Duke Ellington quotes:

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Duke Ellington was famous for hs very original harmonic patterns. -- Lawrence Welk
When I got through, Duke Ellington stood up and started the applause. -- Ruth Brown
A few years later, my Uncle David took me to the Earle Theatre to hear Duke Ellington. -- David Amram
I heard Sidney Bechet play a Duke Ellington piece and fell in love with the soprano saxophone. -- Steve Lacy
Duke Ellington always had a style: original, clean with interesting color combinations. He had an artist's eye. -- Wynton Marsalis
If I were to put on Barbra Streisand and Duke Ellington, one might say the combination isn't good. -- Norman Granz
As for my band, well, my mentors were Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Jimmie Lunceford, and no one had a band more smartly dressed than Duke. -- B. B. King
I fell in love with jazz when I was 12 years old from listening to Duke Ellington and hearing a lot of jazz in New York on the radio. -- Steve Lacy
Do you think Duke Ellington didn't listen to Debussy? Louis Armstrong loved opera, did you know that? Name me a jazz pianist who wasn't influenced by European music! -- Dave Brubeck
There are only two things: love, all sorts of love, with pretty girls, and the music of New Orleans or Duke Ellington. Everything else ought to go, because everything else is ugly. -- Boris Vian
I do very few standards. Hardly any. Other people's tunes that I do are usually obscure tunes, for the most part, although I do a couple of Duke Ellington tunes that are well known. -- Mose Allison
I think it was Duke Ellington who once said that we're always most pleased with our current record. I mean, you have to assume that you learn from one, and you do something better next time. -- George Shearing
It's a spirit that was given me and the relationships and meeting all these great people, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong; through Max I met a lot of people too. My first album was with Benny Carter. -- Abbey Lincoln
You know, I always when people ask me, like, what is my most favorite song, I quote Duke Ellington, when they would ask him, what's his favorite composition? And I say, I haven't written it yet. Because, you know, there are different songs for different occasions. -- Stevie Wonder
Quincy Jones' autobiography 'Q' is very good. Because he's a master at music, he's one of our greatest composers, and its good for him to have a book and tell the good ole days when he was with Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Sarah Vaughan and Ray Charles. -- Ice Cube
So I'm a young boy in the 1940s growing up, seeing Ralph Bunche on a regular basis, seeing Duke Ellington on a regular basis. We know that these people are famous. They're living in the same community as we live in. They go to the same stores and shops. -- Ed Smith
The Metropole Orchestra is like Count Basie or Duke Ellington with strings... it's strings that swing. Strings that swing like Dizzy Gillespie... keep swinging, baby. And when you have all of that special excellence of the Metropole Orchestra, then your music just flies - it soars in a way that's really magical. -- Al Jarreau
My teachers are Duke Ellington and nature. -- Toru Takemitsu
Count Basie was college, but Duke Ellington was graduate school. -- Clark Terry
[Prince] could very well be the Duke Ellington of Rock 'n' Roll. -- Miles Davis
I like to think Duke Ellington would probably embrace a fragrance as well. -- Bryan Ferry
Duke Ellington had a song, "What Am I Here For?" - this is what being pro-life is. -- Nat Hentoff
[I wanted] to play the clarinet well so I could be in Duke Ellington's band, but that's now impossible. -- Nat Hentoff
I keep reverting (to Duke Ellington), he to me is the greatest ever and my favorite jazz philosopher, as such. -- Cannonball Adderley
At least one day out of the year all musicans should just put their instruments down, and give thanks to Duke Ellington. -- Miles Davis
It's like Duke Ellington said, there are only two kinds of music - good and bad. And you can tell when something is good. -- Ray Charles
Bebop didn't have the humanity of Duke Ellington. It didn't have that recognizable thing. Bird and Diz were great, fantastic, challenging -- but that weren't sweet. -- Miles Davis
You always come back to Duke Ellington - he's kind of like the thread that holds everything together from the big band descending to lots of jazz, actually. -- Herbert
My inspiration comes from the message Duke Ellington gave - you are unique, be yourself, put out that thing that is you, then use your work ethic and produce great music. -- Kenny Burrell
You hear about the Duke Ellingtons, the Jimmie Luncefords, and the Fletcher Hendersons, but people sometimes forget that jazz was not only built in the minds of the great ones, but on the backs of the ordinary ones. -- Cab Calloway
I remember the night when I was playing at Birdland, and Duke Ellington walked in wearing that cap of his and with all his elegance. The Duke then came backstage, and I was there with my band. That's the one thing I miss. -- Maynard Ferguson
...he went into the sitting room, put on a Duke Ellington record he had bought after seeing Gene Hackman sitting on the overnight bus in The Conversation to the sound of some fragile piano notes that were the loneliest Harry had ever heard. -- Jo Nesbo
I learned from Ethel Waters, Duke Ellington, Adelaide Hall, the Nicholas Brothers, the whole thing, the whole schmear. [The Cotton Club] was a great place because it hired us, for one thing, at a time when it was really rough [for Black performers]. -- Lena Horne
I especially like Duke Ellington jazz, which is a little more... I lived in New York for a while. I lived in Harlem for a bit, and I just fell in love with the idea of that era of New York, that jazz era, especially jazz in Harlem. -- Charlie Day
The musicians, Duke Ellington, his thing was not about separating himself from the rest of America. Louis Armstrong - go to the forefathers of our music - Jelly Roll Morton - they're not preaching a separatist agenda. They're not taking their music and saying, "This is for me." -- Wynton Marsalis
I listen to tons of hard rock and metal, like Iron Maiden, Motorhead, etc., but I also listen to Beethoven and Mozart, to Discharge and the Bad Brains, and to Charlie Parker and Duke Ellington. So I think there's merit to both the melodic punk and to the hardcore stuff too. -- Dave Smalley

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