Customer Reviews

Dvorï¿1/2k to Duke Ellington: A Conductor Explores America's Music and Its African American Roots

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Maurice Peress is an inspiring guide to the main roads and byways of American music. A conductor of distinction and a writer, scholar and thinker of substance, he offers a combination of personal reminiscences and exciting historical discoveries. He is a leading expert on Dvorak and his time, and offers fresh new insights into the material. His original research on Dvorak's American years has been quite influential in the development of this field more broadly and thus he may be considered the "Dean" of American Dvorak scholarship.

This is a splendid book to read straight through, or to browse and enjoy.

Peress's 'Dvorak to Duke Ellington' is necessary reading for any serious Duke Ellington fan or any student of the lineage of jazz.

Despite long passages spoken in highly technical musical terminology (which will be manna for composers out there), Peress brings so many interesting anecdotes to light, so many fresh insights into Ellington's working methods to composing, laypersons too will gain profound wisdom into the infrastructure that later brought BeBop, hardBop, Modern, R&B, Blues and Rock & Roll into reality.

For Duke lovers, it is heartening to see Peress discover (tearfully) what we already had known: his music is a gift to world history. Peress's nuanced details as to how Duke scored his sobering emotional analyses of Black Culture is particularly stunning, he having access to rare Ellington family archives and an insiders association with the Duke.

And Duke was a poet - literally. YES!

I was completely taken aback at how much is owed to Antonin Dvorak, the Czech emigree, for shaping the jazz juggernaut, or more specifically, the jazz orchestral juggernaut. I am not sure that the limber modern Jazz idiom as we know it, or the Gershwin orchestral phenomenon, would have garnered legitimacy without Dvorak's extra-ordinary cheerleading of our indigenous arts such as Ragtime, sharecropper tunes, and gospel songs. There is an argument intrinsically proffered in the book that Dvorak might have assisted in the abolition of minstrelsy itself.

Peress only missed a few related facts. For instance, he did not cover the Harlem Renaissance leadership and it's muscular shaping of the Jazz and Blues idioms. Those gentlemen (Dubois, et.al) also marketed the Duke heavily, and deserve a mention in this book. Peress also did not describe the original etymology of Jazz as being 'Jass,' a vulgar term coined by whites for early New Orleans jazz that meant something akin to Sexual Intercourse, which I believe should be defined in every sweeping analysis of this art.

Lastly, this book reveals the star-touched career of the author, Maurice Peress, as a composer. I look forward to collecting Peress's jazz re-conditionings, as well as Classical recordings, on CD and vinyl at the soonest opportunity.

Michael James Hawk
Seattle WA USA
July 3, 2007