The Ellington Century (49 page)

Ellington risked even greater acrimony in giving musical shape to the African American experience. The black community had long debated the lessons to be drawn from its history. At the turn of the century Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois laid down contrasting goals of self-sufficiency and equality, economic power and civil rights. Their positions evolved as the center of African American life moved from the rural south to northern cities. Older black leaders such as DuBois and Alain Locke encouraged African American artists to seek a new maturity of expression by pursuing European high art standards of “discipline, restraint, austerity and resolution.”
¹⁰
They were suspicious of jazz and the blues. Younger artists like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, however, embraced the new music and all it represented. Hughes
wrote, “We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our dark-skinned selves without fear or shame”.
¹¹
After the flourishing of the Harlem Renaissance and its vision of the “New Negro” in the 1920s, the Depression devastated black communities everywhere. Many black intellectuals and artists, like Paul Robeson, Richard Wright, and Langston Hughes, joined the Communist Party and at times viewed the Soviet Union as a better friend than the United States. Relations with the party, though, were complex. As Martin Duberman wrote, the party's “aggressively secular scorn for Christian institutions and values, so central to the culture of Afro-Americans, seriously constricted its appeal to the black masses”. As part of its Popular Front stance in the late 1930s, however, the party “threw itself into pronounced support for black arts, helping to sponsor a variety of efforts to encourage black theater, history and music.”
¹²

Once the United States entered the war racial tensions escalated. A segregated army, perpetuating American racism, drafted young black men to fight Nazi racism. While white workers found employment in the burgeoning defense industry, blacks were barred from these jobs; as white America suddenly prospered, the Depression only deepened in Harlem. The
Amsterdam Star-News
described an “upsurge of rebellion, bordering on open hostility” within its community.
¹³
Meanwhile, the Communist Party (which had already lost much credibility due to the Hitler-Stalin pact) made Russian relief a greater priority than improving conditions for African Americans. Even as black political leaders pressed the administration to increase opportunities for black workers, Harlem erupted in riots. How would
Black, Brown and Beige
mirror this complex and fast-changing political climate?

BLACK, BROWN AND BEIGE:
WHAT ARE WE FIGHTING FOR?

Black, Brown and Beige
premiered on January 23, 1943, at a benefit concert for Russian War Relief, and thus appeared at the crossroads of two different and competing causes. The audience may have expected to hear something suitably patriotic. Owing to the propaganda power of radio broadcasts, music played an unprecedented wartime role, whether in the classical form of Shostakovich's Symphony no. 7 (“Leningrad”), which had been smuggled out of the besieged Soviet Union, or in the popular music of the Andrews Sisters and Glenn Miller. Even before the war, didactic anti-Nazi works like Kurt Weill's
Eternal Road
and
Ballad for Americans
by Earl Robinson and John La Touche established a genre of inspirational populist music that would continue with Copland's
Lincoln Portrait
, Blitzstein's
Symphony: The Airborne
, and Schoenberg's
Survivor from Warsaw.
Although Ellington had been contemplating
Black, Brown and Beige
since the early 1930s, it premiered in the context of these wartime works at a time when, as Ellington said to the audience, the Black, Brown, and Beige would once again fight for the Red, White, and Blue. Given the nature of the occasion he could not say explicitly that he hoped they would be rewarded for their services better than they had been in previous wars, but the message was encoded, perhaps too deeply, in the music.

A sold-out, celebrity-packed house cheered the Ellington band's first Carnegie Hall concert, and it received wide attention in the press. Eleanor Roosevelt was in attendance, and Frank Sinatra greeted Ellington backstage during a break from his own show at the Paramount. (Ellington wrote Sinatra's name, address, and phone number at the top of his first sketch for
Black.
He had begun composing the new work a month earlier in Hartford, Connecticut, where the band shared the bill with the emerging blue-eyed singer.) Ellington's manager, William Morris, who was also active in the Russian relief movement, had declared January 17-23 National Ellington Week, and midway through the sold-out concert Ellington received a plaque signed by such luminaries of American music as Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Cab Calloway, Earl Hines, Count Basie, Lena Horne and Paul Whiteman, Leopold Stokowski, Walter Damrosch, Marian Anderson, Paul Robe-son, Roy Harris, Aaron Copland, Kurt Weill, Jerome Kern, and Chico Marx.

