The Grandest Duke

FROM : The New York Review of Books

by Harvey G. Cohen
University of Chicago Press, 688 pp., $40.00

The Duke Box
Storyville, eight CDs, $79.98

Leonard Herman Photography, LLC

Duke Ellington at a private party after a performance, Paris, 1960; photograph by Herman Leonard from Jazz, a collection of his images of Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, and others, to be published by Bloomsbury USA in November

On more than one occasion Duke Ellington described his childhood in Washington, D.C., as a sort of paradise, at least for him and those around him in the family circle. In the song “My Mother, My Father” (written for his 1963 musical show My People) he wrote:

My mother—the greatest—and the prettiest
My father—just handsome—but the wittiest…
I was raised in the palm of the hand
By the very best people in this land
From sun to sun
Their hearts beat as one
My mother—my father—and love

Born Edward Kennedy Ellington in 189

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