Word: ellington
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...record companies embraced the electronically enhanced jazz-pop amalgam known as fusion. Now a whole generation of prodigiously talented young musicians is going back to the roots, using acoustic instruments, playing recognizable tunes and studying the styles of earlier jazzmen, from King Oliver and Louis Armstrong to Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker and John Coltrane. Moreover, with major record labels rushing to sign them up, many of these so-called neotraditionalists are starting to enjoy commercial success, and some are on the road to real wealth...
...young man still had a lot to learn. Stanley Crouch, a New York City- based writer and jazz critic, befriended Marsalis shortly after he joined Blakey's group, and was astounded at how little he knew about jazz history. "He didn't know anything about Ornette Coleman, Duke Ellington or Thelonious Monk," says Crouch, 44. "His dad had tried to make him listen to Louis Armstrong, but he had this naive idea that Louis was an Uncle...
...Stomping the Blues, was a seminal work on African-American music. Murray, now 74, took Marsalis to museums and bookstores and got him reading "everything from Malraux and Thomas Mann to the Odyssey and the Iliad." In particular, he filled him in on the life and works of Duke Ellington, whom Murray considers the "quintessential American composer...
...composing but also to a whole music-centered philosophy about American life and culture. Sitting in the sparsely furnished living room of his Manhattan brownstone, with three Louis Armstrong statuettes peering down from the mantelpiece, he confidently mingles allusions to Picasso and the Iliad with appreciations of Duke Ellington and childhood anecdotes. The hardwood floor is littered with the toys of his two sons, Wynton Jr., 2, and Simeon, six months; their mother Candace Stanley, 28, is doing postgraduate work at New York University. (Marsalis has put the four-story house on the market for $950,000 and is planning...
...meaning of America," he says, "jazz is the primary art form, especially New Orleans jazz. Because when it's played properly, it shows you how the individual can negotiate the greatest amount of personal freedom and put it humbly at the service of a group conception." He points to Ellington as the jazzman who best embodied the "mythology of this country" in his music...