Product Description

Council for Positive Images, Inc. presents the award-winning, universally acclaimed musical biography of one of the world s most influential composers and musicians, Duke Ellington. A DUKE NAMED ELLINGTON had its world premiere on network television in the United States, on the PBS American Masters series (1988). It has since traveled the world, garnering praise. A DUKE NAMED ELLINGTON was selected for screening in international festivals at Cannes, France; Gijon, Spain; Spoleto, Italy; Banff, Ontario, Canada; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Warsaw, Poland; and Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria. A DUKE NAMED ELLINGTON has been awarded the C.I.N.E. Golden Eagle, the Golden Antenna, First Prize at the Bulgarian International TV Festival, and was nominated for an Emmy Award as Outstanding Informational Special. A DUKE NAMED ELLINGTON was acclaimed by the critics as A masterly portrait of a master. (Politiken, Denmark) In a class by itself... a triumph of film and tape research... what can you say but that it is achingly good... (Los Angeles Times) Can't be beat... a superb two-parter... the perfect example of just how an in-depth profile of an artist should be done... (New York Daily News) A Duke Named Ellington accomplishes something that very few documentaries of this sort ever accomplish. It leaves the viewer and listener with a deep sense of Duke Ellington s genius. No small achievement. (New York Post) Much more than a documentary about the Duke... an essential testimony about the music of our century. (Jazz Magazine, France). For the first time, the full panorama of the life and artistic accomplishments of that musical giant, Duke Ellington, has been brought to the television screen. A DUKE NAMED ELLINGTON is a unique study of Ellington s life and works, capturing the genius and charisma of a cultural phenomenon that transcended time, space and musical form. A DUKE NAMED ELLINGTON , an extraordinary two-hour program, is a bl

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #65305 in DVD
• Released on: 2007-05-15
• Format: NTSC
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 110 minutes

Review
"KCET Profile on Ellington in a Class by Itself" By Charles Champlin, Times Arts Editor One of his several uniquenesses was that Duke Ellington was a suave, articulate and engaging public personality with an actor's charisma. That alone set him apart from the great majority of big band leaders who found expression only through their instruments and their orchestras and could hardly introduce a number. Jazz fans who can identify Count Basie's piano after two or three beats would be hard put to recognize his voice. But the Duke, who knew that the music spoke for itself, also knew that a little extra couldn't hurt. He made "Love you madly" a kind of verbal trademark. And he also talked thoughtfully and well about the music and about the remarkable men and women he gathered around him to make it... With all else "A Duke Called Ellington" ...is a triumph of film and tape research. There are black-and-white excerpts from the early films, both features and shorts, that the band did in Hollywood, with Ellington at his suavest, an indubitable star in formal dress and no trace of racial stereotyping. In a television interview, apparently from the '50s, the unseen questioner asks Ellington about his music in relation to "his people". The Duke toys with the answer with a kind of amused irony, then says, "the people that's the better word the people rather than my people, because the people are my people." But there is a sequence from "Black, Brown and Beige," which he called "a tone parallel" to the history of blacks in America and which the band played at its first appearance at Carnegie Hall in 1943. The show's researchers found television footage from the BBC and from Danish and Swedish television, the latter including one of the sacred pieces from late in his career, this one performed at the Gustav Vasa church in Stockholm, with a fine singer named Alice Babs doing a wordless and soaring obbligato above Ellington's piano. It is in the program's s --Los Angeles Times

Review
NEW YORK POST, Monday, July 18, 1988 A DATE WITH THE DUKE "Special Goes to the Heart of an American Genius" By LEE JESKE There's a moment in tonight's first half of "A Duke Named Ellington," the two-part American Masters look at the career of jazz's (arguably America's) greatest composer and bandleader, when five reed players stand in a semi-circle and play "Rockin' in Rhythm." They are Paul Gonsalves, Harry Carney, Jimmy Hamilton, Johnny Hodges and Russell Procope, and their tenures with Ellington lasted, respectively, 24, 48, 26, 42 and 18 years. "Whether I was hungry, sick, broke, or hadn't seen my family in six months or whatever," says the late Russell Procope, "it was all right as soon as I started playing that music. Producer/director Terry Carter has put together a fascinating two hours of Duke Ellington that eschews the usual year-by year biography for a look inside the musical process. By assembling rare footage of Ellington's band--some of it early Hollywood clips, most of it footage from '60s European television appearances -- along with an impressive assortment of clips of Ellington and his players talking about the music, Carter has gone right to the heart of an extraordinary American musical legend. Ellington's creative process is laid at our feet. He refers to his "system of very highly personalized writing, so that practically every note that's written is written for some specific instrumentalist in mind." and through the course of the shows we meet many of the players every one a true-blue original. We also get a welcome focus on Ellington's often-neglected talents as a pianist. And we see the contradictions: the composer of more than 2,000 works who also had to function as a performer and bandleader had to hire and fire people, had to think about budgets, had to please the crowd with the oldies while constantly writing new music. "They get the money, I get the kicks," says Ellington about his players. "I wish I could aff --New York Post

