Ellington is a writer and arranger, as well as a musician and leader. He does movie sound tracks.
If I were to put on Barbra Streisand and Duke Ellington, one might say the combination isn't good.
I don't think that jazz, as any kind of an art form, has any permanence attached to it, apart from the practitioners of it.
For years, Jazz At The Philharmonic albums were the only ones of their kind.
My juices needed restoring. I needed a sabbatical from the record business.
Jazz was uplifted by what I did.
To play today in London, next week in Madrid and the week after that in Warsaw is a bit better than playing Newark and Baltimore and Philadelphia. I've been doing that for 20 years.
Germany is probably the richest country in Western Europe. Yet they wouldn't take any television with Duke and Ella, their reaction being that people weren't interested in it.
