Word: ellington
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...Gift. Ellington burst on the jazz scene in 1927 at Harlem's Cotton Club. Right into 1974 he kept a 16-piece band circling the globe. "What would I do sitting in one place?" he asked a few years ago. "How would I get to hear the new things I write? What reason would I have to retire from the road?" Only illness. Two months ago, Ellington entered Manhattan's Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center with lung cancer, then developed pneumonia. Last week, only a month after his 75th birthday, Edward Kennedy Ellington died...
...made the move to New York, where he would eventually come to epitomize all that was elegant and dignified about jazz. But in those days he was a tough blade. In Chicago, where he frequently dropped in to play, there was a standing order: "Duke Ellington is not to be bothered in the Loop." It stuck, because it came from Al Capone...
...mother to fix dinner. Many of his early works shimmered with exotic "jungle" colors, achieved through the clever use of mutes, slurs and growls, that were intended to romanticize the African roots of jazz. Later works such as Warm Valley and Dusk took on subtle pastels and sophisticated shapes. Ellington's style and reputation eventually transcended jazz, and he even performed with major symphony orchestras...
...jazz musician at least, was almost monastic. If wrestling with a new work, he would write all night in his apartment on Manhattan's West Side. Parties? "I just don't have time to be a social cat." Since the death of Strayhorn in 1967, Ellington's closest intimates were his son Mercer, who played trumpet in the band and served as road manager, and his sister Ruth, president of Ellington's publishing firm Tempo Music. Ellington's marriage to Mercer's mother, his high school sweetheart, Edna Thompson, was short-lived. Though never...
...perhaps, when he was backstage waiting to go on, looking weary from the day's travel, the bags under his eyes heavier than usual. Out in the spotlight, he was a new man, the fingers dancing merrily over the piano keys, the face lit up with joy. Duke Ellington once said, "My reward is hearing what I've done." It was everybody else's reward...