Edward Kennedy Ellington was born on this date.

[Dyedinthewoolliberal]

This is one of about 1000 tunes I could have picked

[Cicada]

1. I think Ellington added notes, Armstrong subtracted them

My wife got me the sound track of Ken Burns documentary on Jazz, and I listened a lot. Armstrong and Ellington struck me as the transcendent geniuses doing two different things. Armstrong it seems to me found the essential elements and subtracted out the parts that weren’t the main elements. Ellington it seemed to me did the opposite, putting into chords things I would never think of in a million years, combining notes that I would have thought absurd to combine but which somehow sounded amazingly good together. I don’t know about music theory or anything like that but I see Steely Dan and Ellington as similar, combining notes that I would never dream should be together but creating a sound that was novel, unexpected, and amazingly wonderful sounding. I had a client who was a composer who came from the USSR. She told me she couldn’t imagine how I could do my work, tax planning stuff. I told her I could not fathom how she could create music. But she told me that it isn’t as hard as I thought, that in school they taught her how to do it, and that I could learn it too. I didn’t believe her. I still don’t believe her. Music is a mysterious magic only gods can put into the heads of Ellington, Armstrong etc. I just can’t imagine how they do it.

[Dyedinthewoolliberal]

2. I don't play an instrument

though I sure have always wanted to. But I have heard and read this enough to believe it's true, to some degree; music and math are closely related. So you might be able to learn music easier than you thought!