Black, Brown, and Beige

30/10/2016 Black,Brown,AndBeigeTheNewYorker
A CRITIC AT LARGE MAY 17, 2010 ISSUE
BLACK, BROWN, AND BEIGE

Duke Ellingtons music and race in America.
By Claudia Roth Pierpont
Duke Ellington in front of the Apollo Theatre, New York, 1963.
T he basement club was cramped, and the bandstand was so small that, by the
drummers measure, it could hardly hold a fight. The clientele included mobsters,
musicians, and star performers from the nearby Broadway shows, slipping in among the
crowd from the time the band appeared, at about ten oclock, straight on until. The
banjoist who provided the schedule could elaborate no further about how long the
night went on: Until you quit. Until period. After 3 . ., you couldnt get a seat. In
the fall of 1926, the craze for Negro music was already sending savvy white New
Yorkers up to Harlem, but the Kentucky Club, on West Forty-ninth Street, had the
hottest band in town. Trumpets, trombone, saxes, clarinet, tuba, banjo, and drums
nine or so players, huddled on the stand beneath the pipes that ran along the ceiling,
plus the handsome young piano player who led the group while dancers surged around
him on the floor. But the band did more than keep the temperature high and the
dancers moving; its arrangements were so startling that even a familiar number like St.
Louis Blues sounded new. Variety capped a gushing review of the colored combo by
noting that the clubs patronstransfixed jazz boys and civilians alikespent a
remarkable amount of time just sitting around and listening.
Duke Ellington and his Washingtonians had been performing in New York, under one
name or another, for about three years, but their range and ambition were just
beginning to show. As new arrivals, they had practiced the sweet, straight, under
conversation music that had been in demand at the Washington society dances where
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conversation music that had been in demand at the Washington society dances where
the original group members started out, but they had quickly discovered that this
sound was all wrong for New York. Not brazen enough, not rhythmically driving; not
Negro enough; not jazz. In truth, a New York style of jazz hardly existed. In the mid-
twenties, the city oered, instead, a heady variety of musical models, including its own
native Harlem stride pianists (who welcomed Ellington as one of their own); the blues
musicians who were part of the ongoing mass migration from the South; Fletcher
Hendersons big, polished sound; and the great horn players of New Orleans, who
blazed through town now and again like comets. And then there were the resident
players who had absorbed the New Orleanians famed techniques: the trumpeter
Bubber Miley joined the Washingtonians before their first uncertain year was out and,
with his waa-waa outbursts and uncannily human shrieks and cries, quickly blew their
decorum away. Ellington was inspired by Mileys wild expressiveness, even if he
couldnt yet meet it or let go the promise of all the other sounds he heard.
The number that caught Irving Millss attention at the Kentucky Club one night, as he
recalled, was Black and Tan Fantasy, a three-minute musical drama jointly credited to
Ellington and Miley. It isnt dicult to figure out which of the authors did what, as a
throbbingly mournful blues gives way to a refined society tunerough and smooth,
black and tan, Miley and Ellingtonor as Mileys solos rise to a hectoring beauty that
finds ease and release in the bands response. The trumpeters manipulation of a simple
rubber plunger cup over the bell of his horn makes for some irresistibly antic sounds
(the trombonist, not to be outdone, gives a good impression of a whinnying horse), but
the piece delivers an unexpected emotional punch: a concluding ri from Chopins
Funeral March is willfully absurd yet seems to seal the trumpets urgent message. (I
like great big ole tears, Ellington said, teasingly, about audience reactions.) The over-
all eect is at once mocking and chilling, like a funeral cortge with skeletons dancing
behind.
Whether or not Irving Mills shed a tear, he recognized both the artistic merit and the
financial potential of such original work. A song publisher with a special interest in
blues, Mills immediately decided to go into band management, with Duke Ellington
and His Kentucky Club Orchestra (their latest, somewhat grandiloquent billing) as his
