A Double Dose of Duke - American Symphony Orchestra & Highlights in Jazz - New York City Article

The American Symphony Orchestra

with special guests Catherine Russell & Marcus Roberts
West 57th Street at Seventh Ave, (212) 247-7800
Thursday, March 12

For information and reservations, please click here:

Highlights in Jazz presents Everlasting Ellington,
with Art Baron, Bill Easley, & drum legend Bernard Purdie.
TRIBECA Performing Arts Center
199 Chambers Street, (212) 220-1460
Thursday, March 19

For information and reservations, please click here:


Two consecutive Thursdays offer a chance to hear the increasingly rare music of the greatest of all American jazz composers, the legendary Duke Ellington. This week, the American Symphony Orchestra under the baton of conductor Leon Botstein, conducts two of Ellington’s rarest extended works, his brilliant piano concerto, New World A-Comin’, which had been introduced at Carnegie in December 1943, heard here in a new treatment featuring keyboard star Marcus Roberts. The concert will also feature Three Black Kings (Trois Rois Noirs) a 1974 work that is generally regarded as Ellington’s final major composition.
If one aspect of Ellington was his symphonic side - indeed, he gave regular appearances at Carnegie throughout the 1940s - he was equally well known for his writing for smaller groups. Art Baron, who, in 1973, was the last ever trombonist to be hired by the Maestro, leads his own group in tribute to his formal boss’s legacy, for which he’s joined by bassist Bill Crow (who subbed briefly with Duke in 1958), as well as saxophonists Bill Easley and Mark Hynes, pianist James Weidman, vocalist Ira Hawkins and the much-recorded drummer Bernard “Pretty” Purdie.
In related news, the Ellington series at Birdland (“Duke Ellington Performance series”) is continuing next month, with a full orchestra playing one of the Duke’s best-remembered long-form compositions, Such Sweet Thunder (The Shakespearean Suite) on Sunday April 19. And lastly, we’re looking forward to the new album by Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra of Ellington’s most celebrated concert work, Black, Brown and Beige.