Word: ellington
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Along with Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker, the legendary tenor saxophonist Lester Young is considered one of the seminal figures in the history of jazz. From his first recorded solo in 1936 through his small group sessions with Billie Holiday and his memorable stint with the Count Basie Orchestra, Young (known as "Pres," short for "President of the Tenor Saxophone") created some of the most memorable recordings in American music. Douglas Henry Daniels, a professor of History and Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has spent more than two decades investigating the legend of Lester...
...1920s and 1930s, she and her sister, Isabelle, were legendary beauties, hotly pursued and discussed." Washington's light-skinned beauty both enhanced and abridged her showbiz career; but her exotic outsider status pursued her, defined her, wherever she went. Her husband, Lawrence Brown, was a trombonist with Duke Ellington, and in the 30s she would occasionally accompany the orchestra on dates in the American South. Josephine Baker's adopted son Jean-Claude has said that the black musicians "could not go into ice cream parlors, so she would go in and buy the ice cream, then go outside and give...
...Washington made her film debut in the Dudley Murphy short "Black and Tan" (1929), in which she plays Duke Ellington's girlfriend, a dancer who performs despite illness and collapses after her big number. In this ambitious, primitive two-reeler, she delicately embodies the wild soul inside the dying swan; few actresses looked more wanly gorgeous than she does in her death scene. Murphy (who cast Fredi's sister Isabelle as the Other Woman in his Bessie Smith short, St. Louis Blues") also chose Fredi to play a prostitute in the Paul Robeson "Emperor Jones," where makeup darkened her skin...
...different,” so she learned to play with her right hand. By the time she reached high school, she had become serious about the school, she had become serious about the sport, attending camps throughout the summer to hone her skills. Once she got to Ellington (Conn.) High School, she established herself as a dominant scorer, netting 2,200 points over a stellar career...
...Cohan captured the energy of the Great White Way with "Give My Regards to Broadway." (There?s also "On Broadway," and numerous other homages to the area). When it comes to the Big Apple, even the public transportation system has received tribute in song, in the form of Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn?s brash but velvety "Take the ?A? Train...