About a year and a half ago I received an email from Jack Chambers with a big attachment. It was the first draft of his upcoming book A Tone Parallel To Duke Ellington.
I read the 560 pages that Jack had sent me and I was stunned. It was another masterwork on Duke Ellington and joins Jack’s Ellington book Such Sweet Thunder which was issued in 2019.
One and a half year later. the final result of Jack’s work is released in mid March by University Press of Mississippi and I had preordered it on Amazon already in December.
It is an amazing book which is the result of years of hard work and many lectures.
Here is a good summary which I found on Amazon, from where I bought the book
“The themes in the book are natural entry points. They provide the context in which the music came into being, with enough biography to satisfy music lovers, even those who come to the book knowing very little about Ellington’s life.
Each chapter features its own playlist as a guide to the music discussed, and, in some cases, fuller listings in case readers might want to pursue a topic further.
In the early chapters, Chambers covers topics that occupied Ellington through much of his career, and in later chapters he covers more specific themes, some of them from Ellington’s last decades, which are less well studied. The music, Ellington said, is his “continuing autobiography,” and it reveals the man behind.”
The chapters are:
Echoes of Harlem
Forty-Eight Years with the Duke on Trains
The Piano Player
Wordless Articulation
Ellington’s Music with Words
The Lotus Eaters
Accidental Suites: Duke Ellington’s Hollywood Scores
Ellington in the Global Village
Diamonds in the Glittering Heap
A Final Masterpiece, Relactantly
The Missing Last Act of an American Composer
The playlists at the end of each chapter are very valuable and should be a great help particular to help newcomers to The Duke
Author: Ulf Lundin