Ignore the credit crisis, the vp debates, end-game positioning by the One and the Other, Rosh Hashanah and Eid, Cubs and White Sox both in the playoffs — here’s the under-promoted but highly impressive fourth annual Duke Ellington Jazz Festival, Oct. 1 – 7! Balancing Kennedy Center concerts with “jazz in the ‘hoods”  (club and arts center gigs mostly but not only NW), sophisticated globalism with emerging artists, the best of student and local ensembles (Berklee College of Music Latin Jazz All-Stars at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts) as well as a free Sunday afternoon marathon featuring blues songster Taj Mahal, incomparable pianist McCoy Tyner, hot-hot singer Dee Dee Bridgewater, bravura bassist Christian McBride and trombonist Conrad Herwig’s Latin Side Project on the National Mall . . . If it didn’t take months to organize events on this scale, one might suspect the DEJF is a convenient circus to distract us from uproar, uncertainty, faith-based initiatives and existential dread.