Word: ellington
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Wynton Marsalis is leading a revolution of tradition. While many of his contemporaries play bland but best-selling smooth jazz and jazz-fusion, Marsalis champions core values: master the instrument, study the greats such as Monk and Ellington and dress and comport yourself with the dignity the music deserves. Though the battle for the music's soul goes on, the success of other young jazz stars in the '90s, from saxophonist Joshua Redman to pianist Eric Reed, is proof of Marsalis' influence. "I've played 150 concerts a year for 15 years," he says. "It helped to rebuild the jazz...
DIED. MERCER ELLINGTON, 76, musician and the son of jazz great Duke Ellington; of heart failure; in Copenhagen. Mercer led his father's orchestra after Duke's 1974 death and was music director of Sophisticated Ladies, the 1981 Broadway celebration of the elder Ellington's music...
...highlight of Friday night's concert was undoubtedly the band's performance of Duke Ellington's challenging Far Fast Suite (1966, recorded on RCA-Bluebird). As anyone who has listened to the suite knows, the places referred to both in the titles of the movements and in the music itself are not in the Fat Fast at all, but rather in the Middle East Iran and India-places such as Amad, Istahan, Agra and Delhi. Only the last movement. "Ad Lib on Nippon" is a musical reaction to an East Asian region. Geographical discrepancies aside, the synthesis of Duke Ellington...
...band was clearly well-rehearsed and inspired by the music. These factors turned the rate performance of an Ellington masterpiece into an excellent opportunity to appreciate America's greatest composer and orchestrator of the 20th century...
...Never End," Redman seemed to mock any legitimate musical statements he may have made earlier in the piece by turning the tenor sax into a penny whistle. Irony in jazz is a good thing, but Redman's silliness is not the same as the sophisticated wit of a Duke Ellington, whose self-mockery in turn said something worthy of the listener's attention...