Sophisticated Lady - Music Of Duke Ellington

 

It Don't Mean A Thing

Sophisticated Lady 

Music Of Duke Ellington and Others

Bandleader Series Vol. 3

Spinorama S-55

From the back cover: The Duke, who was born in Washington, D. C. in 1899, had been playing piano from the time he was seven, and participating in jazz-band performances from his seventeenth year on.

Before coming to New York in 1923 he had not only organized his own jazz band but had also written his first popular tune, "The Soda Fountain Rag." After playing for a while in various New York groups, notably the Wilbur Sweatman Jazz Band in Harlem, he formed a five-piece ensemble fro the Kentucky Club. It was with this group that he first stepped forward as a major publisher, who signed him to a contract.

With a band expanded to fourteen men, Duke Ellington made some excellent recordings and started a historic engagement at the Cotton Club in Harlem where he first became famous. "We came in with a new style," Ellington later reminisced to an interviewer. "Our playing was stark and wild and tense... We tried new effects... We put the Negro feeling and spirit in our music".

From then on, Ellinton was a leading figure in New York jazz. In live performances in night clubs, theaters and musical comedies, on the radio, in motion pictures, on records, he reached out to larger audiences than possibly any other jazz musician.

Wherever he was heard he was acclaimed. During one of his triumphant European tours he gave a command performance at Buckingham Palace and was acclaimed "the most original music mind in America" by Constant Lambert, a leading English serious composer and critic. In 1940 Swing Magazine picked seventeen of his records among the twenty-eight best of the year. In 1942, in a national poll conducted by Downbeat of the country's most popular musician, Ellington led a field of 15,000.

Ellington not only leads his band and plays the piano, but he has also prepared most of his orchestrations. In addition, since 1933 Ellington has occupied a leading position among America's popular composers when "Sophisticated Lady" and "Solitude" became hits. The latter won an ASCAP prize of $2500.00 as the best popular song of the year. He has also written numerous jazz instrumental works in more spacious forms introduced in Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Opera House auditorium.

Sophisticated Lady

Solitude 

Caravan

It Don't Mean A Thing

I Let A Song Go Out Of My Heart

Prelude To A Kiss

Dark Dawn

Green, Pink And Plaid

Jane

Hum Drum