Duke Ellington’s 110th Birthday Anniversary Festival of Music

　
There are always a lot of interesting events going on in any kind of music school, or maybe in general, schools that deal with arts. The UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music is definitely one of those schools. Just by walking through the Schoenberg Building, you will see dozens of announcements of recitals, concerts, and sometimes, even music festivals. Since I transferred to UCLA in September of 2008, I have been trying to go to these events as much as the time allows. Last year, I suppose I went to around 20 to 30 of them. It is certainly difficult to pick one particular event that I enjoyed the most, but the Duke Ellington’s 110th Birthday Anniversary Festival of Music was definitely one of the most precious and impressive events that I have ever experienced at HASOM. I can proudly state that the festival could not be held with such a success at any other institution or venue in the world. On top of that, the festival was open to public and free of charge including the astonish performance by living legend, Kenny Burrell!





Our professor at the Ethnomusicology department and director of jazz studies, Kenny Burrell has been known as one of the most succeeded jazz guitarists in history. When I naively asked him, “So, did you play with Miles Davis?” he smiled and said, “Yeah, I’ve probably played with all jazz men that you know.” Such a precious guy is teaching at HASOM. It is well known that he praises and respects the music of Duke Ellington. He even has the lecture class called “Ellingtonia” (= Study of Duke Ellington), which was definitely one of the coolest classes I have ever taken in my entire school life. The lecture about one of the most significant jazz composers by one of the most significant jazz guitarists in history; can you find any excuse not to take the class?

Such a devoted Ellington scholar, Kenny Burrell led this Duke Ellington festival (he himself used to say in that way) celebrated Duke Ellington’s 110th birthday last year (Duke Ellington was born in April of 1899 and passed away in 1974). The festival was held on April 4th and 5th, the first weekend of spring quarter at UCLA. Over the weekend, UCLA Jazz Student combos, UCLA Philharmonia Orchestra, UCLA Jazz Orchestra, UCLA Contemporary Jazz Orchestra, UCLA Latin Jazz Ensemble, music students and faculties performed compositions by Duke Ellington orchestra with a lot of special guests. Especially, I cannot forget about the night of 4th. At the end of the night, Kenny Burrell showed up with his order made guitar and first performed his own arrangement of Ellingtonia montage. After that, four other special guests, Clayton Cameron, Tom Ranier, Lesa Terry, and Roberto Miranda came up on stage and played with Kenny Burrell as quintet! The special quintet played Ellington’s “Main Stem”, “C’Jam Blues”, and “Take This Coltrane”. There were a lot more to talk about, including the beautiful performance on the following day, “Ellington’s Sacred Music Concert” which, probably for the first time in history, focused on Ellington’s underestimated sacred works. But, above all, the sound of Kenny Burrell’s guitar was simply amazing. Any of the sound I had ever heard could be compared with his guitar. This blog post assignment has been overdue for about 15 minutes now so I have to finish up, but I simply hope that all readers of this article could listen to his guitar at least once in the lifetime. He totally changed my impression toward the jazz guitar. To all HASOM students, we should definitely be proud of the fact that he is teaching at our school.

At the end, it is quite bit of different subject, but I would like to share this interesting collaboration to all readers. He even covers MJ!