Customer Reviews

The Genius of Duke Ellington

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I had wanted a Duke Ellington piano solo book for a long time. And the unfortunate part about buying jazz books is that they aren't available in local stores. There's no way to look inside of the book online, so I basically have to guess which ones are good.

So I guess you see where I'm going - I am not completely happy with it. All of the songs are 1 or 2 pages. After the basic composition, there is no improvisation on the melody. Plus, a lot of the songs are labeled "Boogie-Woogie", which is not my favorite style.

The plus side is that I did learn a cool trick. Now that I know that I don't like really short songs, I can use what is available on Amazon - page count and song count. Doing the math, this book has songs that are an average of 1.7 pages. A different book that I have enjoyed has 5.25 pages per song. So before buying a book, I can check that out.

The other good thing is that the songs have grown on me. The arrangements are by Duke Ellington himself, and not someone arranging his orchestra songs for piano solo. So I like playing what the genius himself arranged. Out of the book, there are a few gems.

agree - don't care for the boogie-woogie arrangements.
prefer the blues styles in the book.

always wondering how they should be played.

looked around and found Doug McKenzie,
who does my kind of jazz, where 'less is more',
without the tsunami of notes, just the music.

Here's Doug's 'Don't Blame Me':
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyJbe5FvO8w
(sounds very good with headphones)

I wonder if Duke Ellington is turning in his grave over this terrible arrangements of his remarkable music ....
I tried "Don't Get around much anymore" and found the Harmonies and "Boogie" arrangements very badly constructed and poorly matched ...
Don't waste your money on this book !