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People of Note - Obituaries
GenealogyBuff.com - Mercer Kennedy Ellington
Posted By: GenealogyBuff.com
Date: Sunday, 4 September 2016, at 4:50 p.m.
System Mechanic - Clean, repair, protect, and speed up your PC!Mercer Kennedy Ellington
Trumpeter bandleader/composer, dies at 76.Mercer Kennedy Ellington was born March 11, 1919, in Washington, D.C., the only child of Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington and Edna Ellington. He died February 8, 1996, in Copenhagen, Denmark, where he had moved in the early 1970s when Denmark afforded a refuge from racism in the United States and Copenhagen was an important center of jazz in Europe. In recent years he spent considerable time in America and abroad, returning to his home in Denmark, as he told the Washington Post, "a few times a year to take a break."
Any assessment of the life of Mercer Ellington must be considered in light of his obligation as "the keeper of the flame," the charge his father had given him and he had accepted. He wanted Duke Ellington to be remembered as more than an outstanding bandleader; after all, at its finest, the Duke Ellington Orchestra had no peers. Mercer desired, above all, for his father to be acknowledged as an outstanding composer, one who synthesized the totality of the American experience and the African American heritage in his music.
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