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Featured Review > Jonathan Eig > Duke Ellington
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(page two)
Richard Wang, a professor of music at the University of Illinois, Chicago, reminisced about hearing Ellington
at the Regal Theater. Wang was in high school and he and two friends got to the theater for the earliest
show. They paid 35 cents to get in, and stayed for all six shows. After about the fourth set,
Jimmy Hamilton waved to the three goggle-eyed white kids at the front of the crowd and invited them backstage.
It was, Wang said, an invitation to "the sanctum, the holy grail." The scene was wild. Hundreds of
well-wishers crowded the area backstage. Each member of the band seemed to have an assortment of adorers
who could not get enough. When it was time for the show to start, Ellington would sit as his piano and
begin to play. The musicians would drift on. He remembers once that everyone was in place but
Johnny Hodges, who was being carried toward the stage "in a certain stage of disability." Hodges' wife ripped
off his coat with one pull and put a saxophone around his neck just in time for her husband to take an
extended solo on "Passion Flower." Ellington knew how to sober his musicians.
He also knew how to write for them. Ellington always said that his true instrument was his band,
not his piano. He wrote parts not for anonymous musicians in specific seats but for his musicians,
his band. He knew the sounds and personalities of the men in his group and he heard them playing
in his imagination, or in his rehearsal studio, as he crafted his compositions. That's one reason why
Ellington's music will never sound as good as it did in his day. Even a first-rate repertory
ensemble like the Smithsonian group can't capture Ellington's sound because they're not Duke's men.
They can learn the Ellington charts and even copy solos by Ben Webster and Cootie Williams, but
that's all.
David Baker, who conducted the Smithsonian band, talked about the challenge. With two good rehearsals,
he said, he could get the repertory ensemble to play Tommy Dorsey's arrangements so well you would close your
eyes and think it was Dorsey. To capture the Ellington sound, though, "you need your rosaries," he said.
"It's a nightmare when you start doing the Ellington band because the Ellington band was about all those
individuals. He shaped his compositions around his players."
Dempsey Travis, a real estate mogul, community activist and writer, is at work on a book about Ellington. He
recalled going with his mother in 1931 to hear Duke at the Oriental Theater. His mother hoped that the trip
would make young Dempsey want to be a musicians, and it worked for a time. "I began to believe I was the
next Duke Ellington, and I kept that belief until 1934 when I heard Nat King Cole for the first time and I knew
my talent was lacking." Travis met Ellington in 1936. "He was the most accessible person, the most
genuine," he said. "There was nothing Dukish about him. He always had time for you."
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