* Enjoying a Capital Childhood, 18991913; Ellingtons Washington: Monumental, Ironicaland Inspirational? * Starting a Career, 191323 * Seeking Special Sounds, 192327; Essential Ellington * Composing at the Cotton Club, 192731 * The Cotton Club: The Artistocrat of Harlem * Ellingtons Musical Sources: a Treasury of Traditions * Essential Ellington * Taking the Road, 193135; Essential Ellington * Swinging to a Different Drummer, 193539; Essential Ellington * Making Masterpieces, 193943; Essential Ellington * Composing for Concerts, 194351; Essential Ellington * Playing for Time, 195156; Essential Ellington * Renewing Career and Creativity, 195665; Essential Ellington * Achieving Final Glories, 196674; Essential Ellington * Elevating Ellington, 1974 * Appendices: Ellingtons Key Musicians; Most Essential Ellington Recordings; Selected Films and Videos; Selected Reading; Ellington Songbooks and Folios
Music historian, musician, award-winning author and record producer, John Edward Hasse has served as curator of American music at the Smithsonian Institution. He is the editor of Ragtime: Its History, Composers and Music, and coeditor of Discourse in Ethnomusicology.
``He captured the sounds of trains, planes, babies, and lions and tigers and bears with his orchestra,'' says trumpeter Marsalis in his poetic tribute to the great jazz composer and performer, Edward Kennedy ``Duke'' Ellington (1899-1974). Hasse, curator of American music at the Smithsonian Institution and of a traveling exhibition called Beyond Category: The Musical Genius of Duke Ellington, is similarly comprehensive in cataloging the minutiae--meaningful and otherwise--of Ellington's illustrious life and career. Drawing on previously untapped documents made available by Mercer Ellington's donation of his father's archives to the National Museum of American History, Hasse traces the Duke's development from his childhood in Washington, D.C., to New York City's Cotton Club to a career that took him on a seemingly endless tour through North America, Europe and the Near East playing with the likes of Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie and John Coltrane. To help those who want to hear the achievement, Hasse ends each chapter with the ``Essential Ellington'' recordings for the years covered in that chapter. Accompanied by 119 photographs from the Ellington archives, Hasse has written a delightful and finely detailed biography of an American legend at work. (Oct.)
Hasse, curator of American Music at the Smithsonian Institution, charts the musical career of jazz giant Edward Kennedy ``Duke'' Ellington (1899-1974). Using previously unavailable family papers now housed at the Smithsonian, he admiringly describes Ellington's accomplishments as a composer and bandleader. Hasse includes an account of Ellington's formative years in Washington D.C., his breakthrough at New York's Cotton Club, his heyday during the 1930s and 1940s, and his subsequent successes. The author also highlights the essential Ellington recordings in discrete sections within each chapter. Though offering few new insights or facts about the jazz master, Hasse provides a well-researched synthesis of the extensive Ellingtonia that should serve as a companion to the recent The Duke Ellington Reader ( LJ 9/1/93). For scholars and fans of American music.-- David Szatmary, Univ. of Washington, Seattle
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