Word: ellington
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...songs, with Duke Ellington behind him, Billy was to get a respectable $2,000 a week. Said his manager last week: "Before that appearance, if the Paramount had offered us an option for next year at $3,000, we would have snapped it up. Now, we don't know how much to ask for him from week to week...
...Duke Ellington was the nation's No. 1 bandleader (for the fifth time), and top soloist (for the first time), according to Down Beat magazine's annual poll. Spike Jones was again King of Corn, nosing out Guy Lombard and Vaughn Monroe...
...last. My 16-month-old niece does it when she drinks beer out of her bottle, and does it better than any of them." To the naked ear its shrill cacophony seems anarchistic; on repeated hearings it becomes clear that the players planned it that way. Duke Ellington, now a disc jockey, has been kind; old Satchmo Louis Armstrong, critical. The feud now raging between partisans of the New Orleans school of jazz, who enjoy their music, and the "progressives," who seem to undergo theirs, is reminiscent of 12th Century theological squabbles...
...setting, the plot, and the words were familiar enough to Londoners. For it was the same bawdy Beggar's Opera that John Gay had written more than two centuries ago. Unlike some others who had tinkered with Gay's libretto (Frederic Austin, Kurt Weill, Duke Ellington), Britten had followed it carefully, keeping to the squalor and backside-slapping of 18th Century London. The music, in its latest disguise, was something else again...
...shifty rhythms, with the brass blaring out accents up on top. Pieces like Two Bass Hit and Stay On It didn't sound like "moldy fig" music (boppese for "decadent" Dixieland jazz); but, except for Dizzy's wild, fast-riding solos, they did sound like something Duke Ellington had thought better of a long time...