Home | Songs By Year | Songs from 1962


African Flower

Buy African Flower now from Amazon

First, read the Wikipedia article. Then, scroll down to see what other TopShelfReviews readers thought about the song. And once you've experienced the song, tell everyone what you thought about it.

Wikipedia article


"'African Flower'" or "'Little African Flower'" (Petite Fleur Africaine) is a composition by jazz pianist and composer Duke Ellington. He first recorded it for his 1962 LP 'Money Jungle'. Ellington originally named it "La Plus Belle Africaine" when he composed it for the Negro Arts Festival in Dakar. He can be heard playing it at 'The English Concert' in 1970. He recorded it with Max Roach and Charles Mingus as "La Fleurette Africaine". Writer Peter Lavezzoli calls it "a masterpiece of simplicity and grandeur.

Norah Jones recorded it for her 2016 album 'Day Breaks'.

Composition



According to Janna Tull Steed, the composition was the result of Ellington's "imaginary vision of a beautiful flower blooming "only for God" in the heart". "African Flower" is composed in the key of E-flat minor, and consists of cascading sequences, with an E-flat minor 7, A-flat minor 7, G-flat minor 7, E-flat-minor 7, B-flat minor 7 flat 5 progression. It is the very first entry in Volume One of the Real Book, the original fakebook which appeared in the 1970s but has been brought up to date and made legal. Scott Saul says of the recording with Mingus and Roach: "Mingus spirals down the bass clef to create a stirring contrapuntal line that evenly balances the stateliness of Ellington's theme."

References



Category:1962 songs

Category:1960s jazz standards

Category:Compositions by Duke Ellington

Category:Jazz compositions in E-flat minor


Buy African Flower now from Amazon

<-- Return to songs from 1962



This work is released under CC-BY-SA. Some or all of this content attributed to http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1022928315.