The concert reinstated Ellington's place of honor in the jazz world after two years of disruption. Jimmy Blanton's early death in July 1942 and the departures of Cootie Williams, Ivie Anderson, and Barney Bigard threatened to terminate the achievement of the “Blanton/Webster” band of 1940 and 1941. Battles between ASCAP, the musicians' union, and the broadcast and recording industries interrupted the development of repertory and records. Responding to obstacles creatively, Ellington had relocated to Hollywood in January 1941. In addition to the usual schedule of ballroom performances the band made five short films and performed in the musical review
Jump for Joy
, which ran from July 10 to September 27, 1941. As Michael Denning points out, the show mixed the revue format of Ellington's Cotton Club shows with the edgy political commentary of
Pins and Needles
, the union-sponsored topical
musical that opened in New York in 1937 with its theme “Sing Me a Song with Social Significance”.

By 1941, however, the war had already altered the tone and terms of political protest. Anticipating that the war effort against Nazi racism might finally bring an end to racial discrimination in America,
Jump for Joy
celebrated (with Paul Webster's lyrics) the imminent death of Uncle Tom, blackface, and the other stereotypes that still reigned in the American theater:

Fare thee well, land of cotton,

Cotton lisle

is out of style,

Honey chile,

Jump for joy.

Jump for Joy
took shape just as A. Philip Randolph was planning a march on Washington to protest employment discrimination in the defense industries. Ellington showed his support of the cause on Lincoln's birthday in 1941 in the radio address “We, Too, Sing America”, its title echoing Langston Hughes's poem. Ellington declared, “The Negro is the creative voice of America…. We fought America's wars, provided her labor, gave her music, kept alive her flickering conscience, prodded her on toward the yet unachieved goal, democracy.”
¹⁴
During the run of the show Ellington also supported such leftist groups as the Veterans of the Lincoln Brigade, the Hollywood Democratic Committee, and the Independent Citizen's Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions, and along with Herb Jeffries and Ivie Anderson he performed excerpts from the show on NBC's
Salute to Labor.

Even though a few of its songs (“I Got It Bad”, “Chocolate Shake”, “Rocks in My Bed”) became popular,
Jump for Joy
never made it to Broadway; after Pearl Harbor its irreverent tone may have seemed out of line. Protest now had to take a backseat to patriotism. Ellington spent most of 1942 on the road, returning to Hollywood in the fall for two full-length films,
Cabin in the Sky
and
Reveille with Beverly
, and also making recordings for the Armed Forces Radio Service. The January 1943 Carnegie Hall benefit concert was simultaneously a triumphant return to New York and a high point in Ellington's political visibility. The stakes were high.

The live recording demonstrates that the Ellington Orchestra was more than up to the occasion; the critical sniping that ensued may simply illustrate the danger of giving an audience too much of a good thing,
though it also exposed the usual cultural prejudices. In the
Herald Tribune
, Paul Bowles, while noting the vociferous approval of the audience, warned that “the whole attempt to fuse jazz as a form with art music should be discouraged…. One might say they operate on different wave lengths; it is impossible to tune them in simultaneously.”
¹⁵
Heard today the concert sounds like a peak moment in the history of American music, a nonstop display of virtuosity and creativity (with new works by Ellington, Strayhorn, Mercer Ellington, Juan Tizol, and Mary Lou Williams) compared to which Paul Whiteman's far more celebrated Experiment in Modern Music of 1924 was, with the exception of one piece,
Rhapsody in Blue
, an overhyped dud. The program opened with “The Star-Spangled Banner” (begun solemnly, but gradually speeding up and ending with a brazen added six chord, which Stravinsky may have imitated at the conclusion of his 1945 Symphony in Three Movements), followed by Ellington's own anthem, “Black and Tan Fantasy”, in its epically slo-mo rearrangement of 1938. Although it featured such chestnuts as “Black Beauty”, “Rockin' in Rhythm”, and “Mood Indigo”, most of the other pieces on the program were of recent vintage.

