We often focus on an entertainer’s individual performance when thinking of the arts. This may sometimes be the right viewpoint, but it can obscure the importance of artistic collaboration in aiding and/or enhancing a career.
Thomas Brothers’s Help!: The Beatles, Duke Ellington, and the Magic of Collaboration is an intriguing examination of famous people who successfully used collaboration to establish their musical legacies. A Duke University professor of music, Brothers’s goal is to show how “their collective methods were the primary reason for the high quality, which just seems to loom larger and larger as the decades pass.” In the author’s view, “one could even say that they”—The Beatles and Duke Ellington—“were the two greatest collaborations in music history.”
Many readers probably understand examining the Beatles in an analysis of successful musical collaboration, but why Duke Ellington?
The legendary American bandleader wouldn’t have been included years ago. As Brothers points out, “Ellington misled the public by exaggerating his own role, keeping collaborators out of sight and off the credits of record labels.” An overview of old recordings, and various radio, TV, and magazine interviews, shows this. “Today,” however, “the situation is much clearer than it used to be, thanks to research on Billy Strayhorn and increasingly honest assessment of the phenomenon.”
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