Word: duking
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Booze was about the only thing the Duke ever retired from. He was an unceasing forward mover in a career that spanned two World Wars, that took him from the streets of his native Washington, D.C., to dinner dates at the White House and that saw him compose such jazz classics as Sophisticated Lady, Caravan and Don't Get Around Much Anymore. Said the late Billy Strayhorn, who composed the Duke's theme, Take the A Train: "He not only doesn't live in the past, he rejects it, at least as far as his own past...
...left as a legacy the most distinctive single body of composition in all of jazz. Where he got the gift even he could not say for sure. His father was a butler who worked up to caterer and then became a blueprint technician. As a boy, Duke showed more aptitude for painting than music. Piano lessons were a chore. "Before I knew it, I would be fashioning a new melody and accompaniment instead of following the score," he said. Indeed he never became a virtuoso pianist; his talent was as a leader, arranger and composer...
...made the move to New York, where he would eventually come to epitomize all that was elegant and dignified about jazz. But in those days he was a tough blade. In Chicago, where he frequently dropped in to play, there was a standing order: "Duke Ellington is not to be bothered in the Loop." It stuck, because it came from Al Capone...
...fast life, and early on the Duke developed an ability to compose anywhere-restaurants, buses, hotels, even taxis. He wrote his first big hit, Mood Indigo, in 15 minutes while waiting for his mother to fix dinner. Many of his early works shimmered with exotic "jungle" colors, achieved through the clever use of mutes, slurs and growls, that were intended to romanticize the African roots of jazz. Later works such as Warm Valley and Dusk took on subtle pastels and sophisticated shapes. Ellington's style and reputation eventually transcended jazz, and he even performed with major symphony orchestras...
...later years, the Duke lived a life that for a jazz musician at least, was almost monastic. If wrestling with a new work, he would write all night in his apartment on Manhattan's West Side. Parties? "I just don't have time to be a social cat." Since the death of Strayhorn in 1967, Ellington's closest intimates were his son Mercer, who played trumpet in the band and served as road manager, and his sister Ruth, president of Ellington's publishing firm Tempo Music. Ellington's marriage to Mercer's mother...