The descendant of one of the most acclaimed jazz bands in the world, the Duke Ellington Orchestra, will take to the stage in the Kremlin.
The concert on April 9th in the State Kremlin Palace is already being advertised all over the city, and if you know nothing about Duke Ellington, who is ranked as one of the greatest jazz musicians of all time, then you might be forgiven for thinking that he was on his way, too.
Instead, the orchestra will be led by Ellington’s grandson, Paul, who himself took over from his father, Mercer, who had led the orchestra after Duke Ellington’s death until he died in 1996.
Duke Ellington led his orchestra for fifty years from the early pioneering days of the 1920s until the last decade of his life when he was world famous, receiving the Presidential Medal of Honor from Richard Nixon in the White House and touring all over the world. He died in 1974 of lung cancer.
He grew up in Washington D.C. where President Theodore Roosevelt would stop on his horse to watch as he and his friends played baseball. It was there that he wrote his first song, “Soda Fountain Rag.” He once said he wrote it as “a one-step, two-step, waltz, tango and fox trot,” so that “listeners never knew it was the same piece. I was established as having my own repertoire.”
Ellington was also a pioneer in touring the Soviet Union. He came in 1971 and was the first great jazz musician after Benny Goodman in 1961 to play in the country.
He and his orchestra played 20 concerts in five cities in five weeks that year. Before he went on tour he told American papers: “When you think of going to Russia to play music, you say, ‘This is where so many great musicians came from,’ you wonder if you are going to be able to breathe the air. It’s one of the most important music places in the world, if not the most. Rimsky Korsakov is the foundation of orchestration. He’s the foundation of music today.”
Ellington is said to have learned the Russian for “Love you madly,” his stage catchphrase for the concerts.
The current-day orchestra will focus on the most famous Duke Ellington tracks, such as “Take the A Train,” “It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing,” “Mood Indigo,” “In a Mellotone” and “Satin Doll.”
The Duke Ellington Orchestra plays the Kremlin State Palace on April 9th at 7 p.m. State Kremlin Palace, the Kremlin. Metro Alexandrovsky Sad. Tel. 917-2336.
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