(from The New York Times)
“I was in a rock band, I played with a bunch of Brazilians, I played R&B with Parliament-Funkadelic and all of that,” he said in an interview before his most recent album, “DreamWeaver,” was released last month. “I mean, I’ve done jazz with Miles Davis and Cannonball Adderley. It’s a goulash. It’s a gumbo.
George Duke, who as a small boy begged his mother to buy him a piano after she took him to see Duke Ellington, began playing professionally at a time when many musicians were interested in blending genres. He played in a trio that backed the singer Al Jarreau while he was still a teenager, then accompanied Dizzy Gillespie and other jazz musicians at clubs in San Francisco. By the early 1970s he had performed and recorded with Adderley, the jazz violinist Jean-Luc Ponty and Zappa’s Mothers of Invention.
Zappa “told me one day that I should play synthesizers,” Mr. Duke wrote on his Web site. “It was as simple as that!” Urged by Zappa, he said, he experimented with a few types of synthesizers before settling on the ARP Odyssey, “purely to be different from Jan Hammer, who was playing the Minimoog.”
Critics sometimes said that Mr. Duke’s music was too smooth, not
challenging enough, and that he was too eager to court a broad audience.
He disagreed. “I really think it’s possible (and still do) to make good music and be
commercial at the same time,” Mr. Duke wrote. “I believe it is the
artist’s responsibility to take the music to the people. Art for art’s
sake is nice; but if art doesn’t communicate, then its worth is negated.
It has not fulfilled its destiny.”
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