initial client. Mills insisted that Ellington concentrate on recording his own
compositions, and that fall the energized players made their first important disks. One
compositions, and that fall the energized players made their first important disks. One
year later, they opened at the Cotton Club.
More than half a century after the Civil War, the most famous night club in New York
was a mock plantation. The bandstand was done up as a white-columned mansion, the
backdrop painted with cotton bushes and slave quarters. And the racial fantasy
extended well beyond dcor: whites who came to Harlem to be entertained were not to
be discomfited by the presence of non-entertaining Negroes. All the performers were
blackor, in the case of the chorus girls, caf au laitand all the patrons white, if not
by force of law then by force of the thugs at the door. Ellington had to ask permission
for friends to see his show. Ironically, it was the Cotton Club that allowed Ellington to
expand his talents, by employing him to arrange and compose for a variety of dancers,
singers, miscellaneous acts, entractes, and theatrical revues. His most extraordinary
talent, however, may have been for making the best of tainted opportunities. For the
big revues, with their plots about black savages and threatened maidens, he devised
music of sophistication and cheekily exotic allure, under such titles as Jungle Blues,
Jungle Night in Harlem, andsinister little masterpieceThe Mooche. But even
before the band sounded a note it delivered a statement: impeccably dressed in
matching tuxedos and boutonnires, its members were of a class with the biggest swells
in the room. And Ellington was the swellest of all: unfailingly soign, magisterially
presiding over the urban jungle, he stood untouched and never lost his smile.
What was he thinking? What did he feel aboutwhat did he contribute tothe mire
of American race relations during the last century? Harvey G. Cohens Duke
Ellingtons America (Chicago; $40) attempts to get under the skin of this apparently
most imperturbable of men, and the results, if hardly conclusive, are fascinating. One of
Ellingtons few confidantes, his sister, Ruth, believed that he concealed himself under
veil upon veil upon veil, and Cohen is not the first Ellingtonian to treasure the
smallest telltale sign of his subjects human susceptibilities. There is, for example, an
uncharacteristically angry letter to a white business associate with whom Ellington
wished to break (which is nevertheless signed with great respect, and turns out not to
have been sent). Cohens extremely intelligent and formidably documented booka
welcome change from much that has been published about Ellingtonis not a
standard biography; Ellingtons personal life and sexual mores are ocially beyond its
scope. Nor is it a critical work, since it contains no musical analysis and not a great deal
scope. Nor is it a critical work, since it contains no musical analysis and not a great deal
of musical description. Cohens long hours in the Smithsonians huge trove of Ellington
papers were devoted to the business records and the scrapbooks, and, as his title
suggests, he has broad social issues on his mind. Even Ellingtons professional life is
examined in circumscribed areas, almost all of which touch at some point upon race.
The question is whether, sooner or later, everything did.
Early in the book, Cohen quotes Ellingtons longtime collaborator Billy Strayhorn
objecting to a movie project about Ellington that Strayhorn was told would have a
racial theme. I dont think it should be racial because I dont think hes racial,
Strayhorn protested. He is an individual. But Strayhorn concluded, in a line of
thinking that seems emblematic of the era and of the personalities involved, You dont
have to say the darn thing. Cohen keeps Ellingtons individuality firmly in sight, while
detailing such targeted subjects as his relationship with Mills, the white man who has
been lauded for launching Ellingtons career andboth before and after they split, in
1939accused of exploitation; Ellingtons travels with his band in the harshly
segregated South of the nineteen-thirties and forties; the overt, if often forgotten, racial
programs of much of his music; and his sometimes contentious relationship with the
civil-rights movement of the nineteen-fifties and sixties.
A dierent set of subjectsEllingtons musical development, his band members, even

