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Born April 29, 1899 in Washington D.C., pianist, composer and bandleader Duke Ellington is one of the most important figures in jazz history. In this biography, jazz historian and award-winning author Scott Yanow takes an in-depth look at the life and career of the iconic figure.

Duke Ellington’s musical accomplishments and innovations are so numerous that they can be difficult to comprehend much less fully list. They fall into four areas: bandleader, composer, arranger, and pianist.

Ellington led his orchestra non-stop for 50 years (1924-74). One can pick out any year from that period, whether it is 1927, 1947 or 1967, and his big band ranks with the top five in the world.

As a composer, he wrote thousands of pieces, ranging from three-minute classics to hour-long suites. Scores of his originals became jazz standards, and he ranked with the other masters of the Great American Songbook such as George Gershwin, Cole Porter, and Irving Berlin. But unlike those composers, Ellington wrote his works not by sitting at home by a piano but while traveling on the road with his orchest

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Duke Ellington

Duke Ellington was one of the most important creative forces in the music of the twentieth century. His influence on classical music, popular music, and, of course, jazz, simply cannot be overstated.

He was born Edward Kennedy Ellington in Washington, D.C. on April 29, 1899, into a middle class black family. His father was a butler in a wealthy household, and he is said to have sometimes worked at White House affairs. Ellington originally had ambitions of becoming a painter, but he became interested in music in his early teens and learned James P. Johnson's "Carolina Shout" from a piano roll. Soon he was part of a small jazz band in Washington.

In 1923 he moved to New York and early in 1924 he became the leader of his band. Soon he was recording, and in 1927 Ellington's band was hired to play regularly at the Cotton Club, where he stayed for five years. Cotton Club performances were broadcast almost nightly, and by 1930 Ellington and his band were famous. And even as early as this, Ellington was beginning to be recognized as an important serious compose

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Duke Ellington

American jazz pianist and composer (1899–1974)

Musical artist

Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington (April 29, 1899 – May 24, 1974) was an American jazz pianist, composer, and leader of his eponymous jazz orchestra from 1923 through the rest of his life.^[1]

Born and raised in Washington, D.C., Ellington was based in New York City from the mid-1920s and gained a national profile through his orchestra's appearances at the Cotton Club in Harlem. A master at writing miniatures for the three-minute 78 rpm recording format, Ellington wrote or collaborated on more than one thousand compositions; his extensive body of work is the largest recorded personal jazz legacy, and many of his pieces have become standards. He also recorded songs written by his bandsmen, such as Juan Tizol's "Caravan", which brought a Spanish tinge to big band jazz.

At the end of the 1930s, Ellington began a nearly thirty five-year collaboration with composer-arranger-pianist Billy Strayhorn, whom he called his writing and arranging companion.^[2] With Strayhorn, he com