Duke Ellington Autographs, Memorabilia & Collectibles

Edward "Duke" Ellington (1899-1974) employed the influences of blues, jazz, bop and ragtime to become one of the greatest composers of the 20th century. He composed over 6,000 works, including "Mood Indigo" (1930), "Ko-Ko" (1940), "Beggar's Holiday" (1946) and the theme from Paris Blues (1960) as well as "Sophisticated Lady" and "It Don't Mean a Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing". Ellington, who had formed his own orchestra in 1923, gained national recognition from radio performances at the Cotton Club in Harlem, whose success he helped establish. An innovator of the Big Band sound, he played that style of music a decade before the peak of its popularity. Ellington also composed Broadway scores, movie themes, sacred and semi-classical works. It would require careful study to trace all the names Ellington has written here, a key to its purpose may be the phrases "Met Opera of Jazz/Blue Note - F. Holzfeind". The Blue Night nightclub, in Chicago, owned by Fred Holzfeind, presented high quality jazz from 1947 to 1960. It was the first integrated club on the Loop, and Duke Ellington played there many times. (His Live at the Blue Note (1959) has been re-issued.) In his autobiography, Music is My Mistress (1973), Ellington called the Blue Note "the Metropolitan Opera of Jazz."