his womenmight have yielded something closer to the post-racial portrait for which
Strayhorn argued, a portrait more in accord with the high personal horizon on which
Ellingtons sights were set. But the darn thing will not go away, and race remains
unsurprisingly essential to the story of Americas first widely recognized black artist,
and of what he had to say.
A n unshakable dignity seems to have been instilled in Ellington from childhood,

and Cohen examines the aspiringly genteel society in which the much beloved
boy grew up. Ellingtons father, who worked for years as a butler in a prominent white
home, saw that his familys dinner table was always formally set, no matter the lack of
funds at any given time. His pious mother virtually worshipped her sonwho was her
only child until he was sixteen, when his sister finally came along. And Ellington
worshipped his mother in return; he fondly remembered her playing parlor tunes and
hymns on the pianohe said the music made him cryand he attributed his lifelong
hymns on the pianohe said the music made him cryand he attributed his lifelong
confidence to her frequent assurances that he was blessed, which he had always
believed.
And why not? Edward Kennedy Ellington was born in 1899, in Washington, D.C., at a
time when the nations capital was arguably the best place for an African-American
child to live. The largest urban Negro community in the country maintained its own
opera company, classical-music groups, and literary societies; its segregated schools
taught African history, stressed proper manners and speech, and were intent on
producing students who were, in Ellingtons phrase, representative of a great and proud
race. For many years, from Emancipation through the imposition of onerous racial
restrictions by the Wilson Administration, climaxing in a brutal, white-sparked riot
following the First World War, the upper stratum of the citys black population held to
a proto-Harlem Renaissance ideal: demonstrate how civilized, intelligent, and
accomplished we are, and racism will fade away. One need not demand respect if one
commands it.
Ellington acquired the nickname Duke on the brink of adolescence, and, whatever its
source (accounts dier), it indicates the superior impression that the boy already made
not an insignificant trait in an era when outstanding black musicians were known
professionally as Bubber, Sonny, and Cootie. If he was intended for leadership, however,
it clearly wasnt going to proceed from his scholastic eorts. Although his schooling
may have aorded him an inner strength, Ellington was a careless student, even in
music (where his only grade on record is a D). But then he didnt respond to formal
training of any kind. Early piano lessons failed to hold his interest, and he learned to
play mostly on his own, mastering James P. Johnsons notoriously dicult Carolina
Shoutwell enough to impress Johnsonby slowing down the piano roll and
matching his fingers to the depressed keys. When he wanted to go further, he charmed
his way into pickup lessons from the professionals who hung out in the local poolroom.
He was careful to point out, later on, that these early masters included both
conservatory-trained musicians and unschooled ear cats who couldnt read a note, and
that he had freely learned from both.
Charm, drive, and an audacious talent: he was barely out of his teens before he had
Charm, drive, and an audacious talent: he was barely out of his teens before he had
established the Dukes Serenaders and several other nicely profitable dance bands, and
was supporting himselfand a wife and babyin style. Yet, by his own account, even
when he felt sure enough to try his fortunes in New York, age twenty-four, he had
never actually written music. He had composed a few songs in his early years, and
began composing again as soon as he hit Tin Pan Alley, but he had never written
anything down and wasnt entirely certain that he could. Ellington was himself
something of an ear cat, and even as he learned what he needed to know, and his
music became increasingly complex, his instinctual bias was for the more instinctual
art. Partly, this was the natural democrats appreciation of the tough and unschooled
African-American gutbucket sound; partly it was the natural aristocrats desire to
make everything look easy. (How was I to know that composers had to go up in the
