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Black Music Sunday: Celebrating jazz, funk, and fusion master George Duke [1]
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Date: 2025-01-12
Black Music Sunday is a weekly series highlighting all things Black music, with over 240 stories covering performers, genres, history, and more, each featuring its own vibrant soundtrack. I hope you’ll find some familiar tunes and perhaps an introduction to something new.
Keyboardist, producer, composer, and singer-songwriter George Duke was born on Jan. 12, 1946. Duke was both a master pianist and synthesizer player, and while he was a stellar jazz artist, he is best known as a practitioner of what has been dubbed “jazz-funk.”
Those unfamiliar with Duke may not realize that he was not just an instrumentalist and performer. He was also the producer behind a host of artists, like Dianne Reeves (for which he received 2 Grammys), A Taste of Honey, Jeffrey Osborne, Deniece Williams, Stanley Clarke, Smokey Robinson, Gladys Knight, Rachelle Ferrell, and Anita Baker.
His website provides an extensive biography.
George Duke was born in San Rafael, California, and reared in Marin City, a working class section of Marin County. When he was just four years old, his mother took him to see Duke Ellington in concert. "I don't remember it too well," says George, "but my mother told me I went crazy. I ran around saying 'Get me a piano, get me a piano!'" He began his piano studies at age seven, absorbing the roots of Black music in his local Baptist church. "That's where I first began to play funky. I really learned a lot about music from the church. I saw how music could trigger emotions in a cause-and-effect relationship." By the age of sixteen, George had played with a number of high school jazz groups. He was heavily influenced by Miles Davis and the soul-jazz sound of Les McCann and Cal Tjader. Attending the San Francisco Conservatory Of Music and majoring in trombone and composition with a minor in contrabass, he received his Bachelor of Music degree in 1967. George and a young singer named Al Jarreau formed a group which became the house band at San Francisco's Half Note Club. "There was another club up the street called The Both/And and I worked there on Mondays with everybody from Letta Mbulu to Sonny Rollins and Dexter Gordon." George later received a Masters Degree in composition from San Francisco State University and briefly taught a course on Jazz And American Culture at Merritt Junior College in Oakland. It was about this time that George began to release a series of jazz LP's on the MPS label.
All About Jazz continues Duke’s story.
One night, on a local jazz station, George heard a record by the violinist Jean-Luc Ponty. When he found out that Jean- Luc was coming to California to record, he sent a tape to Dick Bock at World-Pacific Records, along with a note saying "There is no other pianist for this guy but me." The George Duke Trio which emerged from those sessions was soon burning a path of creative excitement through the jazz world. It included a major European tour and an appearance at the Newport Jazz Festival. The group's first gig in a rock-oriented venue came in early 1969. "It was a club in Los Angeles called Thee Experience," George recalls. In attendance were Cannonball Adderly, Quincy Jones, Frank Zappa, and the unexpected presence of an electric, rather than acoustic, piano on-stage. The Ponty- Duke performance wowed the crowd, and ushered in the West Coast counterpart of the Eastern fusion revolution sparked by Miles Davis, The Mahavishnu Orchestra and Weather Report. Before '69 was out, George joined Frank Zappa (as he put together a new "Mothers Of Invention" lineup) and toured for an entire year.
Duke himself talks about his 1969 gig with Jean Luc Ponty at Thee Experience Club, and tells the story of how he started playing a Fender Rhodes piano.
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Here are Ponty and Duke, covering Herbie Hancock’s “Cantaloupe Island.”
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Duke would go onto hook up with Frank Zappa, which would change his life and his musical progression. I was both a Mothers of Invention and Zappa fan, from the time of the issue of their debut double album “Freak Out,” but it took a while longer for many of my Black friends to join me.
British music writer Charles Waring’s “Mojo” interview with Duke is included on the Zappa Books website.
