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Duke Ellington |
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Kiem Vu |
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One of the most famous, well-respected jazz composer is Duke Ellington, an African American composer of distinction who became the real image of the new era, the Jazz Age of the 20th century. With his largest orchestra in American history, his many talents as a jazz composer, a pianist and a bandleader, he played a significant role in bringing jazz into life.
Duke Ellington was born in Washington D.C., on April 29, 1899 and he began studying piano at the age of six. In 1918, he became a successful bandleader in Washington. Ellington was an art distilled from glamour, racism, murder and good times. He had worked for a gangster at the Cotton Club, a segregated Harlem for Negroes only (Cook 129). Because many famous musicians worked with him at this time, Ellington gained a long-standing knowledge of the strengths of specific interpreters of his music (Chase 513). Most composers did not have this advantage.
He became one of the firsts to compose and arrange jazz music for a large orchestra (Shaw 31). His plays consisted of mingling of sorrow and celebration, erotic ambition and romantic defeat. The plays give us emotional riddles inherent that enriches the contrast between the mood of the melody line and the surrounding context of orchestration and rhyme (Shaw 38). He personified elegance and sophistication, a creative genius who never stopped exploring new dimensions of his musical world (Boyd). As a leading composer of jazz, Duke Ellington produced many famous songs and instrumentals such as "Black and Tan Fantasy," "It don’t mean a thing," "Rocking in Rhythm" (Ellington 520).
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