Mercer Ellington; Composer Led Late Father’s Jazz Band

COPENHAGEN — Mercer Ellington, who led the Duke Ellington Orchestra as arranger, composer and conductor after his father’s death, has died. He was 76.

Ellington died Thursday after three consecutive heart attacks at Gentofte Hospital in Copenhagen, his son Paul said. He also had pneumonia.

Before he took over the Duke Ellington Orchestra in 1974, Ellington worked as a salesman, disc jockey and record company executive. He led small groups, including a band that featured vocalist Carmen McRae, who made her recording debut with the band.

He also worked on and off as trumpeter and band manager with the Duke Ellington Orchestra.

“The music of Ellington will live on like any of the classics, like the works of Debussy or Schoenberg,” Mercer Ellington promised The Times’ late jazz critic Leonard Feather shortly after taking over the band. “What’s most important for us now is that his contributions be authentically represented.”

Mercer Ellington’s best-known composition, the blues “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be,” came about when his father told him the band needed a new tune to record the next day. He wrote it immediately and presented it at a recording session the next morning.

The only child of Edward Kennedy “Duke” and Edna Ellington, Mercer Ellington studied at Columbia University and the Juilliard School. In 1978, he wrote a biography of his father, “Duke Ellington in Person.”

He was music director and conductor of “Sophisticated Ladies,” a music and dance revue of Duke Ellington’s music, from 1981 to 1983, and won a Grammy Award in 1988 in the big-band jazz instrumental performance category for “Digital Duke.”

He conducted his father’s only opera, “Queenie Pie,” in Philadelphia and at the Kennedy Center in Washington. He also helped his father compose “Three Black Kings” from a hospital room during the last five months of Duke Ellington’s life.

Mercer Ellington’s other compositions include “Blue Serge,” “Moon Mist,” “The Girl in My Dreams,” “John Hardy’s Wife” and “Jumpin’ Punkins.”

Ellington moved to Denmark in the early 1970s, at a time when Copenhagen was one of Europe’s jazz centers. He seldom played or recorded in Denmark.

Ellington is survived by his wife, Lena, and four children, Edward Kennedy, Mercedes, Gaye and Paul.