Word: ellington
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Since recrossing the Atlantic, she has begun to make waves. Her performance at a celebration of the film music of Duke Ellington at New York City's Lincoln Center in May startled and delighted those who heard it. As she took the stage to sing Ellington's Saddest Tale--performed by Holiday in 1935--her bearing was tentative, awkward. But when she started singing, her performance was said to be impeccably phrased, suffused with emotion; the New York Times said "she might as well have been channeling Billie Holiday...
Most people know that the composer of Take the "A" Train and Satin Doll and of orchestral suites like Such Sweet Thunder was Duke Ellington. But most people are wrong. The composer, or in many cases the co-composer, of those and dozens of other hallmarks of the Ellington sound was a dapper, diminutive musicians' musician named Billy Strayhorn. From 1938 until his death of cancer in 1967, Strayhorn was Ellington's artistic alter ego--bolstered and publicly praised by the Duke but working always in his shadow, less an employee than a member of his extended household...
Together--and often working with the brilliant arranging skills of Nelson Riddle--Fitzgerald and Granz then went on to songbooks for the likes of Jerome Kern, George and Ira Gershwin, Harold Arlen, Duke Ellington, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, Irving Berlin and Johnny Mercer, the great composers of the great era of American popular music. Those songbooks became the foundation of a legacy, the single source for a musical standard that Fitzgerald, as much as anyone, helped make timeless. "Some kids in Italy call me 'Mama Jazz,'" she recalled. "I thought that was so cute. As long as they...
...magic and mystery and doom of the blues. Ella's art had a sunnier side, a more adaptive quality that let her be, if not an absolute original, a peerless interpreter, a superb vocal actress who could snuggle into Porter's playfulness or Arlen's melodrama or Ellington's chromatic gymnastics with equal agility. Billie Holiday's music was a lifeline. She lived out all the suffering of her songs. For Ella Fitzgerald, music seemed more like a safe harbor, a home from which she rarely ventured...
Roberts has recorded formidable material before--on his 1991 CD, Three Giants, he covered works by Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk. But on Portraits in Blue he takes on his biggest musical challenge by remaking material that is even more familiar and sacrosanct to many listeners. Says Roberts: "Rhapsody in Blue is a piece everyone knows, so the changes you hear, if done right, can give you some idea of the power of jazz music. I wanted to try and bring the piece up to date without sacrificing its basic nature and personality." Because Rhapsody in Blue...