mountains, or to the seashore, to commune with the muses for six months?) Other
popular composers have faced similar gaps between their early training and their goals;
George Gershwins solution was to make himself a lifelong student, working with a
series of teachers on harmony, counterpoint, orchestration. Ellington didnt have the
temperament for this approach, nor did it appear to oer what he needed. He had
something all his own, something that made the arduous process of writing music yield
immediate and exhilarating results: he had his band.
The scrappy band of the early Kentucky Club days became an orchestra of a dozen
players at the Cotton Club. But Ellington wanted an even larger sound: more color,
more detail, more possibilities. By the time of the first European tour, in 1933, there
were fourteen players, plus a vocalist; the group that was ultimately known as Duke
Ellington and His Famous Orchestra had grown, by the mid-forties, to nineteen
players, travelling and recording together, working and virtually living together, fifty-
two weeks a year. These musicians were Ellingtons inspiration, not merely as
professionals but as individuals with irreplaceable musical personalities. He did not
write a Concerto for Trumpet, in 1939; rather, it was a Concerto for Cootiethat
is, a work designed for the specific articulations of the superb trumpet player Cootie
Williams, who replaced Bubber Miley and had already been with Ellington for about
ten years. (You cant write music right, Ellington told this magazine, more than sixty
years ago, unless you know how the man thatll play it plays poker.)
But these musicians were sometimes his collaborators in a more unusual way, described
But these musicians were sometimes his collaborators in a more unusual way, described
by reporters who sat in, marvelling, on working sessions. Ellington would start o with
a melody, or even just a few bars that were quickly tweaked and critiqued into a theme.
Then, one by one, the improvisations beganBarney Bigard on clarinet, Johnny
Hodges on alto saxophone, Tricky Sam Nanton on trombone were all especially fluent
with each player improving on the last players phrases, elaborating and extending,
while the trombonist /copyist Juan Tizol caught the accumulating eects on paper
(albeit not quite as fast as they kept coming). Ellington approved or rejected the
additions, made changes and issued challenges, then usually took the results home and
worked the whole thing over. The next day, there would be a few hours of refinement
and repetition, until the piece was fixed and memorized. (Ellington always preferred
memorization: how could you let loose if your nose was stuck in a score?) By this
method, the time for creating or arranging a new numbermost numbers were about
three minutes long, the standard length of a 78-r.p.m. recordingappears to have been
just two days. My band is my instrument, Ellington said, and the way he played it
explains his musics extraordinary mixture of freedom and control.
This collaborative process could create diculties when Ellington employed a melody
that he had overheard one of the musicians playing, or that a musician had sold him for
a regulation fee. The main tune of Concerto for Cootie, for example, was something
that Ellington bought from Williams for twenty-five dollars, a sum believed to be
reasonable by both parties until, a few years later, words were added and it became a hit
as Do Nothing Till You Hear from Mewith no royalties for Williams. Johnny
Hodges, the bands most gorgeously lyrical player and a fount of melodyhe
contributed the tunes for Dont Get Around Much Anymore and I Let a Song Go
Out of My Heartbecame so annoyed that, during performances, he mimed rubbing
dollar bills between his fingers when Ellington launched into a number that Hodges
felt was rightly his. One of Ellingtons most beloved songs, Sophisticated Lady, has
several contributing claims and was described by the trombonist Lawrence Brown as
one of those where everybody jumps in.
But, as Billy Strayhorn pointed out, the various contested melodies were musical scraps
that would not have amounted to anything had Ellington not labored to smooth out
rough parts, create harmonies, add bridges, and set them in a coherent musical frame.
None of Ellingtons musiciansnot even Strayhornever composed a hit on his own.

