Ellingtonia

They have a Duke Ellington celebration today on WKCR streaming on the internet. If you live in New York City you could just use a radio to listen to it. Of course, i'm a huge Ellington fanatic. The only thing I like just about as much is Johnny Hodges or Billy Strayhorn. What I like about Ellington's music is that it is an entire world unto itself. You could listen to it for several years and not quite exhaust it.

Of course, I love other composers, bandleaders, and instrumentalists just about as much, but very few have that scope that make them whole countries or worlds of music. I realize this is a quantitative judgment, but so much of the music is so damned good too, and it stretches from the 20s to the 70s... The fact that some of the music might not be as great hardly seems to matter.