Duke Ellington

[HERO]

Duke Ellington: ESE-Fe?, EIE-Fe? or SEE? (Ti-PoLR?)



















- Robert Christgau:


http://www.robertchristgau.com/get_artist2.php?id=2188

The Best of Early Ellington [MCA, 1996]
Although it doesn't approach RCA's long-lost Flaming Youth and touches fewer famous classics than Columbia's fainter, cleaner two-CD Okeh Ellington, this warm, scratchy disc leads out of his tangled discography into his '20s music, which traffics in a rinky-dink novelty more rock and roll than his glossy big-band dance charts. At first only a few familiar tunes stand out from the delicate audacity and raucous detail of the sound. But soon every theme kicks in, every silky clarinet solo and bumptious plunger mute. Ellington called this jungle music because white folks would never have believed he heard the modern city so much better than they did. They learned, kind of. A


Duke Ellington and Ray Brown: This One's for Blanton [Pablo, 1972]
That the man played with such lithe ambition in his seventies is a challenge not only to the senescent theory of youth culture but to all lingering truisms about youthfulness. That is, this is alive, and what else matters? I wish the movements of the suite that occupies side two were as attractive in themselves as each of the songs on side one is. But any pianist who can suggest the severe understatement of a Basie or Monk and the rather juicy extravagance of a Tatum or Garner in successive phrase has obviously earned the right to make big big statement--as if that's not obvious already. A-

[Hitta]

[Park]

He wrote some great standards. In a Sentimental Mood is probably my favorite.

Not a huge fan of his playing, so I'll post other renditions I like.