None of Ellingtons musiciansnot even Strayhornever composed a hit on his own.

Most important, all these works turned out to sound purely and recognizably like
Ellington. For those who doubted that he was a real composer, here was the
conundrum: How could the band have created Ellington, when Ellington created the
band?
Despite the air of insouciance, Ellington took his composing seriously. It was gratifying
to have people sit and listen to his music in a proper theatre, as they did for the first
time in 1930, when the band accompanied Maurice Chevalier during a Broadway run
and filled out the bill for an entire act. Coast-to-coast radio broadcasts from the
Cotton Club had won the band an enormous following, and it gave concert-style
performances throughout its first national tour, in 1931, usually performing in movie
theatres between shows. Recordings had similarly prepared the way in England and
France, where, in 1933, the band appeared on variety bills in the biggest venues, and
was met with a respect that, for all its popularity, it had never known at home.
Members of the group were suddenly being discussed not merely as entertainers but as
artists, and it seemed that every note they played was considered to bein the words
of one British criticdirectly an expression of Dukes genius.
The past, Your Honor, is a foreign country, and we did things dierently there.
Artist. Genius. Claims of this sort had been made before the European tour, but during
the mid-thirties they began to take hold. Cohen documents Irving Millss long-term
publicity campaign to build his client just such a gold-plated image, unprecedented for
an African-American. It does not impugn Millss belief in Ellingtons artistry to note
that his goal was to share this belief with the increasingly large, white, record-buying
public. Most of the campaign revolved around Ellingtons gifts as a composer (Again!
ran the ad for a new song, Solitude, in 1935. The stamp of Ellingtons genius!), and
Ellington fed the fire with the release of several longer compositions. Creole
Rhapsody (1931), Reminiscing in Tempo (1935), and the conjoined Diminuendo
and Crescendo in Blue (1937) all took up two or more sides of 78-r.p.m. recordings
until then a length generally granted only to works of classical music, and a sign that
Ellington was extending the notion of musical seriousness beyond its conventional
bounds. He told reporters that he was working on a symphonic suite and an opera,
both based on the history of the American Negro people. It was just a matter of time
both based on the history of the American Negro people. It was just a matter of time
before he got to Carnegie Hall.
W hat we could not say openly, we expressed in music, Ellington wrote in the
British magazine Rhythm, in 1931, trying to explain the Negro musical
tradition that had grown up in America, music forged from the very white heat of our
sorrows. All his life, Ellington gave the impression of having been unscathed by
racism, either in his early yearscolor, he said, was never even mentioned in his
parents homeor during the long professional decades when it defined almost every
move he made: where he could play his music, who could come to listen to it, whether
he could stay in a hotel or attend another musicians show, and where (or whether) he
could find something to eat when the show was over. The orchestra made its first
Southern tour just after its return from England, in 1933, travelling (thanks to Mills)
in supremely insulated style: two private Pullman cars for sleeping and dining, and a
separate baggage car for the elaborate wardrobe, scenery, and lights required to present
a show more dazzling than any that most of the sleepy little towns where they made
their stops had ever seen. Ellington made a special eort to perform for black
audiences, even when it meant that the band added a midnight show in a place where
it had performed earlier that night exclusively for whites. Reports from both racial
groups were that the players outdid themselves; it is dicult to know where they felt
they had more to prove.
Segregation was hardly peculiar to the South, of course, any more than it was limited,
in New York, to the Cotton Club and its ilk. The down-and-dirty Kentucky Club had
been no dierent: even without thugs at the door, there was an unspoken citywide
dictate about where the dierent races belonged. The only exceptions were the Black
and Tans, the few Harlem clubs that permitted casual racial mixing, and to which
Ellington seems to have been paying tongue-in-cheek tribute with the not-quite-
meshing themes of Black and Tan Fantasy. This was the first number played, after
The Star-Spangled Banner, at Ellingtons landmark Carnegie Hall concert, in
January, 1943, although the piece sounded very dierent from his twenties hit: taken at
a slower tempo, with extended solos, it was twice its original lengthso deliberative it
seemed a kind of statementand showed o the burnished power of Ellingtons forties
band.
But much of the program that night made a statement. There were no pop vocals;
But much of the program that night made a statement. There were no pop vocals;
Ellington presented a trio of new musical portraits of the historic black performers
Bert Williams, Bill (Bojangles) Robinson, and Florence Mills; even the brassy
instrumental Ko-Ko, of 1940, was, Ellington told the audience, meant to portray the
square in New Orleans where slaves had once come together to dancethe place
where jazz was born. Everything was designed to set o Black, Brown and Beige, a
three-movement composition, some forty-five minutes long, that had been advertised
as Duke Ellingtons first symphony and that Ellington described as a parallel to the
history of the American Negro. It seems unlikely that any other musical dbut has
carried such hope of repairing divisions: between jazz and classical, between black and
white. The audience itself was described in the press as black, brown, and beige
hardly the usual Carnegie crowdand included Eleanor Roosevelt, Leopold
Stokowski, Count Basie, and Frank Sinatra, all waiting for the revelation of a truly
uniting, truly American music.
Black, Brown and Beige had an elaborate scenario, which Ellington only hinted at in
his spoken remarks. The first and most richly developed section, Black, began with a
powerful work song launched on the timpani and moved on to a homemade hymn of
celestial longing; Ellington spoke, rather obliquely, of these related aspects of the lives
of slaves. (A recording of the concert, complete with Ellingtons remarks, was released
in the nineteen-seventies.) Brown, far more disjointed, took on Emancipation and
the Negros loyal service in a series of American wars (a matter of obvious relevance in
1943), before concluding with a darkly discordant, sung blues. Beige, which brought
the piece up to contemporary Harlem, was the weakest section, perhaps because
Ellington was still working on it the night before the concert, but it stirred him to
remarks about the veneer of progress and a people who still dont have enough to eat
and a place to sleep. Even these mildly critical observations were quickly buried,
however, with his reassurance that, these days, we, of course, find the black, brown, and
beige right in there for the red, white, and blue. The patriotism and the exuberance are
aecting, and entirely apt for a concert that served as a benefit for Russian war relief
and also marked Ellingtons twentieth anniversary in music. What these sentiments do
not jibe with, entirely, are the stark and angry words that he meant the music to
express.
Comprising twenty-nine handwritten pages, and drawing on several previous drafts,

