“He lived openly as a gay Black man with his partner in New York City, in the middle of the century, at the height of Jim Crow,” Phat Man Dee says. “So it was important to me that we celebrate him fully for everything he gave us and who he was.
“His whole life, his existence, his music, his legacy, his gift means we get to celebrate him every time we hear one of his songs,” she added. “And a lot of people don’t even know. They’re like, ‘Oh, I thought Ellington wrote this.’ He wrote a lot of songs that people don’t realize that he wrote and arranged.”
