Word: ellington
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Sophisticated Ladies. Gregory Hines is a dancing, singing, drum-flaying supernova in this stylish tribute to the dandy of the jazz kingdom, Duke Ellington...
...mostly middle-aged and middle-class throng had converged on the Hyatt's expansive lobby for another in a popular new series of weekly dances. Admittance required only a fondness for the fox trot. "Tea dances," the promoters were billing these mildly recherche gatherings: Tommy Dorsey and Duke Ellington tunes were featured, and Friday's Big Band, Steve Miller and His Orchestra, had played the occasions before. The hotel has a ballroom, but the glassy lobby is nearly as large and, in the fading summer light, far more inspiring...
DIED. Mary Lou Williams, 71, influential jazz pianist, arranger and composer who worked with the likes of Louis Armstrong, Andy Kirk, Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie in a career that spanned most of the major eras and styles of jazz; of cancer; in Durham, N.C. Rooted in blues and boogie-woogie, Williams was a consistently adventurous and idiosyncratic performer who played a formative role in the development of bebop in the 1940s and even experimented somewhat in the "free" improvisations of recent years...
What Coward did for the bright Weary of It All worldlings of London, Ellington did for the smart, sassy Take the "A " Train Harlem-Manhattan axis. This mood resonates throughout the show, particularly in Set Designer Tony Walton's scenic imagination. He inscribes the Cotton Club in neon across the night sky rather as Picasso painted with a flashlight in the dark. Through dark blue and white lighting, a flight of stairs becomes a piano keyboard to prance...
...cruel amplification of sound -Broadway's sin against all musicals -robs some of the numbers of the sinewy, teasing subtlety that is an Ellington touchstone. Otherwise, the show is torrid, torchy and trig. -T.E.Kalem