Duke Ellington: Music

The Duke Ellington centenary is finally here, and tributes, re-releases and box sets are springing up from every label on which the Duke ever recorded. Columbia, God bless 'em, has really mined the studio vaults, bringing out a raft of re-releases, including alternate tracks that have never been released at all, as well as entire albums that had never made it to CD from vinyl. Two of those discs under discussion here are Duke's explorations into musical suites, while the other is one of his greatest live performances.

Source:

rambles.net

In American music, Duke Ellington stands alone. Over a period of 50 years — from the '20s to the '70s — Ellington led one of history's finest performing ensembles and established himself as one of America's most powerful musical forces. He encountered jazz in its infancy and expanded it into a sophisticated, internationally celebrated art form.

Source:

npr.org

The Duke is one of many products associated with the celebration of the centennial of Ellington's birth. Given the pervading racism of American society and 20th century cultural criticisms, specifically, Ellington was often denied the broad accolades bestowed upon other American composers and musicians like George Gershwin or Benny Goodman, during his lifetime. As Harold Cruse suggests in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, his fire and brimstone study of black intellectuals, "Ellington could be denied this kind of recognition only because of the undemocratic way the cultural machine in America is run." The irony of Cruse's charges are that Ellington, in many ways, embodied the tenets of American democracy. As Stanley Crouch has asserted, Ellington was "inspired by the majesty he heard coming from musicians of all hues and from all level of training...whenever they said the music was dead, Duke was out there, writing music and performing the meaning of his democratic birthright..." Examples of this practice include the prominent role women vocalists like Ivie Anderson and the great in her own right Mahailia Jackson played in his recordings, his willingness to explore music with African and East Indian influences, and of course his well known and highly prolific musical collaboration with composer and arranger Billy Strayhorn, who was incidentally an "out" homosexual.

Source:

popmatters.com

Duke Ellington was born in Washington D.C., and from an early age he loved music. When he was four years old, he listened to his mother play a popular piano tune called "The Rosary" and he cried, saying, "It was so pretty. So pretty." Not long after that, at the age of seven, he began to play piano himself. It seems that he knew he was going to go places. He told his next door neighbor, Mr. Pinn, "One of these days I'm going to be famous."

Source:

americaslibrary.gov

Ellington was one of the leading figures in jazz history. He was born in Washington, D.C. into a musical family. He was schooled in Washington, D.C. and came under the tutelage of Henry Grant at Armstrong High School, with whom he studied harmony. He began playing the piano at the age of six with Miss Clinkscales, studying later in his career with Will Marion Cook who had been a musical arranger for the vaudeville team Williams and Walker. Ellington got his nickname, "the Duke," while still in high school when he played for local social affairs. At that time he was ... a visual artist, but decided in favor of a musical career.

Source:

si.umich.edu

Ellington's long-term aim became to extend the jazz form from the three-minute limit of the 78 rpm record side, of which he was an acknowledged master. He had composed and recorded Creole Rhapsody as early as 1931, but it was not until the 1940s that this became a regular feature of Ellington's work. In this, he was helped by Strayhorn, who had enjoyed a more thorough training in the forms associated with classical music than Ellington. The first of these, "Black, Brown, and Beige" (1943), was dedicated to telling the story of African-Americans, the place of slavery, and the church in their history. Unfortunately, starting a regular pattern, Ellington's longer works were generally not well-received; Jump for Joy, an earlier musical, closed after only six performances in 1941.

Source:

en.wikipedia.org