Duke Ellington:|Sacred Concerts

The most important thing I”ve ever done – this is how Duke Ellington thought about his Sacred Concerts for choir, soloists and big band. With these three concerts, of which many songs have since become standards, the grandmaster of jazz made history. Duke Ellington conceived his Sacred Concerts between 1962 and 1973 and they resemble a wonderful musical autobiography of the composer. Only very few jazz musicians were able to fill their music with such strong emotions as Ellington could. Both happy moments and strokes of fate have their share in the Sacred Concerts. Above all, Ellington’s unshakeable confidence in God makes the Sacred Concerts a very personal creed. Duke Ellington is considered one of the fathers of the big band sound and shaped this genre like no other: down to the present day, jazz orchestras around the world have been trying to emulate the so-called Ellington Effect. The Fette Hupe big band, which has been committed to Ellington’s style for a long time, joined forces with the Junges Vokalensemble Hannover, a perfect partner for staging the monumental Sacred Concerts with all their original power and expressiveness. With this very rarely recorded cycle, Fette Hupe and the Junges Vokalensemble Hannover close an important gap in the repertoire.