FK Wine Corner.
One. There’s more to being good than taste. A good wine will be made with quality raw materials, by skilled and conscientious people who take the craft and its responsibilities seriously. It will be made at a limited scale, with healthy fruit whose character reflects both the site-source and vintage conditions, and accomplished in a facility having more in common with a farm than a factory. Taken in moderation, it will be both wholesome and healthful. There is nothing particularly subjective or arguable in any of this.
Two. The value of a judgment of quality is dependent on the experience and honesty of the person making it. It’s not clear that we would or should be satisfied with the assertion that ‘if it sounds good it is good’ coming from anyone operating at less than Ellington’s elevated standing. When the Duke speaks, we listen. (If you’re fuzzy on why, see paragraph one.) Opinions based on zero experience are worth zero; opinions based on some experience are worth something; opinions based on experience long, deep and considered should be taken seriously. Such experience will encompass the factual information mentioned in proposition one, and contain a subjective element the keenness of which will have been honed by long practice.
Say, is that East St. Louis Toodle-oo I hear you playin’, Duke? Sounds good!