About the Director
Terry Carter, producer-director of A Duke Named Ellington , is the president of Council for Positive Images, Inc. ( CPI ) a non-profit organization he founded in 1979, through which A Duke Named Ellington was produced. A Duke Named Ellington was originally aired on PBS American Masters series. Carter and CPI won a Los Angeles Emmy for K*I*D*S an educational dramatic miniseries he created, produced, and directed. K*I*D*S , funded by the US Department of Education for adolescents and accompanied by a supplementary study guide, won the endorsement of the National Education Association. Carter also produced and directed Once Upon a Vision, a highly acclaimed historical documentary about US slavery and abolition, narrated by Alex Haley. Carter is known internationally as an actor, for his acting roles in TV and motion pictures, portraying Sgt. Joe Broadhurst in the seven-year hit series McCloud , Colonel Tigh in the popular science-fiction classic series Battlestar Galactica , and Texas Slim in the motion picture Hamilton . www.terry-carter.net

Customer Reviews

What took them so long???
As the reviewer before me states, it has taken 20 years for this to come to home video, even while so much other Great Performances material has been long available. This superb documentary highlights the life and times of one of the most remarkable musical outfits in American history, the Duke Ellington band. While this is not a "revelatory" documentary--it does not delve into Duke's private life, a subject he apparently was not fond of discussing anyway--it is a marvelous chronicle of a great musical organization, with generous clips that show many of the greatest jazz players of the era at the peak of their powers. Ben Webster, Russell Procope, Barney Bigard, Cat Anderson, "Tricky Sam," Jimmy Blanton, Johnny Hodges, Cootie Williams, they're all here.

The most remarkable thing about the Duke Ellington Orchestra is simply that it existed--exited for almost half a century, through a depression, a world war, shifts towards other forms of music, and changes in the music business and recording technology. Duke rode all of it out with a professionalism, resourcefulness and intelligence rarely seen in popular music before or since. The musicians surely knew it, for this band had a remarkably stable personnel. Compositions were written for the sounds and technique of specific players, and Ellington was able to perform these compositions for many decades because those players stayed in the organization. At the same time, there were plenty of squabbles and even outright fights, as some of the men recount on camera. Duke managed to hold his outfit together through a very low-key management style, some examples of which are humorously demonstrated by those who knew him. How one man managed to run a band, write so much astonishing and original music, make his way through all the difficult personalities in the music business, and stay fresh for 40 years, all the while making it look easy as he stood there faultlessly dressed and urbanely sophisticated, is one of music's great mysteries. In a world filled with so many talents that had the potential to be great but never quite realized that potential, Ellington stands out as someone who achieved more than anyone could have expected of him, in an environment that was often downright hostile to his intentions.

This film traces all that, with interviews from sidemen, arrangers, composers, bookers, managers, record producers and even Duke's hair dresser! There are wonderful segments of the band playing such classics as Cotton Tail, Mood Indigo, and Rockin' In Rhythm, as well as extended compositions such as Ad Lib on Nippon, the Second Sacred Concert Suite, and Timon of Athens. Just watching this performance of Ad Lib on Nippon, one of my favorite of Ellington's later works, is worth the price of the DVD alone. And if the band's hair-raising performance of Perdido doesn't floor you, nothing will. I wish someone would release on DVD the entire broadcasts from which these excerpts come!

A Duke Named Ellington is a great portrait of a colossal talent, highly highly recommended. I'll just say again: what took them so long?!?

Finally Available!
I've wanted A DUKE NAMED ELLINGTON to be released since it was broadcast (in two parts) on PBS in the 1980s. It contains wonderful tv and film footage from six decades of Duke's career. An exquisite film.

A Duke Named Ellington
A tribute to America's most prolific composer. Even for those of us that know a lot about the Duke, this is an artistic
and well done piece.you'll like it!