rst, Duke found it difficult to get regular work at the clubs there. Thus, for a time he spent every Saturday playing "rent parties," at which he would earn one dollar per night and all he could eat and drink. Rent parties were a unique phenomenon of the Prohibition period in which people attempted to raise their rent money for the month by hosting large gatherings in their own homes (George 43-44). It wasn't long before Duke got his first official job as a musician at the Kentucky Club in Harlem. Soon after, he landed a job at the famous Cotton Club, where he got his first big break as a musician. At the Cotton Club, Duke Ellington became the leader of his own band, and this early group "bore the seeds of greatness that soon germinated to push orchestral jazz beyond its strict function as dance music and into the hothouse of abstract jazz" (Sales 78).
While working at the Cotton Club, Ellington became influenced by a style of jazz known as "swing" which had been developed by Louis Armstrong and Fletcher Henderson, among others. "Swing" is a highly syncopated style of jazz music which has "the putative eighth notes divided unequally and the lines
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