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A genius walked this way...

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[[caption]] DUKE ELLINGTON (1899-1974) [[/caption]]

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ELLINGTON, Edward Kennedy (Duke)

American composer, jazz pianist, and orchestra leader: b. Washington, D.C., April 29, 1899; d. New York City, May 24, 1974.

Duke Ellington was the most complete American musician of the 20th century. He was a composer whose work was based on his Afro-American heritage rather than the European musical styles that were the sources for most of his contemporaries among "serious" American composers. His compositions encompassed almost all forms of American music - jazz, popular songs, concert works, theatre scores, ballet music, film scores, sacred music. As a pianist and orchestra leader, his work was as much at home in a nightclub or dance hall as it was in a concert hall or the world's greatest churches.

Ellington composed jazz pieces that are part of the basic jazz repertory - "Mood Indigo," " The Mooche," "Black and Tan Fantasy." He wrote popular songs that have become standards. - "Solitude," "Sophisticated Lady." He explored new areas of extended composition with "Black, Brown, and Beige," "Night Creature," and "Such Sweet Thunder." By 1974 he was developing a highly individual repertory of sacred music. 

Early years. Unlike many black jazz musicians, Duke Ellington did not use music as a means of escaping poverty. He was born in Washington, D.C., on April 29, 1899, to a family of moderately comfortable means. His father was a blueprint maker for the Navy Department who also worked occasionally as a butler.

Young Duke, who got his nickname at the age of eight from a friend because of the elegance of manner that he had cultivated even then, was initially torn between music and art. He won a scholarship to study art when he was 19 but rejected it in favor of music. In 1914, at the age of 15, he wrote his first piece of music, "Soda Fountain Rag." By the time he was 20, he was earning $150 a week leading his own small band which included Sonny Greer, a drummer who continued to work with Ellington for 32 years. Ellington and Greer moved to New York in 1923 to join Elmer Snowden's band. Snowden left the group a year later, and Ellington succeeded to the leadership.

Musical Style. The Ellington orchestral style began to emerge during the next two years through the "growl" and "wah-wah" sounds produced by trumpeter Bubber Miley and trombonist Joe (Tricky Sam) Nanton. These were the basic elements in the so-called "jungle" style for which the Ellington band became known when it started a long engagement at the Cotton Club in Harlem in 1927. In that same year, a 17-year-old saxophonist, Harry Carney, joined the band and was still with it 47 years later when Ellington died. In the next few years, a number of other musicians with very individual musical styles and sounds came into the band - Johnny Hodges, Barney Bigard, Cootie Williams, Lawrence Brown. Ellington used their musical colorations as elements in his compositions to create an effect unlike that of any contemporary orchestra.

Career. In 1943 the Ellington band gave the first of a series of concerts at Carnegie Hall in New York City for which the Duke composed a 50-minute work, "Black, Brown and Beige," a pioneering effort in a field in which most compositions ran for only three or four minutes. In the years that followed, Ellington composed one or two concert works every year, most of them of 15 or 20 minutes duration.

During the 1940's, he wrote scores for two musicals - Jump for Joy (1941) and Beggar's Holiday (1947), In the 1950's, Ellington works were commissioned by the Symphony of the Air and the NBC Symphony, and the Duke also wrote and narrated a television production, A Drum Is a Woman. In 1963 he composed a musical panorama of black history, "My People," which was presented in Chicago, and in 1965 he introduced his first Concert of Sacred Music at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. His Second Concert of Sacred Music was premiered in 1968 at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. A third Sacred Concert, first performed in Westminster Abbey in 1973, was never given in America before Ellington's death.
                                  John S. Wilson
Author, Jazz: The Transition Years--1940-1960
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