Duke Ellington Music Video Movie Remarkable In
It features Duke Ellington and his orchestra performing his first extended composition. Symphony in Black: A Rhapsody of Negro Life is one of the earliest cinematic explorations of African-American culture for a mass audience. In September of 1935 Paramount Pictures released a nine-minute movie remarkable in several ways. After his death, his band was controlled by his son, and they continued to release albums even after his death.Digital Duke won Grammy Award for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album in 1988 and the credits for the same were given to ‘The Duke Ellington Orchestra’.WFIUs Jump for Joy: Duke Ellingtons Celebratory Musical features nearly all of the music that Ellingtons 1941 Blanton-Webster band recorded for the show, including the classic hits 'I Got It. Duke Received 13 Grammy Awards, including several for best large ensemble album and many other best songs.
Symphony in Black was produced over a ten-month period. Ellington’s “Rhapsody” has four parts: “The Laborers,” “A Triangle,” “A Hymn of Sorrow” and “Harlem Rhythm.” Holiday appears as a jilted and abused lover in “A Triangle.”Holiday’s only previous screen appearance was as an uncredited extra in a nightclub scene in the 1933 Paul Robeson film, The Emperor Jones. (The Official Website) One of Ellingtons songs, entitled Soda Fountain Rag (video below), uses Debussys style of using scales to create a catchy and rushed feeling.The one-reel movie, directed by Fred Waller, tells the story of Ellington’s “A Rhapsody of Negro Life,” using pictures to convey the images running through the musician’s mind as he composed and performed the piece. Thus Dukes music career was born. Everything is about feeling.Returning home, Duke yearned to play, and dedicated himself to the task. This violin project is sophisticated without a trace of pretension, romantic without a bit of mush, elegant without any fancy touches.
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Billie Holiday recorded her song in October 1934, less than a year after her first nervous recordings with a Benny Goodman studio band in November and December 1933 (“Your Mother’s Son-in-Law” and “Riffing the Scotch”), and during that year she developed from just another “hotcha” singer of the period into a deep, rich artist. I’ve loved this movie since I first saw it in the 1970’s, not only for Billie’s haunting contribution but as a sort of pencil sketch for Duke Ellington’s later symphonic masterpiece, “Black, Brown and Beige,” which also opens with a work song, contains a church sequence and a blues song, and closes with a depiction of (then) present-day African-American life. Other singers such as Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland may have more successfully established and cultivated an image, but Billie Holiday did it first.Billie Holiday–The Life and Artistry of Lady Day : The Complete FilmDuke Ellington Plays for Joan Miró in the South of France, 1966: Bassist John Lamb Looks Back on the DayI don’t know who plays Billie’s unfaithful boyfriend in the “Triangle” sequence, but it doesn’t look like the same person as the dancer in the “Harlem Rhythm” finale, who IS Earl “Snake Hips” Tucker.
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