Harmony In Harlem - the Queen's Suite

The sixteen-piece jazz orchestra, Harmony In Harlem, specialises in the music of Duke Ellington. The director, Michael Kilpatrick, has provided his transcriptions of Ellingtonia for the BBC, the National Youth Jazz Orchestra and other prestigious ensembles but much prefers the pleasure of performing with his own orchestra, established in 2006 with musicians from across the East of England.

Alongside their regular repertoire of foot-tapping swing and jazz exotica from the greatest composer/bandleader of jazz history, Harmony In Harlem come to St Peter's by the Waterfront to perform The Queen's Suite, a remarkable twenty minutes of music created by Duke Ellington and co-composer Billy Strayhorn after meeting Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth at the Leeds Music Festival in 1958. In a lavishly romantic gesture, Duke recorded the suite at his own expense and had only a single pressing of the LP made and sent to Buckingham Palace in 1959. Nobody else was to hear the music until its commercial release after Ellington's death.