Boa pauta para os jornais: acaba de ser lançado nos Estados Unidos "Duke Ellington's America", livro de Harvey G. Cohen. É uma biografia de 720 páginas. Valeria uma entrevista com o autor. Claudia Roth Pierpont tratou do assunto na New Yorker, focando na questão racial:
"'What we could not say openly, we expressed in music," Ellington wrote in the British magazine Rhythm, in 1931, trying to explain the Negro musical tradition that had grown up in America, music ""forged from the very white heat of our sorrows." All his life, Ellington gave the impression of having been unscathed by racism, either in his early years--color, he said, was never even mentioned in his parents' home--or during the long professional decades when it defined almost every move he made: where he could play his music, who could come to listen to it, whether he could stay in a hotel or attend another musician's show, and where (or whether) he could find something to eat when the show was over. The orchestra made its first Southern tour just after its return from England, in 1933, travelling (thanks to Mills) in supremely insulated style: two private Pullman cars for sleeping and dining, and a separate baggage car for the elaborate wardrobe, scenery, and lights required to present a show more dazzling than any that most of the sleepy little towns where they made their stops had ever seen. Ellington made a special effort to perform for black audiences, even when it meant that the band added a midnight show in a place where it had performed earlier that night exclusively for whites. Reports from both racial groups were that the players outdid themselves; it is difficult to know where they felt they had more to prove."
