Duke Ellington
Summary
- 1899-1974
- Jazz composer, pianist and leader of jazz orchestra
- Ellington wrote or collaborated on more than one thousand compositions; his extensive body of work is the largest recorded personal jazz legacy,
Details
- Even though his parents were pianists, he disliked his piano lessons and focussed instead on baseball and drawing. He also worked as a sign painter
- When he heard ragtime he sat down after a 7 year hiatus at the piano to try and copy it.
- He employed others to write his music in traditional musical notation
Quotes
Duke Ellington was one of the few who ever actually took formal lessons, when he was seven, from the exuberantly named teacher Marietta Clinkscales. He lost interest immediately, before he learned to read notes, and quit music entirely to focus on baseball. In school, his interests were drawing and painting. (He later turned down a college art scholarship.) When he was fourteen, Ellington heard ragtime, and for the first time in seven years sat down at a piano and tried to copy what he had heard. “There was no connection between me and music, until I started fiddling with it myself,” he remembered. “As far as anyone teaching me, there was too many rules and regulations. . . . As long as I could sit down and figure it out for myself, then that was all right.” Even once he became arguably America’s preeminent composer, he relied on copyists to decode his personal musical shorthand into traditional musical notation.