Word: ellington
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...Rhythm, rhythm, rhythm, and more rhythm that is the spirit of the musical age. The day of the "Peanut Vender," and "Yes, We Have No Bananas," is over. 'The Big Bad Wolf," "Mine," and "Heat Wave" -- they're the kind of songs people like now. Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington have ushered in a new era of popular music...
Jovial Edward Kennedy ("Duke") Ellington, Negro jazz-band leader, back in Manhattan after a two-month concert tour in Europe (TIME. June 12), declared the Prince of Wales had missed a train to hear his orchestra play in Liverpool. Said he: "Next time I saw the Prince of Wales was with a party of grand people in London. He says to me: 'I stayed over in Liverpool to hear you play.'Well, sir, what a fine spot for me to tell him, 'You're tellin' me, Prince, with 5,000 people banging on the doors...
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...