Edward Kennedy Ellington was born April 29, 1899, in Washington, D.C., to James Edward Ellington, a butler who later worked as a blueprint maker for the U.S. Navy, and Daisy Kennedy Ellington, both amateur pianists. Childhood friends nicknamed him "Duke" for his dapper bearing. He began piano lessons at seven with local teacher Marietta Clinkscales but preferred baseball until, around fourteen, he grew absorbed by ragtime pianists he heard in Washington poolrooms. Largely self-taught from that point, studying Eubie Blake, Luckey Roberts, and James P. Johnson by ear, he composed his first piece, "Soda Fountain Rag," in 1914 while working as a soda jerk. In 1916 he turned down an art scholarship to Brooklyn's Pratt Institute and left Armstrong Manual Training School three months short of graduation to pursue music full time, taking further instruction from Washington pianist Oliver "Doc" Perry. By late 1917 he was leading his own group, the Duke's Serenaders, with childhood friend Otto Hardwick on saxophone, Arthur Whetsel on trumpet, Elmer Snowden on banjo, and Sonny Greer on drums, playing dances for both Black and white audiences in segregated Washington.

Ellington moved his group to Harlem in 1923, where it became known as the Washingtonians and landed a residency at the Hollywood Club (later the Club Kentucky) that ran roughly four years. Trumpeter James "Bubber" Miley joined during this period and, with his growling, plunger-muted horn, pushed the band toward the "jungle style" heard on 1926's "East St. Louis Toodle-Oo." In October 1926 Ellington signed with agent-publisher Irving Mills, who took 45 percent of his earnings but drove a prolific recording schedule across Brunswick, Victor, Columbia, OKeh, and several smaller labels, often under aliases like "The Jungle Band" and "The Harlem Footwarmers." When King Oliver turned down the house-band job at Harlem's Cotton Club, Mills secured the spot for Ellington instead; the engagement opened December 4, 1927, forced the band to expand to eleven pieces, and, thanks to weekly radio broadcasts, made Ellington a national name. Adelaide Hall's wordless vocal on "Creole Love Call" (1927) became his first significant hit. Alto saxophonist Johnny Hodges joined in 1928 and baritone saxophonist Harry Carney in 1927, both remaining Ellington mainstays for decades; singer Ivie Anderson, hired in 1931, stayed eleven years and recorded the definitive 1932 version of "It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)." Ellington's first Cotton Club run ended in 1931; the orchestra then toured extensively and, in 1935, recorded "Reminiscing in Tempo," a long-form piece written as a tribute to his recently deceased mother, a clear early sign of his ambitions beyond the three-minute dance side.

The band's most celebrated era began with two arrivals. Composer and arranger Billy Strayhorn joined in 1939, initially as a lyricist, and became Ellington's closest collaborator for the rest of Strayhorn's life, with Ellington crediting him as essential to nearly every part of his own musical thinking; Strayhorn's own composition "Take the 'A' Train" (1941) became the orchestra's theme song. That same year bassist Jimmy Blanton joined and, before tuberculosis forced his departure in 1941 and killed him in 1942 at 23, transformed the bass from a rhythm instrument into a melodic, soloing voice; tenor saxophonist Ben Webster, in the band from 1939 to 1943, gave the reed section its first regular tenor chair. The period's recordings for Victor and its Bluebird subsidiary, later anthologized as The Blanton-Webster Band, are widely regarded as the peak of the pre-war orchestra. On January 23, 1943, Ellington's band gave its first Carnegie Hall concert, premiering the extended suite "Black, Brown and Beige," a "tone parallel to the history of the American Negro" that met a mixed critical reception at the time but that Ellington revisited for the rest of his career, including a 1958 vocal recording with gospel singer Mahalia Jackson.

Big-band jazz's commercial decline after the war left Ellington's orchestra struggling through much of the early 1950s, a slide reversed dramatically at the Newport Jazz Festival on July 7, 1956, when tenor saxophonist Paul Gonsalves's 27-chorus solo on "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue" brought the crowd to its feet and Ellington to the cover of Time magazine. The resulting Columbia contract opened a fertile late period built around extended, often Strayhorn-co-written suites and thematic albums: Such Sweet Thunder (1957), inspired by Shakespeare; the film scores for Anatomy of a Murder (1959) and Paris Blues (1961); the Far East Suite (1967), drawn from a 1963 State Department tour of the Middle East and Asia; and ...And His Mother Called Him Bill (1967), recorded as a tribute after Strayhorn's death that May. Ellington also sought out peers from outside his own band for one-off studio summits: Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Duke Ellington Song Book (1957) with Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington Meets Coleman Hawkins and Duke Ellington & John Coltrane (both 1962, Impulse!), and, on September 17, 1962, a trio session with bassist Charles Mingus and drummer Max Roach that produced Money Jungle, a famously combustible, dissonance-embracing date unlike anything else in Ellington's catalog.

Ellington's final years combined sustained world touring with an increasingly explicit religious dimension to his composing. He premiered the first of three Sacred Concerts at San Francisco's Grace Cathedral on September 16, 1965, followed by a second in 1968 and a third in 1973, conducting each from the piano. He continued writing large-scale suites (New Orleans Suite, 1970; Latin American Suite, 1972) and smaller studio dates, including 1972's duo album with bassist Ray Brown, This One's for Blanton!, honoring Jimmy Blanton three decades on. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Richard Nixon in 1969 and, though a 1965 Pulitzer Prize jury recommendation for his life's work was rejected by the full board, an episode Ellington later shrugged off good-naturedly, he received a posthumous special Pulitzer Prize in 1999. Duke Ellington passed away in New York on May 24, 1974, of lung cancer and pneumonia, aged 75; more than 12,000 people attended his funeral at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, where Ella Fitzgerald delivered a brief, emotional eulogy. His son Mercer Ellington led a continuation of the orchestra until his own death in 1996.

Ellington's central innovation was treating his orchestra itself as his instrument, writing parts to the specific tonal personality of each musician in his band rather than to interchangeable chairs, a practice that let voices like Johnny Hodges's alto, Harry Carney's baritone, and Cootie Williams's and Ray Nance's growling brass become as identifiable as any of his melodies. He resisted the label "jazz" for his own work, preferring to describe it as beyond category, and pushed steadily from three-minute dance sides toward extended concert suites, film scores, and, late in life, an explicitly sacred repertoire, all while remaining commercially viable across five decades of shifting popular taste. His compositional partnership with Billy Strayhorn, so close that the two men's writing is sometimes difficult to disentangle, shaped the harmonic sophistication of the postwar band. Critics have ranked him among the small handful of major American composers regardless of genre; Gunther Schuller called him "a giant among giants," and his influence runs through virtually every large-ensemble jazz composer and arranger who followed, from Gil Evans to Charles Mingus to Wynton Marsalis.