WBTT Voices: The Duke

Duke Ellington's career is the subject of WBTT Voices, the troupe's community forum series, which begins its 2026-27 run alongside the Ellington revue Sophisticated Ladies. A panel made up of that production's director, Jim Weaver, Jazz Club of Sarasota president Ed Linehan and Pablo Gil, a musician in the show, takes up Ellington's influence on African American life and on the sound of his era. The conversation starts in the crowded Harlem nightclubs of the late 1920s and follows his orchestra from Washington, D.C. and New York to audiences around the world. This is a discussion, not a performance.