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  1. Remembering Duke

    • Alex Webb
    • 25 Aug 06, 11:01 AM

    No, the other Duke - pianist who died on August 8 in Denmark at 84. There are a lot of jazz cats dying these days but Duke was special, and he leaves only one living link with 's classic bebop group of 1947 (drummer Max Roach).

    Duke did something interesting in the context of the time, which was not play many notes. His elegant, spacious style provided a perfect foil to Parker and Miles' prolixity and a striking contrast to the work of pianists like Bud Powell. His brief introductions to Embraceable You and other Parker ballads are themselves classics.

    I met Duke in about 1990 when I was working at the Bass Clef jazz club in London and he was playing there, and I had a chance to record an interview with him which I never got round to placing in a jazz magazine. Anyway, it turned out that the real passion of his life was aeronautics, and he spoke about recent aircraft innovations with enthusiasm. The other subject that animated him was Miles Davis.

    Turned out that in Miles' autobiography - then just out, and which I hadn't read - the trumpeter had slagged him off something awful for his sense of time and his "heavy comping" and such like. Duke, understandably, was very hurt by this and not a little baffled.

    As I am, listening back to such wonderfully balanced works as Scrapple From The Apple and Dewey Square, where the band members' contributions seem to fit together like a Swiss watch. But then Miles did have radar ears - and some strange tastes. History will be kinder, I suspect. RIP Duke.

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  1. 1.
    • At 01:47 PM on 25 Aug 2006,
    • Candadai Tirumalai wrote:

    England and Europe provided jazz musicians with some of their most devoted and enthusiastic audiences; not infrequently they found European countries a more hospitable environment to live in. The late Philip Larkin, otherwise very insular in his artistic tastes, said more than once once that he could not live without jazz, though he did not much care for the Parker-Miles kind.

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  2. 2.

    My condolences to the Jazz World on the Death of Duke Jordan.

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  3. 3.

    I agree with you that his piano work with Charlie Parker is superb, and easily stands the test of time. Sad to hear of his demise.

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