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Ellington: The Keys To a Life
Toward the beginning of “Swingin’ With Duke,” Wynton Marsalis suggests that “when you start to play Duke Ellington’s music, you start to feel how he lived in the world.” Keep reading »
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PBS: An Interview with Wynton Marsalis
People often say that the best improvised music sounds composed and the best compositions sound improvised. Well, Duke Ellington embodied this principle, as his compositions, when played with integrity and soul, have a freshness to them that captures the improvisatory nature of jazz—even the ones that don’t have any improvised sections. Keep reading »
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An Ellington of Short Takes
The career of Duke Ellington is wonderfully logical; each successive step brings more resources to the music, so that it becomes richer and more varied, sometimes in surprising ways. Keep reading »
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Ellington At 100: Reveling in Life’s Majesty
IN Duke Ellington’s world, people are smiling, they are dancing and they are making love. They’re having a good time because his music’s most basic concern is uplift of the human spirit. It’s a music that celebrates freedom of expression, freedom of choice. That’s why we love it. It wants us to love being ourselves and to revel in the majesty of life. Keep reading »
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A Jazz Success Story with a Tinge of the Blues: At Lincoln Center, Defining the Canon Draws Fire
The scene at the Supper Club on West 47th Street seemed to evoke the glory days of jazz—an ebullient swing band playing classic Ellington tunes as dancers in period costumes rocketed around the dance floor. Keep reading »
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Returning Duke’s Love for a City
The thick knot of politicians heaved like longshoremen as they pulled on a yellow rope dangling from a pulley yesterday afternoon at Fifth Avenue and 110th Street. The band played ‘‘Satin Doll.’’ Lost somewhere in the cluster of raised arms were Bobby Short, the cabaret singer, and Robert Graham, the sculptor, who had made the event possible. Keep reading »
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A Swinging Travelogue, With Ellington as Guide
How Chinese is Duke Ellington’s ‘‘Chinoiserie,’’ how African is his ‘‘Liberian Suite’‘? Do they become more so by a particularly forceful rendering of a little pentatonic melody, a particularly dense malleting of the tom-toms? Keep reading »
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Wynton Marsalis: Interview by Ted Panken
The Reigning Genius of Jazz to his admirers, the Emperor With No Clothes to his debunkers, Wynton Marsalis has attracted public attention and provoked ferociously divergent responses like few musicians in the music’s history. Since his emergence in the early 1980’s as a trumpet virtuoso and composer-bandleader, the result of Marsalis’ choice and treatment of material and his penchant for salty public statements is a public persona akin to a massive lightning rod or magnet that absorbs and repels the roiling opinions and attitudes informing the contemporary Jazz zeitgeist. Keep reading »
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From Duke Ellington, Themes for the Movies
Immersing oneself in the music of Duke Ellington gives the sense that he did everything that could possibly be done in jazz. His body of work, which starts in 1923 and ends in 1974, is so loaded with ideas that new movement after new movement in jazz could be sustained by continuing down avenues where he ventured for just a few blocks but then went on to something else. Mr. Ellington was restless, and it made his music fertile. Keep reading »
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Lincoln Jazz: Ellington en Masse
As the artistic airector of the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, Wynton Marsalis had the privilege of introducing the ensemble at Wolf Trap Sunday night. As fourth trumpet in the band, he was often heard from as well, adding plunger-tones to “Black and Tan Fantasy” and some of the more colorful orchestrations before uncorking a vivid, open-toned reading of “Portrait of Louis Armstrong.” Keep reading »