Avoiding the expected, Ellington's program broke with the quasi-historical scenarios of earlier crossover concerts. Paul Whiteman's Experiment in Modern Music, for instance, had laid out a didactic evolution from the “primitive” jazz of “Livery Stable Blues” to Gershwin's sleek symphonic jazz. Two concerts at Carnegie Hall in the late 1930s, produced by John Hammond, figured jazz history as a move from spirituals to swing.
¹⁶
By contrast, Ellington's program looked like a sprawling patchwork quilt of familiar and novel jazz numbers wrapped around a monumental and original trilogy that defied the very category of jazz. Placed at the center of the concert, before the intermission,
Black, Brown and Beige
lasted some forty-eight minutes; the three-part suite was Ellington's long-promised panorama, or “tone parallel”, of African American history.

In its length (four times that of “Reminiscing in Tempo”) and the burden of its content,
Black, Brown and Beige
was unprecedented in jazz composition. Comparable African American works like William Grant Still's Symphony no. 1 or James. P. Johnson's
Harlem Symphony
, both composed for symphony orchestra, mixed jazz elements with symphonic gestures within familiar formal outlines. Ellington, though, scored
Black, Brown and Beige
for his own jazz orchestra, did not call it a symphony, and did not follow any of the formal structures found
in European concert music. To help his audience Ellington briefly introduced each of the three movements (with an uncharacteristic nervousness); program notes by Irving Kolodin and well-placed preview articles in
DownBeat
and the
New York Times Magazine
further spelled out Ellington's intentions.
¹⁷
Black portrayed the distant past in three sections: “Work Song”, “Come Sunday”, and “Light”.
Brown
described events from the Revolutionary War to the Spanish American War in three sections: “West Indian Dance”, “Emancipation Celebration”, and “The Blues”, the only music with a singer and lyrics. Neither Ellington nor Kolodin attempted to outline the sections of
Beige
, but the notes said that it covered the period from the First World War to the present, contrasting the misconceived exotic Harlem of the 1920s with the community's actual educational, economic, and spiritual aspirations.

The program notes shared content with a long poetic script that Ellington wrote out by hand and carefully revised but never published (though parts of it appear in
Music Is My Mistress);
the original is preserved in the Ellington Archive.
¹⁸
The copies of the poem in the Ellington Archive are undated. It is likely but not completely evident that the poem preceded the music; Ellington could have used it as a blueprint for composing the suite, but he also may have written it afterward in the hopes of clarifying the political content of the music, which went virtually unnoticed in the concert's reviews. In 1956 Ellington said that he was working on a new version of
Black, Brown and Beige
with a narration based on “a thing I wrote a long time ago”
¹⁹
a few years later the revised version had evolved into the musical show
My People
, which included important sections of
Black, Brown and Beige.

The poem (as Mark Tucker pointed out in 1993, after it surfaced in the Ellington Archive) clearly links
Black, Brown and Beige
and Ellington's long-promised opera. To chronicle the African American experience, Ellington had imagined a transhistorical black everyman named Boola. His story, told in three parts titled “Black”, “Brown”, and “Beige”, is also the story of his people. This narrative device is similar to the role of the “American” that Robeson sang in
Ballad for Americans
(Ellington would collaborate with John La Touche in the 1946 show
Beggar's Holiday)
, or the narrator/participant in Schoenberg's
Survivor
, but it might also be compared to HCE, the polymorphous progenitor of
Finnegans Wake.
Ellington's poem weaves together Boola's personal story, including his marriage to Voola, with scenes and figures from black history: the “seeds of the first civilization” in Egypt, the African discoveries of “agriculture, law, literature, music, natural sciences,
medicine”, and “basketry, pottery, cutlery, sculpture” “Whence came the art of Greece?…out of black Africa”. Some lines in “Black”