Duke ellington 2
Duke ellington 2One of Duke’s earliest compositions was the “Soda Fountain Rag”, which he played so many different ways, it was thought that it was several compositions (Gammond, 69).
In retrospect, Duke Ellington’s formal music career could be split up into three distinct,masterful periods, when the fruition of his work was most evident. The first period occurred in 1923.........
The second phase of Duke’s masterful career came between the late thirties and
mid-forties, when Duke began experimenting and reworking his earlier, successful titles, and began to reconstruct them into longer forms, to accentuate his players strengths. Gone was the “chugging sound of early jazz bands, replaced by a panorama of musical
textures bound together by a subtler but no less incisive pulse” (Holmes). During this period of his career, Duke would have the extreme fortune of working and learning from musicians that would initialize their career by playing in Duke’s orchestra, and eventully gain historic jazz notoriety from their times with Duke (Holmes). Such players as Jimmy Blanton, the “doomed young virtouoso of the stringed bass”, and Ben Webster, adding to the sax section that already housed Jonny Hodges, Harry Carney, and Barney Bigard
(Holmes).
The trumpet section during this time in Duke’s orchestra comprised such
legends as Rex Stewart and Cootie Williams. Joe Nanton, Juan Tizol, and Lawrence
Brown comprised the monster trombone section, and Sonny Greer rounded out the
orchestra on drums (Holmes). And of course, there the “piano player, as Duke often referred to himself” (Holmes).
During this time, Duke would showcase his individual members in “miniature
masterpieces, three-minute concertos that displayed a single soloist against the backdrop of a tightly-knit ensemble” (Holmes). Then in 1943, Duke began to hold annual concerts in Carnegie Hall, where he would showcase his longer, “concert-length” compositions(Holmes). The most notable of these was Brown, Black and Beige. In 1939, Duke acquired a musician that would be of epochal proportions- Billy Strayhorn. Strayhorn would become Duke’s chief collaborator and side kick, if you will. The best description of Strayhorn was the he was “musical genius of Mozartean proportions for whom composing music was as natural as breathing” (Holmes). In was always said of Ellington, that he
learned from all his musicians in his orchestra, but apparantly, Strayhorn was his “postdoc fellowship” (Holmes).
Through the late forties and mid-fifties, Duke Ellington experienced a sharp
decline in his status as the grandmaster of the music world. With newer, more popular forms of music coming into style, the jazz and swing world that once dominated didn’t seem as potent as it had been just a decade earlier. Duke noted this change, and changed with the times, yet never lost his royal sense of how to compose and orchestrate music to fit the present style. During this span of his career, Duke concentrated on developing more of his...
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