Comprising twenty-nine handwritten pages, and drawing on several previous drafts,

Ellingtons scenario was grounded in extensive reading and research. An opening
section about the proud history of African civilizations quotes from the anthropologist
Franz Boas, as transmitted by W. E. B. Du Boisbut is only fleetingly suggested in the
opening drums of Black. A detailed section on the horrors of the Middle Passage
includes scenes of mutilation and sounds of screaming that Ellington described as a
symphony of torture. Neither the scenes nor the sounds became part of the completed
work. The scenario for Brown honors the leaders of violent slave rebellionsnot
mentioned againand the light caf-concert music for Beige comes nowhere close to
addressing Ellingtons lines: Who brought the dope / And made a rope / of it, to hang
you / In your misery . . . / And Harlem . . . / Howd you come to be / Permitted / In a
land thats free? Cohen speculates that Ellington muted his message because of the
probable cost to his prominent media status or, alternatively, because he genuinely
believed that he would have greater eect through his music than through
confrontation. Another reason is suggested in the scenario itself, where Ellington
explains that African-American song began when a clever slave decided to placate and
yet evade his master: Ill sing, and hide my thoughts from him.
Black, Brown and Beige was torn apart by the major critics. It is dicult not to
wonder if Ellingtons work was damaged by his holding back so much of what he
wanted to sayif his unyielding self-control was not sometimes less than ideal for his
art. Or if the problem, as critics charged, was that he had simply not acquired the
technique for an extended work. Judged as jazz, the composition was deemed
unrecognizable; judged as classical music, it was found formless and meaningless, a
series of poorly connected parts that did not add up to a whole. Cohen is not the first
to retort that Black, Brown and Beige should not be judged by prexisting standards
that its abrupt musical transitions were not a shortcoming but a choiceand that
the composer had achieved exactly what he intended. But Ellington was so discouraged
by the reviews that, after the Carnegie concert, he performed the full work twice more,
and never again. He recorded only some abbreviated and reworked sections. Near the
end of his life, he said that the music was less interesting than the script.
He did not stop writing longer pieces, although they now came mostly in the form of
suites, with separate sections bound by an inclusive theme, and no pretension to the
kind of unity he had so publicly failed to achieve. Almost all these works were written
kind of unity he had so publicly failed to achieve. Almost all these works were written
in close collaboration with Billy Strayhorn, whose shimmering semi-classical touch
became as much a part of the Ellington sound through the next decades as the
growling brass had been during the jungle years; it is possible that no one will ever
disentangle which of the pair composed exactly what parts of a long series of works,
from The Perfume Suite, in 1945, to Far East Suite, more than twenty years later.
Yet the band remained no less a part of Ellingtons creative life; no other group could
get the sound he wanted, and few were even equipped to try. More, he needed his
players to give color and form to the musical sketches that now poured forth
unceasingly: waking or eating, walking or showering, on a crowded train surrounded by
rowdy musicians or in a quiet car travelling through the weary night from one small-
town job to another.
I t was an ungrateful era. The Harlem craze was dead, the Cotton Club was closed,
and the war that had been fought for democracy, equality, and freedomEllington
had been a true believer, selling War Bonds on the radio and opening concerts with
The Star-Spangled Bannerhad done nothing to improve the status of the countrys
Negro citizens. In order to stay together, the band had taken to relentless touring. And,
with private Pullman cars a luxury of the past, racial indignities had become an
inevitable part of present life: Ellington was reported to be especially fearful of
venturing into any place where he risked being turned away. Yet even as the smaller
combos of the rising bebop movement drove other big bands out of business, and as
Duke Ellington and His Famous Orchestra found themselves playing an endless series
of one-night stands, Ellington pressed on, not merely a Jazz Age survivor but, it
