Print
Email
Look It Up
AT A GLANCE
Ellington, Edward Kennedy “Duke”
4 articles on Ellington, Edward Kennedy “Duke”
Ellington, Duke
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century
Word Count: 2235 Includes: Background and Early Career. | Duke Ellington and His Jungle Band. | The Golden Age. | Newport Jazz Festival of 1956. | The Ellington Legacy. | Bibliography(b. 29 April 1899; d. 24 May 1974), pianist, bandleader, and world-renowned composer of jazz and popular music. Many critics regard Ellington as the most significant twentieth-century composer of jazz—which he preferred to call “Negro music.”Born in Washington, D.C., Ellington was raised in a middle-class family among Washington's culturally viable African American community. He once said that his father, James, a butler and later a caterer, provided for the family “as though they were millionaires” (Tucker, p. 7). Ellington's role model was his gentlemanly father, but he was particularly devoted to his puritanical mother, Daisy (Kennedy). From an early age Ellington was encouraged to excel; his family instilled in him a profound sense of racial pride and responsibility. By his own ...
Read full articleEllington, Edward Kennedy (“Duke”)
Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Word Count: 2483 Includes: Musical Beginnings | At the Cotton Club | Beyond the Boundaries of Dance Music | The Great Ellington Band: Early 1940s | Later Musical Works and Social Activism | Ellington's Later Career1899–1974
African American jazz pianist and bandleader; widely considered the greatest composer in the history of jazz. For nearly half a century Duke Ellington led the premier American big band, and through his compositions and performances he brought artistic credibility to African American Jazz. Ellington played the piano, but his orchestra was his true instrument. In the late 1920s he perfected an exotic style that was later termed jungle music. During the 1930s Ellington developed a lush approach to orchestration that introduced new complexity to the simplistic conventions of swing-era jazz. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s he struggled against the limitations of the three-minute 78 R.P.M. recording and the general adherence to twelve- and thirty-two-bar song forms, in the process vastly extending the scope of jazz. Personally and politically, Ellington preferred to avoid direct confrontation; yet he was active as far back as the ...
Read full articleEllington, Duke
Source: African American National Biography
Word Count: 3008 Includes: Further Reading | Discography(29 Apr. 1899–24 May 1974), jazz musician and composer, was born Edward Kennedy Ellington in Washington, D.C., the son of James Edward Ellington, a butler, waiter, and later printmaker, and Daisy Kennedy. The Ellingtons were middle-class people who struggled at times to make ends meet. Ellington's mother was particularly attached to him; in her eyes he could do no wrong. They belonged to Washington's black elite, who put much stock in racial pride. Ellington developed a strong sense of his own worth and a belief in his destiny, which at times shaded over into egocentricity. Because of this attitude, and his almost royal bearing, his schoolmates early named him “Duke.”Ellington's interest in music was slow to develop. He was given piano lessons as a boy but soon dropped them. He was finally awakened to ...
Read full articleEllington, Edward (“Duke”)
Source: The Oxford Companion to United States History
Word Count: 341(1899–1974), composer, bandleader, pianist. Born in Washington, D.C., Duke Ellington learned to play jazz in that city's saloons and clubs. In 1923 he moved to New York City, where in 1927 his band became the house band at Harlem's Cotton Club. Some of Ellington's best-known songs, such as “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo,” came from Cotton Club shows. Ellington and his band toured internationally in the 1930s, but periodically returned to the Cotton Club.Beginning in the 1930s, Ellington traced the history of African-American life in a series of longer compositions, culminating in a 1943 suite entitled “Black, Brown, and Beige.” Presented as a jazz concert in New York's Carnegie Hall, it showed Ellington's growing interest in classical music. Unlike Benny Goodman, who played jazz and classical music ...
Read full article