Dodge, Joseph Jeffers

"Duke" (Edward Kennedy) Ellington, composer, arranger, pianist, and band leader is considered one of America's master musicians; his place in jazz history remains unparalleled. Ellington remained a creative and relevant artist throughout an extraordinary fifty-year career. As a songwriter, he was as prolific as Gershwin and Cole Porter; he assimilated all styles and trends in jazz, adding elements of each to his own compositions. His arrangements were complex and sophisticated, and his varied use of blues structures innovative and seemingly limitless. He inspired his soloists to new heights of imagination and creativity, and his discography is one of the most comprehensive of all twentieth-century composers, his career among the most thoroughly documented.

Born in Washington, D.C. on April 29, 1899, Ellington's earliest musical influences were the ragtime pianists. He made his professional debut at age 17 and his earliest recordings with Elmer Snowden's band, the Washingtonians, in 1927. At Harlem's Cotton Club (1927-31), he began to assume a leading position in the jazz world, earning international fame with the success of his compositions Mood Indigo and Creole Rhapsody. During this formative period he developed a variety of signature styles: "mood" or "blue" pieces, jungle-style production numbers, popular songs, and purely instrumental jazz compositions. From 1933-42, his 14-man band toured extensively throughout the United States, with highly successful visits to Europe in 1933 and 1939. Beginning in 1943, and continuing through 1952, Ellington produced a legendary series of annual concerts in Carnegie Hall with the touchstone work, Black, Brown, and Beige, the first in a series of multi-movement jazz suites, later to include Liberian Suite, Harlem, and Such Sweet Thunder. Beginning in 1950, such large-scale suites were a feature of Ellington's more frequent foreign tours, including a highly successful visit to the Soviet Union in 1971. He composed his first full-length feature film score in 1959, for Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder. In the 1960's he recorded with prominent jazz musicians of the younger generation, including Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, and Max Roach. He devoted the final decade of his career largely to the composition of liturgical music, beginning with the monumental In the Beginning God, for orchestra, chorus, soloistss, and dancer. This was followed by "Second" and "Third" Sacred Concerts in 1968 and 1973. Ellington died in New York on May 24, 1974.

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