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Chord progression for Billy Strayhorn's Lotus Blossom. Perhaps the best performances of this appear on an Ellington album "And His Mother Called Him Bill" which was recorded by the Ellington band a few months after Strayhorn passed away. On the album, Ellington does a solo piano performance that he played as the band was packing up after the recording session. You can hear studio noise that gets quieter and quieter as Duke plays. The second performance is a duet where Ellington plays solo for one chorus and then Harry Carney joins him for a second chorus. We should all be so lucky to have such memorials.

Ellington did not improvise over this tune's changes. He would alter his arrangement slightly while performing it on piano but mostly played the melody as written.

Page 1 and Page 2 of the score for this progresssion. The Eb mi11 chord notated in the 10th bar of the A section of this arrangement should be notated  as an Eb mi13 since the 13th is a very important note in the melody at that point in the score. Couldn't notate the 13th in the chord symbol because I haven't built the mi13 into the SongTrellis Editor yet. 

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