Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington continues to draw attention in the media–too much, really, for me to report in detail, so I’ll stick to the highlights:
• Tom Nolan, Artie Shaw’s biographer, reviewed Duke for the San Francisco Chronicle:
The Duke was a star, whose characteristic-seeming confidence, elegant personality and visual flair were essential components of his public identity.
Rex Stewart, one of his longtime sidemen, described how Ellington looked when he came onstage one night in the 1930s at Harlem’s Cotton Club: “Duke made his dramatic entrance attired in a salmon-colored jacket and fawn-gray slacks and shoes. The shirt, I remember, was a tab-collared oyster shade and his tie some indefinable pastel between salmon and apricot. The audience cheered for at least two minutes.”
All elements of Ellington’s colorful, complicated, oft-secretive life–public and private, musical and personal–are brought to similar vivid life in this grand and engrossing biography…
Read the whole thing here.
• Michael Giltz reviewed Duke with like enthusiasm for the Huffington Post:
With verve and insight, Teachout details Ellington’s lucky breaks, from that stint at the Cotton Club to musicians’ strikes that paradoxically helped him out. Naturally Teachout is sharp on the music in all its dizzying forms, from classic songs like “Take the ‘A’ Train” to extended works that fall in and out of favor but have proven enduring….
Read the whole thing here.
• By now I’ve given a couple of dozen radio interviews about Duke, most of which can now be heard in streaming audio on the web, with many more coming in the next few weeks. Not surprisingly, these interviews tend to cover similar ground, so I won’t burden you with a comprehensive listing, but this concise chat with Jordan Rich of Boston’s WBZ-AM, a well-informed jazz enthusiast, struck me as especially interesting.
• Kathryn Jean Lopez interviewed me for National Review Online about Duke and other matters of related interest (including my thoughts, such as they are, on Lou Reed). It’s a long and wide-ranging Q-&-A in which, among other things, I single out my favorite sentence in the book. You can read it all here.