In the color palette that Black musicians paint with, it should come as no surprise that the tones and shades used often reflect and project our skin tones and the words used to describe them. In other cases the very names used by groups or individual entertainers played upon how we were viewed and marketed to the world outside of the Black community.
We are a pastiche of hues, from ecru, beige, and tan to honey deepening into redbone. We are coffee and chocolate, darkening into rich deeper tones that are often described as “black”; however, they contain hints of eggplant and blue. In essence we are a symphonic blend of musical complexions and complexities; for today’s
Black Music Sunday, I’ll explore them through the work of the late great Duke Ellington, namely his 1943
Black, Brown and Beige symphony, and 1927’s “
Black and Tan Fantasy.”
David Johnson, writing for Indiana Public Media in 2020, offers
a great introduction to the
Black, Brown And Beige symphony.
Carnegie Hall was an esteemed venue where very few jazz artists had ever appeared; African-American bandleader James Reese Europe had performed there in 1912, and Benny Goodman and other swing musicians had played it in 1938 and 1939. Duke Ellington‘s debut there was widely covered in the media and seen as a moment of artistic arrival for the composer, who at this point had already been leading a band for nearly 20 years, and had scored numerous hits such as "It Don‘t Mean A Thing If It Ain‘t Got That Swing" and "Don‘t Get Around Much Anymore.". Ellington scholar Harvey Cohen, author of Duke Ellington‘s America, which devotes an entire chapter to Black, Brown and Beige, says the buildup to the Carnegie concert was tremendous, in both the mainstream and the African-American press, and that it may represent, along with Ellington's famous 1956 "comeback" performance at the Newport Jazz Festival, the zenith of publicity and attention in the composer's 50-year-long career. [...]
What Ellington produced-a 45-minute-long jazz symphony, as well as a long manuscript that provided a wealth of narrative detail for the story he wished to tell, and which has remained unpublished-was extraordinary for its time. He called it "a tone parallel to the history of the Negro in America." Musically, the three-part suite depicted black people brought to America to work as slaves, fighting in wars on behalf of the country that had enslaved them, and searching for a new and better life in the decades following the Civil War. In so doing, he hoped to give African-Americans a deeper historical sense of themselves that would translate into an enhanced modern-day sense of identity.
Here is the entire recording of Ellington’s January 1943 Carnegie Hall concert, which included his premiere of
Black, Brown and Beige. YouTube Video Claudia Roth Pierpont,
writing for The New Yorker in 2010, explored Ellington’s symphonic debut in depth.
… 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 dance—the place where jazz was born. Everything was designed to set off “Black, Brown and Beige,” a three-movement composition, some forty-five minutes long, that had been advertised as “Duke Ellington’s first symphony” and that Ellington described as “a parallel to the history of the American Negro.” It seems unlikely that any other musical début 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 crowd—and 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 Ellington’s remarks, was released in the nineteen-seventies.) “Brown,” far more disjointed, took on Emancipation and the Negro’s 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 “don’t 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 affecting, and entirely apt for a concert that served as a benefit for Russian war relief and also marked Ellington’s 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, Ellington’s 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 Bois—but 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 rebellions—not mentioned again—and the light café-concert music for “Beige” comes nowhere close to addressing Ellington’s lines: “Who brought the dope / And made a rope / of it, to hang you / In your misery . . . / And Harlem . . . / How’d you come to be / Permitted / In a land that’s 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 effect 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: “I’ll sing, and hide my thoughts from him.”
In 1989,
Black, Brown and Beige was performed by the American Composers Orchestra, conducted by Maurice Peress, featuring Jimmy Heath on piano and Roland Hanna on piano.
YouTube Video YouTuber Charles Bradley II includes excerpts of the album’s liner notes with the upload.
(excerpts from the liner notes by Maurice Peress)
Among the papers of Duke Ellington held by his sister Ruth Boatwright, there appears a 33-page verse narrative, entitled "Black, Brown, & Beige", by Ellington. It traces the history of an African named Boola, and tells of his arrival in America by slave ship, of his servitude in a strange and beautiful land, his emancipation and his discovery of the blues. The narrative "Black, Brown, & Beige" is Ellington's philosophical metaphor for black survival in a white world. An enigmatic and complicated work, made all the more difficult to fathom by the disarmingly comfortable tonal palette and rhythmic flow of a jazz band, "Black, Brown, & Beige" is a signature piece by Ellington, but rarely performed. The Suite includes "Work Song", "Come Sunday", and "Light". Together they make up the opening "Black" section of the original work. With the exception of "The Blues", they are the strongest and most "symphonic" of the seven movements. The "Work Song" theme depicts the ax chop, as well as the after-grunt---the back beat---of hard labor. "Work Song" flows into "Come Sunday" which is depicted as a scene where black folks are standing outside a church they cannot enter, enjoying the music and harmonizing along, praising the universal God of all men. A transistional phrase and a trumpet cadenza leads us into the happy-go-lucky "Light", a variation on "Work Song" ending with a final quote of "Come Sunday"---this last, a 1969 idea of Duke's, to give the three movements a proper close.
