Duke Ellington

Then along came the annual Newport Jazz Festival of 1956. In July. Like it does every year. But this year was different. Ellington's set was different.

Legend has it that during a set in Birdland in the early 1950s, after Diminuendo, Paul Gonsalves leant over to Duke and asked if he could solo. What followed was a really long driving solo that whipped the audience into a frenzy, with people crying out and jumping on their chairs.

Ellington may have had that in his mind when, during their set at the Festival, he told Gonsalves to blow as long as he wanted during the Diminuendo interlude. In what has since become jazz folklore, Gonsalves practically started a riot as he played a tenor sax solo for 27 choruses, stirring up the normally staid crowd into a frenzy, making one blonde woman in a black evening dress jump from her box seat and start dancing. This helped serve as a catalyst for the crowd frenzy that grew as Gonsalves continued his incredible solo. Listening to the track the audience's increasing frenzy is audible. This song, along with the other performances at the festival by Ellington's band, were released as a live recording and helped revive Ellington's flagging career.

Duke Ellington lived most of his later years in a townhouse on Riverside Drive at 106th Street in Manhattan, where he died in 1974. At his funeral attended by 12,000 people, Ella Fitzgerald summed up the feeling, "It's a very sad day. A genius has passed."

Ellington started to play gigs in cafes and clubs in and around Washington and his attachment to music grew so strong he turned down an art scholarship to the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 1916 and dropped out of Armstrong Manual Training School where he was studying commercial art, three months before graduation.

By 1917 he'd launched his musical career, painting commercial signs by day and playing jazz by night. At first, he played in other bands, then in late 1917 formed his first group, Duke’s Serenaders, playing their first gig at Washington's True Reformer's Hall.

However, the pull of what became known as the Harlem Renaissance was too strong for the young Ellington and he headed off to New York. New dance crazes, like the Charleston, were bred in Harlem as well as black musical theatre, from Eubie Blake and others. After a few months, the young musicians returned to Washington feeling discouraged by the hard to crack jazz scene in New York. They regrouped and renamed the band 'The Washingtonians' and when band leader Elmer Snowden left the group in early 1924, Ellington took over and began composing more edgy and hipper pieces, that brought him to the attention of the more famous band leaders of the day.

By 1927, the famous band leader King Oliver turned down a regular booking for his group as the house band at Harlem's Cotton Club at Lenox Avenue and 142 St, Manhattan. Ellington, now back in New York was offered the spot. With a weekly radio broadcast, famous and infamous clientèle pouring in to see them on a nightly basis, the period as house band from 1927 to 1931 was a golden age for Duke Ellington as a composer and gave him national prominence.

Following the end of his band's tenure at the Cotton Club [followed as house band by Cab Calloway and his orchestra], and throughout the decade that followed, he composed some of his most well-known pieces, including 'Concerto for Cootie', 'Ko-Ko', 'Cotton Tail', 'Take The A-Train', 'Mood Indigo', 'It Don't Mean A Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)', 'Sophisticated Lady', 'In A Sentimental Mood', 'Blues in Orbit', 'Caravan' and "Jump for Joy", his first full-length musical stage revue.

By now, Ellington's 20-year collaboration with the younger and classically-trained, Billy Strayhorn was producing some of the band's best music of that period.

By the time the fifties came around however, musical styles were changing. Smaller bands were in vogue and the newer music called, 'rhythm and blues', led by the likes of Louis Jordan, Roy Brown and Wynonie Harris were all the rage. Big bands like Ellington's were less fashionable. He continued to write and perform expanding his repertoire into new territories and collaborating on albums with rising stars such as John Coltrane and Johnny Hodges, plus the established stars like Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong.

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