美国人物简介Duke Ellington

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Duke Ellington

  Born Edward Kennedy Ellington on April 29, 1899, Duke Ellington was one of the founding fathers of jazz music. He started playing piano at the age of seven, and by the time he was 15, he was composing. A pianist, bandleader, arranger, and composer, Ellington and his band played together for 50 years. Some of Ellingtons most famous songs include “Don’t get Around Much Anymore”, “Sophisticated Lady” and “In a Sentimental Mood”. Duke Ellington died on May 24, 1974, in New York City.

 

1)      Dukes Band

  Duke Ellington wrote music night and day. Although he was a pianist, it was said thsat his real instrument was his band and the gifted musicians with whom he worked. His drummer, Sonny Greer, was with the band from the beginning; second trombonist Juan Tizol was a Puerto Rican musician who added a little Latin influence to the band; trombonist Lawrence Brown joined the band in 1932 and stayed for 19 years; and Ray Nance played both the violin and trumpet. Mary Lou Williams, one of the great women in jazz, arranged music for Ellington.

  Ellington may not have needed help writing music, but his partnership with Billy Strayhorn is considered one of the most important in American music. Strayhorn, who joined the band in 1939, composed and co-wrote some of the most famous pieces associated with Ellington, including the bands theme song. “Take the A Train”. Their partnership worked so smoothly that they were even able to write songs over the telephone. In his autobiography, Music is My Mistress, Ellington refers to Strayhorn as “…my right arm, my left arm, all the eyes in the back of my head, my brainwaves in his head, and his in mine.”

 

  The Duke Ellington Orchestra was on the road for 50 years and kept up an incredible schedule. The band often performed two shows a day and sometimes even added in a recording session. Ellintons music was familiar to people in the U.S. and abroad-no place was too small or too grand for “the Duke”, as he was known, to play. Over the years Ellington worked with many famous people, including Irving Berlin, Florenz Ziegreld, Al Jolson, Lena Horn, Ella Fitzgerald, Max Roach, Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, Mahalia Jackson,Bing Crosby, and many more. Ellington and his band kept up their fast-paced touring schedule into the early 1970s.

 

 

 

2、Duke Ellington’s Varied Career

   Referred to fondly as Maestro, Ellington loved writing music for his band. The tunes he composed gave each member a chance to shine. He also wrote an incredible amount of music for a number of different types of projects. He composed for musical reviews, movies, Broadway productions, and more.

In 1970, the American Ballet Theater commissioned Ellington to develop a ballet, which he called The River. The ballet was choreographed by the famous dancer Alvin Ailey and premiered on June 25, 1970, at the New York State Theater at Lincoln
                    Center.

That same year, he was also commissioned to write a comic opera. Other works he wrote include a theater piece called Jump for Joy and music for films, including Cabin in the sky and Black and Tan Fantasy. He and his co-writer, Billy Strayhorn, also composed the entire score for the film Anatomy of a murder. What could top this?

Ellington said that by the time he was 20 he had read the Bible three times. It’s no surprise, then, that he wrote the Scared Concerts, a three-part series of concerts combining classical European and African American forms and styles. The First Scared Concert premiered at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco in 1965, the Second at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in the New York City, and the Third Sacred Concert at Westminster Abbey in London. When asked why it took so long to write the concerts, he said, “You can jive with secular music, but you can’t jive with the Almighty ”. Duke Ellington certainly knew how to jive and with his music he taught the world how to swing along.

3、Duke Ellington’s Early Years

   Duke Ellington was born in Washington
                    D.C., and from an early age he loved music. When he was four years old, he listened to his mother play a popular piano tune called “The Rosary” and he cried, saying, “It was so pretty. So pretty.” Not long after that, at the age of seven, he began to play piano himself. It seems that he knew he was going to go places. He told his next door neighbor, Mr. Pinn, “One of these days I’m going to be famous.”

At age 15, Ellington worked at a soda fountain and wrote his first song, “Soda Fountain Rag”. By his late teens, he was making enough money to help his parents move into a better house. One of Ellington’s first professional gigs was a party where he played so long that his hand bled. He earned 75 cents. “It was the most money I had ever seen,” he said. “I rushed all the way home to my mother with it. But I could not touch a piano key for weeks.” What was Ellington’s next move?

Ellington studied music during the ragtime era. Ragtime was a kind of popular American music consisting of off-beat dance rhythms that began with the honky-tonk pianists along the Mississippi and Missouri
                    Rivers. By the time he was 20, he and his friends formed a band that would be the foundation for his life’s work. From 1923 to 1927, he and his band lived in New York City and made about 60 recordings. Their first big break came on December 4, 1927, at the opening night of what would turn out to be a long engagement at the Cotton Club in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood. The Ellington Orchestra often broadcast live on radio from the Cotton Club, so their unique style of jazz became familiar to people across the country.