seemed, the last believer in big-band jazz as a living, developing art. The new works
especially the longer onesdidnt always go over with the record companies (RCA
Victor waited years to release The Perfume Suite), or with the audience, or even,
sometimes, with the players. (We didnt like the tone poems much, Johnny Hodges
admitted when he and a couple of other band members took o on their own, in
1951.) Disappointed critics prescribed a choice: the centurys most important jazz
composer could narrow his focus, concentrate, and composeor lead the band and
tour until he dropped. Not both.
For Ellington it would have been like choosing his heart over his lungs; the whole
For Ellington it would have been like choosing his heart over his lungs; the whole
system by now worked together or not at all. The choice was apparently personal as
well as musical: he loved the life of the road, surrounded by people yet essentially alone.
(He and his wife had separated early on. A famed sexual raconteur, he was rumored to
have a woman waiting at every stop.) Cohen points out that Ellington could have been
a rich man if he had stayed home, collected royalties, and composed. The band had
become a very expensive proposition, and was subsidized largely by those royalties from
long-ago hits. Even when it had a big resurgence, thanks to an appearance at the
Newport Festival, in 1956, the stir was due not to the newly minted Newport Festival
Suite but to a crazily exciting six-minute improvisation by the saxophonist Paul
Gonsalves, played between the paired 1937 pieces Diminuendo and Crescendo in
Blue. Contrary to the long-term concertizing trend in Ellingtons music, the
performance got people back on their feet and dancing again, and got Ellington on the
cover of Time.
His renewed stature did not prevent controversy in the black community, however,
when, in 1959, the N.A.A.C.P. gave Ellington its highest award. Recipients during the
previous couple of years had been Martin Luther King, Jr., and the civil-rights activists
Daisy Bates and the Little Rock Nine. Now the editorial pages of African-American
newspapers doubtfully inquired: What had Ellington done to deserve this honor? It
wasnt just a question of what music had to do with civil rights; Jackie Robinson had
won in 1956, with no such questions raised about baseball. Rather, as the Time article
had put it, Duke is not a militant foe of segregation. It went on to note that he plays
for segregated audiences on his annual swings through the South, and added that
Ellington had explained, with a verbal shrug, Everybody does.
What had he done to deserve the honor? The plainly factual answer is that he had
raised a lot of money over the years playing benefits for the N.A.A.C.P., and for many
other organizations that had asked for his help. But there were deeper answers.
Ellington, oended by the accusation that he had been silent on civil rights, replied
that those who doubted him had simply failed to use their ears. Theyve not been
listening to our music, he said. For a long time, social protest and pride in black
culture and history have been the most significant themes in what weve done. In sum:
We have been talking for a long time about what it is to be black in this country. For
Ellington, being black in this country meant approaching dicult issues in strategically13/36
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/05/17/blackbrownandbeige
Ellington, being black in this country meant approaching dicult issues in strategically
dierent ways. Earlier in the fifties, he had quarrelled with the N.A.A.C.P., in fact,
over playing segregated theatres, arguing that his musicians needed to make a living,
and that the N.A.A.C.P. ought to focus on more urgent matters (such as the toilets
and water fountains in colored waiting rooms). At the same time, he had written
privately to President Truman, asking if Trumans daughter, Margareta concert singer
might serve as honorary chairwoman for an N.A.A.C.P. benefit, the proceeds of
which were to be used to stamp out segregation, discrimination, bigotry, and other
American ills. The letter was discovered by the music historian John Edward Hasse in
the Truman Library, with Ellingtons request marked with the word No! underlined
twice.
Cohen vigorously defends Ellington against critics and historians, both past and
present, who have ignored the nonverbal communication that is the real basis of his
contribution. The language of music is, of course, allusive; the language of protest, as it
