Description:
Karen Barbera and Randall Keith Horton were strangers who met on a train. A 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.
Brief description: Randall Keith Horton identifies himself as an "obscure Ellingtonian." In Spring1964, Horton received a mysterious calling commanding him to "Go to San Francisco and study music." The resulting high point occurred in 1973, when Duke Ellington invited Horton to compose and conduct original music for his orchestra at a concert at Disneyland. Ellington then appointed Horton to briefly serve as his composing and conducting assistant. After Duke's death, the Ellington family chose Horton to lead more than 30 performances of Duke's Sacred Music and write the only full-length, concerto grosso orchestration of Black, Brown and Beige, Ellington's most sweeping and misunderstood work.
Review Quotes:
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