One of the stellar offerings from the original symphony is “Come Sunday,” sung by Mahalia Jackson and recorded in 1958, with Jackson singing what had been
the Johnny Hodges solo. I’ve been playing this quite a bit recently because it brings me peace.
YouTube Video Jazz writer, teacher, and historian Greg Thomas discusses the legacy of Ellington’s
Black, Brown and Beige in this video from Jazz at Lincoln Center.
YouTube Video In 1927—15 years before
Black, Brown and Beige—Ellington wrote “Black and Tan Fantasy” with cornet player
James "Bubber" Miley.
YouTube Video The tune would become the musical centerpiece for the 1929 short film
Black and Tan, which was Ellington’s film debut, directed by Dudley Murphy.
Film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum reviewed the film in 1976.
Duke Ellington rehearses his “Black and Tan Fantasy” for a club date in his flat with trumpet Arthur Whetsol until interrupted by two men from the piano company, sent to remove the instrument because he has fallen behind in the payments. Dancer Fredi Washington bribes the movers with a bottle of gin into telling their boss that no one was home. Duke tells Fredi that they can’t take the job at the club because of her heart condition, but despite her faintness, which causes her to see multiple images, she insists on performing her dance and collapses at the end of her number. A chorus of other dancers is brought on, but Duke stops their band in the middle of their tune so that he and his men can stand by Fredi on her deathbed. There, at her request, they play the “Black and Tan Fantasy” as she loses consciousness.
Dramatic films which use jazz organically (To Have and Have Not is a supreme example) are few and far between, while jazz films which feature the music dramatically are perhaps even rarer. The singularity of Black and Tan, which comprises the first appearance of Duke Ellington on film, is that it fuses both categories — developing a sort of poetic synthesis in less than twenty minutes that, while clearly awkward and dated in many of its ingredients, nevertheless demonstrates, at the very onset of the sound period, that the two new art films of this century don’t necessarily have to trample on one another. Written and directed by Dudley Murphy, who made a short with Bessie Smith (St. Louis Blues) earlier the same year –- apparently with some of the same sets and uncredited bit players –- and previously executed Fernand Léger’s ideas in Ballet mécanique, Black and Tan uses arty trappings and a creaky plot, but has a sharp enough sense of form to turn both of these liabilities into assets.
You can watch the entire 15-minute film below.
YouTube Video Thelonious Monk, whom I wrote about in 2020’s
The Singular Genius of Thelonious Monk, rarely covered other musicians’ work, but in 1956,
Thelonious Monk Plays Duke Ellington was released on the Riverside label, and included
Black and Tan Fantasy.
Here it is, with Oscar Pettiford on bass and Kenny Clarke on drums.
YouTube Video Ellington never stopped his pursuit of Blackness in music—even on his deathbed, as YouTuber ellingtonia1899429
noted in 2012. Three Black Kings was the last serious work written by Duke Ellington for ballet. As he lay dying in his hospital bed in 1974, he gave his son, Mercer, final instructions on how it was to be completed and orchestrated. This work was not played when Duke was alive. But only this 3rd movement, Martin Luther King, known as "ELOS" was recorded by Duke Ellington Orchestra themselves in 1968.
Here’s the Duke’s performance of “ELOS.” Listen to it with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King.
YouTube Video Timothy Judd, Writing for The Listener’s Club, called
Three Black Kings “
a symphonic eulogy.
” Three Black Kings (Les Trois Rois Noirs) was Duke Ellington’s last composition. The orchestral triptych was left unfinished at the time of Ellington’s death in 1974. True to the spontaneous spirit of jazz and guided by superstition, the American composer, pianist, and band leader frequently left pieces incomplete until the day of the first performance. Ellington’s son, Mercer, pulled the pieces together, and Luther Henderson arranged and orchestrated the score. Alvin Ailey choreographed a ballet to accompany the music, which was performed in 1976.
As with many of Ellington’s other large-scale works, such as Black, Brown, and Beige (1943), Harlem (1950), and Night Creature (1955), Three Black Kings is built on a narrative which connects the present to the distant past. According to Mercer Ellington,
He intended it as a eulogy for Martin Luther King and he decided to go back into myth and history to include other black kings. Primitivity, the opening movement, represents [Balthazar,] the black king of the Magi. King Solomon is next, with the song of jazz and perfume and dancing girls and all that, then the dirge for Dr. King. The piece owes its inspiration to a stained glass window of the three Kings Ellington saw in the Cathedral del Mar in Barcelona.
Enjoy these short but powerful clips from Alvin Ailey’s
Three Black Kings ballet.
YouTube Video Join me in the comments to share and enjoy other music and groups—exploring the color spectrum from tan to black.
