Mercedes Ellington remembers the day her grandfather came to see her perform: "He was late," the dancer-choreographer exclaims, ever the indignant artist – no matter if her grandfather was Duke Ellington. "It was in No, No Nanette, we were doing Tea for Two and I was on stage doing this Floradora thing. And he walked in late, with his sister. Everybody was trying to move out of the way, to make way for them," she shakes her head.
That was some role reversal. Some of her earliest memories of the jazz icon are of sitting in the audience at the Apollo Theatre in New York. Because the band was always on tour ("I get my mail in New York, but I live on the road," Duke used to say), shows in New York were family moments, she says, when the musicians were finally reunited with their families. "They wanted to send me to summer camp, I hated camp. So I'd just sit there all day, watching the shows and the movies, as they came on. I loved sitting there, I loved going backstage and eat the fried chicken the band members' wives had brought," she laughs, sitting down with Emirates Business ahead of her UAE shows this week.
Duke Ellington, who led his band from 1923 until his death in 1974, is widely recognised as one of the greatest musicians of the 20th century.
His music straddled genres beyond jazz, too, including the blues, gospel, film scores, popular and classical, and he composed a substantial songbook.
Mercedes talks poignantly of the last time she saw him: "He was in hospital, composing to the very end on the upright piano we'd arranged to have at the foot of his bed. And I would bring him sheet music. I only visited him a few times – everyone had to make an appointment because there were droves of people who wanted to visit, he had cards all over the place. And my great aunt, his sister, was making arrangements, because no two of his girlfriends could come at the same time! He was always debonair, though, and right to the end, he'd keep playing, just noodling on the keyboard, tapping out chord changes and harmonies.
"As time passed, he was less and less able to do that, although he was fairly strong the last time I saw him, he could get out of bed. I was on my way to go see a friend in Los Angeles and I said, when I come back, I want you out of this hospital, we're going to go and do things. When I came back, of course, he'd passed. The next time I saw him was three or four weeks later, it was the funeral."
That was 1974 and she remembers the flight to New York, heading back to see her beloved Uncle Edward (as he insisted everybody, including his grandchildren, refer to him because he didn't want the ladies to think he was old enough to be a grandfather) "I didn't even know he was gone. I read over the shoulder of somebody on the plane and I saw the news in the paper," she says, talking of how, despite ample warning, no one's ever quite prepared for anyone's death.
"But there's the music, that's all there. And when you see the audience, you look at their faces, you see the spirit, the spirit is still there, so there's something to that," she says. Mercedes, the most senior of his grandchildren, plays torchbearer for that cultural legacy and has teamed with saxophonist and composer Victor Goines to create the Duke Ellington Big Band for Panoramajazz, a programme of jazz music in the UAE. She is its producer, director and choreographer.
"Ellington wrote in so many different eras and genres, and we've tried to bring together some of that with this show," she says.
The band is a 15-piece collective that will present some his best-known works in what she calls a "morph", a combination of jazz concert and theatrical Broadway production. "So we go back as early as East St Louis Toodle-oo, and we do some signature tunes like Don't Mean A Thing, Caravan, Take the A-Train and others that people will recognise or may have heard before but might not associate with Ellington.
"We've tried to create it in a show format, with possible relationships implied between the cast, so they're not presented as singers or dancers alone, but really, they're actors, who are creating the reason they perform together, the reason they create the songs."
The show casts the music against the time in the context of when it was created, she says, to track the trends of the periods when they were written – often through the dance forms of the time.
And while some may see her as cashing in on the legendary name, Mercedes, who has spoken out before about how her independent career actually brought her closer to her grandfather, says the name brings with "a tremendous responsibility".
The organisation she founded, the Duke Ellington Centre for Arts, works to protect the accuracy of Duke's story and to bring his music to new audiences and young people. From its new offices in Broadway's theatre district, she says, it will launch several new educational programmes – even as far afield as the UAE.
"I want to make it a universal programme because Ellington's music was universal," she says, telling of how she runs into people whose lives have been touched by the jazz pioneer wherever she goes: in Sri Lanka, Argentina, everywhere.
This week she and the band have been running student workshops in Al Ain and Abu Dhabi city in an attempt to promote a cross-cultural artistic exchange.
When she isn't safeguarding the legacy, then, she's hard at work on her own dancing – now in her 70s, she can still do the splits and she's learning the tango after having had both knees replaced. "My doctor came to see me perform and she was shocked at how much I was doing – and in heels! But movement really is the key. If you stop, you're dead in the water. So I'm going to write a book: My Life according to My Knees!"
n The Duke Ellington Big Band plays at The Palladium, Dubai Media City, on Thursday, May 27