Word: ellington
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...Edward Kennedy Ellington, jazzman, composer, and beyond question one of America's topflight musicians, is a magic name to two generations of Americans. His Mood Indigo, Sophisticated Lady, Solitude, and countless other dreamy tunes have become as familiar as any other songs since Stephen Foster. As jazz composer he is beyond categorizing-there is hardly a musician in the field who has not been influenced by the Ellington style. His style contains the succinctness of concert music and the excitement of jazz. His revival comes at a time when most bandleaders who thrived in the golden...
...Last, Clicks. When Edward Ellington was born in Washington, D.C. in 1899, the capital was jigging to the insolent rhythms of ragtime pianists. Farther west Buddy Bolden's fabulous cornet was shaking New Orleans' levees, and such young idolaters as Joe ("King") Oliver and Sidney Bechet were soon to hammer out the rudiments of instrumental jazz. Washington jazz tended to strings-pianos, banjos, violins-but it had the same ancestry: the sophisticated rhythms of African drums, which later took on a more succinct and sensuous character as they drifted through the Caribbean islands, gradually infiltrated...
...Ellington's father was first a butler, then a caterer, and eventually a blueprint technician, and he provided well for his family. Duke had art lessons, at which he did extremely well, and piano lessons, which he never mastered. He felt they cramped his style. He worked in a soda fountain after school, and spent his hours at home working out his own method of playing the piano. By the time he was 14, he had started a piece called Soda Fountain Rag, and he played it so many different ways that people thought it was several compositions...
Every man in the early Ellington band-as in today's-was a soloist, and the music they played was unlike anything anyone had ever heard. Recalls a friend: "One time at the Cotton Club the entire brass section arose and delivered such an intricate and unbelievably integrated chorus that Eddy Duchin, who was in the audience, literally rolled on the floor under his table-in ecstasy." Says Ellington: "We didn't think of it as jazz; we thought of it as Negro music...
...Ellington, who seems to derive inspiration from being on the move, wrote many of the tunes in a taxi on the way to the studio, or even in the studio. Sometimes he would jump out of bed in the middle of the night, grunt a tune that had just come to him and play it on the piano. It made little difference, since all new numbers had to be worked out anyhow. "You play this," Duke would say to one musician at a time, while noodling out a tune on the piano. As soon as they heard a phrase...