Duke Ellington:The Piano Prince and his Orchestra

Pinkney, A. D. (1998). Duke Ellington: The Piano Prince and his Orchestra. New York, NY: Scholastic.

Brief Annotation: A biography of Duke Ellington told with language evocative of jazz and scratchboard illustrations. The book begins with Ellington’s youthful reluctance to play the piano, his rediscovery of the keys with his introduction to ragtime, and then moves on to talk about his success on radio and the formation of his orchestra.

Genre: Picturebook, Biography

Grade Level: 3-6

Readers who will like this: students interested in historical figures, readers who like jazz music, children who enjoy learning about musicians and musical genres.

Response/Rating (1-4): **** A beautifully crafted book that combines Brian Pinkney’s scratchboard illustrations with Andrea Davis Pinkney’s jazz-inspired text. Students will enjoy the unique flow of this book and the wonderfully unlikely descriptive words and phrases (“fine-as-pie,” “butterscotch,” gutbucket,” etc.) that A. D. Pinkney uses to describe the life of Duke Ellington.

One question you would ask before a read aloud: What is jazz music?

Reading Strategies Connection: Ten Important Words (Yopp & Yopp, 90-94). This during-reading activity requires that students record what they think are the ten most important words in the text as they read, then compare their choices with others and construct a summary sentence. For Duke Ellington, have students pair off, read the text together, recording important words in the story, limiting their selection to ten words. Then gather the class and have each pair share their word choices, creating a bar graph of class words on a piece of chart paper. After students have a class discussion on the important words in the text, have the pairs go back to work, writing a one sentence summary of the book. This exercise encourages students to process the important information in a text and then synthesize that information.