As an early exponent of growl trumpet, Miley changed the sweet dance band sound of the group to one that was hotter, which contemporaries termed Jungle Style.

In October 1927, Ellington and his Orchestra recorded several compositions with Adelaide Hall. One side in particular, "Creole Love Call", became a worldwide sensation and gave both Ellington and Hall their first hit record.

Symphony in Black, which features Ellington's extended piece "A Rhapsody of Negro Life", was one of the first films written and scored by African Americans describing African American life. It introduced Billie Holiday and won an Academy Award as the best musical short subject.

Set in a corrupt world inhabited by gangsters, madams, working girls, panhandlers, and street people as they plied their various trades and struggled to survive in New York, Beggar's Holiday also depicted an interracial relationship, which resulted in nightly picketing outside the theater.

Ellington himself appears briefly in Anatomy of a Murder as "Pie-Eye," the owner of a roadhouse where Paul Biegler (Stewart) and Laura Manion (Lee Remick) have a confrontation. Ellington's jazz score won three Grammy Awards in 1959.

Ellington died on May 24, 1974, of complications from lung cancer and pneumonia, a few weeks after his 75th birthday. More than 12,000 people attended his funeral at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

Ella Fitzgerald, Billy Taylor, Lyle Atkinson and Jo Jones (known as Papa Jo Jones) performed "Solitude" and an old New Orleans funeral hymn "Just a closer walk with thee".

After Duke died, his son Mercer took over leadership of the orchestra, continuing until his own death in 1996. Like the Count Basie Orchestra, this "ghost band" continued to release albums for many years.