Duke Ellington Quotes

I fell in love with jazz when I was 12 years old from listening to Duke Ellington and hearing a lot of jazz in New York on the radio.

I heard Sidney Bechet play a Duke Ellington piece and fell in love with the soprano saxophone.

There are only two things: love, all sorts of love, with pretty girls, and the music of New Orleans or Duke Ellington. Everything else ought to go, because everything else is ugly.

I do very few standards. Hardly any. Other people's tunes that I do are usually obscure tunes, for the most part, although I do a couple of Duke Ellington tunes that are well known.

A few years later, my Uncle David took me to the Earle Theatre to hear Duke Ellington.