"KCET Profile on Ellington in a Class by Itself"  By Charles Champlin, Times Arts Editor      One of his several uniquenesses was that Duke Ellington was a suave, articulate and engaging public personality with an actor's charisma.    That alone set him apart from the great majority of big band leaders who found expression only through their instruments and their orchestras and could hardly introduce a number. Jazz fans who can identify Count Basie's piano after two or three beats would be hard put to recognize his voice.    But the Duke, who knew that the music spoke for itself, also knew that a little extra couldn't hurt. He made "Love you madly" a kind of verbal trademark. And he also talked thoughtfully and well about the music and about the remarkable men and women he gathered around him to make it...    With all else "A Duke Called Ellington" ...is a triumph of film and tape research.    There are black-and-white excerpts from the early films, both features and shorts, that the band did in Hollywood, with Ellington at his suavest, an indubitable star in formal dress and no trace of racial stereotyping.    In a television interview, apparently from the '50s, the unseen questioner asks Ellington about his music in relation to "his people". The Duke toys with the answer with a kind of amused irony, then says, "the people that's the better word the people rather than my people, because the people are my people."    But there is a sequence from "Black, Brown and Beige," which he called "a tone parallel" to the history of blacks in America and which the band played at its first appearance at Carnegie Hall in 1943.    The show's researchers found television footage from the BBC and from Danish and Swedish television, the latter including one of the sacred pieces from late in his career, this one performed at the Gustav Vasa church in Stockholm, with a fine singer named Alice Babs doing a wordless and soaring obbligato above Ellington's piano. It is in the program's s --Los Angeles TimesNEW YORK POST, Monday, July 18, 1988  A DATE WITH THE DUKE  "Special Goes to the Heart of an American Genius"  By LEE JESKE    There's a moment in tonight's first half of "A Duke Named Ellington," the two-part American Masters look at the career of jazz's (arguably America's) greatest composer and bandleader, when five reed players stand in a semi-circle and play "Rockin' in Rhythm."  They are Paul Gonsalves, Harry Carney, Jimmy Hamilton, Johnny Hodges and Russell Procope, and their tenures with Ellington lasted, respectively, 24, 48, 26, 42 and 18 years.    "Whether I was hungry, sick, broke, or hadn't seen my family in six months or whatever," says the late Russell Procope, "it was all right as soon as I started playing that music.       Producer/director Terry Carter has put together a fascinating two hours of Duke Ellington that eschews the usual year-by year biography for a look inside the musical process. By assembling rare footage of Ellington's band--some of it early Hollywood clips, most of it footage from '60s European television appearances -- along with an impressive assortment of clips of Ellington and his players talking about the music, Carter has gone right to the heart of an extraordinary American musical legend.    Ellington's creative process is laid at our feet. He refers to his "system of very highly personalized writing, so that practically every note that's written is written for some specific instrumentalist in mind." and through the course of the shows we meet many of the players   every one a true-blue original. We also get a welcome focus on Ellington's often-neglected talents as a pianist.  And we see the contradictions: the composer of more than 2,000 works who also had to function as a performer and bandleader   had to hire and fire people, had to think about budgets, had to please the crowd with the oldies while constantly writing new music.    "They get the money, I get the kicks," says Ellington about his players. "I wish I could aff --New York Post