DUKE ELLINGTON

Born on April 29, 1899, in Washington, D.C., he grew up among that city's substantial black middle class. His mother, Daisy Kennedy, was the daughter of a District of Columbia police captain. Daisy married the ambitious young James Edward Ellington, who was successively a coachman, butler, caterer, and blueprint draftsman. J.E., as Duke called his father, always acted as though he had money, whether he had it or not. He raised his family as though …

…paths with greater disdain? But in the end, of course, it is Ellington's music that will be remembered. Twenty-five years after his death, a century after his birth, the Duke's works are being played all over the world. Like all great artists, Ellington took an idiom laying close at hand the down-home blues of Southern African-Americans and crafted it into something so sensuous, elegant, and dramatic that people everywhere respond, and will keep responding, deeply.