I was working with my trio with [violinist] Jean-Luc Ponty in a small rock club in Los Angeles called Thee Experience on Sunset Boulevard, and Frank Zappa came in.[1] I was steeped in jazz so I didn't know who Frank was, but I knew this could be a turning point in my life so I played a Fender Rhodes piano with my feet, my head, anything I could come up with. And Frank kind of liked it. He wanted to do an album with Jean-Luc, who said, "I'll do it if I can bring my piano player," 'cos Jean-Luc wanted somebody from the jazz world with him. So I worked with Frank on Jean-Luc's album King Kong [2] and at the end of '69 I did a gig with him at Pauley Pavilion in Los Angeles at UCLA. It was with a big orchestra. [3] About a month later I was at my mum's house for Sunday lunch. The phone rang. She picked up and said to me, "There's somebody named Zuper on the phone." I said, "Zuper? Who the heck is Zuper? Oh, you mean Zappa." So I picked up the phone and he said "I want you to join the Mothers." I said, "The who?" He said, "No, not The Who, the Mothers." I didn't even know who The Who was. I thought he was putting me on, but he sent me a ticket and asked me to see him the following week so he could check me out to see if I was cool. We went in the studio and recorded Chunga's Revenge.
Check out these clips of “Frank Zappa and His Collaboration with George Duke,” from Swedish Television.
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From the YouTube video notes:
Frank Zappa and his collaboration with George Duke is the most noteworthy and most known in musical history among Duke's collaborations. Frank Zappa worked with Duke twice, broken by a hiatus due to Zappa's tours in the USA. Their collaboration began with the 1970 Zappa album, Chunga's Revenge.Duke, a talented keyboard-player, contributed to Zappa's legacy with his work in some of the albums in which Zappa was most known for. Some of these are the 1974-1975 album sequences of Zappa which were Over-Nite Sensation, Apostrophe, Roxy & Elsewhere (all three were 1974), One Size Fits All and Bongo Fury (both were 1975). George Duke had also performed with Zappa and his band in concerts in this period.
The “Best of Atlanta Concerts” YouTube channel posted this interview with Duke, where he talks about developing a “sense of humor” in music—advice he received from Miles Davis—and more.
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Duke pays tribute to Zappa in this mysterious medley posted without details to YouTube.
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After quite a bit of searching, I was able to identify it as a clip from “Live in Prague,”a 2011 DVD release of a concert at the Lucerna Music Bar in 2009. On guitar was Jef Lee Johnson, who passed on in 2013, Ronald Bruner Jr. on drums, and Michael Manson on bass. The exquisite vocals were provided by Shannon Pearson, the "Sangin' Diva.”
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Duke talks about hooking up with, touring, and recording with drummer Billy Cobham in this segment of “The Fender Rhodes Story”:
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Duke also expressed his pleasure about the hookup on his website: The Billy Cobham – George Duke Band "LIVE" On Tour In Europe, by Billy Cobham- George Duke Band I love working with Billy! We started talking about putting a band together while he was playing with The Mahavishnu Orchestra, and I was with Zappa. In fact we did a tour together - boy what a moment in time that was!
I was in the process of leaving the Mothers of Invention, not because I was unhappy, but I just needed to challenge myself in other ways. I wanted to dive headfirst into fusion. Also, my contract with MPS records was ending. Little did I know, that this LP would become such a classic. More musicians have told me that this record changed their lives. Fortunately, I kept the entire original recordings, and more unreleased material exists from the original sessions. Billy and I plan to release that material in the near future.
Besides Billy and myself, the band was rounded off with John Scofield on guitar. He was perfect for the band. Al Johnson was not the first bass player with the band; it was Doug Rauche, who had played with Santana. He was a wild - straight out of the sixties bass player. He really looked the part, and could really play as well! However, he had a rather large substance abuse problem, so we were eventually called Al Johnson to do the gig. [...] Joining forces with Billy was one of the highlights of my career!
Here’s Duke and Cobham, jammin’ live at the Montreux Jazz Festival back in 1976.
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