Duke Ellington — The Monarch Review

Spek and Duke

Wednesday, October 26, 2011 19:05 — 0 Comments

As fellow editor Evan Flory-Barnes likes to point out from time to time when the difficult conversation of genre arises, many of the old jazz masters preferred not to speak of their work as “jazz”, opting instead for the simpler word “music”. It was a response to classical music snobbery. Hip-hop suffers a similar snobbery, despite enjoying wide popular appeal, just as big-band swing did in its day. Spekulation cleverly rebukes this snobbery with his newest work, “The Ellington Project”. His work is Music, definitively. Using samples from Ellington’s band and snippets of the Duke talking, Spekulation creates new songs […]