strayhorn, billy

Biography of Billy Strayhorn, the jazz composer who worked as songwriter and arranger for Duke Ellington's orchestra, writing many of the group's best-known pieces, making many friends in the music world of Harlem and Paris, and dying of cancer at the age of fifty-one.

Tells the story of how jazz composer and musician Duke Ellington, along with Billy Strayhorn, created his jazz composition based on Tchaikovsky's famous Nutcracker Suite ballet. Includes a CD.