Grace Chorale set to perform Duke Ellington’s Sacred Concerts
The Grace Chorale of Brooklyn will return to St. Ann & the Holy Trinity next weekend, April 29-May 1, to present jazz legend Duke Ellington’s Sacred Concerts, a rarely performed but highly regarded set of improvisational music.
The first of these three performance concerts will be held on Ellington’s birthday, April 29. He was born in 1899 in Washington, D.C.
Ellington, at the age of 66, premiered the first of three Sacred Concerts that he would compose during the last decade of his life. This first concert, titled “A Concert of Sacred Music,” premiered at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco in 1965. Two more concerts, “Second Sacred Concert” and “Third Sacred Concert,” premiered in 1968 in New York City, and in 1978 in London, respectively. Throughout the 1960s and ’70s, the legendary jazz musician toured the world performing what he called Sacred Concerts; wherever Ellington performed, he would collaborate with local choirs.