Numerous jazz concerts have been offered this year to celebrate the 100th year since the birth of Duke Ellington, but trumpeter Mike Price says they've got the focus all wrong.

"Most of the concerts are dealing with music Duke wrote during the '30s and '40s," Price points out. "The popular songs -- 'Satin Doll,' 'Sophisticated Lady,' 'In a Sentimental Mood' -- are great, but Duke had a whole creative period later, of jazz suites in the '50s and sacred music in the '60s, which is being virtually ignored."

Price's own "Duke Ellington 100th Birthday Concert" Oct. 1 at Jazz Court TUC aims to rectify this with, among other things, the first live performance in Japan of Ellington's 1957 jazz suite "Such Sweet Thunder" and parts of the "Far East" and "New Orleans" suites.

Price, a lifelong professional jazz trumpeter, was first trumpet in such bands as Stan Kenton's and Buddy Rich's and a teacher at the University of Southern California before an artistic exchange fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the U.S.-Japan Friendship Commission brought him to Japan in 1989.

Since then he has spent most of his time in Japan, teaching and performing with his Mike Price Jazz Quintet. He also performs with Nobuo Hara and the Sharps & Flats. This year he formed the 16-piece Mike Price Orchestra specifically to tackle Ellington's later works.

"Such Sweet Thunder," also known as Ellington's Shakespearean suite, was written in collaboration with Billy Strayhorn for the 1956 Stratford, Ontario, Shakespeare Festival and premiered in 1957 at "New York City's Town Hall Music for Moderns" series.

Taking its title from a line in "A Midsummer Night's Dream," the suite is a series of vignettes on characters from various Shakespeare plays, including Romeo and Juliet, and Marc Antony and Cleopatra from "Julius Caesar" and others. Like other works from Ellington's late period it is little known here.