"With perhaps the most glorious, prolific and successful career in jazz music to date, Duke Ellington is right up there with Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson and Frank Sinatra in terms of musical and cultural significance. While other jazz superstars, such as Louis Armstrong or Miles Davis, might have names that are just as well known, when you compare their respective bodies of work, Ellington, who is known as ""The Duke"" among jazz royalty, sure seems like the undisputed king of jazz.The young Duke Ellington received formal instruction in music, mainly piano, starting when he was eight years old. He formed a band before he completed high school and played locally around the Washington, D.C. area before relocating to New York in the mid 1920s, where his band began to flourish. After a short time, Duke Ellington's band, the Washingtonians, got a gig at the famous Cotton Club in Harlem. Playing at the Cotton Club gave Duke Ellington national exposure on a weekly radio broadcast, enabled him to meet and recruit some of the best and brightest musicians and furthered his celebrity status. Soon enough, The Duke outgrew Harlem. Ellington's big band began recording at a feverish pace and touring frequently in a career that would span roughly five decades.Duke Ellington's impact on jazz encompasses so great a scope that it's difficult to accurately measure the influential power he wielded. Ellington will be remembered for the way in which he composed music with specific band members' strengths in mind, for the film and theatrical scores he wrote to accompany other artistic achievements and for the racial barrier-breaking his wildly popular jazz standards achieved while a traditionally African American genre exploded to mainstream popularity."
