Word: ellington
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...Scared. For a moment, the audience was stunned. Then 5,000 jazz cats rose in a thunderous ovation that they had not accorded Ellington or Dizzy Gillespie, or even Thelonious Monk. Face dripping rivulets of sweat and all but in tears, Mingus embraced his men one by one. But as the applause thundered on, he just prowled back and forth across the stage. Never once did he look at the cheering crowd. "I couldn't, man, I was scared," he said later...
...Mingus ever became a jazz musician at all. His stepmother, a member of the Holiness Church in Los Angeles, permitted only church music in the home, so Mingus was eight before he even knew jazz existed. One night he secretly turned on his father's radio and heard Ellington. He took to playing first the trombone, then the cello, till Veteran Bassist Red Callender got him to start on the bass...
...drifted from band to band-Lionel Hampton, Billy Taylor, Duke Ellington, Red Norvo. "Mingus wouldn't knuckle under to anyone-he had to be a leader," explains his ex-wife No. 2. So he started up his own band and played the jazz clubs. His big break came in 1957, when Brandeis University commissioned him to compose a jazz piece. He wrote Revelations, and critics promptly awarded him a place among the greats of avant-garde jazz...
Harlem's Golden Age began. "Meat was cheap and home brew was strong," wrote Historian Lerone Bennett. "Duke Ellington was at the Cotton Club and Satchmo was at the Sunset, God was in heaven and Father Divine was in Harlem." Those were the days of speakeasies with names like Glory Hole and Basement Brownie's Coal Bed, of stompin' at the Savoy and vaudeville at the Apollo, of "rent parties" where guests paid 50? or $1 to help the host pay his rent and got all the food and drink-and sometimes sex-that they could manage...
...Edward Kennedy ("Duke") Ellington, jazz musician-D.H. He serves art and humanity at once...