Karen Barbera and Randall Keith Horton were strangers who met on a train. A cordial conversation led to an eight-year collaboration to tell new and enlightening stories about Duke Ellington and to bring his forgotten masterpieces back to life. The results are concerts and this book-a biography of both Ellington and Horton centered on their unique relationship and the musical and cultural importance of Black, Brown and Beige and Sacred Concerts.
The book illuminates the historical significance of the compositions that helped create a paradigm shift in American music, race relations and culture. It is an engrossing story of "mysterious callings" that led Ellington to choose Randall Keith Horton as his assistant composer, conductor and pianist in 1973, and the author's serendipitous connection to Horton.
Most of us know Duke Ellington as the king of swinging Jazz. But throughout his 50-year career, he also shattered racial barriers and stereotypes, bridged cultural divides, helped audiences feel their shared humanity, and dared people to imagine, if even for just one evening, a world without categories. Along the way he believed it possible and imperative to elevate Jazz and American composers on par with their European counterparts.
Like a true pioneer, Duke Ellington took risks to provide music that audiences needed to hear, and in doing so, set lofty expectations for a country that was ill prepared to live up to them during his lifetime.
"In telling the story of Randall Keith Horton's ongoing odyssey to repay a musical debt to Maestro Duke Ellington, Karen Barbera has written her own Strangers on A Train, but with a genuine meeting of minds, an optimistic finish, and a twist in the ghostly presence of Ellington, whose spell is ever present. Horton, a conductor-composer-arranger-pianist, worked for Ellington for little more than two weeks nearly half a century ago (superbly rendered here in detail at once hilarious, inspiring, and heartbreaking), and it put him on a lifelong mission to present four neglected Ellington masterpieces: Black, Brown and Beige in a Concerto Grosso adaptation and concert performances of the three Sacred Concerts. Barbera alternates biographies of Ellington, Horton, and each of those four works, adding something genuinely new and enlightening to the buckling shelves of literary Ellingtonia."
Gary Giddins, author of Visions of Jazz and Bing Crosby: Swinging on Star
"This fascinating, page-turning, nearly unbelievable story shines a light on one fellow Ellingtonian's struggle to bring to life the music the world needs to hear."
Mark McCoy, PhD, Princeton Entertainment Group
