Ellington, who is said to have declined an invitation to participate in the "From Spirituals to Swing" extravaganza of American folk- and entertainment-circuit music staged there in 1938­39 by a jazz enthusiast and booster named John Hammond, certainly seems to have regarded his performance of a program of his own arrangements and compositions at Carnegie Hall as a very special historic achievement not only for his career but also for the idiom of American music that he represented.

So for the occasion, in addition to the premiere of Black, Brown and Beige a forty-five-minute tone parallel to the history of American Negroes, composed specifically for concert performance, the program included such already unmistakably Ellingtonian items as "Black and Tan Fantasy," "Rockin' in Rhythm," "Portrait of Bert Williams," "(Portrait of) Bojangles," "Ko-Ko," "Jack the Bear," "Cottontail," "Boy Meets Horn," "Don't Get Around Much Anymore," "Mood Indigo," and others.

In contrast to generally enthusiastic approval from reporters and reviewers in the realm of popular music, the so-called regular music critics, unlike a significant number of their European counterparts, tended to be condescending and dismissive, especially of Black, Brown and Beige. Said one, "Such a form of composition is entirely out of Ellington's ken." As for the other selections, they were approached as if their brevity were more important than their musical content. Conspicuously absent from all the condescension, however, was any evidence of practical understanding and appreciation of the dynamics of the evolution of national cultural identity in the arts comparable to that to be found in Constance Rourke's American Humor: A Study of the National Character (1932) and her posthumous Roots of American Culture and Other Essays (1942); or in John A. Kouwenhoven's Made in America, the Arts in American Modern Civilization (1948) and The Beer Can by the Highway: Essays on What's "American" about America (1961).

Not only was the Carnegie Hall concert a commercial success that turned out to be the first of a series of annual Ellington at Carnegie Hall concerts--some previewed or repeated in comparably prestigious auditoriums in Chicago and Boston--but it can also be said to have played a crucial role in making a significant number of Americans aware that a form of American music had achieved the status of fine art of universal appeal through the extension, elaboration and refinement of folk and pop fare by means of such vernacular devices of stylization as vamps, riffs, blues choruses, pop-song choruses, breaks, fills, call-and-response sequences (solo to ensemble, solo to solo, ensemble to ensemble), turnarounds, substitutions, among others, including idiomatic timbres, harmonies, elementary-level onomatopoeia (especially of the pre-diesel and -electric locomotives), plus a combination of individual sensibility and skill at on-the-spot improvisation required for effective participation in a jam session.

Between the first Carnegie Hall concert in 1943 and his death in 1974 at the age of 75, Ellington went on to compose, perform and record such extended works as Deep South Suite, The Liberian Suite, Tone Parallel to Harlem, A Tonal Group (Melloditti, Fugeaditti, Jam-A-Ditty), The Tattooed Bride, Night Creature, Such Sweet Thunder, Toot Suite (Red Shoes, Red Carpet, Red Garter, Ready Go!), Anatomy of a Murder, The River, The Goutelas Suite, Afro-Eurasian Eclipse, The New Orleans Suite, U Wis Suite, Suite Thursday and the Degas Suite, among others.

Shorter but no less important works such as Mainstem, Cottontail, Someone, Idiom '59, Opus 69, Let the Zoomers Drool, Track 360, Satin Doll, Laying on Mellow, In a Mellotone, Sepia Panorama, C-Jam Blues, B.P., Volupté, The Purple Gazelle, Afro-Bossa, Black Swan and others not only outnumber those of any other jazz arranger/composer but also exceed them all in variety. And there are enough vocal vehicles such as "Sophisticated Lady," "Solitude," "I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart," "I Got It Bad," "Rocks in My Bed," "I'm Just a Lucky So and So," "Everything But You" and "Prelude to a Kiss" to qualify him as an outstanding songwriter.

When Lincoln Center, which includes the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, Metropolitan Opera, New York City Ballet and The Juilliard School, inaugurated its first year-round program of Jazz at Lincoln Center, Duke Ellington's music was the definitive source of its approach to jazz composition, and his orchestra was the comprehensive model upon which the now internationally admired Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra is based.

Such is the context in which Jazz at Lincoln Center has elected to take the leading role that it will play in the yearlong worldwide centennial birthday celebration of Duke Ellington in 1999. During which repeated, most-honorable mention should be made of Jeannette Thurber, who, according to an article by J.E. Vacha in the September 1992 issue of American Heritage, titled "Dvorak in America," "didn't merely endorse her director's theories [about the importance of 'Negro melodies' in American music], she backed them up with concrete actions. The same article that carried the Dvorak interview also announced her decision to open the National Conservatory to black students. Tuition would be waived for the most gifted."

Two who achieved historic distinction were Harry T. Burleigh and Will Marion Cook. Burleigh, who became an outstanding singer (and who incidentally served as soloist at St. George's Episcopal Church from 1894 to 1946 and concurrently at Temple Emmanu-El from 1900 to 1925), is most widely celebrated for his choral arrangements of such "classic" Negro spirituals as "Deep River," "My Lord What a Morning," "There Is a Balm in Gilead," "Were You There?" "Everytime I Feel the Spirit" and "Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho."

Will Marion Cook, who had been an outstanding young violinist at the Oberlin Conservatory and the Berlin Hochschule, was primarily interested in composition at the National Conservatory, and he went on to collaborate with poet Paul Laurence Dunbar on "Clorindy, the Origin of the Cakewalk," a musical-comedy sketch, plus a number of other musicals on his own and with other collaborators. He also served as musical director for the legendary Williams and Walker Variety Show Company. But perhaps his most celebrated undertaking was his organization and direction of the Southern Syncopated Orchestra, with which he made a highly successful national tour in 1918 and took to England and high acclaim in 1919.

It was Will Marion Cook (also from Washington, by the way) who was Ellington's most direct connection to Dvorak and Jeannette Thurber. Not only did Ellington already admire him enough by 1919 to name his son Mercer after Cook's son, he also sought him out in New York and began an informal mentor-and-protégé relationship that lasted until Cook's death in 1944. Incidentally, for all of his highly impressive formal training, Cook's technical advice to Ellington was entirely consistent with the dynamics of the vernacular imperative: Don't be restricted by the established rules. Proceed in terms of what is most natural to your own individual sensibility. Obviously, the devices most natural to Ellington's personal (which is to say idiomatic) sensibility were those of ragtime, the blues and the pop-song chorus. This suggests that as enthusiastic about American folk music as Dvorak was, he may have mistaken the vernacular devices peculiar to European music for universal principles of composition. Ellington did not.

• « Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.