Duke Ellington influenced millions of people both around the world and at home. He gave American music its own sound for the first time. In his fifty year career, he played over 20,000 performances in Europe, Latin America, the Middle East as well as Asia.

Simply put, Ellington transcends boundaries and fills the world with a treasure trove of music that renews itself through every generation of fans and music-lovers. His legacy continues to live onand will endure for generations to come. Winton Marsalis said it best when he said "His music sounds like America." Because of the unmatched artistic heights to which he soared, no one deserved the phrase “beyond category” more than Ellington, for it aptly describes his life as well. He was most certainly one of a kind that maintained a llifestyle with universal appeal which transcended countless boundaries.

Duke Ellington is best remembered for the over 3000 songs that he composed during his lifetime. His best known titles include; "It Don't Mean a Thing if It Ain't Got That Swing", "Sophisticated Lady", "Mood Indigo", “Solitude", "In a Mellotone",and "Satin Doll". The most amazing part about Ellington was the most creative while he was on the road. It was during this time when he wrote his most famous piece, "Mood Indigo"which brought him world wide fame.

When asked what inspired him to write, Ellington replied, "My men and my race are the inspiration of my work. I try to catch the character and mood and feeling of my people".

Duke Ellington's popular compositions set the bar for generations of brilliant jazz, pop, theatre and soundtrack composers to come. While these compositions guarantee his greatness, whatmakes Duke an iconoclastic genius, and an unparalleled visionary, what has granted him immortality are his extended suites. From 1943's Black, Brown and Beige to 1972's The Uwis Suite, Duke used the suite format to give his jazz songs a far more empowering meaning, resonance and purpose: to exalt, mythologize and re-contextualize the African-American experience on a grand scale.

Duke Ellington was partial to giving brief verbal accounts of the moods his songs captured. Reading those accounts is like looking deep into the background of an old photo of New York and noticing the lost and almost unaccountable details that gave the city its character during Ellington's heyday, which began in 1927 when his band made the Cotton Club its home.''The memory of things gone,'' Ellington once said, ''is important to a jazz musician,'' and the stories he sometimes told about his songs are the record of those things gone. But what is gone returns, its pulse kicking, when Ellington's music plays, and never mind what past it is, for the music itself still carries us forward today.

Duke Ellington was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1966. He was later awarded several other prizes, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1969, and the Legion of Honor by France in 1973, the highest civilian honors in each country. He died of lung cancer and pneumonia on May 24, 1974, a month after his 75th birthday, and is buried in theBronx, in New York City. At his funeral attendedby over 12,000 people at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Ella Fitzgerald summed up the occasion, "It's a very sad day...A genius has passed."

