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- The Grace Cathedral concert was scheduled for September 16, 1965, as part of the Cathedral’s year-long celebration of its consecration. Preparations went on for about two years, but the always-busy Ellington wasn’t making much progress on the music.
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Nov 9, 2016 · November 9, 2016. By. Paul Sexton. Look closely at this picture, taken 50 years ago this week on 12 November, 1966. The figure sitting in the front pew of Trinity Cathedral in Phoenix is...
Apr 15, 2016 · Listen to Duke Ellington’s “It’s Freedom” from the Sacred Concerts. The inaugural performance of A Concert of Sacred Music was given at Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, on September 16, 1965.
- Overview
- Early life and career
- Ellington’s ensemble
- Masterworks and popular songs of the 1930s and ’40s
- Classical forms
- Legacy
Duke Ellington grew up in Washington, D.C., in a secure middle-class family that encouraged his interests in the fine arts. He began studying piano at age seven, studied art during his high-school years, and was awarded (but did not accept) a scholarship to the Pratt Institute. He began performing music professionally at age 17.
How did Duke Ellington become famous?
Benefiting from the expertise of a large ensemble that included several important jazz artists, Duke Ellington broke away from the conventions of band-section scoring. Using new harmonies to blend his musicians’ individual sounds and illuminating subtle moods with ingenious combinations of instruments, he created one of the most distinctive ensemble sounds of Western music.
What are Duke Ellington’s best-known works?
Often collaborating with his longtime composing-arranging partner Billy Strayhorn, Duke Ellington was responsible for big-band jazz classics such as “Take the ‘A’ Train” (written by Strayhorn), “Mood Indigo,” “Echoes of Harlem,” “Concerto for Cootie,” “Cotton Tail,” and “Ko-Ko” as well as popular songs such as “Sophisticated Lady” and “Prelude to a Kiss.”
Why is Duke Ellington significant?
Ellington grew up in a secure middle-class family in Washington, D.C. His family encouraged his interests in the fine arts, and he began studying piano at age seven. He became engrossed in studying art during his high-school years, and he was awarded, but did not accept, a scholarship to the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York. Inspired by ragtime ...
Ellington first played in New York City in 1923. Later that year he moved there and, in Broadway nightclubs, led a sextet that grew in time into a 10-piece ensemble. The singular blues-based melodies; the harsh, vocalized sounds of his trumpeter, Bubber Miley (who used a plunger [“wa-wa”] mute); and the sonorities of the distinctive trombonist Joe (“Tricky Sam”) Nanton (who played muted “growl” sounds) all influenced Ellington’s early “jungle style,” as seen in such masterpieces as “East St. Louis Toodle-oo” (1926) and “Black and Tan Fantasy” (1927).
Extended residencies at the Cotton Club in Harlem (1927–32, 1937–38) stimulated Ellington to enlarge his band to 14 musicians and to expand his compositional scope. He selected his musicians for their expressive individuality, and several members of his ensemble—including trumpeter Cootie Williams (who replaced Miley), cornetist Rex Stewart, trombonist Lawrence Brown, baritone saxophonist Harry Carney, alto saxophonist Johnny Hodges, and clarinetist Barney Bigard—were themselves important jazz artists. (The most popular of these was Hodges, who rendered ballads with a full, creamy tone and long portamentos.) With these exceptional musicians, who remained with him throughout the 1930s, Ellington made hundreds of recordings, appeared in films and on radio, and toured Europe in 1933 and 1939.
A high point in Ellington’s career came in the early 1940s, when he composed several masterworks—including the above-mentioned “Concerto for Cootie,” his fast-tempo showpieces “Cotton Tail” and “Ko-Ko,” and the uniquely structured, compressed panoramas “Main Stem” and “Harlem Air Shaft”—in which successions of soloists are accompanied by diverse ensemble colours. The variety and ingenuity of these works, all conceived for three-minute, 78-rpm records, are extraordinary, as are their unique forms, which range from logically flowing expositions to juxtapositions of line and mood. Tenor saxophonist Ben Webster and bassist Jimmy Blanton, both major jazz artists, were with this classic Ellington band. By then, too, Billy Strayhorn, composer of what would become the band’s theme song, “Take the ‘A’ Train,” had become Ellington’s composing-arranging partner.
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Not limiting himself to jazz innovation, Ellington also wrote such great popular songs as “Sophisticated Lady,” “Rocks in My Bed,” and “Satin Doll;” in other songs, such as “Don’t Get Around Much Any More,” “Prelude to a Kiss,” “Solitude,” and “I Let a Song Go out of My Heart,” he made wide interval leaps an Ellington trademark. A number of these hits were introduced by Ivy Anderson, who was the band’s female vocalist in the 1930s.
During these years Ellington became intrigued with the possibilities of composing jazz within classical forms. His musical suite Black, Brown and Beige (1943), a portrayal of African-American history, was the first in a series of suites he composed, usually consisting of pieces linked by subject matter. It was followed by, among others, Liberian Su...
Although Ellington’s compositional interests and ambitions changed over the decades, his melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic characteristics were for the most part fixed by the late 1930s, when he was a star of the swing era. The broken, eighth-note melodies and arrhythms of bebop had little impact on him, though on occasion he recorded with musicians who were not band members—not only with other swing-era luminaries such as Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, and Coleman Hawkins but also with later bop musicians John Coltrane and Charles Mingus. Ellington’s stylistic qualities were shared by Strayhorn, who increasingly participated in composing and orchestrating music for the Ellington band. During 1939–67 Strayhorn collaborated so closely with Ellington that jazz scholars may never determine how much the gifted deputy influenced or even composed works attributed to Ellington.
The Ellington band toured Europe often after World War II; it also played in Asia (1963–64, 1970), West Africa (1966), South America (1968), and Australia (1970) and frequently toured North America. Despite this grueling schedule, some of Ellington’s musicians stayed with him for decades; Carney, for example, was a band member for 47 years. For the most part, later replacements fit into roles that had been created by their distinguished predecessors; after 1950, for instance, the Webster-influenced Paul Gonsalves filled the band’s solo tenor saxophone role originated by Webster. There were some exceptions to this generalization, such as trumpeter-violinist Ray Nance and high-note trumpet specialist Cat Anderson.
Not least of the band’s musicians was Ellington himself, a pianist whose style originated in ragtime and the stride piano idiom of James P. Johnson and Willie “The Lion” Smith. He adapted his style for orchestral purposes, accompanying with vivid harmonic colours and, especially in later years, offering swinging solos with angular melodies. An elegant man, Ellington maintained a regal manner as he led the band and charmed audiences with his suave humour. His career spanned more than half a century—most of the documented history of jazz. He continued to lead the band until shortly before his death in 1974.
Ellington’s sense of musical drama and of his players’ special talents and his wide range of moods were rare indeed. His gift of melody and his mastery of sonic textures, rhythms, and compositional forms translated his often subtle, often complex perceptions into a body of music unequaled in jazz history. Charles Ives is perhaps his only rival for the title of the greatest American composer. Ellington’s autobiography, Music Is My Mistress, was published in 1973.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Apr 29, 2024 · In 1965 he recorded his first concert of sacred music, which met with mixed reviews; a fact that did nothing to deter the Duke from reprising it all over the world on numerous occasions.
Dec 26, 2011 · The Sacred Concerts were not written as a coherent work, but in three batches — there are 30 pieces, total — which Ellington assembled for three occasions — in 1965, 1968 and 1973. The most...
Duke Ellington's "Sacred Concert" was originally presented in Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, California, on September 16, 1965S. A religious man, Duke was deeply moved by the concert's overwhelming acceptance.
