Word: ellington
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...also heard Negro syncopators who scorn sweet stereotype melodies and easy orthodox rhythms. But this summer Europeans will have a chance to hear hot, pulsing jazz played as they never have heard it before. Last week on the S. S. Olympic Negro Edward Kennedy (''Duke") Ellington sailed with his 14-piece all-Negro band to play in London, Liverpool, Glasgow, later on the Continent...
...real "hot" jazz will be shown as coming from Negro performers like mad Buddy Bolden-free-lance trumpeters, saxophonists and trombone players who started the hot jazz cult which today has such heroes as Cab Galloway, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington. Galloway and Armstrong are predominantly showmen. Galloway plays no instrument, sings with his orchestra in a bleating, high-pitched voice, relies partly for his effects on his white dress-suit with ludicrously long tails. Windy, muggle-smoking Louis Armstrong has never had patience or skill to build an orchestra of his own. He is happy strutting before any good...
Compared with these two, big, handsome Duke Ellington is an earnest, all-round musician. He learned to play the piano capably when he was growing up in Washington, D. C. At 16 he was playing with dance orchestras. In his early twenties he went to New York with a four-piece band of his own. Soon he was bettering the other Harlem jazzleaders by writing his own songs-'"Mood Indigo," "Lazy Rhap-sody," "Cotton Club Stomp," "Hot and Bothered." He has made his own arrangements of such straight tunes as "Limehouse Blues," "Three Little Words" and the Blackbirds score...
...Ellington's arrangements, apparently tossed off in the approved hot, spontaneous manner, have been carefully worked out at rehearsals beginning often at 3 a. m. after his theatre and night-club engagements, which gross as much as $250,000 a year. Ellington will sit at the piano, play a theme over, try a dozen different variations. Spidery Freddy Jenkins may see an ideal spot for a hot double-quick trumpet solo. Big William Brand may be seized with a desire to slap his double-bass, almost steal the percussion away from Drummer Sonny Greer. Duke Ellington lets...
Pianist Percy Grainger has likened the texture of Ellington's music to that of British Composer Frederick Delius. Scholarly musicians are looking forward to a Duke Ellington review which is scheduled for New York next season. Such lofty recognition has injected no jarring, self-conscious note into Ellington's performances. Ellington and his players cling to the Negro dialect. Hot obligates are still "riffs" to them. Dapper Sonny Greer, probably the world's greatest drummer, still shouts "Send me, man!" when he is about to launch a percussive volley. Ellington's own soft-spoken orders...