Among the great Big Band leaders, Duke Ellington was the only one who could be everything: composer, arranger, pianist and bandleader. Born in Washington, DC, where his father was a butler, he began playing the piano at age seven, making his professional debut as a ragtime pianist at 17. Ellington moved to New York in 1923 to join Elmer Snowden’s Washington Band. In 1930 his composition Mood Indigo catapulted him to world fame. Elegant and well spoken, he was one of the most important figures of the Harlem Renaissance and a symbol of the Big Band jazz era. He composed over 2000 works, many of them three-minute pieces, constrained by the limitations of the old 78 rpm records. Every member of his band was a virtuoso, and Ellington incorporated their original riffs as part of his compositional process. He composed in many genres, including film music (Anatomy of a Murder) and, towards the end of his life, liturgical music. 

In 1969 Ellington received the Presidential Medal of Honor and in 1970 was elected to the exclusive National Institute of Arts and Letters. He was also the first jazz musician to be named a member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Music. 

Like most of Ellington’s compositions Three Black Kings was a cooperative work, usually with musicians from his band. This time however, it was by necessity. He died before finishing it and it was left to his son Mercer – also a gifted musician – to add the final bars in his father’s spirit. Mercer wrote: 

“He intended it as a eulogy for Martin Luther King and he decided to go back into myth and history to include other black kings. Primitivity, the opening movement, represents Balthazar, the black king of the Magi. King Solomon is next, with the song of jazz and perfume and dancing girls and all that, then the dirge for Dr. King. The piece owes its inspiration to a stained-glass window of the three Kings Ellington saw in the Cathedral del Mar in Barcelona.”

Joseph & Elizabeth Kahn
Wordpros@mindspring.com
www.wordprosmusic.com