Vocabulary in Context Exercise 3

Read each of the passages using context clues to determine the meaning of the italicized word. Note the part(s) of the paragraph you used to help in your selection.

Jazz! The music that touched every musician of the 20th century, whether it was ¹embraced or discarded, still resounds in the chords and creations heard today. Many ²renowned figures provided ³innovation to this form of music, but none more than the "Duke"--Mr. Edward Kennedy Ellington. He took this exciting, pulsating music and enriched it with his ⁴incomparable creativity. Although he would have been 100 years old in 1999, this "old" man still influences musicians today. From short instrumental pieces, to symphonic works, to film scores, to music for the theater and for worship, his range was without comparison. He composed almost 2,000 works during his career ⁵spanning 50 years of creativity from the 1920s through the 1970s.

Born in Washington, D.C. in 1899, Ellington was a contemporary of George Gershwin, another major figure in the serious business of music. In the 1920s, Ellington took his orchestra, known as the Washingtonians, to New York where they performed at the famous Cotton Club in Harlem. By the mid 1930s, Ellington had created an astonishing list of compositions, such ⁶classics as Caravan, Mood Indigo, and Sophisticated Lady. He led his orchestra on a grand tour of Europe where he was greeted by cheering, adoring fans. From this successful foreign tour, he ⁷initiated a series of annual concerts at Carnegie Hall in New York where he introduced his extensive ⁸repertoire of concert suites. He continued to compose concerts, ballets, operas, and film scores (most notably Anatomy of a Murder and The Asphalt Jungle), and officially retired in 1954. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and honorary degrees from Yale and Howard Universities. Although the "Duke" died in 1974 in New York City, his works, even ⁹posthumously, were still being discovered. One of his operas was performed in Philadelphia in 1986, and his symphonic works started to appear in concert halls and recordings. Finally, in 1999, "Duke" was awarded a special Pulitzer Prize for lifetime achievement.

The "Duke's" power and ¹⁰vitality will always remain in his contributions to musicians everywhere. He took jazz and translated it into a style spanning the blues, the big-band sounds of swing, concert suites, and even religious music.