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.

I’ll be making two unusual out-of-town live appearances this week to promote Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington:
• Politics & Prose, the independent bookstore in Washington, D.C., where I’ve previously spoken about H.L. Mencken and Louis Armstrong, is sponsoring a Duke-related bash on Tuesday night at Bethesda Blues and Jazz Supper Club. Not only will I be speaking about, reading from, and signing copies of Duke, but a jazz quartet will be performing songs by the master. You can dine there as well, and I plan to do so–the menu looks fabulous.
The club is at 7719 Wisconsin Avenue and the show starts at seven p.m. Admission is $25. To buy a ticket or for more information, go here.
• The New Jersey Performing Arts Center is presenting a Duke Ellington tribute concert called “Portrait of Duke” on Saturday afternoon as part of its week-long James Moody Democracy of Jazz Festival. I’m the curator of and master of ceremonies for the program, which features performances by Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks (about whom much more here) of original charts by Ellington and Billy Strayhorn. Hilary Gardner, about whose debut album I recently raved in this space, will supply the vocals. I’ll be reading excerpts from Duke and introducing rare film clips of Ellington on and off stage.
The show starts at two p.m. Admission is $49. To buy a ticket or for more information, go here.

Duke Ellington plays Billy Strayhorn’s “Lotus Blossom” in Copenhagen in 1967:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)

“Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.”
Victor Hugo, William Shakespeare

Tonight I’ll be talking live about Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington on Wisconsin Public Radio. The program is Central Time and the half-hour segment, hosted by Cynthia Schuster, will start at 6:05 p.m. ET on WHAD-FM.
For more information, or to listen on line in streaming audio, go here.

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I report on two much-discussed New York shows, the Public Theater production of Good Person of Szechwan and the Broadway revival of Betrayal. Here’s an excerpt.
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Bertolt Brecht’s plays have a reputation for being preachy, but they needn’t be. Yes, he used the theater as a pulpit from which to promulgate the social gospel according to Karl Marx. At the same time, though, he was also a dramatic poet who understood exactly what it means to put on a good show, and the best of his plays, when staged with flair and flexibility, float free from their ideological moorings and permit audiences to revel in their sheer theatricality. It’s not that you forget what he’s trying to say, but in a first-rate revival of a masterpiece like “Galileo” or “Mother Courage and Her Children,” the moral of the story is never presented rigidly but with an openness that allows for multiple interpretations–as well as for pure fun.
Lear deBessonet’s Foundry Theatre production of “Good Person of Szechwan,” which has now moved to the Public Theater after a highly successful Off-Broadway run earlier this year at La MaMa, fills the bill on all counts. It’s one of the best Brecht stagings ever to come my way. It’s also a gender-twisting romp so infectiously silly as to make you wonder whether Ms. deBessonet grew up watching “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” on Saturday mornings, taking notes all the while….
Ms. deBessonet’s hole card is Taylor Mac, a drag-queen performance artist whom she has cast in the central role of Shen Te, a sweet-natured Chinese prostitute (normally played by a woman) whom the gods have mysteriously singled out as an honorable person deserving of favor. She gets it, then regrets it, for as Brecht assures us, “No one can be good for long if goodness is not in demand.” That’s the moral of “Good Person,” which posits that no matter how hard you try, you can’t be good in a corrupt world….
As for the staging, it’s best described as vaudevillian, a high-spirited mélange of low-comedy clowning that has the paradoxical effect of heightening the presentational detachment–you never forget that you’re seeing a show, not an illusion of life–that was the hallmark of Brecht’s theatrical technique. When it’s time to get serious, though, Ms. deBessonet obliges…
Harold Pinter’s “Betrayal,” written in 1978 and last seen on Broadway a quarter-century ago, has now returned there in a big-name revival directed by Mike Nichols and starring Daniel Craig, otherwise known as James Bond, and Rachel Weisz, to whom Mr. Craig is married in real life. An autobiographical play about adultery that is told in reverse chronological order, “Betrayal” is much less opaque–and much more obvious–than the radically original stage plays of the ’50s and ’60s that made its author famous. To me it feels paper-thin and overly schematic, and while Mr. Craig and Rafe Spall, who play the cuckold and his faithless friend, are worth seeing, Ms. Weisz’s performance is a bit on the flat side. Likewise Mr. Nichols’ cool-to-the-touch staging…
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Read the whole thing here.

“The plays I love and the parts I love are the ones that make people feel less alone. That’s a huge part of great art for me–human beings comforting one another with their shortcomings.”
Cherry Jones (quoted in The New York Times Magazine, Sept. 20, 2013)