Opening paragraphs....................

He was the most chronic of procrastinators, a man who never did today what he could put off until next month, or next year.  He left letters unanswered, contracts unsigned, watches unworn, and longtime companions unwed, and the only thing harder than getting him out of bed in the afternoon was getting him to finish writing a new piece of music in time for the premiere.  "I don't need time," he liked to say.  "What I need is a deadline!"  Nothing but an immovable deadline could spur Duke Ellington to decisive action, though once he set to work in earnest, it was with a speed and self-assurance that amazed all who beheld it.  At the end of his life, he left behind some seventeen hundred-odd compositions, a number that is hard to square with the memories of his collaborators, who rarely failed at one time or another to be frustrated by his dilatory ways.  That was fine with him.  He knew what he needed in order to create, and as far as he was concerned, nothing and no one else mattered.  "As long as something is unfinished," he told Louis Armstrong, "there's always that little feeling of insecurity.  And a feeling of insecurity is absolutely necessary unless you're so rich that it doesn't matter."  Few of his pronouncements can be taken at face value - he was never in the habit of telling anyone, even those who supposed themselves to be his friends, what he really thought - but this one has the ring of truth.  "He wants life and music to be in a state of becoming," said the trumpeter Clark Terry, one of the many stars of the band that Ellington led from 1924 until his death a half century later.  "He doesn't even like to write definitive endings to a piece."
-Terry Teachout,  from the Prologue to  Duke:  A Life of Duke Ellington