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Duke Ellington
Composer, bandleader & towering figure of American music
He composed over a thousand works, led a band for fifty years, and turned jazz into an art form the concert hall could no longer ignore.
The rise
Born into a middle-class Washington, D.C. family, Ellington started playing piano as a child and formed his first band as a teenager. Moving to New York in 1923, he secured a residency at the Cotton Club in Harlem in 1927, broadcasting nightly on radio and making the Duke Ellington Orchestra a national sensation.