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Jazz Class Home | Groovin' to Jazz (ages 8-13) | |
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Match Game | Duke's Music Class | Teacher Lesson Plan |
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Duke's Match Game
Before beginning the Matching Game Activity, print out the answer chart. You will need a pencil to fill in the chart.
The three columns below contain six paragraphs, six photographs, and six audio clips, all scrambled. In the audio clips you will hear some of the music Duke Ellington wrote that made him famous. The paragraphs give you information about the music and its importance in the story of his life and career. Study the photographs and listen to the audio clips to determine which photograph and audio clip match each paragraph. Fill in the chart with your answers.
Print out the Match Game worksheet
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"My mother would say, 'Edward, you are blessed.' Do I believe that I am blessed? Of course
I do! My mother told me so, many times, and when she did it was always quietly, confidently." Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington was born in Washington, D.C., April 29, 1899. He was nicknamed "Duke" by a junior high school friend because of the stylish way in which he dressed and the proud way he carried himself. His parents encouraged him to take piano lessons when he was seven years old, and his parents took him to two church services every Sunday. He had a younger sister and grandparents whom he also loved and respected, and developed strong family values. Duke Ellington grew up proud of his African American heritage, which he expressed in much of the music he would write later on, and in the song, My Mother, My Father (Heritage).
"Jazz is a music that came out of Africa with very deep African roots." "The best records of Duke Ellington can be listened to again and again because they are not just decorations of a familiar shape but a new arrangement of shapes." Young Duke Ellington studied harmony with a local music teacher during his high school years, and developed his piano skills playing for dances and parties. He organized his first band and became popular by supplying the new "jazz" music for society functions around town. But New York was the capital of the music world, and that is where he moved in 1923. Soon he caught on there as a promising young musician. His big break came in 1927 when his orchestra of twelve musicians opened at the Cotton Club, a famous Harlem nightclub, with "jungle" decorations and southern plantation scenery. The Cotton Club admitted only white audiences, and they were entertained by African American performers. Years later, Duke Ellington wrote Ko-Ko to the memory of African American slaves in New Orleans, Louisiana, who would gather in a large area called Place Congo to sing, dance and play instruments in large circles, called "rings." In Ko-Ko you will hear some of the "wah-wah" sounds the Ellington band first became famous for at the Cotton Club.
"What distinguishes Ellington's best creations. . .are
their moments of total uniqueness and originality." Duke Ellington left the Cotton Club in 1931 and began a career of traveling that took him millions of miles all over the world. His band had become famous after being heard all over the country on the radio, an invention growing in popularity. He was now ready to start writing in a variety of styles. Mood Indigo is one of Duke Ellington's most original pieces. It is a tone poem, a composition that describes a "mood" or a feeling in an imaginative way. He used his imagination to achieve a dreamy, moody effect with the following unusual trio: a trombone playing high notes; a clarinet playing low notes, and trumpet with a mute in the middle.
"Our major effort has been to make the symphony orchestra swing, which
everybody says can't be done, but I think we managed to do it very well." By the middle of the 1930s, Duke Ellington had become a celebrity, and his band was famous, playing music people loved to dance to, the new music called "swing." He had made movies in Hollywood and traveled to Europe, where he was a great success. In fact, his music was often taken more seriously abroad than in America, which favored his dance band music over his other compositions. One of his most popular songs, from 1932, was It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing). This was one of the first times the word "swing" had been used in the title of a popular song, and it became the unofficial theme of the "Swing Era," a time in the 1930s when the big dance bands were as popular as rock bands were later in the 20th century. One of Duke Ellington's most popular singers was Ivie Anderson, who was with him when the band made its first trip abroad. Follow the words to the verse and sing along with Ivie Anderson. "It don't mean a thing, if it ain't got that swing.
"Music to me is a sound sensation. . . . It takes me to new places and experiences. It brings me invitations to the most interesting occasions in. . Africa, Asia. . . . . I get to smell things in India I couldn't smell anywhere else. . . . I hear distant drums in Africa. . . . ." After World War II, most of the big bands dissolved, but Duke Ellington kept his orchestra together. In the 1960s he toured Europe, the Far East, the Near East and other places for the State Department as a kind of goodwill ambassador. When they returned home after a visit to India in 1963, he and Billy Strayhorn, his hugely talented arranger-composer, wrote The Far East Suite, a collection of pieces that portrayed their impressions of the places they visited. One of the pieces was called Agra. Agra is a city in India where an emperor in the 15th century built one of the most beautiful buildings in the world in memory of his wife; a white marble structure called the Taj Mahal. To give this composition a distinctive "feel," Ellington highlights the baritone saxophone of Harry Carney. The sound of this instrument is one of the characteristics that made the Duke Ellington orchestra very original and unique.
"Because of his depth as a composer and curiosity about the world. . he is able to let us see places, people and things through the prism of jazz, and the result is music utterly original. . .
with the charm and wit of the man who composed it." Duke Ellington was always searching for new ideas and new ways of doing things. He and Billy Strayhorn decided to change the familiar Nutcracker Suite by the Russian composer Tchaikovsky into a modern and style. Listen to how a well-known classical composition can be changed into something delightfully different with the Ellington sound. |
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Paragraph 1