When it comes to jazz musicians improving with age, the pianist Richie Beirach is a perfect example. With a new recording celebrating his 70th birthday, the pianist-composer demonstrates he’s still at the top of his game alongside his congenial partner of two decades, the Stuttgart-born, New York based violinist Gregor Huebner. Another birthday boy, Huebner is also celebrating a milestone, reaching half a century on May 23rd, the exact same day as Beirach. As a tribute, the leading Munich-based jazz label ACT release a CD featuring highlights recorded in 2012 from their decade long annual week’s ‘live’ residence at the illustrious Birdland in New York, in which they are joined by the high calibre lineup of bassist George Mraz, trumpeter Randy Brecker and drummer Billy Hart. Big birthdays are though not the only thing the esteemed pair have in common. Both musicians studied independently of each other with the same classical composition teacher, Ludmilla Uhlela at Manhattan School of Music, and both have an eastern European background. Huebner reflects on their enduring creative partnership over 21 years: “Richie always says we still play in the same way today like we played in the first minute in 1996 in his little apartment on Spring Street in NYC and I feel the same way, even though we have incredibly developed our music together. The spirit and the bond between us was already there in the first minute.” It’s through the development of their own uniquely imaginative version of ‘third stream’, the absorption of elements of the European ‘classical’ music tradition into New York’s postbop idioms that they’ve found so much common ground. In the late 1990’s they recorded together for ACT in the late 1990s on titles Round About Bartok,…Monteverdi,…Mompou in trio with George Mraz. A couple of the tracks from these albums are revisited on the new ‘live’ release. ‘Bartok Bagatelle #4’ at first reflects the elegant classicism of Beirach’s mesmerizing solo piano recordings then later his restless, harmonically adventurous artistry that has glimpses of the early influence of McCoy Tyner and Bill Evans among other piano modernist giants. As does his solo on ‘Bach (Siciliana)’ with Huebner’s violin adding a bewitching yearning, jazz-inflected mediterranean quality.
I think the music of certain composers is more approachable for improvisation then others,” observes Huebner. “For example Bach was a great improviser and you hear that in his music. In some of the romantic composers you find similar harmonic structures which were used later in jazz and with Bartok and other composers from the 20th century the rhythmic part is very interesting. The mix of the music on the CD is very typical for us, you find classical pieces, our own compositions, a typical jazz standard and a composition by John Coltrane [‘Transition’]. Each piece brings something totally new but everything is connected through improvisation.” Of his originals, one of Beirach’s most popular, a classical-influenced, hauntingly melancholic version of ‘Elm’ is a standout piece. Beirach’s infectious latin vamp on the standard ‘You Don’t Know What Love is’ is associated with Chet Baker and a reminder of Beirach’s tenure in his band early on in his career. Approaching the ripe old age of 70, it’s a moment to consider Richie Beirach’s high level achievements as one of America’s greatest living modernist jazz piano stylists. Originally a sideman of both Stan Getz and the aforementioned Baker, Beirach among others has enjoyed a memorably intimate association with the saxophonist Dave Liebman since the 1970s, in bands (Quest, Lookout Farm) that included the legendary Billy Hart whose explosive presence at times on the new CD eclipses entirely his 76 years on the planet. “For Richie,” Huebner explains, “these are his oldest friends, these are the people he grew up with and these are the people he developed his music together” In jazz that development doesn’t come to an end. It’s testament to the exploratory ‘young at heart’ spirit of the grand jazz masters on Live at Birdland New York that not for a second does anyone rest on their considerable laurels.

Originally from Chicago, George Cotsirilos has been a member of the San Francisco Bay Area jazz community for many years and has performed with a wide variety of artists, from San Francisco jazz fixtures like Eddie Marshall, Mel Martin, and Mark Levine to internationally recognized blues singer Etta James, Pharaoh Sanders, and the jazz/soul vocal group, The Whispers. His latest quartet recording of original compositions, Refuge, featuring Keith Saunders on piano, Robb Fisher on bass, and Ron Marabuto on drums, was released in May of 2022 on OA2 Records to excellent notices, has been named a DownBeat Editors’ Pick, and has reached the top 30 on the JazzWeek radio charts. The quartet’s prior CD, Mostly In Blue also received excellent notices and was named by DownBeat as one of the best recordings of 2018. Cotsirilos’s prior trio and solo recordings have been similarly well-received. For example, his trio CD, Variations was chosen by erstwhile Washington Post jazz critic and JazzTimes editor, Royal Stokes, as one of the most notable jazz instrumental CDs of 2013, while its immediate predecessor, Past Present received wide acclaim, including praise from the San Francisco Chronicle for its display of “sublimely fluid jazz guitar skills” and its presentation of “about as tight a jazz trio as you’ll ever be lucky enough to hear.” Cotsirilos’s 2003 solo CD, Silenciosa, is a compilation of jazz tunes performed on solo classical guitar which All About Jazz characterized as “a superb solo guitar recital.” Prior to those releases, in addition to working as an accompanist, Cotsirilos was co-leader of the San Francisco Nighthawks, which included legendary drummer Eddie Marshall, Bobby McFerrin pianist Paul Nagel, as well as former Cal Tjader bassist Robb Fisher, and which recorded for Monarch Records. An earlier quartet recording including Marshall, Nagel and Fisher was released in 2011 by Jazz School Records as part of the Bay Area Jazz Archive Series. Cotsirilos graduated from the University of California at Berkeley, studied jazz with esteemed musician/educator Warren Nunes, and studied classical guitar privately through the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.