Edward Kennedy " DUKE" Ellington
was the greatest jazz composer of the twentieth century-and an impenetrably enigmatic personality whom no one, not even his closest friends, claimed to understand. The grandson of a slave, Ellington dropped out of high school to become one of the world's most famous musicians, a showman of incomparable suavity who was as comfortable in Carnegie Hall as in the nightclubs where he honed his style. He wrote some seventeen
hundred compositions, many of which, like "Mood Indigo" and "Sophisticated Lady," remain beloved standards, and sought inspiration in an endless string of transient lovers, always hiding his inner self behind a smiling mask of flowery language and ironic charm.