Quote by Duke Ellington

"That's wild! I'll start off with five stars and work backwards from there. Now there, to me, is the most perfect band in existence, whether you're thinking of it orchestrationally or in terms of Duke's immensely creative writing. I can't think of anybody I admire more than this man; nobody could even be compared with him, except Billy Strayhorn. Duke does something with this old, tired instrumentation of trumpets, trombones and saxophones, and he has a perfect way of utilizing the men's specific sounds. Anything he plays is a work of art. The band is out of tune, for instance, and it doesn't even matter. They almost have their own brand of intonation. Duke can take an exotic-sounding idea and create something – you might call it sophisticated crudity. It gives both the qualities that I look for – an earthy quality and the sophisticated quality."

— Duke Ellington

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Composers from the United States Musicians from the United States Jazz musicians Pianists from the United States Conductors from the United States

Original Language: English

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English (Original)

Sources

Clare Fischer, reviewing "Agra" from Far East Suite, in "Clare Fischer: Blindfold Test" by Leonard Feather, in DownBeat (October 19, 1967), p. 38

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Duke_Ellington

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Duke Ellington

Edward Kennedy Ellington (April 29, 1899 – May 24, 1974) was an American jazz composer, pianist, and band leader. Although a pivotal figure in the history of jazz, in the opinion of Gunther Schuller and Barry Kernfeld, "the most significant composer of the genre", Ellington himself embraced the phrase "beyond category", considering it a liberating principle, and referring to his music as part of the more general category of American Music.

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