Duke Ellington: An American Composer and Icon

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DUKE ELLINGTON AN AMERICAN COMPOSER AND ICON Mercedes Ellington & Steven Brower Introduction by Tony Bennett

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at the first crescendo (I was so startled that I can’t recall the composition), I felt that I had slammed into a wall of sound. we were to record the orchestra in the bandstand at monterey, the cavernous grace cathedral, the sound-balanced environment of a recording studio, and, on our first night of filming, a shoe box of a nightclub. the ellington sound was pure in each location.

In conversation with gleason, duke recited a litany of compositions, commenting on the circumstance, location, and time to complete each: “‘solitude’—I wrote the whole thing in twenty minutes in chicago, standing up.” In a cramped dressing room at basin street west, duke, in a bathrobe with a towel over his eyes, asked gleason what he would like to hear in the next set. “anything you want to play I want to hear,” was the reply. editing offers the greatest challenge in documentary filmmaking. I don’t mean, however, to dismiss creative camerawork or sound recording. for example, we discovered that ralph j. gleason’s reading of his commentary sounded stilted when compared to the same comments in casual conversation. we, therefore, recorded several hours of conversation between ralph and myself, excerpting what we wanted to use, cutting around the sound of ralph munching on an apple, and assembling the commentary from fragments of conversation. as mentioned earlier, every recorded word was transcribed. we were amused to read a young transcriber’s entry: “my mother used to tell me, ‘you’re a blast.’” what duke actually said was, “my mother used to tell me ‘you’re blessed.’” so much for generational difference. after several time-consuming false starts we finally had a one-hour documentary and a one-hour record of a concert of sacred music ready to show duke. the next challenge was when and where. duke and the orchestra were constantly on the road. there was only one west coast engagement before an extended tour elsewhere in the us. also, the screening had to take place where duke and the orchestra were performing. we settled on a date and time. we were to show both films in duke’s casinohotel after work. under no circumstances was anyone to be invited.

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aboVe: duke with queen elizabeth, 195*. rIght: duke cellebrates his * birthday with evie.

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linocut and letterpess bt steven brower.

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frequent ellington collaborater billy strayhorn.

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