Edward Green - The Cambridge Companion to Duke Ellington

Duke Ellington is widely held to be the greatest jazz composer and one of the most significant cultural icons of the twentieth century. This comprehensive and accessible Companion is the first collection of essays to survey, in-depth, Ellingtons career, music, and place in popular culture. An international cast of authors includes renowned scholars, critics, composers, and jazz musicians. Organized in three parts, the Companion first sets Ellingtons life and work in context, providing new information about his formative years, method of composing, interactions with other musicians, and activities abroad; its second part gives a complete artistic biography of Ellington; and the final section is a series of specific musical studies, including chapters on Ellington and songwriting, the jazz piano, descriptive music, and the blues. Featuring a chronology of the composers life and major recordings, this book is essential reading for anyone with an interest in Ellingtons enduring artistic legacy.

EDWARD GREEN is a professor at Manhattan School of Music, where since 1984 he has taught jazz, music history, composition, and ethnomusicology. He is also on the faculty of the Aesthetic Realism Foundation, and studied with the renowned philosopher Eli Siegel, the founder of Aesthetic Realism. Dr. Green serves on the editorial boards of The International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music , Haydn (the journal of the Haydn Society of North America), and (Music Scholarship), which is published by a consortium of major Russian conservatories, and is editor of China and the West: The Birth of a New Music (2009). An active composer, he received a 2009 Grammy nomination for his Piano Concertino (Best Contemporary Classical Composition) and a commission offered jointly by 13 of Americas major concert wind ensembles, which resulted in his 2012 Symphony for Band .

For a list of titles published in the series, please see .

Ellington at the Rainbow Grill, New York City, circa 1970.
Image on the back cover shows (front row, left to right) Fred Guys guitar, Junior Raglins bass, Duke Ellington, Sonny Greer; (second row) Otto Hardwick, Juan Tizol, Ray Nance, Harry Carney, Betty Roch, Rex Stewart, Ben Webster, Wallace Jones, Lawrence Brown; (back row) Harold Shorty Baker, Johnny Hodges, Chauncey Haughton, Joe Tricky Sam Nanton.

The Cambridge Companion to Duke Ellington

Edited by

Edward Green

Manhattan School of Music

Associate Editor

Evan Spring

University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom

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It furthers the Universitys mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence.

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Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521707534

Cambridge University Press 2014

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2014

Printed in the United Kingdom by Clays, St Ives plc

A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data

The Cambridge companion to Duke Ellington / edited by Edward Green.

pages cm. (Cambridge companions to music)

ISBN 978-0-521-88119-7 (hardback)

1. Ellington, Duke, 18991974 Criticism and interpretation. 2. Jazz

musicians United States Biography. I. Green, Edward, 1951 editor.

ML410.E44C34 2014

781.65092dc23

[B]

2014026370

ISBN 978-0-521-88119-7 Hardback

ISBN 978-0-521-70753-4 Paperback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.