was developing in the late fifties, was, of necessity, directand therefore depended on
words, which helps to explain the presence of white folksingers in the forefront of the
movement where black jazz musicians might be expected to stand. But even when
Ellington used words, he preferred to remain allusive (and elusive). In the wake of the
1957 school-desegregation battles in Little Rock, Charles Mingus recharged the
relation of jazz to politics by composing Fables of Faubus, featuring less than
flattering lyrics about the Arkansas governor; Ellington recorded a new version of the
hymn from Black, Brown and Beige, titled Come Sunday, in which Mahalia
Jackson, pleading with the Lord to see my people through, evokes both Heaven and a
country redeemed.
His eorts became more direct during the next few years. In 1960, Ellington agreed to
accompany some Johns Hopkins students, after a performance, to a Baltimore
restaurant that had turned black students away, and to be captured by a local
photographer being turned away himself; it was a major act in terms of the cost to his
pride. In 1961, his booking contracts began to stipulate that he would not play before
segregated audiences. He led a State Department tour, in 1963, designed to counter the
news stories about American racism that were proving so useful to the Communist
cause, and Cohen believes its political dividends helped to spur the passage of the 1965
Civil Rights Act. Cohen oers many other examples of Ellington as a sometimes
Civil Rights Act. Cohen oers many other examples of Ellington as a sometimes
surreptitious race leader, but it is almost embarrassing that he should have to make
the eort. Celebrating Ellingtons seventieth birthday, in 1969, Ralph Ellison recalled
what it was like when, in his youth, in the thirties, the Ellington band came to
Oklahoma City with their uniforms, their sophistication, their skills; their golden
horns, their flights of controlled and disciplined fantasy, all of it like news from the
great wide world. For black boys like Ellison all over the country, the band had been
an example and goal, he wrote. Who elseblack or whitehad ever been so
worldly, who so elegant, who so mockingly creative? Who so skilled at their given trade
and who treated the social limitations placed in their paths with greater disdain?
Two years before Ellington died, in 1972, Yale University held a gathering of leading
black jazz musicians in order to raise money for a department of African-American
music. Aside from Ellington, the musicians who came for three days of concerts, jam
sessions, and workshops included Eubie Blake, Noble Sissle, Dizzy Gillespie, Charles
Mingus, Max Roach, Mary Lou Williams, and Willie (the Lion) Smith. During a
performance by a Gillespie-led sextet, someone evidently unhappy with this presence
on campus called in a bomb threat. The police attempted to clear the building, but
Mingus refused to leave, urging the ocers to get all the others out but adamantly
remaining onstage with his bass. Racism planted that bomb, but racism aint strong
enough to kill this music, he was heard telling the police captain. (And very few
people successfully argued with Mingus.) If Im going to die, Im ready. But Im going
out playing Sophisticated Lady. Once outside, Gillespie and his group set up again.
But coming from inside was the sound of Mingus intently playing Ellingtons dreamy
thirties hit, which, that day, became a protest song, as the performance just kept going
on and on and getting hotter. In the street, Ellington stood in the waiting crowd just
beyond the theatres open doors, smiling.
Claudia Roth Pierpont has been a contributor to The New Yorker since 1990 and became a sta writer in
2004.
MORE: COMPOSERS RACISM CARNEGIEHALL RACE HARLEM
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30/10/2016 Black,Brown,AndBeigeTheNewYorker

A CRITIC AT LARGE MAY 17, 2010 ISSUE

Duke Ellington in front of the Apollo Theatre, New York, 1963.

A dierent set of subjectsEllingtons musical development, his band members, even

A n unshakable dignity seems to have been instilled in Ellington from childhood,

None of Ellingtons musiciansnot even Strayhornever composed a hit on his own.

None of Ellingtons musiciansnot even Strayhornever composed a hit on his own.

Comprising twenty-nine handwritten pages, and drawing on several previous drafts,

Comprising twenty-nine handwritten pages, and drawing on several previous drafts,

MORE: COMPOSERS RACISM CARNEGIEHALL RACE HARLEM

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